Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are here to
Speaker 2: enchant you in this very special episode Stuff You Should Know,
Speaker 2: which we'd like to also call the Facts of Life too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean alchemy. I think a very appropriate topic,
Speaker 1: taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in
Speaker 2: that sense. Where were you talking about a different podcast?
Speaker 1: No, no, no, let's talk about what but I aim
Speaker 1: to accomplish today.
Speaker 2: Hey man, not only do you aim it, you are
Speaker 2: aimed for it. You hit it right on the head.
Speaker 1: Yeah, alchemy, Baby, let's do it.
Speaker 2: What is the attempted a compliment? Yeah? Well yeah, when
Speaker 2: we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least,
Speaker 2: and I would assume most people kind of conjures images
Speaker 2: of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars
Speaker 2: and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure,
Speaker 2: he's lit by candlelight, he's in a strange little laboratory.
Speaker 2: He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create
Speaker 2: some sort of magical potion or do something like that. Right,
Speaker 2: if you know a little more about it, maybe you
Speaker 2: think of Charlatans who trick people into investing in their
Speaker 2: alchemical schemes of turning you know, lead into gold. But
Speaker 2: it turns out that there's a lot more to it
Speaker 2: than I ever realized, and the people involved were.
Speaker 1: Not.
Speaker 2: They were a lot more interesting and a lot less
Speaker 2: dumb and fraudulent than history is kind of cast the mass.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I always thought of alchemy as just from what
Speaker 1: I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something
Speaker 1: like a boring metal into gold, like you were talking about.
Speaker 1: But it is I think interesting that modern science now
Speaker 1: looks back and say and says, hey, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Sure, it was a lot of bunk and
Speaker 1: bs involved, but some of the foundations of modern chemistry
Speaker 1: were there, even though that wasn't their intention. Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case
Speaker 2: that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork
Speaker 2: for the scientific method.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow. What's cool about it too, is that, you know,
Speaker 2: the Europeans, the medieval European you know, monks and sages
Speaker 2: and scholars are the ones you typically think of at
Speaker 2: least in the West when you think of alchemy, but
Speaker 2: it's a I don't want to say worldwide, but it
Speaker 2: really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of
Speaker 2: different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for
Speaker 2: immortality and glory. Yeah, tots, So we should say that
Speaker 2: you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy
Speaker 2: the Europeans as you think of it, all the way
Speaker 2: back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for
Speaker 2: the Western tradition, but Egypt even seemed to get it
Speaker 2: from other places. Specifically, even back before Egypt, it seems
Speaker 2: like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit
Speaker 2: for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially
Speaker 2: gave alchemy like its birth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know,
Speaker 1: the art or something like that, or maybe maybe you know,
Speaker 1: some other word that they had that meant, you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of transformation might be taking place. The word
Speaker 1: alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually
Speaker 1: French and English and medieval times. But yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting that it followed that route, and it's also
Speaker 1: not surprising that, you know, China was one of the
Speaker 1: first to get involved in something like this, because I
Speaker 1: feel like any time we're talking about ancient practices, China
Speaker 1: always seems to be sort of leading the way in
Speaker 1: one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Indeed, one of the reasons China was so heavy into
Speaker 2: it was because the early alchemical like pursuits or purposes
Speaker 2: were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they
Speaker 2: cared so much about that was because the country had
Speaker 2: a huge Taoist population, and Daoism is very much interested
Speaker 2: in achieving immortality one way or another. And so China
Speaker 2: and it's alchemists put together mercury, arsenic sulfur and said, here,
Speaker 2: drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot
Speaker 2: of people died from drinking those things, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know,
Speaker 2: just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand
Speaker 2: and walk off, like time to get to work, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there were some people that
Speaker 1: suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know,
Speaker 1: on the other side, and this is sort of the
Speaker 1: the plus and minus side of some of these experiments,
Speaker 1: they also whether or not purposefully or not, gave us
Speaker 1: things we still use today, like you know, potassium nitrate.
Speaker 1: So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride,
Speaker 1: which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer like for
Speaker 1: farms and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Mh. So, yeah, there were that is kind of a
Speaker 2: tradition in alchemy of you know, they're trying to do
Speaker 2: something else, but they still found useful stuff that we
Speaker 2: still you know, make her use today. In China's whole
Speaker 2: jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as
Speaker 2: Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more
Speaker 2: focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing,
Speaker 2: and so the pursuit of you know, immortality through special
Speaker 2: elixir just kind of became a moot point or a
Speaker 2: moot point. Sorry.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I mean I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we
Speaker 1: should set our goals a little more.
Speaker 2: Reasonably, right, let's just pretend like we don't care about
Speaker 2: living forever.
