The Chemistry of Alchemy Page 19

  Though Thurneysser avoided a violent end, his demise was still sad. He was poor and unmarried and requested to be buried beside Albert the Great, but he was not. Yet, though identifying him as an “unprincipled quack,” Historian J. R. Partington also credits Thurneysser with being the cause, even if not consciously, of inspiring the beginnings of chemical industry in Prussia.2

  Our second author was more inscrutable than unscrupulous, but pretty interesting just the same.

  Figure 13.1. The First Key of Basil Valentine. (Image used by permission of Edgar Fahs Smith History of Chemistry Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.)

  BASIL VALENTINE

  Basil Valentine stepped into the Renaissance fully formed around early 1600, when a book written under his name rolled off the printing press of Johann Tholde,3 owner and editor. Tholde claimed the manuscript, supposedly written in the 1400s, was discovered when lightning struck a church, a marble slab moved, and a manuscript and some powder of projection were revealed. The book sold well, so more slabs were moved, and, voilà, more manuscripts showed up and more details of Valentine's life surfaced.

  There were, however, some holes in the story. Valentine, it was said, was a Benedictine monk who traveled Europe and Egypt in the early 1400s, but his writings allude to events such as the voyages of Columbus, which wouldn't take place until after his supposed lifetime. And, curiously, editor and printer Johann Tholde had written his own book Haligraphia, which closely resembled some writings of Basil Valentine. In addition, Tholde had edited another manuscript by another alchemist that included the same type of alchemy and technology as in Valentine's writings. Finally, Johann Tholde was a metallurgist and owner of some salt mines and therefore familiar with the mining and metallurgy information included in the works by Valentine.

  Not surprisingly, there are those who equate Tholde with Valentine.

  This theory, that Tholde is Valentine and vice versa, has not always been universally accepted. It is, however, the notion we accept here. If it was the case, if Tholde was Valentine, then it was a pretty good sales strategy: write a book, sell it, then change it a bit and sell it again under a different name, but make sure the person credited as the author is long dead so there are no quarrels concerning payment of profits. While you were at it, dress up the mysterious author as a monk with a story and a powder of projection.

  Therefore, we are going to continue to refer to this author as Basil Valentine, even though we know he was probably Johann Tholde. There were probably others who used the name, too, once the storyline was established. Nonetheless, whoever wrote all the books, some of the books, or the majority of the books ascribed to Basil Valentine, sources agree that the author of the most important works was an able and knowledgeable alchemist with a command of techniques, properties of materials, and practical mining and metallurgy.

  And a certain flair for mystery.

  Partington, in the second volume of his comprehensive four-volume history of chemistry, tackled the Valentine corpus. Using an eighteenth-century German edition of a collection of Valentine's books, he dove in, translated, compacted, and listed highlights of Valentine's works.

  He noted “The language is an Upper Saxony dialect, the style is a mixture of pious mysticism, intolerable verbosity, and sharp invective very reminiscent of Paracelsus…at his worst.” Partington gave an example from Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (ca. 1600), one of Basil Valentine's best-known works, in which Valentine rails against physicians.

  O you wretched wordly-wise little smart-Alicks,…you infamous men, madder than bacchanalian fools, who will neither learn nor soil your hands with coals,…you titular doctors, you poor wretched people,…you miserable stinking bag of maggots, you poor earthworm, why do you look so intently on the shell and neglect the kernel?…But I will put an end to this discourse, lest my tears, which I can hardly restrain, should blot this my writing.4

  Strong words—that would make for interesting seventeenth-century reading.

  Valentine placed an emphasis on antimony as a useful material, as perhaps the title The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony has already implied. Valentine spoke of the purification of gold by fusion with antimony or stibnite, a sulfide mineral of antimony, and even recommended preparations of antimony as a medicine, though he knew it was a poison and “the common people and doctors [are] afraid of them.”5 Then again, true to Paracelsus, he gives a procedure for purifying antimony that essentially removes all the antimony and leaves a harmless wash. But just to be careful, he warned the dispenser to pay attention to the dose. If he had added, “and pat the patient on the head,” he would have completed Paracelsus's placebo approach.

  Valentine seemed to have a working knowledge of the vapors produced in mining operations. He described an explosive vapor, “fire damp,” which would be methane gas produced and hidden in pockets of the mine, and an asphyxiating “choke damp,” which would be a carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide mine gas. Valentine noted, correctly, that these gases are like the gas from fermenting wine and are capable of extinguishing a burning splint. In a later demonstration, we will play around with the gas a bit, but not enough to choke on.

  In the final analysis, Partington says Valentine's technology was good, the medicine at least did no harm, but Valentine's theory left something to be desired. To quote Partington, “His views on the generation of metals…are mystical and unintelligible, but some of his diagrams are said to have special occult meanings.”6

  Or did they?

