Transcription
Alchemy's one of the most misunderstood aspects of Western esotericism. So misunderstood that I actually made a video about five of the common misconceptions I've heard about it. I was thinking about making an entire introduction to alchemy series here on the channel, and I thought I'd kind of done that already. Last year, I was invited to the Flint Institute of Art to give a lecture on the artistic and technical side of alchemy. It's kind of an introduction to alchemy, and I hope it'll do until I actually make one for the channel. I hope you find it interesting. I'd like to thank the staff of the FIA for providing this video and for inviting me and hosting me. And it also is special, I'd like to thank Dr. Allen Klein for sponsoring the lecture. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and this is Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
[Music]
So what was alchemy, and how did it become what we know is the chemistry of today? Dr. Sledge will introduce the long-enduring practice and dispel common myths and discuss where our understanding of alchemy and proto-science is today. Dr. Sledge was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He received a Master's in Mysticism and Esoteric Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and a Master's and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Memphis. He has written on the intersection of metaphysics and politics, often focusing on non-canon figures in the Western intellectual tradition. Dr. Sledge currently teaches philosophy and religious studies at Wayne State University. It has to be a challenge today to talk about the intersection of metaphysics and politics. Thank you so much for having me back. It's amazing to be here in Flint. I'm so honored to be invited. With strange interest I have is how I get invited back. I don't write there's changed me. So tonight we talk about alchemy, where he was, what it was, a history of a little bit, and sort of the burns of Renaissance. We're actually having an alchemy now. That might worry the chemists in the room that we have no real sense about. Okay, but we aren't. That's it. So I want to talk a bit about tonight. Also, I bet you can hear I'm nursing a bit of a cold, so God willing, my my voice will last. So my talk today is called Sublime Transmutation: The Art, Theory, the Art, and the Science of Alchemy. And I say sublime because I really like this idea of the sublime. For folks who've studied Arthur I can't, but he tells us that the sublime is the most powerful image, I was kind of a sensation of art. And I think part of what we get out of alchemy, why part big part of my alchemy remains so compelling, is the art associated with these beautiful symbolic representations of these sublime chemical processes that on the one hand reveal to us, or trying to reveal to us, what their mysteries are. On the other hand, and significantly so, do a great job concealing, right, what's going on. So I think that's part of what's sublime about alchemy. It reveals and it conceals. It lures us in with these very strange and beautiful images, and then at the same time, it says, I'm so fast, I think you're not really initiative. That really initiative. So tonight, I want to talk about a couple of misconceptions about alchemy. I think they're the two dominant ways after we look it up to me these days, and I think unfortunately, both of them are a slightly incorrect. They're slightly wrong in some sense. The first misconception that I think is often had about alchemy was that he wasn't kind of blundering pseudoscience, more akin to magic than anything else, right? I think sometimes we imagine the outcome is be imagine them sitting there with their their furnace, right there, but they're their crucibles, and they're they're just lore and random things in and seeing what happens and blows up. And the amount of me is in some sense not any different fundamentally than just almost random mixing things together. But in fact, has more to do with magic or a conjuring fraud, even then we think of it having to do with an actual experimental science. I think the chemists have all convinced us of this, right? First day of class, we're not almost. And I think that one sold at the chemist. But I think that's I think a misconception. I'm not gonna talk a little bit about why I think that's a misconception. The second misconception I think we have about to me has to do with the idea but somehow the alchemists had nothing to do with with chemicals, chemical change. They weren't interested in experiments at all, but they in fact were really interested in spiritual or psychological transformation. So the alchemists laboring there and the dark, working on these these chemical changes, actually, you know, write what they were really interested in is like a spiritual transmutation of the base parts of us, right? The lid that we are into the gold that we could be. I think that's also a misrepresentation. I think that's also not what the optimist were doing. So I think both of these captures something, right? And then mostly they capture something incorrect. So what I want to do tonight is talk a little bit about where these misconceptions came from and kind of clear them up a little bit and keep making up perhaps a little bit more nuanced vision of alchemy, right? So where do they come from, right? Where did these ideas come from? Well, the first, right, you know, you the outcome, the sort of blundering pseudoscience, more akin to conjuring, really comes out of the humanist tradition, right? They are really trying to distinguish themselves away from Middle Ages, right? So when they call the the handwriting of the Middle Ages gothic, no one in the Middle Ages called their handwriting gothic. Every single medieval piece of literature that you see written in those very type dense black letter ants, they call those literacy moderna, modern letters. It's the humanistic calling of God rhyming. And so a big part of this is also in the 19th century, right? Separating obsessed all from the past. So there's a political aspect about this as well. It's not just straightforwardly the alchemists were we're sort of incorrect. It's also there's an ask attractive. Right? So also another big part of this is we've lost a lot of the actual information of what the alchemists produced. So one modern people often chemists look at an alchemical manuscript or on chemical imagery differently, at a loss as to what this stuff means. I mean, you get these along diatribe of these weird symbols and allegorical language in these very interesting sort of symbolic coded