Alchemy - 26/june/2023

SOURCES

[1]: The Alchemical Choir: A History of Alchemy by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart

[2]: The Cambridge Core Alchemy Reader by Stanton J. Linden

C.T. KELLY’S SPEEDRUN GUIDE TO ALCHEMY V1.0 BETA

PART 1: THE FORERUNNERS OF ALCHEMY

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

• Probably not an ancient egyptian priest
• Probably and early roman greco-egyptian person, or someone styling himself after that
• Not necessarily an alchemist himself, but hermetic doctrine forges the foundation
• The Emerald Tablet
• Contains Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish thought, Platonism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism.
• We should reprint the whole emerald tablet
• IMPORTANT IDEAS
  • The Microcosm/Macrocosm
  • Quintessence
  • Unity of Opposites

PLATO

• Not an alchemist, but extremely influential on alchemy
• IMPORTANT IDEAS
  • Prima Materia
  • Anima Mundi, the world as creature with body and soul
  • The Timeus Dialogue
  • Being/Becoming
  • The Four Elements
  • Inconvertability (The elements cannot become each other)
  • The Purity of Gold

ARISTOTLE

• Not an alchemist, but extremely influential on alchemy
• Lots of false attributions, (Secretum Secretorum for one)
• METEOROLOGY
  • IMPORTANT IDEAS
  • The four principles (wet, dry, coldness, hotness)
  • The exhalation of metals beneath the earth (First real answer to where metals come from)

PSEUDO-DEMOCRITUS (First or second century AD)

• The Treatise of Democritus On Things Natural and Mystical
• Likely the first actual alchemical treatise. Features several recipes for making metal look like other metals
• “O! NATURES, Governors of natures! O! natures, how great, conquering natures with their changes! O! natures above Nature, delighting natures! Therefore these are great natures; no others are more excellent among tinctures than these natures; none are like, none are greater, all these take effect as solutions. You therefore, O! wise men, I plainly understand are not ignorant, but rather wonder,”

CLEOPATRA THE ALCHEMIST (First or second century AD)

• Not that Cleopatra
• We only have this because of Arabic translations via Zosimos of Panopolis
• Dialogue of Cleopatra is from the Book of Komarios
• IMPORTANT IDEAS
  • The Purification of the Spirit (“In thee is concealed a strange and terrible mystery. Enlighten us, casting your light upon the elements. Tell us how the highest descends to the lowest and how the lowest rises to the highest,) (Refers to liquids undergoing distillation and condensation!)
  • The Philosophers Stone as Child “For they are nourished in the fire and the embryo grows little by little nourished in its mother’s womb, and when the appointed month approaches is not restrained from issuing forth.”
  • Comparisons of alchemical purification to the cycle of life and death

UNKNOWN - THE LEYDEN PAPYRUS X AND THE STOCKHOLM PAPYRUS (Late 3rd century)

• More books of practical laboratory alchemy

ZOSIMOS OF PANOPOLIS (300 ad)

• Definitely existed
• Probably wrote the dialogue of cleopatra
• OLDEST KNOWN BOOK ON ALCHEMY Cheirokmeta (Things Made By Hand)
• Greco-Egyptian alchemist and Gnostic mystic
• IMPORTANT IDEAS
  • The Mythologization of Alchemy. He was a gnostic, and believed that alchemical knowledge was given to us by the Nephilim
  • HE INVENTED THE IDEA OF THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE
  • Jung was obsessed with him
  • The Book of Pictures
  • The Book of Keys of the Work
  • Formula of the Crab
  • My sources are annoyingly Jungian so I’ll have to come back here
  • Codex Parisinus

STEPHANOS OF ALEXANDRIA (First half the of the 7th century)

• Probably wrote Great and Sacred Art of the Making of Gold but its alchemy so its contested
• Honestly not super interesting
• Cool Term: tetrasomia. Meaning an alloy of the four base metals
• Basically just experimented with Zosimos theories

ANONYMOUS - 8th or 9th century AD

• The Poem of the Philosopher Theophrastos Upon the Sacred Art
• Influenced by Stephano’s interesting rhetorical style. A compendium of alchemical poetry?
• Weirdly not very interesting
• These poems are fruity af can we get to the islamic polymaths now

