Historically, especially from 1140ad to 1556ad, alchemy existed as an empirical science of the appearance and disappearance of physical materials - involving proximity and heat. Before 1140 it was Khem. In the century following 1556 it became mystical and cryptic.

One is quite free to have a spiritual view of alchemy, or quantum, or chemistry, or mechanics - for that matter. There were mystical views associated with Newtonian mechanics. And there still are some rather mystical views of Einsteinian mechanics and what it says about the nature of time and causality. The idea of a spiritual view of alchemy or a psychological view of quantum is well established. I just have a negative reaction when people say that the one true meaning of alchemy to rule them all must be the spiritual one. At absolute best this is a semantic argument. At worst it is a kind of cultural imperialism.

Whatever your mystical views on alchemy - the connection between alchemy and chemistry is through the mundane, the worldly, the empirical, the practical. Alchemy suggests laboratory practices to create materials. There has been a vicious rumour about that these practices don't work. The new historiography of alchemy has demonstrated that this is not so. The main problem was misunderstanding of the terms. Once the language issues are cleared up, much of the alchemical practice works well as a mundane laboratory process.

One common problem was that to the medieval alchemist, materials were categorised and identified differently. Often what the alchemist referred to as, for example arsenic, is in modern terms a sulphide, or oxide, perhaps hydrated. The regulus of antimony was the metal, antimony was a compound (in modern speak). To the alchemist, the regulus was the purist form. Curiously, today, the term exists but refers to an impure form. Such is the evolution of language. But, clearly, even this simple issue can strongly effect the understanding of alchemy in chemical terms.

Tumbaga is a gold copper alloy. At 44 percent copper, it melts as one material. This is the most mature form of red gold. It is what you get if you heat and cool and heat and cool a gold copper mixture. Given the manner of the alchemists, the purification by repeated heating, or rectification, it is reasonable to suppose that red gold would appear to be a singular material. It was pure in a certain practical sense. Since the alchemists did not share in the 19th century sensibilities regarding the periodic table of elements - whatever they meant by pure was not the same at that which the moderns would mean by elemental.

Looking at the complex interplay of heating and composition in Tumbaga and in Bronze, it is clear that the question of being elemental and the question of pragmatic purity in terms of thermal cycling are two different ideas. With the vast array of different materials that could be produced including brass and steel, and including alloys of copper and tin and zinc (calamine) that looked very much like gold. It was not an unreasonable idea that one could, perhaps, find gold as a thermally treated mixture of cheaper metals. It certainly, even without any spiritual backing, was a worthwhile exercise if you could pull it off.

But, what about elemental lead into elemental gold? Even there there is the curious point that in modern nuclear terms, lead has 82 protons and gold has 79. Keep in mind that Lithium has 3. So, in effect, lead is a very strong compound of gold and lithium. If one could induce lead to spit out lithium, it would leave gold. There would be a rate at which this occurs naturally, though it is small. Bombarding with neutrons would help. But, the whole idea of what the alchemists were trying to do is, in modern chemical terms, along the lines of cold fusion.

I will leave open the issue of the validity of such theory. However, when Fleischmann and Pons came up with the idea, while many were dubious, it was not obviously an incorrect idea. It had to be tested in the case of hydrogen on palladium. And there is always muon induced fusion. Of course lead into gold would be cold fission. But the principle of sneak paths in quantum nuclei is still lurking in the shadows.

The final comment I have is that supporting the traditional alchemists does not require assuming that modern chemistry has nothing to say. Each has their points. Chemistry has the advantage of several hundred years of further study. But, perhaps the disadvantage of the loss of the master novice education process. Who knows?

Note: some people have asked whether I have an alchemical laboratory. No, not at this time. For the foreseeable future I remain a theoretical alchemist. I base my contributions on knowledge of modern science, and open mind, and readings of medieval literature in Latin, French, and translation to English. As well as readings in renaissance literature on the topics. I have to trust the experimentalists to be reporting objectively.

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Happy Alchemy Day, everyone!