things. If you turn this to a monarch, in this to any modern person, I look at this and say, this is a bunch of crazy paganism or witchcraft or God knows. They don't want to read these texts. And so when we do, we don't want to read something Osby or stupid. Well, stupidity might go this way, right? We might be misreading them or I'm not reading them correctly as opposed to us knowing everything and how to figure these things out. I think that's a misconception. When I let misconception up a bit, I think too that the other misconception I think this is another idea that people have, right? Is the alchemist for I'm concerned at all with chemical transmutation. That is to say, they were interested in trying to turn light the gold. And I can tell you tonight without any doubt in my mind, the average alchemist, all things told, was very impossible. He would not be here. So trust me, they were interested in doing it. And that's not their only game. We'll talk more games later with his I intend that breathing went out these are bounds about the transmutation of the alchemists themselves. This is actually very, very lived. This is a very late idea. In fact, the earliest person who really articulates this position is a great spiritualist named Marion Atwood, who wrote a very long dissertation about this thesis about what alchemy is. There's a really great story to be told about her book, actually. She tried to prevent it from being published and burned all the copies of copies. Got out in courses like that. It's amazing. But really, will be head up is folks like Crawley, home, Julian, young, people do a cobra. They lost it, right? His worries about people are amazing, and I have something to say about that. But unfortunately, think that he ought to be. This is the point about what's going on. And this is also true of Virginia, who are magic, pretty folks who do studies in the room. Mohammed is also a cornerstone figure in the history of religious studies. And his great book, Before German Crucible, while very interesting, it's very good to read. It's very clear to me. The Marriot, it just doesn't really understand the people can be very well in this town. Is fall. We're only now beginning to really understand it. So these guys, even though sort of the trifecta, but I think you have that, would you have cold milk, and you have, and they really the people they're gonna give us this psychological or spiritual interpretation of the alq model tradition. And this is very dominant in the New Age movement. So if you go to modern lectures on alchemy, for instance, in the New Age movement, this will be the dominant way they will interpret a lot of the imagery we'll see tonight. Now, am I here to tell anyone that their spiritual path is wrong or incorrect? Absolutely not. If you find spiritual nourishment interpreting alchemical text according to a Jungian or otherwise new-age or spiritual as path, great. All right, I literally hold to a community that they people think we gave us like commandments on a rock that we can't do pork. You think I'm talking snake tricked a woman one time, right? We should be careful. We should we should be calm. So again, this idea, I think holiday needs a great deal in spiritualist movements, and I think it's quite stupid, right? This is a very famous image here. Hermes Trismegistus, the founder in some sense of the alchemical appears twice, thrice great Harvey's. I here with the image of the Sun. So like every night, what do I want to? We don't want to prove is very strong word. What I want to offer, right? What I won't offer you do what you like with it, right? I want to actually offer a bit of a more sun read of both these positions. On the one hand, I'm still running, although one hears, right? I want to say that alchemy was in fact experimental science. It was something very much like experimental science. Now, is experimental science in the modern sense of the word? No, but it is an experimental idea that the way we gain knowledge is to experiment when we deduce things from previous experience, okay? I mean, also you get out and I will turn it on you for that tonight. The second thing I want to review for, right? Is that it's not just a theory of physical transmutation. The idea that you're only looking at physical changes for the outcome is completely unimaginable for the alchemists. You're thinking about all of nature, and nature includes both the material, the the psychological, and the spiritual. And that is a very common belief in the Middle Ages. We're talking about an idea where nothing is in isolation. The Middle Ages or thinking about a world in which everything is connected. Everything from thoughts to symbols to plants to animals to the stars to the chemicals in the laboratory. Everything is fundamentally connected. It is a theory of everything. So when you talk about alchemy, or really talking about a theory of everything. So that's the second part, right? The third part here, I don't actually have something to deal with with the spiritual and physical transmutation of the alchemists themselves. So don't let don't hear me that I'm saying I'm throwing this sort of spiritualist interpretation about being under the bus. I'm not, right? It's just not the primary focus of any alchemists in the Middle Ages. Cool. So make that point a bit more subtle here, fit, but really not me is a total philosophy of nature. And I think nature, I need all of them, even spiritual nature. Again, we think of nature as being sort of the physical world. Of the alchemists, we're talking about a spectrum that runs from everything from the lowest vote of dirt all the way to the divine seat of the God boat. Everything for the ultimate was connected and interconnected. And so this is a very different theory because it's really here is image. We have the other all right. We have this this is the thought memory. Will talk about this morning. Vinaigrette is a water bath on Olympic notice. This is before they have developed a condenser, right? This is to rate their losing of come on the state out of that. I'd like an answer but there is he here. You have the two alchemists debating, right? And notice what's important here is that you actually have astrological influence. So this is a very good representation of what the outcome is stuff was going on. They are learned in the teaching from each other. They are physical changes in the world, and yet being a golf course with astrological forces are for them very important. Also, by the way, not every alchemist believed in astrology. So I did some didn't talk about that for perhaps later on the time.
