How Alchemy Worked

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 13 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we are here to enchant you in this very special episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 13 which we like to also call the facts of life too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, alchemy, I think a very appropriate topic, taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in that sense. Or were you talking about a different podcast? No, no, no.
I'm just talking about

Speaker 15 what I aim to accomplish today.

Speaker 13 Hey, man, not only do you aim it, you or aim for it, you hit it right on the head. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Alchemy, baby.

Speaker 13 Let's do it. Clumsy attempt at a compliment.
Yeah. Well, yeah, when we're talking about alchemy or alchemists,

Speaker 13 for me at least, and I would assume most people kind of conjures images of like some

Speaker 13 magician wearing like a robe with stars and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure.

Speaker 13 He's lit by candlelight. He's in a strange little laboratory.
He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create some sort of magical potion or do something like that, right?

Speaker 13 If you know a little more about it, maybe you think of charlatans who trick people into investing in their alchemical schemes of turning, you know, lead into gold.

Speaker 13 But it turns out that there's a lot more to it than I ever realized. And the people involved were

Speaker 13 not, they were a lot more interesting and a lot less dumb and fraudulent than history has kind of cast them as.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I always thought of alchemy as

Speaker 15 just from what I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something like a boring metal into gold, like you were talking about.

Speaker 15 But it is, I think, interesting that modern science now looks back and says, hey, you know what? I mean, sure, it was a lot of bunk and BS involved,

Speaker 15 but some of the foundations of modern chemistry were there, even though that wasn't their intention, really.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork for the scientific method. Yeah, in some ways.

Speaker 13 What's cool about it, too, is that, you know, the Europeans, the medieval European, you know, monks and sages and scholars are the ones you typically think of, at least in the West, when you think of alchemy.

Speaker 13 But it's a,

Speaker 13 I don't want to say worldwide, but it really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for immortality and glory. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Totes. So we should say that you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy, the Europeans, as you think of it,

Speaker 13 all the way back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for the Western tradition, but Egypt even

Speaker 13 seemed to get it from other places, specifically even

Speaker 13 back before Egypt. It seems like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially gave alchemy like its birth.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know, the art or something like that, or maybe, maybe, you know, some other word that they had that meant, you know, some sort of transformation might be taking place.

Speaker 15 The word alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually French and English in medieval times.

Speaker 15 But yeah, I think it's interesting that it followed that route. And it's also not surprising that, you know, China was

Speaker 15 one of the first to get involved in something like this because I feel like anytime we're talking about ancient practices, China always seems to be sort of leading the way in one way or the other.

Speaker 13 Indeed.

Speaker 13 One of the reasons China was so heavy into it was because

Speaker 13 the early alchemical

Speaker 13 pursuits or purposes were to create an elixir for immortality.

Speaker 13 The reason they cared so much about that was because the country had a huge Taoist population, and Taoism is very much interested in achieving immortality one way or another.

Speaker 13 And so China and its alchemists put together mercury, arsenic, sulfur, and said, here, drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot of people died from drinking those things, right?

Speaker 13 I mean, you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know, just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and walk off. Like,

Speaker 13 time to get to work, you know?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm sure there were some people that suffered under

Speaker 15 alchemy experiments over time.

Speaker 15 But they also, you know, on the other side, and this is sort of the

Speaker 15 plus side and minus side of some of these experiments, they also, whether or not purposefully or not, gave us things we still use today,

Speaker 15 like, you know, potassium nitrate. So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride, which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer, like for farms and stuff like that.

Speaker 13 So yeah, there were, that is kind of a tradition in alchemy of, you know, they were trying to do something else, but they still found useful stuff that we still, you know, make or use today.

Speaker 13 And China's whole jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing.

Speaker 13 And so the pursuit of, you know, immortality through special elixirs just kind of became a moot point or a moo point, sorry.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah, maybe it's really not possible to live forever.

Speaker 13 Maybe we should set our goals a little more reasonably.

Speaker 13 Right. Let's just pretend like we don't care about living forever.

Speaker 15 As far as India goes,

Speaker 15 they were also not seeking immortality and they were also kind of like post

Speaker 15 Buddhist China, like, let's try and promote health. Let's try and cure some disease.

