In fantasy stories, charlatans in 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 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 the inheritors of a wealth of knowledge created by alchemists

who were trying to turn lead into gold!

Why did they keep doing that?

Did they really think it would work?

Was it some science experiment?

Or a religious ritual?

Yes! All of those things.

Today, we'll meet some alchemists and consider just what the heck they were doing all day

with metals, and how they sought to understand stuff.

[Intro Music Plays]

The word “alchemy,” which is where we get the word “chemistry” from, is a bit

of 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 encoded their philosophies in 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 Decknamen: so “tin” might literally mean the metal tin

in one book, but serve as a code word for silver in another.

The books were illustrated, but many of the images were symbols masking their true meanings.

The good and bad thing about the Decknamen 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 non-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 color based on impurities,

meaning tiny bits of other elements.

But, alas—metals, when isolated, don't actually break down into sulphur and mercury.

There were two kinds of alchemical metals: the noble metals were gold, which represented

the sun.

And silver, which represented the moon.

The base metals included 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 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 chrysopoeia, or, literally,

“make into gold.”

To get started, a “chrysopoeian” 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 even agree on what the philosopher's stone actually was,

pretty much symbolizes the whole system.

Chrysopoeia required fine-tuning the practice of metallurgy: alchemists had to heat ingredients

for days on end, controlling the temperature 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, then white, then yellow, and finally

red.

At this point, if your oven hadn't exploded—you won!

You now had 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 experimenters, even if it never quite “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,

had 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 example, was understood as an alchemical workshop:

chemical reactions happened 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 were reactions gone wrong.

So while the alchemists included metallurgists, mine directors, goldsmiths, and natural philosophers,

they were often physicians,

interested in making efficacious compounds called pharmaceuticals, or chematria.

In fact, alchemy was a system for producing useful materials from chematria to alcohol,

alloys, pigments, perfumes, and cleaning products.

Noblewomen alchemists, tasked with caring for the health of the workers in their husbands'

manors, played a major role in producing therapeutics.

These noblewomen set up production facilities—proto-labs—and expanded the 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-sciencey practices that came out of the ancient and medieval

search to understand therapeutic compounds

was palingenesis, 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 palingenesis work?

Why don't you go try it and see if you get better results!?

At least, it might make you pay careful attention to living things and what stuff they seem

to be made out of.

On second thought I'm not gonna encourage you to go burn stuff.

Just as there are multiple sciences today, there were multiple “alchemies” 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 its vital channels of energy transmission using magnets, formalizing

that system of earth magic called feng shui.

This work eventually led to the invention of gunpowder.

Chinese alchemy also included a search for immortality called waidan.

But still no “sorcerers,” sadly.

Mostly, waidan was about self-experimentation and diet.

Indian alchemy focused on medicine, on forms of mercury, and on how to preserve health

and hopefully create an undecayable body.

We've talked before about how an Ayurvedic textbook or samhita had a whole chapter on

aphrodisiacs and another on toxicology.

Alchemy supplied a way of developing these love potions and poisons.

Islamicate alchemy, meanwhile, blended Aristotelian, Chinese, and Indian alchemical practices.

Jābir ibn Hayyān, born in Persia in 721 and known in Europe as “Geber”,

was credited with authoring three thousand texts!

These included a version of the Emerald Tablet, a supposedly ancient Greek text that included

a guide to creating the philosopher's stone.

Hayyan also worked on mineralogy, transmutation, and medicinal elixirs and invented new equipment.

Like many alchemists, Hayyan 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 also was called Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.

Think Gregory House meets Victor Frankenstein meets Miss Cleo.

In addition to his general irascibility, 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 alkahest,

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 a 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 of alchemy was a wondrous invention that most people

don't think of as alchemical.

Help us out, ThoughtBubble:

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum 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 alchemical recipes encoded entirely in pictures?

Thanks Thought Bubble!

So what happened to alchemy?

Parts of it became chemistry, which 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

sixteenth century.

There were notable alchemists in the seventeenth century, including Isaac Newton.

But by this time, chemists wanted a more scientific society.

Publicly, alchemy was attacked as superstition, even as practitioners keep doing it in private.

Alchemy went underground for most of the eighteenth century, maintained in secret societies, before

dying out.

The once-famous book De re 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: we're tracking the rise of

the university and the cathedral!

Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,

Montana and it's made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is

Thought Cafe.

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