The Chemical Choir

A History of Alchemy

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441141361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Beginning in China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists. Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative substances known as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demonstrations of the art were performed in royal courts and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums today. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists principally Carl Jung perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature.

1

China: The Golden Road to Immortality

Beginnings are often contentious and it is a moot point whether alchemy began in China or India. Did it filter through to China from India – or even Egypt – during the second or third centuries BC; was it of Chinese origin and carried thence by traders to India, to the Middle East, and finally to the West; or are we to think that it arose independently in several different places from a combination of metallurgical experimentation and philosophical observation of change and transformation in Nature? If we go by etymology, there seems little doubt that ‘alchemy’ is a mongrel term originating in Chinese kim or chim meaning ‘aurifaction’ – the theoretical possibility that gold can be manufactured. It is then possible to suggest that the various techniques involved in this process, along with their blanket name, trickled into the Mediterranean world where kim was transliterated into the Greek of Egypt as khemeia, to which later still, perhaps under the influence of Syria, was added the Arabic definite article al, and that thus was produced the form alchimia adopted by Latin and Western vernaculars. But let us put these aside for the moment and accept, for the sake of argument, China’s pre-eminence in the origin of this group of activities.

The word kim seems to relate Chinese alchemy to a process whereby gold may be produced from the application of certain protracted laboratory techniques to natural metals or minerals, and thus to refer to the same kind of alchemy with which we are familiar in the West. But making gold is merely one part of this complex and extensive science, because Chinese alchemy differs from its Western counterpart in at least one fundamental respect. For while the manufacture of gold was certainly one aim of its practitioners, a more important one concerned the effort to produce an elixir or pill of immortality – that is, a substance which could be ingested and, by acting on key organs of the body, alter it so that the individual was enabled to live many hundreds of years beyond the normal span, or even become immortal and thus join the ranks of divine or semi-divine beings. Such a goal was never the principal aim in the mediaeval or early modern West, although it is possible to see its modern counterpart in Western hopes that medical techniques such as genetic manipulation may lengthen human life considerably. ¹

In Chinese alchemy, then, we are dealing not only with a science whose main features differ in many ways from that in the West, but also a mindset which is different, too. Three questions need to be asked immediately. Why was gold considered to be so important? Does ‘gold’ in alchemical texts necessarily refer to what a modern metallurgist means by ‘gold’? When the Chinese looked for longevity or immortality, what did they think or believe these were?

Gold was well known in China from ancient times. Coins were made from it, emperors were presented with large quantities of it, and references were made to it in several of the early classics such as the fourth-century BC Book of Changes (I Ching) and its contemporary Historical Classic (Shu Ching). The fact that gold does not rust or lose its colour or tarnish will almost inevitably link it with notions of that state in which everything is perfect and lasts for ever – by definition a state which is not encountered in this material world but belongs to another superior realm of existence. Wearing gold, using vessels made from it, even ingesting gold must surely, it was thought, cause something of that innate virtue in gold to impart itself to human beings, and in consequence gold was conceived to have a value far beyond that of mere exchange in buying and selling. Indeed, one development of alchemical opinion maintained that ‘in a wellordered society, all gold would be thrown away in the mountains’ because the time and effort spent in searching for it distracted people from a more profitable use of their allotted years.²

Nevertheless, the practical advantages of manufacturing gold were well understood and by no means ignored by everyone. Gold-working artisans had early acquired the skills of cupellation, for example, the procedure whereby precious metal is refined and then assayed, and thus were able not only to detect pure gold but also to make that wide variety of metallic substances which could pass or be mistaken for gold by those without such expertise. Indeed, by 144 BC making artificial gold had become so common that the Emperor Ching Ti was obliged to issue an edict against it, and thereafter anyone who wished to practise this form of alchemy needed an imperial licence to do so. Fiscal considerations apart, it may be that this kind of alchemy had become too closely associated with magic to allow the authorities to view it with equanimity. Only 31 years after Ching Ti’s edict, Luan Ta, a magician and pharmacist, was presented to the Emperor. ‘My master’, he said, ‘maintained that yellow gold can be produced [artificially], that the breach in the Yellow River can be closed, that the herb of immortality can be found, and that the hsien can be made to appear.’ It was a bold proclamation of his interests, considering that the Emperor had recently put to death an imperial magician; but fortunately for Luan Ta the Emperor now regretted doing so and was feeling gracious. So Luan Ta was permitted to give a demonstration of his magical abilities. The way was now open again to ask for licences to pursue the arts of aurifaction and, as such a promising way of replenishing imperial treasure could scarcely be passed by, the practice of alchemy picked up again. Indeed, in the eleventh century, we are told, an alchemist made gold from iron in such quantities that the Emperor was able to have several hundred tortoises and medals made out of it, artefacts he either distributed among his officials or used as talismans to protect two of the imperial palaces; while in the twelfth, we learn of silver made from mercury and gold from iron by another alchemist whose final products the author links with potable medicines.³