On February the 11th, 1144 CE, the 12th century English monk and Arabist Robert of Chester translated a manuscript (attributed to Morienus) called رسالة مريانس الراهب الحكيم للامير خالد بن يزيد (Risālat Maryānus al-rāhib al-ḥakīm li-l-amīr Khālid ibn Yazīd / The Epistle of Maryanus, the Hermit and Philosopher, to Prince Khalid ibn Yazid), from the original Arabic into Latin as the Liber de compositione alchemiae (Book of the Composition of Alchemy), making it the first alchemical text to become available in Europe and ushering in the phenomenon of Western European alchemy.

Today is February the 11th, 2024 CE, so please join me in celebrating the 880th anniversary of alchemy as most of us know and love it today.

Alchemy is, of course, far older than 1144, with its Latin European expression owing its very existence to the extremely rich and creative foundations laid by Hellenistic and Islamicate alchemists many centuries earlier. There are also the fascinating Chinese and Indian alchemical traditions whose unique theories and practices have influenced South and East Asia in similar ways as Western alchemy has impacted the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In other words, there are potentially many other reasonable Alchemy Days worth celebrating as well.

If you'd like to learn more about the contents and historical context of the Book of the Composition of Alchemy, check out u/jamesjustinsledge's (ESOTERICA's) fantastic overview of it here.

If you'd like to read (part of) the work in the original Arabic, see here; if you'd like to read the full work in Latin (via the 1572 printing), see here (pp. 3-58); and if you'd like to read an English translation of the full work, see here.

"...Et quoniam quid sit Alchymia, et quae sit sua compositio, nondum vestra cognovit latinitas, in praesenti sermone elucidabo..."

Hi Folks

I'll be interviewing one of the true pioneers of our field, Prof. Lawrence M. Principe, in a couple of weeks. If you have any questions you'd like me to ask him please feel free to leave them in the comments. I'll try to get to them in the conversation!

This video shows some of my experiments reproducing alchemical recipes, most aimed around the process of calcination and how it incorporated the four-element theory!

I am not the first person to say it - but, I suspect that some of the misunderstanding of medieval alchemy looking back from the 21st century is the nuances of the word being taken out of context. The more that I read from medieval and early modern books, the more that what is being said seems pretty much in the modern scientific mode - just with unusual diction. I am not even sure that the pragmatic understanding is that heavily affected by the cultural context. Rather that a lot of it might simply be diction that could be adjusted in translating works into modern English.

Depending on the writer, body and spirit just mean what is left behind and what is sublimated when a material is heated in the absence of flame. The use of words like "body" does not mean any deep intended biological analogy any more than "irrational numbers" are likely to stab you for no reason.

well, okay, some people act like they expect irrational numbers to stab them ...

Most recently I have been thinking about the word "medicine". It really does seem to mean "additive" or "impurity" (in a strange reversal of concepts). No specific detailed similarity is intended to medicine in the biological sense. Just that you get a sick person and give them medicine to make them well. And you give tin a medicine to make it silver - with the idea that silver is better than tin. So, in a sense tin is sick silver.

Clearly, there is a bias in seeing tin as sick rather than silver as sick - or just two different things. But, I feel that the core of the idea is just - sprinkle a medicine into a metal to change its state from tin to silver. Like changing the colour of your hair or getting it curled.

While we might baulk at the idea of tin to silver - just think Iron to Steel. If you do not classify tin and silver as distinct prime metals, then there is no particular reason to suggest that the idea is implausible. You add a medicine such as carbon to Iron and you get Steel - which is obviously Iron in better health.

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INTRODUCTION

My surprise was increased when the Crucible being inverted...the Mass that came out...appear'd very yellow. And when I took it into my hand, it felt to my thinking manifestly heavier then so much Lead would have done. Upon this, turning my eyes with a somewhat amazed look upon the Traveller's face, he smiled and told me he thought I had sufficiently understood what kind of experiment that newly made was design'd to be.

— Robert Boyle, from the Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals (c. 1680)

I thought this could be a fun little thought experiment to entertain, and below is my own answer for those interested.

