Matter—pure potency, pure capacity for being—has consistently eluded humanity’s intellectual and experimental efforts. From the shores of Ningbo to the deserts of Los Alamos, though its names have changed, its essence remains the same. It is Hesiod’s chaos, the tehom of Genesis (1:2), Plato’s chōra, Aristotle’s prote hyle, the silva of Latin hylomorphism, the alchemical lapis, and the sterile neutrino. Prime matter is the gateway to manipulating the very fabric of the physical world, to obtain gold, eternal youth, healing, perpetual energy, a new or meta-universe, or the crafting of the greatest literary masterpiece of all time.
The ancient mythographers did not surrender to the resigned conclusions of logic, but instead depicted matter in the form of a god. They named it Proteus, proto-theos, the azure entity capable of becoming anything, the inkwell into which any pen that writes of transmutation and change has been dipped. This advanced seminar offers students the possibility to reassemble an intergenerational conversation on the concept of pure matter with original, comparative readings of the Proteus myth as it appears in Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, the Carolingians, Jean du Meun, Dante, Ariosto and Tasso– while also adumbrating its continuation in the writings of Giordano Bruno, Goethe, Shelley, and Primo Levi. Particular attention will be paid to both Bibelalchemie and mythoalchemie.