Speaker 1: As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality,
Speaker 1: and they were also kind of like post Buddhists China,
Speaker 1: like let's try and promote health, let's try and cure
Speaker 1: some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold.
Speaker 1: But you know, you'll see that kind of popping up.
Speaker 1: That's why I think a lot of people the first
Speaker 1: thing they think of is turning something into gold, because
Speaker 1: that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists, because
Speaker 1: gold was so revered either as like, you know, the
Speaker 1: best metal, Go ahead and make your white snake joke.
Speaker 2: I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold
Speaker 2: wearing a T shirt that was the best metal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the Devil's hands, the devil horns fingers, and
Speaker 1: you know, also thinking like you know, perhaps like drinking
Speaker 1: something that maybe liquid gold but it's really not liquid
Speaker 1: gold that just turned the color gold could make you
Speaker 1: healthier or maybe live forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And in India they were trying to make gold
Speaker 2: nut to get rich, but because like you were saying,
Speaker 2: they were trying to balance health, restore health, like it
Speaker 2: was just associated with healthy living essentially gold was.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So then we reached the Mediterranean, that was another ancient
Speaker 2: place and by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt
Speaker 2: in three twenty two BCE. They found pretty quickly that
Speaker 2: the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of
Speaker 2: alchemy for a while, and the Greek said, Hey, I
Speaker 2: like your style. Let's mix together our philosophy and our
Speaker 2: understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy, and let's
Speaker 2: produce something really great that medieval monks are really going
Speaker 2: to go nuts for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think this is like, I know we're
Speaker 1: going to say this quite a bit, but I think
Speaker 1: they were these early scientists were taking a stab at something,
Speaker 1: you know, like sure there were Charlatans and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but this was so early on in the game, like
Speaker 1: science is brand new, and they were like, hey, let's
Speaker 1: try this thing and see if it works out. And
Speaker 1: maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't
Speaker 1: expect them to either. So like, I don't know, I
Speaker 1: feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind
Speaker 1: of tried to shine a little bit of light on
Speaker 1: some of this stuff. Is like, hey, they were doing
Speaker 1: their best back then, trying to get trying to get
Speaker 1: involved in science at least, right.
Speaker 2: At least they were doing something you lazy sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I mean this is when the first books
Speaker 1: on it came out. That was one called The Translation
Speaker 1: is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos
Speaker 1: of Mende, and this is around two hundred BCE. A
Speaker 1: lot of this was again about making you know, valuable
Speaker 1: metals like gold and silver. But again it was the
Speaker 1: first kind of preserved writing that we have on this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, no, for sure. And he was also somebody
Speaker 2: who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and
Speaker 2: the processes, which would come to be very rare. As
Speaker 2: alchemy developed, it became much more secretive. But this Greco
Speaker 2: Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this
Speaker 2: this specific kind of alchemy it's called Hellenistic alchemy that
Speaker 2: laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. One of
Speaker 2: the other big things that came out of it, or
Speaker 2: another indicator of how important it was is there was
Speaker 2: this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists,
Speaker 2: the monks. His name was Hermes Trists Megistos. Just a
Speaker 2: great name, not a good hotel check in name, but
Speaker 2: it's a it's a great name.
Speaker 1: Regardless how many times. Are you gonna hear that?
Speaker 2: Right? And you would say it just like that too,
Speaker 2: like real uncertain and unsteady like Hermes. I think. So
Speaker 2: it was a combination, a straight up combination of Thoth
Speaker 2: or Toth I think both the Egyptian god who invented writing,
Speaker 2: the one with the ibis bird head, yeah, and Hermi's
Speaker 2: the Greek messenger of the gods. Like this was a
Speaker 2: complete syncret syncretization of those two, and later medieval monks
Speaker 2: would describe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermi's.
Speaker 1: T Yeah, Hermi's t that's a that's a better check
Speaker 1: in named by far? Is that t acer or t ee?
Speaker 2: I think it means like Hermi's third. The best I
Speaker 2: think is what tris megistos translates to.
