How Mary the Jewess Helped Your Hollandaise

third comes the one as the fourth. That is the most famous axiom attributed to Marry the Jewess, who it said, is the first known alchemist of the Western world. She is known to have invented processes and apparatus that went on to be used for centuries, both in and out of the scientific community. In fact, one of them, as Maria hinted at, you may have used in your home kitchen.

Mary lived some time during the first through maybe the third century CE, which is a pretty wide delta, But I mean, what can you do when your timeline is roughly two thousand years ago. She lived in Egypt, and at the time of Mary's life, the region was a province of the Roman Empire. Alchemy can be described as a combination of ancient chemical science and speculative philosophy. We've been talking about it all season, and those who practiced

it had a few goals in mind. The popular image of an alchemist was an individual who wanted to transmute base metals into silver or gold, and of course, as we've discussed, they also wanted to discover the key to immortality. Perhaps in your imagination there is a cauldron or maybe a room full of glass vials and overflowing bookshelves, and for some alchemists that we've talked about, that could be accurate. What we know is that along the way, many made

some significant contributions to science. For example, among many other things, alchemy gave us a better understanding of metallurgy and how to extract metals from ores. It also gave us things like European porcelain, and it laid out the basis for the science of toxicology. Really, alchemy laid the groundwork for modern day chemistry and medicine. But let's go into reverse for just a moment. Alchemy came to the West. It

wasn't started in the West. In China. There is a long history, and I mean thousands of years of Daoist monks, using alchemy to focus on the external world as well as the inner force of the body. Indian alchemists were focused on transmuting gold and prolonging life, long before the Western world knew anything about these sorts of practices. It's believed that Western alchemy practices began probably around b C.

At the time of Egyptian king Hermes Trismegistus. As a side note, that is what he was named by the Greeks, but he was also known as Talk the Egyptians, and that is how he is deified. Egyptian alchemists presented their first document, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes. That's a tablet which was said to contain the secret of the prima material. The prima material was considered to be the matter that

was the foundation for everything else. By the sixteenth century in Europe, alchemists naturally kind of fell into two categories. Those who were focused on chemical processes and apparatus, which is more like the precursor to today's chemistry, and those who were focused on the metaphysical side of the practice. And this was the group who went looking for gold and immortality. Unlike the alchemists we've been talking about who have been perhaps stereotypically trying to turn lead into gold.

It doesn't appear that Mary was much interested in discovering the philosopher's stone that had eluded alchemists everywhere. Perhaps she was on the side, but no one seems to have left any evidence that that was the case. Mary, it seems, was most interesting it in practical chemical processes. Think of her work as a a mix of today's analytical chemistry

and chemical engineering, or maybe like today's industrial chemists. None of Mary's own writings have survived over the last two thousand years, but quotations credited to her have been found in hermetic writings, most notably the work The Dialogue of Mary and Eros on the Magistry of Hermes, written by an anonymous Christian philosopher. In it is also vocabulary that would eventually become part of the language of alchemists, including lyukosis,

which is whitening, and xanthosis, which is yellowing. The famous tenth century index of Arabic books called the Katab Alphorist, compiled by ib And al Nadeem, site Mary too as one of the fifty two most famous alchemists. But let's note that these works were written between eight and ten centuries after she lived. It in on Idem also highlights that Mary was able to prepare cop put more to him.

Cop up more to him could be considered just a useless substance leftover from a chemical operation, but alchemists didn't overlook it. It's also a type of purple hematite iron oxide pigment. You may know it as cardinal purple, and it's often used in oil paints and various dyes. There are probably several reasons we could get into why this discovery was notable, but let's talk about the Roman citizen ry to your everyday person. This discovery wasn't just about

making iron oxide. The pigment made it way easier to get a purple shirt or purple paint. Tirian purple, which was known as Phoenician red or Imperial purple, was expensive, and it's because it took a substantial amount of labor to produce. Tirian purple is a biological pigment and it's made by extracting the dye from tens of thousands of rock snails. One Roman gown it was said needed ten

thousands shells to be dyed in this manner. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor, and when we return we will talk about distillation and how Mary's inventions change the alchemy landscape. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about who Zosimos of Panopolis is and why he's important to Mary's story. So we catch up with Mary's story when she appeared in the works of the writer Zosimos of Panopolis, also known by the Latin name

Zosimos Alchemista, which means Zosimos the Alchemist. He was an Egyptian alchemist and gnostic mystic who wrote more than a century after Mary's death. It's believed that while his information is pretty strong, he likely misidentified Mary as a quote sister of Moses, and she's still often identified as Miriam the pro Fit, the sister of Moses. Miriam the Prophet is a biblical woman who is also known as Mary the Jewess, as well as Maria the Hebrew, Maria the Sage,

and Mary the Prophetess. The Arabs know her as the daughter of Plato. She was likely considered Mary or Maria the Wise. Zes Simos was not Mary's contemporary, and when he mentions her, he often points out that she was quote one of the sages and had lived in times past. He writes of her work, her experiments and inventions, that we don't get a picture of her life outside of her work through his writings, because he was really all business.

