these days alchemy gets a bad rap in
fantasy stories charlatans and fancy
robes promise to turn lead into gold but
real alchemists weren't just mystical
misers they were skilled
experimentalists backed by theories of
matter and they played a huge role in
the development of our knowledge about
one of our fundamental questions what is
stuff do chemists today spend a lot of
time trying to turn lead into gold no
but in part they are inheritors of a
wealth of knowledge created by
alchemists who were trying to turn led
into gold
why do they keep doing that did they all
really think that it would work was it
some science experiment or religious
rituals yes all of those things today
we're gonna meet some alchemists and
consider just what the heck they were
doing all day with their metals and how
they sought to understand stuff
the word alchemy which is where we get
the word chemistry from is a bit of a
mystery it might mean the black earth
symbolizing Egypt but it might not
either way all of these words were used
in Europe before 1600 to describe the
same system let's define alchemy as a
way of thinking philosophically about
stuff by changing it this included older
astrological ideas alongside new ones
derived from experiment and observation
alchemy parallels the scholastic medical
tradition we looked at last time both
systems spanned across Eurasia and
relied on books but the alchemists had
different social norms or ideas about
how someone creating knowledge should
act alchemists did publish books but
typically they encoded their
philosophies and complicated allegories
or stories wherein the characters and
actions stand for something other than
what they appear this essentially
rendered whole alchemical systems secret
except to their own friends they used
code words called dekhna men so tin
might literally mean the metal tin in
one book but serve as a code word for
silver and another the books were
illustrated but many of the images were
symbols masking their true meanings the
good and the bad thing about the deck
demon system was that anyone could read
any proto scientific treatise on what is
stuff and come away with almost any
conclusion good thing today we have the
internet to help everyone agree on
scientific questions based on evidence
right a lot of alchemical books focused
on transmutation or changing metals into
other metals in theory all the way back
to Aristotle transmutation mimicked a
natural process metals were compounds
formed deep in the earth when different
quantities of sulfur and Mercury were
crushed together miners had been working
with metals for years digging them up
and then heating them to purify them the
difference for alchemists though was
that transmutation meant hacking this
whole process by doing it artificially
but the alchemical metals are not
compounds of anything they're elements
so how did the alchemists take nan
compounds and read them as compounds the
alchemists had problems obtaining pure
samples when they heated up chunks of
metal these would bubble and change
colors based on impurities meaning tiny
bits of other elements but alas
metals when isolated don't actually
break down into sulfur and Mercury there
were two kinds of alchemical metals the
noble metals were gold which represents
the Sun and silver which represents the
moon the base metals include mercury
which represented the planet Mercury
copper for Venus iron for warlike Mars
tin for Jupiter and lead for slow sad
Saturn in fact our name for the metal
mercury comes from this alchemical
association with the Greek messenger god
agents of transmutation also fell into
two categories particulars which only
did one thing for example change copper
into silver and universals meaning the
Philosopher's Stone
that's the Philosopher's Stone no
sorcerers involved American Harry Potter
this mysterious stone could change any
base metal into gold the quest for the
universal transmutation agent was called
cry so pariah or literally make into
gold to get started that cry so poem
would combine the right ingredients in
an egg-shaped vessel called an Alembic
and then heat the mixture up for a long
time what were the right ingredients to
make the Philosopher's Stone alchemists
disagreed the fact that they didn't
agree on what the Philosopher's Stone
actually was pretty much symbolizes the
whole system presip away are required
fine-tuning the practice of metallurgy
alchemists had to heat ingredients for
days on end controlling the temperatures
precisely without the aid of modern lab
equipment or even a thermometer
it was difficult sweaty work eventually
the mix of ingredients would turn black
and then white and then yellow and
finally red at this point if your oven
hadn't exploded you won you now have a
lump of red substance that when heated
up with base metals changed them into
gold supposedly the search for the
Philosopher's Stone produced new
alchemical theories and felt like a
wonder inspiring generations of
experiment errs even if it never quite
you know worked alchemy persisted
because transmutation clearly produced
something including new compounds the
problem is that we don't always know
what it produced because of the whole
secret code thing Luna fixa for example
was a dense white metal that was
corrosion resistant and a high melting
point and was pretty soft was it
platinum white gold or something else
entirely but alchemy was never only
about metals the human body for
was understood as an alchemical workshop
chemical reactions happening in the
organs transmuting one kind of stuff
into another this is still pretty
amazing we eat stuff that is not at all
human at least hopefully and then that
stuff somehow becomes us in an
alchemical framework illnesses where
reactions gone wrong so while the
alchemists included metallurgists mine
directors Goldsmith's and natural
philosophers they were often physicians
interested in making ethicist compounds
called pharmaceuticals or k matreya in
fact alchemy was a system for producing
useful materials from came a tree -
alcohol alloys pigments perfumes and