Speaker 1: All right, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2: And this is this is one of those episodes to
Speaker 2: chuck where when we say words we might accidentally cause
Speaker 2: somebody to go poof and write something either appears or disappears,
Speaker 2: So everybody'd be prepared for something to vanish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Uh, And no one knew it that,
Speaker 1: you know, Like when you look back on stuff like this,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to parse out like who was
Speaker 1: who was first, who was influencing who is sort of
Speaker 1: spread around the world. There's is a theory that India's
Speaker 1: belief system was basically just sort of brought over as
Speaker 1: a maybe not as a book, but you know, brought
Speaker 1: over wholesale from proto Arians in Central Asia, and they
Speaker 1: were in the area between four and five thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: So it's you know, I don't know if there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be gained from sort of debating who was
Speaker 1: coming up with what first, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, I mean it doesn't really matter. It's
Speaker 2: those historians. They're kind of fixated around that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: But you know, it is interesting to wonder, like where
Speaker 2: culture came from because so much of it influences so
Speaker 2: much else. It's not just in alchemy but in all
Speaker 2: things basically. But you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he
Speaker 2: actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of
Speaker 2: alchemy is kind of like based on, Like this guy
Speaker 2: was the guy he's like, here's how it's done, and
Speaker 2: this is the ground rules for alchemy. Hey, everybody, his
Speaker 2: name was those the most of Panopolists, and those of
Speaker 2: the most of Panopolists wrote something like twenty eight books
Speaker 2: on alchemy. And for a while they're like, we've only
Speaker 2: got a couple of letters of this guy, but we
Speaker 2: knew he was brilliant. Apparently they've been finding his stuff
Speaker 2: all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't
Speaker 2: realize they had it before. But a lot of his
Speaker 2: writings have recently been rediscovered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his stuff. He's another one of those that
Speaker 1: was pretty detailed in his writing and to have like
Speaker 1: stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing. He was because
Speaker 1: he was an alchemist obviously transforming metals or you know,
Speaker 1: trying to transform metals. But he, like I said, he
Speaker 1: was pretty specific. He would have write ups on like
Speaker 1: exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he
Speaker 1: was using. A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed
Speaker 1: from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe
Speaker 1: craft work, not the band, but you know crafting and
Speaker 1: like like a bedazzle, yeah, like a dazzler or perfume making.
Speaker 1: And he credited a lot of this stuff with a
Speaker 1: Jewish woman named Maria, and he was like, you know
Speaker 1: a lot, I've taken a lot of her methods and
Speaker 1: a lot of her methods also transferred over to early
Speaker 1: methods of cooking, like you know, French and Italian cooking methods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a water bath, a bomb Marie or a
Speaker 2: bonyo Maria is you know, like you know when you
Speaker 2: melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan
Speaker 2: that has water in it. Yeah, so you don't scorch it,
Speaker 2: right exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria
Speaker 2: who has lost a history aside from Zozimosa Panopolis's writings,
Speaker 2: but she apparently taught him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff to not make gold from lead.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean he definitely came up with some processes
Speaker 2: that he figured out himself. And like you said, these
Speaker 2: people were taking a stab at it. They were like,
Speaker 2: what happens if I do this, and what happens if
Speaker 2: I if I try that same thing with a different
Speaker 2: metal or a different powder or something like that. So
Speaker 2: they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation
Speaker 2: that would lead to what we understand it as a science.
Speaker 2: Those of most was doing this like he was one
Speaker 2: of the first to do this. I also saw a definition.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not.
Speaker 2: But he had an explanation or a definition of what
Speaker 2: alchemy is. He said it was the study of the
Speaker 2: composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the
Speaker 2: spirit from bodies, and bonding the spirits within bodies. And
Speaker 2: what are you saying, Like, if you stop and think
Speaker 2: about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible. Yeah, He's saying. Alchemy
Speaker 2: is the study of all the things we've observed about
Speaker 2: the world around us, trying to figure out how that
Speaker 2: stuff works, Like how does a soul come into a
Speaker 2: body and become attached to it, how does it leave
Speaker 2: it after death? What's the deal with water? That kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. So like it was just them seeking to apply,
Speaker 2: essentially a proto scientific understanding of the world as they understood.
Speaker 1: It, Like what happens if I distilled this thing down
Speaker 1: to its base form or create you know, you're gonna
Speaker 1: hear a lot of talk about vapors, like you know,
Speaker 1: boil something or heat something to create a vapor and
Speaker 1: then smash it together with this thing. And now I've
Speaker 1: just learned you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe,
Speaker 1: but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes
Speaker 1: properties of both materials if I combine these two things.
Speaker 1: And while they may not have understood what the heck
Speaker 1: that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what
Speaker 1: they were doing was this right exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this whole jam that was laid down by
Speaker 2: Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind
Speaker 2: of combine their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world,
Speaker 2: which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about you know,
Speaker 2: what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air,
Speaker 2: the four elements, that was the understanding of the world
Speaker 2: that they were working. They were trying to figure things
Speaker 2: out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution
Speaker 2: to alchemy early on, which is science would later kind
Speaker 2: of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset,
Speaker 2: especially considering that Democritis, who was around around the same
Speaker 2: time as Aristotle, remember him, he was the one who's like,
Speaker 2: everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going
Speaker 2: to use the word Adams yet.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. Good place for a break, yeah, I think so,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the move into Europe. Right after this.
