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The Alchemy of Revolution: Gerrard Winstanley's Occultism and Seventeenth-Century English Communism . By David Mulder. American University Studies, series 9, 77. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. xi + 364 pp.

Gerrard Winstanley, the best known of the True Levellers or Diggers, has attracted a good deal of attention in the past quarter century. Treatments include major works by Olivier Lutaud, Winstanley: Socialisme et Christianisme sous Cromwell (Paris, 1976), and T. Wilson Hayes, Winstanley the Digger: A Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). David Mulder indicates no awareness of either of these studies, which is particularly unfortunate since Mulder's principal thesis—the importance of Winstanley's use of alchemical metaphors—has already been developed by Hayes with much greater sophistication. Charles M. Gray's claim that Mulder treats Winstanley and the Diggers "in a strikingly new light" is thus regrettably untrue. Mulder avers that Winstanley did not "panic" when he espoused a revolutionary ideology because "he understood sympathetic rebellion in hermetic terms, an outlook that enabled him to view radical change as productive of harmony" (p. 52). Winstanley's God, says Mulder, was the Ultimate Alchemist, and the core of Winstanley's thought can be seen in alchemical terms. Sulphur represents the masculine spirit of domination, mercury the feminine spirit of subservience, and salt the principle of divine fire which purges the masculine. Each principle has a variety of analogs which Winstanley used in enunciating his revolutionary principles. The analogs of sulphur, for example, include Adam's curse, the ages of the antichrist, the Norman conquest, and landowners, whereas the counterparts among the analogs of mercury are human flesh, the Christian community, the English people (especially the poor), and cottagers. The corresponding analogs of salt, which purge masculinity and liberate femininity, are the indwelling spirit, the advent of Christ, the Diggers, and Winstanley himself, who in this scheme liberates the cottagers from the landowners. In exploring such imagery Mulder, unlike Hayes, offers no real sense of how the symbolism evolved, though he is surely correct in insisting that the foundation of Winstanley's thought was religious and, at least in his own mind, consistent.