The History of Alchemy: Not Just Ancient Chemistry

Secret Societies

When the modern person hears the word “Alchemy,” they probably think of some ancient form of chemistry. In fact, possibly the most intelligent man in history, Isaac Newton, was known to tinker in Alchemy. So, the practice must have been largely scientific, right?

Well not entirely.

Alchemy came about at a time in history when so-called “secret societies” were a growing fad. Societies — groups of people who shared similar interests and put their heads together in pursuit of these interests — were just a common thing at the time: Astronomy societies, horse-breeding societies, culinary societies, what have you.

But secret societies had something to hide, and one usually had to submit to an extensive initiation ritual to join one. Because if one was willing to undergo the ritual, they knew the person was committed and could keep their secrets. And Alchemy, as a practice, was relegated to private practitioners and secret societies.

A Philosophical Approach

The most common goal associated with alchemy was trying to get lead to transform into gold. The two metals are relatively soft and heavy, so it may not seem unreasonable to think that they could be closely related, and perhaps a bit of chemical tinkering could get the one to transform into the other.

However, practitioners of alchemy didn’t think of this in terms of chemicals. They had a very philosophical and spiritual approach inherited largely from Greek thinkers.

To the Greeks and the Alchemists, metals, trees, buildings and people all fell along a spectrum from “base” to “precious.” The base was the most primitive representation of something — a comically absurd or hideously repulsive version of a thing as far from perfect as possible.

So, imagine a child’s stick figure drawing of a person. This would be base representations of human beings in art form, whereas a master sculptor’s work would be precious or perfect representation of a human being.

The World of Forms

To understand how this works, one must revisit the famous example of Plato’s cave. In this well-known parable, a group of men are chained up in a cave watching shadow puppets on the wall of the cave and thinking these shadows they saw of animals and people actually were animals and people. Sadly for the captives, they were simply poor representations of those things.

Then a man escapes the chains, exits the cave and sees the real world. Now he has seen the perfect representation of humans and animals.

Plato would say that there exists some realm of forms. The forms in this realm are the perfected templates of the poor shadows we encounter in the physical world we occupy. But things in our world fall along a spectrum wherein different objects, people, mathematical equations, governments, and acts of virtue are closer and closer to perfection.

So, whereas lead is a poor, base, disgusting shadow of what a metal should look like, gold is the perfect representation of this metal.

How Medievals Understood Origins

How does one advance metals up the spectrum to approach their perfect form?

It was the impression of Alchemists that metals grew within the earth, like an infant grows within its mother’s womb. A base metal, like lead, had not yet had enough time within the earth to mature. The question was simply how to get a metal to mature when it had left its womb of earth?

A comparable idea at the time was the origin of life. For instance, Medievalists believed that humans began as homunculi — microscopic, pre-formed humans who just grew and grew as it sat in the womb. They also believed that vermin, like rats, maggots, and roaches, sprung up fully-formed from filth. They proved this fairly successfully by leaving rotting food covered with filthy rags in a corner and, overnight, it was crawling with rats and insects.

It has to be understood that this was not just an idea of physical maturity of homunculi, vermin, and base metals, but of spiritual maturity as well. Remember this is drawing from the best form of science they had at the time: ancient philosophy. And by ancient philosophy the universe was fundamentally spiritual and only superficially material.

The Philosopher’s Stone

Now that we know that Alchemy was centered on the idea of spiritual maturity, one could see why the so-called “philosopher’s stone” could make lead into gold, but also perfect the human body and the human soul. Because ultimately the process of maturation extended across all of the spiritual and physical world, and the only key was finding the single substance which caused maturity and one could theoretically transform earth into a paradise by sprinkling this substance about (it was called a “stone,” but more commonly thought of as a powder or wax).

It was the literal equivalent of transforming Plato’s cave into the sunlit world outside. Once discovered, the philosopher’s stone could turn this imperfect realm of shadows into the Platonic world of forms.

A Brief History of Alchemy

The word “Alchemy” is derived from the Egyptian word, ‘chem’ or ‘qem,’ meaning black — a reference to the black alluvial soils bordering the Nile, and the Greek word ‘chyma,’ meaning to fuse or cast metals. This was later established in Arabic as ‘al kimia.’

In fact, it was the Arabian world which first picked up where the Greeks left off in practicing Alchemy and translating the Greek texts into Arabic. Only later on did the Europeans take up the practice.

So, the history of alchemy practice ranges almost as broadly as the practice of astrology. And just as astronomy eventually emerged from astrology, chemistry eventually emerged from alchemy.

But how did these ancient alchemists believe that such transformations could be done?

In modern chemistry, it is known that the various elements are made up of atoms which contain different configurations of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Since one cannot tinker with an atom using tweezers to manipulate these various particles, if one wished to turn lead into gold, one would need the much more complex and expensive technique of a particle accelerator, which uses magnets to push individual particles around, speeding them up faster and faster until they slam into one another and create a new configuration.

We can use this method to manufacture gold, but we can only do it one atom at a time, and it costs a lot of money in terms of the raw power it takes to run the accelerator each time we do it.

In the ancient world, they had a different idea of how elements were made. This ancient world put a great deal of consideration into the idea of balance. If the world was balanced, it was perfect, but if things fell out of balance, they began to decline.

