Chapter
4

Medieval Alchemy and the Quest for Gold

In This Chapter

• Alchemy in the Dark Ages

• The genius of Roger Bacon

• The Church’s persecution of alchemists

• Alchemists Nicolas Flamel and Sir Issac Newton

• Puffers: a new class of alchemists

• The demise of alchemy and rise of chemistry

After the tumultuous outpouring of alchemical ideas in Alexandria, the craft of alchemy went into a dormant phase and was actively pursued only in Arabia and the East. The West was in the grip of the Dark Ages, a period of stagnate intellectual growth and lack of innovation that lasted from the fall of the Roman Empire (476 C.E.) to the beginning of the second millennium (1000 C.E.).

Arabian invaders brought alchemy back to life in Europe through the infusion of Alexandrian manuscripts and commentaries they brought with them when they crossed over from Morocco in 711 C.E. and occupied Spain for more than 700 years. The Islamic rulers proved very tolerant, and Spain soon became a haven for Jews and other persecuted minorities. The new rulers also encouraged learning in what some historians refer to as a mini-renaissance in Europe.

The Emerald Tablet and other alchemy manuscripts, first translated into Latin in the early 1100s, quickly spread throughout Europe. Scholars eagerly embraced the new ideas, which resulted in a wide dissemination of alchemy books. However, alchemy proved to be a complex tradition full of special jargon and symbolic images, and the ancient craft was not so easily deciphered. Try as they might, early students of alchemy failed to grasp the deeper meanings of the new ideas and preferred literal interpretations that did not require too much thought. In the cryptic, multilevel language of alchemy, interpreting anything literally spelled disaster, so before long, European alchemists were trapped in a quagmire of gibberish and contradictory concepts. Only one literal fact seemed clear, and that was that alchemy was about making gold.

Nevertheless, the early alchemists’ attempts to transform base metals into gold resulted in the discovery of acids, alcohols, alloys, and hundreds of new compounds. Alchemy became the leading intellectual movement in Europe, even to the point where some universities started replacing the works of Aristotle with texts attributed to Hermes. This was the heyday of alchemy.

The Beginning of European Alchemy

The first translation of an Arabian alchemy manuscript in Europe was the Book of the Composition of Alchemy by Morienus, who had lived in the seventh century. In 1144, Robert of Chester, who translated the Koran and introduced algebra and other Arabian teachings to the West, translated this book into Latin.

Soon after Robert’s translations began circulating, the floodgates opened, and by 1200, Europe was inundated with hundreds of Arabian books. So much translating was going on that the Archbishop of Toledo in Spain founded a new college completely devoted to making Latin translations of Arabian works. One of his translators, Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187), single-handedly translated 76 manuscripts, including important alchemy books by Avicenna and Jabir.

Many writers were also ready to interpret the confusing alchemy texts for the eager Europeans. Writers, such as Vincent of Beauvais and Bartholomew the Englishman, added long commentaries to the Latin translations of Arabian alchemy works, and other authors wrote whole books trying to explain what the Arabs were saying. Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) wrote a popular commentary on alchemy entitled Guide for the Perplexed.

Before long, Europe was producing its own alchemists. The first of these was a Swabian monk by the name of Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), who lived from 1193 to 1280. Albertus was a true genius, so skilled in all forms of knowledge that he was called “Doctor Universalis.” He became an adept in alchemy, and his labwork resulted in the discovery of potassium lye and many other useful compounds.

Through his meticulous observations of the metals, Albertus realized the regularity of properties charted in the modern periodic table, in which the characteristics of the elements repeat in an eightfold cycle. “The metals are similar in their essence, and differ only in their form,” he summarized. “One may pass easily from one to another, following a definite cycle.”

Albertus taught at several universities, including in Freiburg, Cologne, and Paris, and initiated other Europeans into alchemy. One of his students was St. Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Aquinas popularized the works of Aristotle and wrote a monumental compendium of religious philosophy called Summa Theologica. He is also thought to have created the influential text Aurora Consurgens, which is an alchemical interpretation of the “Song of Songs.”

Aquinas was a prolific writer, but after having a mystical experience in December 1273, he never wrote another word. As a result, several of his most important works end abruptly in the middle of a paragraph. He told his fellow monks that during meditation he had seen a vision of Sophia, the divine feminine principle suppressed by the patriarchal Church. He said he had found the Philosopher’s Stone in the wisdom of Sophia, and after that profound experience, everything he had written seemed worthless, like so much straw in comparison.

