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images. Curiously, these images appeared first as part of an independent German poem titled Sun and Moon (Sol und Luna) that was later spliced into the Latin prose text of the Rosarium.
Here the personification of the two ingredients draws on Arabic—the name Gabritius is undoubtedly derived from kibrīt, the Arabic word for “sulfur,” and Beya from bayāḍ, meaning “whiteness” and “brightness,” surely referring to mercury.
outlandish. Sexual intercourse and reproduction are common elements of alchemical imagery, both textual and graphic. But given that alchemy is fundamentally a generative and productive practice (that is, it makes stuff), comparisons to procreation are actually appropriate.
The basis of this comparison lies in a well-established notion dating to ancient Greek medicine that males (just like Sulfur) are characterized by the qualities of hot and dry, while females (just like Mercury) are qualitatively cold and wet.
hermaphrodite in alchemy represents a substance arising from the union of a substance that is “male” (hot-dry) and one that is “female” (cold-wet).
practitioners promoted an expanding array of chemically produced or enhanced medicaments. Medical alchemy (also known as iatrochemistry or chemiatria) would expand enormously in the sixteenth century thanks to the influential writings (and rantings) of the iconoclastic Swiss physician Theophrastus von Hohenheim, commonly known as Paracelsus.
The recipe literature continued to develop as more workshops turned to chemical methods for producing a range of goods useful in arts and manufactures—salts, pigments, dyes, mineral acids, alloys, perfumes, distillates of various sorts, and so on. Alongside these industrious and productive activities, a wealth of new concepts about the hidden nature of matter and its transformations developed.
Most readers probably are aware of several common claims about alchemy—for example, that it is fundamentally distinct from chemistry, that it is inherently a spiritual endeavor or involves self-transformation, that it is akin to magic, or that its practice then or now is essentially deceptive.
vicious attacks on transmutational alchemy specifically as something simply fraudulent.
through the Arabic-speaking world.2 Because these two words now carry a host of modern connotations (most often, that chemistry is modern and scientific, while alchemy is outdated and non-scientific), many historians of science have adopted the practice of using the archaic spelling chymistry to refer to the whole range of practices that nowadays would be classed under chemistry and alchemy. This terminology was suggested both to recognize the undifferentiated domain of “alchemy and chemistry” and to transcend the automatic implications prompted nowadays by the words alchemy and chemistry.
Accordingly, the Academy of Sciences issued some of the noisiest rhetoric condemning transmutational endeavors—not as theoretically impossible but simply as fraudulent.
Everything within the ambit of chymistry that was most easily subject to criticism—for example, the Philosophers’ Stone, metallic transmutation, and so forth—was split off and increasingly labeled as alchemy.
“Alchemy” became the scapegoat for chymistry’s sins, driven from the respectable quarters where a newly purified chemistry could now reside.
Alchemist and alchemy became pejorative terms, descriptors of archaic, empty, fraudulent, even irrational persons and activities.
Many chemists—even within the Academy of Sciences itself—continued to work on the problem of transmutation.
demonstration. Sources disagree as to whether only three fellows bothered to show up or none at all, but what is clear is that on the appointed day, Price committed suicide by drinking poison.
Wiegleb also, like Adelung, compared alchemy to witchcraft.
In fact, the last decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the first of several “alchemical revivals.” In German lands, the number of alchemical texts being published suddenly spiked in the 1770s and 1780s, and several groups and journals (generally short lived) devoted to reviving, reorganizing, and pursuing chrysopoeia were founded.
secret societies and alchemy developed remains incompletely understood, but alchemy’s long-standing tradition of holding ancient and privileged secrets harmonized extremely well these groups’ claims of harboring ancient and arcane wisdom.
He bemoans the weakened state of chrysopoeia, blaming it on the fact that we live nowadays in an “enlightened” world, in a time when every sixteen-year-old boy is already a champion of criticism and a persecutor of superstition and antiquity. They revile their forefathers who believed too much, who debated about many things they did not understand, and who (to their shame) affirmed many things for which they could not declare a reason—save that they believed. Thus the grandfather is dishonored in his grave by his grandson, and the father by his son, and whosoever can say such things without
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“wisdom’s envelope, to guard her universal magistery from an incapable and dreaming world.”30 The balance of Atwood’s treatise presents her thesis in ponderous Victorian prose, interwoven with a jumble of decontextualized quotations from alchemical and classical authors, and filled with obscure assertions, enraptured exclamations, and strangely distorted scientific notions.
