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Most historians have seen three distinctive threads leading towards the development of Hellenistic alchemy: the empirical technology and Greek theories of matter already referred to, and mysticism – an unsatisfactory word that refers to a rag-bag of magical, religious and seemingly irrational and unscientific practices. Undoubtedly this third ingredient left its mark on the young science, and it in turn has left its mark on ‘mysticism’ right up until the twentieth century. In Hellenistic Egypt, as in Confucian China, there was a distinctive tendency to turn aside from observation and experiment and the things of this world to seek solace in mystical and religious revelations. It was the absorption of this element into alchemy that splintered its adherents into groups with different purposes and which later helped to designate alchemy as a pseudo-science.
Recent studies have shown the considerable extent of pharmacological knowledge within the Arabic tradition. This tradition was to furnish the Latin west with large numbers of chemical substances and apparatus. It was clearly already well established in Greek alchemy, and it is to medicine that the historian must also look for another of alchemy’s foundation stones. For it was the Greek pharmacists who mixed, purified, heated and pulverized minerals and plants to make salves and tinctures. In Greek texts the word for a chemical reagent is, significantly, pharmakon.
The modern conspectus is, therefore, that practical alchemy was the bastard child of medicine and pharmacy, as well as of dyeing and metallurgy. By applying Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Gnostic and Stoic ideas to the practices of doctors and artisans, Greek alchemists reinterpreted practice as transmutation. This point is especially clear in a seventh-century AD text by Stephanos of Alexandria, ‘On the great and sacred art, or the making of gold’, in which he attacked goldsmiths for practising aurifiction. If such craftsmen had been properly educated in philosophy, he commented, they would know that gold could be made by means of an actual transformation.
For one group of such-minded alchemical philosophers, astrology, magic and religious ritual grew at the expense of laboratory and workshop practice. Alchemical symbolism and allegory appealed strongly to the early Gnostics and Neoplatonists. The ‘death’ of metals, their ‘resurrection’ and ‘perfection’ as gold or purple dyes were symbolical of the death, resurrection and perfection of Christ and of what should, ideally, happen to the human soul. This esoteric alchemy is more the province of the psychologist and psychiatrist, as Jung claimed, or of the historian of religion and anthropology, than of the historian of chemistry. Nevertheless, as in the case of Isaac Newton, the historian of science must at all times be aware that, until the nineteenth century at least, most scientific activities were, fundamentally, religious ones. The historian of chemistry must not be surprised to find that even the most transparent of experimental texts may contain language that is allegorical and symbolical and which is capable of being read in a spiritual way.
Exoteric alchemists continued their experimental labours, discovered much that was useful then and later, and suffered the indignities of bad reputation stemming from less noble confidence tricksters. Another group became interested in theories of matter and promoted discussion of ideas of particles, atoms or minima naturalis. Finally, the artisans and technologists continued with their recipes, uninterested in theoretical abstractions.
The primitive notion that metals grew inside the earth had been supported by Aristotle in his treatise Meteorologica – the title referred to the physics of the earthly, as opposed to the celestial, sphere, and had nothing to do with weather forecasting. Less perfect metals, it was supposed, slowly grew to become more noble metals, like gold. Nature performed this cookery inside her womb over long periods of time – it was for this reason that, during the middle ages, mines were sometimes sealed so as to allow exhausted seams to recover, and for more metals to grow. If one interpreted the artisans’ aurifictions as aurifactions, then it appeared that they had successfully succeeded in repeating Nature’s process in the workshop in a short time. Perhaps further experimentation would bring to light other techniques for accelerating natural alchemical processes.
Although Aristotle had never meant by ‘prime matter’ a tangible stuff that could be separated from substances, this was certainly how later chemists came to think of it. Similarly the tactile qualities became substantialized (substantial forms) and frequently identified with the aerial or liquid products of distillation, or pneuma.
In gold-making, much use of analogy was made. Since there is a cycle of death and regrowth in Nature from the seed, its growth, decay and regeneration as seed once more, the alchemist can work by analogy. Lead is taken and ‘killed’ to remove its form and to produce the primary matter. The new substance is then grown on this compost. In the case of gold, its form is impressed by planting a seed of gold on the unformed matter. To grow this seed, warmth and moisture were requisite, and to perform the process, apparatus of various kinds – stills, furnaces, beakers and baths – was required, much of it already available from artisans or readily adapted from them.
A secret technical vocabulary was developed in order to maintain a closed shop and to conceal knowledge from the uninitiated, a language that through its long history became more and more picturesque and fanciful. In Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618), we read that ‘The grey wolf devours the King, after which it is buried on a pyre, consuming the wolf and restoring the King to life.’ All becomes clear when it is realized that this refers to an extraction of gold from its alloys by skimming off lesser metal sulphides formed from a reaction with antimony sulphide and the roasting of the resultant gold – antimony alloy until only gold remains. As Lawrence Principe has noted, this incomprehension on our part is surely little different from today’s mystification when the preparative organic chemist issues the order, ‘dehydrohalogenate vicinal dihalides with amide ion to provide alkynes’. In other words, although alchemists undeniably practised deliberate obfuscation, much of our incomprehension stems from its being in a foreign language, much of whose vocabulary has been lost. On the other hand, we must recognize that obscurity also suited the rulers and nobility of Europe, who patronized alchemists in the hope of solving their monetary problems.
ARABIC AND MEDIEVAL ALCHEMY (#ulink_d0eedad9-8a68-5474-97b1-e4d557d39403)
Greeks alchemy spread geographically with Christianity and so passed to the Arabs, who were also party to the ideas and practices of Indian and Chinese technologists and alchemists. The story that alchemical texts were burned and alchemists expelled from Egypt by the decree of the Emperor Diocletian in 292 AD appears to be legendary. Alchemy does not seem to have reached the Latin west until the eleventh century, when the first translations from the Arabic began to appear. In Arabic alchemy (the word itself is, of course, Arabic), we meet for the first time the notion of the philosopher’s stone and potable gold or the elixir of life. Both these ideas are found in Chinese alchemy. Two alchemists who were much revered later in the Latin west were Jābir and Rhazes.
