In Our Time - Alchemy

Episode Date: February 24, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Alchemy, the ancient science of transformations. The most famous alchemical text is the Emerald Tablet, written around 500BC and attributed to the mythical Egyptian figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Among its twelve lines are the essential words - “as above, so below". They capture the essence of alchemy, that the heavens mirror the earth and that all things correspond to one another. Alchemy was taken up by some of the most extraordinary people in our intellectual development, including Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, the father of chemistry, Robert Boyle, and, most famously, Isaac Newton, who wrote more about alchemy than he did about physics. It is now contended that it was Newton’s studies into alchemy which gave him the fundamental insight into the famous three laws of motion and gravity.With Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London, Lauren Kassell, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What makes people want to believe in aliens? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Donald Trump last week announced that he'd be releasing the US government's UFO files. So why the renewed interest in life out there? And what deeper spiritual meaning might people be searching for? Check out the global story. We are serious journalists on BBC.com.

or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the end of the 16th century, the German alchemist Heinrich Konrad wrote, Darkness will appear on the face of the abyss.

Night, Saturn, and the antimony of the sages will appear. Blackness and the ravens' head of the alchemists and all the colors of the world will appear at the hour of conjunction, the rainbow also, and the peacock's tail. Finally, after the matter has passed from ashen colour to white and yellow, you will see the philosopher's stone. This is the language of alchemy. It's cryptic and coded, symbolic and secretive.

Isaac Newton wrote more manuscripts on alchemy in like language than on anything else. Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, described himself, as an alchemist. What was the essence of alchemy, its history and legacy, and how much more was it than a rapacious desire to turn base metals into gold? With me to discuss alchemy is Lauren Castle, lecturer in the history and philosophy of science

at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Pumfrey, senior lecturer in the history of science at the University of Lancaster, and Peter Fawshaw, lecturer in Renaissance Philosophist at Birkbeck University of London. Peter Fawshore, alchemists were interested in seeing the origins of the art in the Bible, but there was one key non-biblical text that was very important.

It's called the Emerald Tablet, supposedly written by Hermes Trismogistus, in about the 500 BC in Egypt. Can you describe why that was so significant? One thing was that it was one of the first texts ever translated into Latin when Alchemy finally hit Europe in the 12th century. And it appeared in a text attributed to Aristotle called the secret of secrets, so it was guaranteed to wet people's interest. It's very important because it's a pithy text of about 12, 13 lines,

which has the phrase, as above, so below in, which became really one of the major maxims, really, of magical philosophy and alchemy. That phrase keeps recurring and recurring, so can you just tell listeners what you think it means and why it was so resonant? I can do better. I can tell you what some of the alchemists thought it meant. Thomas Aquinas' teacher Albert the Great, for example, suggested that reading the Emerald Tabulate,

as above and so below, refers to the influence of the heavens, the seven planets of the Ptolemaic cosmos, from the moon up to Saturn, influenced the growth of seven metals in the earth. So, for example, Saturn influenced the growth of lead, sun, the growth of gold and so forth. and there was a correlation between the planets and above and the metals below.

Others say that it's form in a neoplatonic sense and matter below, which are the two components of all substances. So the relationship between what is up there and what's down here, a material and a spiritual relationship, which is where the Bible comes in here, isn't it? But that there's a dynamic going on between the Earth, and let's call it the heavens. Yes, and also what was very interesting was that it's, in some ways, it's a pre-Christian creation myth, which is equated with the book of Genesis. And people, when they read things like the Amarral Tablets, said, hey, this sounds really almost like Genesis at times.

