Francis Mercury van Helmont

Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (baptised 1614, died 1698) was a Flemish alchemist and writer, son of the chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, and published his father's pioneering works in the 1640s. Trained as a physician, he became a kabbalist and, with Henry More, annotated Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's translations of kabbalistic texts. He led an itinerant life across the Netherlands, Germany and England, was imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition in Rome in 1661, and served as physician to Anne Conway, whom he introduced to kabbalist thought. In A Cabbalistical Dialogue he defended kabbalist metaphysics, placing matter and spirit on a continuum and describing matter as a coalition of monads. A friend of Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote his epitaph, he also wrote on the Adamic language and took part in the Keithian controversy among the Quakers.