Speaker 2: Okay, Chuck. So things were just kind of hanging around
Speaker 2: from you know, three hundreds BCE, where the Egyptians and
Speaker 2: the Greeks that kind of come together and created that
Speaker 2: version of alchemy, and eventually the Arab world started to
Speaker 2: rise and it started to go over here and go
Speaker 2: over there, and wherever it went, it kind of took
Speaker 2: this and that from each culture that it found interesting.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that they did, they showed
Speaker 2: up in Egypt and they said, Hey, I like this
Speaker 2: alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last
Speaker 2: few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually
Speaker 2: helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning
Speaker 2: that took place around this time in the Arab world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, logging stuff describing stuff that would
Speaker 1: later on again, you know, lay the foundation for legit
Speaker 1: chemists of the future. And one of their theories was
Speaker 1: that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically,
Speaker 1: you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture,
Speaker 1: and combining these different ways are going to have different outcomes.
Speaker 1: Like to produce those vapors, you're going to have cold
Speaker 1: water basically, and combine that with some sort of hot
Speaker 1: moist air to create a vapor, and they would you know,
Speaker 1: mix these things together and they would combine it with
Speaker 1: mercury or sulfur or something like that and trying to
Speaker 1: make gold once again, pray.
Speaker 2: I think it's called christiopoia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the technical term I think for trying to
Speaker 1: make gold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big, big names.
Speaker 2: There are a few big names, but two that still
Speaker 2: made it all the way through history. Rosie's who's known
Speaker 2: as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time.
Speaker 2: He was an alchemist. A contemporary I believe of his
Speaker 2: named Jabir. He was well known as an early scientist.
Speaker 2: Some people call him the father of chemistry. And these
Speaker 2: guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't
Speaker 2: just throw a handful of powder, something like, you know,
Speaker 2: do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.
Speaker 2: Just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution too,
Speaker 2: was that they took a lot of these ancient texts,
Speaker 2: translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated
Speaker 2: into Latin, which is when things started to spread like
Speaker 2: wildfire throughout Europe. In like the twelfth century.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot
Speaker 1: we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is
Speaker 1: the beginning in about the twelfth century when it moved
Speaker 1: into Europe. And this was the time when Europe was shifting,
Speaker 1: you know, to a university sort of a more academic
Speaker 1: way of looking at things and away from the monasteries
Speaker 1: who were I guess some of the more early you know,
Speaker 1: science minded people. Yeah, and Christian scholars at the time
Speaker 1: in Europe, they started to become a little more open
Speaker 1: to say, like, hey, maybe we should you know, look
Speaker 1: to other texts, ancient texts, even look from other cultures
Speaker 1: to try and see if we can learn something from them.
Speaker 1: And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid,
Speaker 1: sulfuoric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs.
Speaker 1: And this is where you'll hear more about things like
Speaker 1: you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, Philosopher's Stone,
Speaker 1: which we'll get into and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it,
Speaker 2: I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came
Speaker 2: from the Crusades. Europe just showed up and was like,
Speaker 2: give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, that would be my guess. But yeah, around
Speaker 2: this time, so I read that the European alchemists, following
Speaker 2: this tradition believed that in the ancient world they had
Speaker 2: already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just
Speaker 2: sounds so cool. Make a really cool like title for
Speaker 2: a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book
Speaker 2: or something. You know, are you making it Philosopher's Stone? No,
Speaker 2: I think it's just kind of like it's just fit naturally.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book,
Speaker 1: Sorcerer's Stone. Okay, that's why asked if you were joking.
Speaker 2: Not the Sorcerer's Stone. It's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the
Speaker 1: Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2: What a rip off. Okay, Well, we're talking about the
Speaker 2: philosopher's stone, and that was a term for this substance
Speaker 2: that supposedly was all over the place, But we just
Speaker 2: didn't recognize the magical properties of it that you could
Speaker 2: turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever. The perfect
Speaker 2: version of that thing was because that was the thing.
Speaker 2: Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal,
Speaker 2: and all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever,
Speaker 2: are we we're seeing them in the process of moving
Speaker 2: naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. What they
Speaker 2: were trying to do is figure out how those processes
Speaker 2: worked so they could speed it up right, yeah, and
Speaker 2: do it. Do it. But like that's where they got
Speaker 2: the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold.
Speaker 2: That's what they were trying to do, was move lead
Speaker 2: into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And
Speaker 2: the way that they thought you could do that was
Speaker 2: with the Philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you mentioned earlier that they would operate a
Speaker 1: little more in secrecy later on, and this is kind
Speaker 1: of where we are now now. They would operate, maybe
Speaker 1: they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but
Speaker 1: it was kind of shrouded in secrecy. A lot of
Speaker 1: times they would use like codes and symbols and metaphor
Speaker 1: and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And
Speaker 1: there were a handful of European alchemists that you know,
Speaker 1: we should probably go over a little bit. The first
Speaker 1: of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He
Speaker 1: was a German philosopher in the thirteenth century, and he
Speaker 1: was a friar, a Dominican friar, and he studied the
Speaker 1: work of these Arab alchemists, because like we said, it
Speaker 1: kind of came over from there, and the ancient Greek philosophers,
Speaker 1: which you know, as we mentioned, kind of did those
Speaker 1: two world of philosophy and science or this kind of science.