Over two thousand writings covering the fields of alchemy, astrology, numerology, medicine and mysticism were attributed to Jābir ibn Hayyān, a shadowy eighth-century figure. In 1942, the German scholar Paul Kraus showed that the entire Arabic Jābirian corpus was the compilation of a Muslim tenth-century religious sect, the Ism’iliya, or Brethren of Purity. No doubt, like Hippocrates, there was a historical Jābir, but the writings that survive and which formed the basis for the Latin writings attributed to Geber were written only in the tenth century. Until very recently, no Arabic originals for the Latin Geber were known and many historians suspected that they were western forgeries, or rather original compilations that exploited the name of the famous Arabic alchemist. William Newman has shown, however, that the Geberian Summa Perfectionis, arguably the most influential of Latin works on alchemy, was definitely based upon manuscripts of Jābirian translations already in circulation, and that it was the work of one Paulus de Tarento, of whom nothing is yet known.
The Jābirian corpus as well as the Latin Summa were important for introducing the sulphur – mercury theory of metallic composition. According to this idea, based upon Aristotle’s explanation in Meteorologica, metals were generated inside the earth by the admixture of a fiery, smoky principle, sulphur, to a watery principle, mercury. This also seems to have been a conflation with Stoic alchemical ideas that metals were held together by a spirit (mercury) and a soul (sulphur). The theory was to lend itself beautifully to symbolic interpretation as a chemical wedding and to lead to vivid conjugal images in later alchemical texts and illustrations. As critics in the Latin west like Albertus Magnus were to point out later, this did not explain satisfactorily how the substantial forms of different metals and minerals were produced. What is most interesting, therefore, is that the Summa clearly speaks of a particulate or corpuscular theory based upon Aristotle’s concession, despite his objection to atomism, that there were minima naturalia, or ‘molecules’ as we would say, which limit the analysis of all substances. The exhalation of the smaller particles of sulphur and mercury inside the earth led to a thickening and mixing together until a solid homogeneity resulted. Metals varied in weight (density or specific gravity) and form because of the differing degrees of packing of their constituent particles – implying that lighter metals had larger particles separated by larger spaces. Since the particles of noble metals such as gold were closely packed, the alchemists’ task, according to the author of the Summa, was to reduce the constituent particles of lighter, baser metals in size and to pack them closer together. Hence the emphasis upon the sublimation of mercury and its fixation in the practical procedures described by Geber. As in the original Jābirian writings, such changes to the density, malleability and colour of metals were ascribed to mercurial agents that were referred to as ‘medicines’, ‘elixirs’ or ‘tinctures’. Although these terms were also adopted in the west, it became even more common to refer to the agent as the ‘philosopher’s stone’ (lapidens philosophorum). References to a stone as the key to transmutation in fact go back to Greek alchemy and have been found in a Cairo manuscript attributed to Agathodaimon, as well as in the earliest known alchemical encyclopedia, the Cheirokmeta attributed to Zosimos (c. 300 AD).
Apart from its influence on alchemical practice, the Summa also contained an important defence of alchemy and, with it, of all forms of technology. Alchemy had always been too practical an art to be included in the curriculum of the medieval university; moreover, it had seemed theologically suspect insofar as it offered sinful humankind the divine power of creation. The Summa author, however, argued that people had the ability to improve on Nature because that was part of their nature and cited, among other things, farmers’ exploitation of grafting and alchemists’ ability to replicate (synthesize) certain chemicals found naturally. As Newman has suggested
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During this innovative period, alchemical writers and their allies produced a literary corpus which was among the earliest in Latin to actively promote the doctrine that art can equal or outdo the products of nature, and that man can even change the order of the natural world by altering the species of those products. This technological dream, however premature, was to have a lasting effect on the direction taken by Western culture.
Exoteric alchemy, committed as it was to laboratory manipulation, in this way bequeathed a commitment to empiricism in science and emphasized the centrality of experiment.
Al-Razi (850–c. 923), or Rhazes, was a Persian physician and alchemist who practised in Baghdad and who compiled the extremely practical text, Secret of Secrets, which, despite its esoteric title and hint of great promises, was a straightforward manual of chemical practice. Rhazes classified substances into metals, vitriols, boraxes, salts and stones on the grounds of solubilities and tastes, and added sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), prepared by distilling hair with salt and urine, to the alchemists’ repertory of substances. Sal ammoniac was soon found to be most useful in ‘colouring’ metals and in dissolving them.
A rationalist and systematist, Rhazes seems to have been among the first to have codified laboratory procedures into techniques of purification, separation, mixing and removal of water, or solidification. But although he and other Arabic authorities referred to ‘sharp waters’ obtained in the distillation of mixtures of vitriol, alum, salt, saltpetre and sal ammoniac, it is doubtful whether these were any more than acid salt solutions. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly by following the procedures laid down by Rhazes and by modifying still-heads that Europeans first prepared pure sulphuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids in the thirteenth century.
The Secret of Secrets was divided into sections on substances – a huge list and description of chemicals and minerals – apparatus and recipes. Among the apparatus described and used were beakers, flasks, phials, basins, crystallization dishes and glass vessels, jugs and casseroles, candle and naphtha lamps, braziers, furnaces (athanors), files, spatulas, hammers, ladles, shears, tongs, sand and water baths, hair and linen filters, alembics (stills), aludels, funnels, cucurbits (flasks), and pestles and mortars – indeed, the basic apparatus that was to be found in alchemical, pharmaceutical and metallurgical workshops until the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Rhazes’ techniques of distillation, sublimation, calcination and solution were to be the basis for chemical manipulation and chemical engineering from then onwards. We must be careful, however, not to take later European artists’ representations of alchemical workshops at face value.
A few of the techniques described by Rhazes deserve further comment. Calcination originally meant the reduction of any solid to the state of a fine powder, and often involved a change of composition brought about by means of strong heat from a furnace. Only later, say by the eighteenth century, did it come to mean specifically the reduction of a metal to its calx or oxide. There were many different kinds of furnace available and they varied in size according to the task in hand. Charcoal, wood and straw were used (coal was frowned upon because of the unpleasant fumes it produced). The temperature was raised blacksmith-fashion by means of bellows – hence the derogatory names of ‘puffers’ or ‘workers by fire’ that were applied to alchemists. Direct heat was often avoided in delicate reactions by the use of sand, dung or water baths, the latter (the bain-marie) being attributed to the third-century BC woman chemist known as Mary the Jewess. Needless to say, because heating was difficult to control, apparatus broke frequently. Even in the eighteenth century when Lavoisier found need to distil water continuously for a period of months, his tests were continually frustrated by breakages. By the same token, since temperature conditions would have been hard to control and replicate, the repetition of processes under identical conditions was difficult or impossible. However, whether alchemists were aware of this is doubtful.
