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Alchemy - 30/oct/2023
🕑 Added 2023-10-30 18:14:20 +0000 UTCTHE FOUNDATIONS OF ALCHEMY
What would it mean to un-bake a cake?
These days, that would mean something atomic. It would mean throwing baked goods into the beam of a particle accelerator, or leaving a tin of pastries in an unshielded atomic reactor. Theoretically, it could be done, but peeling a cake apart, proton-by-proton, would be a painstaking and ludicrously expensive process.
In the second century, it would mean something alchemical. It would mean distilling the cake down to its elemental essences, purging its impurities, and then slowly reintroducing new materials until it transmutes into what you want. However, you aren’t even sure if such a thing is possible.
The eternal question with alchemy is how. How did we get from essences and alembics run by mercury-poisoned scholars, to particle accelerators and nuclear reactors run by radiation-poisoned scholars? The simple answer is practice, and a whole lot of writing things down. The slightly less simple answer is that modern science is built on the work of alchemists theorizing about the nature of the world, and finding ways to practically test those theories. The difference between alchemy and chemistry is theory. Once people learned they were working with atoms, not essences, chemistry became the dominant paradigm. But, that transition to modern experimental science was fueled by millenia of alchemical knowledge. Alchemy is one of the many great rivers that feed the lake of modern science. We, dear reader, are the horny salmon making our way upstream. This is easier said than done.
To understand alchemy, we have to see the world like the alchemists did. Chemistry is complex enough, and we are going to spend the next few thousand words doing it wrong on purpose. For example: Alchemists did not think the world was made of atoms. The fundamental particle of alchemy is called the “corpuscle.” They are like atoms, but where atoms are all the same size, and cannot be divided, corpuscles can be any size, and they are infinitely divisible. Where nowadays we understand atoms to be clouds of particles, corpuscles are like infinitely small wads of clay. Modern atomic science hinges on standardized weights and measurements, but alchemical particles can be different sizes, weights, and masses. They can nested inside of each other, or marbled together in many different textures and forms like the nuts and marshmallows in a scoop of rocky road.
Why did they think the world worked that way? Try to put yourself in some 2nd century alchemical shoes. If you knew nothing about the universe, what seems more likely: “Iron is just a big lump of metal.” or “Iron is made of a pattern of trillions of little orbs that are uniform and identical in every way.” And let us say you want to argue with another alchemist about this. How would you go about proving your theory? It’s going to be a while before you can get your hands on an electron microscope. You can only use what materials you can get your hands on. How long do you think it would take to invent the particle accelerator?
ALCHEMY: A PRIMER
Alchemy is difficult to study. Many of these texts are written in coded language, and properly deciphering them requires knowledge of historical chemistry, theology, and languages. Sure, you can read classical Arabic, but do you know enough about 4th century metallurgy, and Alexandrian Judaism, to decipher what chemical process is happening?
The last century or so has been disastrous for alchemical scholarship. The sheer difficulty of these texts has led to a rash of scholars who reject the idea that they are even about proto-chemistry at all, claiming that alchemical literature is simply coded psychological allegory. This idea is nonsense, and there is no basis for it. But if I want to claim that alchemy “isn’t really about the chemicals” what are you going to do? Learn classical Greek just to prove me wrong? The result of this is a vicious cycle of bad citations that is only now being untangled. Even good scholars routinely get lost among the twisting popular misconceptions of alchemical history. So let us take a moment to debunk some misconceptions:
One: Alchemy is not a monolithic tradition. There is no “one alchemy” handed down from master to student. It is not a single tradition that “goes back to the Egyptian god Thoth.” Physics works the same wherever you are. Two people on opposite sides of the world can independently figure out how to mix flour and water together to make bread. Theories of alchemy are complex as cultures, and as diverse as cuisines.
Two: Alchemy is not primarily concerned with the psychic, the spiritual, or the self-transformative. Alchemy is about physical materials, not what the physical materials may represent spiritually. Some alchemists were indeed mystics and magicians, and pondering the nature of nature is a natural fit for religious thinkers, but alchemy is always primarily about ordinary metallurgy.