It was believed that he may have based his text on Furnaces and Apparatus is on a text written by Mary herself, and he also quotes her extensively in his work The Coloring of Precious Stones. Writing at the beginning of the fourth century, CE, Zosimos gives us some of the oldest surviving texts on alchemy, and his works include Agatha demon an alchemist in Late Roman Egypt, Pseudo Democritis, author of the four Books of Pseudo Democritis, and Hermes Transmegistus,

whom we mentioned earlier. He provided one of the first definitions of alchemy as the study of quote, the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits

from bodies, and bonding the spirits within bodies. Zosimos is considered one of the most important sources of the history of Egyptian alchemy, and he's also included in a compendium of alchemical writings that was probably put together during the Byzantine Empire in the seventh or eighth century C. There are recordings of Mary's story in addition to Zassimos's writings at the Fannius, who was the Bishop of Salamis, mentions Mary as Mary the Jewis and two of his works,

Great Questions and Small Questions. Mary's legacy was also translated into Arabic writings, where she was written as a contemporary of Jesus Christ, which would put her life at the very beginning of the first century C. It was also suggested she was a contemporary of Austin's, a Persian brother in law of Xerxes, who lived as long ago as roughly five hundred BC. So even with mentions of contemporaries, there's enough contradiction that it's tricky to pin down her

exact position on a timeline. Some of the experiments attributed to Mary and her inventions continue to be used in modern day chemistry. According to William Newman, professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, we quote the earliest real distillation apparatus can be identified as something like a still found in the works of

Zosimos of Panopolis. He attributes these discoveries to marry the Hebrew, and once you have good distillation apparatus, lots of things are possible, Newman continues, quote Mysteriously, for some reason, nobody he actually tried to isolate ethel alcohol out of wine or beer until much later. But when they did, they had to have decent stills, and he's talking about Mary's stills. The idea of distillation is described in the Emerald Tablet

as quote. It rises from Earth to heaven and descends again to Earth, thereby combining within itself the powers of both the above and the below. Distillation was one of the key stages in the process of transmitting base metals into gold, and you had to know how to distill. You had to, and it was Mary who invented and described the alchemical apparatus and processes to do so. It's like the most poetic description of distillation. You had to

You had to rises from Earth to heaven. We are going to take a break for a word from our sponsor, and when we come back, we're going to talk about Mary's relationship to Carl Jung. Welcome back to criminalia. We're going to talk now about three of Mary's inventions, including one that you probably have used in your home. These inventions,

let's talk about the apparatus called the Kara tacas. First, Kara Takas copied the process of distillation that naturally occurs in nature, and the device went on to become a staple in chemistry lambs. The apparatus is made of an air tight container with a sheet of copper on its upper side, and it's used to heat substances to collect vapors. If you've ever listened to people talk about distillation of spirits, that all sounds pretty familiar. When it is used, it's

sealed connections form a tight vacuum. As part of her work, Mary studied sulfur compounds and discovered what we call Mary's black. Mary's black is a black sulfide coating on metal, and it's produced during the process of katakas. Mary's device was later modified by a German agricultural chemist named Franz von Sockslet in eighteen seventy nine, and the extractor today still bears his name, the Sockslet extractor. The Socolet extractor apparatus

is pretty similar to what Mary had made herself. It's a glass reservoir set between a lower flask at the bottom and a condenser at the top. It's one of the most popular techniques for extraction of certain components called semi volatile organic compounds from solid materials, and the solvent that's used in the process removes any insoluble impurities that were in the original material. Of note. In addition to the extractor, Von Sockslet had a hand in nutritional science

as well. Louis Pasteur, for instance, we all know, invented the food preparation process known as pasteurization that was patented in eighteen sixty five to fight the quote diseases of wine. It was Franz in eight six who proposed that the process applied to milk and other beverages. Mary's also credited as having invented an apparatus called the triba coast, which is kind of a three armed apparatus that was also

used for distillation. It's actually not one clear whether Mary did or did not invent the triba coast, but Zosimos credits the first description of this instrument to her. In her writings quoted by him, she recommends that the copper or bronze used to make the tubes on the Treba coast should be the thickness of a frying pan, and that the joints between the tubes and the steelheads should

be sealed with flour paste. That's pretty specific and that's actually still used today, and this is the one that most of us are going to recognize. Mary also invented a water bath technique known as the beam Marie that

literally is French for Marie's bath. This apparatus is basically a heated but not boiling water bath, and it works similarly to a double boiler, which basically is just two pots, so a larger one with warm water in it and a smaller, more shallow pot that nestles inside that larger one. The setup applies indirect heat through steam, and it can maintain a base that's in a liquid state or reliquefy

a solidified base. In the laboratory, it can be used to incubate samples at a constant temperature over a period of time. This water bath method has also been the preferred heat source instead of an open flame for heating flammable chemicals. It's a way to prevent a fire from starting. In the culinary world, still today, it's used to make cheesecakes and set custards such as crambrew let, or plan.

