How Alchemy Worked

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1:24Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we are here to enchant you. In this very special episode, Stuff You Should Know, which we like to also call The Facts of Life 2. Yeah, I mean, alchemy, I think a very appropriate topic, taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic. Oh, yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in that sense. Or were you talking about a different podcast? No, no, no. I was talking about what I aim to accomplish today. Hey, man, not only do you aim it, you, or aim for it, you hit it right on the head. Yeah.

2:05Alchemy, baby. Let's do it. Clumsy attempt at a compliment. Yeah. Well, yeah, when we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least, and I would assume most people, kind of conjures images of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. He's lit by candlelight. He's in a strange little laboratory. He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create some sort of magical potion or do something like that, right? If you know a little more about it, maybe you think of charlatans who trick people into investing in their alchemical schemes of turning, you know, lead into gold.

2:47But it turns out that there's a lot more to it than I ever realized. And the people involved were not they were a lot more interesting and a lot less dumb and fraudulent than than history is kind of cast them as. Yeah, I always thought of alchemy is just from what I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something like a boring metal into gold like you were talking about. But it is, I think, interesting that modern science now looks back and says, hey, you know what? I mean, sure, there was a lot of bunk and BS involved. But some of the foundations of modern chemistry were there, even though that wasn't their intention, really.

3:33Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork for the scientific method. Yeah, in some ways, sure. What's cool about it, too, is that, you know, the Europeans, the medieval European, you know, monks and sages and scholars are the ones you typically think of, at least in the West, when you think of alchemy. But it's a, I don't want to say worldwide, but it really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for immortality and glory. Yeah. Totes. So we should say that you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy, the Europeans as you think of it, all the way back to Egypt.

4:18Egypt was like the starting point for the Western tradition. But Egypt even seemed to get it from other places, specifically even back before Egypt. It seems like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially gave alchemy like its birth. Yeah. And they may have called it like, you know, the art or something like that. Or maybe, you know, some other word that they had that meant, you know, some sort of transformation might be taking place. The word alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually French and English in medieval times.

4:55uh but yeah i think it's interesting that it followed that route and it's also not surprising that you know china was one of the first to get involved in something like this because i feel like anytime we're talking about ancient practices china always seems to be sort of leading the way in one way or the other indeed um one of the reasons china was so heavy into it was because the early alchemical pursuits or purposes were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they cared so much about that was because the country had a huge Taoist population, and Taoism is very much interested in achieving immortality one way or another.

5:38And so China and its alchemists put together mercury, arsenic, sulfur, and said, here, drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot of people died from drinking those things, right? I mean, you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know, just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and walk off like time to get to work, you know? Yeah, I'm sure there were some people that suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know, on the other side, and this is sort of the the plus side and minus side of some of these experiments, they also, whether or not purposefully or not, gave us things we still use today, like, you know, potassium nitrate.

6:23So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride, which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer, like for farms and stuff like that. So, yeah, there were, that is kind of a tradition and alchemy of, you know, they were trying to do something else, but they still found useful stuff that we still, you know, make or use today. And China's whole jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more focused on rebirth and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing. And so the pursuit of, you know, immortality through special elixir just kind of became a moot point or a moo point, sorry.

7:05Yeah, I mean, I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah, maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we should set our goals a little more reasonably. Right. Let's just pretend like we don't care about living forever. As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality. And they were also kind of like post-Buddhist China, like, let's try and promote health. Let's try and cure some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold. But, you know, you'll see that kind of popping up. That's why I think a lot of people, the first thing they think of is turning something into gold, because that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists, because gold was so revered, either as like, you know, the best metal.

7:50Go ahead and make your white snake joke. I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold wearing a T-shirt that says the best metal. Yeah, with like the devil's hands, the devil horns fingers. Sure. And, you know, also thinking like, you know, perhaps like drinking something that maybe liquid gold, but it's really not liquid gold. It just turned the color gold could make you healthier or maybe live forever. Yeah. And in India, they were trying to make gold not to get rich, but because like you were saying, they were trying to balance health, restore health. Like it was just associated with healthy living.

8:26Essentially, gold was. Yeah. So then we reached the Mediterranean. That was another ancient place. And by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 322 BCE, they found pretty quickly that the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of alchemy for a while. And the Greeks said, hey, I like your style. Let's mix together our philosophy and our understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy and let's produce something really great that medieval monks are really going to go nuts for. Yeah. And I think this is like, I know we're going to say this quite a bit, but I think they were, these early scientists were taking a stab at, at some, at something, you know, like sure there were charlatans and stuff like that, but this was so early on in the game, like science was brand new and they were like, Hey, let's try this thing and see if it works out.

