Why is alchemy bad

Alchemy is an esoteric science, from which all contemporary exoteric sciences find their root. In this regard, I should warn you that any serious pursuit of Alchemy will eventually lead you toward a study of astrotheology, mythology, archaeology, and the collective narratives left to us by our ancient ancestors; and to view them from a perennial perspective. This course of study will redefine how you perceive scripture, often leading to a crisis of faith should you be a literalist and approach scripture from a fundamental point of view.

In a very real sense, this crisis mirrors the observation of Paul in 1 Corinthians wherein the thoughts and actions of childhood are replaced with a more mature perspective. From the standpoint of one bound to a fundamental interpretation of scripture or any mythology , any who deny the efficacy of scripture is inherently evil or aligned with evil.

At this point I should point out that my study of Alchemy replaced my own literalist views of the world, freeing me and allowing me to abandon the childish and narcissistic perspective of orthodox fundamentalism and exchange them for a quiet and profound sense of the divine.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of having come to this sense of the divine is that it was never the object of my study to develop such a sense, especially following my own crisis of faith. Nevertheless, there it is, and it presents itself without requirement. In the end, anyone who truly pursues a course of study in Alchemy will discover this to be the eventual outcome, for one cannot deconstruct their cognitive processes as I have described in class, lecture, or writing and this not be the case.

With regard to immortality and power, my feelings align with your own and I have had little interest in either nor do I believe that this was ever the true intent of any practical application of Alchemy.

Thank you for your very sincere interest and questions regarding the pursuit and study of Alchemy. Much luck and success in your study of the sciences! Thank you for sharing the question and your answer to it. Your post inspired me to put down some of my own thinking in this regared: Any science can be used for good or evil. It is the intent of the practitioner that is ultimately good or evil. If I used science to create a bomb…then the science is not evil but I myself would be evil.

From my perspective their was a good dose dose of prayer and contemplation from many alchemist especially those who seek to find the Divine hand of God in nature. They actually set high moral standards for themselves as their was the underlying thinking that man and material is not seperated but that evil in man wil undo the alchemical process itself.

The big difference between alchemy and science for me is that the alchemist is part of the process and not seperated from it. A 'golden' human being was resplendent with spiritual beauty and had triumphed over the lurking power of evil.

The basest metal, lead , represented the sinful and unrepentant individual who was readily overcome by the forces of darkness If lead and gold both consisted of fire, air, water, and earth, then surely by changing the proportions of the constituent elements, lead could be transformed into gold. Gold was superior to lead because, by its very nature, it contained the perfect balance of all four elements. Alchemy shows up in some odd places.

For instance, Isaac Newton , best known for his study of gravity and his laws of motion , also wrote more than a million words of alchemical notes throughout his lifetime, historians have estimated.

In March , the Chemical Heritage Foundation bought a 17th-century alchemy manuscript written by Newton. Buried in a private collection for decades, the manuscript detailed how to make "philosophic" mercury, thought to be a step toward making the philosopher's stone — a magical substance thought to have the ability to turn any metal into gold and give eternal life. Many of his papers were destroyed in the eighteenth century because they were loaded with discussions of alchemy—which by then had acquired its bad reputation.

Wilford reported from a recent meeting of historians of chemistry in Philadelphia. From his report as well as this one from the New York Sun and this one from Chemical and Engineering News , it seems as if the meeting neglected one of the most interesting sides of alchemy: its role in the history of bio -chemistry. While a lot of alchemists dealt in Kevin-Trudeau-style hogwash, some did important work.

Jan Baptist van Helmont , a sixteenth-century Belgian alchemist, carried out a classic experiment on biological growth. He put a five pound willow sapling in a tube of pounds of earth.

For five years he gave the tree nothing but water, and then weighed both tree and earth. The tree had grown to pounds, while the earth had lost a few ounces.

I first came to appreciate the importance of alchemy in the rise of biochemistry while working on my book Soul Made Flesh , on the history of neurology. Thomas Willis, the first neurologist, started out as an alchemist, deeply influenced by Van Helmont. He came into contact with Robert Boyle through their shared interest in alchemy. And his first important work was a book that used alchemy to reinterpret physiology. The third key is presented as a crucial step in the process.

The two preceding keys can be interpreted to describe the purification of gold and the preparation of a highly corrosive acid similar in composition to aqua regia; these are the two reagents to be used in the third key.

If you can interpret it, the third key of Basilius Valentinus encodes the volatilization of gold chloride. Thus the invisible gold must be recovered in its original visible form; the easiest way to do this is simply to evaporate the solution — the thermally unstable gold chloride would quickly decompose back into gold. However, these directions seem circular; they lead nowhere. In the woodcut, the reader can see the red dragon in the foreground and the strange pair of a fox and a rooster mutually consuming one another in the background.

Can there be any chemical meaning here? Nevertheless, attempts to replicate the process verified its reality. But if fresh acid is immediately poured over the residue, distilled off to dryness, and the process repeated several times, after a few repetitions, beautiful, gleaming ruby-red crystals of gold chloride can be sublimed into the neck of the retort.

Under these conditions, he unknowingly took advantage of an equilibrium between gold chloride and its components — the atmosphere of chlorine allowed the gold salt to sublime at a moderate temperature. A similar process was independently rediscovered and chemically explained in , three hundred years after Valentinus first carried it out.

This sublimation of a thermally unstable gold salt is a tricky operation in a modern laboratory, even with the assistance of modern technology and chemical knowledge. Imagine then, how truly remarkable it is that an alchemist carried it out successfully four hundred years ago using unannealed soft-glass vessels and a charcoal fire where temperature could be gauged only by touch and experience and controlled only by opening and closing furnace vents.

Clearly, this alchemist was a highly competent, patient, and experienced experimentalist; the kind of a person one would gladly hire in a lab today — provided that they agreed to write research reports in a straightforward manner. Alchemy was a wide-ranging and diverse practice in early modern Europe. Its concepts and promises influenced fine art, literature, and poetry. Despite its culture of secrecy or perhaps because of it , alchemy fired imaginations and tinctured thought in multiple areas to an extent we are only now coming to realize.

But beneath it all, in the smoky laboratories of its practitioners, lay what we would quickly recognize as chemical operations, powered by the dream of understanding matter and controlling its transformations in order to generate new, more perfect, more valuable products. In this way, alchemists were very much the crafters of the traditions and goals of chemistry as it continues today.