When Did Alchemy Meaning Shift From Science To Symbolism?

I like to think of this change as a slow drift that picked up speed in the 17th and 18th centuries. Practical laboratory work continued for a while, but the rise of experimental standards and reproducible results—championed by people like Boyle—started to marginalize the more mystical aims. By the time Lavoisier reorganized chemistry in the late 1700s, the science had mostly split from the occult traditions.

Symbolic alchemy didn’t disappear; it migrated into literature, art, and occult societies in the 1800s and got a psychological makeover with Jung in the 20th century. So the shift is gradual, institutional, and cultural, not instant.

When I think about this shift I tend to picture overlapping waves rather than a single turning point. Early alchemists combined metallurgy, dyeing, medicine, and mystical goals; their laboratory notes could look like recipe books or allegories, depending on the reader. The real erosion of alchemy’s scientific standing began alongside the rise of modern experimental practices in the 1600s. Figures like Francis Bacon emphasized empirical methods, and Robert Boyle criticized speculative notions that couldn’t be tested.

The decisive cultural blow came with the late 18th century: Lavoisier’s quantitative methods, the oxygen theory replacing phlogiston, and standardized nomenclature made chemistry a reproducible, communal science. At that point the transmutation ambitions and esoteric language of alchemy were increasingly marginalized in scientific institutions. Still, the symbols had power: occult revivals, Romantic poets, and later Jung transformed those images into psychological and cultural metaphors. So for me the shift from science to symbolism is gradual—anchored in the 17th–18th centuries—but completed only when culture repurposed alchemy’s language for new, non-laboratory meanings.

I’m the sort of person who enjoys tracing a single image through centuries, so I’ll follow the philosopher’s stone as a marker. In medieval and Renaissance workshops the stone represented both a material quest—metal transmutation, elixirs—and a spiritual process. But the institutionalization of science changed how people read that image. Starting in the 1600s, experimentalists demanded transparent methods and public verification; the Royal Society and texts like 'The Sceptical Chymist' undermined secret jargon and unfalsifiable claims.

By the late 1700s, with Lavoisier and the birth of modern chemistry, the practical credibility of transmutation faded. After that, the stone persisted as metaphor: 19th-century occultists, Romantic writers, and later Jung turned alchemy into symbolic language about transformation, psyche, and art. Personally, I find the dual life of alchemy—laboratory ledger and poetic map—comforting; it reminds me that ideas can migrate between practice and myth.

I used to lose myself in library basements flipping through brittle manuscripts, and that costume of parchment and strange diagrams is part of why this question fascinates me. The shift from alchemy as practical proto-science to alchemy as primarily symbolic was a long, messy fade rather than a single cliff-edge moment.

In broad strokes, alchemy functioned as hands-on experimentation and a hermetic worldview from late antiquity through the Middle Ages—think Jabir ibn Hayyan and the medieval Latin tradition—into the Renaissance. But from the 17th century onward, things started to change: experimentalists like those in the Royal Society promoted observation and reproducibility, and texts such as Robert Boyle’s 'The Sceptical Chymist' (1661) pushed chemistry toward clearer methods and away from secretive allegory. By the late 18th century, Lavoisier’s chemical revolution practically sealed the scientific split; systematic nomenclature and quantitative experiments discredited goals like metallic transmutation within mainstream science.

Yet symbolic alchemy didn’t vanish. Romantic, occult, and artistic circles kept the imagery alive in the 19th century, and Carl Jung in the 20th century reinterpreted alchemical imagery psychologically in 'Psychology and Alchemy'. So I see the shift as a two-century transformation—practical alchemy declining scientifically by the late 1700s, while symbolic readings blossomed afterward and continue to color culture today.

Some days I picture the shift as a courtroom drama: alchemy on trial before the new methods of modern science. The opening arguments began in the 1600s when experimental skeptics insisted on replicable results and criticized occult explanations that couldn’t be tested. The closing arguments came in the late 1700s with Lavoisier’s overthrow of phlogiston and the arrival of systematic chemical nomenclature.

After that scientific verdict, alchemy’s public role changed. It wasn’t erased; instead, it was reclaimed by artists, mystics, and psychologists. Jung’s mid-20th-century work reframed alchemical motifs as inner psychological processes, and that reading has had a huge cultural afterlife. For me, the takeaway is that the shift was a cultural realignment: by the end of the 18th century the laboratory had parted ways with hermetic symbolism, which then found new life in myth, art, and therapy.