Transcription
Though now lost in hallowed antiquity, the goal of the hermetic or occult science of alchemy has been universally recognized since at least the late pagan world of the city of Alexandria: the stone of the philosophers. This substance, somehow everywhere and nowhere, a stone that is not a stone, was thought to be capable of truly miraculous, even magical feats. It could, of course, transmute base metals into noble ones, lead to gold most famously. But it could also heal disease. It could transform mere stone to precious gems. It could reverse the process of aging. It could cause barren fields to sprout with lush life. It could teach one to speak the languages of beasts and birds. There's even a version of it so subtle that it could only be detected through taste, and that version would allow one to see and communicate with none short than the very angels of heaven. The philosopher's stone is truly the stuff of legend.
Though these legends are often as extraordinary as they are confused, contradictory, and shrouded in enigma, allegorical, let's face it, baroque code. Let's discuss the origins, the history, the powers, and the production of the famed philosopher's stones of the alchemists. If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, cabala, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content on topics and esotericism, including curated playlists on various topics. Sam, if you want to support this work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics and esotericism here on YouTube for free, I'd hope you consider supporting my work over at my Patreon with a one-time donation or with the handy-dandy super thanks option that you can use there below the episode. But now, let's dive in and discuss the philosopher's stone, the goal of the occult science of alchemy. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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The exact origins of both the concept and the term "philosopher's stone" are equally mysterious. The concept is ultimately derivative of two theoretical origins in Greek philosophy, along with the indigenous genius of Egyptian metallurgy. The first of those are the Eleatic philosophers, such as Parmenides, who held that despite all appearances, the cosmos was fundamentally a united ontological monad. It was just one thing. In toto, all is one. That is, all difference at the level of appearance was actually an expression of a deeper, underlying metaphysical unity. This more metaphysical concept was put into a physical theory, specifically the generation of the elements and the metals, by our perennially good friend Aristotle in his text, the Meteorology. Now, while this text is rarely studied now, it was among the most popular in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Aristotle, leaning on the Empedoclean theory of the four elements (which, if you've ever played a role-playing game, you know what's coming: earth, air, fire, and water) and their properties of being dry, wet, hot, and cold, described how these elements interacted deep within the earth through vapors and exhalations in relationship to the sun, acting as a kind of heating element as it rotated around the earth. Yes, as the sun rotated around, these vapors or exhalations interact with these simple bodies, as he terms them in his book, The Physics, and become fixed as elements or stoicheia, or the metals more specifically, though because these are fundamentally just ratios of the four fundamental elements, they could be decomposed and converted into other elements still. That's kind of what goes on in the eternal churning within the earth. And this is the core, the core of alchemical theory, because physical reality was fundamentally just a ratio of substances and the effects of the exhalations. Any substance could be converted into any other. They're all fundamentally united as one substance.
Further, and equally important, if unintelligent nature could perform this process deep within the earth by mere final causation, as Aristotle would have it, surely an active intelligence could reproduce, even improve, this process through artifice, or through art, as the medieval alchemist had it. The task then was to reduce a substance back into this neutral substrate, the medieval materia prima, and then recompose it in a more noble form. And at some point in antiquity, by at least Maria the Jewess and Zosimos of Panopolis, sometime around 300 CE in the Alexandrian context, again, this substrate was already thought to have the powers to convert baser metals to more noble ones, precisely through artifice. Among the earliest references to this substance as a stone is in Zosimos of Panopolis, where he calls it "a stone that is not a stone." And welcome to that kind of stuff, with the process of transmutation already encoded in texts like the Formula of the Crab, the Lectures, and the Chrysopoeia, literally "the gold-making of Cleopatra" (not Cleopatra II, a different Cleopatra). That one-page text, by the way, the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, the gold-making of Cleopatra, fully merges both the philosophical elements (you can see the Ouroboros, or the motto "all is one") along with the physical apparatus for the transmutation. You can see distillation apparatus there. The wedding of theory and action, theory and experimentation, philosophy and empirical science. You can check out my episode on Cleopatra's text, "The Goldmaking," if you're interested to learn more about her alchemical genius. And I also have other episodes on alchemy. Check those out, too.