It's foreshadowing Genesis, maybe, even. And you find that in the book of Genesis, you've got light being created, which correlates with as above, and then you've got the formless and void. earth and water below, which ties in with the azababso below of Hermestris Magistus and the Emerald Tablet. You say this was translated in Latin. Did the idea of alchemy then, as it were, take form then? Or did it take form later in the 7th, 8th and 9th century, in the Islamic culture, the development of Islamic culture? Certainly, I mean, it's very influential in Alexandria even earlier,

but certainly in the Arabic tradition, you've got very famous names like Jabir, Bin Haiyan, also famous as being a Sufi. His works were translated into Latin, or at least ones attributed to him, and the figure Gabor in the Latin tradition became extremely influential, introduced the ideas of mathematics, quantification of substances, which influenced people like Robert Boyle later on. So is this theoretical here, or is this time the pre-middle ages, if we're using the way that we're counting in the sort of Christian world,

Are they talking about turning base metals into gold, and the illiciture of life? All that's going on then, is it? You're certainly getting that in the Arabic tradition. You're also getting discussions of, even then, of the properties of things like alums and salts and how they can be used in medicine as well. But certainly, yes, discussions of the transmutation of one substance to another.

Aristotle's talking about it, the Arabs picket up, and then people like Roger Bacon in England in the 13th century developed these ideas. Lauren, can I talk to, Lauren Hussle, can I talk to you about the English monk and natural philosopher Roger Bacon? How, he took up the practice of alchemy.

What did the practice of alchemy mean for him in the 13th century? What had happened to it, that it arrived at his door, as it were, than he embraced it so rigorously? I'm not an expert on Roger Bacon. My sense, however, is that he picks up the notion of distillation, and he is very much interested in coming up with a sense of pure substances, which can be used for medical purposes. If you separate out the pure from the impure, you can then enhance the powers of substances.

This is what distillation does, and then you come up with something which has not simply physical properties, but a spiritual. It's more than its physical help that comes to the body. So we're talking about the third thing now. First of all we're talking about the sort of almost philosophical idea, as above so below, a way of understanding. Then we're talking about at the same time, then you can turn base metals into gold.

And now we're talking about its uses in medicine here. Would the drive towards medicine part of the alchemy, as Roger Bacon saw, it. Absolutely. And he, along with a series of other John of Rupas-Cisa, text attributed to Raymond Lull, these are all 13th, 14th century alchemists who are talking primarily about distillation, and they're interested in the elixir of life. They're interested in that which makes one healthier and enables one to live longer. This is a tradition that becomes one of the dominant traditions through the later period.

So what is he actually doing? Is he going into a laboratory in the 13th century? Does he have a laboratory? Are there sort of glass bottles? Can you just tell us what he's doing for this distillation? Is it like an old-fashioned chemistry laboratory that I used to go see at school? Well, go to it at school.

Yes, probably. We have a lot more textual evidence than we do of actual physical evidence. But yes, he knew an awful lot about the way that many different physical properties. I mean, Roger Bacon is known not primarily as an alchemist. In the literature, he is thought of it as one of the first experimental philosophers.

That's an anachronistic way to put it. That's more of a 17th century definition. But what he is doing is observing things and questioning the standard approaches to how they were understood. So he does work with light. He does work with distillation. He explores all of these things.

hands-on. But it seems to me that we're still talking in nice parallel lines because we started with the idea of as above so below. We had the idea of Genesis, you know, God's, everything, all things were made by him. So we have two ideas of all things were made by.

And is Roger Bacon working on the idea, as I understand it, that there is a substrate, there is a basic substance, which is the same in everything. And if you can find the key, to that, then you can move it around. Is that the basis of the theory behind his experiments,

which holds on to the idea expressed by Roger? Quite possibly, am I allowed to throw this open to the others? I find that, I think that when you asked Peter about the question of what were the two books, you have the Bible, you have

the text by Hermes Trismegistis, I thought you were going to talk about the book of nature. What Bacon is doing is trying to understand what is going on in the physical world that he is observing. If you're looking for whether he is part of what is referred to as the corpuscularian tradition,

whether he is picking up on this Gabor, pseudo-Gabre set of texts where all things are positive as coming from sulfur and mercury, then, yes, to some extent, he is looking to isolate and then to manipulate physical properties. Stephen Pumpery, can I turn to you? In the quotation at the top of the program,

the philosopher stone was referred to. How does that link in with what's been said so far? Well, I think it links in quite nicely with this idea that alchemists and indeed many philosophers had, that there was some prime matter, some kind of underlying substrate common to all things, and individual types or species of metals were differentiated by some kind of properties added to this prime matter. And the philosophical stone was the ultimate secret, I suppose, of the alchemists. And I think it brings together a lot of the things. What the philosopher's stone was, was that kind of magic ingredient.

