The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

If we turn to the writings of the alchemists, we are in a different world...!

eBook DESCRIPTION

The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry is very interesting in itself. It is also a pregnant example of the contrast between the scientific and the emotional methods of regarding nature; and it admirably illustrates the differences between well-grounded, suggestive, hypotheses, and baseless speculations. I have tried to tell the story so that it may be intelligible to the ordinary reader. (With Original 18 Illustrations)

eBook TAGS

Science, Chemistry, Alchemy, Chemistry History, Occult Science, mysticism, Secrets, transmutation

eBook EXCERPT or SYNOPSIS

Alchemy is a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life. Moreover, alchemy was, in fact, illegal in many European countries from the Middle Ages down to the early modern period. This is because rulers were afraid of undermining the gold standard, of corrupting the gold supply in Europe.
Spiritual Alchemy is the act of inner transformation. It is healing and freeing the inner parts of ourselves that need to be changed. By transforming these parts of us, it leads to inner liberation, the freedom from our fears, beliefs that no longer serve us, soul loss, and other self-destructive disorders.
What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.
Alchemy is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe.
For thousands of years before men had any accurate and exact knowledge of the changes of material things, they had thought about these changes, regarded them as revelations of spiritual truths, built on them theories of things in heaven and earth (and a good many things in neither), and used them in manufactures, arts, and handicrafts, especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced.
The accurate and systematic study of the changes which material things undergo is called chemistry; we may, perhaps, describe alchemy as the superficial, and what may be called subjective, examination of these changes, and the speculative systems, and imaginary arts and manufactures, founded on that examination.
We are assured by many old writers that Adam was the first alchemist, and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world; certainly alchemy had a long life, for chemistry did not begin until about the middle of the 18th century.
No branch of science has had so long a period of incubation as chemistry. There must be some extraordinary difficulty in the way of disentangling the steps of those changes wherein substances of one kind are produced from substances totally unlike them. To inquire how those of acute intellects and much learning regarded such occurrences in the times when man's outlook on the world was very different from what it is now, ought to be interesting, and the results of that inquiry must surely be instructive.