As Hellenistic science was being absorbed into the new Islamic world, alchemical theory actually became a great deal more precise. Rather than just vague elements, stoicheia, we find in Aristotle and the alchemical texts there at Alexandria, informed primarily by the esoteric priestcraft of the Egyptian metallurgists, especially in terms of the coloring of metals, especially in terms of working with gold. I mean, you've ever seen ancient Egypt? Yeah, they're good at it. Islamic alchemists developed the sulfur-mercury theory of the metals. This theory held that all metals were a specific ratio of mercury and sulfur, either fused through complex processes within the earth, or mercury alone being the fundamental substrate itself, subjected to chemical processes, thus converting it into a fixed, noble metal, with sulfur thought of as a kind of impurity. While the exact origins of the sulfur-mercury theory are lost and were probably hidden to begin with in the esoteric Ismaili circles associated with the quasi-legendary Baghdadi alchemist and philosopher Jabir ibn Hayyan, thus we don't know exactly how it developed, but it is very likely to have emerged out of very careful experimentation for reasons that I'll explain in just a moment. We can appreciate this more by exploring at least a programmatic description of the mature process by which the philosopher's stone was said to be produced, as it's articulated in late medieval European Latin alchemy.
Now, two things should be made very clear at this point of the conversation. The first is that historical alchemists were universally interested in chemically analyzing and transforming nature. They were really interested in making gold. The concept of spiritual alchemy, or alchemy as a kind of inward psychological process, is almost entirely a 19th-century and 20th-century romantic revision, or honestly, just a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of what alchemy actually was in history. Now, while those spiritual or psychological reinterpretations of alchemy are interesting, projecting them onto historical alchemy fundamentally distorts our understanding of what the alchemists were doing back there in history and why they thought they were doing it. They had rigorous theories informed by experimental observation.
Secondly, there are at least as many theories about how to produce the philosopher's stone as there were alchemists. Simply put, alchemical theory was fundamentally incorrect. It was an incorrect theory of nature, and thus producing the philosopher's stone, or any elemental transmutation by chemical means, are both impossible. Nothing can do that. Well, you can get a particle collector. Thus, while many alchemists were careful experimentalists, discovering a great deal of truths about nature, literature about the philosopher's stone often contained some combination of admittedly hard-earned experimental information along with a significant adjunct of speculative theory and well, hand-waving and just kind of making things up as you go, or predicting how things might go based on the suppositions that you have back at the beginning of your theory. You can even see this often in alchemical texts where they hit an experimental wall. Clarity often gives way to just straight-up allegory and speculative guesswork, along with a bunch of flowery language about how everything at this point is super duper secret, and if you're not an adept, you'll never figure it out, and magic. Thus, there is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, a singular process by which the stone of the philosophers would be produced. The alchemist never discovered it because it wasn't discoverable. What we have are hundreds of records of attempts, experimental observations, and various degrees of written clarity, actually, many of which are clear enough that we can reproduce them point by point in modern labs. And modern historians of alchemy are doing just that, along with a heap, a mountain of speculative vagaries as the Great Work went forward.