The Wizardry of Roger Bacon

Educated at Oxford and Parisian universities, Roger Bacon was another medieval genius who mastered a number of different disciplines. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Bacon created drawings and models of airplanes, helicopters, tanks, submarines, and other inventions centuries ahead of his time. He drew one of the first complete maps of the world and created the more exact Gregorian calendar we still use today. He also built early microscopes and telescopes and constructed a towering observatory that survived for centuries.

Bacon was initiated into alchemy by a mysterious Frenchman named Master Peter, whom Bacon often referred to as the “Lord of Experimentation.” Others suggest that Albertus Magnus may have initiated Bacon in Paris, but whoever taught him, Bacon quickly became Europe’s leading alchemist. He shared formulae for numerous useful compounds, including gunpowder, and produced powerful tinctures and elixirs. He is also said to have achieved successful transmutations of the metals.

Unfortunately, Bacon was so far ahead of his time that his contemporaries believed he was in league with the devil, and his antisocial behavior did not help dispel the rumors. He was said to have created a talking head of brass that revealed dark secrets to him and a mirror in which he could see into the future.

Although he was a Franciscan monk with a Doctorate in Divinity from Oxford, Bacon was constantly in trouble with the Church, which kept a close eye on his activities. In 1257, a Church court accused him of practicing sorcery and placed him under house arrest in Oxford for the rest of his life.

Pope Clement IV released him from his sentence in 1267 on the condition that Bacon write down all his knowledge in one book. The result was a vast compendium of mathematics, science, and philosophy called the Opus Majus (The Major Work). In it, Bacon summarized all branches of science and proposed they were all part of a single true philosophy that had been lost to mankind.

Bacon continued to criticize the Church and even declared that the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Greece were morally superior to the Christian world. Not surprisingly, he was sentenced to prison for heresy in 1278, but was released 14 years later by the head of the Franciscan order after Bacon shared certain alchemical secrets with him. In his typically defiant fashion, Bacon immediately began work on Compendium Theologiae, a book about the theological errors and faults of Catholicism. His superiors were incensed at his impudence, but this time, because he had an ally in the head of the Franciscan order, he avoided prison.

The Church never forgave Roger Bacon, and his works are still banned. When he died in 1294, his fellow monks nailed all the books in his library to their shelves and left them to rot unopened.

Alchemy and the Church

Roger Bacon’s run-ins with Church authorities were typical of the relationship between alchemists and religious authorities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To avoid conflicts, some alchemists deliberately concealed their work in Christian terminology. For instance, the word “Christ” was often used to refer to the Philosopher’s Stone, the spark of life concealed in the darkness of matter (see Chapter 9). Other alchemists stopped publishing their ideas or went into hiding.

But many alchemists would not compromise their principles. Alchemist and mathematician Giordano Bruno is a good example. He gave public lectures on the principles of the Emerald Tablet and portrayed the universe as a living presence full of alchemical influences. Declaring the tablet’s “Operation of the Sun” as the grand symbol of all natural processes, he boldly asserted that the sun was the center of the cosmos, in direct violation of Church dogma. Then he went so far as to assert that the universe was infinite and contained many other worlds that harbored intelligent life.

That declaration was too much for the Church, and in 1576, they attempted to arrest him on charges of heresy. Bruno, who was a Dominican priest, got wind of the action against him and fled. But the Church pursued him all across Europe as he continued to publish his heretical manuscripts. Finally, the priests of the Inquisition caught up with him in 1592 and began a seven-year trial, during which they listed every single blasphemous statement Bruno ever wrote and demanded he recant each one. When he refused to recant something he had said, they tortured him mercilessly. Still, he refused to take back anything he had said or written. When the Inquisitors realized they could not break him, they sentenced him to death, and on February 8, 1600, a gag was tied tightly around Bruno’s tongue, and he was burned alive in public.

The Church was always suspicious of alchemists’ preoccupation with meditation and spiritual development. The chillingly unsympathetic position of the Church in that regard was read into court records during the heresy trial of Miguel de Molinos in Rome in 1687. Molinos was an advocate of meditation and quiet contemplation, but he crossed the line when he asserted that anyone could practice prayer and meditation in the presence of God in the privacy of his own home. According to the representative of the Pope, the duty of the Church was only to preserve ritual and maintain the physical presence of the Church and not to invoke the spiritual enlightenment of individuals. The Church banned all of Molinos’s writings and sentenced him to life in prison, where he died nine years later.