Distillation, one of the most important procedures in practical chemistry, gave rise to a diversity of apparatus, all of which are the ancestors of today’s oil refineries. Already in 3000 BC there is archaeological evidence of extraction pots being used in the Mesopotamian region. These pots were used by herbalists and perfume makers. A double-rim trough was percolated with holes, the trough itself being filled with perfume-making flowers and herbs in water. When fired, the steam condensed in the lid and percolated back onto the plants below. In a variation of this, no holes were drilled and the distillate was collected directly in the trough around the rim, from where it was probably removed from time to time by means of a dry cloth. In the Mongolian or Chinese still, the distillate fell from a concave roof into a central catch-bowl from which a side-tube led to the outside. Modern experiments, using working glass models of these stills, have shown that
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the preparation of strong spiritous liquor was, from a technological point of view, a rather simple matter and no civilisation had a distillation apparatus which gave it an advantage.
Even so, although the Chinese probably had distilled alcohol from wine by the fourth century AD, it was several centuries later before it was known in the west. Even earlier, in the second century of our era, the Chinese had discovered how to concentrate alcohol by a freezing process, whereby separation was achieved by freezing water and leaving concentrated alcohol behind.
The observation of distillation also provided a solution to the theoretical problem of what made solid materials cohere. The binding material could not be Aristotelian water since this patently could not be extracted from a heated stone. Distillation of other materials showed, however, that an ‘oily’ distillate commonly succeeded the ‘aqueous’ fraction that first boiled off at a lower temperature. It could be argued, therefore, that an ‘unctuous’, or fatty, moisture was the cohesive binder of solid bodies. This notion that ‘earths’ contained a fatty material was still to be found in Stahl’s theory of phlogiston in the eighteenth century.
An improvement on distillation techniques was apparently first made by Alexandrian alchemists in the first century AD – though, in the absence of recorded evidence, it is just as likely that these alchemists were merely adopting techniques and apparatus from craftsmen and pharmacists. This is particularly evident in the ‘kerotakis’, which took its name from the palette used by painters and artists. This wedge-shaped palette was fitted into an ambix (still-head) as a shelf to contain a substance that was to be reacted with a boiling liquid, which would condense, drip or sublime onto it. These alchemists made air cooling in the distillation process more efficient by separating the distillate off by a continuous process and raising the ambix well above the bikos or cucurbit vessel embedded in the furnace or sand bath. (In 1937 the word Ambix was adopted by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry as the title of the journal that ever since has played an important role in the history of chemistry.) In the Latin west the word alembic (from the Arabic form of ambix, ‘al-anbiq’) came to denote the complete distillation apparatus. By its means, rose waters, other perfumes and, most importantly, mineral acids and alcohol began to be prepared and explored in the thirteenth century.
Continuous distillations were also made possible in the ‘pelican’, so-called because of its arms, which bore resemblance to that bird’s wings. Such distillations were believed to be significant by alchemists, who were much influenced by Jābir’s reputed success at ‘projection’ (the preparation of gold) after 700 distillations. The more efficient cooling of a distillate outside the still-head appears to have been a European contribution developed in the twelfth century. Alchemists and technologists referred to these as water-cooled stills or ‘serpents’. This more efficient cooling of the distillate probably had something to do with the preparation of alcohol in the twelfth century, some centuries after the Chinese. This became an important solvent as well as beverage in pharmacy. By then chemical apparatus was becoming commonly made of glass. It should be noted that, although ‘alcohol’ is an Arabic word, it had first meant antimony sulphide, ‘kohl’. In the Latin west, alcohol was initially called ‘aqua vitae’ or ‘aqua ardens’ (the water that burns), and only in the sixteenth century was it renamed alcohol. It had also been named the ‘quintessence’, or fifth essence, by the fourteenth-century Spanish Franciscan preacher, John of Rupescissa, in an influential tract, De consideratione quintae essentiae. According to John, alcohol, the product of the distillation of wines, possessed great healing powers from the fact that it was the essence of the heavens. An even more powerful medicine was obtained when the sun, gold, was dissolved in it to produce ‘potable gold’. John’s advocation of the quintessence was extremely important since it encouraged pharmacists to try and extract other quintessences from herbs and minerals, and thus to usher in the age of iatrochemistry in the sixteenth century. Here was the parting of the ways of alchemy and chemistry.
The sixteenth century saw great improvements in chemical technology and the appearance of several printed books dealing with the subject. Such treatises mentioned very little chemical theory. They aimed not to advance knowledge, but to record a technological complex that, in Multhauf’s opinion, ‘although sophisticated, had been virtually static throughout the Christian era’. Generally speaking they discussed only apparatus and reagents, and provided recipes that used distillation methods. Many recipes, especially those for artists’ pigments and dyes, bear an astonishing resemblance to those found in the aurifictive papyri of the third century and therefore imply continuity in craftsmen’s recipes for making imitation jewellery, textile dyeing, inks, paints and cheap, but impressive, chemical ‘tricks’.
One such book was the Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1538), which was published in Italy in 1540. This gave a detailed survey of contemporary metallurgy, the manufacture of weapons and the use of water-power-driven machinery. For the first time there was an explicit stress upon the value of assaying as a guide to the scaling up of operations and the regular reporting of quantitative measurements in the various recipes. On alchemy, despite retaining the traditional view that metals grew inside the earth, Biringuccio provides a sceptical view based upon personal observation and experience
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Now in having spoken and in speaking thus I have no thought of wishing to detract from or decrease the virtues of this art, if it has any, but I have only given my opinion, based on the facts of the matter. I could still discourse concerning the art of transmutation, or alchemy as it is called, yet neither through my own efforts nor those of others (although I have sought with great diligence) have I ever had the fortune to see anything worthy of being approved by good men, or that it was not necessary to abandon as imperfect for one cause or another even before it was half finished. For this reason I surely deserve to be excused, all the more because I know that I am drawn by more powerful reasons, or, perhaps by natural inclination, to follow the path of mining more willingly than alchemy, even though mining is a harder task, both physical and mental, is more expensive, and promises less at first sight and in words than does alchemy; and it has as its scope the observation of Nature’s powers rather than those of art – or indeed of seeing what really exists rather than what one thinks exists.
That is succinctly put: by the sixteenth century, the natural ores of metals, and their separations and transformations by heat, acids and distillations, had become more interesting and financially fruitful than time spent fruitlessly on speculative transmutations.
