Raising Hell (19 page)

But according to another legend, this one recounted by Zosimus of Panopolis, it was an order of fallen angels, known as the Watchers, who passed along the vital information. Why? Because these angels had watched over humankind so diligently that they’d fallen in love—or lust, to be more accurate—with their wards: “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God [the angels] saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose” (Genesis 6:1–2). Along with the other skills these angels imparted to their human wives—skills such as botany, astrology, and the use of cosmetics to enhance their appearance—was alchemy.
Needless to say, God took a very dim view of these proceedings.

Pandemonium reigns in a Puffer’s Laboratory. Print by Breughel the Elder, engraved by Cock, sixteenth century.
**

One of the books of Enoch, which were not included in the Old Testament, tells a similar story, and Tertullian, the early Christian writer, goes on the record to say that it was indeed these wicked angels who introduced mankind to all sorts of magical arts, not least among them the ability to create and harness the powers inherent in gold and silver and lustrous stones. Tertullian went on to say that the master of these alchemists, and of all others who pursued the secrets of nature, was the Egyptian god Thoth, also referred to by Alexandrian Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus (or Thrice-Great Hermes, to distinguish him from the other Hermes of their classical homeland). Hermes was generally credited with being the inventor of the arts and sciences, and as a result, alchemists often described what they did as the hermetic art. (Today, when we say that something is hermetically sealed, we are actually referring to the seal of Hermes that alchemists placed upon their vessels and flasks.)

If anything at all can be agreed upon in respect to the origins of alchemy, it’s that the seeds of the science were sown and first flourished in ancient Egypt among those Greeks of Alexandria. In the tenth century, the Arab scholar al-Nadim wrote his
Kitab-al-Fihrist,
in which he declared that the “people who practice alchemy, that is, who fabricate gold and silver from strange metals, state that the first to speak of the science of the work was Hermes the Wise, who was originally of Babylon, but who established himself in Egypt after the dispersion of the peoples from Babel.”

Papyri from the third century
A.D.,
found in a tomb in Thebes and partially written in Greek, offer in great detail the methods used by jewelers to manufacture alloys that simulate gold. They’re not meant to be occult texts, and the information they present is really nothing more than trade secrets for the making of costume jewelry. But it’s more than likely that over time, the practitioners of the art, realizing the fantastic success they were having with marketing fake gold, started to believe their own sales pitches. Later texts increasingly obscure the actual methods of coloring metals and making alloys, and elaborate instead on the arcane theories and claims of transmutation.

As the Arab empire spread itself into Spain and Morocco, this body of knowledge was carried along, where it was commingled with mystical Jewish practices and translated into Latin; the Latin translations brought word of it westward. Most notable of these translations was
The Book of the Composition of Alchemy,
which Robert of Chester completed on February 11, 1144, and in which he announced that he was introducing his readers to a whole new subject of study. From then on, alchemy flourished, and by the thirteenth century it had found in men like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Arnold of Villanova its most learned advocates and practitioners. Over a thousand years after it had begun, among the jewelers and early metallurgists of ancient Egypt, alchemy put down its deepest roots in the soil of western Europe.

THE PHILOSOPHERS’ STONE

If, by most accounts, the primary aim of alchemy was to discover the method of making lesser metals into gold, the first and most important step toward that goal was to discover the elusive philosophers’ stone.

What was the stone? To that, there’s no simple answer. According to some authorities, the stone, also known as the powder of projection, was a substance made of fire and water; to others it was an invisible gift from God. In the words of Nicolas Valois, a fifteenth-century French alchemist and author of
Cinq livres.
"It is a Stone of great virtue, and is called a Stone and is not a stone.”

A seventeenth-century English alchemist, who wrote under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes, was a tiny bit more specific. In
A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby,
he wrote that the stone was “a certain heavenly, spiritual, penetrative, and fixed substance, which brings all metals to the perfection of gold or silver. . . . It is the noblest of all created things after the rational soul, and has virtue to repair all defects both in animal and metallic bodies, by restoring them to the most exact and perfect temper. . . .”

The recipes for its concoction are some of the most abstruse imaginable. But however you went about getting it, or making it, the philosophers’ stone was considered absolutely vital to the transmutation of metals. It was the miraculous powder, elixir, chemical, that could transform one thing into another. A dash of the stone and any man could turn his tin cup into a golden goblet.

Many men spent their whole lives trying.

Alchemy, also known to its adepts (or masters) as the great art, was an all-consuming practice, which required absolute devotion, constant work, and an unwavering attention to detail; if he ever hoped to distill the stone, the alchemist was advised to lead a pure and blameless, contemplative, and abstemious life.
Known for their long beards, long robes, and absentminded, otherworldly demeanor, alchemists spent their days poring over dusty folios, deciphering inscrutable texts, and, most of all, conducting endless experiments in their homegrown laboratories. As astrology was in many ways the precursor of astronomy, so alchemy was the precursor of chemistry. (It was while he was conducting his search for the stone that alchemist Hennig Brand accidentally discovered phosphorus.)

The fundamental idea behind the philosophers’ stone was this: metals “grew” in the earth, just as plants grew in the soil, and as all things aspired upward, so, too, did these humble metals aspire to become gold. The alchemist’s job was to strip these metals of their baser properties, and through the addition of the stone, help them to achieve their highest state—which just so happened also to be their most valuable state.

