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The completed Philosophers’ Stone appears as a deep red, extremely dense, brittle, and fusible substance capable of penetrating the metals the way oil does paper.
After a few minutes, after all the contents of the crucible are molten again, the product—gold or silver, depending on which stone was projected—can be poured out into an ingot.
According to one account, a sample of the Philosophers’ Stone reputedly found hidden in a bishop’s tomb by John Dee transmuted 272,330 times its weight of lead into gold.
Chrysopoeians advanced various theories to explain the marvelous action of the Philosophers’ Stone. All of them agreed that its action was purely natural, that is, operating by natural laws alone. It is important to stress this point, since moderns often imagine the transmutational process to be somehow “magical” or “supernatural.”
Another variation on this theme was that the elixir is “plusquamperfect,” that is, in regard to the mineral realm the stone is more than perfect—it is gold elevated high above its usual rank of perfection.
recombines them into a wholesome and perfected substance. In this way, God Himself is a chymist at both the beginning and the end of time, and in reflection, the chymist’s work to improve material substances is divinized, for he acts in a God-like capacity to improve the natural world.
world. Because Paracelsus was far from a clear or orderly writer—it was even claimed by one of his associates that he dictated all his treatises while drunk—and because few of his writings were published during his lifetime, his immediate impact was only moderate and localized.
Another part of the criticism focused more broadly on the antiestablishment attitude of Paracelsians and their vision of chymistry. Many physicians quite reasonably objected to being publicly declared fools and having their formal training, scholarship, and licensing dismissed as worthless.
Any substance heated with the alkahest is first decomposed into its proximate ingredients (the tria prima), and upon further heating is reduced to water. As such, the alkahest promised to be the ultimate means of carrying out chymical analyses—a crucial means of gaining knowledge for Van Helmont and his followers. “There is no more certain genus of acquiring knowledge,” he wrote, “than when one knows what is contained in a thing and how much of it there is.”62 By stopping the process at the right point, and distilling off the alkahest, the “first essence” (ens primum) of the dissolved
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He asserts that without chymistry there would be neither bricks, lime, nor glass with which to build houses; no inks, paper, dyes, or pigments with which to print and color; no spirituous drinks like beer and wine; no adequate medicines, salts, or metals.
Thus, seventeenth-century “chymistry”—the unified field of what we today call alchemy and chemistry—stretched across a wide domain: from seeking the Philosophers’ Stone, metallic transmutation, the alkahest, and other alluring secrets, to explaining natural functions of the body and the cosmos, to illustrating theological truths, to refining metals, making medicines, and preparing cosmetics.
Modern scholarship suggests that several authors are hidden behind the mask of Basil Valentine (a pseudonym most likely derived from basileos valens, a hybrid of Greek and Latin meaning “powerful king”).
antimony is known as a fairly rare, semimetallic element of moderate toxicity (sharing many properties with arsenic), but for early modern chymists it was a source of inexhaustible fascination.
Valentine instructs the reader to grind antimony ore (stibnite, native antimony sulfide [plate 3]), roast it slowly until it turns light gray, melt this “ash” in a crucible, and then pour out the molten material to provide “a beautiful, yellow, transparent glass.”
obtained a sample of ore from Eastern Europe (Valentine specifies the use of “Hungarian antimony”), ground it, roasted it, fused the ash, all exactly as before—and this time obtained the beautiful, yellow, transparent
about 1 to 2 percent of the ore’s total weight, proved to be the key; without its presence, the glass does not form.10 In fact, when I took the ugly gray lumps from the failed trials, remelted them, and added a pinch of powdered quartz (or silica, silicon dioxide), they also turned into beautiful golden glasses.
George Ripley, for example, wrote his fifteenth-century Compound of Alchymie in the form of twelve “gates,” each one cryptically describing a single operation (such as solution, sublimation, putrefaction) necessary for making the Philosophers’ Stone.
answer is Valentine’s favorite substance, antimony ore or stibnite. Stibnite was widely thought to be related to lead, and was used to purify gold.18 Calling stibnite a ravenous wolf would make sense to anyone who has seen it react with metals. When melted, stibnite dissolves—“devours”—the metals with breathtaking speed.
thrown into melted stibnite, it dissolves almost instantly. Metals other than gold are turned into sulfides that float to the surface. A brilliant white alloy of antimony and gold sinks to the bottom of the melt, where it is easily retrieved after the crucible has cooled.