Alchemy had been transmuted into chemistry, as the change of name reflected. Here a digression into the origins of the word ‘chemistry’ seems appropriate. There is, in fact, no scholarly consensus over the origins of the Greek word ‘chemeia’ or ‘chymia’. One familiar suggestion has been a derivation of the Coptic word ‘Khem’, meaning the black land (Egypt), and etymological transfer to the blackening processes in dyeing, metallurgy and pharmacy. What is certain is that philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had no word for chemistry, for the term ‘chymia’, meaning to fuse or cast a metal, dates only from about 300 AD. A Chinese origin from the word ‘Kim-Iya’, meaning ‘gold-making juice’, has not been authenticated, though Needham has plausibly suggested that the root ‘chem’ may be equivalent to the Chinese ‘chin’, as in the phrase for the art of transmutation, lien chin shu. The Cantonese pronunciation of this phrase would be, roughly, lin kem shut, i.e. with a hard ‘k’ sound. Needham concludes that we have the possibility that ‘the name for the Chinese “gold art”, crystallised in the syllable chin (kiem) spread over the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms for chemistry and then, indirectly, the Arabic one’.
Whatever the etymology, the Latin and English words alchemia, alchemy and chemistry were derived from the Arabic name of the art, ‘al Kimiya’ or ‘alkymia’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Arabic definite article, ‘al’, was dropped in the sixteenth century when scholars began to grasp the etymology of the Latin ‘alchimista’, the chemist or practitioner; but it is far more likely to have followed Paracelsus’ decision to refer to medical chemistry as ‘chymia’ or ‘iatrochemia’. The word ‘chymia’ was also used extensively by the humanist physician, Georg Agricola (1494–1555), whose study of the German mining industry, De re metallica, was published in 1556. Although he used Latin coinages such as ‘chymista’ and ‘chymicus’, it is clear from their context that he was still referring, however, to alchemy, alchemical techniques and alchemists, and that he was, in the tradition of humanism, attempting to purify the spelling of a classical root that had been barbarized by Arabic contamination.
Agricola’s simplifications were widely adopted, notably in the Latin dictionary compiled by the Swiss naturalist, Konrad Gesner (1516–65) in 1551, as well as in his De remediis secretis: liber physicus, medicus et partim etiam chymicus (Zurich, 1552). As Rocke has shown, the latter work on pharmaceutical chemistry was widely translated into English, French and Italian, and seems to have been the fountain for the words that became the basis of modern European vocabulary: chimique, chimico, chymiste, chimist, etc. Curiously, the German translation of Gesner continued to render ‘chymistae’ as ‘Alchemisten’. German texts only moved towards the form Chemie and Chemiker in the early 1600s.
By then, influenced by the practical textbook tradition instituted by Libavius, as well as by the iatrochemistry of Paracelsus (chapter 2), ‘alchymia’ or ‘alchemy’ were increasingly terms confined to esoteric religious practices, while ‘chymia’ or ‘chemistry’ were used to label the long tradition of pharmaceutical and technological empiricism.
NEWTON’S ALCHEMY (#ulink_ce56c6f6-43e7-5378-a709-2b7e63dd81da)
When the economist, John Maynard Keynes, bought some of Newton’s manuscripts in 1936 when Newton’s papers were unfortunately dispersed, he drew attention to the non-mathematical, ‘irrational’ side of Newton. Here was a famous scientist who had spent an equal part of his time, if not the major part, on a chronology of the scriptures, alchemy, occult medicine and biblical prophecies. For Keynes, Newton had been the last of the magicians. Historians have tended to ignore Newton’s alchemical and religious interests, or simply denied that they had anything to do with his work in mathematics, physics and astronomy. More recently, however, historians such as Robert Westfall and Betty Jo Dobbs, who have immersed themselves in the estimated one million words of Newton’s surviving alchemical manuscripts, have seen his interest in alchemy as integral to his approach to the natural world. They view Newton as deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic and Hermetic movements of his day, which, for Newton, promised to open a window on the structure of matter and the hidden powers and energies of Nature that elsewhere he tried to express and explain in the language of corpuscles, attractions and repulsions.
For example, the German scholar, Karin Figula, has been able to demonstrate that Newton was steeped in the work of Michael Sendivogius (1556–1636?), a Polish alchemist who worked at the Court of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague, where he successfully demonstrated an apparent transmutation in 1604. In his several writings, which were translated and circulated in Britain, Sendivogius wrote of a ‘secret food of life’ that vivified all the creatures and minerals of the world
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Man, like all other animals, dies when deprived of air, and nothing will grow in the world without the force and virtue of the air, which penetrates, alters, and attracts to itself the multiplying nutriment.
As we shall see in the following chapter, this Stoic and Neoplatonic concept of a universal animating spirit, or pneuma, which bathed the cosmos, was to stimulate some interesting experimental work on combustion and respiration in the 1670s.
In a spurious work of Paracelsus, Von den natürlichen Dingen, it had been predicted that a new Elijah would appear in Europe some sixty years after the master’s death. A new age would be ushered in, in which God would finally reveal the secrets of Nature. This prophecy may explain why, as William Newman has suggested, early seventeenth-century Europe was peopled by several adepts like Sendivogius who claimed unusual powers and insights. Another, this time fictitious, adept was ‘Eirenaeus Philalethes’, whose copious writings were closely read by Newton. It is possible that Newton developed his interest in alchemy while a student at Cambridge in the 1660s under the tutelage of Isaac Barrow, who had an alchemical library. But it is equally likely that it was Robert Boyle’s interest in alchemy and in the origins of colours that stimulated Newton’s interest, as well as making him a convinced mechanical philosopher. Like Boyle, Newton was interested in alchemical reports of transmutations as providing circumstantial evidence for the corpuscular nature of matter. In addition, however, Newton was undoubtedly interested in alchemists’ Neoplatonic claims of secret (or hidden) virtues in the air and of attractions between heavenly and earthly matter, and in the possibility, claimed by many alchemical authorities, that metals grew in the earth by the same laws of growth as vegetables and animals. In April 1669 Newton bought a furnace as well as a copy of the compilation of alchemical tracts, Theatrum Chemicum. Among his many other book purchases was the Secrets Reveal’d of the mysterious Eirenaeus Philalethes, whom we now know to have been one of Boyle’s New England acquaintances, George Starkey. The book, which Newton heavily annotated, aimed to show that alchemy mirrored God’s labours during the creation and it referred to the operations of the Stoics’ animating spirit in Nature.