Speaker 2: Right right. So there was another guy. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: a bunch that we could talk about, John d, Arthur
Speaker 2: d Roger Bacon. They were all alchemists who contributed to
Speaker 2: our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of
Speaker 2: was jonder Roque Telaude de jonder Roche Telaude. I think
Speaker 2: I got it that second time.
Speaker 1: That sounds good to me. But German is my non specialty.
Speaker 2: He was, he was he was trying to figure out
Speaker 2: chris poia chrysal poya, which is again transforming things into gold.
Speaker 2: The thing is and this is a really good example
Speaker 2: or way to point this out. He was a Franciscan monk.
Speaker 2: He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter
Speaker 2: of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty. So
Speaker 2: many times the alchemists are like, all they wanted to
Speaker 2: do is like just make gold and be rich. They
Speaker 2: were just greedy magicians essentially. No, it's not the case.
Speaker 2: They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted
Speaker 2: to find the elixir of life to end disease. Like,
Speaker 2: they had really big, big goals that they were trying
Speaker 2: to reach. And he was a good example that he
Speaker 2: wanted to give the Catholic Church the ability to make
Speaker 2: gold so that they could fund themselves better.
Speaker 1: Essentially, yeah, I took a vowed poverty in my twenties.
Speaker 1: I think you did too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, it was forced on me.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that he did too, which
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting, I think, is he got talked about
Speaker 1: sort of distilling things down to their purest form. He
Speaker 1: did that with booze, and he's distilled it down to aqua.
Speaker 1: How would you pronounce that? Vita aqua vite, aqua vite.
Speaker 1: He called it the fifth essence of wine or the
Speaker 1: quinta essentia. And this goes back to Aristotle again, this
Speaker 1: idea that you know it's something different than those four
Speaker 1: classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot he
Speaker 1: pronounced his name, but let's just call him Doctor R.
Speaker 1: Said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down
Speaker 1: to its purest form of alcohol and I put meat
Speaker 1: in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like
Speaker 1: it is. It stops this decay. And he wasn't. He
Speaker 1: didn't think he had tapped into a new way to
Speaker 1: preserve meat. He thought like, hey, maybe this stops things
Speaker 1: from aging, and maybe this alcohol is a cure.
Speaker 2: All right. He went on to create the my tie.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, another one. This guy's my favorite. Paracelsus. His
Speaker 2: real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolis Bombastis von Hoheim, but
Speaker 2: we'll call him phil Hohenheim Hohenheim. Yeah, well, he went
Speaker 2: by Paracelsus. I think we talked about him in our
Speaker 2: poison episode or there was some episode, because he was
Speaker 2: famous for saying the dose makes the poison like you
Speaker 2: can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you,
Speaker 2: which is a really important understanding at the time. But
Speaker 2: he was one of the ones who led the way
Speaker 2: of secrecy because he believe that what the alchemists were
Speaker 2: doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe,
Speaker 2: and that this information was way too potent to just
Speaker 2: have out there. So he was one of the ones
Speaker 2: that led the charge in that. He also was known
Speaker 2: as questioning Galen's thousand year old idea of the four
Speaker 2: humors being the cause of disease. Paracelsus was like, no,
Speaker 2: I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe
Speaker 2: even little tiny bugs or something like that that get
Speaker 2: in your throat and then into your stomach and then
Speaker 2: just really screwed things up down there. Yeah, that's me
Speaker 2: paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus. So he was a straight
Speaker 2: up genius. Yeah for his time. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure they came but right back at him
Speaker 1: and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile.
Speaker 1: That's the problem. He's like, you sure, like this other
Speaker 1: stuff could be making us sick.
Speaker 2: He's like again, with the bile.
Speaker 1: There was also Nicholas Flamel I guess or Flammeel. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how you would pronounce that, but I think
Speaker 1: Flamel Flamel. Okay. He is the one who was credited
Speaker 1: to discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He was just a mere
Speaker 1: bookseller in the fourteenth and I guess fifteenth centuries. And
Speaker 1: he said, I got a book. I purchased a book,
Speaker 1: and it was in a language that was so hard
Speaker 1: to translate. It took me twenty one years. But once
Speaker 1: I finally cracked that code. In that book was the
Speaker 1: information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this
Speaker 1: is what I don't understand. He got rich, But did
Speaker 1: he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what
Speaker 1: I couldn't figure out.
