The Chemistry of Alchemy Page 7

  The last part of Geber's book contains ways for testing for the purity of gold or silver, so no excuses. If the product doesn't test well, the alchemist must have done something wrong. Maybe the procedure wasn't followed correctly or carefully enough…maybe the attitude wasn't right. Geber also executes another maneuver that might fall into the category of built-in explanations for failure: he hints there is a secret somewhere in the book that people who are prepared should be able to find. Excellent! If it doesn't work for you, then you need to go back and study some more. No holes in that.

  Moreover, if the recipe didn't work, purity could be blamed. The mercury had to be ultrapure “philosophical” mercury. The sulfur had to be ultrapure philosophical sulfur. In Geber's recipe we will use for our demonstration, he recommended repeating a purification process twenty times, which is moderate compared to the seven hundred times required by some Islamic recipes or years of repetition demanded by others. Admittedly they started with impure ingredients by today's standards, but after the first ten purifications, they should have had a pretty good product, so many of the repetitions may have been unnecessary.

  At times, however, purifications yielded results. As we will see in our next chapter, there was one instance when extra care was taken and something new climbed out of the pot. Maybe it wasn't gold—but it was good.

  But first, to the furnaces of Geber!

  DEMONSTRATION 4. DIVINE WATERS

  In this demonstration we will be reproducing Geber's medicine of the first order for citrinating silver as found in William Newman's translation of Summa perfectionis23—sort of. We will not use mercury, we will not add dissolved silver, and we will not purify our ingredients twenty times. Nonetheless, the results can be pleasing.

  As used by Geber, citrinating meant reddening or imparting the appearance of gold. And Geber was not the only author to use the word in this sense. Chaucer, in an impressively astute description of alchemy, has his hero, a yeoman, describe the alchemy of his master, including the process “of oure silver citrinacioun.”24 Chaucer likewise displays his knowledge of the alchemists’ use of gratuitous ingredients, ingredients thrown in for show, for good measure, or to align the recipe with theory, but that don't actually take part in the reaction. Chaucer's yeoman recites,

  And busy me to telle you the names

  Of orpiment, burnt bones, iron squames,

  That into poudre grounden be ful smal?

  And in an erthen pot how put is al,

  And salt y-put in, and also pepper…

  Actually the salt may have been part of the reaction, but the pepper is no doubt a gratuitous ingredient.

  The ingredient we believe might be gratuitous in Geber's recipe for citrinating silver is mercury, but to tell the truth, we didn't try the procedure with mercury, so it may be that Geber got better results. However we were content with ours.

  The recipe as translated by Newman is as follows (recall that Luna, the Moon, means silver and quicksilver is real mercury).

  We elicit this medicine either from sulfur or from quicksilver, or from a commixture of both, but from the sulfur less perfectly, while from quicksilver more…. But if [the mixture] does not become red, remove part of the unkilled quicksilver, and repeat its sublimation with sulfur. But let the sulfur be cleaned from all impurity, and likewise the quicksilver…. And after you have repeated its sublimation twenty times upon the precipitated quicksilver, dissolve it with dissolving sharpness of waters, calcine it repeatedly, and dissolve until it suffice abundantly. After this, dissolve part of the luna [silver]; and when it is dissolved, mix the dissolved solutions and coagulate. Let you project it on fused luna, for it will yellow that with a very rich yellowing.25

  The recipe sounds pretty complicated as stated above, but not to worry, our version is fairly straightforward. In fact, this recipe is well tried and well known. It has shown up several times in history, including on the Leyden papyrus of the Alexandrian artisans, and in their version they also have gratuitous ingredients, as can be seen in the following translation.

  The invention of sulfur water. A handful of lime and another of sulfur in fine powder; place this in a vessel containing strong vinegar or the urine of a small child. Heat it from below, until the supernatant liquid appears like blood. Decant this latter properly in order to separate it from the deposit, and use.26

  In this version of the recipe, we believe the strong vinegar or urine of a small child might be a gratuitous ingredient. Though again, our recipe will not call for either one and our recipe worked well, so we did not experiment further; therefore, it may be strong vinegar or urine of a small child would improve the results. However, even if urine would improve the result, we are not sure why it would have to be the urine of a small child unless one counts the advantages of abundance and ease of procurement.