I suppose we might think of it like a catalyst in a sense that would bring everything to perfection as different kinds of species of metal or whatever were growing or developing from some primitive base form such as a base metal of iron through to its perfection as a noble metal of gold. And the philosopher's stone was something that would work and bring about perfection at various levels,

at the material level. The example would classically be the transmutation of base metals into gold. But that was just one example. The Philosopher's Stone also had effects at the organic level, particularly on the human body. So the Philosopher's Stone, if one somehow kind of ground it up and made a medicine

out of it, would bring to perfection the bodies of cleanser of impurities and bring it to the most perfect health that was available, not eternal life, but certainly the prolongation of life. And it also connects not just at the material and the organic, but to the spiritual level in a theological

sense as well. Because the alchemist's language is often loaded with religious language and allusions to theology. And some alchemists made connections between the philosopher's stone and Christ as the stone rejected by the builders. And so the philosopher's stone could also be seen to refer to the perfecting work of Christ or the Holy Spirit, bringing the soul from its state of original sin to perfection in union with God and eternal life.

So it works at all of these three levels. That's why it's so central to alchemy. And is the turning of metals into gold? to make them more perfect. Is that in order to find the philosopher's stone? Is it thought of as something like a kidney stone which the body turns into stone, which is all the things that fascinated people at that time? Is it

rather like that? Is that a useful? No, the philosopher as soon as I understand it, and it's obviously quite difficult to understand. They don't give as much help. The philosopher's terms I understand it is something that one kind of adds to one's kind of alchemical operations on other kind of matters. So you might take a big lump of lead, add a small

bit of this kind of secret ingredient that someone's given you, if you're very lucky, You know, it's a three hours later, wham-bam. It's kind of the philosopher's stone has acted to allow nature to work faster than she normally does and perfect this lead into gold. So, no, it's a, what exactly it is, we're not clear about. I mean, an alchemist like Paracelsus said that you make the philosopher's stone by taking the rose-tinted blood of the lion

and mixing it with the gluten of the eagle, which kind of doesn't get us very far. Except if you meant, I mean, we're not had Paliseltzer. Paracelsus comes at about just after 20 past 9. Well, that's probably the clearest definition of how to make the fossil stone. The line and that, that could be code, though. We're using a lot of code this way. Peter, why this obsession with metals? Metals were seen as the most perfect manifestation of basic matter.

Also, metals, I think, are significant because a lot of natural philosophers, so people who are interested in alchemy as well, are reading Aristotle. And Aristotle in his work called Meteorogia, even though that sounds as though it's about the weather. In book three, he posits the formation of metals and minerals and rocks and so forth from two substances. A watery vapour, which later on is understood as being mercury by Gabor or Javier, and an earthy smoke, which is understood as being sulphur. and natural philosophers really take this Aristotelian idea

is developed by the Arabs and really more firmly equated with sulfur and mercury and the idea is that in Aristotelian theory is that all things are growing to perfection so all metals will eventually grow mature or ripen into gold and as Stephen mentions the alchemist is looking for something that will catalyze the process you can take lead The idea is an Aristotelian theory that lead and gold

aren't a different matter. They're both basically primal matter which is this matter without form and what you do is you strip away the form of lead reduce it to primal matter and then encourage nature to put the form of gold.

It seems to be that just in this early middle age, as the middle age goes into the customer of Renaissance, alchemy is standing for a great number of things. It's a do with a search for, it's a do with still the search for the divine, it's a do with the interaction between the heavens and the earth, it's to do with what you do with things themselves,

and to do with the purification of yourself. It's ultimately in alchemy. At the same time, because of this, we are going to turn this into gold and make people, including ourselves, very, very, very rich, it netted an awful lot of fakes and charlatans who are called, I believe, Lauren, puffers at the time. Can you give us an example of one or two of the puffers?

