City Upon a Hill

In the shadow of Puritan New England, where scripture, law, and community shaped every aspect of daily life, a different kind of visionary emerged. Drawing on European alchemical traditions, Hermetic philosophy, and Christian reformist ideals, he believed that nature itself was a sacred text, written by the Creator and waiting to be deciphered. This episode brings you a story of religion, medicine, politics, and alchemy in an age of upheaval and imagination: the story of John Winthrop, Jr.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:08 Intro
• 2:14 Fire Void of Flame
• 8:38 Creatures of Nature
• 14:20 City Upon a Hill
• 20:02 Conclusion
• 22:45 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
History often prefers its categories clean: statesmen over here, mystics over there. But the past is rarely so tidy. In seventeenth-century New England, John Winthrop, Jr. stood at the intersection of politics, science, and spiritual inquiry. A colonial governor, physician, and practicing alchemist, Winthrop defied the boundaries that modern narratives often impose on early American history. To understand his life is to enter a world where the spiritual and political were not opposites, but intertwined tools in a broader quest to restore divine harmony to a fractured world.

In the shadow of Puritan New England, where scripture, law, and community shaped every aspect of daily life, a different kind of visionary emerged. Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s founding governor, was more than an heir to political power. He was a seeker, a man who looked for signs of redemption not only in the Bible but in the natural world. Drawing on European alchemical traditions, Hermetic philosophy, and Christian reformist ideals, he believed that nature itself was a sacred text, written by the Creator and waiting to be deciphered.

In this episode, I bring you a story of religion, medicine, politics, and alchemy in an age of upheaval and imagination: the story of John Winthrop, Jr.

Act 1: Fire Void of Flame
Born in 1606 in Suffolk, England, to a Puritan family, Winthrop was heir to a sacred mission. His father, John Winthrop, Sr., would famously lead the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but the younger Winthrop’s aspirations moved beyond governance. He longed for understanding both of scripture and of the matter of the world, of the hidden harmonies God had left veiled since the Fall of humankind. Alchemy, for him, was no heretical indulgence but a means of spiritual restoration. As the son and heir of the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, Jr. stood at the confluence of power and piety. But unlike his father’s largely ecclesiastical vision of the New World, Winthrop Jr. cast his gaze both downward, into the natural matter of the world, and upward, toward divine mysteries encoded in creation.

As a young man, Winthrop embarked on a journey that echoed the pilgrimages of medieval seekers. Sailing eastward aboard a merchant ship, he visited Constantinople and Venice, cities charged in the alchemical imagination with ancient wisdom. In the university town of Padua, he studied natural philosophy; in Venice, he encountered Jacob Golius, a scholar with a newly acquired trove of alchemical texts. These were not idle curiosities. They were fragments of a divine map, and Winthrop was learning to read them.

By 1629, he had returned to London, just in time to witness his father’s selection to lead the Puritan exodus to New England. But if his father’s calling was ecclesiastical, his own would be philosophical. In New England, he would build not only towns and settlements but a vision. He saw the American wilderness as a new site for an old project: the reformation of man and matter.

In 1631, barely twenty-five, Winthrop adopted John Dee’s monas hieroglyphica, an iconic representation of the principles of alchemy, as his personal sigil. Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist, astrologer, and magician, had become a symbol of the possibility that the rigorous study of nature and number could expand Christian knowledge. To embrace Dee was to align oneself with a vision of the cosmos as a divine code, legible to the faithful and the learned alike. In New England, Winthrop’s identity as alchemist, physician, and governor would come to fuse these threads into an emergent Puritan natural philosophy. Winthrop’s work as a physician across Connecticut was infused with this conviction: alchemy was not just practical, but sacred. One of his contacts, the alchemist Johann Rudolph Glauber, spoke of the secrets of aurum potabile, drinkable gold, writing, “all its whole Essence may be said to resemble nothing else but some tender penetrating Fire, yet void of flame, everyone may readily conjecture what it is helpful for, and what use it is of in Medicine.” In aurum potabile, Winthrop saw a medicine that was at once material and metaphysical.

Far from a fringe obsession, Winthrop’s alchemy sat at the heart of a movement to redeem creation. For scholars in early modern Europe, alchemy was a mode of healing not merely of bodies but of souls and societies. Alchemist Basil Valentine described this Christian alchemy in 1678, writing, “Invocation of God must be made with a certain Heavenly Intention, drawn from the bottom of a pure and sincere Heart… For God will not be mocked… but the Creator of all things will be invoked with reverential fear, and acknowledged with due Obedience… No impious Man shall ever be partaker of true Medicine, much less of the eternal Heavenly Bread.” Winthrop’s connections with scientists, scholars, and mystical societies, such as the Order of the Rosy Cross, placed him within this vision of reform: the world as wounded, but redeemable through reason, observation, and grace.