It's a preferred method because the steam that develops keeps the surface of the food from drying out as it bakes. Need to melt chocolate, The bomb Marie is for you because this technique prevents the fat from separating and liquefying honey warming high fat sauces like hollandaise. There's really no end to the uses for the bombrie and how it can make like a perfectly smooth thing out of something that was one solid. It is also used across the food service industry is a way to keep dishes warm

for an extended period of time. Because she did live so long ago, we did see stories about Mary that may or may not be factual. For instance, though we weren't able to dig deeply into this because we're not experts in ancient alchemy. Yet we did read about the idea that Mary believed medals had different genders, and by joining genders together you could create a new entity, a new substance. There is a quote that's attributed to her that goes join the male and the female, and you

will find what is salt. The idea is interesting, but whether or not Mary believed that, we really can't be sure. It's also believed that Mary may have founded an academy where she taught alchemy in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Could be so, but again this is one that's difficult to verify. Actually, there are more than a few problems that we ran into when trying to look at Mary's life and peace at altogether. We've talked about some of them. But Mary, it said, was also the one who discovered

hydrochloric acid, but that is pretty hotly debated. It may have been discovered by Jabir ibben Hyan in d or perhaps it should be credited to William Prout in four. And then there's George. Sincellis George, who was a Byzantine chronicler of the eighth century that places his work minimum five centuries after Mary's life, described Mary as a teacher of the philosopher Democritis, whom she hadn't met in Memphis, Egypt,

during the time of Pericles. Problem with all that is that the time of Pericles is a period between roughly four sixty one to four nine b c eat. That means in something like six hundred years before the earliest point where we know that Mary could have been alive. So teasing out her life outside of Alchemy can be really something of a challenge. That quote Holly shared at the beginning of the episode really does live on for Mary. And let's go back to how important that quote has

remained over the centuries. It was one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one

as the fourth. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, has said that Mary's rule runs like a light motif throughout almost the whole of the lifetime of Alchemy, extending over more than seventeen centuries, and according to him, the quote can be seen as a metaphor for his idea of the principle of individual ation, the central process of human development, when an individual achieves

their sense of individuality. A very merry thing, it seems, Ali, But you got going on in the caldron today for MARYE. You know some things, some things. This one is a fruity little number, and I am calling it Mary's Black because it's black. This is a super simple one and you can serve it a couple of different ways. I initially did one that's like a very basic poured into a chilled cocktail glass. It is one ounce of blue curasou, one ounce of strawberry vodka, two ounces of pomegranate juice,

and a couple of dashes of floral bidders. The floral bidders really changed the flavor profile, so just know if you skip it, you'll have a slightly different drink. Now this I just shook it all and poured it into a glass together. It's got a very sharp flavor because of that pomegranate juice. So if that altogether is too harsh for a sip, you can just pour club soda on top an ounce or two and soften it up a little around the edges. You can also soften it

with ginger ale. If you want, whatever you want. It's your it's your alchemy. It's fine, it's your drink, it's your cauldron. But it's it's super easy to put together, and I wanted to do something that included at least two different alcohols. Since we owe Mary a little bit of a debt, of gratitude for the cauldron existing in the first place. This one is very easy to do as a mocktail. Keep the pomegranate juice. Obviously, if you recall,

I don't remember what season it was. There was another cocktail where I mentioned that you can get non alcoholic blue curasau in most grocery stores. It's like over with the syrups, like with the simple syrups and stuff. But yeah, you can use that. And then in lieu of strawberry vodka. You have some options here, right. You can do if you want to blend some strawberries to the point where they get pretty juicy, you could do that and put it in. You could also just slice some and put

it in. You could muddle them. Basically, just get some fresh strawberries and add them to this whole business. And then you know, bitter's optional, but yes, same same basic thing. The strawberry is add such a nice thing. I originally did this with regular vodka and it just wasn't quite right. You need that strawberry flavor to make the other two play together nicely. It's like builds a bridge between the citrus and the pomegranate. It is really my kind of

drink because I'm the cranberry tart, cherry pomegranate. I'm like, let me yeah, And it's a black drink, which I think we've only had. We had we'd have a couple we've had. I think we've had to and one of them we did with charcoal, and I always liked doing them with not charcoal. We did one not too long ago that involved cola in the mix to turn it dart. Yeah. I thought about also trying it with gin. There's a purple gin that I like to use. Yeah. Nope, Oh

it didn't. It just wasn't. It wasn't horrible. It just tasted weird. It was like I couldn't even describe what was wrong about it. I didn't dance on the palette. I understand why angels dancing on the tip of my tongue when I drink this. There you go. So yes, that is Mary's Black, and hopefully if you make it, you find that it does dance on your palette. We are so grateful for the time you spend with us.

So thank you for being with us and hearing Mary's story this week, and we hope you will come right back next week because we have a little more alchemy to discuss. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.