Alchemy: the art of transmutation

IPanopolis and Alexandria

The oldest alchemical texts are practical recipes. Two papyri from third-century Thebes, now in Leiden and Stockholm, contain hundreds of instructions for making imitation gold and silver, dyeing wool purple and colouring stones to pass as emeralds. They were written by craftsmen for craftsmen, and their aim was not to transmute lead into gold but to make something that looked and behaved enough like gold to sell.

Out of that workshop tradition, in the same Greco-Egyptian world that produced the Hermetica, came a philosophical alchemy. Its first great name is Zosimos of Panopolis, writing around AD 300, whose surviving fragments combine furnace technique with Gnostic visions: a priest torn apart and boiled in a bowl, rising as spirit, an allegory of the metal's death and resurrection in the vessel. He credits earlier authorities he calls Hermes, Agathodaimon and above all Maria the Jewess, to whom the later tradition attributed the water bath, the bain-marie that still bears her name, and the kerotakis, a sealed apparatus for exposing metals to vapours. The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a single sheet of drawings, gives the earliest image of the ouroboros with the words hen to pan, the all is one.

The word itself traces the journey. Greek chēmeia or chymeia, of disputed origin, possibly from Kēmi, the black land of Egypt, possibly from cheumeia, pouring; Arabic al-kīmiyā; Latin alchimia. The article came off in the eighteenth century and left the word chemistry.

IIThe Jabirian Corpus

Arabic alchemy transformed the subject into a systematic science. The vast body of work attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, supposedly a disciple of the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq in the eighth century, was in fact written largely in the ninth and tenth centuries by a school, and runs to several thousand treatises. It gives the sulphur-mercury theory: all metals are compounds of two principles, a hot dry sulphur and a cold moist mercury, in different proportions and purities, and so every metal is in principle convertible into every other by adjusting the balance. It gives the science of the balance, a numerological method of measuring the natures in a substance through the letters of its Arabic name. And it gives a mass of genuine laboratory chemistry.

Abu Bakr al-Razi, the physician of Rayy who died around 925, stripped much of the symbolism away and wrote the Secret of Secrets as a practical manual, classifying substances into minerals, vegetables and animals and describing distillation, calcination and crystallisation with the precision of a laboratory notebook.

IIIThe Latin West

Robert of Chester's translation of an Arabic treatise in 1144 is conventionally the first Latin alchemy. Within a century the art had a great textbook, the Summa perfectionis, written around 1300 under the name of Geber and now attributed to the Franciscan Paul of Taranto; it put the sulphur-mercury theory on a corpuscular footing and was read for four hundred years. Roger Bacon wrote on it, Albertus Magnus described experiments, and a papal bull of John XXII in 1317 condemned alchemists who made false coinage, which tells you they were numerous.

The legend of Nicolas Flamel belongs here, and should be corrected. Flamel was a real Parisian scrivener and bookseller who died in 1418 rich enough to endow churches. The story that he had transmuted mercury into gold with the help of a mysterious book of Abraham the Jew first appears in a publication of 1612, nearly two centuries after his death, and the alchemical works attributed to him are later forgeries.

IVParacelsus and the Three Principles

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus and died in Salzburg in 1541, burned the works of Galen and Avicenna in front of his students at Basel in 1527 and set out to rebuild medicine on alchemy. He added a third principle to sulphur and mercury: salt, the principle of fixity and body. His tria prima were not the common substances of those names but philosophical principles present in everything, and when wood burns their action becomes visible: what burns is sulphur, what flies off as smoke is mercury, what remains as ash is salt.

For Paracelsus the purpose of the art was not gold but medicine. Diseases were specific entities with specific chemical remedies, and the alchemist was to extract the active arcanum from a mineral or plant and give it in measured doses. Mercury for syphilis, antimony, laudanum: the chemical medicine of the next two centuries, and much of modern pharmacology's first instinct, descends from him. His followers, the Paracelsians, fought the Galenists across Europe for a hundred and fifty years.

VThe Great Work

The goal of the magnum opus was the philosophers' stone, a substance which, projected in a tiny quantity onto a molten base metal, would perfect it into gold, and which, taken as the elixir, would cure all disease and prolong life. The process was described in a deliberately obscure language of colours, animals and marriages: the green lion devouring the sun, the black crow, the white swan, the peacock's tail, the king and queen joined in the bath and dying in the tomb. The colour stages were the most constant part of the scheme.

The seventeenth century produced the art's most beautiful books. Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens of 1617 combined fifty emblems, fifty epigrams and fifty fugues for three voices, a multimedia treatise in which the reader looks, reads and sings the Work. The Mutus Liber of 1677, the silent book, contains no text at all beyond its title page, only fifteen plates of an alchemist and his wife at the furnace. The motto solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate, sums up the method.

VINewton's Million Words

In 1936 Sotheby's auctioned the papers Isaac Newton had left at his death, and the economist John Maynard Keynes bought a large part of the alchemical manuscripts. Having read them, he declared that Newton was not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians. Newton wrote something over a million words on alchemy, more than on physics or optics, transcribed and translated alchemical texts including the Emerald Tablet, kept laboratory notebooks for thirty years, and experimented with the reaction of antimony and mercury in search of a "philosophical mercury". His contemporary Robert Boyle, often called the father of chemistry, believed in transmutation, sought the stone, and campaigned to repeal the medieval statute against multiplying gold.

Historians of science now use the older word chymistry for the period before about 1720, because the distinction between alchemy and chemistry did not yet exist. William Newman and Lawrence Principe have reconstructed several of the seventeenth-century processes in a modern laboratory, and some of the colour changes the texts describe, including the "philosophical tree" growing in the flask, turn out to be real chemistry described accurately in code.

VIIThe Alchemy of the Soul

The reading of alchemy as primarily a spiritual discipline is old; Jacob Böhme and the Rosicrucians already treated the furnace as a figure of the soul. But it was made dominant in the twentieth century by Carl Gustav Jung, whose Psychology and Alchemy of 1944 and Mysterium Coniunctionis argued that the alchemists were projecting the unconscious processes of individuation onto their matter: the nigredo is the encounter with the shadow, the coniunctio the union of conscious and unconscious, the stone the Self. Mircea Eliade gave a parallel account in terms of initiation.

It is a powerful reading and it has shaped every popular book on the subject since. It is also, as Principe and Newman have shown, historically lopsided: many alchemists were doing chemistry and meant exactly what they said about metals. The truest account is that both kinds of alchemist existed, often in the same person, and that for most of them the distinction would have made no sense.