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George W. Carey published this, his best-known work, in 1917, at the crossing point of two enthusiasms: the biochemistry of the cell salts, and the New Thought conviction that scripture was written about the human body. Both are on display here, fused into one system and delivered in the confident, diagram-loving voice of the era.
The scheme runs as follows. Twelve mineral salts occur in human tissue, and the twelve signs of the zodiac preside over them; health is their balance, disease their lack, and the mineral kingdom the pharmacy with which nature restores it. Carey walks through the salts one by one, naming the tissue each governs and the complaint its absence announces. On that base Carey builds outward. Magnesia phosphate keeps the white fibres of nerve and muscle in tune; the gray matter of the brain is the precious ointment of the old texts; the upper brain is the Word of John's gospel, and the body's regeneration, bodily, chemical and spiritual, is the practical secret the allegories kept. It is a scheme, not a metaphor. The title's three-fold plane is exactly that: one operation read at three levels.
The book remains a foundational document of the biochemic movement and a fascinating specimen of a moment when the physique could be read as a palimpsest of divine instruction. Historians of alternative medicine will find the doctrine here at full length and in its own chief advocate's idiom; readers returning to the old regeneration teachings will find the source itself, unmediated and in plain language.
Reading guide
George Washington Carey (1845–1924) practised as a physician in Los Angeles and became, along with his collaborators in the "chemistry of life" school, one of the characteristic figures of the American movement that read the body as a spiritual chemistry. The Tree of Life: An Expose of Physical Regenesis on the Three-fold Plane of Bodily, Chemical and Spiritual Operation he published himself in Los Angeles in 1917 — author, printer and publisher in one, as the title page cheerfully admits. It carries forward the textbook work on the Chemistry of Life that made his name in that circle.
The book's claim is stated plainly in its opening pages: the human body is a chemical laboratory, and the biblical narrative is a code for its operation. Eden is the organism; the tree and its fruit are the processes of seed and sap; the mineral salts and internal secretions are the workers that carry on the chemistry of life; the zodiac signs map onto bodily functions, chapter by chapter. "Physical regenesis," on the three planes of the subtitle, is the program of conserving and transmuting the body's own essences until the operative chemistry is raised — bodily, chemical and spiritual treated as one continuous operation. It is occult physiology in its most confident American key, the same current that fed New Thought and the cell-salt movement of the period.
A caution worth stating in its own box: the physiology here belongs to 1917 and to Carey's interpretive system. It is read today as history of ideas, not as medicine, and nothing in it should be taken as health advice.
What still repays a modern reader is the method and the music of it: a scriptural-allegorical lens pressed onto the body, patient, systematic, and utterly serious. The transformation language runs parallel to the alchemical tradition — our essay on the alchemist's garden makes a good companion — and the late Dr. Carey's laboratory metaphor finds its bookish cousins elsewhere on these shelves.
Essays from the reading room that share this book's ground.
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