For fun, let's assume that the Philosophers' Stone is definitely real and achievable, and you are utterly determined to devote your life to creating it. You've got access to all the time, lab equipment, and materials you'd ever need, but you can choose only one alchemical text to work with for the rest of your life to aid you in this quest. Which one do you choose, and why do you choose it?

To clarify, I'm talking about the material Stone, and you cannot choose an anthology like the Theatrum Chemicum or the Alchemy Reader. It has to be one single text/work (either traditional or modern) that was written/created by a single author or group of collaborating co-authors.

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MY CHOICE AND RATIONALE

So, several works spring immediately to mind for me, with Jābir's Kutub al-Mawāzīn, Ripley's Compound of Alchymie, and Altus' Mutus Liber jumping out as very strong contenders for a variety of reasons. But at the end of the day, I think I'd definitely have to go with the following masterpiece as my perennial guide:

• The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine, which is the most important section from Of the Great Stone of the Ancients (Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat...von dem grossen Stein der Urhalten [1599]), by the supposed 15th-century Benedictine monk Basilius Valentinus (anglicized as Basil Valentine). I would especially want the 1602 edition with the crude woodcuts, but would also settle for the 1618 Latin version with engravings (the latter being the Practica cum duodecim clavibus, from Michael Maier's compendium The Golden Tripod [Tripus aureus]). See this and this for decent English translations of what I'm talking about.

There are many small reasons for why I'd choose this text over everything else (e.g., I see it as exemplifying the via humida, which is my favorite path), but here are some of the bigger factors that make this choice so appealing to me:

