The Harmony Society, revisited

Ticket to Heaven, or:
Alchemy's last gasp

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

Working in an archive, as I do, is a bit like browsing through an antique shop. On the one hand, you never know exactly what you’ll find, and on the other, sometimes you’ll find something that stops you in your tracks—a real “What the hell?” moment.

I had never heard of Old Economy, although friends from the Pittsburgh area had. Nor had I ever heard of The Harmony Society. If I had, I probably would have assumed that it was some sort of amateur music group. As it turns out, they were a group of German Pietists who settled in western Pennsylvania and Ohio in the early 19th Century. They were also renowned craftsmen—wheelwrights, barrelmakers, blacksmiths, but above all weavers. Their textiles were considered among the best in the early years of the Republic. By 1830 the Harmony Society was also the leading center of American silk production.

Its members’ skill and dedication to hard work made the Harmony Society wealthy. At one point its holdings were estimated at $2 million, at a time when a million dollars really meant something.

In the lab with Father Rapp

But all this dedication and hard work wasn’t what brought the settlement of Old Economy to my attention. It seems that the inner circle members of the Harmony Society were also practicing alchemists. This is where my “What the hell?” moment occurs.

You see, alchemy was generally considered to be on its way out by the 1600s. The Age of Enlightenment had supposedly consigned it to that celebrated ash-heap of history. So what was “Father” George Rapp, the leader of the Harmony Society, doing in his laboratory with hundreds of pounds of imported cinnabar?

Well, for one thing, he was extracting mercury from it. But then what? The Harmony Society wasn’t selling mercury to thermometer makers. It appears that Rapp and an inner circle of disciples had fallen under the spell of Paracelsus
and Jacob Bohme.

Turning lead into gold

The alchemists were popularly considered to be folks who believed that you could take a bar of lead, place a wondrous “guzzinta” called The Philosopher’s Stone next to it and wake up the next day with a bar of gold. Such simplicities were roundly and rightly debunked by Robert Boyle and others. Alchemy became risible. But the first alchemists were philosophers and religious types, not rationalists, and they weren’t necessarily looking to create gold. I suspect that in 1830 Rapp’s silk operation was providing him with all the gold he could use.

It seems that “Father” Rapp was actually looking not for gold but for a recipe to purify the soul, raising it up to Heaven. America has always been The Big League for strange doctrines of every stripe, and the notion of alchemy as a purgation of the spirit went back far beyond Paracelsus— all the way to Ancient China, in fact. It’s comical to image an already-rich old man and a couple of disciples, aided by some female assistants, looking for a way to transform mercury into gold. It’s less so to imagine him thirsting for immortality. As the poet Li Ho wrote of a long-dead emperor on a similar search:

He drank wine to the chime of bells and shot his arrows at heaven,
In his furs braided with gold tigers and streaked with spurted blood.
Morning after morning, evening after evening, he sighed when the seas turned round,
And he tethered the sun on a long rope that youth might never pass.
(Translation: A.C. Graham)

“Father” Rapp prayed in his private chapel called The Grotto, where a representation of the sun was carved into its stone floor, and when The Great Work failed, his disciples blamed the failure on the loose morals of Rapp’s female assistants. For, as the thrice-great Hermes Trismegistus taught, “As above, so also below.”