The Stone of the Wise

Alchemy, which paralleled chemistry much as astrology did astronomy, probably arose in the eastern Mediterranean in Roman times. Later it flowered in the Islamic world and in medieval Europe, but with the scientific revolution it split off from chemistry proper and slowly declined as the great chemical discoveries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries undermined its position.

Well, just what was alchemy? A philosophy, - an art, and (its practitioners thought) a science. As a philosophy it dealt with the nature of matter; as a science it formulate laws governing the changes in material substances; as an art it was carried on with furnaces, vessels and reagents as was chemistry.

But alchemy differed from chemistry in two ways. First, it was based upon magical concepts of the analogistic universe, full of sympathetic forces and occult connections. Secondly, while chemistry studies the behavior of matter for a vast variety of industrial and medical purposes, alchemy narrowly pursued the secrets of changing base metals into gold and of making the Elixir of Life to confer health and immortality. Some alchemists even sought the alkahest or universal solvent, though the smarter ones asked: what would you put in it if you got it?

To begin operations, the alchemist needed a sample of prima materia or "first matter." This was variously identified with mercury, gold salt, vinegar, air, fire, blood cloud, sea, Venus, dragon moon, shadow, theriac, Goose of Hermogenes, and many other real and fancied substances. An alchemical recipe reminds one of the magical chain Gleipnir of Norse myth forged by the dwarfs out of the breath of fishes, the footfalls of cats, the beards of-women, and other improbable substances.

Then the alchemist undertook his magnum opus, a series of chemical manipulations, usually based upon some biological or mythological analogy. The alchemist who wrote under the name of Morienus taught that to obtain the Philosopher's Stone for transmuting metals there had to be coitus (in a chemical sense), conception, pregnancy, birth, and nutrition

Generations of alchemists tried in all seriousness to stimulate these events. Others believed that to transform a metal into gold, it had to be "killed," "buried," and "resurrected."

Most alchemists used a clay reverbatory oven called an athanor or "philosophical egg," together with retorts and other legitimate chemical apparatus. They paid much attention to changes in color and sought a process that would carry their material through a sequence of three colors: black ("Crow's Head," symbolizing putrefaction) white (indicating the lesser Stone) and red (indicating the perfect Stone).

The Philospher's stone, the objective of all this activity was a substance which, "projected" or sprinkled on molten metal, would turn that metal into silver or, if the Stone were of the highest grade, into gold. The Stone was also called the Tincture the Grand Magisterium. the Quintessence, the Stone of the Wise, the Universal Essence, the Thirnian Stone, the Hyle, or the Carbunculus. Those who claimed to have seen it usually described it as a powder, generally red but sometimes of another color. The power of the Stone to transmute was estimated at as much as a million times its own weight.

Having gotten his Stone, the alchemist could use it to transmute base metals or, by dissolving it in alcohol, to make the elixir vitae, the Elixir of Life, by which he could cure all ills, rejuvenate himself and prolong his life. Elixirs for these purposes have been developed in various societies: a Chinese emperor is said to have died from drinking such a concoction.

Some of the recipes were fantastic to say the least. The early alchemist Theophilus proposed to make gold as follows: Imprison and feed two cocks until they copulate and lay. The resulting eggs must be brooded by toads fed on bread. (Toads do not eat bread. ) These eggs produce normal-looking chicks which are, however, really basilisks and which grow snakes' tails and burrow out of sight unless kept on a stone floor. Put these basilisks in underground brazen vessels for six months, during which time they are nourished by "subtle earth" which enters through the holes in the vessels. Then roast the vessels and mix the remains of the basilisks with vinegar, copper, and human blood to make gold.

A determined alchemist might spend years distilling and redistilling mercury. He thought that to obtain the Philospher's Stone he had to start with the Mercury of the Philosophers, which could only be refined from common mercury by repeated distillation. So he repeated the operation over and over until his funds ran out or the fumes killed him.

Or he might roast molten lead until it all evaporated, leaving a tiny lump of silver to begin with. But the alchemist, not knowing this, would think he had done at least a second-rate transmutation.

