¶ Intro / Opening
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are here to enchant you in this very special episode Stuff You Should Know, which we'd like to also call the Facts of Life too.
Yeah. I mean alchemy. I think a very appropriate topic, taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic.
Oh yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in that sense. Where were you talking about a different podcast?
No, no, no, let's talk about what but I aim to accomplish today.
Hey man, not only do you aim it, you are aimed for it. You hit it right on the head.
Yeah, alchemy, Baby, let's do it.
What is the attempted a compliment? Yeah? Well yeah, when we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least, and I would assume most people kind of conjures images of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars
¶ Introduction to Alchemy
and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure, he's lit by candlelight, he's in a strange little laboratory. He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create some sort of magical potion or do something like that. Right, if you know a little more about it, maybe you think of Charlatans who trick people into investing in their alchemical schemes of turning you know, lead into gold. But it turns out that there's a lot more to it than I ever realized, and the people involved were.
Not.
They were a lot more interesting and a lot less dumb and fraudulent than history is kind of cast the mass.
Yeah. I always thought of alchemy as just from what I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something like a boring metal into gold, like you were talking about. But it is I think interesting that modern science now looks back and say and says, hey, you know what I mean. Sure, it was a lot of bunk and bs involved, but some of the foundations of modern chemistry were there, even though that wasn't their intention. Really.
Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork for the scientific method.
Yeah.
Wow. What's cool about it too, is that, you know, the Europeans, the medieval European you know, monks and sages and scholars are the ones you typically think of at least in the West when you think of alchemy, but it's a I don't want to say worldwide, but it really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for
immortality and glory. Yeah, tots, So we should say that you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy the Europeans as you think of it, all the way back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for the Western tradition, but Egypt even seemed to get it from other places. Specifically, even back before Egypt, it seems like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially gave alchemy like its birth.
Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know, the art or something like that, or maybe maybe you know, some other word that they had that meant, you know, some sort of transformation might be taking place. The word alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually French and English and medieval times. But yeah, I think it's interesting that it followed that route, and it's also not surprising that, you know, China was one of the
¶ Global Roots of Alchemy
first to get involved in something like this, because I feel like any time we're talking about ancient practices, China always seems to be sort of leading the way in one way or the other.
Indeed, one of the reasons China was so heavy into it was because the early alchemical like pursuits or purposes were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they cared so much about that was because the country had a huge Taoist population, and Daoism is very much interested in achieving immortality one way or another. And so China and it's alchemists put together mercury, arsenic sulfur and said, here,
drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot of people died from drinking those things, right, I mean, you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know, just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and walk off, like time to get to work, you know.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there were some people that suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know, on the other side, and this is sort of the the plus and minus side of some of these experiments, they also whether or not purposefully or not, gave us things we still use today, like you know, potassium nitrate. So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride, which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer like for farms and stuff like that.
Mh. So, yeah, there were that is kind of a tradition in alchemy of you know, they're trying to do something else, but they still found useful stuff that we
still you know, make her use today. In China's whole jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing, and so the pursuit of you know, immortality through special elixir just kind of became a moot point or a moot point. Sorry.
Uh yeah, I mean I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah, maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we should set our goals a little more.
Reasonably, right, let's just pretend like we don't care about living forever.
As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality, and they were also kind of like post Buddhists China, like let's try and promote health, let's try and cure some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold. But you know, you'll see that kind of popping up.
That's why I think a lot of people the first thing they think of is turning something into gold, because that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists, because gold was so revered either as like, you know, the best metal, Go ahead and make your white snake joke.
I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold wearing a T shirt that was the best metal.
Yeah, like the Devil's hands, the devil horns fingers, and you know, also thinking like you know, perhaps like drinking something that maybe liquid gold but it's really not liquid gold that just turned the color gold could make you healthier or maybe live forever.
Yeah, And in India they were trying to make gold nut to get rich, but because like you were saying, they were trying to balance health, restore health, like it was just associated with healthy living essentially gold was.
Yeah.
So then we reached the Mediterranean, that was another ancient place and by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in three twenty two BCE. They found pretty quickly that the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of alchemy for a while, and the Greek said, Hey, I like your style. Let's mix together our philosophy and our understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy, and let's produce something really great that medieval monks are really going to go nuts for.