Speaker 2: No, the later alchemists, like starting around the seventeenth century,
Speaker 2: they created a legend about him, saying that he had
Speaker 2: created the Philosopher's Stone, so you know, he could turn
Speaker 2: anything into gold, and that's how he got rich.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but how did he where? How did he get rich?
Speaker 1: I still look out because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.
Speaker 2: No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh
Speaker 2: that's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him.
Speaker 2: I got because he really was well known. He's recorded
Speaker 2: historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly they endowed
Speaker 2: like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches
Speaker 2: that are some of them are still around today. And
Speaker 2: he was known for putting alchemical messages kind of encoded
Speaker 2: in the buildings, like on plaques or in oventories or
Speaker 2: something like that. Yeah, so he definitely was an alchemist.
Speaker 2: He definitely was rich. But it was this legend that
Speaker 2: grew up around him that he was one of the
Speaker 2: few who actually found the Philosopher's Stone, almost his Sorcerer's stone,
Speaker 2: man see gets in there.
Speaker 1: Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be
Speaker 1: one hundred and fourteen, but records say he was between
Speaker 1: eighty and one hundred and fourteen. So that's a pretty
Speaker 1: big gap there, a wide range. Yeah, thirty four years.
Speaker 2: It is pretty wide, but even eighty back in the
Speaker 2: fourteen hundreds early fourteen was pretty respectable, I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2: So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2: That was one thing that as far as we know,
Speaker 2: no one ever created, right, but all of the alchemists
Speaker 2: in Europe were after this trying to figure this out,
Speaker 2: while at the same time also performing all these other
Speaker 2: experiments just in case they didn't figure out how to
Speaker 2: do the Philosopher's Stone. They were figuring out how to
Speaker 2: do it the hard way too. There was also another
Speaker 2: thing that they were famous for trying to create, which
Speaker 2: are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature
Speaker 2: that they wanted to create so that they could study
Speaker 2: how life begins or like Zosimos had said, you know
Speaker 2: how how the spirit bonds to the body. Like, that's
Speaker 2: the kind of thing they're trying to figure out by
Speaker 2: creating many humans. And they had all sorts of I
Speaker 2: think it's fair to call it wacky ideas of how
Speaker 2: to create a homunculus.
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus
Speaker 1: is fun in and of itself. But yeah, there's something
Speaker 1: called the Book of the Cow. This is an Arabic
Speaker 1: book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something
Speaker 1: to do with. And there was a recipe for a
Speaker 1: homunculus in there, which is one a Monculye, and it
Speaker 1: involved in seminating a you, which is I guess that's
Speaker 1: a female sheep, right with human sperm. Don't ask cow.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they.
Speaker 2: Had too many ways to do that back then.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they had their methods, and you would have
Speaker 1: a berth and it would be some sort of shapeless
Speaker 1: form at that point, and then you need to treat
Speaker 1: it with specific stuff materials, put it in a glass container,
Speaker 1: and then it grows into a tiny person.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't think that this ever worked, but they
Speaker 2: I guarantee some people tried it for sure.
Speaker 1: Oh I bet. I mean you have to have some
Speaker 1: excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right, Oh
Speaker 1: my god.
Speaker 2: Oh that's going to stay with me like Sorcerer's Stone Chuck.
Speaker 2: Every time I see the word you eat, it reminds me.
Speaker 2: There was this Happy Days episode where Richie was writing
Speaker 2: in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl
Speaker 2: that he liked well in a place where he knew
Speaker 2: that she was going to walk home from high school
Speaker 2: for this. And he drew I and then the heart
Speaker 2: and then the you like a sheep, and the girl
Speaker 2: comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it
Speaker 2: and she's like, I love sheep, and he's like, it's
Speaker 2: a you, I love you. But the way that she
Speaker 2: said I love sheep just always it stuck with me,
Speaker 2: like the weird thing you said about inciminating sheep and
Speaker 2: Sorcerer's Stone will always.
Speaker 1: Yeah with me, and it probably taught you the lesson
Speaker 1: like never put yourself out there with a girl.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, that was definitely your line you got from
Speaker 2: Richie Cunningham. For sure.
Speaker 1: I had forgotten completely about that, and as you started
Speaker 1: to tell that story, I completely remembered it just like
Speaker 1: flooded back to me. That's funny.
Speaker 2: There's one other one too. This was a Brady Bunch
Speaker 2: one that I always think of whenever I think of
Speaker 2: I heart sheep when I see the word you. So
Speaker 2: we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing.
Speaker 2: There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friend
Speaker 2: stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat.
Speaker 1: Okay, I remember this.
Speaker 2: So happened that like a bunch of officials from the
Speaker 2: school were came over for coffee to the Brady House
Speaker 2: while the goat was there, and they had to move
Speaker 2: it from room to room and hide it, and Greg
Speaker 2: finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding
Speaker 2: in this really awkward position and the face he makes
Speaker 2: when they opened the closet doors. I can't imagine how
Speaker 2: many takes they did to get it just that perfect.