Speaker 15 Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold.

Speaker 15 But, you know, you'll see that kind of popping up.

Speaker 15 That's why I think a lot of people, the first thing they think of is turning something into gold, because that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists because gold was so revered either as like, you know, the

Speaker 15 best metal.

Speaker 15 Go ahead and make your white snake joke.

Speaker 13 I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold wearing a t-shirt that was the best metal.

Speaker 15 Yeah, with like the devil's hands, the devil horn's fingers. Sure.

Speaker 15 And, you know, also thinking like, you know, perhaps like drinking something that

Speaker 15 may be liquid gold, but it's really not liquid gold. It just turned the color gold could make you healthier or maybe live forever.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And in India, they were trying to make gold not to get rich, but because, like you were saying, they were trying to balance health, restore health.

Speaker 13 Like it was just associated with healthy living, essentially gold was. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So then we reached the Mediterranean. That was another ancient place.
And by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 322 BCE,

Speaker 13 they found pretty quickly that the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of alchemy for a while. And the Greeks said, hey, I like your style.

Speaker 13 Let's mix together our philosophy and our understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy. And let's produce something really great that medieval monks are really going to go nuts for.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And I think this is like, I know we're going to say this quite a bit, but I think they were, these early scientists were taking a stab at

Speaker 15 something, you know? like sure they were charlatans and stuff like that but this was so early on in the game like

Speaker 15 science was brand new and they were like hey let's try this thing and see if it works out uh and maybe didn't always follow modern best practices but you can't expect them to either so like i don't know i feel like over time on this episod on this uh podcast period we've kind of tried to shine a little bit of light on some of this stuff is like hey they're they were doing their best back then trying to get

Speaker 15 trying to get involved in science, at least.

Speaker 13 Right, at least they were doing something, you lazy sack.

Speaker 15 Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is when the first books on it came out.
There was one called

Speaker 15 The Translation is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos of Mende. And this is around 200 BCE.

Speaker 15 A lot of this was, again, about making, you know, valuable metals like gold and silver.

Speaker 15 But again,

Speaker 15 it was the first kind of preserved writing that we have on this.

Speaker 13 Yeah, right. No, for sure.
And he was also somebody who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and the processes, which would come to be very rare as alchemy developed.

Speaker 13 It became much more secretive. Yeah.

Speaker 13 But this Greco-Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this specific kind of alchemy. It's called Hellenistic alchemy that laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come.

Speaker 13 One of the other big things that came out of it, or another indicator of how important it was, is there was this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval

Speaker 13 alchemists, the monks.

Speaker 13 His name was Hermes Trismegistos, which is a great name. Not a good hotel check-in name, but it's a great name, regardless.
Do you spell it against her?

Speaker 15 Like, how many times are you going to hear that?

Speaker 13 Right. And you would say it just like that, too, like real uncertain and unsteady, like Hermes Trismegistos, I think.

Speaker 13 Um, so it was a combination, a straight-up combination of Thoth or Toth, I think.

Speaker 13 Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, the one with the ibis bird head, yeah, and Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods. Like, this was a complete

Speaker 13 syncretization of those two.

Speaker 13 And later, medieval monks would ascribe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermes T.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Hermes T. That's a that's a better check-in name by far.

Speaker 15 Is that T-E-A, sir, or T-E-E?

Speaker 13 I think it means like Hermes third the best.

Speaker 13 I think is what Trismegistos translates to. All right.

Speaker 13 That's pretty good. And this is one of those episodes, too, Chuck, where when we say words, we might accidentally cause something to go poof and something either appears or disappears.