Three: Alchemy was not “opposed to science.” Alchemy, like mathematics, was one of the practices that became modern science. See our earlier metaphor about horny salmon.
Four: Up until around 1800, alchemy and chemistry were the same thing. Similar to the early days of astrology/astronomy. They were not meaningfully distinct in any way. The only exception to this is the label “Chymistry” used to describe the transitional period between alchemy and chemistry in the late 1700s.
Five: I am not afraid to name names. Carl Jung is not a reliable source on alchemical history. His theory that alchemical literature is some form of coded psychological self-help literature is unsupported and ahistorical. The idea that alchemy was “never really about the metals” has been actively harmful to the field. For the last century or so, even credible historians have seen alchemy as a bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo, and thus denied it a place in proper scholarship, or worse, described it as backwards superstition in opposition to the logic and reason of the enlightenment.
THE GREAT WORK
Alchemy attempts to produce precious metals, stones, and medicines through the manipulation of elemental essences. There are several theories as to how this might be done. One camp theorizes that substances can be changed via altering the ratios of their platonic elemental essences. Another camp theorizes that all materials can be reduced to a primal form the Prima Materia. Once this is achieved, a substance called the philosopher's stone can be added to the vessel like yeast in bread, causing the desired substance to form. This process is known as the “Opus Magnum'' or Great Work.
The Great Work comes in several basic stages. These stages are named according to the colors that appear in the vessel. They are: blackening (nigredo), whitening (albedo), yellowing (citrinas), and reddening (rubedo). These colors are the result of heating a copper-mercury amalgam. As the mercury evaporates, the substance will change color. This process has been described by alchemists as cauda pavonis, “peacock’s tail.”
These stages can additionally be broken down into several steps. The number of these steps will vary from alchemist to alchemist, but the most common form of the process involves ten steps. They are:
- Calcination. Meaning oxidation by heating. Whenever you see an alchemist describe something as a “calcinate” that means its oxidized. Rusty iron is “iron calcinate” old green copper is “Copper Calcinate”
- Solution. Meaning ”dissolution in “sharp” (or mercurial) liquids.” This means breaking a substance down by bathing it in acids.
- Putrefaction. Decomposition. Now that you’ve broken your substance down with acids, you’ve got to boil it in warm compost to induce fermentation. At this stage the substance turns a nasty black color, and is often described by alchemists as the “Black Raven'' which is soon resurrected as the “white dove,” thus marking the end of nigredo, and the beginning of albedo.
- Reduction, The recovery of the fugitive “spirits” (“spirit” in this context means a volatile substance) during the calcination process by means of a fluid (“philosophical milk”), whereupon a yellow coloration (citrinitas) appears. Basically, you’re adding back what you boiled off earlier. You know you’re doing it right when it turns yellow.
- Sublimation. Adding the volatile, “spiritual” matter back to the vessel causes a violent reaction, and a red coloration. Alchemists often describe this as the raging of the “red dragon.” This is where rubedo occurs.
- Coagulation or Fixation. The reaction dies down, and the substance begins to solidify. This is the coagula part of solve et coagula. Congratulations, you have yourself some stable Prima Materia.
- Fermentation. This is a rare step. Some alchemists like to add a little bit of gold at this stage to act as a sort of “Yeast of Gold” to speed up the process.
- Lapis philosophorum. The Philosopher’s Stone. Now your prima materia can grow into ultima materia, (supreme matter). This bit is usually described as a heavy, dark red, mildly shiny, powder or stone. When you heat it up, it turns kinda waxy, but solidifies again when it cools. (What the alchemist has probably done at this point is produce mercury(II) sulfide, better known as Cinnabar.)
- Multiplication. Now that you have your philosopher's stone, you can shave off bits of residue, and use that to make more. This is similar to how you can cut a mushroom in half, plant both halves, and get two mushrooms.