Speaker 2: But it's one of the great all time shots of
Speaker 2: seventies television.
Speaker 1: If you ask me, did the goat was he wearing
Speaker 1: like a like a cape or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm going to send you that clip because it's
Speaker 2: worth watching.
Speaker 1: All Right, So I guess we need to take our
Speaker 1: second break, yes, and then we'll come back with more
Speaker 1: talk of seventies television right after this. All right, So
Speaker 1: we have talked sort of hinted at the fact that
Speaker 1: alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years,
Speaker 1: and there's a more modern sort of view of it
Speaker 1: as like that, hey, they were doing the best that
Speaker 1: can at least that's what Chuck said. And some of
Speaker 1: the foundations they laid for modern chemistry you're actually kind
Speaker 1: of valuable. And that's kind of where we're at now.
Speaker 1: A lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate,
Speaker 1: maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened,
Speaker 1: which is also valuable. What else, oh.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean just the very fact that these guys
Speaker 2: were carrying out experiments like before then philosophers just said
Speaker 2: like Aristotle, like this is what everything's made of, earth, wind, fire, water.
Speaker 1: Trust me.
Speaker 2: No one asked him exactly, No one asked him, how
Speaker 2: do you know that? Or anything like that, and he
Speaker 2: really you know, I'm not saying he was a fraud
Speaker 2: or anything, but he didn't use any scientific experimentation. It
Speaker 2: was the alchemists who started that. They were the ones
Speaker 2: who started working in the lab with specific measures of
Speaker 2: materials and then very importantly recording their results, so they
Speaker 2: were documenting what they were finding. These are all just
Speaker 2: the basic outlines of the scientific method today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean the word chemistry actually comes from
Speaker 1: alchemy in about the seventeen eighties, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: M hm.
Speaker 1: And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy,
Speaker 1: doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry
Speaker 1: that can happen, Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: Like romantic chemistry, right, So so a rom com what
Speaker 2: they have in there, romantic chemistry. That understanding and use
Speaker 2: of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the
Speaker 2: word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes, by
Speaker 2: almost two hundred years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good point. And there were also some
Speaker 1: pretty major players that we you know revere as our
Speaker 1: scientific forebears that were involved in stuff like this, who
Speaker 1: maybe try to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton.
Speaker 1: And this is like well into the eighteenth century when
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton was doing his thing, and he was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we could make gold from other materials and maybe
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna you know, I'm also into some occult
Speaker 1: and spiritual concepts, but I'm going to kind of play
Speaker 1: that down and keep that all under the table for
Speaker 1: now and it will only be discovered later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, underneath his roughle puffy pirate shirt, he had the
Speaker 2: best metal T shirt.
Speaker 1: On well, and people that were in charge of sort
Speaker 1: of keeping up with his story and his records they
Speaker 1: kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect
Speaker 1: his image, didn't they.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing
Speaker 2: two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe.
Speaker 2: One like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know
Speaker 2: and love is like the world's first true scientists. At
Speaker 2: the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well, like
Speaker 2: he was looking into the whole thing like you know that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: essentially he was trying to figure it out. He apparently
Speaker 2: believed or his paper said that he thought alchemy was
Speaker 2: this ancient wisdom that God had directly given humans and
Speaker 2: that alchemists were figuring out we're learning like that this
Speaker 2: was like divine, a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially,
Speaker 2: and like like you said, his papers were kept private
Speaker 2: just to preserve his image for centuries, and then finally
Speaker 2: they started to get published and people started to understand
Speaker 2: him a little more. And I saw a really interesting
Speaker 2: quote at some point that one of his biographers said
Speaker 2: that Isaac Newton was not the first scientists, he was
Speaker 2: the last alchemists. WHOA, Yeah, And I mean it doesn't
Speaker 2: necessarily make sense to you if you when you first hear,
Speaker 2: but it's very much like how say a bird evolved
Speaker 2: out of a dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not
Speaker 2: a true bird. The first bird was the first true bird.
Speaker 2: And in that same way, the point they were making
Speaker 2: was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists
Speaker 2: evolved out of, but he was not that he was
Speaker 2: part alchemists too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good point. There were, you know, even
Speaker 1: some more modern world leaders that were like, you know,
Speaker 1: these guys were trying to make gold and I know
Speaker 1: that didn't work out, but like, maybe we could try,
Speaker 1: because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold.
