How Alchemy Worked

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

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

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

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

what I aim to accomplish today.

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

Yeah.

Alchemy, baby.

Let's do it.

Clumsy attempt at a compliment.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, when we're talking about alchemy or alchemists,

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

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

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?

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.

But it turns out that there's a lot more to it than I ever realized.

And the people involved were

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

Yeah, I always thought of alchemy as

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

But it is, I think, interesting that modern science now looks back and said and says, hey, you know what?

I mean, sure, it was a lot of bunk and BS involved,

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

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.

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.

But it's a,

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.

Totes.

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

all the way back to Egypt.

Egypt was like the starting point point for the Western tradition, but Egypt even

seemed to get it from other places, specifically even

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.

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

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

But yeah, I think it's interesting that it followed that route.

And it's also not surprising that, you know, China was 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.

Indeed.

One of the reasons China was so heavy into it was because the early alchemical

pursuits or purposes were to create an elixir for immortality.

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.

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?

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

time to get to work, you know?

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

alchemy experiments over time.

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

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,

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.

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.

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.

And so the pursuit of immortality through special elixir just kind of became a moot point or a moo point, sorry.

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

Maybe we should set our goals a little more reasonably.

Right, right.

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

As far as India goes,

they were also not seeking immortality, and they were also kind of like post-Buddhist China.

Like, let's try and promote health.

Let's try and cure some disease.

Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold.

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

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 best metal.

Go ahead and make your white snake joke.

I wasn't going to.

I was just thinking of gold wearing a t-shirt that was the best metal.

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

Sure.

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

maybe liquid gold, but it's really not liquid gold.

It just turned the color gold could make you healthier or maybe live forever.

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.

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

Yeah.

So then we reached the Mediterranean.

That was another ancient place.

And by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 322 BCE,

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 your style.

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.

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

something, you know?

Like, sure, they were charlatans and stuff like that, but this was so early on in the game.

Like

science was brand new.

And they were like, like, hey, let's try this thing and see if it works out.

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

podcast period, we've kind of tried to shine a little bit of light on some of this stuff.

It's like, hey, they were doing their best back then,

trying to get involved in science at least.

Right.

At least they were doing something, you lazy sack.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, this is when the first books on it came out.

There was one called

The Translation is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos of Mende.

And this is around 200 BCE.

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

But again,

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

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.

It became much more secretive.

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.

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 alchemists, the monks.

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 again, sir?

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

Right.

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

So it was a combination, a straight-up combination of Thoth or Toth, I think Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, the one with the ibis bird head,

and Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods.

Like this was a complete

syncretization of those two.

And later medieval monks would ascribe like alchemical texts to having been written by Hermes T.

Yeah.

Hermes T.

That's a better check-in name by far.

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

I think it means like Hermes III the best.

I think is what Trismegistos translates to.

All right.

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.

So everybody be prepared for something to vanish.

Yeah, I agree.

And no one knew it.

When you look back on stuff like this, it's kind of hard to parse out

who was first, who was influencing who.

It's just sort of spread around the world.

It is a theory that India's belief system was basically just sort of

brought over as a, maybe not as a book, but, you know, brought over wholesale from proto-Aryans in Central Asia.

And they were in the area between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago.

So it's, you know, 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.

Yeah.

I mean, it does really matter.

It's those historians.

They're kind of fixated on that kind of thing.

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

you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he 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.

Okay, everybody.

His name was Zosimos of Panopolis.

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.

Apparently, they've been finding his stuff all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't realize they had it before.

But a lot of his writings have recently been rediscovered.

Yeah, and his stuff, he's another one of those that was pretty detailed in his writing.

And to have stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing.

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

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.

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.

Yeah, like a bedazzler.

Or perfume making.

And he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named Maria.

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 of cooking like you know French and Italian cooking methods 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 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 of Panopoulos' writings, but she apparently taught him.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

He's saying alchemy is the the study of you know all the things we've observed about the world around us trying to figure out how that stuff works 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 uh that kind of stuff so like it was just them seeking to apply

essentially a proto-scientific understanding of the world as they understood it yeah like what happens if i distill this thing down to its base form or uh create you know you're going to hear a lot lot of talk about vapors,

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

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

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

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.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

So

this whole, 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.

