Introduction to Alchemy: Historical Origins and Principles

The origin of Alchemy is difficult to trace in the meanders of history. The first documents historically recognized as alchemical – momentarily leaving aside Indian and Chinese alchemy – date back to Egypt during the Ptolemaic period and are attributed to figures like Maria the Jewess, Ostanes, and Comarius, but they refer to even earlier writings attributed by tradition to Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus. The Arabs inherited and cultivated this Egyptian legacy, particularly the Alexandrian one, developing it further with figures like Geber. Around the 12th and 13th centuries, alchemy then spread to Europe, and it was precisely during this period that the first alchemical texts began circulating in major European centers. Historians are still much debated about how this diffusion of alchemical texts occurred. Certainly many manuscripts arrived with the crusades, while others claim that alchemy was an art practiced by the inner circle of the Order of the Temple. This historians' assertion is based on a book of uncertain authenticity: "The Book of Baptism by Fire," which was said to reveal the secret statutes of the Temple's inner circle, containing an article prescribing "not to pass imperfect metals [...] into true silver and true gold, except in houses where all brothers have been chosen." Therefore, some want to see in the origin of European alchemy's diffusion an important role played, more or less directly, by the Knights Templar. Whatever the origin of this diffusion, around the 12th and 13th centuries the first movements of alchemy scholars were created, which established themselves increasingly in the 14th and 15th centuries with the fall of knightly orders, until exploding in the 16th and 17th centuries when the number of alchemists multiplied immeasurably, becoming a kind of social phenomenon where it was said that anyone could have a laboratory to operate and attempt transmutations. The world of alchemy is thus a vast sea in which currents of every type navigate through the centuries, and in which characters of every social, cultural, and religious extraction swim. In it we find Arabs and Christians, poor and rich, travelers and sedentary people, those persecuted by the church for heresy like Arnold of Villanova and Roger Bacon alongside canonized saints like Albert the Great or Saint Thomas Aquinas, figures rejected by official science like Paracelsus or Giovanni Battista della Porta next to figures celebrated by it like Sir Isaac Newton, who dedicated most of his life to alchemy. From these premises, it's clear that it's very difficult to treat this subject from a historical point of view in a unified manner, gathering under one ideal roof all these heterogeneous characters. What we will do in this fascicle is therefore provide an excursus of alchemical practice, according to the interpretation today most commonly accepted by historians and scholars of the subject, referring to those figures who were its major exponents, universally accepted among the alchemists themselves, considered of unquestioned authority, finding and reporting their common points, seeking to understand their mentality to then outline a kind of simplified alchemical iter. In short, what we will do is provide a first approach to this subject that appears quite difficult, but whose essential lines are actually relatively simple. Let's begin this process by trying to find a first definition of the very subject we want to treat, that is, alchemy. A fairly general definition is provided by a well-known alchemist: Roger Bacon: "Alchemy is the science that teaches to prepare a certain medicine or elixir that projected on imperfect metals communicates to them perfection at the very moment they are obtained" (Mirror of Alchemy). Defining alchemy therefore seems quite easy, the definition given by this alchemist agrees with the definition passed down by popular culture: alchemy aims to find a certain medicine or philosopher's stone that allows transforming all base and imperfect metals like lead into purest gold. However, this definition gives rise to a first misunderstanding which, among other things, is what misled most alchemy historians before the new current of modern historians decided to use an approach more akin to the alchemical mentality. Reading this definition with our mentality, in fact, we might be led to believe alchemy as a picturesque prehistory of our modern chemistry, based on Cartesian presuppositions, in which strange and characteristic characters aim to obtain, through chemical transformations completely independent of the experimenter, a gold ingot starting from a lead ingot. This way of understanding Alchemy actually constitutes, as modern historians of Alchemy have demonstrated, a profound anachronism that derives from interpreting with our post-Enlightenment mentality phrases and concepts that were formulated with other conceptual presuppositions. All Alchemists, in fact, agree in placing as the founding basis of Alchemy a law, called the Law of Analogy. The Law of Analogy says that chemical elements are nothing other than externalized and individualized expressions of subtle forces of spiritual character partially present in the alchemist himself. Starting from this law, therefore, it becomes clear that in alchemical practice every operation of exterior chemistry was associated and subordinated to a more important and vital realization of interior and spiritual character that conditioned, for better or worse, the chemical operation correlated to it. Pernety, in fact, distinguishes two types of chemistry: hermetic chemistry which "takes as matter the Principles (these subtle forces of spiritual character) and acts on them following the ways of nature itself" in contrast to vulgar chemistry which "takes mixtures already brought to completion and operates on them with extrinsic decompositions, which destroy natures and result in monsters" (Egyptian and Greek Fables). Therefore, the mode of action of