Edmund Dickinson

William Dickinson, rector of Appleton in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), by his wife Mary, daughter of Edmund Colepepper, and was born on 26 September 1624.

[1] About this time (Dickinson later claimed) he made the acquaintance of a certain Theodore Mundanus, an adept in alchemy about whom not much is otherwise known, who prompted him to devote his attention to chemistry.

We had a long conversation about the philosopher's elixir, which he believed attainable and had seen projection himself by one who went under the name of Mundanus, who sometimes came among the adepts, but was unknown as to his country or abode; of this the doctor has written a treatise in Latin, full of very astonishing relations.

[1][3] Troubled with the stone, Dickinson retired from practice and spent the remaining nineteen years of his life in study and in the making of books.

[1] While still a young man he published a book under the title of Delphi Phoenicizantes, Oxford, 1665, in which he attempted to prove that the Greeks borrowed the story of Pythian Apollo from the Hebrew scriptures.

Anthony à Wood says that Henry Jacob the Younger, and not Dickinson, was the author of this book; it appeared with a contribution from Zachary Bogan.

He established a philosophy founded on principles collected out of the Pentateuch, in which he mixed ideas on the atomic theory with passages from Greek and Latin writers as well as from the Bible.