Of course, the Church’s fury was not directed just against alchemists and people seeking spiritual development. Anyone who healed with herbs or extolled the virtues of natural cures was accused of practicing the black arts. The Church had declared that the devil caused all disease, which could only be cured by exorcisms performed by priests. Anyone else was interfering with the will of God.

It has been estimated that more than 3 million people were burned at the stake during the Middle Ages. Girls could be tortured for witchcraft from the age of 9, and boys from the age of 10. Homosexuals were sometimes thrown into the fires of burning witches. In fact, the derogatory term “faggot” originally referred to small logs used to start fires. The Church also proclaimed that all cats were demons to be burned along with witches. Cats were imprisoned alive in the walls of buildings to ward off evil spirits, and at Easter, cats were locked in wicker baskets and thrown into bonfires.

These Church practices killed so many cats that the rat population surged, which contributed to the rapid spread of the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the fourteenth century. Nearly half the population of Europe perished—including at least one Pope and hundreds of Inquisitors.

Medieval and Renaissance Alchemy

The Black Death had another unforeseen consequence. It gave rise to the great need for medicines, and alchemists were at the cutting edge in the search for new cures. These alchemists produced many herbal tinctures and tonics that provided relief to diseased people, and the silver- and mercury-based antibiotics created by alchemists were the only effective tools for the treatment of syphilis, pneumonia, infections, and the plague.

Arnold of Villanova was a Spanish alchemist who became a leader of medical alchemy in the late thirteenth century. His tonics cured many ailments, and his elixirs were said to rejuvenate body tissue and increase longevity. He treated several national leaders and popes, although he was briefly imprisoned in Paris for his heretical views on the alchemical nature of the Holy Trinity.

Paracelsus, one of the greatest alchemists of all time, is considered the founder of modern medicine, because he began using chemicals (drugs) in the treatment of disease. His hybrid of alchemy and medicine, which he named iatrochemistry, became very popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Nicolas Flamel’s Powder of Projection

Another alchemist who benefited the infirm and diseased people of the Middle Ages was Nicolas Flamel. However, he was no doctor, nor did he produce miraculous cures. Instead, the penniless bookseller suddenly became very rich and gave huge sums of money and property to charities. He also founded several free hospitals, free schools for the blind, and homes for the poor throughout France. His explanation for his newfound wealth was that he had discovered the secret of making gold.

Nicolas Flamel was well educated in the Hermetic arts, had been initiated into alchemy, and had a driving passion to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. His bookstore was full of alchemy books, and he was always on the lookout for new alchemy texts to add to his library. One day, a young Jewish man came to him with a rare alchemy book to sell, and Flamel gladly paid him the requested price of 2 florins. This was during a period in history when Jewish people were being expelled from France and many of them were selling treasured possessions before fleeing to safety in Islamic Spain.

The curious book had an ancient binding of worked copper, on which were engraved curious diagrams and certain characters, some of which were Greek and Hebrew and others unknown. The pages of the book were not parchment but were the bark of young trees covered with script written with an iron point. The pages were divided into groups of seven and consisted of three parts separated by a page showing a strange and unintelligible diagram.

The edges of the book were covered in gold leaf, and the title page listed the author as “Abraham the Jew—Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher.” There were curses against anyone who read the book who was unworthy of its contents, and every page carried the word Maranatha!, which was a Syrian expression used by Jews of the time as a curse on their enemies. It meant literally, “the Lord cometh to execute vengeance on you.”

Despite his great learning, Flamel could not make sense of the book. He even copied pages from the book, displayed them in his store, and sent them to experts hoping someone might understand parts of them. After 21 years of trying to decipher the book, Flamel decided to travel to Spain to seek the help of Jewish scholars who had settled there. Flamel left the book in safekeeping with his wife and only took a handful of pages copied from the book. He hoped to entice someone to make the journey back to Paris with him to help translate the entire book.

In Leon, Flamel met an elderly Jewish scholar who was familiar with the book of Abraham the Jew and wanted very much to see it for himself, but the man died on their return journey. Fortunately, the scholar had recognized the script on the copied pages as ancient Chaldean and translated several pages. That was enough for Flamel and his wife to begin translating the remaining pages, and three years later they finished the complete translation.