Yeah, And I think this is like, I know we're going to say this quite a bit, but I think they were these early scientists were taking a stab at something, you know, like sure there were Charlatans and stuff like that, but this was so early on in the game, like science is brand new, and they were like, hey, let's try this thing and see if it works out. And
¶ Greco-Egyptian Foundations
maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't expect them to either. So like, I don't know, I feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind of tried to shine a little bit of light on some of this stuff. Is like, hey, they were doing their best back then, trying to get trying to get involved in science at least, right.
At least they were doing something you lazy sad.
Yeah, exactly. I mean this is when the first books on it came out. That was one called The Translation is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos of Mende, and this is around two hundred BCE. A lot of this was again about making you know, valuable metals like gold and silver. But again it was the first kind of preserved writing that we have on this.
Yeah, right, no, for sure. And he was also somebody who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and the processes, which would come to be very rare. As alchemy developed, it became much more secretive. But this Greco Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this this specific kind of alchemy it's called Hellenistic alchemy that
laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. One of the other big things that came out of it, or another indicator of how important it was is there was this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists, the monks. His name was Hermes Trists Megistos. Just a great name, not a good hotel check in name, but it's a it's a great name.
Regardless how many times. Are you gonna hear that?
Right? And you would say it just like that too, like real uncertain and unsteady like Hermes. I think. So it was a combination, a straight up combination of Thoth or Toth I think both the Egyptian god who invented writing, the one with the ibis bird head, yeah, and Hermi's the Greek messenger of the gods. Like this was a complete syncret syncretization of those two, and later medieval monks would describe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermi's.
T Yeah, Hermi's t that's a that's a better check in named by far? Is that t acer or t ee?
I think it means like Hermi's third. The best I think is what tris megistos translates to.
All right, that's pretty good.
And this is this is one of those episodes to chuck where when we say words we might accidentally cause somebody to go poof and write something either appears or disappears, So everybody'd be prepared for something to vanish.
Yeah, I agree. Uh, And no one knew it that, you know, Like when you look back on stuff like this, it's kind of hard to parse out like who was who was first, who was influencing who is sort of spread around the world. There's is a theory that India's belief system was basically just sort of brought over as a maybe not as a book, but you know, brought over wholesale from proto Arians in Central Asia, and they were in the area between four and five thousand years ago.
So it's you know, I don't know if there's a lot to be gained from sort of debating who was coming up with what first, you know.
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean it doesn't really matter. It's those historians. They're kind of fixated around that kind of thing. But you know, it is interesting to wonder, like where culture came from because so much of it influences so much else. It's not just in alchemy but in all things basically. But you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of alchemy is kind of like based on, Like this guy was the guy he's like, here's how it's done, and
this is the ground rules for alchemy. Hey, everybody, his name was those the most of Panopolists, and those of the most of Panopolists wrote something like twenty eight books on alchemy. And for a while they're like, we've only got a couple of letters of this guy, but we knew he was brilliant. Apparently they've been finding his stuff all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't realize they had it before. But a lot of his writings have recently been rediscovered.
Yeah, and his stuff. He's another one of those that was pretty detailed in his writing and to have like stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing. He was because he was an alchemist obviously transforming metals or you know, trying to transform metals. But he, like I said, he
¶ Zosimos and Early Experiments
was pretty specific. He would have write ups on like exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he was using. A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe craft work, not the band, but you know crafting and like like a bedazzle, yeah, like a dazzler or perfume making.
And he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named Maria, and he was like, you know a lot, I've taken a lot of her methods and a lot of her methods also transferred over to early methods of cooking, like you know, French and Italian cooking methods.
Yeah, like a water bath, a bomb Marie or a bonyo Maria is you know, like you know when you melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan that has water in it. Yeah, so you don't scorch it, right exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria who has lost a history aside from Zozimosa Panopolis's writings, but she apparently taught him.
Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot of this stuff to not make gold from lead.
Yeah. I mean he definitely came up with some processes that he figured out himself. And like you said, these people were taking a stab at it. They were like, what happens if I do this, and what happens if I if I try that same thing with a different metal or a different powder or something like that. So they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation that would lead to what we understand it as a science. Those of most was doing this like he was one
of the first to do this. I also saw a definition. I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not. But he had an explanation or a definition of what alchemy is. He said it was the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirit from bodies, and bonding the spirits within bodies. And what are you saying, Like, if you stop and think
about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible. Yeah, He's saying. Alchemy is the study of all the things we've observed about the world around us, trying to figure out how that stuff works, Like how does a soul come into a body and become attached to it, how does it leave it after death? What's the deal with water? That kind of stuff. So like it was just them seeking to apply, essentially a proto scientific understanding of the world as they understood.
