The Belief in Alchemy
Philip Ball’s book on water, H2O,
explained the reasons. The first one is obvious. Given what was at stake with
alchemy (gold, riches), it is not surprising that none of its practitioners
shared information or made their techniques public. That in turn meant that
independent confirmation, or attempts to redo the process, were out of the
question. Further, they encrypted their notes to ensure that even if stolen,
they wouldn’t make sense to others. Which in turn ensured there was no way to compare
two methods or attempts.
But it’s the other reason that goes far
deeper, and is built on ancient, often Greek, principles. We like to think of
ancient Greece as the fountainhead of everything good about the West, but as
Ball says:
“It is not possible to find a single
example from classical Greek philosophical thought that was modified as a
consequence of experiment. Naturally, one can’t possibly hope to get everything
right by thought alone, to find that the Universe falls in line with your ideas
of how it ought to be.”
Aristotle came up with the famous fourfold
categorization of the elements – earth, air, fire, water. To reiterate, the
Greeks thought of these as “elements”, a status we attribute today to the likes
of carbon, oxygen and iron today. Once you start there, then technological
limitations add to the confusion:
“In the elemental philosophies of
antiquity, transformations of matter are often discussed in terms of changes of
state, not of composition… To the ancient Greeks and their successors, ice is
not fundamentally the same stuff as liquid water. It is a substance that has
the attributes of earth and metals – hardness, solidity… To Thales, water
became a kind of earth when it froze, and a certain kind of air when it
evaporated.”
The implication of the above isn’t obvious,
so let me make it explicit. To the Greeks and their followers over their ages,
it looks like the “elements” (earth, air, water) can be converted from one to
the other. Transmutation, in other words!
Aha, now it all begins to makes sense:
“It’s only when we recognize this that the
old views of matter, including those of alchemical tradition, start to make
sense. If we can make earth from water, why not gold from base metals? After
all, that’s not even converting one ‘element’ to another (in pre-scientific
framework), but just making one metal to another.”
No wonder then, the West believed in the possibility of alchemy for so long.
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