So what was alchemy, right? What was alchemy? The word alchemy is actually a bit of a mystery. Surprise, surprise. Sure about alchemy, the word is actually a bit of a mystery. We know that the is an Arabic definite article, right? So what the word exam only comes from the Greek. We think it may have to do with the basic of the word chemical, the very belly got better. Consider actually is that we're dealing with an Egyptian word, right? The Egyptian word for Egypt was chem, which means the black. It may refer to the soil of that region, right? So we think that the actual word alchemy is in fact itself a bit about me. I've been agreed. It's a bit of Egyptians, a bit of Arabic. And so what we get is the Egyptian thing, right? Yeah, it's a bit of a mystery, but it has to do with the fact that many of the alchemists, love much about losing, originated in Alexandria. We will talk about that more in just a moment. So what was it, Frank? I work with several theories of nature. And I say Beuys, there was never one alchemy, right? When so many people say, well, how come he says this? My question always is, what your book you read, right? Because there are dozens about everybody alchemists has slight differences in their theories, some big, some small. Some believe in astrology, stuff don't. Some believe that it's is, and some believe it's back. There are laws about chemical schools. When we get into they're talking about sort of the overall, it is about me. I'm gonna give you the most general version of the theory. So it has to do with the creation and alteration of substances. That's really important. Creation of substances. This is going to be incredibly controversial because in the same way that we don't worry about, for instance, people engaging in genetic regulation, right? What we said, right? But they're playing God. That's our worst. The exact same where he was had about the alchemists of Middle Ages, that they are in there and then we like authorities doing their weird stuff, and they're transforming things, and only God can do that, and they must be with the devil. That was a warrior. He's without to. But the creation and alteration of substances here, right? It's also the theoretical and practical knowledge. We're gonna talk a lot about the theoretical and practical knowledge actually accumulated by the alchemists over the course of about a thousand years, including their art and literature. There's a great deal of art literature. I mean, every one of these slides is just literally one image from an alchemical book. There are dozens of these books that are available to us. And I said Golden Age of alchemy in it. These are all available to us quite easily these days. It also includes the ability to transferring substances, right? We'll talk about how they thought that was possible because the idea was you can translate this into visitor, this substance into this Testament, this substance earned another substance to do with another substance. That was something they were very interested in. We are very interested in doing that. Also, the production of the universal solvent was very interesting to them, right? The idea of the stomach I'll cast, the ability to produce a solvent that dissolves everything. But this things to a lot of the problem. If you produce the solvent dissolves everything, what do you put it in? Yeah, thank you. It was the problem. So they had to produce the universal holder, right? So the universal solvent was a big idea of theirs, right? The production of medicine. Everybody me, myself having cold, I ingested chemicals that are suppressing the symptoms of my colon break down. That idea that you can ingest chemicals and suppress a cold. We will see coming out of the alchemical tradition guaranteed is that you can take things from the outside balancing that's enough chemical idea. We'll see a very hard developed by folks like Paracelsus, all the most miss mercury, almost miss Benson oriented around drinking mercury. Sam, don't do that. And it's also the practices in Xalapa. That's right. It's also the spiritual transformation. Talk about this toward the end. Yeah, has had a deep idea. And I think it's a core lesson for us to learn as scientist today. For the alchemists, you didn't just get to transform anything you wanted. If you were a bad person, you have to become spiritually and morally purified in order to accomplish the great work. So you couldn't just go into a lab and cook up nerve gas, right? No. The idea was, if you are a bad person with bad intentions, God or nature or interview didn't stop you. And unfortunately, I think they're right. This is an important lesson. I tell my students, right, after my ethics classes, can does not imply should. Can does not apply should. The alchemists, that was a very cool idea. Just because we can does not mean be sure. Just because we can't make gold does not be assured.
So some districts do some history of alchemy. There have been craftspeople throughout the ages who have known all kinds of things about how to do chemical transformations of reality. I list a lot of them here, right? Brewers, Brian Brewers and coats, at Smith's, the tulips, dyers, Fuller's, the sayers, glass makers. All of these people and all of these crafts had all kinds of chemical knowledge going all the way back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and before. So it's not like when out food comes on the scene, they're inventing things from scratch. We would all see what the alchemist is. Even though they don't develop things from scratch, they synthesize things from all of these different crafts in a way. There's none of the other crafts did previously. It's really the Greeks that are really gonna take the breakthrough. The Greeks are gonna ask a very basic question. They're gonna ask a question beginning of seventh and sixth centuries, looks like Bailey's, what is nature? What is nature most fundamentally? And they're going to be to get debating that issue. You're gonna theories. Bailey's gonna say it's all water. Democritus is gonna say, no, it's tiny little things you can't cup anymore. There are no holes there. Adams, right? All the people going to say all kinds of other things. And they're gonna begin debating what fundamentally is reality. And that debate is going to be published and disseminated and alternative checked. So will we get from the practical sign of these craftspeople? We combine with this theoretical side from this Greek world, and we're gonna see what we get to Aristotle here in a minute. They're gonna have a theory for why things are the way they are, and then techniques for all bringing them. When we combine those two things, techniques for altering them from the craft world and the Greek a theoretical world, why things are the way they are, now we're gonna have a systematic program. I wish to change reality in itself. And that is going to be the project, right? This breakdown is, I think incredible. It has a weakness, though, right? The main weakness is, I'm sure being scientist in the room know, it's the Greek way of doing scientists was to do really, really elegant ideas and then go looking for evidence to prove them. That doesn't work. You know, if you've ever argued with a conspiracy theorist, you know, you can always find reasons to believe things, right? You've gotta help us all or whatever they are. The Greeks did science this life, right? The Greeks did knowledge comes from this way, and it was it led them astray. We'll talk