Who is the founder of alchemy

The Spirituals, who saw themselves as the true followers of St. Francis, embraced radical poverty and fiercely criticized church hierarchy and the more mainstream Conventual Franciscans. The Spirituals were also caught up in apocalyptic fervor and a fondness for prophecies, believing that the Antichrist was about to appear.

It might seem incongruous that a man so fervently committed to the ideal of poverty would also devote himself to finding the secret of making gold. Yet at the start of his Book of Light , written about , John states clearly why he studied chrysopoeia and why he decided to write about it.

I considered the coming times predicted by Christ in the Gospels, namely, of the tribulations in the time of the Antichrist, under which the Roman Church shall be tormented and have all her worldly riches despoiled by tyrants. My intention is to be helpful to the good of the holy Roman Church and briefly to explain the whole truth about the Stone. True to his Spiritual Franciscan views, John says that the tribulation of the Antichrist is at hand, and that the church will need every form of help to withstand it; that help includes alchemy.

John was not the only Franciscan who thought this way. The same concern about the coming of the Antichrist lay behind much of what Roger Bacon—also a Franciscan friar—wrote to the pope about sixty years earlier: the church will need mathematical, scientific, technological, medical, and other knowledge to resist and survive the assault of the Antichrist. We are well familiar with the use of science and technology for national security; in the case of John and Roger, we find a medieval precedent that includes alchemy as a means of ecclesiastical security.

John describes a series of sublimations of mercury with vitriol and saltpeter, followed by digestions and distillations. Despite the apparently clear directions, however, his first step will not work in a modern laboratory if followed verbatim. There are two possible explanations. In fact, his book contains an annotation toward the end that notes how crude saltpeter ordinarily contains salt, and gives a method for purifying it by fractional crystallization.

The second possibility is that John intentionally left out the crucial ingredient as a way of preserving secrecy. With it, he extended alchemy into a new area—medicine. Thus, John recounts how he sought a substance that could prevent corruption and decay and thus preserve the body from illness and premature aging. The Latin alchemical term for this delightful liquid— aqua vitae —lives on in the names of several liquors: the Italian acquavite , the French eau-de-vie , and the Scandinavian akvavit.

Quintessence is a word still used to express the finest, purest, and most concentrated essence of a thing. John borrows the word from Aristotelian natural philosophy, where it represents a substance different from and greater than the four elements fire, air, water, and earth , namely, the imperishable and eternal material from which everything beyond the moon, such as the stars and planets, is made.

The implication is that this terrestrial quintessence of wine is similarly impervious to decay. While this might sound outlandish, John almost certainly based his belief on empirical evidence—he notes how meat left in the open air quickly begins to rot, but when immersed in alcohol it is preserved indefinitely.

He may also have noticed that while wine quickly degrades into vinegar, distilled alcohol remains unchanged. It is this stability and preservative power that John tries to turn to medicinal use. Some 19th-century practitioners headed in new methodological directions.

They continued to pursue metallic transmutation, but in new ways that often drew on contemporaneous scientific discoveries. He maintained that the metals were actually compounds of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen and were therefore interchangeable by altering the relative proportions of these components. According to Zosimos, who wrote of her and her discoveries, Maria the Hebrew, or Maria Hebraea, lived between the first and third centuries AD. She also saw metals and other objects as male or female, and thought that metals, like living things, could die.

However, she believed death was only a change in form and not final, just like plants change into ash when they burn. It is a double-vessel airtight container with a sheet of copper upon its upper side that heats substances without scorching them. All three are still used today for chemical experiments. With his work on the effect of chemicals on the human body, his discovery of carbon dioxide, and his belief that understanding the body and the world needed to begin with alchemy, Belgian scientist Van Helmont helped synonymise alchemy and chemistry.

He reckoned that nothing could advance without alchemy. Also, his theory was that gold created by alchemy would never decay or die, and consuming the manmade gold would have the same effect on the body.

During his gold-finding experiments, he inadvertently created the basis for gunpowder by combining sulphur and saltpetre. He spent 30 years collating and translating everything he could, pulling out all the stops to uncover the formula for the supreme object of alchemy.

Like transmuting base metals into gold with alchemic processes, sick organs in the body could be made healthy with the help of chemicals. On the plus side, Paracelsus was credited with discovering laudanum, or tincture of opium. This prompted a summons to the court of Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony, who ordered him to make this claim a reality, as he loved gold but was always short of money.

German alchemist Brand, like his 17th century peers, saw human urine as more than just waste and he discovered something truly precious in pee — phosphorus. He collected around 5, litres of urine during his experiments and he apparently preferred getting it from people who drank beer due to the distinct colouration.

It is believed that he boiled and extracted the components of the urine in different ways. Upon final distillation, the product left behind was white, smelly and glowed in the dark. It was also extremely flammable. Egyptian beliefs in life after death, and the mummification procedures they developed, probably gave rise to rudimentary chemical knowledge and a goal of immortality.

Alchemy was also developed independently in China by Taoist monks. The monks pursued both the outer elixir and the inner elixir. The former being minerals, plants etc. Like China and Egypt, India developed alchemy independently. They had beliefs similar to the Chinese, in that they used external and internal methods to purify the body and prolong life. The dawn of Alchemy 1. The word Alchemy 1. Legendary origins of alchemy 1. The oldest written sources. Alchemy in the West 2.

Egypt 1. The Hellenistic era 2. The Arabic era 2. The Christian Middle Ages. This paper seeks to investigate the origins and the history of Alchemy. Almost no art or science has been subject to such controversial discussion over centuries than alchemy.