So, let's lay out a programmatic analysis of how the philosopher's stone was to be produced in many of the mature alchemical theories, pointing out some of the major theoretical differences among the alchemists as we go. The process had roughly five stages. The earlier stages are actually grounded in really clear experimental evidence, the later of which move and drift largely in the domain of pure alchemical speculation. The first stages had to do with the preparation of the base substances required for all alchemical experimentation, typically things like gold, silver, sulfur, mercury, and in some cases, like in the Paracelsian school, that of salt or other kinds of chemicals that would have been used in the process of transmutation. The preparation of the metals is especially instructive for both alchemical process and alchemical theory. Of course, you'd need base metals to be transformed in the alchemical process, and lead being the most common because it was inexpensive and relatively easy to work with, despite being very toxic. That didn't stop these alchemists. Mercury. The most common form of lead to occur in nature is the mineral galena, or lead sulfide. To extract the elemental lead, one needs only to roast it over a common hearth fire, a camp fire. You can melt lead shot over a camp fire. Now, what would be obvious to the alchemist would be the smell. As it heats up, it gives off the telltale odor of sulfur, brimstone. Galena is lead sulfide, after all, with the liquid lead looking very much like mercury before being quenched in water and thus fixed as lead. But alchemists working with better fire control realized that with the right furnace and the right crucible, if they continue to increase the temperature of the galena, the lead would vanish. It would oxidize, as we know it now, leaving behind sometimes a tiny button of silver, another element often found in mineral galena. Again, think of this in terms of the development of alchemical theory: roasting lead to give it a mercury-like liquid appearance before giving off sulfur as a smell, eventually leaving behind, apparently by transmutation, something like silver. The sulfur-mercury theory sounds bizarre at first, admittedly, but it is at least born out of experimental experience. This will prove true with the production of mercury, or quicksilver, as well. Gold and silver were further prepared by cupellation, heating such that the base metals oxidize or vaporize and or bind with the furnace and crucible, with lead, sulfur, and most famously antimony being employed in that process. Liquid mercury, indispensable for all of alchemy, was extracted from the stone cinnabar. That's cinnabar right there, by roasting powdered cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, such that the fumes were fed by distillation into cold water. The gaseous mercury vapor would be condensed back into a liquid in the cold water, thus again with sulfurous gas being released in the process. Again, surely further proof to the alchemist of the sulfur-mercury theory of the metals. Also, this would probably produce some amount of sulfuric acid, or oil of vitriol, as the alchemist had it, as a byproduct, which would be concentrated and widely used in both alchemy and modern chemistry. In fact, modern industrial chemistry is simply impossible to imagine without the enormous amounts of sulfuric acid used hourly. So, you can thank an alchemist for that.
These first steps, the extraction and purification of the fundamental alchemical elements, are often the clearest. This is a place in alchemy literature where it's very easy to reconstruct what they're doing, mostly because these areas in alchemical practice actually overlapped with the less esoteric world of metallurgical assaying, determining the quality of metals, mining, and of course, the minting of coins, but still had to be mastered by any would-be alchemist. Now, those so-called primitive elements would need to be rendered fit, fit for alchemical use, not just coining coins, thus taking on their properties of being sophic, or in a philosophically purified form. This is the partition between the world of metallurgy and assaying and alchemy proper. Typically, the process of producing sophic gold and silver would involve dissolving gold with aqua regia and silver with aqua fortis, with the solution subjected to evaporation before being crushed into a powder. It's not hard to understand why alchemists called this gold powder "sophic sulfur." The reddish gold powder greatly resembles elemental base sulfur. In fact, this is probably the most famous image in all of alchemy: a green lion devouring the sun. With the lion being the acid, the sun being gold, and that green tint, that's the process, probably because most of the gold that they were working with contained at least a bit of copper, hence the greenish color in the acid solution. Ditto, silver powder was thought to be "sophic mercury," and quicksilver thought to be a kind of "sophic salt," or the menstruum, or matrix, the base metallic substrate. This is the materia prima in which all things could be transformed into the stone of the philosophers, which in turn would convert those base metals into noble ones. Though again, it's worth pointing out here that even at this point in alchemical theory, there were major disagreements. Some schools held that elemental sulfur and mercury, as we know them, were to be part of the process. Others held that only sophic sulfur and mercury, along with quicksilver, were part. Others held that mercury, or quicksilver, as we know it, were part of the process alone. Others held that sulfur was always just an impurity to be driven off, thus leaving the stone behind. The philosopher's stone was part of the process of driving off the impure sulfur. Recall that all these sulfides dealt with in the process we've been talking about earlier. We're dealing with a lot of sulfides, and many of them required driving off the sulfur in the process of purification. Others held that a wide range of substances would be introduced at this point into the matrix for the production of the stone: saltpeter, all kinds of stuff. We are just at the start of step three in the process, and there are already a dozen or so schools at this point debating each other about how to proceed. You can see this is going to get very messy.