But Winthrop was no mystic recluse. For eighteen years, he served as governor of Connecticut. He practiced diplomacy, administered justice, and advanced colonial infrastructure. He did so not despite his alchemical interests but because of them. His political philosophy echoed the pansophic ideals of Jan Comenius, whom he met during a return trip to England. Comenius envisioned a society governed by reason, tolerance, and the knowledge of nature, principles Winthrop quietly carried into his administration. In matters of conscience, he was startlingly liberal for his time, writing, “Although the magistrate is bound to encourage, promote, and protect the professor and profession of the Gospell and to manage and order civill administration in due subservience to the interest of Christ in the World… yet in such differences about the doctrine of the Gospell, or Waies of the Worship of God, as may befall men exercising a good conscience, manifesting it in their conversation, and holding the foundation, not disturbing others in their way of worship that differ from them, there is no warrant for the magistrate under the Gospell to abridge them of their liberty.” This liberalism was no accident. It reflected his alchemical cosmology, one that saw spiritual and material truths unfolding in mysterious and diverse ways.

Act 2: Creatures of Nature
Throughout his life, Winthrop remained connected to European networks of alchemical and scientific reform. His membership in London’s Royal Society was a natural extension of his lifelong commitment to the unity of spiritual and empirical knowledge. His vision embraced healing a world dismembered by sin through understanding rather than control.

Despite its long history, alchemy is a word we have learned to misunderstand. Once dismissed as superstition or proto-chemistry, it is often relegated to the shadows of scientific history as too mystical for science and too experimental for religion. But from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, alchemy was something else entirely: not merely a method, but a worldview. At the heart of alchemy lay a paradox: to transform the world, one had first to transform the self. Following the Renaissance revival of ancient texts, in the late fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum introduced European thinkers to the voice of Hermes Trismegistus, or Hermes the Thrice-Great. The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of ancient Greek philosophical and theological texts attributed to a legendary figure who blends aspects of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. These writings form the core of Hermeticism, a spiritual and philosophical tradition that emerged in late antiquity. To Ficino, the Hermetic texts offered more than esoteric speculation; they pointed toward a world where knowledge was sacred, and the divine could be glimpsed through nature. It was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who attempted to harmonize Hermeticism with Christianity. In his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico cast humanity not as a fallen creature, but as a being capable of rising toward the angels or descending into base matter. For the alchemist, every transformation in the laboratory was a mirror of the soul’s ascent.

By the early sixteenth century, this intellectual alchemy gave way to more material ambitions. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa synthesized the magical and theological strains of Renaissance thought into a cosmology that placed the human magician-alchemist at the center of divine creation. But it was Paracelsus who redefined alchemy as both science and sacrament. Rejecting classical understandings of medicine, Paracelsus looked to the hidden virtues in metals, minerals, and celestial forces. He believed that God had written truth into the book of nature and that the alchemist’s task was to read it.

Alchemy in this period was not a solitary pursuit but a public project. Laboratories sprang up beside lecture halls; physicians carried flasks alongside Bibles. Natural philosophers debated sulfur and salt in the same breath as salvation. As the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion fractured Christendom, many alchemists viewed their work as a form of healing, both for the body and for the divided church and a corrupted world. Nowhere was this more clearly seen than in the seventeenth-century vision of the Rosicrucians, members of the Order of the Rosy Cross. This mysterious brotherhood proclaimed a great unveiling where alchemy would guide humanity back to its intended harmony with creation, writing, “God in these latter days hath poured out so richly His mercy and goodness to mankind, whereby we do attain more and more to the perfect knowledge of his Son Jesus Christ and Nature… wherein there is not only discovered unto us the half part of the world, which was heretofore unknown and hidden, but he hath also made manifest unto us many wonderful, and never heretofore seen, works and creatures of Nature…” For the Rosicrucians and their followers, alchemy was the fulfillment of Christian spirituality. The philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, the fabled aurum potabilewere physical miracles that would usher the world toward redemption.

By the mid-seventeenth century, this alchemical vision had begun to shift. The rise of mechanical philosophy and the empirical rigor of the Royal Society redefined the boundaries of acceptable knowledge. Scientists, though sympathetic to alchemy’s aims, stripped its language of mysticism. The fire of transmutation was being domesticated into chemistry. Yet even as its vocabulary changed, alchemy’s spiritual heart continued to beat in quiet studies, private correspondences, and the experimental dreams of men like John Winthrop, Jr. For Winthrop, colonial governor and faithful alchemist, the American wilderness was the Garden of Eden waiting to be remade.

Act 3: City Upon a Hill
Historians of early New England once viewed Puritanism and alchemy as irreconcilable, the former a faith of asceticism and control, the latter a playground of esoteric and possibly heretical speculation. But Winthrop’s life disproved this theory. Like his European contemporaries, he inhabited a world where science was born from scripture, and where the study of nature was an act of devotion. As Jan Comenius wrote, “A true knowledge of the world of Nature will be a key to the mysteries of the Scriptures.” In this light, alchemy was a natural extension of Puritanism.