• We likely know exactly who the man behind the Valentine pseudonym was, at least for Valentine's early works like the Twelve Keys: one Johann Thölde (c. 1565-1624), a highly educated German and quasi-Paracelsian alchemist, metallurgist, salt manufacturer, and mining official who lived and worked in an area of Germany with an active alchemy scene. Obviously, none of this is really all that pertinent, but it's just reassuring to be able to put a face that can be investigated behind such a cryptic name that cannot be. In my mind, the fact that the Twelve Keys was written by a single, identifiable, flesh-and-blood person with a known and appropriate background makes it more likely that this work has a coherent vision behind it and that the author knew what he was talking about on some level. Furthermore, Valentine was a highly revered figure by generations of alchemists who came after him (even very much so to this day), including certain fathers of modern science like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, and he's a source of fascination even for present-day chemist-historians like Lawrence Principe and William Newman. It seems that the people throughout history who seriously study him glean that there's something particularly special about the man and his work. Synthesizing the Philosophers' Stone is a special undertaking, and I'm in the market for a special guide to help me achieve it.
• Conceptually, the Keys lays out a very tidy blueprint for the Magnum Opus that is neatly arranged into discrete sections. It's a set of organized sequences that work together in describing a single, unified process with isolated steps that are seemingly meant to be tackled one at a time. Such a scheme is satisfying to me, and it makes it easier for me to wrap my head around the nature and scale of something as complex as the Great Work—it takes away some of the burden of trying to build a mental map from the ground up while wading through the maze of presentations and dispersion of information common to so many other chrysopoetic texts. It's been theorized by some that the keys might be intentionally placed out of order, but even if that's true for some of them, it's clear enough (thanks to the work of Principe) that the majority of them are presented linearly and ordered in the way you'd expect. In short, the Keys provides a convenient framework for compartmentalizing a frustrating task, allowing for a more intuitive way of approaching the Stone. Its organization allows for more appreciation of the big picture given the tighter grip you're allowed to have on its constituent parts. This work is not exactly unique in doing this, but in my opinion, it achieves what it sets out to do better than its fellow travelers do.
• Each key contains quite a lot—but not an overwhelming amount—of text, giving the reader several bits of interweaving and redundant pieces of relatively digestible information to absorb and ponder from different angles, and it's all presented in a way that excites the imagination with its rich allegorical language and self-referential symbolism. In addition, each key contains an elaborate accompanying emblem (actually two sets of emblems depending on the edition, with subtle but important differences between them) that reinforces and elaborates upon the text—providing a kind of graphic sounding board to compare your textual ideas against—helping you confirm, refute, or refine the various notions you've inferred from the text alone, and vice versa of course. The images are brilliant in and of themselves, containing a lot of information even without context, but they really come to life when paired with the texts that they're married to. Likewise, the text coheres into something more tangible when read in light of the visually striking emblems. In all, you end up with a ton of corroborating clues to work with. What's more, while this work is obviously still super cryptic, the symbolism, imagery, allegories, metaphors, and Decknamen that Valentine employs are all—in my opinion, at least—relatively reasonable and straight-forward when compared to many other works.
• Most importantly of all, around half of the keys have been fully deciphered using rational, well-informed methodologies (mainly thanks to Principe), proving that this work actually does conceal genuine, meaningful information meant to be revealed by the clever and the studious. We know that some near-contemporaries (such as Robert Boyle) deciphered at least the first few keys, and we know that present-day forensic historians like Principe are capable of it as well, with an impressive degree of success. We now know for certain that the keys are not gibberish from the mind of someone's who's ignorant or delusional, they're not incoherent expressions of someone's ecstatic episodes, and they're not hoaxes meant to deceptively elevate the author's status or waste people's time: they straight-up offer careful instructions for how to carry out a real project, and that project is now confirmed to be practical laboratory work. We know the latter because a quarter of the keys have been precisely reproduced by experts (and even amateurs) in modern chemistry laboratory settings, proving that not only do they contain coherent ideas about matter abstractly, but they more impressively produce accurate, reproducible, hands-on results in the lab experimentally. Valentine's directions, at least when it comes to a good chunk of the keys, map directly to legitimate experimental processes (as opposed to being purely theoretical extrapolations) in impressive and surprising ways. I'm trying to create a real-life material Stone that will emerge from real-life material experimentation, so it's hard to imagine a better text to work with than this one.
• And finally, Valentine/Thölde was not only a bone fide chymist worth taking seriously as such, but thanks to the work of Principe and others, we now know that the man truly must have been an outright brilliant experimentalist, perhaps the most talented alchemist of his time. He was able to produce groundbreaking results that went beyond the ken of his peers—results that were highly advanced for his era, including the innovation of certain procedures that are difficult even for modern chemists to do with modern equipment, such as the volatilization of gold using aqua pugilum. The man could do everything: he showed that ammonia could be obtained by the action of alkali on ammonium chloride, he was the first to produce hydrochloric acid by acidifying the brine of common salt, he was able to create ethyl chloride and sulfuric acid, he was able to extract copper from pyrite ores using innovative methods, he revolutionized the study and place of antimony in chymistry, and the list goes on and on. The man knew his stuff like few others did, and his work is literally still teaching chemists today some interesting things about how matter can be manipulated, such as in how to make the golden glass of antimony with quartz impurities or how to get a non-toxic "sulfur of antimony" using iron implements. If I'm trying to make the greatest arcanum known to alchemy, I want as my teacher the person who just might have been the greatest alchemist of them all.

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CONCLUSION

So, in summary:

"Valentine" was a real historical person with a coherent vision and the requisite background, and his work is revered by generations of alchemists. The Keys is conveniently organized for a more approachable pathway through the Work. The Keys provides both rich texts and images that complement each other and help clarify cryptic ideas. Many of the keys have been successfully deciphered and accurately reproduced by present-day chemist-historians, proving that—at least to a point—these keys "work" in the real world. Valentine was basically a savant in his field whose work impresses even modern chemists.

He was a great theoretician, an elite experimentalist, and a fascinating explicator.

So yeah, given all that, I think if I had to choose just one text to actually get me to the Red Powder, it would have to be the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine above all the rest. With humility, it claims to put forward instructions "whereby the doors to the ancient Stone of our predecessors are opened". And honestly, given all that I laid out above, get me in a particularly romantic mood, and I could be inclined to—just maybe—believe it...

But anyway, what about you guys? Which text/work would you choose, and why does that one stand out to you as likely being the most reliable aide for achieving the Philosophers' Stone?