It must be said that the alchemists themselves very much contributed to this controversy by keeping their recipes and practices secret. Because of the highly encrypted language and the excessive use of symbols and pictures in many alchemical treatises and works it really does not make wonder that alchemy became denounced as pseudo-science, deception and quite in a few cases even as folly. However, on the other hand there were a number of famous and learned men who seriously believed in alchemy and its possibilities.

Also it should not be forgotten that alchemy was the mother of modern chemistry and many alchemists, though by mere chance, discovered on their quest for gold chemical processes and substances that are still in use. Mentioning gold is not to say that this was the one and only aim of all alchemists. As we shall see, alchemists throughout the world actually strove for three aims: wealth, i.

In this paper I will try to present the appearances of alchemy in a chronological order, however sometimes it will be necessary to abandon this way because of the parallel development of alchemy in very different regions. Also of interest will be some of the main theories and their development and finally important representatives of alchemy.

Scholars are not yet sure where the word alchemy actually originates from. The Arabic prefix al- was put in front of an, apparently, much older word. An argument for that theory is that alchemy later sometimes was named Egyptian Art.

According to other theories the word was coined by the Greek alchemists in Alexandria. It was then applied to the whole art. Yet another possible origin of the word is in the field of legends to which I will come in the following.

Basically there are three legends going around about the origin of alchemy. According to the first and perhaps most wide-spread one alchemy was brought into this world by the deity Hermes Trismegistos, who in the course of an ongoing syncretism in Hellenistic Egypt and Greece was equalled to the gods Chnum, Thoth and Ptah. On the basis of that legend alchemy is called the Hermetic Art and if something is sealed air- and watertight it is hermetically sealed.

According to an other legend alchemy, together with magic and other occult arts, came to mankind after the battle of the angels when the Lord threw the rebellious angels out of the heaven. They came down to earth, got married with ordinary women and taught them everything they knew. Finally the third legend says that alchemy was taught to Moses and Aaron by the Lord himself because they were chosen.

Now, for someone who hears this story it must be quite obvious that if Moses was able to destroy gold so completely he must as well be able to make it.

Unfortunately there are only a few examples of early alchemical writings that have survived till today. Among these artefacts are some fragmentary cuneiform script tablets from old Egypt that contain recipes for making alloys and colouring metals. Burckhardt says that in Egypt alchemy was considered a holy art and therefore was handed down orally. The big fire in the library of Alexandria, too, surely destroyed a number of precious works on alchemy. The so far oldest known and most famous sources are two papyri from the 3rd century AD.

They became known as Papyrus Leidensis and Papyrus Holmiensis 5. Both contain a number of recipes for the imitation of gold and silver by forming either gold-containing alloys or simply golden-looking ones like brass. Furthermore they contain recipes for 'making' precious stones and pearls. Some recipes are open deception 6. It is held by some scholars that both papyri are compilations of much earlier works. For a very detailed description of the two papyri see the outstanding work of Lippmann.

Another source is the tabula smaragdina, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos. Its authenticity has been doubted at 7 not only because the oldest preserved version is an Arabic translation. It contains a very dense summa of alchemy and because of this density is very difficult to understand. There is a number of other works dating back to that period and published under famous names, but most of these works are pseudepigraphs and therefore cannot be taken as a kind of 'authentic' sources.

It is very difficult to investigate early alchemy in Egypt, meaning pre-Hellenistic Egypt. Lippmann, Burckhardt et alii hold that here is the true cradle of alchemy, though in a wider sense. The oldest evidences can be traced back to the Old Kingdom c. As early as that the Egyptians were good metallurgists. The workshops were in the temples of these gods and the artisans were either priests themselves or slaves of the temple.

Bearing this in mind indubitably must have been highly respected for their secret wisdom, a fact that reinforced their power. Around BC one can find the first hints of a theory, that there are four elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and everything consists of a mixture of them. If the mixture is changed it theoretically should be possible to transform one substance into an other. This theory usually is ascribed to Aristotle, but apparently similar theories, naming four and sometimes five elements, developed independently in different regions and cultures at about the same time.

Also rather early emerged the concept of the seven planets and their corresponding metals, perhaps coming from Babylon. In the course of time there developed a proper temple industry.

They 'multiplied' gold by creating alloys, e. Apart from these metallurgical enterprises there also appeared the imitating of precious stones and the colouring of glass. The substances in use were mineral salts and certain ashes and slags.

Burckhardt in particular explains the lack of written artefacts with this secretness. However, step by step the Egyptian empire declined and foreign influences became stronger.

Among those influences were all sorts of philosophical concepts and streams like platonic, pre-Socratic, and Aristotelian philosophy. A new age of alchemy was dawning. Several scholars and most encyclopaediae place the beginning of alchemy in this period. Indeed alchemy during this era reached a bright bloom. The centre of this new period became Alexandria with its great library. Characteristic of it was a heretofore unknown religious syncretism.

As mentioned above, the Greek god Hermes Trismegistos in Hellenistic Egypt became mixed with the gods Chnum, Thoth, and Ptah and was equally worshipped. The Ouruboros, a snake that eats its own tail, is the symbol of two old Egyptian gods 9 and at the same time of the Greek Agathodaimon, also a snake-shaped god. The latter later on was sometimes referred to as Egyptian philosopher, king, or god.

Among the important theories of the time is that of the ovum philosophicum, the egg that contains all four elements. Plato and Aristotle developed a transmutation theory on the basis of the four-element theory.