According to his diaries, Flamel followed the instructions of Abraham the Jew and changed a half-pound of mercury first into silver and then into pure gold. Simultaneously, as Flamel put it, he “accomplished the same transmutation in my soul.” After only three transmutations of mercury into gold, Flamel was rich beyond his dreams, yet he kept none for himself. Instead, he gave it away to charity. At nearly all his charities, Flamel commissioned strange stones or plaques containing alchemical symbols. Alchemists still make the pilgrimage to view mysterious symbols at Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie Church, the Cemetery of the Innocents, and other works commissioned by Flamel.

Flamel continued his lifelong labor of copying manuscripts and studying alchemy, but soon lost interest in making gold. Because he saw his fellow alchemists ruined by the love of gold, he locked away Abraham’s book and never shared its contents with anyone. He felt that the physical transmutations in his lab had started a greater spiritual gold growing within him and his wife, Pernelle, that was worth more than any material possession.

So he continued to live the quiet life of a scholar, wrote many important books on alchemy, and along with his wife lived a long, vigorous life into his 80s. He carefully planned how he wanted his wife and himself buried. He also had his tombstone prepared beforehand. It shows a bright sun above a key and a closed book in the middle of various figures. Many have taken this to mean that Flamel chose not to share the key to alchemy with an impure world. His tombstone can still be seen at his gravesite in Paris at the Musee de Cluny at the end of the nave of the Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie Church. After the death of Flamel and his wife, their house, monuments, and even his grave were nearly destroyed by people searching for gold or alchemical secrets.

Flamel bequeathed his library to a nephew named Perrier, whom he had initiated into alchemy. Perrier kept the family secrets, and Flamel’s library was passed down from generation to generation. One of his descendents named Dubois demonstrated what he called his illustrious ancestor’s powder of projection in the presence of Louis XIII and successfully transmuted leaden balls into gold.

The ruthless Cardinal de Richelieu heard of the Flamel demonstrations and imprisoned Dubois for questioning. The cardinal eventually condemned him to death and seized all of his property, including the book of Abraham the Jew. He also ordered Flamel’s original home searched and his coffin pried open. According to reports from the time, no body was found.

The cardinal built an alchemical laboratory at the Chateau of Rueil, which he often visited to study the manuscript and try to understand the hieroglyphs to discover the secret of creating gold. Fortunately, the ambitious politician never succeeded in cracking the key of Abraham the Jew. After Cardinal de Richelieu died, the book itself was never found, although copies of the drawings and some of the text were made. You can view them online at www.FlamelCollege.org/flamel.htm.

Isaac Newton and the Black Dragon

Famed scientist Sir Isaac Newton was a practicing alchemist who wrote more on alchemy than any other subject. Yet most of his alchemical works were never published, because after his death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed them “not fit to print.” Today, most scholars agree that Newton considered himself first and foremost an alchemist, and that the inspiration for his laws of light and theory of gravity came from his alchemical work.

Newton believed that alchemy originated with Thoth and that supernatural visitors to ancient Egypt gave it to mankind. He prepared his own personal translation of the Emerald Tablet and kept it safely hidden away in his laboratory. When he worked on his alchemy experiments, Newton demanded complete secrecy. “He very rarely went to bed sometimes not till five or six in the morning,” said one of his servants of his alchemy work, “especially at springtime, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarce going out night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate into.”

Newton was always fearful that the secrets of alchemy would leak out into the world and cause fearful political and social consequences, because mankind was not ready for such power. In 1676, after fellow alchemist Robert Boyle announced the discovery of a “special mercury” that became hot and glowed when mixed with gold, Newton was terrified Boyle had revealed too much. He wrote him a letter cautioning him to keep everything about alchemy secret: “Your discovery may possibly be an inlet to something more noble that is not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there should be any verity in the Hermetic writings,” Newton wrote to Boyle, “therefore I question nothing but that the great wisdom of the noble Author will sway him to high silence—there being other things besides the transmutation of metals, which none but the Hermetic philosophers understand.”

Newton was a true adept of alchemy who revered the divine pattern spoken of in the Emerald Tablet, while Boyle was one of a new breed of materialistic alchemists who denied the existence of hidden forces, correspondences, synchronicities, and invisible influences of any kind in nature.