9:23and maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't expect them to either. So, like, I don't know. I feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind of tried to shine a little bit of light on some of this stuff. It's like, hey, they were doing their best back then, trying to get involved in science at least. Right, at least they were doing something, you lazy sass. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is when the first books on it came out. There was one called, the translation is Natural and Mystical Things, by an Egyptian named Bolos of Mende. And this is around 200 BCE. A lot of this was, again, about making, you know, valuable metals like gold and silver.

10:04But, again, it was the first kind of preserved writing that we have on this. Yeah, right. No, for sure. And he was also somebody who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and the processes, which would come to be very rare as alchemy developed. It became much more secretive. But this Greco-Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this specific kind of alchemy, it's called Hellenistic alchemy, that laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. one of the other big things that came out of it or another indicator of how important it was is there was this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists the monks his name was Hermes Trismegistos which is a great name not a good hotel check-in name but it's a it's a great name regardless.

11:01Could you spell it again sir? Like how many times are you gonna hear that? Right and you would say it just like that too like real uncertain and unsteady, like Hermes Tris Mesistos, I think. So it was a combination, a straight up combination of Thoth, or Thoth, I think Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, the one with the ibis bird head, and Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods. Like this was a complete synchronization of those two. And later medieval monks would ascribe like alchemical texts to having been written by Hermes T. Yeah, Hermes T. That's a better check-in name by far. Is that T-E-A, sir, or T-E-E?

11:44I think it means like Hermes III the best, I think is what Trismegistos translates to. All right. That's pretty good. And this is one of those episodes too, Chuck, where when we say words, we might accidentally cause somebody to go poof and something either appears or disappears. So everybody be prepared for something to vanish. Yeah, I agree. And no one knew it that, you know, like when you look back on stuff like this, it's kind of hard to parse out like who was who was first, who was influencing who is this sort of spread around the world. There is a theory that India's belief system was basically just sort of brought over as a maybe not as a book, but, you know, brought over wholesale from proto-Aryans in Central Asia.

12:28and they were in the area between four and five thousand years ago. So it's, you know, I don't know if there's a lot to be gained from sort of debating who was coming up with what first, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't really matter. It's those historians. They're kind of fixated on that kind of thing. But, you know, it is interesting to wonder, like, where culture came from, because so much of it influences so much else. It's not just in alchemy, but in all things, basically. But you mentioned Boulos of Mende, and he actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of alchemy is kind of like based on.

13:08Like this guy was the guy. He's like, here's how it's done. This is the ground rules for alchemy. OK, everybody. His name was Zosimos of Panopolis. And Zosimos of Panopolis wrote something like 28 books on alchemy. And for a while, they're like, we've only got a couple of letters of this guy. but we knew he was brilliant. Apparently, they've been finding his stuff all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't realize they had it before, but a lot of his writings have recently been rediscovered. Yeah, and his stuff, he's another one of those that was pretty detailed in his writing, and to have stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing.

13:46He was, because he was an alchemist, obviously transforming metals or trying to transform metals. but he like I said he was pretty specific he would have write-ups on like exactly what tools he was using on what methods he was using a lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed from the kitchen like kind of cooking stuff or maybe craft work not the van but you know crafting and like like a bedazzler yeah like a bedazzler or perfume making and he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named Maria. And he was like, you know, a lot of, I've taken a lot of her methods and a lot of her methods also transferred over to early methods of cooking, like, you know, French and Italian cooking methods.

14:33Yeah, like a water bath, a bain marie or a bain maria is, you know, like, you know, when you melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan that has water in it? Yeah, so you don't scorch it, right? Exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria, who has lost the history aside from Zosimos of Penopolis' writings, but she apparently taught him. Yeah. And he said, hey, you can use a lot of this stuff to not make gold from lead. Yeah. I mean, he definitely came up with some processes that he figured out himself. And like you said, these people were taking a stab at it. They were like, what happens if I do this?

15:08And what happens if I try that same thing with a different metal or a different powder or something like that? So they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation that would lead to what we understand it as a science. Zosimos was doing this. Like he was one of the first to do this. I also saw a definition. I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not. But he had an explanation or a definition of what alchemy is. He said it was the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirit from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies and what he was saying like if you stop and think about it it's actually pretty comprehensible yeah he's saying alchemy is the study of you know all the things we've observed about the world around us trying to figure out how that stuff works like how does a soul come into a body and become attached to it how does it leave it after death what's the deal with water uh that kind of stuff so like it was It's just them seeking to apply essentially a proto-scientific understanding of the world as they understood it.

16:13Yeah. Like what happens if I distill this thing down to its base form or create, you know, you're going to hear a lot of talk about vapors. Like, you know, boil something or heat something to create a vapor and then smash it together with this thing. And now I've just learned, you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe, but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes properties of both materials if I combine these two things. And while they may not have understood what the heck that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what they were doing was this. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So this whole this whole jam that was laid down by Zosimos and Bolas and the early Egyptians who eventually kind of combined their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world, which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about, you know, what made matter up like earth, wind, fire and air, the four elements.