In the minds of its architects, seventeenth-century New England was not a settlement but a covenant. The story of its founding is often told in political terms, but this narrative flattens what, for its earliest inhabitants, was a sacred experiment: a striving to remake the world, or at least a corner of it, according to the will of God. When John Winthrop, Sr., stood before his shipbound flock in Southampton in 1630 and spoke of a “city upon a hill,” he was not being optimistic. He was issuing a warning. In his sermon, he cautioned, “…if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.” If the new colony failed to uphold its covenant with God, it would fall as a spectacle under divine judgment.

This sense of spiritual urgency shaped every facet of early New England society. Towns were planned as religious communities, with their meetinghouses serving as the axis of both worship and governance. Ministers held no formal political office, yet their words could sway magistrates and stir revolutions of conscience. And beneath it all was the land itself: wild, strange, and—many believed—moral. The Puritans read the natural world as a kind of second Bible. They saw God’s hand in blighted crops, in sudden death, in fire and flood. This intimacy with nature was not Romantic but terrifying. Yet for some, the wilderness also held possibility. Men like John Winthrop, Jr., with his alchemical texts and European correspondence, believed that nature, properly studied, could heal as well as threaten. Drawing from the Rosicrucian and Paracelsian traditions, he imagined a world where the study of matter could reveal the fingerprints of its Maker. Extracting medicine from minerals and transmuting base metals into gold was both a scientific endeavor and a form of redemption.

In May of 1653, Winthrop’s scientific and political acumen would be put to the test. When a handful of women in New Haven began suffering “fits,” they accused Elizabeth Godman of afflicting them through witchcraft. Historian Walter Woodward argues that alchemist-physicians like Winthrop could serve as a source of “expert testimony” on the nature of magic and illness. In the Godman case, Winthrop cast doubt by insisting the afflictions had a natural rather than supernatural cause. Nicholas Augur, the physician attending the women, disagreed, arguing that once Godman had been formally accused and questioned, the “fits” subsided. Recognizing the communal hostility at the root of witchcraft accusations, Winthrop worked to discredit the accusations of witchcraft and instead attempted to convince Godman to conform more fully to social expectations. Rather than convict her of witchcraft, the New Haven magistrates warned Godman, “that her carriage doth justly render her suspicious of witchcraft,” and that she should instead “keepe her place and medle with her own business.”

Four years later, in May of 1657, Winthrop was elected and reluctantly accepted the position of governor of Connecticut. A year after that, he presided over the 1658 Hartford witch trials. Before Winthrop’s tenure, Connecticut had seen seven witch trials, beginning in 1647. Every one of the accused in these trials had been convicted and executed. In 1658, Winthrop used his knowledge of occult medicine to influence the proceedings and attempt to reconcile the accused with the community. At the conclusion of the first trial under Winthrop, the jury decided, for the first time in Connecticut, not to convict. When, in 1661, Winthrop returned to England on a political matter, witch trials and convictions resumed within a matter of months, indicating the degree to which Winthrop’s presence had moderated the pattern of accusations, convictions, and executions. When Winthrop returned in June 1663, it was to the news that four people had been hanged for witchcraft in his absence.

Conclusion
New England in the seventeenth century was never just a colony. It was a crucible: a space of testing, forging, and transformation. Its people were torn between fear and hope, between the inherited memory of England and the tenuous possibility of something better, purer, more godly. Their laws were severe; their faith, demanding; and their society, shaped by a deep sense of covenant with the divine. Yet within that rigor lay a profound and enduring hope: that through obedience, vigilance, and grace, the divine order that had been broken since Adam’s Fall might be restored. The wilderness, far from being merely an untamed landscape, became a spiritual arena, where redemption might take root.

The story of John Winthrop, Jr., challenges modern assumptions about early American history by revealing a figure who embodied both religious devotion and intellectual curiosity. His life dismantles any neat division between science and religion, rationality and mysticism, governance and spiritual experimentation. Winthrop’s alchemical interests were not a private eccentricity but a public and philosophical pursuit, integrated into his vision of political leadership and moral reform. For him, the study of nature—of metals, medicines, and cosmic correspondences—was inseparable from the study of scripture. Healing the world physically was part of restoring it spiritually.

As a colonial governor, a practicing physician, and a member of the Royal Society, Winthrop stood at the crossroads of traditions that would later diverge. In his hands, the philosopher’s stone was never merely a tool for turning lead into gold; it was a symbol of hope that the world, damaged and divided, might still be made whole. In John Winthrop, Jr., we encounter a New England charmed by a sacramental vision of knowledge itself: a belief that to understand creation was, ultimately, to draw closer to its Creator.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about John Winthrop, Jr. and alchemy in early modern New England, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes, especially Walter Woodward’s Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.