Newton’s lifelong work in alchemy focused on antimony, a brittle, steel-gray metal that tarnishes to a black finish, which usually hides its silvery metallic luster. It is known in alchemy as the “Black Dragon.” Newton was fascinated by the regulus of antimony, which is a star-shaped crystalline form produced when heating antimony ore to high temperatures. If antimony has been sufficiently purified, it forms long and slender crystals, which, during cooling, form triangular branches around a central point that looks like a bright silver star. Alchemists named this peculiar signature of antimony after Regulus, the brilliant double star at the heart of the constellation Leo. The name is derived from the Latin regulus, meaning lesser king. The regulus of antimony combines readily with gold.

Newton believed that the spirit of the Black Dragon of antimony was purified and released during the creation of its regulus. He felt the consciousness of the alchemist played an important role in capturing this powerful presence hidden in the black metal. “On a clear, uncloudy, and windless day, the regulus will become starred quite easily when you’re ready and sufficiently skilled in the process,” he wrote, “The clear weather helps considerably, but more so does the bond between the matters and the operator.”

In the star signature of antimony, Newton found the possibility of gaining cosmic knowledge from the spirits of the metals. He went on to create the regulus of iron and regulus of silver and used them as reflecting mirrors in a telescope to peer deep into space. Finally, Newton applied thrice-distilled mercury to the silver regulus to obtain the most perfect reflecting mirror ever used in telescopes. Perhaps Newton’s belief that the regulus of metals could provide information about the universe was realized. About this time, he began publishing his breakthrough papers on the nature of light and gravity.

In the mid-1670s, Newton composed a long treatise entitled The Clovis (The Key), which was the culmination of years of experimentation with the regulus of antimony. He finally admitted he had transmuted antimony into the long-sought Philosophical Mercury that would make gold multiply and grow. “I know whereof I write,” Newton said, “for I have in the fire manifold vessels with gold and this Philosophical Mercury. I have such a vessel in the fire with gold thus dissolved, but extrinsically and intrinsically into a Mercury as living and mobile as any mercury found in the world. For it makes gold begin to swell, to be swollen, and to putrefy, and to spring forth into sprouts and branches, changing colors daily, the appearances of which fascinate me every day. I reckon this is a great secret in alchemy.”

The Puffers

The fascination with gold during the Middle Ages produced a new class of alchemists known as “puffers.” They were called puffers because they constantly sat next to their furnaces vigorously fanning their bellows trying to increase the heat of their fires. They were convinced that extremely hot temperatures alone could transmute the metals.

When their methods failed, the puffers resorted to trickery to produce gold. They covered pieces of real gold with dye or paint that could be easily removed by dipping them in magical elixirs that were really just acidic solutions. Using such tricks, many puffers were able to convince princes, kings, and popes to finance their endeavors, although not a few went to the gallows when they were unable to produce more gold than they consumed. A few heads of state, such as Frederick of Wurzburg, had special gilded gallows built just for hanging alchemists.

The lure of multiplying gold seduced mercenary alchemists like the puffers, who quickly degenerated into charlatans and criminals and eventually brought alchemy into disrepute. In fact, so many people claimed to be making gold that several nations feared it would upset their economies if even a few of the stories of transmutation were true. Many passed laws making the alchemical production of gold and silver unlawful.

Henry IV of England outlawed alchemy in 1404, but Henry VI started issuing licenses in alchemy in 1440. Later, laws were passed that a certain percentage of all gold coins had to use alchemical gold. All gold coins minted during the reign of Edward III are said to have been made entirely of gold produced by alchemists. Respected alchemists like Isaac Newton, Raymond Lully, and Jacque le Cor were appointed the heads of national mints for obvious reasons.

During the Renaissance, however, European royalty began to realize they didn’t need alchemists to magically multiply their coffers. They could do it themselves simply by printing paper money. The idea surfaced in the early 1700s in the court of the French prince of Orleans. Like many rulers of the time, he had employed alchemists to produce gold in hopes of paying off his debts, but he promptly dismissed all his alchemists after meeting Scottish gambler and financier John Law, who suggested the prince print worthless paper money to pay off his debts. The promissory notes, each signed by the prince, became legal tender that were traded publicly and never had to be redeemed. The idea caught on as rulers around the world realized that paper could be transmuted into any value much easier than lead into gold.