It, Like what happens if I distilled this thing down to its base form or create you know, you're gonna hear a lot of talk about vapors, like you know, boil something or heat something to create a vapor and then smash it together with this thing. And now I've just learned you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe, but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes properties of both materials if I combine these two things.
And while they may not have understood what the heck that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what they were doing was this right exactly.
Yeah, So this whole jam that was laid down by Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind of combine their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world, which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about you know, what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air, the four elements, that was the understanding of the world that they were working. They were trying to figure things
out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution to alchemy early on, which is science would later kind of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset, especially considering that Democritis, who was around around the same time as Aristotle, remember him, he was the one who's like, everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going to use the word Adams yet.
Right exactly. Good place for a break, yeah, I think so, all right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the move into Europe. Right after this.
Okay, Chuck. So things were just kind of hanging around from you know, three hundreds BCE, where the Egyptians and the Greeks that kind of come together and created that version of alchemy, and eventually the Arab world started to rise and it started to go over here and go over there, and wherever it went, it kind of took this and that from each culture that it found interesting.
And one of the things that they did, they showed up in Egypt and they said, Hey, I like this alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning that took place around this time in the Arab world.
Yeah, and you know, logging stuff describing stuff that would later on again, you know, lay the foundation for legit chemists of the future. And one of their theories was that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically, you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture, and combining these different ways are going to have different outcomes.
Like to produce those vapors, you're going to have cold water basically, and combine that with some sort of hot moist air to create a vapor, and they would you know, mix these things together and they would combine it with mercury or sulfur or something like that and trying to make gold once again, pray.
I think it's called christiopoia.
Yeah, that's the technical term I think for trying to make gold.
Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big, big names. There are a few big names, but two that still made it all the way through history. Rosie's who's known as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time. He was an alchemist. A contemporary I believe of his named Jabir. He was well known as an early scientist.
Some people call him the father of chemistry. And these guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't just throw a handful of powder, something like, you know, do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time. Just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution too, was that they took a lot of these ancient texts, translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated into Latin, which is when things started to spread like
wildfire throughout Europe. In like the twelfth century.
Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is the beginning in about the twelfth century when it moved into Europe. And this was the time when Europe was shifting, you know, to a university sort of a more academic way of looking at things and away from the monasteries who were I guess some of the more early you know,
science minded people. Yeah, and Christian scholars at the time in Europe, they started to become a little more open to say, like, hey, maybe we should you know, look to other texts, ancient texts, even look from other cultures to try and see if we can learn something from them. And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid, sulfuoric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs.
And this is where you'll hear more about things like you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, Philosopher's Stone, which we'll get into and stuff like that.
Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it, I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came from the Crusades. Europe just showed up and was like, give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. Yeah, you know, that would be my guess. But yeah, around this time, so I read that the European alchemists, following this tradition believed that in the ancient world they had already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just
sounds so cool. Make a really cool like title for
¶ Arabic Alchemy's Influence
a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book or something. You know, are you making it Philosopher's Stone? No, I think it's just kind of like it's just fit naturally. You know.
Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book, Sorcerer's Stone. Okay, that's why asked if you were joking.
Not the Sorcerer's Stone. It's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it.
No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the Philosopher's Stone.
What a rip off. Okay, Well, we're talking about the philosopher's stone, and that was a term for this substance that supposedly was all over the place, But we just didn't recognize the magical properties of it that you could turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever. The perfect version of that thing was because that was the thing.
Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal, and all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever, are we we're seeing them in the process of moving naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. What they were trying to do is figure out how those processes worked so they could speed it up right, yeah, and do it. Do it. But like that's where they got the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold. That's what they were trying to do, was move lead
into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And the way that they thought you could do that was with the Philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically.
Yeah, And you mentioned earlier that they would operate a little more in secrecy later on, and this is kind of where we are now now. They would operate, maybe they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but it was kind of shrouded in secrecy. A lot of times they would use like codes and symbols and metaphor and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And there were a handful of European alchemists that you know, we should probably go over a little bit. The first
of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He was a German philosopher in the thirteenth century, and he was a friar, a Dominican friar, and he studied the work of these Arab alchemists, because like we said, it kind of came over from there, and the ancient Greek philosophers, which you know, as we mentioned, kind of did those two world of philosophy and science or this kind of science.