The alchemical term ‘gold’, then, was not necessarily confined to the dense, bright yellow, lustrous metal whose chemical symbol is Au. Mediaeval Chinese texts list various kinds of gold (and indeed silver) which clearly include other metals which have either been gilded, tinged with sulphides, or coated with gold, or were themselves yellowish, such as the cuprous or brassy alloys, or were actually ores of other metals such as chalcopyrite or bornite. So we must be prepared to find that alchemical gold may have been a substance which strove after the condition of gold (Au) inasmuch as the alchemist was endeavouring in his laboratory to hasten what he conceived as a change which took place in Nature as one metal ‘grew’ into another; or to work with a metal or alloy which could be made to take on the appearance of gold. Consequently, when we find that an alchemist claims to have produced gold artificially, we are not entitled to dismiss out of hand what he is saying, nor to assume that there must have been any intent to deceive. As Arthur Waley observed:

In China . . . the attempt to make gold went on simultaneously with the attempt to make artificially pearls, jade, and other ‘talismanic’ substances, and this combination of speeding up what were conceived as natural processes and a theoretical approach to the alchemical treatment of substances, which relied on extracting their vital ‘essences’ – essences which were not the same as the physical substance itself, but were its innermost reality and therefore just as much ‘gold’ or ‘mercury’ or ‘cinnabar’ as the material substance – meant that alchemists could legitimately call their artificial products ‘gold’ or ‘silver’ without any sense of falsehood.

It is also worth observing that certain Chinese writers were suspicious of natural, unrefined gold. ‘It wards off evil influences,’ wrote Thao Hung-Ching in c.AD 500, ‘but it also contains poison which, if the metal is ingested in the unpurified state, can kill.’ Alchemical gold, on the other hand, had been subjected to a large number of refining processes before it emerged in its final form. It followed, therefore, that it was superior to natural gold as an ingredient in elixirs or pills which were to be taken internally.⁴

The growth of minerals, ores and metals in the ground was a theory common to both Chinese and Western thought. The Book of Huai Nan (c. second century BC), for example, describes how, after 500 years, the mineral chüeh (perhaps realgar) gives birth to yellow mercury which in turn, after another 500 years, produces gold, while azurite or malachite takes 800 years to give birth to green mercury and green mercury another 800 to produce a blue metal which was probably lead. Similarly, Liu An observed, ‘Gold grows in the earth by a slow process and is evolved from the immaterial principle underlying the universe, passing from one form to another up to silver, and then from silver to gold.’ Minerals, then, matured within the earth which acted as a kind of womb for their growth, and were subject to those cyclical rhythms of birth, growth, maturity and death, which could be observed in everything else. But not only did they grow, they also decayed – all except gold which seemed to be immune to natural corrosion – so the speculation arose, if Nature takes so long to achieve her ends, can the process she employs be speeded up? Hence experimentation in the alchemical laboratory.

Experimentation of such a kind and scale, however, represents human intrusion into forces normally well beyond human control, since birth, growth, decay and death are processes subject to the will of the Divine, no matter how that Divine may be envisaged. As Nathan Sivin has remarked, ‘an alchemist who set out to fabricate an elixir in a few months or a year was creating an opportunity to witness the cyclical sweep of universal change.’⁵ Yet in doing so, he or she was not merely an observer but an active and powerful player, intruding upon the realms of both religion and magic, the former because, as an alchemist, one is challenging the power and will of the Divine by seeking to alter its settled will, the latter because, so extraordinary is the process whereby Nature is bent to the wishes of a human operator, the resulting gold or elixir will be capable of producing effects which are beyond the usual or, indeed, ‘natural’, effects one can normally employ for one’s own advantage. Thus, for example, we are told by the great Chinese alchemist Ko Hung that past adepts and alchemists could disappear at will, or cause cloud and mist to appear, or make water flow backwards and similar occult feats. Magic, he said, was essential to protect the alchemist against natural or even preternatural dangers, and therefore an alchemist ought to know which amulets he must wear or carry in order to ward off dangerous animals and evil spirits. We may also note the common term for ‘alchemist’ –fang shih, which means ‘magician-technician’.