- Projection. Now that you've got your philosopher's stone, it’s time to make some gold. All you’ve got to do is get some dust from the philosopher's stone, and mix it into your base metal. If you’ve done your alchemy right, it should make the base metal change color until it looks like gold. In later, medical applications of alchemy, this is the point where you apply your panacea (universal medicine that cures all ills.)
Keep in mind that there are many different ways to bake a cake. These ten steps and four stages are only the most common recipe. Every alchemist will have their own version of the Magnum Opus. There are versions with as few as seven steps, and others with more than 24. Some versions only have three stages, going from black, to white, directly to red. Part of what makes alchemy so difficult to study is the sheer diversity between thinkers. It helps to tackle the subject chronologically.
ALEXANDRIA, CRADLE OF ALCHEMY
What we would recognize today as alchemy started in the Ptolmeic era. For those that don’t know, that was the period of time when Alexander the Great finished slaughtering and conquering his way through Egypt, and died. Alexander’s generals convened. Their goal was to choose who among them would run the country they just conquered. They chose Ptolemy, who also happened to be the head of one of the most politically powerful families in Greece. They would last from around 305 BCE until around 30 BCE, when an Alexander the Great fan club called the Roman Empire would try their hand at slaughtering and conquering Egypt. The good news was that the Ptolemies loved themselves some libraries.
According to Galen, If you showed up to the big fancy port in Alexandria, and you had a book, some nice folks from The local Library of Alexandria would show up, take your book, make a copy of it, and return the book when they were done with it. This made Alexandria an excellent place to be if you liked to learn things, or if you were a librarian who enjoyed bullying merchants.
Folks got their hands on Greek natural philosophy, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, as well as mythologies from Greece, Egypt, and Judea. What information we have from this era is scant and precious, but history is a machine we can understand. When diverse knowledge is compressed into a tight space, and made available, it creates an explosion of innovation. What you have here is a recipe for a Unique Moment in History. In this case, that moment was the birth of Alchemy.
We do not know who wrote the first complete alchemical texts. Physika kai Mystika (“Natural and Secret Questions”) and Peri Asēmou Poiēseōs (“On the Making of Silver”) are both attributed to the Greek philosopher Democritus. In all likelihood, however, they were likely authored by a 3rd century Egyptian Neopythagorean named Bolos of Mendes.
The books themselves are unseasoned chicken compared to the spicy buffalo hot wings that Alchemy would become. They contain a primordial version of alchemy, all theory, no style, without a trace of magic or mysticism. On one hand, this is where we see the first recipes for gold-production, (chrysopoeia), but on the other hand, the primary concern of these texts seems to be the counterfeiting of precious metals and stones. The roots of alchemy are not grand mystical or psychological designs, they are grounded in ordinary, material, experiences like a merchant overcharging for bad copper.
MIRRIAM OF ALEXANDRIA
Alchemy is defined by both a theory and a practice. Just thinking about how metals work isn’t alchemy. Messing about with metals and a kiln isn’t alchemy. But once you’ve got some theories about metals, and a way to test them, then you’re doing alchemy.
Alchemical history proper begins on the north shore of Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, with a woman named Mirriam.
In the 1st century, most alchemy in Egypt was heavily tied to the House of Life, the state temple system. Most of what Egyptian temple alchemists did was build statues of the Gods. Color was important to Egyptian religion. When one was building a statue of the gods, color was of spiritual importance. Each of the big gods got their own color association. White for Horus, black for Anubis, green for Osiris, etc. If you were commissioned by the government to make a statue of Horus, the metal had to be white. While Egyptian alchemists were primarily concerned with transforming the color of metals, they didn’t seem to care much about making metals from scratch the way other alchemists were.
But the state-funded House of Life alchemists weren’t the only game in town: they had private competitors. Running an alchemy lab is expensive. It takes expert labor and all sorts of expensive and exotic ingredients, not to mention the cost of fuel. One of the only institutions that could afford to compete with the House of Life was Alexandria’s local Synagogue.