There are many, many, of the puffers. And one of the problems is that you have stories that are told, they're now referred to as transmutation stories, in which people say, I am a real alchemist, and this is

my claim to legitimacy. And I got the text or the stone because I married the widow of the dead alchemist or I met this itinerant on the road. All of these

stories posit a bad alchemist against a good alchemist, the good alchemist being the one who is being written about. Any number of practitioners were referred to as these puffers, these charlatans, Paracelsus, I know we're not quite 20 past. Paracelsus was famously decried as a charlatan. virtually everyone who practiced it had this label attached to them at some point or another. Now, there are people who, I mean, you can think of them as sort of market stall alchemists. There are people who are swindlers of some sort or another. And this is one of the things that in order to understand alchemy,

you have to understand that it has always been suspect. It has always been thought to be fraudulent. and there have always been frauds. So I don't know of particular ones from the early date, but the evidence about these guys is hard to track down, largely because they don't write. But there were people, like Nicholas Flammell, as I've got down here, and George Starkey, do you know about those people?

Can you give the list of some idea of how they were getting away with it? Well, presumably nobody turned up saying, look, I've turned a base metal into gold. So in a sense, how did they all get away? They all turned up to say this. Edward Kelly. John D's sidekick, as it were, John D. is Queen Elizabeth's astrologer. They found supposedly in the monastery at Glastonbury a powder of the philosopher's stone,

and Edward Kelly allegedly did transmutations in front of the Emperor Rudolf in Prague, and actually was knighted. He did really well from it, but he was always accused of being a charlatan and fraudulent. But do you believe that Kelly did turn it into gold then with the means available, We can come to the present day as to how the idea is by no means foolish or not a sensical of changing things. But at that time, the means available, do you think that he did? Or he was just a clever of charlatan than the others? Well, historians of science, particularly historians.

Well, maybe Charlton's the wrong idea, because some of them really were searching for things that were very important. But it was just at the age a few hundred years ago where they had not the means that people have now. And so to deride them is foolish, because that was then. and with what they had, they went a very long way, as we can now see. Well, I think, I mean, historians of science, especially historians of alchemy, you know, don't like being forced to talk about what they think was really going on. But let me kind of take a chance.

I mean, I think that from what I've read, given that the alchemists, as it were, understanding in our terms, of what kinds of metals there were in purification were rather different, I think we can imagine that some of the operations did result in pure gold, smelted out when they didn't expect it to be there in the first place. And there may have been a few kind of tricks, and indeed some minerals and amalgams can look a bit like gold. So I think what we can say is that the results of these operations

sufficiently often produced material that was sufficiently convincing to count as gold at that time to give the whole thing a very serious credibility. When you buy a gold watch, how do you know it's gold? Well, I don't know anything about that sort of. But precisely, it's the same then. If it's a yellow color, if it's heavy, if it's malleable, then it's sort of gold. And you do find, for example, still in museums, gold coins and medals which have been struck.

Some of them even which are partially silver. From Foursgild, of course, yes. Well, yeah, like I'm parrite, yes. But you find some which are really closely approximating gold. There may be amalgams, as Stephen implied. and that's one of the things that the more skeptical alchemists or the more realistic ones that you've got to test them. So even on this level, which is a sort of greed populist level of can,

if you're an alchemist, go and show me. Yes. Even enough people were showing me them, emperors, kings, to keep the things who are ticking over at this time. Yes, yeah. One of the, one of the, because we'll come back to the sort of association with ideas of how the universe operated in a moment to do. But another, as it were,

a public demonstration that they were archimists was to do the pursuit of the elixir of life. Can you, do you want to just, could you talk about that to learn what they were pursuing when they were looking for the elexia of life? Well, they're pursuing,

this brings us partly back to Roger Bacon and the distillation, they're pursuing the quintessence, the fifth essence, the thing which is that which was present at creation. So they're referring it back to the Bible in this case. Oh yes, it always refers back to the Bible.

