Giuseppe Francesco Borri

Giuseppe Francesco Borri (4 May 1627 in Milan – 20 August 1695 in Rome) was an alchemist, prophet and doctor.

In 1644, together with his brother, Borri entered a Jesuit seminary in Rome. There he was taught by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who had an important influence on him. His intolerance of ecclesiastical authority deteriorated his relationship with his teachers (Borri even led a collective rebellion of seminarists, provoking the replacement of the Rector), and in 1650 Borri was expelled from the seminary.
He started his activity as a physician and alchemist among the pilgrims flocking to Rome for the Holy Year. In this period he met the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara, himself an alchemist, and in 1653 he took service with Count Federico Miroli, as physician and alchemist.

Borri also began his propaganda, both messianic and political, with the purpose of returning to an evangelically pure religion. Borri believed religion to be the foundation of every science and scientific investigation. For him the whole world (Christian and non-Christian) should be conquered and ruled by a Papal theocracy, that should trailblaze the Kingdom to come: a sort of heavenly world, a new Golden Age, where the values of a renewed and universal Christianity would triumph. Borri considered himself (at least according to the later Inquisition’s records) Prochristus, that is prophet and herald of the new era.

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