Preparations for working the science and making an elixir were complex, involving astrology so that one might be sure the time was propitious for undertaking such work, abstinence from certain foods as part of a more general purification of the body in order to prepare the alchemist psychologically for the awful importance of the experiments he was about to make, and withdrawal from town or village into the fastness and solitude of a mountain retreat where concentration could be complete and uninterrupted. Maintaining a balance of male and female, too, was important and so the alchemist’s wife, or at least a female assistant, often played a crucial role in the progress of the work. Consequently we find that alchemy was an operation practised by women as well as men. From the Records of Strange Magician-Technicians (Chiang Huai I Jen Lu), written in c.AD 975, we are told about a female alchemist, Keng hsien-seng, who was not only a mistress of the ‘art of the yellow and the white’ (i.e. alchemy), but also of many other techniques ranging from distillation of perfumes to conjuring tricks; the twelfth-century poet Hsü Yen-Chou recorded the sad story of Li Shao-Yün who spent many years trying to concoct an elixir from cinnabar – one of the many key ingredients in Chinese alchemy – but died without achieving her aim; and Ko Hung, whose wife was also an alchemist, relates a well-known anecdote about Chheng Wei who, purportedly, lived in the first century BC. He tried to manufacture gold according to instructions laid down in a book by the second-century BC alchemist Liu An, but without success:

One day his wife went to see him just as he was fanning the charcoal to increase the heating of a reaction-vessel in which there was mercury. She said, ‘Let me show you what I can do’, and, taking a small amount of some substance from her pouch, she threw it into the vessel. After about the space of time in which a man could take a meal, she opened the vessel, and they saw that the contents had all turned to silver. Chheng Wei was amazed and asked his wife how it was that she could achieve a successful projection. She replied, ‘It cannot be gained unless one has the right destiny’.⁶

Now, it will have been noted that while Chheng Wei and his wife were experimenting with the creation of a precious metal, Li Shao-Yün was trying to make an elixir. Over time, Chinese alchemy developed more than one branch of itself and its pursuit of an elixir of immortality could be followed in one or two ways, wei tan which made it out of mineral or inorganic substances, or nei tan which used bodily tissues and secretions such as saliva or semen or blood, extracting from them their primary vitalities, their ‘essences’, in forms which could then be incorporated into ingestible or potable concretions. One clear difference between the two methods, however, is obvious. Wei tan produced elixirs which proved time and again to be poisonous. It is not possible to eat or drink compounds of mercury, lead, cinnabar and a host of other minerals or metals, no matter how refined or distilled, without succumbing to their lethal effects. A sixth-century AD text, Records in the Rock Chamber (Thai Chhing Shih Pi Chi), describes how the ingester might feel:

After taking an elixir, if your face and body itch as though insects were crawling over them, if your hands and feet swell dropsically, if you cannot stand the smell of food and bring it up after you have eaten it, if you feel as though you were going to be sick most of the time, if you experience weakness in the four limbs, if you have to go often to the latrine, or if your head or stomach violently ache – do not be alarmed or disturbed. All these effects are merely proofs that the elixir you are taking is successfully dispelling your latent disorders.

Alas, on the contrary, as Needham points out, these are actually symptoms characteristic of metallic poisoning, something which was candidly admitted about two centuries later by the author of the Mirror of the Alchemical Laboratory, Tan Fan Ching Yuan: ‘When people use mercury and cinnabar to fabricate [gold] vessels, it is a technique to make private profit, and this [material] should not be taken internally, for it contains the poisonous chhi of [this] metal’.⁷

Why, then, did people continue to manufacture and use these dangerous elixirs? The answer lies in the goal at which they were aiming: longevity or immortality. Chinese concepts of longevity and the afterlife are radically different from those in the West. Mahayana Buddhist notions in particular provide a multiplicity of hells and heavens, with reincarnated spirits ascending and descending through an immense range of possibilities including life as an incarnated human. Indigenous Chinese ideas, on the other hand, were firmly rooted in this world, this corporeal existence, and so the goal of longevity was one at which people found it easy and natural to aim. Drugs of various kinds, coupled with breathing and sexual exercises, not only rejuvenated the body here and now but prolonged its existence far into the future; while remarkable preservation techniques enabled even a corpse to retain its plasticity, apparently incorruptible, as the famous case of the Lady of Tai illustrates. Rarefi cation of the body thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 China: The Golden Road to Immortality
• 2 India: The Way of Tantra and Mercury
• 3 Roman Egypt: The White and the Yellow Arising from Blackness
• 4 The Islamic World: Balance and Magic Numbers
• 5 Mediaeval Europe: Translations, Debates and Symbols
• 6 The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Pretension, Fraud and Redeeming the World
• 7 The Rosicrucian Episode and its Aftermath
• 8 Theology Wearing a Mask of Science: The Later Seventeenth Century
• 9 Alchemy in an Age of Self-Absorption: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 10 A Child of Earlier Times: The Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index