A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust by Steven Y. Wilkerson

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust by Steven Y. Wilkerson Frederick Amrine Steven Y. Wilkerson, A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust. Asheville, NC: Chiron, 2019. 386 pp. This is a very introductory book. The author's choice to write an introduction has yielded a study with the predictable strengths and weaknesses. There is much to recommend this book to beginners, either with Goethe, with alchemy, with Jung, or with all three. It is for the most part intelligent and lucidly written. It begins with a capsule biography of Goethe, then proceeds logically to an introduction to alchemy, to a short biography of Jung, to the centrality of his alchemical studies, to an interpretation of Faust, and finally to brief considerations of other texts, Faustian and otherwise. Alas, the book also displays the weaknesses of an introduction. It replicates information that is easily found elsewhere. Indeed, A Most Mysterious Union consists largely of citations and allusions to extant studies, chiefly Gray's Goethe the Alchemist (1952) and Raff's Jung and the Alchemical Imagination (2000). It is telling that the author closely follows Ronald Gray's nearly seventy-year-old book. (Alice Raphael's 1965 Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone is not mentioned, either in the body or in the bibliography: Could Wilkerson possibly be ignorant of it?) Seventy years is a long time, and there has been a flood of work on Goethe and alchemy since then. None of it finds its way into Wilkerson's bibliography. I fear that he greatly underestimates the widespread acceptance of the influence of alchemy on Goethe and the sophistication of the insights that have been generated in the interim. Moreover, the biography of Goethe quotes several nineteenth-century studies, and is rather Victorian in simultaneously condemning Goethe's affairs and being titillated by them. Reading the biography, one might think that Goethe squeezed his writing into the little time left after his Byronesque adventures with women. Those of us who have lived through the sixties are not impressed by a 39-year-old virgin. The most original section of the book is the end, where the author compares Goethe's Faust with Marlowe's, Mann's, Dante's Divina Commedia, and, oddly, [End Page 389] Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These comparisons are, however, lamentably simplistic and wrongheaded. At multiple key points, Wilkerson demurs even recapitulating the central tenets of Gray's and Raff's studies. Why not simply skip this book and read them instead? Frederick Amrine University of Michigan Copyright © 2021 Goethe Society of North America