Speaker 13 So everybody be prepared for something to vanish. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 15 And no one knew that, you know, like when you look back on stuff like this, it's kind of hard to parse out like who was who was first who was influencing who it's just sort of spread around the world there there's is a theory that um india's belief system was basically just sort of um

Speaker 15 brought over as a maybe not as a book but you know brought over wholesale from proto-arians in central asia and they were in the area between four and five thousand years ago so it's you know i don't i don't know if there's a lot to be gained from sort of debating who was coming up with what first you know right yeah

Speaker 13 uh yeah I mean, it doesn't really matter. It's, it's those historians.
They're kind of fixated on that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 But, you know, it is interesting to wonder like where culture came from because so much of it influences so much else. It's not just in alchemy, but in all things, basically.
But

Speaker 13 you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he

Speaker 13 actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of alchemy is kind of like based on. Like this guy was the guy.
He's like, here's how it's done. This is the ground rules for alchemy.

Speaker 13 Okay, everybody. His name was Zosimos of Panopoulos.

Speaker 13 And Zosimos of Panopoulos wrote something like 28 books on alchemy. And for a while, they were like, we've only got a couple of letters of this guy, but we knew he was brilliant.

Speaker 13 Apparently, they've been finding his stuff all over the Arabic world

Speaker 13 in libraries that they didn't realize they had it before. But a lot of his writings have recently been rediscovered.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and his stuff, he's another one of those that was pretty detailed in his writing. And to have like stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing.

Speaker 15 He was, because he was an alchemist, obviously transforming metals or, you know, trying to transform metals.

Speaker 15 But he, like I said, he was pretty specific. He would have write-ups on like exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he was using.

Speaker 15 A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe craft work, not the band, but you know, crafting and like a bedazzler.

Speaker 15 Yeah, like a bedazzler or perfume making. And he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named Maria.

Speaker 15 And he was like, you know, a lot of, I've taken a lot of her methods and a lot of her methods also transferred over to early methods of cooking, like, you know, French and Italian cooking methods.

Speaker 13 Yeah, like a water bath, a bon marie or a bagno maria is, you know, like, you know, when you melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan that has water in it?

Speaker 13 Yeah, so you don't scorch it, right? Exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria, who has lost a history aside from Zosimos of Panopoulos' writings, but she apparently taught him.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot of this stuff to not make gold from lead.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I mean, he definitely came up with some processes that he figured out himself. And like you said, these people were taking a stab at it.
They were like, what happens if I do this?

Speaker 13 And what happens if I try that same thing with a different metal or a different powder or something like that? So they were experimenting.

Speaker 13 They were starting the beginnings of experimentation that would lead to what we understand it as a science. Zosimos was doing this.
Like he was one of the first to do this.

Speaker 13 I also saw a definition. I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not, but he had an explanation or a definition of what alchemy is.

Speaker 13 He said it was the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirit from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.

Speaker 13 And what he was saying, like, if you stop and think about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he's saying alchemy is the study of you know all the things we've observed about the world around us, trying to figure out how that stuff works.

Speaker 13 Like, how does a soul come into a body and become attached to it? How does it leave it after death? What's the deal with water?

Speaker 13 That kind of stuff. So, like, it was just them seeking to apply

Speaker 13 essentially a proto-scientific understanding of the the world as they understood it. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Like what happens if I distill this thing down to its base form or create, you know, you're going to hear a lot of talk about vapors,

Speaker 15 like, you know, boil something or heat something to create a vapor and then smash it together with this thing.

Speaker 15 And now I've just learned, you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe, but I've all of a sudden discovered that

Speaker 15 it changes properties of both materials if I combine these two things.

Speaker 15 And while they may not have understood what the heck that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually, what they were doing was this.

Speaker 13 Right, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 this whole jam that was laid down by Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind of combine their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world, which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about, you know, what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air, the four elements, that was the understanding of the world that they were working from.

Speaker 13 They were trying to figure things out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution to alchemy early on, which as science would later kind of

Speaker 13 decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset, especially considering that Democritus, who was around around the same time as Aristotle, remember him?

Speaker 13 He was the one who's like, everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going to use the word atoms yet.
Right.

Speaker 15 Exactly.

Speaker 15 Good place for a break, yeah?

Speaker 13 I I think so.

Speaker 15 All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the move into Europe right after this.

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Speaker 13 Okay, Chuck, so things were just kind of hanging around from, you know, 300s BCE, where the Egyptians and the Greeks had kind of come together and created that version of alchemy.

