Arts · Alchemy · Overview

Alchemy

Alchemy is the art of 'perfecting bodies'. Its books describe a single work, carried out on matter in a vessel over a fire, that is supposed to bring an imperfect thing — a base metal, sick body, and for some writers the practitioner — to the state that it was always meant to reach. The same word does for all three, and that is the ambiguity every argument about alchemy has been fought over since.

The books run from Greco-Egyptian Egypt, where Zosimos of Panopolis was writing around 300, through the Arabic writers whose work entered Latin in 1144, to Paracelsus, who added a third principle to the older two in the 1520s, and on into the chemistry that grew out of it. In 1850 Mary Anne Atwood read the whole literature as an inner discipline; Silberer gave that reading a psychology in 1914 and Jung a larger one in 1944; and historians of science have been arguing with it ever since. The fact that Alchemy can be referring to tangible, spiritual, or psychological, can often make discussing it problematic.

What the books say it is

The shortest English statement of it is in The Mirror of Alchemy, printed in London in 1597 under Roger Bacon's name — an attribution that is traditional and not secure. It opens by quoting older definitions rather than giving its own.

For Hermes saith of this Science: Alchimy is a Corporal Science simply composed of one and by one, naturally conioyning things more precious, knowledge and effect, and conuerting them by a naturall commixtion into a better kind.
The Mirror of Alchemy, Chap. I — London, 1597

In plain English The book opens by quoting older definitions rather than giving its own. Alchemy is a bodily science: it joins precious things together and turns them, by a natural mixing, into something better than they were.

Alchimy therfore is a science teaching how to make and compound a certaine medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast vpon mettals or imperfect bodies, doth fully perfect them in the verie proiection.
The Mirror of Alchemy, Chap. I — London, 1597

In plain English The aim is a single medicine, the Elixir. Cast on an imperfect metal, it is supposed to finish it — which is why the same word, perfecting, does for metal and for a person.

Two things follow from that definition, and they run through this whole section. The work is on bodies, by a natural mixing — it is physical, and its writers clearly say so. And what it produces is a medicine: one substance that finishes whatever it is cast upon. A literature that talks like that about metal can be read as talking like that about a person, and eventually it was.

Where to go next

  • The Great Work The colours the work passes through — black, the peacock's tail, white, red — in the 1597 book's own words, and what the tidy four-stage version adds.
  • Principles Every metal made of quicksilver and sulphur, and the third principle, salt, that Paracelsus adds to them.
  • Operations The laboratory work, and Ripley's division of it into twelve gates from calcination to projection.
  • Spiritual alchemy Atwood, Silberer and Jung read the work inwardly; historians of science say that reading is younger than it looks. Both sides, with their sources.

Alchemy elsewhere in this study