  THE TWELVE KEYS

  In a breakthrough investigation of an illustrated edition of Valentine's Concerning the Great Stone of the Ancient Sages (ca. 1620), the second part of which, The Twelve Keys, gives Basil Valentine's recipe for the philosophers’ stone, historian Lawrence Principe7 accomplished a decoding of Valentine's symbolic language and allegorical illustrations and found not mysticism—but chemistry! After carefully prying it from intertwined and self-referential symbolism, Principe was able to reproduce, experimentally, Valentine's procedure. In his own book The Secrets of Alchemy (Synthesis), Principe gives an entertaining and enlightening presentation of his finding. To paraphrase Partington: We could not do a better job, so we will not attempt it—but in the following, we will offer some highlights of what Principe discovered, just to give the flavor.

  Concerning the Great Stone of the Ancient Sages began gloriously with “When I had emptied to the dregs the cup of human suffering…” Then the Basil Valentine character proceeded to tell how he took himself to a monastery and sheltered himself from the evils of the world. However, in the monastery, once securely sequestered, he found he had time on his hands, so he took up alchemy. He found additional motivation when a friend of his, on the verge of succumbing to kidney disease, gave up hope. Valentine resolved to apply all he had learned from his studies and his newly acquired skills to make a medicine to cure his friend. Six years later, having tried all the herbal preparations he could, he turned to mineral preparations and found “one which exhibited many colors.” He extracted the “spiritual essence,” gave it to his friend, and his friend was completely cured. Then he added,

  Thus have I been wishing to reveal to you…as far as may be lawful to me, the Stone of the Ancients,…I write about it, not for my own good, but for that of posterity, and though my words be few and simple,…. Ponder them well, that you also may find the Rock which is the foundation Stone of truth, the temporal blessing, and the eternal reward.8

  However, his “few and simple” words turned out to be The Twelve Keys, a mishmash of images and invention that read like the ravings of hallucinating magi.

  Consider the first key:

  Let my friend know that no impure or spotted things are useful for our purpose. For there is nothing in their leprous nature capable of advancing the interests of our Art….

  Let the diadem of the King be of pure gold, and let the Queen that is united to him in wedlock be chaste and immaculate. If you would operate by means of o
ur bodies, take a fierce grey wolf, which, though on account of its name it be subject to the sway of warlike Mars, is by birth the offspring of ancient Saturn, and is found in the valleys and mountains of the world, where he roams about savage with hunger. Cast to him the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated; and when it has been performed thrice the Lion has overcome the wolf, and will find nothing more to devour in him.9

  Hm. What happened to speaking plainly?

  The opening phrases aren't too bad. We understand that Valentine is saying that we must start out with pure materials, “no impure or spotted things,” which has long been the alchemists’ credo. The instructions after that are not too bad either. We are familiar with the idea that it takes gold to make gold, so we are not surprised that a “diadem…of pure gold” is required. We don't know about the queen yet, but we can move on. Mars we know is iron and Saturn is lead, but a gray wolf?

  We need some help, and Principe provided it.

  The passage, Principe explained, uses Decknamen, a German word meaning “cover names,” code for the accepted name for a material, but with this caveat: the Decknamen are chosen so someone familiar with alchemy could puzzle out the meaning. The tale tells, metaphorically, the steps in the process, so, again, the prepared could follow the thread.

  Principe enlightened us: the passage represents a purification process for gold that is used today. Stibnite, a gray, crystalline antimony/sulfur compound, was the gray wolf. Metals dissolve rapidly and spontaneously into melted stibnite and react to form sulfides—except for gold. Therefore, impure gold would melt into the stibnite (“cast to him the body of the King”), and impurities would react with the sulfur and could be physically removed. The gold, however, would remain intact. After removing the impurities, the gold and the remaining stibnite and antimony could be strongly heated (“burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire”). The antimony would evaporate, and the gold could be recovered in purified form.

  Principe proceeded to decode all twelve steps of the allegorical tale—in a marvelous rendition—but we will let readers discover those secrets and surprises in their own investigation of Principe's work. What is important to us here is that Principe revealed, after centuries of attempted interpretation by mystics, philosophers, and even psychologists, Valentine was describing a real, working alchemical recipe. Brilliant.

  So the big question: Why all the obscurity, subterfuge, and seeming mysticism? There may be many answers.

  For one, in these times as now, craft workers protected proprietary information, so the alchemists weren't the only group to develop a “shop talk” to cover trade secrets or to reinforce comradery. It may be that if we worked in an alchemical workshop in 1600, Valentine would have made perfect sense.10 For another, the pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance authors found if they made their recipes difficult enough or their ingredients obscure enough, the odds of someone actually being able to follow the procedure were fairly slim, so they did not have to worry about shouts of fraud. But the late-Renaissance alchemists were fairly savvy. They knew how to work the fires, and the popularity of a book would drop precipitously if the failure of the process was shown to be in the recipe and not in the alchemist. Witness Bernard Palissy's opinion of alchemists after he tried to learn alchemy from books. Valentine's obscurity hid the information from the non-alchemist, but when a true alchemist bought the book, they would have been able to puzzle it out.

  Moreover, people may have expected a little mysticism with their alchemy. Readers at the time enjoyed the challenge of following clues to an answer, and, in fact, highbrow word games called emblematics were popular because of their appeal as intellectual puzzles.

