Alchemy

Alchemy's reputation as pure symbolism obscures the fact that alchemists spent most of their time in laboratories doing chemistry, and that a great deal of what they did worked.

The theory held that all substances share a single prime matter differentiated by form, so that any substance could in principle be reduced and rebuilt as any other. On top of that sat the four elements and, from the Islamic tradition, the sulphur-mercury theory of metals, to which Paracelsus later added salt. If lead and gold differ only in the proportion and purity of their constituents, transmutation is not absurd; it is a metallurgical problem. That is a coherent inference from a wrong premise, not a superstition.

The magnum opus, the great work, is described in stages named for colours: nigredo, the blackening or putrefaction; albedo, the whitening; sometimes citrinitas, the yellowing; and rubedo, the reddening, at which the Philosopher's Stone is obtained, the agent of transmutation and, in many accounts, the elixir prolonging life.

The laboratory record is substantial and is not in dispute. Alchemists developed or refined distillation, sublimation, calcination and crystallisation; produced the mineral acids, which transformed what chemistry could do; isolated phosphorus, discovered in 1669 by an alchemist boiling down urine in search of the stone; and built most of the glassware and furnace design that early chemistry inherited.

The obscurity of the texts was deliberate. Decknamen, cover names, disguised substances and procedures behind mythological and allegorical language, a green lion, a red king, a dragon devouring its tail, partly to protect commercial secrets, partly because the work was held to be dangerous in unprepared hands. Modern scholarship has decoded a good deal of it back into recoverable laboratory procedure.

Whether alchemy was proto-chemistry or spiritual discipline is the central interpretive dispute in the field, and the answer that has emerged from recent scholarship is that the question was badly posed.

The spiritual reading dominated the twentieth century. Carl Jung treated the alchemical corpus as a projection of psychic processes, the operations on matter as an unrecognised description of individuation, the nigredo as the confrontation with the shadow, the coniunctio as the integration of opposites. Psychology and Alchemy of 1944 is the influential statement, and it made alchemy interesting to a large audience who had no interest in furnaces. Mircea Eliade and others read it as a religious technology of transformation.

The laboratory reading has since been reasserted with considerable force by historians of science, principally Lawrence Principe and William Newman, who did something obvious that nobody had done: they took obscure alchemical recipes, decoded the cover names, and ran them, obtaining the described results, including the Philosophers' Tree, a dendritic growth of silver amalgam that a text describes and that had been assumed to be allegory. Their conclusion is that a great many passages taken as spiritual allegory are operational instructions, and that the sharp distinction between alchemy and chemistry is a construction of the eighteenth century, made when chemistry wanted respectability. The historical term for the whole field, they note, was chymistry, covering both.

The best-supported position now is that the tradition contained both strands and that many practitioners held both at once without difficulty, since a cosmos in which matter and spirit are continuous does not require the distinction. Isaac Newton, who wrote more on alchemy than on physics, is the standing evidence that a first-rate experimentalist saw no conflict.

Spiritual alchemy as a self-conscious separate discipline is largely a modern development.

The transmission is well documented and worth following, because each stage added something identifiable.

Greco-Egyptian alchemy at Alexandria in the first three centuries CE is the earliest recognisable form, combining Egyptian metallurgical and dyeing craft with Greek matter-theory and a Hermetic religious framing. Zosimos of Panopolis, around 300 CE, is the first alchemist whose writings survive in quantity, and his work already contains both operational recipes and visionary allegory in the same texts, which is a useful corrective to anyone wanting a clean separation.

The Islamic world made it a science. Jabir ibn Hayyan, whose corpus is large and of disputed authorship, supplied the sulphur-mercury theory and a systematic experimental programme; al-Razi classified substances and apparatus with a precision that reads as recognisably chemical. The word alchemy itself carries the Arabic article, and so do alembic, alkali and elixir.

Europe received it by translation from Arabic in the twelfth century, and it became a learned pursuit with royal and ecclesiastical patrons and a steady problem of fraud, which drew prohibitions and, in England, a statute against multiplying gold in 1404. Paracelsus in the sixteenth century redirected it toward medicine, founding iatrochemistry and introducing mineral remedies against the Galenic orthodoxy.

Alchemy did not so much end as divide. Through the seventeenth century it was still respectable, Boyle and Newton both pursued transmutation, and the separation of a respectable chemistry from a disreputable alchemy was made in the eighteenth century largely by chemists who wanted to be taken seriously. What survived on the other side of that split was carried into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by occultists, and then by Jung, and it is that line rather than the laboratory one that most modern practitioners inherit.