The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement by Richard Noll Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994,  xv + 387 pp., $22.50

Sometime, probably in the 1650s, Isaac Newton claimed to have “opened gold” and “achieved the philosophical mercury.” He was at work, at the time, on two of his passions, a complete explanation of the workings of the natural world, and alchemy. Having solved, to his satisfaction, the problems of the movement of celestial bodies, he was seeking a solution to the mechanics of the microscopic world. His alchemical research involved the star regulus of antimony, a crystalline compound which forms patterns of lines that at first appear to emanate out from the center. However, with a simple figure-ground transposition the lines can as easily appear to move into the center. Just such a transposition was suggested by a theosophist named Mrs. Atwood, who maintained in her tracts that the lines formed in the star regulus were in fact attracted inward. As Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (1975) has shown, in her exemplary study of Newton's alchemy, from which the above outline is drawn, Newton probably derived the concept of force from his work with the star regulus and his reading of Mrs. Atwood. Dobbs goes on to note that Newton was taken to task for his use of “occult qualities” in his theorizing about attraction and repulsion (p. 211). In the end, however, it was, in Dobbs's view, precisely the “wedding of the Hermetic tradition with the mechanical