The Secrets of Alchemy (Synthesis)

by Lawrence M. Principe

But much of the modern world’s familiarity with alchemy is more apparent than real.

Far outnumbering works by historians, however, are those by an assortment of popular writers, occultists, enthusiasts, and a few hucksters that recapitulate a variety of clichés, misconceptions, historical errors, and baseless opinions, rather than presenting the current state of knowledge about the subject.

Most such books link alchemy in various ways—both favorable and unfavorable—to religion, psychology, magic, theosophy, yoga, the New Age movement, and, perhaps most often, to loosely defined notions of the “occult.”

Alchemy is now a hot topic among historians of science. Books and manuscripts that have lain unread for centuries are now being read again, and their contents more accurately understood in historical context. We are learning more about alchemy every day.

Historians of science customarily divide the history of Western alchemy into three main chronological periods: the Greco-Egyptian, the Arabic, and the Latin European. The

its lineage signaled by the Arabic definite article al- affixed to the word itself.

To locate the origins of alchemy, we must travel back to Egypt in the first centuries of the Christian Era.

Many technical operations fundamental for alchemy had been developed well before its emergence. The smelting of metals such as silver, tin, copper, and lead from their ores had been practiced already for four thousand years.

Significantly, most of the recipes deal with how to make imitations of these valuable substances: coloring silver to look like gold, or copper to look like silver; making artificial pearls and emeralds; and coloring cloth purple using cheaper imitations of the extravagantly expensive imperial purple dye made from murex snails.

The ingredients of this recipe are simple, clearly identifiable, and readily obtainable, so we can replicate the process today. After the ingredients are mixed (I found that urine works better than vinegar, by the way) and boiled gently for about an hour, an orange-red and unpleasantly scented liquid results. Although the Leiden Papyrus does not say how to use the liquid, we can guess. When a polished piece of silver is dipped into it, the metal quickly becomes tawny, then golden, then coppery, then bronzy, purple, and finally brown. Impressively, the shiny brilliance of the metal remains undiminished by the color changes until the very end, and the color and sheen remain stable for long periods of time. With a little practice and careful control of the temperature and the length of time the metal is left in the solution, I succeeded in making silver look astonishingly like gold (see plate 1).4

extremely thin layers of sulfides on the metal surface, owing to the action of calcium polysulfides present in this “water of sulfur.” To be sure, similar compositions are still used occasionally today for patinating metal objects (in other words, producing changes to their surface color).

Alchemy, like other scientific pursuits, is more than a collection of recipes.

only original documents currently known to survive from the Greco-Egyptian period.

The Greek word mystika did not refer in ancient times to what we today call mystical, that is, something having a special religious or spiritual meaning, or expressing a personal experience of the ineffable. Instead, it simply meant things to be kept secret.

uses the same fourfold division of processes into those for gold, silver, gems, and dyes. This similarity of format suggests that a whole tradition of practical recipe books once existed in which this division was standard.

“Nature delights in nature, nature triumphs over nature, nature masters nature.”

The process for making gold is called chrysopoeia, from the Greek words chryson poiein (to make gold), and it is accompanied by the less common (and less lucrative) argyropoeia, the making of silver. The general process of transforming one metal into another is called transmutation.

The birth of alchemy required the union of two traditions: the practical artisanal knowledge exemplified in the recipe literature, and theoretical speculations about the nature of matter and change present in Greek natural philosophy:

The notion that a single ultimate substance lies beneath all material things is known as monism.

of Greco-Roman Egypt, the two streams of craft traditions and philosophical traditions coexisted. Their merger—probably in the third century AD—gave rise to the independent discipline of alchemy.

One of the most prominent authorities is named Maria—sometimes called Maria Judaea or Mary the Jew—and Zosimos credits her with the development of a broad range of apparatus and techniques. Maria’s techniques include a method of gentle, even heating using a bath of hot water rather than an open flame.

Maria the ancient alchemist, not only for the rest of alchemy’s history, but even down to the present day. It is her name that remains attached to the bain-marie or bagno maria of French and Italian cookery.