Alchemy became splintered during this period, torn asunder into the two opposing camps of the true adepts and the pseudo-alchemists. The pseudo-alchemists were the worldly puffers and other uninitiated amateurs who relied on physical methods and trickery to produce material gold. The true adepts were a select fraternity of initiated alchemists to whom the laboratory work was a part of a comprehensive philosophical and spiritual system based on the teachings of Thoth and Hermes. The experiments of the true adepts to transmute metals were carried out as a demonstration of Hermetic principles and not just as a way of accumulating wealth.

Thanks in part to the proliferation of pseudo-alchemists in the Middle Ages, the Hermetic principles and spiritual significance of alchemy were shoved into the background. True adepts suffered along with the puffers in the degeneration of their craft and loss of standing in society. By the late sixteenth century, alchemy was in philosophic disarray and widely regarded as the most confused and difficult system of thought in history. French historian Albert Poisson summed up the situation in his History of Alchemy (1891): “Scholasticism with its infinitely subtle argumentation, theology with its ambiguous phraseology, astrology so vast and so complicated, are only child’s play in comparison with the difficulties of alchemy.”

The Rise of Chemistry

Modern chemistry actually arose from the purely physical work of the puffers and originated from an entirely different tradition than the Hermetic teachings passed down from ancient Egypt. Puffers were called chemists in popular speech in the Middle Ages, and by the Renaissance, chemistry had become a separate discipline from alchemy. Historians sometimes use the term “chymistry” to refer to the short period in the seventeenth century when alchemy and chemistry were not sharply separated from each other. But by the eighteenth century, alchemy and chemistry had gone their separate ways.

The trend was obvious as early as 1595, when Andreas Libavius published a book called Alchymia, a guide for chemists that separated the laboratory aspects of alchemy from its spiritual principles. Then Jan Bantista van Helmont (1577–1644) began working with gases as separate substances and not the single Element of Air. Johann Glauber (1604–1668) continued the trend by treating metals, acids, and salts as everyday things without spiritual or archetypal properties. These “chymists” shared the alchemist’s belief in transmutation but no longer felt bound by the Hermetic principles of their craft. A new system that focused only on physical reality slowly supplanted traditional alchemy.

The demise of alchemy began in 1661 with the publication of Robert Boyle’s practical laboratory guide The Sceptical Chymist. Boyle was both an alchemist and chemist who discovered the mathematical laws that govern the formation of gases. That may not sound earth-shaking to us, but Boyle was actually abandoning alchemy with his idea that mathematical laws and not spiritual principles govern the creation of matter.

Antoine Lavoisier, who developed the mathematical theory of conservation of mass in chemical reactions in 1783, is considered the father of modern chemistry. In 1787, he published his definitive work Elements of Chemistry and, two years later, Characteristics of Chemicals. In these books, he abandoned any references to alchemical principles and focused only on the physical properties of substances.

The absolute end to any spiritual component in chemistry came with the publication of John Dalton’s Atomic Theory in 1803. His billiard-ball theory of matter ignored the elegant crystallization of energy idea that was part of the alchemical viewpoint. This crystalline idea would not return until the rise of quantum physics in the twentieth century (see Chapter 23).

In many ways, chemistry can be thought of as materialistic alchemy. The last gasp of alchemy in Europe came when the puffers’ methods became mainstream in the eigh-teenth century with the commercialization of chemistry. Alchemy had degenerated from a practical path of spiritual perfection into a competitive race for commercial products to put up for sale. New drugs and miraculous chemicals had replaced the lure of gold, but the basic techniques and motivation of puffers and chemists were the same.

The practice of alchemy could not survive in the new atmosphere of materialism and industrialization, where the work was solely on the physical level. The key to success in the ancient art had always been the ability to work on all levels of reality—not only on the physical but on the psychological and spiritual levels as well. The alchemist’s workshop was “between worlds,” and things that took place there could never be reproduced in a chemist’s lab.

The Least You Need to Know

• Many alchemists of the Middle Ages had difficulty understanding the alchemy manuscripts being translated for the first time into Latin and focused mainly on making gold.

• The Church persecuted alchemists because of their heretical spiritual beliefs and disregard of Church dogma.

• Those in power employed alchemists to make gold and often executed those who failed.

• Alchemists split into two factions during the Middle Ages, true adepts who followed the ancient Hermetic teachings and the materialistic puffers or pseudo-alchemists.

• Modern chemistry was born of the practical yet spiritually incomplete laboratory work of the puffers.