Chemistry was slower than most sciences to free itself from pseudo-scientific associations. The reason was that the laws of chemistry are so complex and interdependent that, in formulating these laws, you must hit upon the right scheme almost all at once, instead of proceeding in normal scientific fashion from the simpler problems to the more complex. Moreover chemistry is concerned with the behavior of atoms and molecules and, since you can't see atoms and molecules, you have to infer their existence and behavior from other facts.

Medieval European alchemists believed that alchemy had been invented by Tubal-Cain, Noah, or some such patriarch and passed down by Solomon, Hermes Trismegistus, Osthanes Demokritos, and other adepts, some of whom never lived and the rest of whom had nothing to do with alchemy. Thus Hermes Trismegistus is a combination of the Greek messenger-god Hermes and the ibis-headed Egyptian god of wisdom, Tehuti or Thoth, metagrobolized into a mortal king of Egypt who lived about the time of the Flood and wrote 36, 525 books on alchemy.

Actually, alchemy developed from two main roots: the speculations of Classical philosophers about the nature of matter, and the techniques of Mediterranean metal-smiths and other industrial artisans.

A few Ionians, or Asiatic Greeks, began philosophical speculations about matter in the sixth century B. C. Some of them thought that the universe around them was made of a single primal matter, of which all the familiar substances were modifications. Thales of Miletos suggested that the "first principle" was water; Anaximenes, that it was air; Herakleitos, that it was fire or change; Pythagoras, that it was number.

As these guesses left nobody much the wiser, the next formula "tried was that the universe was made of a few simple substances. Empedokles of Agrigentum, the fifth-century B. C. Siceliot-Greek philosopher, advanced the classical element-theory of antiquity: that there were four elements—earth, water air, and fire,

This Empedokles was a versatile fellow whose accomplishments were exaggerated into legends. Though rich and pompous, he was an influential democratic politician who liberalized the constitution of his city. He wrote plays and poems, and addressed his fellow-townsmen thus:

Modesty was evidently not a vice with him. Anyway, he taught that these four elements, mixed in various proportions, give all the familiar substances:

In the following century Aristotle complicated this picture by adding a fifth element, aither or ether, an imaginary pure high-altitude air. He also analyzed the elements into combinations of four fundamental qualities: heat cold dryness, and wetness. Thus fire was hot and dry, air hot and wet, and water cold and wet. Classical scientist^ spent much' of their time and thought in juggling these qualities, producing a body of theory notable for ingenuity influence, and complete uselessness.

The other root of alchemy was the Egyptian art of counterfeiting—or, to take a kinder view, making cheap alloys that looked like gold and silver.

Egypt has produced wonderfully skilled artisans and jewellers from the early dynasties to the present, and the art of imitating precious metals had been stimulated by the discovery of mercury about the third century B. C.

It was found, for instance that a good ersatz gold can be made by combining silver arsenic, and sulfur. Later philosophers who read of these metallurgical feats wondered whether the Egyptians hadn't really made gold, since the alloy looked like gold and a metal's appearance was deemed one of its most essential qualities.

Pliny the Elder said that Emperor Gaius Caligula made a little gold by heating arsenic sesquisulphide, but concluded that the method was impractical. After this early reference to gold-making come several fragmentary works on alchemy from the first seven centuries of our era, published under the names of (pseudo-) Demokritos, Synesios, Zosimos Olympiodoros, and Stephanos. These early references point to vigorous alchemical activity in Roman times, centering in Egypt.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, alchemy spread. It flourished in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. However, of the many treatises that have come down from this period, most are so full of magic, mystery and amphigory as to be practically unintelligible. One reads:

A serpent is stretched out guarding the temple. Let his conqueror begin by sacrifice, then skin him, and after having removed his flesh to the very bones, make a stepping-stone of it to enter the temple. Mount upon it and you will find the object sought. For the priest, at first a man of copper, has changed his color and nature and become a man of silver; a few days later, if you wish, you will find him changed into a man of gold.

How much good would this do a practical chemist setting out to make gold?