  But these are simple answers, and it was not a simple-answer age. Maybe the author truly did want to share what he knew with a chosen few and hide information from sinister forces. Maybe he trusted only people knowledgeable enough to understand the technical analogies and spiritual enough to understand the Christian allusions. Why would this be important? The agent of the Antichrist might be out there. Could be. Or the enemy could use the information to sabotage the economy. Or the unscrupulous could use the knowledge to take advantage of the innocent.

  And the unscrupulous were out there…or so it would seem. Yet for some it was not so clear. Is it unscrupulous to do what you must to get by? Next chapter we will meet a man for whom this question applies.

  But before we go, let's visit Basil Valentine in his more practical days. In his various writings in addition to The Twelve Keys, he revealed himself an able and pragmatic alchemist. In the next demonstration we will duplicate some of his methods and take a moment to admire his technical skills.

  Out of the mystics and into the fire!

  DEMONSTRATION 13. LIFTING THE MYSTICAL FOG

  In this chapter's demonstrations, these practical procedures will remind us, when all is said and done, that Basil Valentine—whoever he was—was an excellent alchemist.

  DISPOSAL

  Liquids produced in the demonstration can be disposed of by pouring down the drain, as long as the drain is immediately flushed with water for two to three minutes. The solids can be stored in baggies and taped in your notebook to be admired forever.

  REMOVING THE CRY TIN

  Tin is a very flexible material, especially in thin sheets. In demonstration 2 we had you make a puddle of tin and observe the cry of tin, the odd creaking noise tin makes when it is bent back and forth. The alchemists considered the cry to be an imperfection of tin and looked for ways to remove it. Corrupting tin with impurities was one way. On the other hand, Basil Valentine attached no mystic meaning but simply noted brittleness as a property of impure tin.

  Retrieve the rust we suggested you make ahead of time in “Stores and Ores,” or make some now. Alternatively you may be able to find a source of rust, as most households have some rust somewhere. Set it aside, put your safety glasses on, and then make another tin puddle by melting some tin in a beaker in your cast-iron skillet.

  While the tin is still molten and moving freely, put several pinches of rust in the tin. Mix the combination with your sacrificial screwdriver and continue to heat, though the mixing will never be perfect. One method for assuring adequate mixing might be to repeatedly fold the rust into the tin. When the rust is mixed somewhat uniformly, pick up the beaker with oven mitts and tip it so a puddle of tin forms on the side and bottom and make the puddle as thin as reasonable. Turn off the heat on the burner.

  Hold the beaker tilted until the puddle no longer flows and then set it on a heat-resistant surface to cool for at least fifteen minutes. When the mass has cooled, put on your work gloves and pry the tin out of the beaker with your screw driver, as before.

  Now try bending the tin. It should be more brittle and difficult to bend, as Valentine reported.

  And no more crying.

  LYE

  You may have already prepared your lye from the directions suggested in “Stores and Ores,” but if not, we repeat the directions here.

  Turn the clock back two weeks to start this reaction—or wait two weeks to see the results. Sorry, but it takes time, of which the alchemists seemed to have more of in their world.

  Find some wood ash. Fireplace ash works well, or campfire ash (which is a nice excuse to have a fire in the fireplace or a campfire). All you need is about a half cup (around 125 milliliters). Put the ash in a glass or ceramic container and add distilled water until you have covered the ash and have about the same volume of water above the ash as you have ash. In other words, if you have a clear container, you should see a height of ash followed by the same height of water.

  It may seem odd to require distilled water when you are pouring it over dirty ash, but it can make a difference. The old alchemists used rain water as their source of clean water, but that may not be a good idea nowadays.

  Cover the container with a watch glass or plastic wrap and allow this conc
oction to soak for two weeks, stirring when you think of it, but at least once every two days. In the meantime, find the litmus paper suggested for purchase in “Stores and Ores,” but if you didn't order it then, there is plenty of time to get some in the next two weeks! Test every so often by collecting a drop of the water above the ash and dropping it on a strip of red litmus paper. At the end of two weeks’ time, the water should turn red litmus paper blue.

  The process we have described (and you have applied) is called leaching, and the watery component above the mixture is called leachate or lixivium. When the leachate turns the litmus paper blue, it is called lye.

  The term lye applies to several substances and mixtures. Sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide are both called “lye” as are solutions of potassium or sodium carbonate, such as we've created here. The common thread is that these substances are corrosive and fall into the chemical category of a base, which is defined as a substance that neutralizes acid. The definition may seem circular, but that's our modern definition. The old alchemists, including Basil Valentine, knew it as contraries. Acids and bases are contraries.

  Accordingly, if your solution is ready, you should be able to see these two contraries battle it out.

  Allow the ash to settle and then pour off the lye into a clean beaker. You don't need it all, so stop before you catch any ash in the clean beaker. Start adding vinegar (acetic acid), one drop at a time. After each addition, swirl the beaker and test the solution by touching the solution with a corner of red litmus paper. Eventually the litmus paper should no longer turn blue when you dip it in the leachate, which means all the base has been neutralized by that contrary acid. Chemists today call this process titration.