What the alchemist does is what God does at creation. The alchemists are pursuing a way, as was being talked about before, of replicating what happens in the bowels of the earth at a greater speed. This is God's work. So they look for the processes that enables them to do this. And one of the products, one of the most important products as well as gold, is this quintessence. This, it's a, I mean, if you imagine alcohol, alcohol is, it evaporates quickly. It is like air.

It is a water that burns. It's a very, it's a divine substance of some sort. They're looking for, through distillation, some sort of quintestants, which then has positive effects on the body. And that is the elixir of life. It preserves health. And just jumping in, quintessence is spirit. And spirit at the time has so many different ramifications.

You get equated with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the world, the spirit in your body, and there's a sort of continuum between them in a way. I just want to actually, Mark, where we're talking about that, when you say it all goes back to the Bible, We're talking about the fall, aren't we? So is that where exactly in the Bible are they referring to when they're talking about the elixir of life? Oh, the elixir of life.

I can't answer that question? Well, can somebody answer that question? Thank you very much. The story is that Adam and Eve sin, and we know it's Eve's fault, right? Adam and Eve's sin, disease is the result. So before the fall, they have, I mean, they're all different stories about whether they were giants,

whether they had genitals. It's very interesting. the debates about what the existence of Adam and Eve was like before the fall. After the fall, they suffer disease and they will suffer death. The angels come along at the behest of God, and they tell Adam what he needs to know in order to heal his disease. Now, this is a story that Paracelsus likes to tell in various forms, and after Adam, the knowledge of medicine,

Adam has the first true knowledge of medicine, declines, and men begin to live less long, right? The patriarchs live for, you know, however many score years. Yeah, exactly. So what Paracelsus is saying, we have lost this knowledge. It's no longer present in books. We need to recover it from nature, from studying nature.

And so his whole program is to find this true Adamic, knowledge, this angelic knowledge that Adam and Eve had after the fall, in order for us to be able to heal ourselves better. And the only source of this is practice. It cannot be found in the corrupt classical tradition. Paracelsus about five minutes late.

Here he comes. Can you just give him a date and take on from what Lauren is so eloquently said just to place him as to what he is bringing to the table? in terms of alchemy. Well, to remember, date, he's born in rather humble origins. So, as many humble, we're not quite sure, born somewhere around 1493, 1494, dies in 1541.

And the dates, I think, are significant because he's developing his ideas in that very kind of turbulent time of the Peasants' Revolt and the Reformation. And he himself is a very kind of firebrand, radical character, with strong ideas on religion, medicine, alchemy, everything. What I think he really brings to the table is,

First of all, an evolution of alchemical theory. We've talked about sulphur and mercury. Paracelsus adds a third principle, which he calls salt. So he's refining alchemical theory. But perhaps more importantly, what I take him to do is to say that, to argue very forcefully, that these three triaprima, these three alchemical principles are not just the basis of the understanding of transmutation of metals. They are the basis of all matter.

the entire creation. And so what Paracelsus successfully does, or certainly his followers on his behalf, what he does is to advocate an entire alchemical model of the whole universe, which he deliberately opposes to, as Lauren said,

the corrupt bookish tradition of people like Aristotle and Galen of the sort of four traditional elements. And through him and his followers, they are effectively setting up an alchemical or chemical philosophy as a rival way of understanding the whole of nature to attack the philosophy of the schools

and the traditional medicine of the gayliness at the time. He is accorded some people give him great eminence for bringing all sorts of things to medicine, for instance introducing the idea that illness comes from germs which are external and not internal. And we haven't really got time to go into that now. But to move to another big person in this story is Simon Foreman, a follower of Paracelsa,

the English Archimist. Lauren, can you tell us what he did that was important in this story? Foreman, he is not a great scientist. He's not a great figure in the history of science, but what he does is he writes constantly. He's born in 1552, he dies in 1611. I've spent the last 10 years of my life working on him. That's why I know his dates.