The real pioneer of Muslim alchemy was Abu Musa Jabir ibn-H ayyan whom Europeans called Geber. He lived about the eighth century and revived the almost forgotten experimental methods of Archimedes and other Hellenistic scientists. Of the many Arabic works attributed to him, some are adaptations of Greek alchemical works. Others show considerable chemical knowledge such as the preparation of lead carbonate and the reduction of arsenic and antimony from their sulphides. About 200 medieval Latin works were ascribed to Jabir, but most of these were mere pseudepigrapha written under Jabir's name for reasons of prestige.

Jabir probably originated the hypothesis that all substances were compounds -of sulfur and mercury. This theory partly replaced Empedokles' four-element hypothesis. But Jabir's sulfur and mercury were not the ordinary substances known by these names. His Sulfur (we capitalize it to distinguish it from common sulfur) was the "principle" of combustibility and color, while his Mercury or Azoth was the principle of liquidity and luster. Thus gold and silver were nearly pure Mercury. Like the Greeks, Jabir tended to confuse things with qualities. Other alchemists added a third principle, Arsenic or Salt, the "principle of solidity."

With the decline of the Caliphate as a result of the Turkish invasions in the tenth and eleventh centuries the intellectual center of Islam shifted from Baghdad to Spain, and thence alchemy spread to Western Europe. From the eleventh century on Europeans read translations of Arabic alchemical manuscripts and decided to become alchemists themselves. Many wrote their own treatises under the names of their Muslim predecessors or, later, under the names of distinguished European scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas.

Thus there grew up an immense and unreadable corpus of alchemical literature. The Byzantine and Arabic works had been heavily magical, telling of visions of the tail-biting snake Ouroboros (an old Egyptian magical symbol) and of the seven heavens of the planets. They invoke Hermes Trismegistos and affirm that the sages hide the secret of transmutation for fear of the anger of demons. Sometimes these works preserve the old Hellenistic-Egyptian counterfeiting formulas, but so distorted by repeated translations as to be scarcely recognizable.

The European alchemists followed this tradition. Their treatises had such flowery titles as "The New Pearl of Great Price", "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" or "An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King". To hide their meaning from the "vulgar", they saw fit "to vaile their secrets with a mistie speech" by such code-names as "Royal and Magnificent Blood of a Gray Dove" for red lead and "Product of the Daughters of the Bulls of Athens" for honey. Paracelsus used "Red Lion" for gold and "Green Lion" for copper sulphate."Dragon's Blood" might be almost anything, even "real" dragon's blood since that rare substance was a commonplace of magical recipes.

The seven metals were often called by the names of the planets: "Sun" for gold, "Moon" for silver, "Mars" for iron, and so on. Some alchemists devised symbols like those of astrology for their substances and illustrated their books with pictures full of kings, lions dragons, naked people, skeletons, mountains, and other symbolic objects. Western alchemists achieved such masterpieces of obscurity as this:

But if you add to the Eagle the icy Dragon that has long had its habitation upon the rocks, and has crawled forth from the caverns of the earth, and place both over the fire, it will elicit from the icy Dragon a fiery spirit which, by means of its great heat, will consume the wings of the Eagle, and prepare a perspiring bath of so extraordinary a degree of heat that the snow will melt away upon the summit of the mountains, and become of water, with which the invigorating mineral bath may be prepared, and fortune, health, life, and strength restored to the King.

This special jargon might have been helpful had there been a Society of Alchemical Engineers to standardize the terms. As there wasn't, the number of symbols increased with each new treatise, running into the thousands. Alchemists sometimes began their tracts with protests against the "obscure and allegorical style" of their colleagues, and then went ahead to write as cryptically as their predecessors.

One of the most celebrated pieces of alchemical writing, the "Tabula Smaragdina" or "Emerald Tablet," comprised a collection of aphorisms which goes back to early Muslim alchemy and perhaps farther. Medieval accounts tell how Alexander the Great found a slab of emerald inscribed with Phoenician characters in the tomb of Hermes in a cave near Hebron, reading:

1. I speak not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.

2. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.

3. And as all things were produced by the mediation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation.

4. Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carried it in its belly, its nurse is the earth.