There were, of course, countless claims of success. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was the most renowned for the feat (even though, strangely enough, he died leaving no great estate). An experimenter named J. B. van Helmont (1577–1644) declared that he’d managed to transmute mercury into gold. And as late as 1782, an Englishman named James Price—a doctor, chemist, and Fellow of the Royal Society—was displaying a couple of mysterious powders, which he claimed would yield gold and silver when mixed properly with other ingredients. To get silver, he took the white powder, mixed it with fifty or sixty times its weight in mercury, tossed in borax and niter, then heated the result in a crucible; to keep things suitably fluid, he stirred the mixture with an iron rod. To get gold, he used a red powder and otherwise followed the same procedure. When the resulting metals were tested at assay, they proved to be quite genuine.

The Royal Society was so impressed with Price’s discoveries that they invited him to conduct these experiments in front of some of their own trained observers; news like this, the society declared, was too good to be kept secret. Price agreed, though he must have been having some pretty serious doubts, because he had no sooner arrived for the demonstration than he swallowed
a draft of prussic acid, fell writhing to the floor, and died. Later inquiry suggested that the iron rod, which he’d been using to stir the solution, was actually hollow, and that he’d been injecting the gold and silver into the crucible through its stem.

THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

Derhaps it should come as no surprise that the second great aim of the alchemists, after the secret of transmuting metals, was the discovery of the elixir of life, the miraculous liquor that would restore the physical body and even bestow immortality. Many an aged alchemist, having toiled in penury and want all of his life, no doubt dreamed of stumbling upon the fountain of youth, the elixir that would make all of his travails worthwhile and grant him a second chance to enjoy life. On their deathbeds, several of them claimed to have discovered this amazing secret.

But, given the fact that they all went ahead and died anyway, this seems highly unlikely. (Right up to the last, the German abbott best known as Trithemius was dictating the recipe for a concoction that he promised would give perfect health and memory to anyone who took it.)

The idea of such an elixir was as old as the gods themselves. The ancient Greeks believed the mighty figures on Mount Olympus sustained themselves, for eternity, by feasting on nectar and ambrosia. And alchemists, who believed all things had to be stripped of their corruption and brought to their highest, purest state, believed no less of the human body: it was all a matter of refining and purging, of ridding the body of one illness or imperfection after another, until it had prevailed over all of its afflictions, and its “humours” (vital essences) had been brought into perfect balance. “For since there is one single and most general beginning of all corruptions,” wrote Gerhard Dorn, “and one universal fount of regenerating, restoring, and life-giving virtues—who, save a man bereft of his senses, will call such a medicine in doubt?” Who indeed?

Theory aside, the alchemists believed the elixir existed for
another reason, too: they just couldn’t fathom a god who would grant to lowly beasts a gift he withheld from his highest creation, man. “Let us turn rather to Nature,” wrote Arnold of Villanova in a tract published in Paris in 1716, “so admirable in her achievements. . . . Is it possible that she will refuse unto man, for whom all was created, what she accords to the stags, the eagles, and the serpents, who do annually cast aside the mournful concomitants of senility, and do assume the most brilliant, the most gracious amenities of the most joyous youth?” Stags were thought to renew themselves by eating snakes and vipers; lions were thought to do the same by devouring the flesh of pepper-eating apes; certain birds, it was said, lived for six hundred years, elephants for three hundred, and horses for one hundred. “From all which considerations,” Villanova concluded, “it follows that it is not beyond belief that a like prodigy may be found in the superior order of the same productions whence man himself has been derived, for man is assuredly not in a worse condition than the beasts whom he rules.” When all was said and done, the alchemists were arguing that it just wasn’t fair for animals to get a better deal than humans.

And they bent every effort to rectifying this strange inequity.

In antique times, Aristaeus declared that he had found it, the miraculous compound that would transmute metals and grant man the gift of immortality. He was thought to have lived already several hundred years, and many of the inhabitants of his native Sicily were so impressed that they built temples where they could worship him as a kind of god.

An early nineteenth-century text on alchemy, written by K. C. Schmieder, points to a fifteenth-century magician named Salomon Trismosin and states that after he’d ingested a half grain of his own compound, “his yellow wrinkled skin became smooth and white, his cheeks red, his grey hair black again, and his bent spine was lifted vertically.”

Denis Zachaire, author of the
Opuscule très excellent de la vraye philosophie naturelle des métaux,
even offered the prescription for using a dash of the philosophers’ stone as a cure-all: “To use our Great King [the stone] for restoring health, a grain weight
of it must be taken after its production and dissolved in a silver vessel with good white wine. The sick person must be made to drink this, and he will be cured in a day if the illness is of only a month’s standing; if it is of a year’s standing he will be cured in twelve days. To remain in perpetual good health he would have to take some of it at the beginning of the autumn and spring, made up in the form of a confected electuary.” (An electuary was a pasty concoction made up of a powdered medicine and a sweet syrup to help it go down.)

H. Zedler’s
Universal Lexicon,
published in the eighteenth century, described a “panacea aqua,” which a Parisian practitioner reportedly employed to cure several patients. The panacea appeared to be nothing more than highly distilled water.

And of course there were the stories that every alchemist told of his own miraculous discoveries and successes. Cagliostro’s was one of the most famous.

Consulted by an aging noblewoman desperate to recover her lost youth, Cagliostro prescribed two drops of his precious Wine of Egypt, to be taken only when the moon had entered its last quarter. As that event was still a short time off, the old woman locked up the vial in her wardrobe cabinet and, to further ensure its safety, told her maid it was nothing more than a cure for the colic. But as bad luck would have it, the maid suffered a terrible bout of the colic on the very next night, and remembering the vial, opened it and drank its entire contents.