  Just one more aside before we begin our work: sulfur and divine are the same word in Greek.27 Not that this is unusual in a language. In English, fluke and fluke are the same word, but one can mean a flatworm while the other means a stroke of luck, though few would consider a flatworm a stroke of luck. However, Zosimos used the homonyms in an allegorical tale of a man of copper, and then silver, who is tortured by dismemberment and boiled in a bath of divine water to obtain virtue and become gold.28 Was he talking about a similar sulfur-water process? Maybe…

  At any rate, here at long last is our procedure.29

  DISPOSAL

  The sulfur water can be saved for a later demonstration by putting it in a glass container and covering the top with a sandwich bag or plastic wrap secured with a rubber band. If you decide not to save it, the sulfur water can be disposed of down a drain, but do small amounts at a time, with the cool water running into the drain at the same time. When you're done, follow with another five to ten minutes of a water flush. Tape your alchemical iron and your citrinated silver in your notebook.

  DIVINE WATER

  If anyone in the vicinity (including yourself) is allergic to sulfur, skip this demonstration. If not, you will need your sulfur from the drugstore, pickling lime from the grocery store, a pre-1965 US silver dime, a US copper penny, tweezers, a beaker, your cast-iron skillet, a plastic spoon, and your safety glasses. You will also need to perform all phases of this demonstration outside and use a hibachi as a heat source. For ease of handling, a lasting heat, and a more even heat, use regular charcoal briquettes as fuel in the hibachi.

  Clean your penny with a vinegar/salt solution. (Can't help it, one more aside: Geber recommends this exact recipe for cleaning copper.)

  Place about an eighth cup (20 milliliters) of sulfur with the same amount of pickling lime in your beaker and place the beaker in the cast-iron skillet. Add a little less than one-quarter cup of distilled water (about 50 milliliters) to the powders in the beaker. The pickling lime is calcium hydroxide and forms a caustic solution in water, which is our “sharp water.” Warm this mixture by placing the beaker in the skillet on your hibachi with the grill set on the middle height and stir patiently with your spoon. Remember Geber's admonition: “Therefore let him that hath not Patience desist from the Work…”30

  Be careful not to let the solution boil (hot, splashing sulfur recalls scenes of Hades).

  When the mixture is ready (about fifteen to twenty minutes), it will have a pale-green color. You have to keep stirring your mixture while dipping your coins because the solution is, in fact, a suspension—as opposed to a homogeneous true solution—and will separate if unstirred.

  While the solution is warm, and while stirring, take your penny with tweezers and dip about half of the coin into the sulfur water. It should take only about a minute for the penny to turn dark brown on the part that is exposed to the water. It should have the look of rusty iron, and, in fact, such a coin may have been Albert the Great's nonmagnetic alchemical iron. Set the penny aside and, when it is dry, tape it in your notebook because we will use it in a future demonstration.

  Now you have to allow the sulfur water to cool. R
emove the skillet from the hibachi. Again be patient, it has to cool to room temperature. You don't have to continue stirring.

  Once the sulfur water has cooled, stir it thoroughly and keep stirring while you use the tweezers to dip the silver dime. The silver dime is our “fused luna.” Leave the dime in the mixture (with stirring) for about thirty seconds. If when you remove the dime it is dark brown, it was in the solution for too long. Soak it overnight in baking soda and water in an aluminum pan (an old trick for removing tarnish from silver), and the dime should clean up. When you have the timing right, you'll find when you remove the dime from the sulfur-water dip, the part of the dime that was in the sulfur water has a brilliant, white-gold gleam.

  If your attitude is right.

  The explanation that has been offered is that a yellow-colored polymeric coating of calcium polysulfide forms on the surface and adheres especially well to the surface of a silver dime.31 The brown coating on the alchemical iron, however, is probably a mix of corrosion and sulfide tarnish.