He wrote 15,000 handwritten pages survived from a single decade. That is most of what we have. have is this decade between 1590 and 1600. What he documents is the life of an alchemist, astrologer, magician in London in the 1590s. This is a period when the great commercial Commonwealth enterprises are underway. Great improvements in navigation are taking place. People are interested in making sure that navigators and merchants have. practical knowledge and that they're taught this practical knowledge. So there's a lot happening. There's a high literacy amongst... He's going to see Shakespeare's plays.

He is going to see Shakespeare's play. He's doing all of this stuff in London. And what he documents is that there is a huge circulation of alchemical pericelsian medicine in this period, which is being passed in scruffy handwritten notes from person to person and being practiced in conjunction with astrology and magic at the most dispersed level on the streets of London. But here it's coming to the... And this is alchemy in that sense,

in this thriving 1590s, Elizabeth I first, Shakespeare's writing, East India Company's about it before, and so on and so forth. In comes alchemy to the highest courts, the queen and the Privy Council back alchemy. It literally put their money where their alchemy is, and so on and so forth.

So it's roaring away. What, though, did former... do that convinced people around him that it was alchemy that was his that was a key way into a real knowledge of the world. Can you just tell the listeners what he did? He practiced astrology. That's a sort of backwards answer, right?

That was his service. You could come to him and he would, based on the moment of the question that was asked, he would tell you what was wrong with you and he would give you either an answer that he could help, help your illness, and he would either help it with straightforward remedies or not. Because we're back to the very beginning of the program, because astrology had a bearing on medicine, given that the heavens had a bearing on what was happening here. So it was astrology.

But he also used the Elexia of Life idea, didn't he, on himself when he got the plague, the beginning of the... Sorry, I want you the story. No, I don't want the story. I'm going to get moving. It's your notes I'm quoting from, for goodness sake. 1591. So he's bringing into play the Elexia of Life as well as the sort of astrological ideas behind Malcolm, isn't he?

Yes, he is probably giving everybody this stuff that he is distilled. He says he can cure the plague with it. And he is... At the time there's a separation between medical practitioners who work, they write prescriptions and an apothecary fills those prescriptions. Foreman refuses to work within the established hierarchy. He is not a legitimate physician,

and he says you get the full service from me. You get these potions that I'm making, which may or may not have magical, alchemical, astrological properties. They may be straightforward herbal things, and he enables people to be treated by him in what is probably a comprehensive, coherent framework.

So in some sense you have the apotheosis of alchemy, but at the same time it isn't studied at any university, as I understand it. You're going woof-woof. I'm going woof, actually, we're talking about it. I mean, there's 1590s, early 1600s are the heyday of Paracelsian revival in some ways. He died in 1541. Then you find 1580s, particularly text, start being,

because Paracelsus wrote in German most of the time. People are translating into Latin, promulgating it. And what you find, with Simon Foreman, He is very Paracelsian, hands-on, getting dirty, making your own medicines, and astrology is necessary for... You know the Azabov so below? The as above the stars, Paracelsa says there's a heavenly arcana and there's a star also inside you. The physician identifies your ailment through astrology. The alchemist then makes the arcana, which is the secret remedy, which is good for you.

I don't answer my question, though, is why isn't it studied at universities as astrology, as astronomy, and so and so forth. There's so much knowledge going on. It's so, it's taken up by very intelligent influential people in society. Why isn't it a subject to university? Because it's very hands-on. For example, medicine, university medicine, for example, Steve mentioned Galen. A doctor at university had the theory and then he had some underling like a barber surgeon to do all the physical work. And it's the same with medicine. Alchemy is hands-on. You don't get a pharmacist to do it. You do it yourself. I think also there's a... The secretiveness as well, I'm sorry to push on a bit.