Speaker 13 And eventually, the Arab world started to rise and it started to go over here and go over there. And wherever it went, it kind of took this and that from each culture that it found interesting.

Speaker 13 And one of the things that they did, they showed up in Egypt and they said, Hey, I like this alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last few hundred years. Teach that to us.

Speaker 13 And that actually helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning that took place around this time in the Arab world.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And, you know, logging stuff, describing stuff that would later on, again, you know, lay the foundation for

Speaker 15 legit chemists of the future.

Speaker 15 And one of their theories was that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically, you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, coldness, dryness, moisture, and combining these in different ways are going to have different outcomes.

Speaker 15 Like to produce those vapors, you're going to have cold water basically, and combine that with some sort of hot, moist air to create a vapor.

Speaker 15 And they would, you know, mix these things together and they would combine it with mercury or sulfur or something like that. And trying to make gold once again.

Speaker 13 I think it's called christiopoia. Yeah.

Speaker 15 That's the technical term, I think, for trying to make gold.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 13 And there are a couple of big names. There are a few big names, but two that still made it all the way through history.

Speaker 13 Raziz, who's known as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time, he was an alchemist, a contemporary, I believe, of his named Jabir.

Speaker 13 He was well known as an early scientist. Some people call him the father of chemistry.

Speaker 13 And these guys were, they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't just throw a handful of powder at something like, you know, do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.

Speaker 13 Just little contributions like that.

Speaker 13 What was a huge contribution too was that they took a lot of these ancient texts, translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated into Latin, which is when things started to spread like wildfire throughout Europe in like the 12th century.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot we had to stop by Arabia first.

Speaker 15 But this is beginning in about the 12th century when it moved into Europe. And this was a time when

Speaker 15 Europe was shifting, you know, to a university, sort of a more academic way of looking at things and away from the monasteries who were, I guess, some of the more early, you know, science-minded people.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And Christian scholars at the time in Europe, they started to become a little more open to say like, hey, maybe we should, you know, look to other texts, ancient texts even, look from other cultures to try and see if we can learn something from them.

Speaker 15 And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid, sulfuric acid, stuff like that,

Speaker 15 and trying to develop elixirs. And this is where you'll hear more about things like, you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, philosopher's stone, which we'll get into and stuff like that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it, I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came from the Crusades.

Speaker 13 Europe just showed up and was like, give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. You know, that would be my guess.

Speaker 13 But yeah, around this time, so I read that the European alchemists following this tradition believed that in the ancient world, they had already

Speaker 13 found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just sounds so cool. It'd make a really cool title for a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book or something, you know? Are you making it?

Speaker 13 Philosopher's Stone.

Speaker 13 No, I think it's just kind of like it's just, it fits naturally, you know?

Speaker 15 Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book.

Speaker 15 Sorcerer's Stone. Okay.

Speaker 15 That's why I asked if you were joking.

Speaker 13 Not the Sorcerer's Stone, it's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it?

Speaker 15 No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the Philosopher's Stone.

Speaker 13 What a rip-off.

Speaker 13 Okay, well, we're talking about the Philosopher's Stone, and that was a term for this substance that supposedly was all over the place, but we just didn't recognize the magical properties of it, that you could turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever the perfect version of that thing was, because that was the thing.

Speaker 13 Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal. And all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever, are we're seeing them in the process of moving naturally into gold.

Speaker 13 That's how they understood it. What they were trying to do was figure out how those processes worked so they could speed it up, right? Yeah.
And do it.

Speaker 13 Like that's where they got the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold. That's what they were trying to do was move lead into its more perfect natural state, which was gold.

Speaker 13 And the way that they thought you could do that was with the Philosopher's Stone, which would make that happen automatically. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And you mentioned earlier that

Speaker 15 they would operate a little more in secrecy later on. And this is kind of where we are now.

Speaker 15 They would operate. Maybe they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but it was kind of shrouded in secrecy a lot of times.

Speaker 15 They would use like codes and symbols and metaphor and stuff when they were like recording their experiments.

Speaker 15 And there were a handful of European alchemists that, you know, we should probably go over a little bit. The first of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great.