17:10that was the understanding of the world that they were working from. They were trying to figure things out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution to alchemy early on, which as science would later kind of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset, especially considering that Democritus, who was around around the same time as Aristotle, remember him? He was the one who's like, everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going to use the word atoms yet. Right, exactly. A good place for a break, yeah? I think so. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the move into Europe right after this.

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20:32Okay, Chuck, so things were just kind of hanging around from, you know, 300s BCE, where the Egyptians and the Greeks had kind of come together and created that version of alchemy. And eventually, the Arab world started to rise, and it started to go over here and go over there, And wherever it went, it kind of took this and that from each culture that it found interesting. And one of the things that they did, they showed up in Egypt and they said, hey, I like this alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning that took place around this time in the Arab world.

21:14Yeah. And, you know, logging stuff, describing stuff that would later on, again, you know, lay the foundation for for legit chemists of the future. And one of their theories was that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically, you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture. And combining these in different ways are going to have different outcomes, like to produce those vapors. So you're going to have cold water, basically, and combine that with some sort of hot, moist air to create a vapor. And they would, you know, mix these things together and they would combine it with mercury or sulfur or something like that.

21:56And trying to make gold once again. I think it's called chrysopoeia. Yeah, that's the technical term, I think, for trying to make gold. Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big names. There are a few big names, but two that still made it all the way through history. Razi's, who's known as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time. He was an alchemist, a contemporary, I believe, of his named Jabir. He was well known as an early scientist. Some people call him the father of chemistry. And these guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't just throw a handful of powder at something like, you know, do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.

22:41Just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution, too, was that they took a lot of these ancient texts, translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated into Latin, which is when things started to spread like wildfire throughout Europe in like the 12th century. Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is beginning in about the 12th century when it moved into Europe. And this was a time when Europe was shifting, you know, to a university, sort of a more academic way of looking at things and away from the monasteries who were, I guess, some of the more early, you know, science minded people.

23:23Yeah. And Christian scholars at the time in Europe, they started to become a little more open to say like, hey, maybe we should, you know, look to other texts, ancient texts, even look from other cultures to try and see if we can learn something from them. And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid, sulfuric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs. And this is where you'll hear more about things like, you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, philosopher's stone, which we'll get into and stuff like that. Yeah. And we should say, now that I think of it, I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came from the Crusades.

24:04Europe just showed up and was like, give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. You know, that would be my guess. But yeah, around this time. So I read that the European alchemists following this tradition believed that in the ancient world, they had already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just sounds so cool. It'd make a really cool like title for a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book or something, you know. Are you making a joke? Philosopher's Stone. No, I think it's just kind of like it fits naturally, you know? Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book, Sorcerer's Stone.

24:42Okay. That's why I asked if you were joking. Not the Sorcerer's Stone. It's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it? No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the Philosopher's Stone. Oh, my God. What a ripoff. Okay, well, we're talking about the Philosopher's Stone, and that was a term for this substance that supposedly was all over the place, but we just didn't recognize the magical properties of it, that you could turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever the perfect version of that thing was. Because that was the thing. Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal.

25:16And all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever, we're seeing them in the process of moving naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. what they were trying to do was figure out how those processes worked so they could speed it up. Right. Yeah. And do it. Do it. But like that's where they got the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold. That's what they were trying to do was move lead into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And the way that they thought you could do that was with the philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically. Yeah.

25:51And you mentioned earlier that they would operate a little more in secrecy later on. and this is kind of where we are now. They would operate, maybe they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but it was kind of shrouded in secrecy a lot of times. They would use like codes and symbols and metaphor and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And there were a handful of European alchemists that, you know, we should probably go over a little bit. The first of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He was a German philosopher in the 13th century and he was a friar.

26:26a Dominican friar. And he studied the work of these Arab alchemists because, like we said, it kind of came over from there. And the ancient Greek philosophers, which, you know, as we mentioned, kind of melded those two worlds of philosophy and science or this kind of science. Right, right. So there was another guy. I mean, there's a bunch that we could talk about. John D., Arthur D., Roger Bacon, they were all alchemists who contributed to our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of was Jean de Rochtelade. I think I got it that second time. It sounds good to me, but German is my non-specialty.

27:04He was trying to figure out chrysopoia, which is, again, transforming things into gold. The thing is, and this is a really good example or way to point this out, he was a Franciscan monk. He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty. So many times the alchemists are like, all they wanted to do was just make gold and be rich. They were just greedy magicians, essentially. No, that's not the case. They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted to find the elixir of life to end disease. They had really big goals that they were trying to reach.