Where the House of Life alchemists enjoyed government funding, they also did not have much professional freedom. If the government wanted 500 statues of Osiris, you had to fill the order. By contrast, Jewish alchemists had to compete by learning and innovating as fast as possible. Alexandria’s Jewish quarter was a wellspring of cutting-edge alchemical theories, techniques, and technology.
Mirriam of Alexandria, aka Mary the Prophetess, Maria Hebrea, and Mary the Copt, was one such innovator. In her work, we see the first evidence of both an alchemical theory and practice. Mirriam did not simply create recipes for gold, she theorized about the nature of gold, and how those theories could be tested. It is difficult to summarize the sheer magnitude of her contributions to alchemical and scientific history without getting lost in the technical details. She is credited with the invention of dozens of materials, techniques, theories, and devices that would shape alchemy for centuries. To illustrate her contributions, she is the Marie in Bain-Marie, literally “Mary’s bath.” While she likely did not invent the technique, whenever chefs today make a double-boiler to melt chocolate, they are performing a technique popularized nearly two thousand years ago by an Alexandrian alchemist.
The Tribikos: A type of alembic with three “arms”, long tubes with vessels at the ends, used to distill substances and collect their vapors.
The Kerotakis: When used properly, this device creates an airtight seal in which substances are continually distilled, congealed, and distilled again. This “circulation” process of purification is often depicted as an ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, which itself became a central image of alchemy. (for those familiar with chemistry, the kerotakis is essentially a Soxhlet extractor.)
The Bain Marie: If you’ve ever wondered who the “Marie” in “Bain Marie” was, here you go. What we now know of as the double boiler was used extensively by alchemists throughout the years when gentle heat was needed.
Let’s say you want to make a philosopher's stone. Maria argued that the fundamental method was a process of distillation, sublimation, and rectification.
The Inversion of Nature: To volatilize the fixed, and fix the volatile. Or, to make the solid into fluid, and to make the fluid into solids. This allows the alchemist to break apart substances into their constituent parts.
The Union of Opposites:
First and foremost, is the Axiom of Maria: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” This describes the process of splitting a substance into its constituent parts so that it may be recombined into a new form.
(These are gonna be fodder for some good illustrations)
HERMES TRISMEGISTUS AND ALCHEMY
Hermes Trismegistus, literally “Hermes the Thrice-Great” is the smartest, firstest, most original-est, wizard/prophet/sage who ever existed. He was Hermes and Thoth and Moses all at the same time, and he invented everything cool and smart and he definitely existed.
The body of work attributed to Hermes Trismegistus is called Hermetica. If all these disparate peoples and religious cultures are the bricks of western esotericism, Hermetica is the mortar sticking it all together. Pick any book of alchemy or magic from the antique world, chances are you’ll find the influence of Mr. Trismegistus.
Hermeticism had a few key ingredients that made it perfect for gluing ideas together. First, it gave us a legendary sage that supposedly all knowledge came from. If two theologies have a similar idea, that’s because they both came from Trismegistus. Second, where the Gnostics saw the world as an impure thing made by a malicious God, the Hemetics think God did a pretty good job with the world, and aim to learn about God by studying the world. This is pretty clever, because not everyone can study a book, but everyone can look at rocks and trees. Third, it heavily resists ideas like doctrinal faith and pure rationality in favor of dispelling confusion. If you were confused, the Hermetics were happy to discuss things until the mysteries of reality revealed themselves.
Hermeticism serves as a scaffolding for the otherwise chaotic history of alchemy. Hermeticism touched many different intellectual fields, but no upstanding Byzantine scholar would care if an alchemical text was published by Joe Alexandrian, who cares if some guy thinks metals and the stars are similar? But an alchemy text published by Legendary Wizard Hermes Trismegistus? Now that has clout. If a great sage says the metals and the stars are similar, well you might be more inclined to listen. People have been following his teachings for generations now, so there’s gotta be something to it. Maybe he actually was the son of Thoth.