Speaker 15 He was a German philosopher in the 13th century, and he was a friar, a Dominican friar. And he studied the work of these Arab alchemists because, like we said, it kind of came over from there.

Speaker 15 And the ancient Greek philosophers, which, you know, as we mentioned, kind of melded those two worlds of philosophy and science, or this kind of science.

Speaker 13 Right, right. So

Speaker 13 there was another guy. I mean, there's a bunch that we could talk about.
John D., Arthur D., Roger Bacon, they were all alchemists who contributed to our understanding of the world.

Speaker 13 One I hadn't heard of was Jean de Roque Tillade. Telade.
Jean de Roque Telade. I think I got it that second time.

Speaker 15 It sounds good to me, but German is my non-specialty.

Speaker 13 He was trying to figure out

Speaker 13 Chrysopoia,

Speaker 13 which is, again, transforming things into gold. The thing is, and this is a really good example or way to point this out, he was a Franciscan monk.
He didn't care anything about getting rich.

Speaker 13 As a matter of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty.

Speaker 13 So many times, the alchemists are like, all they wanted to do was just make gold and be rich.

Speaker 13 They were just greedy magicians, essentially no that's not the case they wanted to create gold to end poverty they wanted to find the elixir of life to end disease like they had really big

Speaker 13 big goals that they were trying to reach and he was a good example of that he wanted to give the catholic church the ability to make gold so that they could fund themselves better essentially yeah i took a vow of poverty in my 20s I think you did too.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
It was forced on me.

Speaker 15 So one of the things that he did too, which is pretty interesting, I think, is he talked about sort of distilling things down to their purest form.

Speaker 15 He did that with booze, and he distilled it down to aqua, how would you pronounce that? Vita?

Speaker 13 Aqua Vitae. Aqua Vitae.

Speaker 15 He called it the fifth essence of wine or the quinta essentia.

Speaker 15 And this goes back to Aristotle again, this idea that,

Speaker 15 you know, it's something different than those four classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot how you pronounced his name, but let's just call him Dr.
R,

Speaker 15 said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down to its purest form of alcohol and I put meat in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like it is. It stops this decay.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 he didn't think he had tapped into a new way to preserve meat. He thought, like, hey, maybe this stops things from aging and maybe this alcohol is a cure-all.

Speaker 13 Right. He went on to create the Mai Tai.
Oh, nice. Another one, this guy's my favorite, Paracelsus.
His real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hochheim.

Speaker 13 Hochheim. Phil? Hohenheim.
Hohenheim? Yeah. Well, he went by Paracelsus.
I think we talked about him in our...

Speaker 13 a poison episode or there was some episode because he was famous for saying the dose makes the poison like you can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you which is a really important understanding at the time but he was one of the ones who led the way of secrecy because he believed that what the alchemists were doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe and that this information was way too potent to just have out there.

Speaker 13 So he was one of the ones that led the charge in that. He also was known as

Speaker 13 questioning Galen's thousand-year-old idea of the four humors being the cause of disease.

Speaker 13 Paracelsus was like, no, I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe even little tiny bugs or something like that that get in your throat and then into your stomach and then just really screw things up down there.

Speaker 13 Yeah, um, that's me paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus, so he was a straight-up genius for his time.
I'm a big fan.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm sure they came right back at him and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile. That's the problem.

Speaker 15 He's like, you sure? Like, this other stuff could be making us sick.

Speaker 13 He's like, again, with the bile.

Speaker 15 There was also Nicholas Flamel, I guess, or Flamel. I'm not sure how you would pronounce that.

Speaker 13 I think Flamel. Flamel.
Okay.

Speaker 15 He is the one who is credited to have discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He was just a mere bookseller in the 14th and, I guess, 15th centuries.

Speaker 15 And he said, I got a book. I purchased a book, and it was in a language that was so hard to translate, it took me 21 years.
But once I finally cracked that code, in that book was.

Speaker 15 the information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this is what I don't understand.
He got rich, but did he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what I couldn't figure out.

Speaker 13 No, the

Speaker 13 later alchemists, like starting around the 17th century, they created a legend about him saying that he had created the Philosopher's Stone, so now he could turn anything into gold.