Starkey laid stress upon the properties of antimony, whose ability to crystallize in the pattern of a star following the reduction of stibnite by iron had first been published by the fictitious monk, ‘Basil Valentine’ in 1604 in The Triumphant Chariot of Antimony, one of the most important alchemical treatises ever published. Valentine, who was supposed to have lived in the early fifteenth century, was the invention of Johann Tholde, a salt boiler from Thuringia. The Triumphant Chariot was concerned with the preparation of antimony elixirs to cure various ailments, including venereal disease. In Secrets Reveal’d, Starkey referred to crystalline antimony (child of Saturn from its resemblance to lead) as a magnet on account of its pattern of rays emanating from, or towards, the centre. Newton appears to have spent much of his time in the laboratory in the 1670s investigating the ‘magnetic’ properties of the star, or regulus, of antimony, probably in the shared belief with Philalethes that it was indeed a Royal Seal, that is, God’s sign or signature of its unique ability to attract the world’s celestial and vivifying spirit.
Very possibly it was Newton’s interest in solving the impossibly difficult problem of how passive, inert corpuscles organized themselves into the living entities of the three kingdoms of Nature that drove him to explore the readily available printed texts and circulating manuscripts of alchemy, including, in particular, the works of Sendivogius and Starkey. As Professor Dobbs has expressed it
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THE DEMISE OF ALCHEMY AND ITS LITERARY TRADITION (#ulink_df37adf7-2361-5e20-ab48-2c60ef151630)
Historians of science are the first to stress that any theory, however erroneous in later view, is better than none. Even so, many historians of science have expressed surprise that alchemy lasted so long, though we can easily underestimate the power of humankind’s fear of death and desire for immortality – or of human cupidity. To the extent that it undoubtedly stimulated empirical research, alchemy can be said to have made a positive contribution to the development of chemistry and to the justification of applying scientific knowledge to the relief of humankind’s estate. This is different, however, from saying that alchemy led to chemistry. The language of alchemy soon developed an arcane and secretive technical vocabulary designed to conceal information from the uninitiated. To a large degree this language is incomprehensible to us today, though it is apparent that the readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ or the audiences of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist were able to construe it sufficiently to laugh at it.
Warnings against alchemists’ unscrupulousness, which
TABLE 1.2 Chemicals listed in Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.’
are found in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, were developed amusingly by Chaucer in the Chanouns Yemannes Tale (c. 1387) in which he exposed some half-dozen ‘tricks’ used to delude the unwary. These included the use of crucibles containing gold in their base camouflaged by charcoal and wax; stirring a pot with a hollow charcoal rod containing a hidden gold charge; stacking the fire with a lump of charcoal containing a gold cavity sealed by wax; and palming a piece of gold concealed in a sleeve. Deception was made the more easy from the fact that only small quantities were needed to excite and delude an investor into parting with his or her money. These methods had hardly changed when Ben Jonson wrote his satirical masterpiece, The Alchemist, in 1610, except that by then the doctrine of multiplication – the claim that gold could be grown and expanded from a seed – had proved an extremely useful way of extracting gold coins from the avaricious.
As their expert use of alchemical language shows, both Chaucer and Jonson clearly knew a good deal about alchemy, as equally clearly did their readers and audiences (see Table 1.2). Chaucer had translated the thirteenth-century French allegorical romance, Roman de la Rose, which seems to have been influenced by alchemical doctrines, while Jonson based his character, Subtle, on the Elizabethan astrologer, Simon Forman, whose diary offers an extraordinary window into the mind of an early seventeenth-century occultist.
By Jonson’s day, the adulteration and counterfeiting of metal had become illegal. As early as 1317, soon after Dante had placed all alchemists into the Inferno, the Avignon Pope John XXII had ordered alchemists to leave France for coining false money, and a few years later the Dominicans threatened excommunication to any member of the Church who was caught practising the art. Nor were the Jesuits friendly towards alchemy, though there is evidence that it was the spiritual esoteric alchemy that chiefly worried them. Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), for example, defended alchemical experiments, published recipes for chemical medicines and upheld claims for palingenesis (the revival of plants from their ashes), as well as running a ‘pharmaceutical’ laboratory at the Jesuits’ College in Rome. In 1403, the activities of ‘gold-makers’ had evidently become sufficiently serious in England for a statute to be passed forbidding the multiplication of metals. The penalty was death and the confiscation of property. Legislation must have encouraged scepticism and the portrayal of the poverty-striken alchemist as a self-deluded ass or as a knowing and crafty charlatan who eked out a desperate existence by duping the innocent.
Legislation did not, however, mean that royalty and exchequers disbelieved in aurifaction; rather, they sought to control it to their own ends. In 1456 for example, Henry VI of England set up a commission to investigate
FIGURE 1.1 The preparation of the philosopher’s stone.
(After J. Read, Prelude to Chemistry; London: G. Bell, 1936, p. 132.)
the secret of the philosopher’s stone, but learned nothing useful. In Europe, Emperors and Princes regularly offered their patronage – and prisons – to self-proclaimed successful projectionists. The most famous and colourful of these patrons, who included James IV of Scotland, was Rudolf II of Bohemia, who, in his castle in Prague, surrounded himself with a large circle of artists, alchemists and occultists. Among them were the Englishmen John Dee and Edmund Kelly and the Court Physician, Michael Maier (1568–1622), whose Atalanta fugiens (1618) is noted for its curious combination of allegorical woodcuts and musical settings of verses describing the alchemical process. It was Maier, too, who translated Thomas Norton’s fascinating poem, The Ordinall of Alchemy, into Latin verse in 1618.
Such courts, like Alexandria in the second century BC, became melting pots for a growing gulf between exoteric and esoteric alchemy and the growing science of chemistry. Like Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who ‘beheld in his fantasy the whole cosmos as a work of Supernal Alchemy, performed in the crucible of God’, the German shoemaker, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), enshrined alchemical language and ideas into a theological system. By this time, too, alchemical symbolism had been further advanced by cults of the pansophists, that is by those groups who claimed that a complete understanding, or universal knowledge, could only be obtained through personal illumination. The Rosicrucian Order, founded in Germany at the beginning of the seventeenth century, soon encouraged the publication of a multitude of emblematic texts, all of which became grist to the mill of esoteric alchemy.
Given that by the sixteenth century, if not before, artisans and natural philosophers had sufficient technical knowledge to invalidate the claims of transmutationists, it may be wondered why belief survived. No doubt the divorce between the classes of educated natural philosophers and uneducated artisans (which Boyle tried to close) was partly responsible. There were also the accidents and uncertainties caused by the use of impure and heterogeneous materials that must have often seemingly ‘augmented’ working materials. As one historian has said, ‘fraudulent dexterity, false philosophy, public credulity and Royal rapacity’ all played a part. To these very human factors, however, must be added the fact that, for seventeenth-century natural philosophers, the corpuscular philosophy to which they were committed underwrote the concept of transmutation even more convincingly than the old four-element theory they rejected (chapter 2).