5. It is the cause of. all perfection throughout the whole world.

6. Its power is perfect if it be changed into earth.

7. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.

8. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and inferior. Thus you will obtain the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.

9. This thing is the fortitude of all fortitude, because it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates every solid thing.

10. Thus were all things created.

11. Thence proceeded wonderful adaptations which are produced in this way.

12. Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, possessing the three parts of the philosophy in the whole world.

13 That which I had to say concerning the operation of the Sun is completed.

At least forty-eight books have been written to explain the "Emerald Tablet", but at best it expresses in a vague way the principles of sympathism and analogism that underlie all sympathetic magic.

Besides their belief in the four Elements, the four Qualities, and the three Principles, the alchemists entertained the notion that metals grew from seeds in the earth like vegetables. Some thought that the heavenly bodies impregnated the earth, and that gold, for instance, was the child of the sun; tin, of Jupiter; and copper, of Venus. Others believed that Nature was trying to make the perfect metal, gold and that base metals were abortive or defective efforts in this direction. Or they thought that metals evolved changing from one to another and moving up the scale to gold. The alchemist's job was to synthesize gold by speeding this natural process.

There was some questions as to whether the end-product would be common gold or some mysterious new "Gold of the Philosophers," also called ios (Greek for "tarnish"). The idea of this supergold was based upon the appearance of a purplish or iridescent film on the surface of some alloys under certain treatments.

Accounts of dramatic discovery of magical books like the "Emerald Tablet" are a common feature of pseudepigraphic (falsely attributed) works, especially those about occult matters. For instance, the alchemical treatise "Concerning the Seven" was said to have been discovered in the tomb of the mythical King Kyranides at Troy, while the "Book of Images of the Moon" turned up in a golden chest. The medieval practice of asserting that a book was received under mysterious circumstances, to lend it spurious authority, is an old custom that has not yet died out, as witness Madame Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine" and Joseph Smith's "Book of Mormon".

Even when they did not resort to such melodramatics medieval alchemists commonly ascribed their books to long-dead famous men—even to those, like Raymond Lully whose authentic works show that they did not believe in alchemy.

Thus, astrology was analogistic astronomy, so alchemy was analogistic chemisty, full of religous mysticism, Neoplatonic symbolism, and thaumaturgic magic. Alchemists, working on the magical principle of "as above, so below," believed they were operating on the planes of matter and spirit at the same time. As men had spirits or souls, they believed, metals must have them too.

Following the laws of sympathetic magic, they thought that actions on the spiritual plane affected reactions on the material one. Hence they modelled their chemical processes on the Catholic Mass. or on the creation-myth of Genesis, or on the Crucifixion, or on the reproduction of organisms. They sought moral purity while trying to purify their materials, and tried hard to get their wives with child while "marrying" their Philosophical Sulfur and Mercury. With all these distractions and irrelevancies, it is not surprising that their findings were small for the effort expended.

They were also misled by their passion for gold, which men had originally chosen as their favorite money-stuff not for occult virtues but because of its rarity and chemical torpor. But because of its use as a medium of exchange, the alchemists looked upon it as a "perfect" or "noble" metal attributed magical properties to it, and even used it as a medicine, useless though it is for this purpose.

Obviously, if the alchemists had succeeded in making gold on a large scale they would have defeated their own ends by cheapening the metal. This inflationary possibility does not seem to have worried them much, though Thomas Norton cautioned them not to reveal their secrets to the vulgar, lest some rascal thereby "remove from their hereditary thrones those legitimate princes who rule over the peoples of Christendom."

A few anti-alchemical laws were passed, but not to prevent inflation. The English law of 1404, for instance, made gold-making a felony because of the fear that the king might get his hands on the power and so become independent of Parliament. This act, however, soon fell into abeyance, and English patents or licenses were issued in the fifteenth century to "labor by the cunning of philosophy for the transmutation of metals with all things requisite to the same at his own cost, provided that he answered to the King if any profit grow therefrom." The pious Henry VI issued four such patents in 1544 to several priests and monks, reasoning that they, with their experience of transubstantiation of the Host at Mass, should be well fitted to change metals.