more about that in a bit, but it led them astray. By the way, this is one of the earliest diagrams from nucleus, the earliest in New York struggled through. Euclidea, by the way, the Euclidean are down scripture, the Pythagoreans, and the Pythagoreans believed everything was fundamentally composed numbers. Things were, I think we still believe that, by the way. I mean, how much time he's been doing math in your physics classes? Yeah, it's weird. The numbers seem to be what we're obsessed with, right? Maybe the numbers were just really. Pythagoras thought there was a huge breakthrough in the Alexandrian world, right? A huge breakthrough was technological. And the Alexandrian world here around the turn of the Common Era, it's difficult to say this big invented distillation, right? They invented the steam engine. They even took the water bath. Can you imagine, right? If the steam engine would have taken home holding the Alexandrian of all the way, they'd be accepted under for us. Think about it. There's a whole book to be written or someone plays on that, right? With his team engine invented by Hero of Alexandria, Brian. It's how many years was it after the steam engine? We were on the moon. Yeah, 300 years, little laps, right? Imagine if we are on the moon the same year that Christianity was legalized, 325. There's I think there's no reason why that couldn't have happened. And can we have a for any engineers gonna remember my dog's Android design the steam engine and the first vending machine, by the way. You get these breakers, right? It means the early optimist to do the writer of this alchemical texts for women. This is also a world of which women could compete with men for non-production. We know a famous alchemist here named Cleopatra. We also know of a areum, the Jewess, who invented the Marines. So he was in new French cooking. The breed is still named after her. That name comes directly from the alchemical tradition. It's a water bath distillation, right? So you can hold temperature a bit more steady than that form of distillation. If you've ever had many forms of whiskey, most whiskey Vashem is still on memory. Brandy, almost always has been about money. So if you've ever had any brandy, thank the Jews. So also at this time, all the major aspects of alchemy replace by the Alexandrian period. All the major aspects of how come here in place. Let's give you a couple examples of these on the world views in place. This is a famous image of the snake eating its own tail, right? This is a thorough Boros. May the tail here, right? The idea that everything is one fact, read Greek minuscule, grieve hinto Han, all is one, right? Everything is connected. Fundamental comment, I deal in alchemy. Here we have the treaty ghosts, right? Here you can see the distillation arms, I'm the main distillation here. Again, notice that a note condenser or very little condemned to hear it speak up. This was the distillation apparatus invented by either Cleopatra or Mary the Jewess. We're not sure. But again, if you drink this team was a womanist. So again, a technical achievement here, the philosophical achievement, and also esoteric achievement. This folks, is the earliest formula we have for the production of gold from base metals. It's from so suppose without Lowe's Andrea, probably sometime around the second or third century. It's completely clear that both waited for you here. You don't pass no. We have no. We do know that it's involving Chrysler palladium, which means gold making agree. So if you want to be the work of deciphering this, feel free to destabilize our calm. So this is this is the earliest. It's called the formula of the crab. But exactly what it means is mysteries. But again, all the inter aspects about the air heater, right? The philosophical element with the technical element. We have this or esoteric cult.
So we've been on country world, sort of the crucible of alchemy. Forgive my, it's really the Islamic world where we get out to be really developed into a science, technically, technically sophisticated process, right? Let's say Islamic, it, I mean, I say this long looking because the Islamic world is not just listens, right? There are Christians and Jews and all kinds of people. There is the Islamic, it, I mean, the wider world of their conquest, indeed, right? The word out of either Greco Arabic Egyptian word, and many of the really exotic words we get actually now movie that are very confusing. The European is anything with your Hyland things, right? They're actually just Arabic words, right? So all right, the black elixir, Olympic ethanol, literally the word for furnace in Arabic. And as obviously other word, a soft, right? Any alchemist salutes is a great esoteric word. If you know what the real beating of the Azoff, people control all things. In fact, it has the last letter of the Greek, Arabic, the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin out with a minute, right? It just pronounced all, which means mercury in Arabic. So it's one of these things for like, if you don't know what it means, it has to be magical. So again, what what passes for esotericism, I mean, it's just actually era. It's a this period time when we actually develop what's called the surf, the soul for mercury theory. I have an example of that theory operating currently here. It is the sulfur mercury theory. Will see is the idea that all the metals are fundamentally composed of sulfur and Mercury. And if you put them in some combination to seal them, you can get gold. I'm waiting in this top here. Acids are actually introduced, right? So we have aqua regia is actually developed this time. Aqua Fortis, you know, it's a Buick acid, nitric acid, also invented by the Arab alchemists at this time. Alcohols distilled in a very elaborate way. In fact, the Arab Muslims were making perfume out of it. They were making perfumers. Don't make large with alcohol. It wasn't until Christian moms, Irish monks came down said, if people comes out, this is really good eg by the water of life, whiskey. So again, we think that probably happened somewhere did not in France or maybe sure where alcohol was first distilled for consumption, although we do all those facilities in Europe are in the the Armagnac region of France. So if you're arming the after he alchemists, this time ripe are also does key scientist at this time. You may recognize, right? Job air, they've been high in Razi, had been seen up for any doctors in the room who would seen as probably the one of the principal writers of medical documents of me world. The turbo Phyllis, the forum, the Congress of the philosophers, written by an Arab alchemist at this time. And the famous emerald tablet. For anyone here who practices the esoteric world, tablets or the mainstay of this, right? Folks referred this. I pass above so below for this kind of language before. That's the Emerald Tablet. That was developed primarily in Arab lands. Early on, we just actually found the last 20 years, the actual original Arabic version. This is from an Arabic alchemical manuscript. That kind of distillation apparatus is exactly this icon. You will still be sued. It's still see using the coming out region of France. It is not fundamentally change. We have the birthday frog. I'm proposing tonight, folks. We have out today, 11:42. This is the birthday of alchemy in Europe. We have Robin Chester's translation of the composition about me, which you can read online. It enters into your iPad, 11:44, and