KHALID IBN YAZID - 635–c. 704

• YEAHH THERE WE GO
• Secreta Alchymiæ
• A return to hardcore laboratory alchemy
• “Know then my Brother, that this Magistery of our Secret Stone, and this Valuable Art, is a secret of the Secrets of God, which he has hidden with his own People; not revealing it to any, but to such, who as Sons faithfully have deserved it, who have known his Goodness, and Almightiness.” EXHALT AND TRANSCEND
• Azot vive - The Principal of all metals
• A return to the exhalation of metals beneath the earth, and an exploration of what this means for the material world.
• “Beginning now to speak of the Great Work, which they call Alchymie, I shall open the matter without concealing ought, or keeping back any thing, save that which is not fit to be declared: We say then, that the great work contains four Operations, viz. To Dissolve, to Congeal, to make White, and to make Red.”
• There is so much here we are gonna have to come back to him

JABIR IBN HAYYAN / PESUDO-GEBER (8th century)

• GANG GANG GANG
• Like literally, they’re likely groups of thinkers writing under a single name
• Summa perfectionis magisterii,
• Liber de investigatione perfectionis,
• Liber de inventione veritatis,
• Liber fornacum,
• Testamentum Geberi
• We are gonna have to come back here
• SULPHUR MERCURY THEORY
  • He’s where we  get sophic sulphur and sophic mercury

AVICENNA (c. 980–1037)

• Revolutionized the Exhalation theory
• De Mineralibus
• Acivenna believed that alchemy was “by imitation only”
• Passage that used to be attributed to Aristotle but was actually from Kitˆab al-Shif
• The passage’s notoriety stems from its abrupt rejection of metallic transmutation and contention that alchemists perform only aurifiction, not aurifaction; Nature is decidedly superior to Art

ALBERTUS MAGNUS - 1193? or 1206?–1280

• Taught Thomas Aquinas
• Work is probably spurious
• Albertus follows the popular sulphur-mercury theory
• From Libellus de Alchimia, Ascribed to Albertus Magnus

When pure red sulphur comes into contact with quicksilver in the earth, gold is made in a short or long time, either through the persistence [of the contact] or through decoction of the nature subservient to them. When pure and white sulphur comes into contact with quicksilver in pure earth, then silver is made, which differs from gold in this, that sulphur in gold will be red, whereas in silver it will be white. When, on the other hand, red sulphur, corrupt and burning, comes into contact with quicksilver in the earth, then copper is made, and it does not differ from gold except in this, that in gold it was not corrupt, but here [in copper] it is corrupt. When white sulphur, corrupt and burning, comes into contact with quicksilver in the earth, tin is made, [as is indicated from the fact that] it crackles between the teeth 3 and quickly liquefies, which happens because the quicksilver was not well mixed with the sulphur. When white sulphur, corrupt and burning, comes into contact with quicksilver in foetid earth, iron is made. When sulphur, black and corrupt, comes into contact with quicksilver, lead is made. Aristotle says of this that lead is leprous gold.

• Aristotle [read: Avicenna] “I do not believe that metals can be transmuted unless they are reduced to prime matter, that is, purified of their own corruption by roasting in the fire.”
• MERCURY: An equal mixture of elemental earth and water
• SULPHUR Sulphur, the fatness of the earth, 9 is condensed in minerals of the earth through temperate decoction, (boiling) whereby it hardens and becomes thick; and when hardened it is called sulphur.
• Sublimation: Heating something to a vapor
• Calcination: Burning something to ash
• Coagulation: To heat a liquid in a dry environment until it is solid.
• Fixation: To “temper” a volatile substance in flame until it is non-reactive
• Solution: To dissolve a calcined substance in a liquid
• Distillation: Distillation. To heat something into its liquid form.
• Ceration: To heat a solid substance while gradually adding liquid, usually with the goal of achieving a waxlike substance.

Turba Philosophorum?? Where is that?

ROGER BACON (c. 1219–c. 1292)

• Radix Mundi
• Pushes back on Avicenna “Excellent Discourse of the Admirable Force and Efficacie o Art and Nature by asserting that “Art using Nature for an instrument, is more powerfull then naturall vertue” (from The Mirror of Alchimy, ed. Stanton J. Linden, 49)”
• Red Man and White Wife are common designations for the opposing “principles” of sulphur and mercury that are conjoined in the chemical wedding to produce the philosopher’s stone.