cleaning products noble woman alchemists
tasked with taking care of the health of
the workers on their husband's manners
played a major role in producing
therapeutics these noble women set up
production facilities proto labs and
expanded their repertoire of alchemical
products which could be sold and the
system itself was heavily gendered
metaphorically which we can see in many
gorgeous illustrations of allegorical
kings and queens of heaven the kings and
queens of stuff one of the wackier life
science he practices that came out of
the ancient and medieval search to
understand the therapeutic compounds was
Palin Genesis or life again the idea
that you could bring things back to life
by burning them and then freezing their
ashes alchemists spent a lot of time
burning and freezing leaves did Palin
Genesis work oh why don't you go try it
yourself and see if you get better
results than they did at least it might
make you pay careful attention to living
things and what stuff they seem to be
made out of I'm second thought I'm not
gonna encourage you to go burn stuff
just as there are multiple Sciences
today there were multiple Alchemy's in
medieval Eurasia Chinese alchemy was
tied into ideas about the earth itself
remember how in Chinese natural
philosophy the earth was one living
organism Chinese alchemists detected
it's vital channels of energy
transmission using magnets formalizing
that system of earth magic called Fung
Shui this work eventually led to the
invention of gunpowder Chinese alchemy
also included a search for immortality
called wide on but still no sorcerers
sadly mostly wide-on was about self
experimentation and diet Indian
can be focused on medicine on forms of
mercury and how to preserve health and
hopefully create an undo cable body
we've talked before about how an
Ayurvedic textbook or SEM heeta had a
whole chapter on aphrodisiacs and
another on toxicology alchemy supplied a
way of developing these love potions and
poisons Islamic in alchemy meanwhile
blended Aristotelian Chinese and Indian
alchemical practices shabbir even Heian
born in Persia and 7:21 and known in
Europe as Gaber
was credited with authoring 3000 texts
these included a version of the Emerald
Tablet a supposedly ancient Greek text
that included a guide to creating the
Philosopher's Stone
hyeyeon also worked on mineralogy
transmutation and medicinal elixirs and
invented new equipment like many
alchemists high on often wrote
allegorically trying in his own words to
intentionally baffle most readers except
those whom God loves but the person most
famous today for his work in alchemy is
the Swiss physician and iconoclast
Paracelsus born in 1493 who is also
called Theophrastus bombastic von
Hohenheim
I think Gregory House meets Victor
Frankenstein meets Miss Cleo in addition
to his general harass ability Paracelsus
is famous today for the phrase the dose
makes the poison
Paracelsus also believed that the
Philosopher's Stone was a universal
solvent called the Alka has which was
derived from lime alcohol and carbonate
of potash and could theoretically
dissolve anything even gold and most
radically Paracelsus introduced salt as
a third element that made up all metals
Paracelsus was a critic of university
natural philosophers and physicians he
saw these scholastics as likely to
mistake textual generalizations for
truths he admonished his alchemical
colleagues not to trust the words of the
ancient masters but then he became a
master himself someone you could write
books in the style of you could say that
alchemy like other knowledge making
systems was torn between text and
experiment that is between loyalty to
tradition and iconoclasm and return to
basic observation thus even if
alchemical books were often secret
concealing gibberish they were important
in supporting a long-term rational
debate about the true nature of stuff in
fact the most famous product
alchemy was a wondrous invention that
most people don't think of as alchemical
at all help us out thought-bubble
Johannes against slicer latencies and
Gutenberg born in Germany in 1468 was a
metallurgist who invented a process for
mass producing movable-type Gutenberg
made his type
from an alloy of lead tin and antimony
creating a more durable system he also
pioneered working with oil-based ink and
made tweaks to the common cheese press
to make his printing press his real
achievement though was bringing all of
these together into a system that made
printing books economical and I mean way
more economical than having rooms full
of monks hand copying manuscripts
economical printing meant better
duplicated texts with fewer errors
knowledge circulated not simply thanks
to personal travel which was slow and
somewhat random but as discrete
knowledge some of this knowledge was
intentionally secret code which presents
a problem for historians today how do we
figure out what the alchemists meant
when they wrote things like the wind
blows over the marriage of the Moon and
Saturn how do we interpret how chemical
recipes encoded entirely in pictures
thanks thought-bubble
so what happened to alchemy parts of it
became chemistry which of course we'll
get to later but alchemy also became
increasingly seen as dirty dangerous
unsavory low-class and lacking a
classical pedigree unlike say astronomy
and in Europe alchemy was tied to a
geocentric cosmology that goes out of
fashion in the 16th century still there
were notable alchemists in the 17th
century including Isaac Newton but by
this time
chemists wanted a more scientific
society publicly alchemy was attacked as
superstition even as practitioners kept
doing it in private
alchemy went underground for most of the
18th century maintained in secret
societies before dying out the once
famous book de ray Metallica or
concerning the nature of metals was
first translated into English by
classicist Herbert Hoover who was also a
president and his wife Lou Henry Hoover
in 1912 fascinating next time pack your
mortarboard hats and masonry tools were
an attractor rise of the University and
the Cathedral
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