Laws against magic did not much affect alchemy because the men of that time considered alchemy science rather than magic. Alchemists were not usually molested unless caught in fraud. But if they had little to fear from the law, they were liable to be seized by some greedy prince or noble in order to extort the secret of the Stone from them. In 1575 Duke Julius of Brunswick roasted a woman alchemist alive in an iron chair because she failed her promise to give him a gold-making formula.

In another case the fat Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton was said to have effected several transmutations, and the story got around. In 1602 Seton toured Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, eloping with the daughter of a citizen of Munich in the process. Then the Elector of Saxony summoned him to Dresden where, failing to wheedle his secret out of him, he had the alchemist jailed and tortured.

Then Michael Sendivog, a young Slavic alchemist living in Dresden, heard of Seton's plight. Sendivog sold some property in Krakow and used the money to bribe the guards to let him visit the prisoner. Seton promised Sendivog the secret of transmutation in exchange for his freedom. Sendivog got the guards drunk and spirited Seton away to Krakow, but Seton reneged on his promise on the pretext that it would be sinful to disclose such awful Hermetic mysteries. When Seton died from the effects of the torture about 1603, Sendivog married his widow in hope she might have Seton's secret, but in this too he was disappointed.

Then Sendivog obtained the patronage of Emperor Rudolf II, who, though a haughty and unlikeable man with intervals of insanity, was an enthusiast for the sciences and pseudo-sciences and subsidized the astronomers Brahe and Kepler, Once an avaricious Moravian noble kidnapped Sendivog to wring his secrets from him. When Sendivog escaped and complained to Rudolf, the emperor confiscated the noble's estate and gave it to the alchemist.

Before he died in 1646 at 84, Sendivog had been councillor of state to four successive emperors. He revised and published some of Seton's manuscripts. In one of these in a dialogue between Mercury, Nature, and an Alchemist, Sendivog's disillusioned alchemist candidly admits:

Now I see that I know nothing; only I must not say so. For I should lose the good opinion of my neighbors, and they would no longer entrust me with money for my experiments. I must therefore go on saying that I know everything; for here are many that expect me to do great things for them... There are many countries, and many greedy persons who will suffer themselves to be gulled by my promises of mountains of gold.

The most dramatic incident in the biographies of alchemists is, of course, their successful transmutation of metal. In the commonest form of this story, the alchemist after struggling without success for years, meets a mysterious stranger who gives him a small quantity of the Stone. With this the alchemist makes some gold, but when he goes to look for his benefactor, the adept has vanished.

One of the best-known of these tales concerns the Belgian savant Jean Baptiste van Helmont. This gifted physician of Brussels (1577-1644) performed notable work in physiology and chemistry and invented the word "gas". He was, however, a disorderly and superficial thinker, of whom it was said "He wanted to be learned in a brief time and easily and therefore rushed through all- the sciences without lingering by any." The "nobility of character" his friends attributed to him did not stop him from claiming to possess the alkahest, or from writing:

I am constrained to believe that there is the Stone which makes Gold, and which makes Silver; because I have at distinct turns, made projection with my hand, of one grain of the Powder, upon some thousand grains of hot Quick-silver; and the business succeeded in the Fire, even as Books do promise; a Circle of many people standing together with a tickling Admiration of us all... He who first gave me. the Gold-making Powder, had likewise also, at least as much of it, as might be sufficient tor changing two hundred thousand Pounds of Gold... For he gave me perhaps half a grain of that Powder, k and nine ounces and three quarters of Quick-silver were thereby transchanged: But that Gold, a strange man, being a Friend of one evening's acquaintance, gave me.

Some decades later the Dutch physician Helvetius told an almost identical yarn about a mysterious "Artist Elias" who gave him a grain of the Stone (which looked like yellow glass) wherewith he turned three ounces of lead to gold, but who went off on a pilgrimage to Palestine and was never seen again. As this tale occurs again and again with little variation, it was evidently borrowed by one biographer from another to pad his narrative. The mysterious stranger with the Stone, we can infer, never existed, and men like van Helmont can have fine reputations for honesty and still draw a long bow.