Nevertheless, despite the fact that the mechanical philosophy allowed, in principle, the transmutation of matter, by the mid eighteenth century it had become accepted by nearly all chemists and physicists that alchemy was a pseudo-science and that transmutation was technically impossible. Those few who claimed otherwise, such as James Price (1752–83), a Fellow of the Royal Society, who used his personal fortune in alchemical experiments, found themselves disgraced. Price committed suicide when challenged to repeat his transmutation claims before Sir Joseph Banks and other Fellows of the Society. By then, chemists had come to share Boerhaave’s disbelief in alchemy as expressed in his New Method of Chemistry (1724). Alchemy had become history, and they happily accepted Boerhaave’s allegory of the dying farmer who had told his sons that he had buried treasure in the fields surrounding their home. The sons worked so energetically that they achieved prosperity even though they failed totally to find what they had originally sought.
The absorption of the experimental findings of exoteric alchemy by chemistry left esoteric alchemy to those who continued to believe that there ‘was more to Heaven and earth’ than particles and forces. Incredible stories of transmutations continued to surface periodically during the eighteenth century. Indeed, legends concerning the ‘immortal’ adventurer, the Comte de Saint-Germain, continue into the twentieth century. In Germany, in particular, the Masonic order of Gold- und Rosenkreuz, which was patronized by King Frederick William II of Prussia, combined a mystical form of Christianity with practical work in alchemy based upon the study of collections of alchemical manuscripts. All of this increasingly ran against the rationalism and enlightenment of the age, and we know that at least one member, the naturalist, Georg Forster, left the movement a disillusioned man. Other alchemical echoes were to be heard in the speculative Naturphilosophie that swept through the German universities at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in the modified Paracelsianism of Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathic system, which he launched in 1810.
Modern alchemical esotericism dates from 1850 when Mary Ann South, whose father had encouraged her interest in the history of religions and in mysticism, published A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery. This argued that alchemical literature provided the mystic religious contemplative with a direct link to the secret knowledge of ancient mystery religions. After selling only a hundred copies of the book, father and daughter burned the remaining copies. Later, after she had married the Rev. A. T. Atwood, she claimed that the bonfire had taken place to prevent the teachings from falling into the wrong hands. Whatever one makes of this curious affair, her insight that alchemists had been really searching for spiritual enlightenment and not a material stone, supported by the translation of various alchemical texts into English, proved influential on Carl Jung when, in old age, Mrs Atwood republished her study in 1920. It also inspired Eugène Canseliet in France to devote his career to the symbolic interpretation of the statuary and frescoes of Christian churches and chateaux, as a result of the publication in 1928 of Le Mystère des Cathedrals by the mysterious adept ‘Fulcanelli’. The ability of the human mind to read anything into symbols has been mercilessly exposed by Umberto Eco in his novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). In counterbalance, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius (1990) paints a vividly sympathetic portrait of the esoteric mind.
Ironically, the growth of nineteenth-century chemistry encouraged a revival of alchemical speculation. Dalton’s reintroduction of atomism, the scepticism expressed towards the growing number of chemical elements (chapter 4), the discoveries of spectroscopists and the regularities of the periodic table (chapter 9), all suggested the possibility of transmutation. Although the possibility was given respectability by Rutherford’s and Soddy’s work on radioactivity at the beginning of the twentieth century and physically realized on an atomic scale in the 1930s, it had earlier led in the 1860s to ‘hyperchemistry’. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find gold transmutation stories occurring during even the most positivistic periods of Victorian science. During the 1860s, Chemical News (chapter 12) attributed the high price of bismuth on the metal market to a vogue for transmutation experiments. This was connected to a daring swindle perpetrated on the London stock-market by a Hungarian refugee, Nicholas Papaffy. Papaffy duped large numbers of investors into promoting a method for transforming bismuth and aluminium (then a new and expensive metal) into silver. This followed from a successful public demonstration at a bullion works in the classic tradition of Jonson’s Subtle. Needless to say, after trading offices were opened in Leadenhall Street, Papaffy decamped with an advance of £40 000 from the company. Nor was the American government less gullible. In 1897 an Irish – American metallurgist, Stephen Emmens, sold gold ingots to the US Assay Office that he claimed to have made from silver by his ‘Argentaurum Process’.
In France during the same period, hyperchemistry enjoyed the support of an Association Alchimique de France to which the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, subscribed, and which influenced Madame Blavatsky’s ‘scientific’ writings for the theosophists and inspired the English composer, Cyril Scott (1879–1970), to compose the opera The Alchemist in 1925. The occult interest in alchemy has continued to the present day and has been given academic respectability since 1985 through the publication of the international scholarly review, Aries, a biannual devoted to the review of the history of esotericism, Hermeticism, theosophy, freemasonry, the Kabbalah and alchemy. Today, booksellers catalogue alchemy under ‘Occultism’ and not ‘History of Science’, while Ambix, the academic mouthpiece of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (founded 1937) continues to receive occultist literature for review, as well as the occasional letter pressing its editor for ‘the secret of secrets’.
In 1980, at the phenomenal cost of $10 000, a bismuth sample was transmuted into one-billionth of a cent’s worth of gold by means of a particle accelerator at the Lawrence Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. The ‘value’ of the experiment is underlined in Frederick Soddy’s ironic remark some sixty years before
(#litres_trial_promo):
If man ever achieves this further control over Nature, it is quite certain that the last thing he would want to do would be to turn lead or mercury into gold – for the sake of gold. The energy that would be liberated, if the control of these sub-atomic processes were possible as in the control of ordinary chemical changes, such as combustion, would far exceed in importance and value the gold.
2 The Sceptical Chymist (#ulink_3eea0eeb-26ee-5bfd-aa46-35fade29d0d4)
I see not why we must needs believe that there are any primogeneal and simple bodies, of which, as of pre-existent elements, nature is obliged to compound all others. Nor do I see why we may not conceive that she may produce the bodies accounted mixt out of one another by variously altering and contriving their minute parts, without resolving the matter into any such simple and homogeneous substances as are pretended.
(ROBERT BOYLE, The Sceptical Chymist, 1661)
The phrase ‘The Scientific Revolution’ conjures up a rebellion against Greek authority in astronomy and dynamics, and physics in general. It reminds us of names like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Bacon and Newton. Chemists’ names are missing. Indeed, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revolution in chemical understanding does not readily spring to mind. What was there to rebel against or to revolutionize? Was there a new chemical way of looking at substances in the seventeenth century that in any way paralleled the new physical way?