Is it the language that I read at the beginning of the programme, the language that Newton writes in which I want to get to you in a few minutes? Is it because of the secrecy, they want to keep it out of any public domain for all sorts of, you tell me, reasons? Oh, yes. I mean, they certainly do write in this secretives of cryptic way. I mean, that means we're dealing with codes here. And I suppose there are several reasons where that might be. I mean, some of them, I think, frankly, we've talked about charlatans and so forth,

are writing in this way because they're trying to. to obscure the fact that they're pretending to more knowledge than they have. I'm sure that's one reason. Another reason is that this, if it's true, particularly some alchemical transmutation, is powerful knowledge which you don't want the vulgar to have. And in this case, the vulgar means the unadept, the uninitiated, not just the common people, and peers of the realm don't count as kind of initiates in this sense. So you're keeping it from the uninitiated.

And the reason for that perhaps is that the true alchemical adeptus, imagined himself to be particularly chosen by God as part of a succession of people who had been initiated into this kind of revealed knowledge which was the ultimate key to the understanding of nature. I'm going to move radically now because there we go. Boyle called... Yes, I'm sorry, it's not far, never mind.

Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry in 1661, he wrote the skeptical chemist. Now, he is the father of... Let's leave it at that, to find the father. He was an alchemist and paid great tribute to alchemy. And can we talk about him as an alchemist as well as a chemist? Because it would seem that there we are with the most practical hard subject, and with this other subject which comes trailing clouds of Genesis

and Egyptian law and so on and so forth. So can we just talk about Boyle? Yeah, good. Boyle is interesting because, I mean, this sceptical chemist, everyone thinks, oh, he's totally against alchemist. And certainly early on he does make remarks, for example, he loathes the obscurantism of alchemy, the way it's transmitted, you know, green lions and dragons and so forth. And he said, no, we've got to have a far more sort of open language so that we can share knowledge.

So that in some ways is the end of one style of alchemical transmission. But he is fascinated with alchemical processes. You mentioned George Starkey, an American who comes over from the States, from the States, from the Americas, and has far more laboratory experience than Boyle introduces him to this work. And they really do practice, they're theoreticians on the properties of matter.

Boyle is fascinated by the property of mercury as some sort of universal solvent. He even gives a paper to the Royal Society in about 1678 on the degradation of gold by an anti-Elexia. He can't make the elixir that makes gold, that perfects it, but he's made one that at least dissolves gold, which is a start. And he's critical of Paracelsus for his bombast, critical for the odd language he uses, but has a great deal of respect for adepts and Spuriris,

which is another codename for Paracelsian type of alchemy. Lauren, do you see the alchemy in Boyle's work? Absolutely. And I think it's very useful for Peter to have pointed out that Starkey, taught Boyle from around 1600, you have this coalescence of different, what are referred to as schools of alchemy. And Boyle and Starkey or Starkey teaching Boyle are following a mercurial school of alchemy as opposed to. And they're less interested in the medical applications. They're much more interested in the matter principles, though there are still medicinal applications.

There are these other schools as well. And Boyle is setting himself up as one sort of proponent against these other schools. And he is actually doing some of what, he's looking for this red powder that has been circulating in Europe for about 100 years. He's looking for missing texts which tell you about how to make this red powder. So he's recovering very assiduously, as does Newton, the process and the history of alchemy, both through the textual and the practical study. I want to go to Newton, sorry.

All right. I'm sorry about that, Stephen. There we go. But people will be surprised that he wrote more about alchemy and it seems to have been just as devoted alchemy as he was to his science as he wrote more about it. But what I've learned in the last week or so preparing for this program is that there is a body of thought

that it was the ideas behind alchemy which may have more influenced his own thinking on the laws of motion and gravity than what he discovered in mathematics. Now, can you unravel that, please? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think what we have to start from here is that when Newton is beginning to think about this in the 1660s,

the dominant way of thinking about nature is the mechanical philosophy, that the world can be explained in terms of lifeless corpuscles, none of this spirit, none of this connection through intermediaries with God, although God, of course, is there. And Newton's deeply worried about, that. He's deeply worried that developments

in natural philosophy are squeezing out the divine and the spiritual. Now, I think it's clear that his calculations for the inverse square law of gravity don't come as a way, kind of sui generis out of the maths, but then he starts thinking, well, what's going on here? And it's clear that both in the

1670s and indeed right to the end of his life, he's deeply interested in alchemy because he thinks that alchemists have been, what have these alchemists have been studying? They've been studying looking for that extra kind of spiritual, non-material, non-mechanical element, which is the key to the God's creation and upholding of the universe.