Speaker 1: Maximilium the second and Rudolph the second and this was
Speaker 1: sixteenth and seventeenth century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they
Speaker 1: were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help
Speaker 1: financially support these alchemists because you never know, maybe they
Speaker 1: can maybe they can tap into this elixir of life
Speaker 1: or get us untold amounts of gold.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also saw Henry the sixth not only gave
Speaker 2: some like I think fifteen or sixteen alchemists official royal
Speaker 2: licenses to produce alchemical gold, he took what they used
Speaker 2: and minted it into coins. So supposedly there was no
Speaker 2: It was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with
Speaker 2: a little bit of water and it produces some alloy.
Speaker 2: Once you clean it up. That looks a lot like gold,
Speaker 2: but it's much lighter. There's coins out there still today
Speaker 2: to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry the
Speaker 2: sixth commission and that Britain's gold coins were made out
Speaker 2: of for a little while.
Speaker 1: Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.
Speaker 2: I would guess, so and that is ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit, don't you think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would even say more than a little bit.
Speaker 2: I'd say a lot of bit.
Speaker 1: Okay. The Academy Royale des Sciences in France is founded
Speaker 1: in sixteen sixty six, and that's when they said, all right,
Speaker 1: this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in
Speaker 1: our curriculum anymore. We're not going to look at astrology.
Speaker 1: We're gonna move into the modern era of the seventeenth
Speaker 1: century version of the modern era. And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: They kind of shut all that stuff down as like
Speaker 1: the official scientific as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the whole thing kind of continued on the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century still had alchemists in it. The upshot of
Speaker 2: that whole thing was that they were frauds, charlatans, and
Speaker 2: they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad
Speaker 2: name to our modern ears. But also science when it
Speaker 2: was really when it really developed it, it had a
Speaker 2: tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it
Speaker 2: evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Same thing with alchemists, like it was just so dumb
Speaker 2: and backwards. Science is the truth. It just based disavowed alchemy,
Speaker 2: even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: now it is nice, kind of refreshing that today science
Speaker 2: is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing,
Speaker 2: but this is our grandfather. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less
Speaker 1: embarrassing than father.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it depends on the air of the
Speaker 2: grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff
Speaker 2: at Thanksgiving. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I strive to be if I ever am a grandfather,
Speaker 1: just to be the sort of sweet, doddering old guy
Speaker 1: that everyone just thinks is fun and funny.
Speaker 2: You definitely will be, man, no controversy about. I think
Speaker 2: you're also though, one of those grandfathers who's also a
Speaker 2: beloved dad.
Speaker 1: Too, which is well, so far, so good.
Speaker 2: It's hard to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh. One more thing about alchemy. I when I was
Speaker 2: studying listened to a bunch of Dungeon synth. I know
Speaker 2: I've mentioned it before, Okay, but in particular I was
Speaker 2: listening to albums by which Bolt. Okay, it's really good stuff. Man,
Speaker 2: if you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music.
Speaker 2: You could do a lot worse than listening to witch Bolt,
Speaker 2: all right, And then it also jogged my memory when
Speaker 2: I mentioned Dungeon Synths. A couple of years ago. We
Speaker 2: got an email from somebody named the loan Enchanter who
Speaker 2: has a Dungeon synth label called High Mage Productions, and
Speaker 2: you can go check them out on band camp. But
Speaker 2: they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were
Speaker 2: lost because I sent them to Jerry, and she's like,
Speaker 2: I have never heard either of these, so we can
Speaker 2: look for some High Mage Production jingles coming in the future.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for that.
Speaker 1: Casting. I'm going to check out witch Bolt.
Speaker 2: What a great name it really is, and their album
Speaker 2: covers are amazing too. I bet Okay, Well that's it
Speaker 2: for Alchemy everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done,
Speaker 2: and that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: This is a correction on me. I can't believe I
Speaker 1: missed this. I feel like a dummy. Hey guys, when
Speaker 1: you mentioned heavy metal parking Lot on the Sunset Strip
Speaker 1: episode the Greatest Heavy Metal Short Documentary of All Time,
Speaker 1: Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spearrus she made Decline of
Speaker 1: the Western Civilization, so I goofed that up. I was
Speaker 1: totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization. Another great documentary.
Speaker 2: But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot? Then I have.
Speaker 1: I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently Jeff Krulik and John
Speaker 1: Hayne made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's beyond satire and
Speaker 1: encapitulates a moment in time that was magical. They also
Speaker 1: made and this I didn't know, they also made a
Speaker 1: documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty fun. I'm gonna have to check that
Speaker 1: one out. That is from That's with best regards from
Speaker 1: matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio, with a ps, I love
Speaker 1: you both, Perry very much.
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, matthew T. Right back at you. And
Speaker 2: if you want to be like matthew T and correct Chuck.
Speaker 2: Chuck loves that kind of thing, you can wrap it up,
Speaker 2: spank it on the bottom as an email, and send
Speaker 2: it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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