Hermetica comes in two types: The “technical” hermetica, which deals with things like astrology, mathematics, magic, and alchemy, and the “philosophical” hermetica, which deals with anthropology, cosmology, and theology. As for the alchemical hermetica, not much of it still exists. What fragments we have are preserved in the writings of later alchemists, who were familiar with Hermetic ideas.
Hermeticism has one foot in religious philosophy, and the other in natural philosophy. As such, it became an intellectual atom-smasher. If you have some great ideas about God and some great ideas about how to test the purity of copper, but you just can’t figure out how to combine the two, Hermeticism serves as an excellent conceptual glue.
(maybe talk about the emerald tablet here?)
ZOISMOS OF PANOPOLIS
If you want to divide alchemy into eras, the first era ends with Zosimos of Panopolis. Before Zosimos, Alchemy had a theory and a practice. After Zosimos, alchemy had a theory, a practice, and a full-fledged theosophical system underlying it. He was a practical innovator, experimenting with new techniques for gilding and dying, but he was also a mystic.
Very little is known about Zosimos’s life, but his writing carries clear influences from Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, as well as broader Greek and Egyptian traditions and philosophy. The man was a regular reading and writing machine. It is likely that he wrote far, far more texts than have survived today, on a wide variety of topics. For instance, one of his works is titled “On the sacred letter òmega” It is a magical, symbolic exploration of the Greek letter omega. He likely wrote a treatise like this for every letter of the Greek alphabet.
Zosimos’s work comes in two types. The vast majority are practical, full of things like descriptions of alchemical vessels, catalogs of materials, and commentaries on ideal conditions for alchemy. These are catnip for scholars of alchemical history like myself, but it’s the second type that’s gotten all the attention. These theo-philosophical texts have titles like Authentic Commentaries or “Authentic Memorials” (gnèsia hypomnèmata), and it is here that we see the birth of the idea of “spiritual alchemy.”
3rd century alchemical theory had a significant astrological element, and even Miss Hebrea references the belief that transmutation can only be properly done in a specific month. Zosimos, however, thinks this is nonsense. He believed that alchemy needed exactly two things: for the alchemist to meet the right material conditions, and for the alchemist to undergo a significant ritual purification beforehand.
This spiritual purification occasionally had a moral element to it. There are myriad references to the idea that transmutation simply would not work unless your intentions were pure or holy. Many of these alchemists believed wholeheartedly in some sort of God, and turning stuff into other stuff is kinda his job isn’t it? It makes sense that divinity would only let you play with his toys if he knew you weren’t going to break anything.
For Zosimos, this meant something Gnostic. In Zosimos’s version of the Garden of Eden, man is seduced twice. First he is first born as pure spirit, only to be seduced by fate into a body. Then he is seduced again by the creation of a woman, which only binds him further to material reality. It is knowledge of that spiritual, inner, self that Zosimos considers essential for alchemy. The stars and planets? Those are the augurs of seductive fate. They are “watchers” or the “pretenders,” divine planetary beings whose purpose is to distract man from knowledge of their inner self. * [footnote: With the humorous implication of it being important to eventually destroy the moon.]
Zosimos was equally influenced by Hermetic literature. His most famous text is Visions, a bizarre, dreamlike work which seems to describe an intricate purification ritual. The images of steps to an altar, sacred mixing bowls, and white-garbed priests are clearly evocative of Hermetic ritual. There are two main competing views of the text. One holds that the ritual language is a metaphorical description of the preparation of alchemical reagents. The other view, infamously pioneered by C.G. Jung, claims that the language is representative of some inner, psychological, experience that has nothing to do with metallurgy. This is nonsense, but not entirely nonsense.
Zosimos was notably more mystical than other alchemists. One cannot ignore the ritualistic elements of his theory. It would be just as incorrect to ignore the practical elements of his practice. An alchemist can be as mystical as they like but, no metal? No alchemy. The mistake is in thinking that proto-chemistry and spirituality cannot co-exist. God made the world, didn’t he? What is more spiritual than lending a hand?
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