Frankenstein and the alchemists: Mary Shelley and the modern Prometheus
Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus in Victor Frankenstein's reading: Mary Shelley's novel between alchemy, galvanism and the Prometheus myth.
In the summer of 1816, at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron suggested that each of his guests write a ghost story. Among them were Percy Bysshe Shelley, the physician John Polidori and Mary Godwin, not yet nineteen. From that challenge came Polidori's The Vampyre and, above all, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in London in January 1818.
Victor's forbidden reading
Before becoming a modern scientist, Victor Frankenstein is a boy fascinated by the old masters of the occult. He tells how he chanced upon a volume of Cornelius Agrippa at an inn near Thonon, and then immersed himself in the works of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. His father dismisses those books as trash, but the young man goes on dreaming of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.
At the University of Ingolstadt Professor Krempe mocks him for wasting time on outdated authors, while Professor Waldman shows him a different path: the ancients promised the impossible and achieved nothing, the moderns obtain concrete results. Victor then combines the ambition of the alchemists with the methods of chemistry, and resolves to discover the very principle of life.
Galvanism and the vital spark
Mary Shelley does not describe the process by which Victor animates his creature, and deliberately leaves the moment in shadow. In the introduction to the 1831 edition, however, she recalls that summer's conversations about experiments attributed to Erasmus Darwin and about galvanism, the research into animal electricity begun by Luigi Galvani in Bologna at the end of the eighteenth century. The spark that brings the body to life is therefore a scientific idea of the period, not a magical rite.
The novel thus stands on a border. On one side lies the Hermetic tradition of the homunculus and of artificial creation; on the other, the new confidence in experimental science. Victor belongs to both worlds, and for that very reason he embodies the danger of a knowledge that never questions its own consequences.
The myth of Prometheus
The subtitle recalls Prometheus, the Titan who according to Greek myth stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity and was punished by Zeus, and who in some versions, such as Ovid's, shaped human beings from clay. Like him, Victor defies the limits set on mankind and pays a terrible price: the creature, rejected by all, takes revenge by killing Victor's little brother William, his friend Clerval and his bride Elizabeth.
The creature himself reads Milton's Paradise Lost and compares himself to Adam, but also to Satan, the fallen angel. The relationship between creator and creature thus becomes a reflection on responsibility: the true horror lies not in the stitched body, but in the abandonment of a being who asked only to be accepted.
From book to modern myth
In 1831 Mary Shelley published a revised edition, with a new introduction in which she describes the book's genesis and the waking vision that, she said, inspired its central scene. As early as the 1820s the story reached the English stage, and in the twentieth century cinema made it one of the most recognisable myths, often straying far from the novel.
Frankenstein shows how the authors of Renaissance occultism lived on in the Romantic imagination. Agrippa and Paracelsus appear not as masters to be followed, but as symbols of a thirst for knowledge that, separated from compassion, can turn into tragedy. Mary Shelley's lesson still speaks today to the relationship between science, power and responsibility.