However, most commonly, some ratio of sophic sulfur, mercury, or quicksilver, along with some other potential substances, would be now sealed into a thick, clear vessel known as the hermetic egg. Typically, this vessel, also called an aludel, or the vase of the philosophers, along with a thousand other names that it has, was often shaped a bit like a teardrop, sometimes, or just an egg, and would be sealed from the outside world, hence our term, still in use, "hermetically sealed." Though other shapes, even double reciprocating pelican designs, could also be used in the process for preparing the proximate elements of the Great Work. Alchemical texts give a range of volumes for the hermetic vessel, but most agree that it must be quite thick. The glass must be quite thick. It must be clear, and it needs to be able to withstand the pressures that inevitably build up within it during the Great Work. Though it's never imagined as being terribly large. Mostly this size, not big. Of course, it doesn't need to be that large because once the stone of the philosophers is produced within it, even a tiny amount can convert massive amounts of base metals into noble ones. So, you don't need a lot of philosopher's stone. It's like ghost chilies. A little goes a long way.
The hermetic egg is now subjected to fires of various intensities. It undergoes very specific processes in a very specific order, and it will change colors in a specific order as the stone comes into being in its matrix, in the womb of the hermetic egg. Let's treat each of these in turn. The careful control of heat and fire was a constant mainstay in alchemical literature. Of course, no standards for denoting temperature existed at this time, so there are a range of very colorful conventions. For instance, "the heat of a nesting hen," "what is called the Egyptian fire," "this is the perceived heat of an Egyptian summer day," "cooking fire," "culinary fire." The melting point of lead, about 621.5 degrees Fahrenheit or 327.5 degrees Celsius, was a common benchmark. The heat given off by fresh horse manure was ubiquitous. A lot of horses out there. "Celestial heat," that is to say, the heat coming down from the stellar rays of astrological objects, or the heat given off by a water bath, a sand bath, an ash bath, just bare naked flame, or blasting flame. Of course, what heat to use and when in the process was endlessly debated by the alchemists, but all agreed that if you didn't heat things properly, in the proper way, it botched the whole process, and especially overheating would destroy the transmutation process.
The processes that give rise to the stone of the philosophers are also variously described. The order in which they occur is constantly debated, and even how many stages there are is the subject of constant quarrels. Some alchemists argued for a singular process for the transformation into the stone. Others argued for four processes. Paracelsus, actually, argued for just seven. He was always the maverick. Others hold as many as 14, though most tend to land on 12, corresponding to the signs of the zodiac. Let's discuss some of these in turn, in kind of a programmatic manner that nearly every alchemist would have said that I was wrong about, because they don't even agree with themselves. Calcination is the process of reducing the components which go into the hermetic egg to powder, often through roasting. We've already seen this one done with the production of sophic sulfur and mercury earlier. This process also results in fixing the metals, thus making them less fusible and less liquid or wet. Next, coagulation will be the introduction of sophic mercury and sophic silver with at least some quicksilver in the egg before sealing or looting it, depending on, again, the school. This phase is most famously illustrated as marital conjunction, or the famed chemical wedding. Indeed, this is probably the most famous aspect of the alchemical process in art and in Jungian psychology. At this point, the Great Work of alchemy can really truly be said to have begun. It's the conjunction that really kicks off the work. Solution, and often dissolution, were somewhat the same thing, typically from a fixed substance into a liquid one, often using things like acids or "philosophical waters," as the alchemists often termed them. Sometimes this compound is mixed with revivification, in which dead or fixed elements could be again made to flow, such as the extraction of liquid mercury from our friend cinnabar here. Digestion or fermentation was sought to be when a rare substance could penetrate into a denser one through the invisible, tiny pores in that substance. This process could also be aided by cibation, serration, or inhibition, or feeding the fermentation or alchemical processes with various substances along the way. In fact, a not uncommon theory of transmutation was that the philosopher's stone actually penetrated into the pores of baser metals through a kind of fermentation and thus perfected them by sealing them in a certain kind of manner. Thus, lead wasn't transformed into gold, but