Speaker 13 And that's how he got rich. Yeah, but

Speaker 15 how did he get rich?

Speaker 13 I still don't care.

Speaker 15 Because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.

Speaker 13 No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh.

Speaker 13 That's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him because he really was well known.
He was recorded historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly,

Speaker 13 they endowed like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches, and that are some of them are still around today. And he was known for putting

Speaker 13 alchemical messages.

Speaker 13 kind of encoded in the buildings, like on plaques or in archways or something like that. Yeah.
So he definitely was an alchemist.

Speaker 13 He definitely was rich, but it was this legend that grew up around him that he was one of the few who actually found the philosopher's stone. I almost said sorcerer's stone man.
See?

Speaker 13 Gets in there.

Speaker 15 Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be 114, but

Speaker 15 records say he was between 80 and 114.

Speaker 13 So that's a pretty big gap there, a wide range.

Speaker 15 Yeah. 34 years.

Speaker 13 It's pretty, pretty wide, wide, but even 80 back in the 1400s, early 1400s, pretty respectable, I guess. Yeah, agreed.
So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.

Speaker 13 That was one thing that, as far as we know, no one ever created, right?

Speaker 13 But all of the alchemists in Europe were after this, trying to figure this out, while at the same time, also performing all these other experiments, just in case they didn't figure out how to do the Philosopher's Stone, they were figuring out how to do it the hard way, too.

Speaker 13 There was also another thing that they were famous for trying to create, which which are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature that they wanted to create so that they could study how life begins or

Speaker 13 like Zazimos had said, you know,

Speaker 13 how the

Speaker 13 spirit bonds to the body. Like that's the kind of thing they were trying to figure out by creating many humans.

Speaker 13 And they had all sorts of, I think it's fair to call it wacky ideas of how to create a homunculus.

Speaker 15 I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus is fun in and of itself.
But yeah, there's something called the Book of the Cow.

Speaker 15 This is an Arabic book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something to do with. And there was a recipe for a homunculus in there, which is one homunculi.

Speaker 15 And it involved inseminating a ewe, which is, I guess, that's a female sheep, right?

Speaker 15 With human sperm.

Speaker 15 Don't ask cow. I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they had their method.

Speaker 13 There's not too many ways to do that back then. I'm sure they had their methods.

Speaker 15 And you would have a birth, and it would be some sort of shapeless form at that point.

Speaker 15 And then you need to treat it with specific stuff, uh, materials, put it in a glass container, and then it grows into a tiny person. Yeah,

Speaker 13 I don't think that this ever worked, but they, some, I guarantee some people tried it for sure. Oh, I bet.

Speaker 15 I mean, you have to have some excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 oh my god, oh, uh, that's gonna stay with me, like sorcerer's stone, Chuck.

Speaker 13 Every time I see the word you, E-W-E, it reminds me there was this happy days episode where Richie was writing in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl that he liked.

Speaker 13 Well, in a place where he knew that she was going to walk home from high school, right?

Speaker 13 And he drew I and then the heart and then the you like a sheep. And the girl comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it.
And she's like, I love sheep. And he's like, it's a you, I love you.

Speaker 13 But the way that she said, I love sheep, just always it stuck with me. Like the weird thing you said about inseminating sheep and sorcerer's stone will always stick with me.

Speaker 15 And it probably taught you the lesson, like, never put yourself out there with a girl.

Speaker 13 That's right. Yeah, that was definitely the line you got from Richie Cunningham for sure.

Speaker 15 I had forgotten completely about that. And as you started to tell that story, I completely remembered it.
It just like flooded back to me. That's funny.

Speaker 13 There's one other one, too. This is a Brady Bunch one that I always think of whenever I think of I, heart, sheep, when I see the word you.

Speaker 13 So we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing.

Speaker 13 There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friend stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat. Okay, I remember that.

Speaker 13 It just so happened that like a bunch of officials from the school came over for coffee to the Brady house while the goat was there, and they had to move it from room to room and hide it.