So Newton is an alchemist in his way of thinking. He's a decoder. He's trying to decode the alchemical texts. And by the end of his life, there's been some very nice research done by Karen Fagala. By the end of his life, Newton thinks that he's managed to arrive at a kind of inverse square law, mathematical inverse square law, of what the alchemists were talking about in terms of calibs and magnesium or sulfur and mercury. and he thinks he's arrived at an ethereal, attractive and repulsive model of the law of gravity,

which is derived from a modernised form of this alchemical tradition of thought, which he thinks holds the key to nature. After you've got to remember that Newton thought that Pythagoras and other ancients knew the law of gravity but expressed it in code. Yeah, yeah. One thing, sort of going slightly back to Boyle, whose writings after Boyle's death actually, Newton is desperately trying to get hold of, by the way. just to sort of change people's perspectives on Boyle, yes, the father of chemistry,

but don't be under any misapprehension that this is just physical chemistry. Boyle towards the end of his life wants to leave a hermetic legacy, as he calls it, and one of the most fascinating quotes is he says, the philosopher's stone may be an inlet into another sort of knowledge that will allow us to actually have intercourse with good spirits.

He actually, he, Elias, Ashmole, who founds the Ashmolean, believe that the Philophist stone actually has supernatural qualities that allow communication with angels. And so it's interesting to equate, the smiling at me, is to equate the physical chemist, who's the sort of prototype of the father of modern chemistry, with someone who has these very spiritual beliefs that Newton has too.

But do you think that the repudiation of alchemy by people in the last hundred or more years is now being, again, repudiated? the repudiation is being repudiated, given the search for fundamental particles through nuclear materials seem to be able to be transformed from one thing or other. Do you think that that was a very good early push-it-it-it with insufficient means at their disposal to get there? Yes. I think there clearly is a legacy in terms of the attempts to transform one kind of something on and understand the relations. But what that kind of modern physics of the change of one of a bit into another completely lacks, of course, is this kind of spiritual religious side.

That universe has gone. But I think that one thing... How it's gone completely? Well, it's certainly gone out of modern particle physics, I think. I think if we're looking for the survival of modern alchemy, it's perhaps worth looking at kind of modern alternative health practices, whereby a rigorous of discipline of the body, of eating the right foods, of purifying yourself. you somehow become a better person. That I think, does it work kind of maps onto the kind of lingering

sort of psychological interest in alchemy rather than seeking a direct line-down to modern physics. The founder of homeopathy, for example, and you still find that. I mean, that's homeopathic websites, for example, have him as one of their authorities. Well, it seems a bit of a come-down, actually. After all, it's to end up with keeping fit.

It is. But the elixir was for prolonging life. And all of these things at the end of the day, they're aiming for perfection. You know, perfect body, perfect spirit, perfect soul. Alchemy is all about that. The three principles of mercury, sulfur, and salt are spirit, soul, body. But if we go back just to a very limited idea of transmutation of metals, I think we can see that there's always been a place for that within all philosophy.

I mean, Aristotle has it. Our mainstream alchemists have it. And in the time when Newton's working, the mechanical philosophers, there's a mechanical philosophy of alchemy. After a few believe that the only difference between gold and iron are atoms arranged in different ways, if you can kind of smash them with a hammer enough, you can kind of rearrange these particles physically. and generate gold.

So there's always been a tradition which you don't have to buy in to the whole kind of spiritual element to allow this of belief that metals are related and that we're understanding something about the fundamental nature of matter. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks Lauren Kassel, Peter Fawr and Stephen Pumfrey.

And next week I'll be discussing Sto Stoicism, Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, etc. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk

forward slash radio four.