Alchemical Dialogues in Literary Tradition
The dialogue is an intrinsic part of literary tradition in Europe, as a genre dating back to Antiquity, and there are good reasons for this long continuation. The genre has been utilised as a didactic means to convey and spread ideas in an attractive and comprehensible manner, ranging from scholastic disputations to downright polemics to moralising conversations for laymen. The variety of these dialogues and the motivation for their use is discussed hereafter. Furthermore, the dialogue in the form of individual revelation has been firmly placed within the hermetic tradition, where hermetic must be understood as the whole body of occult arts and disciplines current and practised since at least the Hellenic period, such as Hermetism , Gnosticism , natural magic , astrology and alchemy . Hellenic-Egyptian hermetic arts were studied extensively by A.J. Festugière, whose useful typology of hermetic dialogues will be used below. The alchemical dialogue stands in a tradition that is...