My next review is of The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe, this was recommended reading from Alchemy by Philip Ball.
The book consists of seven chapters, the first five of these are chronological covering the Greco-Egyptian origins of alchemy, developments in the Islamic world, and the medieval period; at this point the chronology breaks to cover the 18th century onwards which involves the reinterpretation of alchemy before returning to the Golden Age of alchemy in the Early Modern Period (1500AD-1700AD).
The final chapters are on interpreting alchemical texts, and alchemy in wider society.
My aim in this review is not to repeat comments on the history of alchemy that I made in my review of Philip Ball’s book but rather to highlight what felt new in this book.
The small disorder in the chronology is to highlight how our modern view of alchemy is to a large degree influenced by the 18th century where “scientists” were carefully splitting respectable chemistry from not so respectable alchemy. The “not so respectable” part of alchemy has always been chrysopoeia – making gold from base metals – it has been the symbol of alchemist wasting their life, and frittering away their money on a fruitless enterprise or it has been seen as fraud.
The Victorians adopted alchemy as part of the spiritualist revival adding more mystical elements to it. This coloured the views of early historians of science who tended to write off the whole subject in terms of scientific content.
What excited me about this book early on is that the author went to the trouble of repeating some alchemical recipes in the modern laboratory. In one example he discovers that a reaction doesn’t work as described when a pure starting material is used but does work when the natural ore from the place where the alchemist in question worked because of the presence of silicon dioxide in the ore. In another he discovers that a described reaction works if an iron rod is used to stir the mixture, as specified in the recipe but the products observed are actually compounds of iron rather those that the alchemist believed they had made. This reflects modern laboratory practice; method descriptions that are pretty good but sometimes overlook the impact of apparently minor details and it isn’t unknown for modern scientists to make products different from those they were attempting to make!
These recreations highlight that alchemists could be very sophisticated experimenters not only in terms of the equipment they used but also, for example, observing changes in weight during chemical reactions.
Alchemical experiments were motivated by ideas about how substances are constructed which go back to the earliest writer in alchemy; in 300AD Zosimos of Panopolis was writing about theoretical principles and making observations. He talks about all metals containing a body (which makes them metals) and a spirit which gives them particular properties. Therefore the task of transmutation is to extract the “spirit” of a base metal and replace it with the “spirit” of gold. Later the Arabic writer Jābir ibn Ḥayyān talked in terms of a Mercury-Sulphur theory which evolved into something more elaborate linking with the the Aristotelian classical elements and Galen’s humors. We would now consider these theories utterly wrong but they are the same shape as our modern theories. These types of theories maintained until the late 18th century when our modern ideas of chemical elements were developed.
We also see a leakage of language from alchemy into modern day chemical terms, for example, the Greek God Hermes was long associated with alchemy and glass vessels were closed with “the seal of Hermes” which becomes “hermetically sealed” in modern parlance.
As I commented in my review of Ball’s book, alchemy seems to have been particularly rife with publishing under other people’s names. The Jabirian corpus is one example of this. A couple of items to add to this, Principe comments at one point in this book that in some cases transcriptions of ancient documents mix in works from other authors. For example, ibn-Sina’s text on mineralogy was attached to a translation of Aristotle’s Meteor giving ibn-Sina’s work more gravitas. Secondly, alchemy developed a culture of dispersing information across many small “publications” with initiates into the culture expected to read widely across the corpus to find out what to do rather than find everything in one place.
Obfuscation is a key theme in much writing on alchemy. The mindset was of special knowledge which was available only to initiates in the culture. Understanding alchemical documents was not a simple act of reading, it required wider understanding. The use of Decknamen (aliases used to describe reagents in alchemical recipes) is a recurring theme in the book – these can change through the course of a document.
The case of George Starkey (1628–1665) is particularly revealing because in his case we have his works under a pseudonym (Eirenaeus Philalethes) but also at least some of his laboratory notebooks. We can see an obfuscated alchemical recipe in one of his books alongside the same recipe in plain language in a letter sent to Robert Boyle.
The Early Modern Period encompassed more varied publishing formats, for example each chapter in Michael Maier’s 1617 Atalanta fugiens featured a motto, an emblematic image, a six-line epigram, 2 pages of prose and a piece of music! This is reminiscent of Erasmus Darwin’s epic poems about botany from the late 18th century.
Emblematic images are a recurring theme in the book, they illustrate an alchemical process using allegorical symbols rather than literal illustrations of the process. Principe warns us we need to see them in the context of the text in which they are found – the emblematic image re-iterates the text. So, for example, in Basil Valentine’s 1602 book Von dem grossen Stein der Uhrhalten the text about purifying gold says “take the ravenous grey wolf that on account of his name is subjected to bellicose Mars but by birth is is a child of old Saturn” means to take the antimony ore stibnite to purify gold. Each metal had an associated planet, and Saturn is the planet associated with lead but we are looking for a child of Saturn which is stibnite (an ore of antimony) which at the time was seen as related to lead. The allegory is reinforced because molten stibnite will dissolve gold very quickly – it is “ravenous”. It has the air of a cryptic crossword clue and I would imagine these texts would be relatively easy to read for those in the know.
The final chapter talks about alchemy in wider culture, it appeared in plays and even Shakespearian sonnets. There was also a long standing interplay with religion – the theme of purification appealed both to alchemists and preachers.
I think this may become one of my favourite books of the year, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman is the only one I might rank above it.