They believed, for instance, that humans were composed of four humours which included phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile.

So long as the humours were in balance, the person was healthy, but if they came out of balance, the human became ill. So once a person was ill, they began to extract whatever humours they could in order to bring balance back to the person and restore health.

In the same way, alchemists felt that the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, had to be in perfect balance in order to perfect an element. Thus, a great deal of alchemy simply involved fiddling about with dirt, billows, forges, and buckets to determine the correct balance.

Because the alchemists frequently had higher aims than simply getting wealthy (that is, they wanted to achieve physical and spiritual perfection) in many ways, the piece of lead was an experimental item which could help them determine if their attempt at creating the philosopher’s stone had worked.

Modern Science and Element Formation

So, what do we now know about element formation that the ancient alchemists did not? As mentioned before, elements are composed of a number of electrons, protons, and sometimes neutrons. The general rule is: the less components in an element, the more of it we can find. The simplest and most abundant element in the universe is hydrogen, which contains exactly one electron and one proton.

Indeed, at one point, hydrogen was likely the only element in the universe. Which raises the question of where everything else came from?

The simple answer to that is stars. Stars form when a massive amount of hydrogen is drawn together by its collective gravity, causing tremendous amounts of pressure to build. As the pressure builds, the hydrogen atoms begin to move about faster and faster until they begin colliding into one another at the sorts of speeds we would need a supercollider to reproduce. As they slam together, they begin to combine in a process called “fusion.” The atoms fuse together and a tremendous amount of energy is released as a result, which is what gives a star its heat and light.

For the first part of its life, stars combine hydrogen molecules and produce helium as a result, which has two protons and two electrons — essentially the product of two hydrogen atoms fused together.

So what? A star can take the simplest element and create the next most simple element. Not much of interest there.

However, stars live for a very long time, and during that time, the nuclear reactor at the center of the star starts to run out of hydrogen as it has eventually fused it all. When this happens, the star changes shape and size and begins to fuse the only element it has available: helium. As the star fuses helium, it produces carbon and oxygen. When it runs out of helium it has to begin fusing the next elements, and so on up the periodic table.

When a star explodes, it spreads its guts all over the cosmos, which contains most of the elements on the periodic table, so that when a planet like earth eventually forms from all the dust and wreckage of the previous star, we have some of everything to go around.

Interestingly, the really complex, heavy elements like lead, and gold are hard to get from the life cycle of a star, and are thought to be produced when stars, neutrons, or even black holes collide — because only the massive amounts of energy and pressure produced by such a cosmic collision are sufficient to produce such heavy elements. Or so the theory goes.

Since you may imagine that cosmic events like that occur fairly infrequently, it is a wonder that we have everything on the periodic table present here on earth. In fact, few if any other planets in our solar system are as abundant with elements as is earth.

Is Platonic Philosophy Entirely False?

Knowing what we do about elements we can turn our noses up at the simpletons of the past and their quaint ideas regarding earth, air, fire, and water as the basic elements.

But that wasn’t all there was to Alchemy. What about the idea that there are perfect Platonic forms and imperfect ones? Surely some human beings follow a genetic and physical template which is superior to others, right? I mean surely Joseph Merrick wasn’t quite as ideal a form as, say, a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or in terms of character and quality, surely a Martin Luther King or an Abraham Lincoln were superior in character to, say, a Hitler or a Stalin?

Or even in the world of elements: surely gold is, indeed, superior to lead, no matter how they are formed. Gold does not corrode, it is an excellent conductor, it is aesthetically pleasing, whereas lead is literally toxic, a poor construction material, and has no luster or sheen.

Perhaps things do not develop along a spectrum as Alchemists thought, but perhaps there does exist an ideal spectrum of quality along which things lie?

Ultimately, this is a philosophical rather than a scientific question. And, in fact, quite a few scientists are “neo-Platonists” especially regarding things like logic, math, and human reason. No combination of physical elements can easily explain these non-physical things, and one explanation is that there might exist some non-physical grounding for such things.

Eastern Alchemy

Alchemy did not simply occur in the Western world. While Medieval Europeans were attempting to conjure up the Philosopher’s Stone, Chinese Taoists were busily at work trying to create the “golden pill.” While the aim of the Philosopher’s Stone was to bring about Platonic perfection in all that it touched, the purpose of the Golden Pill was somewhat more humble. Taoists were simply interested in physical immortality.

Taoist philosophy is not quite as simple or straightforward as Plato and his world of forms, but as a religion, Taoism does not muck around with afterlives and reincarnation. It is mostly just interested in prolonging physical life and eventually eliminating death altogether.

Unfortunately for the various dynasties and noblemen who funded these Chinese alchemists, the ways in which they tried to create the golden pill frequently involved the use of cyanide, mercury, lead, and other toxic substances which had quite the opposite result as they hoped to achieve.

As in Europe, eventually the more chemical sort of alchemy was abandoned in China — but Chinese alchemy still exists in another form: “internal alchemy.” The goal of internal alchemy is the same as the other sort of alchemy: long life or immortality. But it involves a variety of dietary restrictions, meditative practices, physical exercises, and life choices which — if practiced according to instruction — would theoretically lead to immortality.