The historian’s reply has usually been a negative one, with the rider that chemistry developed much later than either astronomy or physics or anatomy and physiology; and that chemistry did not become a science until the eighteenth century. Its revolution was carried out by Lavoisier.
Whether or not this was the case, it can be agreed that chemistry presented the early natural philosopher with peculiarly difficult problems. The sheer complexity of most of the chemical materials with which chemists commonly worked can be seen, with hindsight, to have inevitably made generalizations extremely difficult. Chemists were considering with equal ardour the chemical components of the human and animal body, and of plants and minerals, the procedures of metallurgy, pottery, vinegar, acid and glass manufacture, as well as, in some quarters, abstractions like the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. There was no universally agreed chemical language, no convenient compartmentalization of substances into organic and inorganic, into solids, liquids and gases, or into acids, bases and salts; and no concept of purity. For example, when Wilhelm Homberg (1652–1715) ‘analysed’ ordinary sulphur in 1703, he obtained an acid salt, an earth, some fatty matter and some copper metal.
But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the further development of chemistry was a case of insufficient analysis – there was a complete absence of a knowledge or concept of the gaseous state of matter. Chemistry remained a two-dimensional science, which studied, and only had equipment and apparatus to handle, solids and liquids.
This does not mean that chemistry lacked organization, for there were any number of grand theories that brought order and classification to this complicated subject. The problem with these organizational theories was not only their mutual inconsistency, but the fact that by the 1660s they looked old-fashioned and part of the pre-revolutionary landscape that astronomers and physicists had moved away from. To many natural philosophers, therefore, chemistry seemed tainted; it was an occult or pseudo-science that was beyond the pale of rational discourse.
This was where Boyle came in, for he devoted his life to bringing chemistry to the attention of natural philosophers as a subject worthy of their closest and honest attention. His intention was to ‘begat a good understanding betwixt the chymists and the mechanical philosophers’. In order to do this, he had to show, among other things, that the three or four traditional explanations of chemical phenomena lacked credibility and that a better explanation lay in the revived corpuscular philosophy.
PARACELSIANISM (#ulink_ebe7065e-b46d-5648-834e-40358c730f1a)
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who rechristened himself Paracelsus in order to indicate his superiority to the second-century Roman medical writer, Celsus, was born near Zurich, then still nominally part of the Holy Roman empire and under Austrian domination. At the age of twenty-one, on the advice of his physician father, he visited the mines and metallurgical workshops in the Tyrol where he studied metallurgy and alchemy. After claiming a medical degree from Ferrara in Italy, Paracelsus became Medical Officer of Health at Basel, a position he was forced to leave in an undignified manner two years later after his abusive and bombastic manner had offended public opinion. Thereafter, he became a rolling stone, restlessly traversing the roads and countries of war-torn Europe, associating with physicians, alchemists, astrologers, apothecaries, miners, gypsies and the adepts of the occult.
It is easy to see why he offended. Not only did he lecture in German instead of Latin, an unorthodox behaviour for a physician, but he publicly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna to show his contempt for orthodox medical opinion – a ceremony that was to be repeated by Lavoisier and his wife 250 years later.
If your physicians only knew that their prince Galen … was sticking in Hell, from whence he has sent letters to me, they would make the sign of the cross upon themselves with a fox’s tail. In the same way your Avicenna sits in the vestible of the infernal portal.
Come then and listen, impostors who prevail only by the authority of your high positions! After my death, my disciples will burst forth and drag you to the light, and shall expose your dirty drugs, wherewith up to this time you have compassed the death of princes .… Woe for your necks on the day of judgement! I know that the monarchy will be mine. Mine too will be the honour and the glory. Not that I praise myself: Nature praises me.
Is this rhetoric or the ravings of a lunatic?
Not surprisingly, contemporary estimates of Paracelsus varied tremendously. An opinion that ‘he lived like a pig, looked like a drover, found his greatest enjoyment in the company of the most dissolute and lowest rabble, and throughout his glorious life he was generally drunk’, may be contrasted with his pupils’ expressions, ‘the noble and beloved monarch’, ‘the German Hermes’ and ‘our dear Preceptor and King of Arts’. What did this contradictory, bewildering figure do for chemistry? What did he teach?
Most of his writings were only published posthumously and there has always been controversy between historians who accept only the ‘rational’ writings as genuine and those who view his eclectic mixture of rationalism, empiricism, Neoplatonic occultism and mysticism as the genuine Paracelsus. Although he definitely subscribed to alchemy, i.e. to the doctrine of transmutation, ‘alchemy’ had a wider meaning for Paracelsus. It entailed carrying ‘to its end something that [had] not yet been completed’. It was any process in Nature in which substances worked or metamorphosed to a new end, and thus included cookery and the chemical arts as well as physiological processes such as digestion.
This widened sense of the word was to be reflected explicitly in what has been described as the first chemistry textbook, the Alchemia published by the Lutheran humanist, Andreas Libavius (1540–1616), in 1597, though, as we shall see, Libavius was contemptuous of Paracelsus. For Paracelsus, chemistry was the key subject for unveiling the secrets of a universe that had been created by a chemist and operated by chemical laws. The views of Aristotle and Galen were those of heathens and heretics and had to be replaced by an empiricism that was controlled by Christian and Neoplatonic insights. Paracelsus and his followers, such as Ostwald Croll in his ‘royal chemistry’, the Basilica Chymica (1609), often made much of the story of creation in Genesis, which they interpreted as a chemical allegory. Paracelsianism thereby came to share many of the attributes of esoteric alchemy in which ‘the art’ was essentially a personal religious avocation.
On the other hand, Paracelsus saw himself essentially as a medical reformer, as someone destined to refute age-old teachings and to base medical practice on what he claimed were more effective mineral medicines. He taught that the principal aim of medicine should be the preparation of arcana, most of which turn out to be chemical, inorganic remedies as opposed to the herbal, organic medicines derived from Greco-Roman medicine. The arcana would destroy and eliminate poisons produced by disease, which itself was due to the putrefaction of the ‘excrements’ produced in any ‘chemical’ process. Diseases were therefore specific, as the new pandemic of syphilis then sweeping Europe suggested, and were to be cured by specific arcana.