it spreads and rapidly can work. Very taken up with alchemy for obvious reasons. Trance new things and other things. And this parts a big big conversation. And your theory in tradition, can you make things by yourself, or you playing God? And that's part of what makes out to be very, very nerve-wracking to many people. The idea is, you can't make things. God makes things. We can mix things together, but you can't make to stop from other stuff. Like I can't transmute a lamb into a into a horse. You can't go for species, species. Why do you think you can go for blood be gold? And the album is going on returns new stuff. And they're like, that's witchcraft. Don't do that. So there's a debate that's going to go on in the alchemical world about that question. Can you transform nature by art? Artificial, right? Let's go uses word artificial. Literally means to make it through art. Is it really famous alchemists here? Albertus Magnus is a pretty famous alchemist. You may have heard of the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is himself also most probably singleness. Raimondo Bowl, and some other folks who are also a great, great renown, right? So our alchemists here practicing. And alchemy reaches its high point in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll talk more about why then. It also reaches its global point in the 16th or 17th centuries. That is to say, any of the most beautiful pieces of alchemical art come from this time. Also, alchemists are the best able to control their implementation at this time. It's also the time period where we have constant fraud. That is to say, there's all kinds of ways on tricking people into making them believe you can make led to go. I'll give you one example. Tissue, you can take a crucible, make a false bottom, put gold dust in the false bottom, right? Take the proof, put in the fire, right? Heat something to add your other stuff in, right? They pour it out, and that drops a lump of gold. Then you convince your open prints, well, if I could do that, I can for my time, a little bit of leg, all this gold, won't you pay me a bunch of money now? Let's do this for you. And they would paint a bunch money. He guess what happened? That alchemists, yeah, I caught them. Yeah, they would catch you. This is a gold and they would hang you from a gold-plated gibbet and leave you there. That was a common punishment for fake for alchemists to engage in fraud. So I'm gonna play gold, will play gold, right? Notice he's wearing gold, right? So the constant threat of fraud. Also in this time period, are we have that the alchemist who has what happened out the best name of 81 in history, really boosts Aurelia, steel, phrases, bomb, fast, as well, Paracelsus, who think literally beans better than Celsus, was an ancient Roman art doctor. Paracelsus really dramatically changes the way we do medicine and James would we do alchemy. He's really the bridge between the medieval world of alchemy and sort of the war world. He's created to read his, right? Answer, just he just like cursing like a sailor. It's just really great to read. You'll just like call people like shy scoff to their face, just any people. I will have to learn to baby-talking this prick mark, your throat that way too. It's really all about. So I'm supposedly, right? So again, lots of alchemy is in the be found here. Also, lots of drug. The late second century, the attack on the traditional theories of nature are really total at this time. Aerosol is coming under massive attack. This is, of course, the very famous image of a skeptical chemist, which is the 1651 text, which is taught to be the origin of modern chemistry. They'll tell you that Robert Boyle practiced alchemy. Do that with daily dyed things like, yeah, the chemistry, but for real, is that what you think? For exact. So Boyle knew to will talk about in a minute. They both practice alchemy. I'll be persistent, by the way, all the way to the mid-19th century. I think we should always remember the atom was not completely proven until the early 20th century. So even by the early 20th century, you could still be like alchemist and Assad like, yeah, like I'm hedging my best program, right? So again, see that this time period, we are really seeing a transition from alchemy into chemistry. In fact, scholars actually refer to this period as chemistry, if we spell it wrong on purpose to indicate the sort of no-man's land in between both. On the one hand, they are increasingly isolating chemicals from each other, but at the same time, still doing this transformation, transmutation business.
How do not be work? We can blame this guy. It's always a guy with trusty Sarah style from the school in Athens, right? Aristotle's theory. We can play here. Anything blame it on their pedigree. He stole the theory from the pedigrees. I bet you all know exterior. Aristotle said there are four fundamental things that exist, right? Air, water, fire, earth, right? And there are two principles, right? There's a masculine principle and a feminine principle because everything is some combination of these four chemicals. And you can see it here, right? Earth, water, air, fire. So here's the musical for worlds, which is not the Pythagorean music. That the world's is illustration. Well, it's a basic theory, folks. If everything that exists is some combination of these two of these four things, and if nature produces them by manipulating those four things in different ratios, then you can decompose them out of those ratios, Reid comes to him in some other ratio, and change one thing to another. That's the theory. It's a theory again. This is a far better theory. Airlocks theory than passing on series of time, which was the gods made everything and we can't change anything. That was the dominant theory. But they're right, right? The idea was, we'll Poseidon shakes the waters, that makes earthquakes. So it's alright, pretty, you know, two sacrifices. Aristotle's coming up with at least a theory, right? That says here is an actual theory about what's going on. Here's how we can actually manipulate the world based on how this goes. What gets developed in the Islamic world is that these two principles, right? The cold moist principle and the warm dry principle become represented by actual metals. And you can see here, not always as Thomas Aquinas. And if you see here, this is the image of sulfur and this image of mercury. They're deep within the earth. And there are these exhalation according to Islamic alchemists that depending on various kinds of forces working on sulfur and chemistry about sulfur and Mercury, they actually end up becoming different kinds of things. So the exact best ratio happens, it becomes cold. If there is less, you know, it's not so hot, not so cold, or whatever, it becomes silver, copper, or iron, tin, etc. This is the theory for white metals, different for each other, right? They are cooked in the earth. The idea is, as they're cooked to the earth, they're changing to different kinds of things. That when we get them, we get the various stages of that transmutation. Well, the idea is simple, folks. So blown up, at least you can tape your out chemical egg bond here, you seal it, you hermetically seal. What drives us where we get the term hermetically sealed? So there's nothing on the outside. You subject it to these various forces, you distill it, you calcine it, you smash it, you heat it, you do all kinds of things to it. You emulate the processes inside the