Speaker 13 And Greg finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding it in this really awkward position. And the face he makes when they open the closet door,

Speaker 13 I can't imagine how many takes they did to get it just that perfect. But

Speaker 13 it's one of the great all-time shots of 70s television, if you ask me.

Speaker 15 Did the goat, was he wearing like a

Speaker 15 cape or something?

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I remember that. Yeah.
I'm going to send you that clip because it's worth watching. All right.

Speaker 15 So I guess we need to take our our second break. Yes.
And then we'll come back with more talk of 70s television right after this.

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Speaker 15 All right, so

Speaker 15 we have talked, sort of hinted at the fact that alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years.

Speaker 15 And there's a more modern sort of view of it as like that, hey, they were doing the best they can, at least that's what Chuck said.

Speaker 15 And some of the foundations they laid for modern chemistry are actually kind of valuable.

Speaker 15 And that's kind of where we're at now.

Speaker 15 A lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate.

Speaker 15 Maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened, which is also valuable.

Speaker 15 What else?

Speaker 13 Oh, well, I mean, just the very fact that these guys were carrying out experiments.

Speaker 13 Like, before then, philosophers just said, like Aristotle, like, this is what everything's made of: earth, wind, fire, water. Trust me.
No one asked him, exactly.

Speaker 13 No one asked him, how do you know that? or anything like that. And he really, you know, I'm not saying he was a fraud or anything, but he didn't use any scientific experimentation.

Speaker 13 It was the alchemists who started that.

Speaker 13 They were the ones who started working in the the lab with specific measures of materials and then, very importantly, recording their results.

Speaker 13 So they were documenting what they were finding. These are all just the

Speaker 13 basic outlines of the scientific method today. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I mean, the word chemistry actually comes from alchemy

Speaker 15 in about the 1780s, which is pretty interesting.

Speaker 15 And alchemy is also, like the other definitions of alchemy,

Speaker 15 doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry that can happen?

Speaker 13 Yeah, you know, like romantic chemistry, right?

Speaker 13 So a rom-com, what they have in there, romantic chemistry, that understanding and use of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes by almost 200 years.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 15 And there were also some pretty major players that we, you know, revere as our scientific forebears that were involved in stuff like this who maybe tried to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton.

Speaker 15 And this is like well into the 18th century when Isaac Newton was doing his thing and he was like yeah maybe we could make gold from other materials and maybe I'm not gonna you know I'm also into some occult and spiritual concepts but I'm gonna kind of play that down and keep that all under the table for now and it will only be discovered later yeah underneath his ruffled puffy pirate shirt he had the best metal t-shirt on well and people that were in charge of sort of keeping up with his story and his records they kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect his image, didn't they?

Speaker 13 Yeah, Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe.

Speaker 13 One, like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know and love is like the world's first true scientist.

Speaker 13 At the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well. Like he was looking into the whole thing like hedging his bets?

Speaker 13 Yeah, essentially, he was trying to figure it out he he apparently believed or his papers said that he thought alchemy was this ancient wisdom that god had directly given humans and that alchemists were figuring out were learning like that this was like divine a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially And like, like you said, his papers were kept private just to preserve his image for centuries.

Speaker 13 And then finally, they started to get published and people started to understand him a little more.

Speaker 13 And I saw a really interesting quote at some point that one of his biographers said that Isaac Newton was not the first scientist. He was the last alchemist.
Whoa.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And I mean, it doesn't necessarily make sense to you

Speaker 13 when you first hear it, but it's very much like how,

Speaker 13 say, a bird evolved out of a

Speaker 13 dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not a true bird.
The first bird was the first true bird.

Speaker 13 And in that same way, the point they were making was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists evolved out of, but he was not that. He was part alchemist, too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's a good point.

Speaker 15 There were, you know, even some more modern world leaders that were like, you know, these guys are trying to make gold and I know it didn't work out, but like, maybe we could try because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold.

Speaker 15 Maximilian II and Rudolph II, and this was 16th and 17th century

Speaker 15 Holy Roman Empire stuff where they were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help financially support these alchemists?

