The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy

225 Pages·2008·1.39 MB·English

by  P. G. Maxwell-Stuart

THE CHEMICAL CHOIR
Frontispiece: A list of alchemical signs and their meanings. It begins (third line)
with gold, gold fi lings and silver, and ends with symbols for days, nights, hours,
and a day and a night.
The Chemical Choir
A History of Alchemy
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
First published 2008
Paperback edition published 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-8870-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in India
Contents
Illustrations vii
Introduction ix
1 China: The Golden Road to Immortality 1
2 India: The Way of Tantra and Mercury 19
3 Roman Egypt: The White and the Yellow Arising from Blackness 29
4 The Islamic World: Balance and Magic Numbers 45
5 Mediaeval Europe: Translations, Debates and Symbols 55
6 The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Pretension, Fraud and
Redeeming the World 83
7 The Rosicrucian Episode and its Aftermath 105
8 Theology Wearing a Mask of Science: The Later Seventeenth Century 123
9 Alchemy in an Age of Self-Absorption: The Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries 137
10 A Child of Earlier Times: The Twentieth Century 153
Notes 167
Select Bibliography 181
Index 197
For David Stewart
Illustrations
Between pages 84 and 85
1 Wei Po-Yang and a disciple. Wei Po-Yang wrote the fi rst surviving
Chinese book on alchemy (c.ad 142). The dog and the pupil were
essential to his experiments.
2 Preparation of the elixir of immortality. The man, the dragon
and the fi re represent yang, the male balancing power within the
universe. The woman, the tiger and the water represent yin, the
female balancing power.
3 Nägärjuna. There were several authors of this name, and a number
of them had alchemical works attributed to them. Their dates range
from the second century ad to at least the tenth.
4 A list of alchemical signs and their meanings. It begins (third line)
with gold, gold fi lings and silver, and ends with symbols for days,
nights, hours, and a day and a night.
5 Maria the Jewess. She was credited with inventing several pieces of
alchemical apparatus, including the bain-marie for the distillation
of liquids, and the tribikos, a still with three funnels and receivers
in which distilled vapours are condensed. This picture shows her
pointing to the white herb growing upon a mountain, a herb which
is mentioned several times in teachings attributed to her.
6 Two drawings of the bain-marie and one of the tribikos.
7 Avicenna: Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sinä. Along with
al-Razï (Rhazes), Avicenna was one of the best known of the Islamic
alchemists from the late tenth and early eleventh century, a period
when Islamic alchemy was at its height. The postage stamps show
his continuing fame in the Islamic world.
8 A table of alchemical symbols, from Basil Valentine’s work. It shows
those not only for the seven planets but also for the four elements,
essential ingredients, and the principal stages of the Work itself.
viii THE CHEMICAL CHOIR
9 Title page of Denis Zacaire’s supposed autobiography, the account
of an alchemist’s trials and misfortunes in his pursuit of the
alchemical goal of transmutation.
10 An alchemical recipe from an eighteenth-century manuscript, now
kept in St Andrews University Library.
11 A nineteenth-century version of an alchemist at work. It is clearly
derived from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century engravings, none
of which should be taken as photographs, but rather impressions
appealing to a general public view of what an alchemist ought to
look like.
12 One of the 15 engravings from the seventeenth-century Mutus
Liber, a book which formed the basis for experiments in alchemy
during the twentieth century.
Introduction
In 1675 Johann Joachim Becher, physician, metallurgist, economic theorist,
adviser to the Elector of Bavaria and alchemist, transmuted lead into silver from
which he made a commemorative medal. During the same year Wenceslas Seiler,
an Augustinian monk and later offi cer of the Bohemian Mint, went one better
and transmuted copper and tin into gold. Then in 1677, on the saint’s day of
the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, he transmuted a large medallion, over a
foot wide, from silver into gold. Both transmuted artefacts can be seen in the
Kunstshistorisches Museum in Vienna, along with another similar medal struck
from gold which had been transmuted in the presence of Karl Philip, Count
Palatine of the Rhineland on the last day of December 1716. These alchemical
displays were by no means unusual – indeed, they were encouraged at the
Imperial Court, partly as diversions, partly as demonstrations that God was
favouring the Habsburgs with these signs of His pleasure and approval – and we
must put aside the conventional image of the alchemist as a threadbare, etiolated
individual, filthy and stinking from sulphurous smoke and half-poisoned
by mercury, and picture a well-dressed, articulate man surrounded by noble
men and women in a vaulted chamber of a castle or imperial palace, lecturing
deferentially to people who almost certainly well understood what he was talking
about and who had examined his equipment thoroughly beforehand to obviate
any chances of fraud. Demonstrations by members of the Académie des Sciences
in the presence of Louis XIV, or by Fellows of the Royal Society of London before
Charles II, provide close parallels, the demonstrators being some of the foremost
scientists of their day.
But beyond these refi ned and elevated circles there did indeed exist thousands
of poor alchemists who spent their inheritances, their substance and their future
prospects, not to mention the money of any patrons they might acquire in the
course of their researches, in pursuit of what all too often turned out to be an
elusive goal. Nor was the phenomenon confi ned to Europe. The Far East, India
and the Middle East housed thousands of alchemists in their turn – before
Europe, in fact – and while it is often assumed that alchemy was largely replaced
by chemistry during the eighteenth century and relegated to those dark corners
of history in which failed or superseded beliefs are supposed to lurk, the truth is
that at this present time alchemy has never been more vigorous or more widely