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

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?

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, exactly.

Good place for a break, yeah?

I think so.

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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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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, and you know, logging stuff, describing stuff that would later on, again, you know, lay the foundation for for legit chemists of the future.

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, dryness, moisture, and combining these in different ways are going to have different outcomes.

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.

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

right I think it's called Christiopoia yeah

that's the technical term I think for for trying to make gold yeah exactly

and there are a couple of big big names there are a few big names but two that still made it all the way through history 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.

He was well known as an early scientist.

Some people call him the father of chemistry.

And these guys were, they were contributing by saying, hey, don't just throw a handful of powder at something.

Like, you know, do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.

Just little contributions like that.

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.

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

But this is beginning in about the 12th century when it moved into Europe, and this was a time when

Europe was shifting, you know, to a university, sort of a more academic.

uh way of looking at things and away from the monasteries who were i guess some of the more early you know, science-minded people.

Yeah.

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.

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

and trying to develop elixirs.

And this is where you'll hear more about things things like you know,

immortality, like the elixir of life, philosopher's stone, which we'll get into, and stuff like that.

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.

Europe just showed up and was like, give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy.

You know, that would be my guess.

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

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?

Philosopher's Stone.

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

Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book,

Sorcerer's Stone.

Okay.

That's why I asked if you were joking.

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

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

What a rip-off.

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.

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.

That's how they understood it.

What they were trying to do is figure out how those processes worked so they could speed it up.

Right?

Yeah.

And do it, do it by 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.

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

Yeah.

And you mentioned earlier that

they would operate a little more in secrecy later on.

And this is kind of where we are now.

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.

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

And there were a handful of

European alchemists that we should probably go over a little bit.

The first of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great.

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.

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

Right, right.

So

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.

One I hadn't heard of was Jean de Roque Telade.

Telade.

Jeanne de Roque Telade.

I think I got it that second time.

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

He was trying to figure out Christiopoia, Chrysopoia,

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 about getting rich.

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

So many times, the alchemists are like, all they want to do is just make gold and be rich.

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,

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 oh yeah yeah it was forced on me uh so one of the things that he did too uh which is pretty interesting i think is he god talked about sort of distilling things down to their purest form he did that with booze and he distilled it down to aqua uh how would you pronounce that vita aqua vitae aqua vitae um he called it the fifth essence of wine or the quinta essentia

and this goes back to Aristotle again this idea that

you know it's something different than those four classical elements that we're talking about and I forgot how he pronounced his name but let's just call him dr.

R

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 and it

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.

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 Hocheim.

Phil?

Hohenheim.

Hohenheim?

Yeah.

Well, he went by Paracelsus.

I think we talked about him in our

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.

So he was one of the ones that led the charge in that.

He also was known as

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

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.

Yeah.

That's me paraphrasing him.

That was Paracelsus.

So he was a straight-up genius for his time.

I'm a big fan.

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.

He's like, you sure like this other stuff could be making us sick he's like again with the bile uh there was also nicholas uh flamel i guess or flammel i'm not sure how you would pronounce that but i think flamel flammel okay um he is the one who is credited to have discovered the philosopher's stone uh he was just a mere bookseller in the 14th and i guess uh 15th centuries and he said i got a book i got 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 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.

No, the

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.

And that's how he got rich.

Yeah, but

how did he get rich?

I still don't care.

Because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.

No, from what I saw, his wife was rich.

Oh.

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,

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

alchemical messages

kind of encoded in the buildings, like on plaques or in archways or something like that.

Yeah.

So he definitely was an alchemist.

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?

Gets in there.

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

records say he was between 80 and 114.

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

Yeah.

34 years.

It's

pretty wide.

But even 80 back in the 1400s, early 1400s, pretty respectable, I guess.

No, agreed.

So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.

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

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.

There was also another thing that they were famous for trying to create, 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

like Zazimos had said, you know,

how the

spirit bonds to the body.

Like, that's the kind of thing they were trying to figure out by creating many humans.

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

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.

This is an Arabic book in the 9th century

that apparently Plato had something to do with.

And there was a recipe for a homunculus in there, which is one homunculi.