earth. You give me like those processes perfectly. Well, you'll turn for that sulfur and Mercury into what if some metals, right? In whatever. And they have good experimental evidence to believe this, right? One thing they found is if you take that is the copper sulfate and put steel iron into it, the in transmutes. No, no, that's that's what actually. But we now know that's what not actually happening. But Magan ears noticed this for a long time. The copper bound to the iron, the Iowas transmuted. Well, that's not what's happening with a thoughtful. So the basic idea here is you have to put them through these twelve processes. Right? Now, these twelve processes vary widely from alchemists to alchemists. So you start with calcination, right? Smashing things up like mercury bulb, right? Making a powder of them. And you go all the way through these different kinds of processes, all the way to projection. Projection allows you to introduce the pure version of sulfur mercury into a base metal and what instantly converted to gold, right? You can skip all those processes. That's the underlying theory behind alchemy. You can see if you're this really beautiful illustration, right? You can see the alchemical addict, right? Hermetically sealed. And you can see this great little straightening gear of the process of the fight going on inside here. I had a great deal of heating things of going on in order to do this process. So this 12-step process will go offset by colors. How you knew you're doing it, right? It will go from black, which by the way, you take sulfur and Mercury, you put them into a vessel like this. You can't see here, but it starts off black, right? The sulfur and Mercury interact, and you get especially the heat to it. You go from black to white to yellow to red. The chemical turns red. You can see here. Here is turned red. You know you are now on the road toward the Philosopher's Stone. That is to say, the pure elemental stuff capable of transmuting one substance to another. Now, all the way, you don't kind of other stuff. Get medicines, you could get the universal solvent, all cast, we talked about earlier, and you can get all kinds of potions for extending life. Not thanking you immortal, by the way. In Chinese alchemy, making you a boarder was a big part of Chinese alchemy. You could never become immortal. And European out, why sin? You have to die. The wages of sin is death. So in my childhood was never in the game or the alchemists of this. Although there are stories about famous living two to three hundred years. Now, the exact starting substance, how does proceeded, how it all worked is varies widely from alchemical texts. Alchemical texts, not really very widely, but the actual symbolic representations of this are very unclear, right? They're intentionally concealed so that you have to know, right? If you're in their own, you know, don't go. We're not going to tell you. You have to figure it out. They give you clues along the way. The alchemists, there thanks for giving you these kinds of clues. So we can see these many things about the manuscript here. We see very famous images here of mercury, Ryan Mercury's being transmuted, writing into various form forms. And again, the various elements dumping out of out of those chemicals. These crucibles, by the way, you can see them here. I've brought something from my own collection. These crucibles that I have here were discovered in an archaeological dig. I've been put on the private market from around good track. They are in fact recovered from an alchemical lab. This one was used. I don't know what was in there. Are you touching it? They're called Hessian crucibles, and they're nested inside. Don't like this. So Russia calls these crucibles. They date from some time and the in the substance centuries. The high days of alchemy grew up them to come up and take a look at it if you like. They're famous. They're Hessian crucibles were made from the specific area of Germany where the soil there contains a little bit of aluminum. And so when they're fired, they actually become very, very resistant to heat damage. We get the crucibles incredibly hot without them being damaged. So take her out over there, put these crucibles and fire it up. Makes it go. Trust me, I've tried. Now, what this stuff strikes this is obscure and esoteric. You have to understand every single discipline in the Middle Ages having technical jargon. Every single discipline has its technical jargon. Now, again, I dare you to walk into a queue mystery lab and ask them what they're doing. And if you're not a chemist, it's gonna sound like Greek to you. Right? Go into a programming lab with appropriate computers and ask them what they're doing. It's gonna sound like Greek to you. Yeah, let's have their own technical jargon vocabulary. Now, just because it's technical one jargon lady does not mean it's completely coherent. We'll talk more about the fact that we can read a lot of this now. We actually have a good idea of what's going on in these texts.
So the basic idea here is folks, the underlying theories is a huge problem. Gerber furnaces. Underlying theories never going to work. The truth of the matter is, transmutation is effectively impossible. We'll talk about the one exception to this in a minute. But it was never going to be possibility actually following through with this Aristotelian theory and transmuting one element into another. It's something not possible given the mechanisms that the alchemists had. However, this is what really makes it out to be important. They ain't never gave up. They carefully described the processes they were engaging in, and all of these techniques, right? So I'm going to go back a couple slides. All of these techniques, writing calcination, solution, separation, conjunction, citation, fermentation, all of these require enormous amounts of can practically to do. Right? Fermentation, if you've ever made beer, it's easy to muck it up. You have to be very, very carefully skilled in order to pull fermentation off correctly. Right? Things like distillation, solution, development, and the production of acids. It's very technically sophisticated. So all the way to the production of the Philosopher's Stone, you took the trans be one chemical led to another. They discovered a wealth of things, all kinds of techniques. By the way, the exact same techniques you'll still see in a chemistry lab today. They're highly perfected now. They were breezy beta tested and in our chemical labs of the Middle Ages. Again, this is still dead, right? Without this, the condenser, I mean, missing here. It's not that unusual. But still, if you walk into and see the big transition happened in the late Middle Ages, early modern period. The one, the rise what we call entrepreneurial alchemy. Now, I'll give you an idea what happened in entrepreneurial alchemy. So one thing you can do is you can go to the French, you can make gold, and then you can fail. And we all know what happened to him. The gold plated maybe you didn't do that, right? Oh, what could you do? You can make assets, you can make glass, you can make cosmetics, you can make a contained, right? You can distill alcohol. You can produce chemically pure substances like potassium nitrate. And you can imagine why in the early 17th century, maybe maybe European princes got really interested in you making very pure potassium nitrate. Anyone know why? Gunpowder. Gunpowder, right? Because guess what? If you have a gunpowder.