  All that glitters is not gold, and not everything brown is iron. And—as we'll see next—Geber was serious about alchemy, but not all alchemists were so sober.

  The quintessence: it is the human heaven.

  John of Rupescissa, ca. 1350*

  Fourteenth-century western Europe had few light moments. Famine, war, rebellion, schism, cruelty, poverty, disease, and despair marked the era—but some found their own light moments. John of Rupescissa found his.

  JOHN OF RUPESCISSA

  Born in France around 1310, John of Rupescissa had a rough life. At the valiant age of twenty-two he joined the Spirituals,1 a radical group within the Franciscan friars. Noble idea, but 1332 was a dangerous year to be a Spiritual.

  Since the Church's inception, popes had gained in pomp and extravagance. By the 1400s, they lived in elaborate palaces, maintained standing armies, and sold indulgences to indulge themselves. The Spirituals preached a return to the ascetic life of Jesus—and disapproval of Church leaders who did not. The movement enjoyed popularity for the two years that the Church went without a pope to persecute them, 1314 to 1316,2 but the tide turned in 1316. John XXII, pope from 1316 until 1334, did not like the Spirituals or their uncomfortable habit of pointing out his excesses. Early in his pontificate, four Spirituals were burned at the stake for their beliefs, and Rupescissa easily could have joined them, but he got lucky. The pope died two years after Rupescissa joined, and the new pope, Benedict XII, was a different breed. In a random event, in an age that did not understand random events, Benedict XII was elected on the first vote—to everyone's surprise. Normally, the first vote drew the battle lines for negotiations to begin. But apparently each cardinal made the mistake of voting for the guy who couldn't possibly win—and he won.

  A fairly religious pope, Benedict XII was not as hostile to the mendicants. However, Benedict's pontificate was over in seven years, and his successor had new concerns. Pope Clement VI had the distinction of being the pope during the Black Death, when people were looking for someone to blame. Someone with that kind of burden has to find time to relax, and Clement did. He poured out the coffers on secular pleasures, and the Spirituals were on the march again.

  Astute enough to realize the political value of the Spirituals, Clement scolded his more bellicose brethren: “What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity—but we will be silent on that…”3 But though personally unruffled by the Spirituals, Clement allowed the churchmen to persecute them if they wished.

  Rupescissa was arrested in 1344 and spent the rest of his life in prisons.

  The first prisons were, to say the least, substandard. Alternately chained and forgotten, then tormented and ridiculed, by Rupescissa's own account he cleaned handfuls of maggots from his open wounds and slept in darkened cells surrounded by his own filth. Branded insane, he recorded being “locked under a staircase in the hopes he might die quietly.”4

  Yet, in an odd way, prison might have been good fortune. Maggots actually clean wounds (perhaps nature's way of preserving the host), and while Rupescissa was on the inside, the war, famine, rebellion, disease, and despair raged outside. He came down with a mild case of plague but survived, which some people did, but might not have been so lucky had he received a medical treatment of the day. Another quirk of his backward luck was that he was imprisoned—and not burned at the stake. Other Spirituals on the outside continued to be less fortunate.

  Why was the Church so upset with the Spirituals? Beyond a burr under the comfortable saddle of the pope's white mule, they posed a more fundamental threat: they preached their own brand of theology, a dangerous intrusion on the purview of the Church. What theology did they teach? That the end of the world was coming, and the Antichrist was at hand.

  When it comes to understanding the concept of Antichrist, the word nearly says it all: an essence of evil to do battle against good at the end of time, which has parallels in Judaism, Islam, and other religions, each accompanied by a substantial mythology. Yet, the Christian Antichrist is unique in its absence of mythos. In the Bible, the Antichrist is named but never explained. The King James Version uses the word Antichrist only four times, and it is not clear if this indicates a person or persons, one of several beasts, a spirit, or an idea. The Christian Apocalypse enhances the concept, but the Antichrist is not mentioned by name. So Catholics had to count on poets, prophets, and commentators to augment the small amount of available scripture. These augmentations grew to have the strength of scripture and provided the basis for the Spirituals’ beliefs.

