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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 so -called 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 was talking about what I aim to accomplish today.
Hey, man, not only do you aim it, you aim for it, you hit it right on the head.
Yeah. Alchemy, baby.
Let's do it. A 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 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.
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 than history is kind of cast them as yeah i always thought of alchemy as um 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 say and says, hey, you know what, I mean, sure, there 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, sure.
What's cool about it, too, is that, you know, the Europeans, the medieval European 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 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 and 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 any time 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 get to work you know yeah i'm sure i'm sure there were some people that suffered under uh alchemy experiments over time uh but they also you know on the other side and this is sort of the um 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 um like you know potassium nitrate so they sort of have accidentally discovered gunpowder, and ammonium chloride, which is used
today as nitrogen in 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 throughout the country, because Buddhism is much more focused on rebirth and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing.
And so the pursuit of, you know, immortality through a 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. Let's just pretend like we don't care about living forever.
wherever as far as india goes uh they were also not seeking immortality and they were also kind of like post uh buddhist china like let's try and promote health let's try and cure some disease um maybe we can try and transfer something into gold uh 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 uh either there is like, you know, the, the, the best metal, uh, go ahead and make your white snake joke.
I wasn't going to, I was just thinking of, of gold wearing a t -shirt.
This is the best metal. Yeah.
It was like the devil's hands, the devil, devil horns, fingers.
Sure. Uh, and, and, you know, also thinking like, you know, perhaps like drinking something that, uh, 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.
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 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 dab at, at some, at something, you know, like sure there were charlatans and stuff like that, but this was so early on in the game, like 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, 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 were doing their best back then, trying to get involved in science, at least. Right, at least they were doing something, you lazy sap.
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 Boulos of Mende.
And this is around 200 BCE.
A lot of this was, again, about making valuable metals like gold and silver.
but again it was uh it was the first kind of preserved writing that we have on this yeah right no for sure and uh he was also somebody who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and the processes which um would come to be very rare as alchemy developed it became much more secretive yeah but this um greco -egyptian creation this melding of uh 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 Trismegistus.
Just a great name. Not a good hotel check -in name, but it's a great name regardless.
Could 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 tristos, 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.
This was a complete synchronization of those two.
and later medieval monks would describe like alchemical text 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 Trismegistus 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 somebody to go poof And something either appears or disappears.
So everybody be prepared for something to vanish.
Yeah, I agree. 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 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 four and five thousand 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 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 um 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 an alchemy but in in all things basically.
But you mentioned Bolas 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 Panopolis wrote something like 28 books on alchemy.
And for a while, they were like, 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 metals or trying to transform metals.
Uh, but he, like I said, he was pretty specific.
He would have, uh, write -ups on like exactly what tools he was using on what methods he was using.
Uh, a lot of this stuff was obviously, uh, repurposed from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe craft work, not the band, uh, but you know, crafting and, uh, like.
Like a bedazzler. Yeah.
Like a bedazzler or perfume making.
And he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named, uh, Maria.
And he was like, you know, a 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.
Yeah, like a water bath, a bain -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. Exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria, who has lost a history aside from Zosimos of Panopolis' 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 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?
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 create, you know, you're going to hear a 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.
Yeah. So this whole jam that was laid down by Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind of combined 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 is 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. 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 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 later on, again, you know, lay the foundation 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 Chrysopoeia.
Yeah. That's the technical term, I think, for trying to make gold.
Yeah, exactly. 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.
Razi's, 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 Jabeer.
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 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.
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 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 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 would make a really cool, like, title for a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book or something, you know?
Are you making a joke?
Philosopher's Stone.
no I think it's just kind of like 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 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 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 work so they could speed it up, right?
And 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.
It's 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, you know, 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 worlds 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 Roquetelade.
Jean de Roquetelade.
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 chrysopoeia, 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. 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 like 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.
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.
He did that with booze and he distilled it down to aqua.
how would you pronounce that, Vita?
Aquavitae. Aquavitae.
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 you pronounce 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 its decay.
And 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 is my favorite, Paracelsus.
His real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohheim.
But we'll call him Phil?
Bill? 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 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.
There was also Nicholas Flamel, I guess, or Flamel.
I'm not sure how you would pronounce that.
I think Flamel. Flamel.
Okay. Okay. 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.
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 the information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone.
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 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 where how did he get rich i still don't get it 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's recorded historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly, they endowed like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches.
Some of them are still around today.
and he was known for putting alchemy alchemical messages um kind of encoded in the buildings like on plaques or in art ways 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 this the philosopher's stone i almost said sorcerer's stone man see gets in there Uh, another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be 114, but, um, records say he was between 80 and 114.
So that's a pretty big, uh, gap there or a wide range.
Yeah. 34 years. It is pretty, pretty wide, but even 80 back in the 1400s, early 1400s is pretty respectable, I guess.
Yeah. 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. 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 Zosimos had said, you know, how the spirit bonds to the body.
Like that's the kind of thing they're 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 ninth 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 a 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 - 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, 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 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?
Yeah. Oh, my God. That's going to stay with me like Sorcerer's Stone, Chuck.
Every time I see the word you, E -W -E, it reminds me there's 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.
I remember this. And he he drew I and then the heart and then the U 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 U I love you you but the way that she said i love sheep just always it stuck with me like the weird thing you said about um inseminating sheep and sorcerer's stone will always stick with me and 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 ritchie cunningham for sure i told i had forgotten completely about that and as
you started to tell that story i completely remembered it just like flooded back 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 that.
And 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 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.
And the face he makes when they open the closet door, I can't imagine how many takes they did to get it just that perfect.
But it's one of the great all -time shots of 70s television, if you ask me.
Did the goat, was he wearing 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, 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 going to, you know, I'm also into some occult and spiritual concepts, but I'm going to 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, Like he was looking into the whole thing, like, you know, essentially he was trying to figure it out.
He apparently believed, or his paper 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.
trees. 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. 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 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 are trying to make gold and I know that 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 Rudolf 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 are coins.
No, it was a combination of mercury 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.
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 it.
OK. The Académie Royale des Sciences in France is 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 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 fraud 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 evolved out of like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing.
Same thing with alchemists.
Like it was just so dumb and backward. Science is the truth.
It just basically disavowed alchemy, even though it directly evolved out of alchemy.
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 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 doubt about it. I think you're also, though, one of those grandfathers who's also a beloved dad, too.
Well, so far so good.
It's hard to do. 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. But in particular, I was listening to albums by Witch Bolt.
Okay. It's really good stuff, man.
Yeah. If you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music.
I am. 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 the future.
Thank you very much for that.
Fantastic. I'm going to check out Witch Bolt.
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 Spheeris.
She made Decline of the Western Civilization So I goofed that up I was totally thinking of Decline of the 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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