And it involved inseminating

ewe, which is, I guess, that's a female sheep, right?

With human sperm.

Don't ask how.

I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they had their methods.

Not too many ways to do that back then.

I'm sure they had their methods.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, I bet.

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

Oh, my God.

Oh,

uh, that's gonna stay with me, like Sorcerer's Stone, Chuck.

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.

Well, in a place where he knew that she was going to walk home from high school, remember this.

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.

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.

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

That's right.

yeah that was definitely the line you got from richie cunningham for sure i told i i had forgotten completely about that and as you started to tell that story i completely remembered it just like flooded back to me that's funny 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 so we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing

There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friends stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat.

Okay, I remember.

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.

And Greg finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding it in this really awkward position.

Yeah.

And the face he makes when they open the closet door, it's, I can't imagine how many takes they did to get it just that perfect.

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

Did the goat, was he wearing like a like a cape or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember that.

Yeah.

I'm going to send you that clip because it's worth watching.

All right.

So I guess we need to take our second break.

Yes.

And then we'll come back with more talk of 70s television right after this.

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All right, so

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

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

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

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

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

What else?

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

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.

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.

It was the alchemists who started that.

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

So they were documenting what they were finding.

These are all just the

basic outlines of the scientific method today.

Yeah.

And I mean, the word chemistry actually comes from alchemy.

in about the 1780s, which is pretty interesting.

And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy,

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

Yeah, you know, like romantic chemistry, right?

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.

Yeah, that's a good point.

And there are 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 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 uh spiritual con 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?

Yeah.

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

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

At the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well.

Like he was looking into the whole thing like

yeah, essentially he was trying to figure it out.

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.

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

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.

Yeah.

And I mean, it doesn't necessarily make sense to you

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

say, a bird evolved out of a

dinosaur bird.

The dinosaur bird was not a true bird.

The first bird was the first true bird.

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.

Yeah, it's a good point.

There were, you know, even some more modern world leaders that were like, you know, these guys were 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.

Maximilian II and Rudolph II, and this was 16th and 17th century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help financially support these alchemists?

Because you never know.

Maybe

they can tap into this elixir of life or get us untold amounts of gold.

Yeah.

I also saw Henry VI

not only

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 were coins.

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.

He, he, like, there's coins out there still today to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry VI

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

Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.

I would guess so.

And that is ironic, isn't it?

Yeah, a little bit, don't you think?

Yeah.

I would even say more than a little bit.

I'd say a lot of bit.

Okay.

The Académie Royale des Sciences in France was founded in 1666.

And that's when they said, all right,

this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in our curriculum anymore.

We're not going to look at astrology.

We're going to move into the modern era of the 17th century version of the modern era.

And that's what they did.

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

Yeah.

And the whole thing kind of continued on.

The 19th century still had alchemists in it.

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.

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 um same thing with alchemists like it was just so dumb and and backward science is the the the truth um it just basically disavowed alchemy even though it directly evolved out of alchemy yeah

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

I don't don't know.

It depends on the era the grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff at Thanksgiving, you know?

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 fun and funny.

You definitely will be, man.

No controversy.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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

Well, so far, so good.

That's hard to do.

Yeah.

One more thing about alchemy.

I, when I was studying, listened to a bunch of dungeon synth.

I know I've mentioned it before.

Okay.

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

Okay.

It's really good stuff, man.

If you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music,

you could do a lot worse than listening to Witch Bolt.

All right.

And then it also jogged my memory.

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

And you can go check them out on Bandcamp.

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.

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

Thank you very much for that.

Fantastic.

I'm going to check out Witchbolt.

What a great name.

It really is.

And their album covers are amazing, too.

Oh, I bet.

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.

This is a correction on me.

I can't believe I missed this.

I feel like a dummy.

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.

She made decline of the Western Civilization.

So I goofed that up.

I was totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization, another great documentary.

But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot then?

I have.

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.

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

No.

So that's pretty fun.

I'm going to have to check that one out.

That is from, that's with best regards from Matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio with a P.S.

I love you both very, very much.

Thanks a lot, Matthew T.

Right back at you.

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.

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