Today there is a common misconception that alchemists worked more or less blindly— stumbling about mixing a little of this and a little of that in a random search for gold. This

Joining separated spirits to other bodies would then bring about transmutation into a new metal.

likewise expresses his surprise that when the vapor of sulfur turns mercury into a solid, not only does the mercury lose its volatility and become fixed (that is, nonvolatile), but the sulfur also becomes fixed and remains combined with the mercury.

Zosimos calls transmutation the “tingeing” of metals, and uses the word baphē, from the verb baphein, which means “to dip” or “to dye”; he likewise calls a transmuting agent a “tincture,” that is, something able to tint or color.

It is no longer a simple composition for bringing about superficial changes but rather some putative substance able to bring about real transmutation—and consequently something eagerly sought and eagerly hidden.

Here an almost ubiquitious feature of alchemy appears: secrecy and the hiding of names.

Thanks to an ambiguity in the Greek language, in some contexts the name can mean either “water o...

some places he intends the name to mean a transmuting agent, while in others he is clearly talking about the simple lime-sulfur c...

15 In yet another place he describes it as “the silvery water, the hermaphrodite, that which flees without ceasing . . . it is neither a metal, nor a water always in moveme...

In point of fact, in a Zosimos text just recently identified, the Egyptian admits freely that alchemical writers “call a single thing by many names while they call many things by a single name.”

The moderate level of secrecy encountered in the earlier recipe literature thus becomes more intense and more self-conscious with Zosimos. Such secrecy would wax and wane in intensity but never disappear for the rest of alchemy’s history.

To promote such secrecy, Zosimos employs a technique that would become typical for alchemical authors: the use of Decknamen, a German term meaning “cover names.” These Decknamen function as a kind of code.

where he uses the adjective our to specify a substance other than that usually meant by a common term; for example, he uses “our lead” to mean the mineral antimony

Decknamen serve a dual purpose: they maintain secrecy, but they also allow for discreet communication among those having the knowledge or intelligence to decipher the system.

They simultaneously conceal and reveal. Consequently, Decknamen have to be logical, not arbitrary, so...

processes. In other words, the actors, places, and actions described are personified Decknamen woven into a coherent and extended narrative. Such allegorical language would remain a common feature of alchemical writing, and become especially prominent in works by European practitioners starting in the fourteenth century.

But it is more probable that Zosimos composed these “dreams” explicitly, much like a fiction writer works, thus creating a self-consciously allegorical “prologue” for one of his practical treatises.

“dreams,” he declares axiomatically that “silence teaches excellence,” as if to explain his own relative silence and to advise an analogous silence for his readers.

The use of dreams as a literary device was an established and popular practice in Zosimos’s day,

The daimons thus use these false tinctures to manipulate their ignorant possessors, thereby keeping them under daimonic sway and subjected to Fate (an evil force to be rejected). What true alchemists seek, Zosimos declares, are tinctures that are purely “natural and self-acting,” bringing about transmutation by the operation of their natural properties alone.

Given the Gnostics’ fondness for casting their tenets into myth format, we could wonder if Zosimos’s choosing to put alchemical processes into an allegorical dream sequence arises from the same tendency to mythologize doctrines—

If scholars are correct to date Zosimos’s activity to around 300 AD, then he witnessed not only Emperor Diocletian’s violent suppression of a rebellion in Egypt in 297–98 but also the attempted destruction of alchemy’s literary heritage by the same emperor.

Diocletian ordered all “books written by the Egyptians on the cheimeia of silver and gold”

it is one of the earliest usages we have of a term— cheimeia—from which the words alchemy and chemistry derive.

of early alchemy, several of their authors await further and more careful study. One important development within this material is a greater melding of the practical with the theoretical and philosophical.

THE ALL (hen to pan)—directs us again toward ancient Greek philosophical notions

Clearly, this principle undergirds the idea of alchemical transmutation: one thing can be turned into another because at the deepest level they are really the same thing.

this substance is one of several things he meant by the phrase “water of sulfur.”