Right right. So there was another guy. I mean, there's a bunch that we could talk about, John d, Arthur d Roger Bacon. They were all alchemists who contributed to our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of was jonder Roque Telaude de jonder Roche Telaude. I think
¶ European Quest for Gold
I got it that second time.
That sounds good to me. But German is my non specialty.
He was, he was he was trying to figure out chris poia chrysal poya, which is again transforming things into gold. The thing is and this is a really good example or way to point this out. He was a Franciscan monk. He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty. So many times the alchemists are like, all they wanted to do is like just make gold and be rich. They were just greedy magicians essentially. No, it's not the case.
They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted to find the elixir of life to end disease. Like, they had really big, big goals that they were trying to reach. And he was a good example that he wanted to give the Catholic Church the ability to make gold so that they could fund themselves better.
Essentially, yeah, I took a vowed poverty in my twenties. I think you did too.
Oh yeah, yeah, it was forced on me.
So one of the things that he did too, which is pretty interesting, I think, is he got talked about sort of distilling things down to their purest form. He did that with booze, and he's distilled it down to aqua. How would you pronounce that? Vita aqua vite, aqua vite. He called it the fifth essence of wine or the quinta essentia. And this goes back to Aristotle again, this idea that you know it's something different than those four
classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot he pronounced his name, but let's just call him Doctor R. Said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down to its purest form of alcohol and I put meat in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like it is. It stops this decay. And he wasn't. He didn't think he had tapped into a new way to preserve meat. He thought like, hey, maybe this stops things from aging, and maybe this alcohol is a cure.
All right. He went on to create the my tie. Oh nice, another one. This guy's my favorite. Paracelsus. His real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolis Bombastis von Hoheim, but we'll call him phil Hohenheim Hohenheim. Yeah, well, he went by Paracelsus. I think we talked about him in our poison episode or there was some episode, because he was famous for saying the dose makes the poison like you can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you,
which is a really important understanding at the time. But he was one of the ones who led the way of secrecy because he believe that what the alchemists were
¶ Alchemists' Noble Pursuits
doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe, and that this information was way too potent to just have out there. So he was one of the ones that led the charge in that. He also was known as questioning Galen's thousand year old idea of the four humors being the cause of disease. Paracelsus was like, no, I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe even little tiny bugs or something like that that get in your throat and then into your stomach and then
just really screwed things up down there. Yeah, that's me paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus. So he was a straight up genius. Yeah for his time. I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I'm sure they came but right back at him and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile. That's the problem. He's like, you sure, like this other stuff could be making us sick.
He's like again, with the bile.
There was also Nicholas Flamel I guess or Flammeel. I'm not sure how you would pronounce that, but I think Flamel Flamel. Okay. He is the one who was credited to discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He was just a mere bookseller in the fourteenth and I guess fifteenth centuries. And he said, I got a book. I purchased a book, and it was in a language that was so hard to translate. It took me twenty one years. But once I finally cracked that code. In that book was the
information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this is what I don't understand. He got rich, But did he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what I couldn't figure out.
No, the later alchemists, like starting around the seventeenth century, they created a legend about him, saying that he had created the Philosopher's Stone, so you know, he could turn anything into gold, and that's how he got rich.
Yeah, but how did he where? How did he get rich? I still look out because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.
No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh that's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him. I got because he really was well known. He's recorded historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly they endowed like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches that are some of them are still around today. And he was known for putting alchemical messages kind of encoded in the buildings, like on plaques or in oventories or
something like that. Yeah, so he definitely was an alchemist. He definitely was rich. But it was this legend that grew up around him that he was one of the few who actually found the Philosopher's Stone, almost his Sorcerer's stone, man see gets in there.
Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be one hundred and fourteen, but records say he was between eighty and one hundred and fourteen. So that's a pretty big gap there, a wide range. Yeah, thirty four years.
It is pretty wide, but even eighty back in the fourteen hundreds early fourteen was pretty respectable, I guess.
Yeah, agreed.
So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone. That was one thing that as far as we know, no one ever created, right, but all of the alchemists in Europe were after this trying to figure this out, while at the same time also performing all these other experiments just in case they didn't figure out how to do the Philosopher's Stone. They were figuring out how to
¶ Notable Alchemists' Discoveries
do it the hard way too. There was also another thing that they were famous for trying to create, which are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature that they wanted to create so that they could study how life begins or like Zosimos had said, you know how how the spirit bonds to the body. Like, that's the kind of thing they're trying to figure out by
creating many humans. And they had all sorts of I think it's fair to call it wacky ideas of how to create a homunculus.