  In addition, Paul, an early-Christian missionary (ca. 5 CE to 67 CE), wrote a letter to the Thessalonians, a Christian community he had established, in which he responded to their fears for the end of the world. To calm them he told them not to worry because when the end was near, they would have plenty of warning. There would be signs. And in the fourteenth century, there were signs.

  For western Europe, the 1300s started badly. There was a crop failure from rainstorms that brought to mind Noah's flood, followed by famine. The Hundred Years’ War launched near the middle of the century, followed by the plague. Incredibly, a third of the population died, and more incredibly, over three years. There wasn't time to bury all the bodies. A second wave hit ten years later and this time killed mostly children because they didn't have the immunities of the adults. And in a weird sort of psychological inversion, unable to control the horrors around them, people perpetuated horrors on themselves and on each other. The Spirituals prophesized the end was on hand and the Antichrist was coming.

  But the Church leaders knew prophesy was an ancient craft. A certain John of Bassigny, for instance,5 held some popularity during this era based on his prophecies, which he said he'd received during his sojourn in the Holy Land. However, the places he named for his visits didn't exist, and his prophecies for the first half of the fourteenth century were amazingly accurate—from his book published in the last half of the fourteenth century. But the Spirituals and their predictions resonated with the people, so the Church's reaction was to keep their eyes on the situation. One person in particular they wanted to keep an eye on was the outspoken John of Rupescissa.

  As we outlined above, Rupescissa's initial situation was not good. He was transferred like a one-eyed dog from one cage to the next, until after five years, in 1349, he ended up in the papal prison at Avignon. There are two versions of how this was accomplished, one is that the transfer was at the behest of the pope and the other is that a guard took sympathy on Rupescissa and allowed him to escape. The escape story is difficult to believe because sympathy in prison guards does not fit the picture of the fourteenth century, and if Rupescissa did manage to escape, it would have made more sense to run for the hills than to the papal court at Avignon. But at any rate, again, it turned out in his fav
or: at Avignon, Rupescissa was allowed to defend his prophecies.

  Figure 5.1. A late fifteenth-century woodcut depicting the Antichrist. (Image from Devils, Demons, and Witchcraft, by Ernst Lehner and Johanna Lehner [New York: Dover, 1971].)

  Rupescissa was French, and the pope lived in France, so, predictably, Rupescissa prophesized that the Church, once it figured out how to behave (live in actual poverty), would get a new French pope, and the king of France would become the Holy Roman emperor. Together with the pope, he would rid western Europe of Muslims and the Mongol invaders, convert all nonbelievers, and set up for good times for a thousand years before the end.6 This wasn't bad news for the Church, and they didn't need another Spiritual martyr, so they allowed him to live but didn't allow him to leave.

  Nonetheless, things lightened up for Rupescissa at Avignon. He began writing, which meant he was allowed pen, paper, and books, and he was allowed visitors. We know this from his own account:

  Since I was held unjustly in this dark cell by my enemies, and since my body was corrupted by the evils of the chains and the cell, through the kindness of a servant, I was able to have aqua ardens from a certain man of God and my friend; and with only a smearing of it around the place [of the wound], I was cured.7

  Aqua ardens is another name for aqua vitae, which is another name for high-proof distilled alcohol. It was discovered by alchemists in the process of distilling—and redistilling, and redistilling—their wine, looking for the purest possible spirit of wine. And the purest possible spirit of their fire-smothering, colored wine turned out to be a clear, aromatic liquid that supported fire. Alchemy achieved, alchemy fulfilled. Once Rupescissa learned of aqua vitae, he saw deliverance of the Church, humankind, and himself.

  The Church, he declared, would need all the help it could get during the upcoming times of tribulation. Alchemy was essential. Aqua vitae would be the medicine of the Apocalypse, and alchemical metals would be beaten into swords.