Alchemy

Everybody sort of knows about alchemy and rejects it--turning lead into gold, let's not get silly!  But in the Middle Ages it was a major branch of philosophy.  This is why the first Harry Potter book was entitled (in the UK) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

As you doubtless can guess if you've been reading this blog, I'm not about to say, "Ha, how dumb can they get in the Middle Ages?  Lead into gold indeed!"  Rather alchemy, which in fact became the ancestor of what we consider chemistry, started as a theoretical musing on the nature of the universe.  Medieval Europe got it from the Arabs (as the prefix al- should have told you),  from the eighth or ninth century onward.  The Arabs in turn had gotten a lot of it from ancient Greek philosophy.

The starting point was the question of what was the basic "stuff" of the universe, the assumption that everything, if reduced to its smallest bits, might be the same.  We actually believe this now.  Everything is composed of atoms, whether it's a rock or a tree or a person or a drop of water.  And if everything is composed of the same smallest bits, just rearranged differently, then it makes sense that one substance can be turned into another.  We don't turn lead into gold, but we are happy to think that hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water.

Medieval people actually didn't concentrate on the lead-to-gold thing until the end of the Middle Ages (and they didn't worry about some magical "stone").  Their main interest was copper-to-gold, or even gold-to-copper, and this wasn't an issue about creating wealth.  Rather it was seeing two shiny metals as metaphors.  Copper started by looking like gold, like the sun, then turned green with verdigris to look like natural growing things.

 Human action, it was understood, turned one thing into something else.  So as copper was smelted or hammered by humans, it was considered to undergo an alchemical change.  What had once been a nugget of ore was now a coin, or an oil lamp, or a door knocker.  There were methods that would turn copper green faster than natural weathering.  So alchemy was a way to ponder the relationship between nature and human.

Alchemy was considered a good Christian science.  After all, in transubstantiation, the Communion wafer became the body of Christ.  Now it also at the same time remained a wafer, and finding actual blood in one's wafer was considered unorthodox at best, but it did change its substance (that's what transubstantiation means), by what was considered an example of divine alchemy.

Modern people tend to draw distinctions between "real" sciences, like chemistry and astronomy, and "fake" sciences, like alchemy and astrology, conveniently leaving out the detail that the former derived from the latter.  And in fact medieval people were very aware of the danger of charlatans promising that they could make you rich if you just gave them money for their alchemical experiments, or tell you which decisions to make depending on the phase of the moon or stars.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018