Arturo Reghini and the Alchemical Quest of Francesco Maria Santinelli

The great freemason and Pythagorean initiate Arturo Reghini published a study in 1925 in the journal Ignis, interpreting one of the best-known alchemical texts of the 17th century, an alchemical ode in Italian, composed of three “songs”, preceded by a preface in Latin and followed by a proem and a commentary. This work had long been attributed to Otto Tachenius, a 17th-century German physician, pharmacist, and alchemist, but Reghini intuited that he could not be the author, who should instead be identified within the Italian sphere. Indeed, in 1956, the great historian of Freemasonry Pericle Maruzzi demonstrated the actual authorship of this mysterious and enigmatic text: the author was Francesco Maria Santinelli, an Italian nobleman and initiate, a poet and scholar of Alchemy, Hermeticism, and mystery and esoteric disciplines, who was very close to Queen Christina of Sweden. An extraordinary figure with an adventurous and tumultuous life, he was destined to become, along with Massimiliano Savelli di Palombara, Francesco Borri, Athanasius Kircher, and Federico Gualdi, one of the main figures in the academies and hermetic and initiatic circles of his time.