Alchemy

Alchemy was a long-lived practical and philosophical pursuit concerned with transforming matter. Its best-known goal was transmutation, turning base metals such as lead into silver or gold, often by means of a substance called the philosophers’ stone. Alchemists also made medicines, dyes, pigments, glass and purified salts, and some sought an elixir that would prolong life. The word reached English from medieval Latin alchimia, from the Arabic al-kimiya, whose earlier origin is debated.

The earliest Western alchemical writings come from Graeco-Roman Egypt. Recipes for imitating precious metals and dyes survive on papyri, and around 300 CE Zosimos of Panopolis wrote treatises that combine laboratory description with religious and visionary language. From the eighth century onwards, scholars writing in Arabic greatly expanded the art. A vast body of writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan developed the theory that metals are composed of two principles, sulphur and mercury, and the physician Abu Bakr al-Razi described substances and apparatus with remarkable clarity.

In the twelfth century Arabic works were translated into Latin, beginning with Robert of Chester’s version of the Book of the Composition of Alchemy in 1144, and alchemy took root in medieval Europe. In the sixteenth century the Swiss physician Paracelsus urged alchemists to make medicines rather than gold. Separate traditions flourished elsewhere. In China, Daoist waidan (“outer elixir”) sought elixirs of immortality, while neidan (“inner elixir”) turned alchemical language into a discipline of meditation and breath. India developed its own tradition of rasashastra, centred on mercury and medicine.

Alchemy is richly documented through thousands of manuscripts, printed books, surviving apparatus and excavated laboratories. Historians no longer treat it simply as superstition or fraud, although frauds certainly existed and were satirised, as in Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist (1610). Many alchemists were careful experimenters who refined distillation, sublimation and other techniques that chemistry later inherited.

Historians such as Lawrence Principe and William Newman have shown that in the seventeenth century there was no sharp line between alchemy and chemistry, and they use the period spelling “chymistry” for the combined field. Robert Boyle, often called a founder of modern chemistry, sought the philosophers’ stone, and Isaac Newton wrote around a million words on alchemical topics, many of them notes and transcriptions of other authors. Principe has reproduced alchemical recipes in the laboratory, showing that strange descriptions, such as a metallic “tree” growing in a flask, often record real chemical reactions in coded, allegorical language.

What the evidence does not show is that anyone ever turned lead into gold by chemical means. Modern physics explains why: changing one element into another requires altering the atomic nucleus, which ordinary chemical reactions cannot do. Over the eighteenth century chemistry separated itself from the pursuit of transmutation, which became increasingly associated with esoteric and spiritual interpretation.

Alongside its laboratory work, alchemy always carried religious and symbolic meanings. Medieval and early modern texts compared the purification of metals to the death and resurrection of Christ, and illustrated their processes with kings and queens, dragons, eagles and the marriage of the sun and moon. In the nineteenth century some occultists argued that alchemy had always been a purely spiritual discipline, a reading that historians regard as one-sided but that remains popular.

The psychologist Carl Jung, in works such as Psychology and Alchemy (1944), interpreted alchemical imagery as a map of the psyche’s journey towards wholeness, and his ideas strongly shaped twentieth-century views of the subject. In Daoist practice, inner alchemy continues as a living tradition of meditation and self-cultivation. Alchemical symbols also appear widely in art, fantasy and games, from the philosopher’s stone in the Harry Potter stories to the Japanese manga Fullmetal Alchemist.

The dream of transmutation has even had a modern twist: in particle accelerators physicists have turned tiny quantities of other elements into gold, at a cost far greater than the gold’s value. For historians, alchemy is now a respected field that illuminates how people in many cultures tried to understand and master the material world.