Paracelsus taught that macrocosm (the heavens) and microcosm (the earth and all its creatures) were linked together. The heavens contained both visible and invisible stars (astra) that descended to impregnate the matter of the microcosm, conferring on each body the specific form and properties that directed its growth and development. Like acted upon like. The task of the chemist was, by experiment and knowledge of macrocosmic – microcosmic correspondences (the doctrine of signatures), to determine an astral essence or specific virtue capable of treating a disease. To isolate the remedy, the alchemist-physician had to separate the pure essence from the impure, by fire and distillation. Here, Paracelsus owed much to the medieval technology of distillers and to the writings of John of Rupescissa in the fourteenth century. The latter had identified Aristotle’s fifth, heavenly element, the ether, as a quintessence that could be distilled from plants. Paracelsus and his followers were, however, rather more interested in the inorganic salts remaining after distillation than in the distillates themselves.
In this way Paracelsus initiated a new study he called ‘iatrochemistry’, which invoked chemistry to the aid of medicine. Whereas the Paracelsians were individualistic in their pantheistic interpretation of Nature, regarding chemical knowledge as incommunicable except between and through the inspiration proper to a magus, Libavius and the textbook writers who followed him argued that chemistry could be learned by all in the classroom, provided it was put into a methodical form. This construction of a pedagogical discipline involved the classification of laboratory techniques and operations and the establishment of a standardized language of chemical substances. Progress in chemistry, or in any science, would come only from a collective endeavour to combine the subjective, and possibly unreliable, contributions of individuals after subjecting them to peer review and measuring each one critically against past wisdom and experience.
Iatrochemical doctrines became extremely popular during the seventeenth century, and not unlinked with this was a rise in the social status of the apothecary. Both in Britain and on the Continent there was a compromise in which chemical remedies were adopted without commitment to the Paracelsian cosmology. Didactically acquired knowledge of iatrochemistry gave these medical practitioners (who in Britain were to become the general practitioners of the nineteenth and twentieth century) a base upon which they could branch out into their own medical practice and away from the control of university-educated physicians. The need for self-advertisement encouraged them to teach iatrochemical practice and to introduce inorganic remedies into the pharmacopoeia. They were therefore less secretive than the alchemists. Because they wanted to find and prepare useful medical remedies, they were keen to know how to recognize and prepare definite chemical substances with repeatable properties. In teaching their subject, what was wanted was a good textbook, which would provide clear and simple recipes for the preparation of their drugs, with clear unambiguous names for their substances and adequate instructions on the making and use of apparatus for the preparations. Theory could play second fiddle to practice.
Iatrochemistry became very much a French art and here the subject was helped in Paris by the existence of chemical instruction at the Jardin du Roi. Beginning with Jean Beguin’s Tyrocinium Chymicum in 1610, which plagiarized a good deal from Libavius’ Alchemia, each successive professor, Étienne de Clave, Christopher Glaser and Nicholas Lemery, composed a textbook for the instruction of the apothecary’s apprentices who flocked to their annual lectures. Many of these texts went into other languages, including Latin and English. By 1675, when Lemery published his Cours de Chimie, a textbook tradition had been firmly established as part of didactic chemistry and which considerably aided the establishment of chemistry as a discipline. Some historians of chemistry believe that this formulation of chemistry as a scholarly, didactic discipline, which began with Libavius well before the establishment of the mechanical philosophy, was far more significant than the latter for the creation of modern chemistry.
In chemical theory, Paracelsus introduced the doctrine of the tria prima, or the three principles. Medical substances, he said, were ultimately composed from the four Aristotelian elements, which formed the receptacles or matrices for the universal qualities of a trinity of primary bodies he called salt (body), sulphur (soul) and mercury (spirit).
The world is as God created it. He founded this primordial body on the trinity of mercury, sulphur and salt and these are the three substances of which the complete body consists. For they form everything that lies in the four elements, they bear them all the forces and faculties of perishable things.
The doctrine of the tria prima was clearly an extension of the Arabic sulphur – mercury theory of metals applied to all materials whether metallic, non-metallic, animal or vegetable, and given body by the addition of a third principle, salt.
This theory of composition, which essentially explained gross properties by hypothetical property-bearing constituents, rapidly replaced the old sulphur – mercury theory, though not the Aristotelian four elements. Paracelsus was happy to use Aristotle’s example of the analysis of wood by destructive distillation to justify the tria prima theory. Smoke was the volatile portion, mercury; the light and glow of the fire demonstrated the presence of sulphur; and the incombustible, non-volatile ash remaining was the salt. Water was included within the mercury principle, which explained the cohesion of bodies.
Van Helmont begged to differ and provided a simpler, and supposedly more empirical, alternative theory of composition.
HELMONTIANISM (#ulink_fe42fe5e-0abe-579b-bfad-d4a9f168f19f)
Iatrochemistry came to fruition in the work of a Flemish nobleman, Joan-Baptista van Helmont (1577–1644). Present-day Belgium was then under Spanish control. In 1625, as a consequence of Helmont’s controversial advocation of ‘weapon salve’ treatment in which a weapon, and not a wound, was treated, he was denounced as a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition and spent the remainder of his life, like Galileo, under house arrest. As with Paracelsus, it was van Helmont’s posthumous writings that brought his name to fame and exerted a considerable influence upon seventeenth-century natural philosophers like Boyle and Newton. This influence was firmly established after 1648 with the posthumous publication of his Ortus Medicinae, which was issued in English in 1662 as Oriatricke or Physick Refined. Helmont, who claimed to have witnessed a successful transmutation of a base metal into gold, was a disciple of Paracelsus and an iatrochemist. However, like any good disciple, he modified, interpreted and disagreed with his master’s doctrines considerably.
After studying several areas of natural philosophy, he chose medicine and chemistry for his career, calling himself a ‘philosopher by fire’. He was strongly anti-Aristotelian, one facet of which was that he refused to accept the four-element theory. But neither was he able to accept Paracelsus’ tria prima. To simplify a rather complex philosophy, we can say that according to van Helmont there were two first beginnings of bodies: water and an active, organizing principle, or ‘ferment’, which moulded the various forms and properties of substances. This return to a unitary theory of matter was influenced by his interpretation of Genesis, for water, together with the heavens and the earth, had been formed on the first day.
In more detail, he imagined that there were two ultimate elements, air and water. Air was, however, purely a physical medium, which did not participate in transmutations, whereas water could be moulded into the rich variety of substances found on the earth. Van Helmont did not consider fire to be a material element, but a transforming agent. As for earth, from his experimental observations, he believed that this was created by the action of ferments upon water.