Speaker 15 Because you never know, maybe they can, maybe they can tap into this elixir of life or get us untold amounts of gold.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I also saw Henry VI

Speaker 13 not only

Speaker 13 gave some, like I think 15 or 16 alchemists official royal licenses to produce alchemical gold, he took what they used and minted it into coins. So, supposedly, there was coins.

Speaker 13 No, it was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with a little bit of water, and it produces some alloy once you clean it up that looks a lot like gold, but it's much lighter.

Speaker 13 There's coins out there still today to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry VI

Speaker 13 commissioned and that Britain's gold coins were made out of for a little while.

Speaker 15 Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.

Speaker 13 I would guess so. And that is ironic, isn't it? Yeah, a little bit, don't you think? Yeah.

Speaker 13 I wouldn't even say more than a little bit. I'd say a lot of bit.
Okay.

Speaker 15 The Academie Royale des Sciences in France is founded in 1666. And that's when they said, all right,

Speaker 15 this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in our curriculum anymore. We're not going to look at astrology.

Speaker 15 We're going to move into the modern era of the 17th century version of the modern era. And that's what they did.

Speaker 15 They kind of shut all that stuff down as like the official scientific, as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And the whole thing kind of continued on. The 19th century still had alchemists in it.

Speaker 13 The upshot of that whole thing was that they were frauds, charlatans, and they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad name to our modern ears.

Speaker 13 But also science, when it was really, when it really developed, it had a tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 Same thing with alchemists. Like it was just so dumb and backward.
Science is

Speaker 13 the truth.

Speaker 13 It just basically disavowed alchemy, even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah.

Speaker 13 But now it is nice, kind of refreshing that today science is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing, but this is our grandfather. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less embarrassing than father.

Speaker 13 I don't know. It depends on the era the grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff at Thanksgiving, you know?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I strive to be, if I ever am a grandfather, just to be the sort of sweet doddering old guy that everyone just thinks is

Speaker 15 fun and funny.

Speaker 13 You definitely will be, man. Not a word.
No controversy.

Speaker 13 I think you're also, though, one of those grandfathers who's also a beloved dad, too, which is.

Speaker 15 Well, so far, so good.

Speaker 13 It's hard to do. Yeah.

Speaker 13 One more thing about alchemy. I, when I was studying, listened to a bunch of dungeon synths.
I know I've mentioned it before. Okay.

Speaker 13 But in particular, I was listening to albums by Witch Bolt. Okay.

Speaker 13 It's really good stuff, man. If you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music,

Speaker 13 you could do a lot worse than listening to Witch Bolt. All right.
And then it also jogged my memory.

Speaker 13 When I mentioned Dungeon Synth a couple years ago, we got an email from somebody named Alone Enchanter who has a Dungeon Synth label called High Mage Productions.

Speaker 13 And you can go check them out on Bandcamp. But But they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were lost because I sent them to Jerry and she's like, I have never heard either of these.

Speaker 13 So we can look for some high mage production jingles coming in the future.

Speaker 13 Thank you very much for that.

Speaker 15 Fantastic. I'm going to check out Witchbolt.

Speaker 13 What a great name. It really is.
And their album covers are amazing, too. Oh, I bet.

Speaker 13 Okay, well, that's it for alchemy, everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done.
And that means it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 15 This is a correction correction on me. I can't believe I missed this.

Speaker 13 I feel like a dummy.

Speaker 15 Hey, guys, when you mentioned heavy metal parking lot on the Sunset Strip episode, the greatest heavy metal short documentary of all time, Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spirus.

Speaker 15 She made Decline of the Western Civilization.

Speaker 15 So I goofed that up. I was totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization, another great documentary.

Speaker 13 But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot then? I have.

Speaker 15 I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently, Jeff Krulik and John Hain made heavy metal parking lot.
It's beyond satire and encapsulates a moment in time that was magical.

Speaker 15 They also made, and this I didn't know, they also made a documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 15 So that's pretty fun. I'm going to have to check that one out.
That is from, that's with best regards for Matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio with a PS.

Speaker 13 I love you both very, very much. Thanks a lot, Matthew T.
Right back at you.

Speaker 13 And if you want to be like Matthew T and correct Chuck, Chuck loves that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom as an email, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 2 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

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