Alchemy Part 6

The descent of alchemistical doctrine can thus be traced
with fair continuity for a thousand years, from the Greeks
of Alexandria down to the time when Latin alchemy was
firmly established in the West, and began to be written
of by historical authors like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon
and Arnoldus Villanovanus in the 13th century. But side
by side with this literary transmission Berthelot insists
that there was another mode of transmission, by means of the
knowledge of practical receipts and processes traditional
among jewellers, painters, workers in glass and pottery, and
other handicraftsmen. The chemical knowledge of Egyptian
metallurgists and jewellers, he holds, was early transmitted
to the artisans of Rome, and was preserved throughout the
dark ages in the workshops of Italy and France until about
the 13th century, when it was mingled with the theories of
the Greek alchemists which reached the West by way of the
Arabs. Receipts given in the Leiden papyrus reappear in
the Compositiones ad Tingenda and the Mappae Clavicula,
both workshop receipt books, one known in an 8th-century
MS. at Lucca, and the other in a 10th-century MS. in the
library of Schlettstadt; and again in such works as the De
Artibus Romanorum of Eraclius and the Schedula Diversarum
Artium of Theophilus, belonging to the 11th or 12th century.

Theory of Transmutation.--The fundamental theory of the
transmutation of metals is to be found in the Greek alchemists,
although in details it was modified and elaborated by the
Arabs and the Latin alchemists. Regarding all substances as
being composed of one primitive matter--the prima materia,
and as owing their specific differences to the presence of
different qualities imposed upon it, the alchemist hoped, by
taking away these qualities, to obtain the prima materia
itself, and then to get from it the particular substance he
desired by the addition of the appropriate qualities. The
prima materia was early identified with mercury, not ordinary
mercury, but the ``mercury of the philosophers,'' which was the
essence or soul of mercury, freed from the four Aristotelian
elements--earth, air, fire and water--or rather from the
qualities which they represent. Thus the operator had to
remove from ordinary mercury, earth or an earthy principle or
quality, and water or a liquid principle, and to fix it by
taking away air or a volatile principle. The prima materia
thus obtained had to be treated with sulphur (or with sulphur
and arsenic) to confer upon it the desired qualities that were
missing. This sulphur again was not ordinary sulphur, but some
principle derived from it, which constituted the philosopher's
stone or elixir--white for silver and yellow or red for
gold. This is briefly the doctrine that the metals are
composed of mercury and sulphur, which persisted in one form
or another down to the 17th century. Of course there were
numerous variations and refinements. Thus in the Speculum
Naturale of Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1250) it is said that
there are four spirits--mercury, sulphur, arsenic and sal
ammoniac-- and six bodies--gold, silver, copper, tin, lead and
iron.3 Of these bodies the two first are pure, the four last
impure. Pure white mercury, fixed by the virtue of white
non-corrosive sulphur, engenders in mines a matter which
fusion changes into silver, and united to pure clear red
sulphur it forms gold, while with various kinds of impure
mercury and sulphur the other bodies are produced. Vincent
attributes to Rhazes the statement that copper is potentially
silver, and any one who can eliminate the red colour will
bring it to the state of silver, for it is copper in outward
appearance, but in its inmost nature silver. This statement
represents a doctrine widely held in the 13th century, and
also to be found in the Greek alchemists, that everything
endowed with a particular apparent quality possesses a hidden
opposite quality, which can be rendered apparent by fire.
Later, as in the works attributed to Basil Valentine, sulphur,
mercury and salt are held to be the constituents of the metals.

It must be noted that the processes described by the alchemists
of the 13th century are not put forward as being miraculous
or supernatural; they rather represent the methods employed by
nature, which it is the end of the alchemist's art to reproduce
artificially in the laboratory. But even among the late
Arabian alchemists it was doubted whether the resources of
the art were adequate to the task; and in the West, Vincent of
Beauvais remarks that success had not been achieved in making
artificial metals identical with the natural ones. Thus he
says that the silver which has been changed into gold by the
projection of the red elixir is not rendered resistant to the
agents which affect silver but not gold, and Albertus Magnus
in his De Mineralibus --the De Alchemia attributed to him
is spurious--states that alchemy cannot change species but
merely imitates them--for instance, colours a metal white to
make it resemble silver or yellow to give it the appearance of
gold. He has, he adds, tested gold made by alchemists, and
found that it will not withstand six or seven exposures to
fire. But scepticism of this kind was not universal. Roger
Bacon--or more probably some one who usurped his name--declared
that with a certain amount of the philosopher's stone he could
transmute a million times as much base metal into gold, and
on Raimon Lull was fathered the boast, ``Mare tingerem si
mercurius esset.'' Numerous less distinguished adepts also
practised the art, and sometimes were so successful in their
deceptions that they gained the ear of kings, whose desire
to profit by the achievements of science was in several
instances rewarded by an abundant crop of counterfeit coins.