Given ammonium chloride’s ability to sublime, eagle is an appropriate Deckname for it—both the salt and the bird fly through the air. (The modern term volatilize derives from the Latin volare, “to fly.”)
First, at least some cryptic texts and emblems dealing with making the Philosophers’ Stone do encode real chemical processes that their authors carried out. Second, these bizarre allegories and emblems can be rationally and methodically deciphered, meaning that their authors constructed them carefully, not only to conceal their knowledge, but also to reveal it in a measured way to the most talented and thus the most worthy readers. Third, readers expected such allegorical language and imagery to have a specific, discernible meaning; they labored at understanding it, and at least some of them
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Since the steps after sealing the prepared material in the “philosophical egg” had become virtually canonical by the end of the sixteenth century, there was no reason to encode them. Thus, by drawing on laboratory results, theoretical extrapolations, and textual precedents,
Why was there so much interest in this Philosophical Mercury? Mercurialists maintained that it and common gold were the two starting materials for making the stone. Sealed in the philosophical egg, the two would react, display the necessary colors of black, white, and red, and produce the elixir.
The most well known was the “Tree of Diana,” a simple crystallization of silver precipitated from a silver nitrate solution.
the term donum dei (gift of God) is actually a technical phrase used in medieval and Renaissance theological and legal literature dealing with the status of knowledge. St. Thomas Aquinas (among others) asserts that all knowledge is in fact a donum dei. In so doing, he alludes to an established legal precept that “knowledge is the gift of God, therefore it cannot be sold” (scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest).
The underlying idea is that since knowledge is a divine gift, the person who has received it has no right to sell it, in part because he does not in fact own it, and in part because doing so would be simony, that is, the sin of selling spiritual goods for money. Late medieval and early modern chymical writers were surely aware of the term’s background. Their use of it both underscores the ultimate source of all knowledge while of course elevating theirs in particular, and emphasizes the obligation to use the gift of knowledge wisely and appropriately.
The long-standing idea of celestial effects on earth—the macrocosm-microcosm interaction expressed in the Emerald Tablet (“as above, so below”) and that undergirded astrology—was regarded as visible every day in the tides, the seasons, and the turning of the compass toward the North Star;
After reiterating that the knowledge of such secrets is truly a gift of God (Gabe und Geschenck Gottes), Khunrath continues: The dear ancient philosophers obtained the knowledge and practice of this thing [the Stone and its matter], as one can clearly find in their books, either from God himself through a special divine inspiration, secret visions, or the revelations of good spirits, or from another philosopher and human teacher, or indeed from the light of nature, through diligent reading, true books, and by contemplating, meditating upon and observing wisely the wonderful workings of nature
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Divine revelation and visions are laid alongside ordinary human instruction, the study of books, and careful observations of the world at large. The connection among them is that God is ultimately the source of knowledge.
Thus, the acquisition of rare knowledge—howsoever obtained—is truly a gift of God. But that gift need not be wrapped in thunder and lightning or in ecstatic visions (although it might be); it can arrive silently and gently while reading a book, listening attentively to a teacher, contemplating the actions of nature, or bending over a crucible.
Yet alchemy is more than gold making, more even than the transformation of one substance into another. From the time of its emergence in Greco-Roman Egypt nearly two thousand years ago and down to the present day, it has evolved in a variety of cultural and intellectual contexts, and developed along multiple lines. A
Small wonder, then, that it inspired not only other investigators of nature but also a range of artists and authors (even to the present day) who could find meanings of their own in its claims, promises, and language. Thus, alchemy forms a part of not only the history of science, medicine, and technology but also the history of art, literature, theology, philosophy, religion, and more.
many ideas developed and held by the practitioners of chemeia, al-kīmiyā’, alchemia, chymistry, and chemistry have subsequently been shown to be factually incorrect. Nonetheless, science is not a body of facts existing “out there”; it is an ever-developing story about the world as told by human observers rooted in time and place.
