Queen Christina (or Kristina) was the ruling monarch of Sweden from 1644 to 1654. Her father Gustavus Adolphus (Gustav II Adolf) had been a prominent Protestant leader during the Thirty Year War, during which he was killed in battle. During the war, Protestant Sweden became a regional great power. It therefore created quite a stir when the great warrior-king's successor abdicated her throne, left Sweden and converted to Catholicism! Christina died in 1689, and is one of the few women buried in the Church of St Peter in Rome.
However, it seems that everything wasn't quite right with the former Queen's conversion. Already during her lifetime, there were rumours that Christina was a lesbian, a libertine and a pantheist. The rumours haven't subsided since. Was she "intersex", an atheist, or the lover of a Roman cardinal? There are other, even stranger, whisperings as well. A mysterious alchemical monument in Rome, Porta magica, is associated with the renegade queen. Unknown personages from a foreign land supposedly helped her in her alchemical laboratory before vanishing. Today, an initiate of the Golden Dawn claims to have a letter in the queen's own handwriting confirming that she was an Adept of the arcane arts...but refuses to publish the document.
"Fenixelden: Drottning Kristina som alkemist" is a book by Susanna Åkerman, taking us deep into the maze surrounding the royal maverick. The author is currently a librarian at the Swedenborg library in Stockholm, Sweden. Ironically, given the subject-matter, her book is scholarly, detailed and frankly boring. But yes, it does make you wonder about the Catholic orthodoxy of Christina, and the real reasons for her conversion...
My impression is that Christina didn't really convert to the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, but rather to the dynamic 17th century intellectual culture, a culture inbued with Hermetism and other forms of esotericism, but also heresy, free-thinking and libertinism. In many nations, this culture was nominally "Catholic". Åkerman suspects that Catholicism was attractive to the queen since it was possible for a woman to stay celibate without necessarily losing her social standing. This would be an almost bizarre irony if true: did Christina become a Catholic because she was gay?
Christina almost self-identified as male, and cultivated a pseudo-masculine image around herself. It's possible that her deviation from the prevalent norms went even further. Her interest in alchemy might have been connected to a desire to "transition" and in some sense become male (compare the notion of the divine androgyne). The former queen's private library was well stacked with books about alchemy, the esoteric aspects of music, angel magic, Neo-Platonism, Jewish and Hermetic Kabbala, utopian writings, and Joachimite prophecy. She did have an alchemical laboratory in Rome, although nobody really knows how far advanced her experimentation was. Was she a dabbler, taken advantage of by the usual quacks? Or did she succeed in becoming an Adept of the occult inner circle? Was she actually their *leader*, as some modern "adepts" seem to think?
With that, I close this little review. Don't worry, if I ever find the philosopher's stone, I'll let you know...
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