The source for Atwood’s ideas lies not in late antique, medieval, or early modern alchemy but rather in her own time and place, specifically the English craze for Mesmerism during the 1840s.
Alchemy’s central goals—achieving metallic transmutation, producing better medicines, improving and utilizing natural substances, understanding material change—
Seventeenth-century chymists, like their medieval predecessors, recognized seven metals: gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and mercury.
They called two of them—gold and silver—“noble” because of their resistance to corrosion, their beauty, and their rarity.
They labeled the remaining five base or “i...
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Already in antiquity, each of the seven metals had become linked to a particular planet. If we include the Sun and Moon as planets (as pre-Copernican astronomy did) there are seven planets, just as there are seven metals (see chart below). The correlations between each pair varied somewhat during the first centuries of alchemy, but had become fixed by the time of Latin alchemy.5
The origins of some connections are obvious: the two noble metals, for instance, are linked to the two major luminaries—gold with the Sun and silver with the Moon—
Iron is linked to Mars, probably because iron (in the form of armor and weaponry) is naturally as...
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Copper is paired with Venus, since the goddess’s home and the richest ancient copper mines were both on Cyprus—the island that accordingly provides the Latin word for “copper,” cuprum.
who maintained a chymical laboratory in his Danish castle-observatory named Uraniborg—referred to chymistry as “terrestrial astronomy” or “astronomy below.”7 This relationship between “astronomy above” and “astronomy below” echoes the Emerald Tablet—“as above, so below”— tersely expressing the interconnectedness of nature
Each pair of planets and metals was given a shared symbol, and chymists regularly used the planetary names to refer to the metals.
anima auri, or “soul” of gold.
white metal having the appearance of silver, but displaying all the other properties of gold—great density, high melting point, resistance to corrosion by nitric acid, and so forth. Several
Hippocratic statement about the art of healing came to be applied as well to alchemy: “Ars longa, vita brevis” (The art is long, but life is short).
While a careful reading of original texts does indicate points of commonality, it also reveals a broad diversity of approaches, theories, and practices. It also shows that ideas and methods evolved in response to practical experience.
The use of excrement as a starting material stems from an ancient axiom that the material of the Philosophers’ Stone “is of cheap price and found everywhere” and “is trodden underfoot.”
The combination of two substances also lends itself readily to analogy with biological sexual reproduction, where two parents are required.34 In making the Philosophers’ Stone, the hot-dry quality of Sulfur represents a “male” element, and the cold-wet of Mercury represents the “female.”
One key difference of course is that modern chemists do not use this system to be intentionally obscure or misleading, although some introductory chemistry students might think otherwise.
This airtight closure of the vessel, often carried out by melting the sides of the neck together, was called the “seal of Hermes,” in reference to alchemy’s legendary founder. (The memory of this very practical step in making the Philosophers’ Stone remains alive today in the expression “hermetically sealed.”)
The sealed “egg” is then placed in a furnace and heated (the correct temperature is another
Heating sealed vessels is generally a bad idea, since there is no provision for the release of pressure as the enclosed air expands upon heating, and certainly there are many accounts of e...
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If the material has been rightly chosen and prepared, and a detonation avoided, in thirty to forty days the enclosed substance will turn black. Black, the first of the “primary colors” of the stone, was called the “head of the crow” (caput corvi), the “blackness blacker than black” (nigredo
Upon continued heating, the blackness is supposed to recede over the following weeks, replaced by a multitude of short-lived and often-changing colors, called the “peacock’s tail” (cauda pavonis).
Gradually, the semiliquid mass grows lighter and lighter, finally becoming a brilliant white, the second of the primary colors of the Philosophers’ Stone.
marks the completion of the White Philosophers’ Stone or Whi...
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After certain further treatments, including the addition of silver, this White Stone becomes capable of transmuting all base metals into silver.
Reaching the ultimate goal of the work, however, demands continued heating beyond the white stage. Most writers suggested increasing the heat gradually at this point, whereupon the white material turns yellow and then darkens to a deep red.
The Red Stone must be “fermented” with gold—