[Music]
Again, if I get a gun, if I got you like, give me all your phone. Oh, I didn't expect that to be alchemy. But you just robbed me. Okay, okay. So again, the ability to produce very high-quality individual chemical compounds, right? Drove the alchemists away from trying to transmute gold. They would still try that way to die, I'm sure, right? Also, they were moving in the directions of actually producing these chemical pure substance. Also, another thing that's worth pointing out here, right? Is by the 17th century, you can very clearly track in Europe when there's a lot of books written on alchemy and when there will be called pressures, mental famines. That is the same when the amount of gold and silver Europe drops. So when mines dry up, guess what happens? Alchemy gets real interesting. Why? Because he's just not enough silver and gold and these European places to keep the economy afloat. And when there's a lot of old silver, interest in alchemy drops. You can trace this in a graph. I say you can. We have it swells to well. Guess what happened to 70th century? The mining situation opens up dramatically. There are tons of silver mines. The central Eastern Europe, gold's flowing in from Africa. If you have enough gold, enough silver, guess that you don't need any more. Don't want the alchemists making one nugget of gold and God knows how I did it, right? So again, other factors are gonna intervene on the alchemist. So on the one hand, alchemy will come to an end. On the other hand, it will persist by another name, doing different kind of anything. So anyone tells you how he's dead, gone, absolutely not. They just got one profit. Well, they got tired of being hanged for gold plated chips. Also, by the way, at the same time, Aristotle's theories are coming under constant attack, right? Galileo was attacking the Aristotle. Everybody's attacking Aristotle. And increasing we're finding out it doesn't seem like he's right. Turns out he was price Li. We're all about everything. I feel bad for Aristotle sitting. I mean, can you imagine anything? Every domain about alchemy did finding starts to the imagination. These are one page of million words written by no lesson Isaac Newton on alchemy. He wrote in a ratio of ten to one the science that we science. No, he was far more interested in our chemical processes and viable interpretation of the apocalypse. But he wasn't inventing physics.
or calculus, in fact, we've been the only reason why he proclaimed calculus is someone else playing it. He's like, "Oh, I did that person." It was an afterthought for him. Really, what mattered for him was the alchemy. He's beautiful, how chemical ideas he writes. This is the lattice philosophy for us, right? The Philosopher's Stone. And this is the various colors things should turn as they go. This process was not corrupt by any stretch of the imagination. Alchemy slowly transforming what we will call chemistry, and then chemistry slowly transformed than what we have now called modern chemistry. It wasn't like one came to an end and one began. My fate, as it broke up one day, we're divorced, it's over, she's not working out. The idea here is a very slow process by which this happens, right? So all the way back from Paracelsus, his idea that the sulfur mercury theory is wrong, no salt. So again, it's a small change, but it was a dramatic change given the alchemical theory of today.
The production of specific chemicals for industrial use. When we talk about 93 to bulldoze, introduction of a crepuscular theory, right? The idea that there are these tiny little pieces of stuff that are but what exists. Also to the moving meant a lot late from the idea that you go looking for evidence. Take Card introduces the idea of radical doubt. How do you find the truth? You doubt your way to the truth. You don't believe your way to it. That is a methodological shift of dramatic importance. And now is going to be a huge shift in the way we did science as opposed to the way, yeah, because again, if you believe that the ad that's have converted led to gold, you're going to go looking for how they did it. You know, graph yourself, right? And again, the shift here was a general shift away from from a larger paradigm, away from Aristotle, to a kind of skepticism about how things are going to work.