I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus is fun in and of itself. But yeah, there's something called the Book of the Cow. This is an Arabic book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something to do with. And there was a recipe for a homunculus in there, which is one a Monculye, and it involved in seminating a you, which is I guess that's a female sheep, right with human sperm. Don't ask cow. I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they.
Had too many ways to do that back then.
I'm sure they had their methods, and you would have a berth and it would be some sort of shapeless form at that point, and then you need to treat it with specific stuff materials, put it in a glass container, and then it grows into a tiny person.
Yeah. I don't think that this ever worked, but they I guarantee some people tried it for sure.
Oh I bet. I mean you have to have some excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right, Oh my god.
Oh that's going to stay with me like Sorcerer's Stone Chuck. Every time I see the word you eat, it reminds me. There was this Happy Days episode where Richie was writing in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl that he liked well in a place where he knew that she was going to walk home from high school
for this. And he drew I and then the heart and then the you like a sheep, and the girl comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it and she's like, I love sheep, and he's like, it's a you, I love you. But the way that she said I love sheep just always it stuck with me, like the weird thing you said about inciminating sheep and Sorcerer's Stone will always.
Yeah with me, and it probably taught you the lesson like never put yourself out there with a girl.
That's yeah, that was definitely your line you got from Richie Cunningham. For sure.
I had forgotten completely about that, and as you started to tell that story, I completely remembered it just like flooded back to me. That's funny.
There's one other one too. This was a Brady Bunch one that I always think of whenever I think of I heart sheep when I see the word you. So we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing. There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friend stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat.
Okay, I remember this.
So happened that like a bunch of officials from the school were came over for coffee to the Brady House while the goat was there, and they had to move it from room to room and hide it, and Greg finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding in this really awkward position and the face he makes when they opened the closet doors. I can't imagine how many takes they did to get it just that perfect. But it's one of the great all time shots of seventies television.
If you ask me, did the goat was he wearing like a like a cape or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Yeah. I'm going to send you that clip because it's worth watching.
All Right, So I guess we need to take our second break, yes, and then we'll come back with more talk of seventies television right after this. All right, So
¶ The Homunculus Concept
we have talked sort of hinted at the fact that alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years, and there's a more modern sort of view of it as like that, hey, they were doing the best that can at least that's what Chuck said. And some of the foundations they laid for modern chemistry you're actually kind of valuable. And that's kind of where we're at now.
A lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate, maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened, which is also valuable. What else, oh.
Well, I mean just the very fact that these guys were carrying out experiments like before then philosophers just said like Aristotle, like this is what everything's made of, earth, wind, fire, water.
Trust me.
No one asked him exactly, No one asked him, how do you know that? Or anything like that, and he really you know, I'm not saying he was a fraud or anything, but he didn't use any scientific experimentation. It was the alchemists who started that. They were the ones who started working in the lab with specific measures of materials and then very importantly recording their results, so they
were documenting what they were finding. These are all just the basic outlines of the scientific method today.
Yeah, And I mean the word chemistry actually comes from alchemy in about the seventeen eighties, which is pretty interesting.
M hm.
And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy, doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry that can happen, Yeah, you know.
Like romantic chemistry, right, So so a rom com what they have in there, romantic chemistry. That understanding and use of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes, by almost two hundred years.
Yeah, it's a good point. And there were also some pretty major players that we you know revere as our scientific forebears that were involved in stuff like this, who maybe try to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton.
And this is like well into the eighteenth century when Isaac Newton was doing his thing, and he was like, yeah, maybe we could make gold from other materials and maybe I'm not gonna you know, I'm also into some occult and spiritual concepts, but I'm going to kind of play that down and keep that all under the table for now and it will only be discovered later.
Yeah, underneath his roughle puffy pirate shirt, he had the best metal T shirt.
On well, and people that were in charge of sort of keeping up with his story and his records they kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect his image, didn't they.