perfected through the fermentation of the subtle power of the stone. In this way, the stone heals, heals the base metal, hence the added medical dimension we find in alchemy and the medical power of the stone to cure people and reduce the signs of aging. In fact, this cibation theory of the power of the philosopher's stone is among the few naturalistic theories for the power of the stone at all. Most of the West are just kind of hand-wavy. Then a miracle happens. Hooray. So the cibation theory is at least a naturalistic one. Distillation, or causing substances to separate through heating and condensation, was a perennial favorite of the alchemist. Substances would often be distilled many, many times, with the distillate actually reintroduced to the base in a process called circulation or cohobation, sometimes with primitive reflux stills like that double pelican model I mentioned earlier, or double alembics, or multiple linked alembics. If you've ever enjoyed a distilled spirit like brandy or whiskey, you need to thank an alchemist. Sublimation was also important. It was the formation of crystals in the top of the hermetic egg or aludel by heating and cooling the substance toward the top. This exaltation was thought to be the pure substrate of the substance heated, and these sublimates of "essential salts," often as the alchemists called them, were highly coveted substances. Distillation and sublimation were very often depicted in alchemical art and were among their most favorite procedures. Though very often returning the distillate to the pot for redistillation had no chemical effect, it was very often just a waste of time from a chemical change perspective. I don't want to think about how much time was spent doing 50 distillations. Poor guys. Separation was often a term that covered a range of processes, including things like decanting and racking, as we would call it now. For instance, recovering that oily sulfuric acid from the water used to cool the mercurial vapor produced during the distillation of cinnabar. That was an example of racking. This is used again for producing liquid mercury. Putrefaction, or mortification, often induced through more intensive heating, would kill the outer substance while preserving the living metallic seeds within, which could be resurrected through various means. This process was often thought of as the most precarious in the alchemical process. It involved highly specific temperature control of the "philosophical fire." Too little, and the seeds were trapped in the substance; and too much, of course, they'd be destroyed. Again, the idea of metallic seeds, this idea of growing metallic seeds emerged from experimental experience. Modern reconstruction of alchemical experiments show that these things look a lot like trees inside there, and it actually reflects the hylomorphic, or the living matter theory, of a great deal of hermetic thought. A stark difference with the dead matter theory of 18th-century materialism. Again, if you've ever seen an alchemical image, the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine, the Splendor Solis, or the Mutus Liber, many of the images I've been showing, it's very likely you've seen a depiction of some alchemical substances undergoing one of these or many of these processes. Of course, there are at least two important steps left: multiplication and projection, but I'll come back to those in just a moment. And maybe one day I'll do a live commentary on just one of these texts and try to walk through it step by step, as far as I'm able to decode it. That could be good hermetic fun.
All the while these processes are going on in the alchemical egg, there are thought to be very important changes in the color of the substances going on there within the hermetic egg itself. These changes were the only indicators that the process was proceeding correctly, and if they didn't appear, or they didn't appear in the correct order, something was profoundly amiss. Now, the specific colors and their order is a subject, again, of enormous debate. But early alchemy held that there were actually four such colors involved: black, then white, then yellow, and then finally red. I think this is a Tool song. Generally speaking, this tradition was rather conservative, actually, and remains relatively consistent. This is a place where, surprisingly, alchemists tend to agree generally, though other colors would also be said to appear. The most important, of course, being the peacock's tail. This often occurred between black and white. And of course, the green lion, the green of the green lion discussed earlier. And if these colors appeared out of order, for instance, if red appeared at any point before the other colors, it was thought to indicate that overheating had happened, and thus the entire process was botched. You have to start over. In all chemical art, these colors take on a wide range of representations with flowers and birds, of course, things like the raven, the swan, the peacock, the phoenix, etc., all being very, very common motifs in alchemical imagery.