It's a great painting actually from the 19th century. It's a depicting in some sense what we think happened to some alchemist here doing some distillation work. His vessel breaks, and out of it flows phosphorus, pure phosphorus. He's isolated an element. He didn't know it, but he's done the work of isolating an element. We see the same thing with people like Priestley and other folks who do something with oxygen and stuff like that. Doing the alchemy, realizing, hold on, maybe these are elements, and maybe not salt, salt, sulfur, and mercury folks. We were in a golden age about chemical research. I say golden age, I really mean there are more texts available to you, to us as scholars, that ever before. I have, let me literally go online. I can download the entire works about chemical chemical writers that were literally available in two libraries in Europe up until now. Google is getting a ton of these books, and they are available to us. And we're now for the first time in history actually being able to trace which alchemists influence other alchemists and how what are they learning from each other? How are they treating their experiments? How are they learning that if you do this, something this weird gas comes off? That gas is combustible. I need to be really careful, right? How do we trace this stuff out? And it's finally realizing that these alchemists were not fumbling around. They were communicating their erotic letters. They were publishing. They don't publish a book, realizing it was misprinted, take it back, republish it, and warn their original reader, don't do it that way. Oh, we're giving a very good system because the alchemists were not engaged willy-nilly, just add whatever you like, just like whatever you want these chemicals. We're getting a very strong sense they're engaging in experimentation, all right? They're engaging experimentation. In fact, we're learning that the founders of the so-called scientific revelation are actually our scientific innovation, sorry, we're actually much more complicated than we ever thought before. Newton, or other people, again, we think of these as the founders of science. There's big that fast between their time doing things we would now associate with the occult rather than good science. We're getting a far better vision of what these people were actually like and therefore at the time. In fact, research and alchemy is now, but it's a respectable field. I do research in alchemy. When I say I do, present you to alchemy, no one looks at me and thinks of my sinks themselves, oh god, one of those people that probably do actually, but they, they published my neighbors. You can publish accounts, all right? There's an entire journal called Epics, dedicated largely to the history of alchemy now. The history belt, right? There's a great thing you're saying, right? Nonsense. It's nonsense, but the history of nonsense about science, aren't you doing it, right? But this is the store of the books. This is a modern reproduction of an alchemical experiment, whereas one of Duty's attempts to make vitriol, right? Aqua Fortis, right? Which if you've ever studied alchemical folks, ugly folks up here have a background and how come you started out to be a bit before, yeah? One of those famous images. Do I perceive alchemy is the green lion design devouring the Sun? It's a very common image. This is the image, if you've ever read, you know, the folks, this is the image he always comes back to, the lion devouring the Sun. No one anything with this was do we discovered the fact, but the outcome is actually invented aqua regia. Aqua regia is an acid that will, in fact, dissolve gold. Well, we didn't know that they could really do this, actually, technically very sophisticated to do. Well, what do we do? This is actually Newton's exact recipe for creating aqua fortis. Then we recreated it using, you know, things that won't quite kill us as easily. So we can see a crew, you can see a distillation apparatus here, then be guided aqua fortis, top orgia, there with across the center, right? We can actually make reproduce Newton's experiment down to the team. That has to say, we can actually reproduce what he alchemists did and we'll learn why they did what they did. No realizing, no, they were never just messing around, fooling around. They have absolutely discovering things. They have meant that logical processes by which they fundamentally trying to figure things out. So again, we are now living in a great period. Again, if you literally can go and get a PhD in chemistry, I think he's been a good leader of your time doing what we now call forensic chemistry, recreating the chemistry of the ancient world. What do they say? Who's who laughs last laughs best? Yeah, turns out if you can transmute letting the gold, right? No, the particle accelerator. Yeah, you can do it. In 1980, folks at LBNL were actually able to transmute very thin sheets of bismuth oil into gold. Business my way is right there next to lid, right? So right there next to it, and they were able to do this transmutation was possible. I'm sure the alchemists all like in their graves like, right now. The problem that was the good news. The amount of gold created was so minut that you had to effectively have very sophisticated technology even notice it's there. If you got close to it, it was highly radioactive. So transmit view and be dead. And about 1 o'clock trillion dollars to make an ounce of it. But we did. So again, like in whoo-hoo laughs last laughs best.
And this leads me to my last point of the nine folks, or my next to last point. And this is the image, right? It's a very famous image here of the Green Line devouring the Sun, right? That aqua regia. How come it was neither of the things we think it was? It was neither folly and ridiculous nonsense, people sort of laboring stupidly over something that was always doing to produce nothing. That simply isn't true. The entire practical operation that we now knows chemistry comes out of those processes. Now, was it funny, really based on a wrong assumption about nature? Sure, right? Do you really want to look back in the past to be like, y'all got it wrong, you're stupid? No, let's be humble. They were laboring carefully over a thousand years, 2,000 years, trying to develop this, these techniques, and they did an amazing job to do so. So we should be respectful of what the alchemists did, even if fundamentally we know they were never going to try to be led to gold, right? That just wasn't in the, it wasn't in the cards. But that side projects here are incredibly important. Awesome, by the way, right? I don't want to throw the idea that the alchemical ideal, the idea that the process of transmuting space metals, things like led the goal, was simply about profit. Now, there's certain, they were alchemists out there trying to make a fog, but again, for the alchemists from Mineola, that's right. And I think the best word about me at this time is the work of Pseudo-Gerber. So new Gerber says, at the very beginning of the book, look, if you want, if you're here for greed, just put the book down. If you hear do bad stuff, put the book down, because fundamentally nature will write you, God will write you. And if you're here to create problems and struggles and evil with this, it will get found out and you will be destroyed. So there's an idea that alchemy, that's fundamentally we were responsible not just for what we make, but for who we are. I think, right? And this is what the last idea I want to land on. There's something about this idea that all is one, right? That a philosophic line is added below as above, so below are the famous image here of the oral, that's right, this thing eating its own tail. I think one of the lessons we can take from alchemy, one of the else's I take from alchemy, is that science has a responsibility not just to create and destroy, right, but it has a moral responsibility to create what allows human beings, the rest of creatures on this planet, to flourish. Because if we simply think of nature is something we can extract from, that we can transform, and we can just take from, we're all seeing the consequences of that mentality. And I think, but cut the outcome is to never make that step. For the alchemists, they were always in a dialectic, in a relationship with nature. As they transform nature, they were transformed. And as they transformed themselves, only then could they further transport major. This idea that we can simply extract from nature, we can take from nature, we can transform nature any way we like, I think is irresponsible. And I fun to really think it's a lesson we can learn from how chemical forebears. Welcome back. I hope you found that interesting. Sorry for jumping in and out of the frame there, and I hope the audio is okay. And also, my apologies for Young's dates. I think I placed him in the 17th century, making him several hundred years old. It's a kind of Jungian slip, if you get what I mean. At any rate, I hope you found the video interesting. I've included some recommended readings in the description below. I hope you'll check those out. Alchemy's gonna be a mainstay here at Esoterica, so hope you'll subscribe and consider supporting us at Patreon. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and you've been watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.