Yeah. Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe. One like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know and love is like the world's first true scientists. At the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well, like he was looking into the whole thing like you know that. Yeah,
essentially he was trying to figure it out. He apparently believed or his paper said that he thought alchemy was this ancient wisdom that God had directly given humans and that alchemists were figuring out we're learning like that this was like divine, a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially, and like like you said, his papers were kept private just to preserve his image for centuries, and then finally they started to get published and people started to understand
him a little more. And I saw a really interesting quote at some point that one of his biographers said that Isaac Newton was not the first scientists, he was the last alchemists. WHOA, Yeah, And I mean it doesn't necessarily make sense to you if you when you first hear, but it's very much like how say a bird evolved out of a dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not a true bird. The first bird was the first true bird.
And in that same way, the point they were making was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists evolved out of, but he was not that he was part alchemists too.
Yeah, it's a good point. There were, you know, even some more modern world leaders that were like, you know, these guys were trying to make gold and I know that didn't work out, but like, maybe we could try, because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold.
Maximilium the second and Rudolph the second and this was sixteenth and seventeenth century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help financially support these alchemists because you never know, maybe they can maybe they can tap into this elixir of life or get us untold amounts of gold.
Yeah. I also saw Henry the sixth not only gave some like I think fifteen or sixteen alchemists official royal licenses to produce alchemical gold, he took what they used and minted it into coins. So supposedly there was no It was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with a little bit of water and it produces some alloy. Once you clean it up. That looks a lot like gold,
but it's much lighter. There's coins out there still today to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry the sixth commission and that Britain's gold coins were made out of for a little while.
Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.
I would guess, so and that is ironic, isn't it.
Yeah, a little bit, don't you think.
Yeah, I would even say more than a little bit. I'd say a lot of bit.
Okay. The Academy Royale des Sciences in France is founded in sixteen sixty six, and that's when they said, all right, this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in our curriculum anymore. We're not going to look at astrology. We're gonna move into the modern era of the seventeenth century version of the modern era. And that's what they did. They kind of shut all that stuff down as like the official scientific as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes.
Yeah, And the whole thing kind of continued on the nineteenth century still had alchemists in it. The upshot of that whole thing was that they were frauds, charlatans, and they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad name to our modern ears. But also science when it was really when it really developed it, it had a tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing. Same thing with alchemists, like it was just so dumb
and backwards. Science is the truth. It just based disavowed alchemy,
¶ Alchemy's Scientific Legacy
even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah, but now it is nice, kind of refreshing that today science is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing, but this is our grandfather. Yeah.
Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less embarrassing than father.
I don't know, it depends on the air of the grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff at Thanksgiving. You know.
Yeah, I strive to be if I ever am a grandfather, just to be the sort of sweet, doddering old guy that everyone just thinks is fun and funny.
You definitely will be, man, no controversy about. I think you're also though, one of those grandfathers who's also a beloved dad.
Too, which is well, so far, so good.
It's hard to do.
Yeah.
Uh. One more thing about alchemy. I when I was studying listened to a bunch of Dungeon synth. I know I've mentioned it before, Okay, but in particular I was listening to albums by which Bolt. Okay, it's really good stuff. Man, if you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music. You could do a lot worse than listening to witch Bolt, all right, And then it also jogged my memory when
I mentioned Dungeon Synths. A couple of years ago. We got an email from somebody named the loan Enchanter who has a Dungeon synth label called High Mage Productions, and you can go check them out on band camp. But they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were lost because I sent them to Jerry, and she's like, I have never heard either of these, so we can look for some High Mage Production jingles coming in the future. Thank you very much for that.
Casting. I'm going to check out witch Bolt.
What a great name it really is, and their album covers are amazing too. I bet Okay, Well that's it for Alchemy everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done, and that means it's time for listener mail.
¶ Newton and Alchemy's Decline
This is a correction on me. I can't believe I missed this. I feel like a dummy. Hey guys, when you mentioned heavy metal parking Lot on the Sunset Strip episode the Greatest Heavy Metal Short Documentary of All Time, Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spearrus she made Decline of the Western Civilization, so I goofed that up. I was totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization. Another great documentary.
But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot? Then I have.
I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently Jeff Krulik and John Hayne made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's beyond satire and encapitulates a moment in time that was magical. They also made and this I didn't know, they also made a documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
No.
So that's pretty fun. I'm gonna have to check that one out. That is from That's with best regards from matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio, with a ps, I love you both, Perry very much.
Thanks a lot, matthew T. Right back at you. And if you want to be like matthew T and correct Chuck. Chuck loves that kind of thing, you can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom as an email, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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