Now, again, just how long this process would take was also, you guessed it, the subject of enormous debate among the alchemists, though all agreeing that patience, faithful patience, was in order. Though some had the process taking as little as seven days, that would be mirroring the process of divine creation and a day of rest. Others took it that an entire year would be required. Others still, tracking more specific things for the procession of the zodiac for the beginning and the completion of the process. Some thought that a stone that would only transmute silver took a bit less time to produce than one that also transmuted gold: five months for the silver stone and between seven and nine for the gold one. And some have three, seven, or even 12 years. Others, a single season for how long it would take. Though a very popular unit of time was what is called the "philosophical month" of 40 days, with each color change proceeding through one of those philosophical months. So, roughly 160 days or so. Regardless, even by art, the processes would take time, and all chemical texts urged patience as a sublime virtue. Certainly, they weren't wrong there. "Patientia radix bonorum est," as Horace had it.
While the middle processes were often widely debated, the final parts of the alchemical process were generally agreed upon. Toward the end, as the substance became a bright shade of red, the stone of the philosophers was emerging, though in its first weak, infantile form. It was often thought that it needed to be fed, like a baby, often with mercury (don't feed mercury to babies) to strengthen the stone, sometimes through the process of further sublimation. This process of multiplication greatly concentrated the power of the stone, and when complete, the stone could have the power to transmute huge, enormous quantities of base metals with only tiny amounts of the philosopher's stone. In fact, Pseudo-Lull actually commented that with only a tiny amount of the philosopher's stone, he could, mirroring Mercurius, assert that he could transmute the entire sea with just a little bit of the stone, if only it were made of mercury.
But what did the stone look like? Most often it was described as either a kind of wax-like substance. Sometimes it looked like a bit like a red gem, maybe like a ruby, but most commonly it was a red powder, quite heavy and having a kind of wonderful aroma. I kind of imagine it being like spice from Dune. This powder would then be projected, the final state of the alchemical process, by casting a very small amount of it either onto molten lead or common quicksilver or mercury, with the base substance transmuting into either silver (a white powder, actually, was said to accomplish that; it's a kind of lesser philosopher's stone) or gold via the red stone or red powder. Again, recall the appearance of the sophic sulfur prepared from the gold at the very start of this alchemical process, way back. The silver or gold produced was said to be even purer than that made from the mines. Art had truly triumphed over nature, an idea that positively vexed some theologians like Thomas Aquinas. He was a no-no on alchemy.
Further, the stone of the philosophers had the ability to cure disease. It could reverse old age. It could convert common stones to precious gems. It could cause crops to grow in barren lands. It could allow one to speak the languages of beasts and birds. It even allowed one to see and communicate with the angels. That one, I think I mentioned at the beginning. You could only taste it; it was so subtle. Like all legends, over time, the stone came to have tremendous power well beyond the ability to create mere worldly wealth. The philosopher's stone is a positively wonderful concept that interacts with early experimental science, with philosophical speculation, with theological concerns about the role of alchemy in perfecting nature, early medical theories, philosophy, and of course, especially since the 19th and 20th centuries, spirituality and psychology. The philosopher's stone thought to be taken as an interior state of one's psychology or one's spiritual being. These varied powers of the stone are aptly captured in hundreds, the hundreds of names for it in the alchemical literature: "The Shadow of the Sun," "The Azoth," "The Paracelsus," "The Sophic Hydrolith," "The Basilisk of the Philosophers," "The Blood of the Salamander," "The Universal Quintessence," or, I think perhaps my favorite, "Substantia Exuberantia," substance exuberant. Certainly a stone and not yet a stone, as Zosimus had it all along a millennium and a half ago. It's no wonder that it's absolutely that the stone continues to be the subject of fascination and even the object of a still-questing group of alchemists out there.
If you want to learn more about alchemy, make sure to check out my playlist on the subject, along with the recommended readings in the description for reliable, reliable scholarly information about alchemy. A lot of the stuff on the internet is real bad. And again, make sure to subscribe, check out my other content, and again, consider supporting this work of making scholarly and free topics like this on esotericism for free by taking a look at my Patreon, considering a one-time donation to the channel, or with a super thanks option down below. Of course, much, much more alchemy content to come. But until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.