Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Came today we're
Speaker 1: bringing you an episode from the Vault. This one is
Speaker 1: called Dissolver of Worlds. It originally published on April. I
Speaker 1: remember being very excited about this one when we recorded it.
Speaker 1: Uh we we talk a lot about the history of
Speaker 1: the quest for a universal solvent in in alchemy. All right,
Speaker 1: let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and I wanted to start off today
Speaker 1: by thinking about containers. Um, if you ever look around
Speaker 1: a chemistry lab, you will notice that there are a
Speaker 1: lot of containers made out of glass. Glass is often
Speaker 1: thought of as as the chemist's friend, right, And this
Speaker 1: is because silica, the stuff that glass is made out of,
Speaker 1: is generally chemically inert, not much reacts with it, and
Speaker 1: glass is insoluble in in most solvents, so it's not
Speaker 1: going to be leaching off and contaminating your sample. But
Speaker 1: this is not true in all cases. For instance, there's
Speaker 1: a chemical we've talked about on the show before, called
Speaker 1: hydrofluoric acid, uh, the solution of hydrogen fluoride or HF
Speaker 1: in water. Hydrogen fluoride is known to actually corrode even glass,
Speaker 1: and there's some pretty good videos of this that you
Speaker 1: can look up, like the YouTube channel called periodic Videos
Speaker 1: as one you can find where they dissolve a glass
Speaker 1: light bulb in hydrofluoric acid. I think while it's plugged
Speaker 1: in by the way, at least when when the glass
Speaker 1: finally does dissolve and break off in the liquid, the
Speaker 1: the film inside the light bulb, I recall, is like
Speaker 1: sparking in the solution in a in a very weak
Speaker 1: and creepy and cursed way. But it's kind of disturbing
Speaker 1: to see even glass, the ultimate non reactor, just getting
Speaker 1: sort of cleanly sheared off of the top of a
Speaker 1: bulb when it's dipped into this this stuff and then
Speaker 1: falling away and eventually just dissolving into it and becoming
Speaker 1: a liquid itself. Regular glass, of course, is made of
Speaker 1: silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide or s
Speaker 1: I O two, and when you put glass into hydrogen
Speaker 1: fluoride into hydrofluoric acid, the hydrogen fluoride breaks the bonds
Speaker 1: between silicon and oxygen in silica to form silicon fluorine molecules,
Speaker 1: and the result is the hydrofluoric acid eats right through
Speaker 1: the solid glass. So here you've got this material, this
Speaker 1: hydrofluoric acid that cannot be stored in regular glass containers,
Speaker 1: has to be stored in special plastic containers or it
Speaker 1: might eat right through the bottle and spill everywhere. And
Speaker 1: this is a jumping off point for today's episode, because
Speaker 1: we're gonna be looking at the question of what if
Speaker 1: you were to imagine a material that pushed the boundaries
Speaker 1: even farther, if there was a solvent that that could
Speaker 1: dissolve everything it touched, a sort of universal solvent. M Yeah,
Speaker 1: this reminds me a lot of our discussions in the
Speaker 1: episode on Hollywood Acid, the the way that acids are
Speaker 1: sometimes presented in science fiction, especially where you know, you
Speaker 1: you wound a xenomorph and it's so it's it's acidic
Speaker 1: blood seems to just burn its way through every floor,
Speaker 1: you know, all the way through the hull of the ship. Yeah, precisely.
Speaker 1: So this will be kind of a follow up episode
Speaker 1: to that. But but going more into the history of
Speaker 1: alchemy and getting into some of the metaphorical realms of
Speaker 1: these these high powered solvents. Now, one thing this immediately
Speaker 1: relates to for me is a thought experiment that I
Speaker 1: remember encountering from reading some of the American philosopher Daniel
Speaker 1: Dennett's books, where um Dinnett often talks about a metaphor
Speaker 1: that he uses called universal acid. It's basically exactly what
Speaker 1: we're describing here, but he doesn't mean it in the
Speaker 1: pure material sense. Then it uses the metaphor of universal
Speaker 1: acid to describe evolution. Uh. And and what he means
Speaker 1: there is that evolution is a concept that is not
Speaker 1: just a theory in biology. It's not just that when
Speaker 1: we discovered evolution by natural selection we could suddenly explain
Speaker 1: the diversity of species on Earth. That was true, but
Speaker 1: it's also a sort of revolutionizing world view that changes
Speaker 1: everything it touches. And so, to quote from his summary
Speaker 1: of this idea from his book Intuition, Pumps and Other
Speaker 1: Tools for Thinking, din it writes, universal acid is a
Speaker 1: liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything, but
Speaker 1: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles
Speaker 1: and stainless steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What
Speaker 1: would happen if you somehow came upon or created a
Speaker 1: dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed?
Speaker 1: What would it leave in its wake after everything had
Speaker 1: been transformed by its encounter with universal acid? What would
Speaker 1: the world look like? Little did I realize that in
Speaker 1: a few years I would encounter an idea, Darwin's idea
Speaker 1: bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid. It eats through
Speaker 1: just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake
Speaker 1: a revolutionized worldview, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable,
Speaker 1: but transformed in fundamental ways. Now there's a thing here
Speaker 1: where the metaphor I think might not be the best one,
Speaker 1: because we get Hollywood acid in our brains, and when
Speaker 1: we think about Hollywood acid, Hollywood acid doesn't just change,
Speaker 1: it destroys. Right. You put the Batman in the Hollywood acid,
Speaker 1: and then the Batman is no more. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of this, though, comes down to what we
Speaker 1: I mean when you talk about things being destroyed. This
Speaker 1: is a very human viewpoint. This is a very um,
Speaker 1: you know, organism based view of things. That the Batman
Speaker 1: is destroyed in the acid, that the the car is
Speaker 1: destroyed in the crash. Uh that or that even something
Speaker 1: is destroyed when it is um you know, when it's
Speaker 1: just you know, a metal or something and it's melted
Speaker 1: or it's uh or it's it's it's it's put into
Speaker 1: some sort of an acid or a base. But you know,
Speaker 1: it comes back to the basic principle that matter can
Speaker 1: neither be uh, you know, ultimately created or destroyed. Everything
Speaker 1: can only be transferred into different states or broken down
Speaker 1: into different components. That's a very good point. Yeah, from
Speaker 1: the sort of like chemical view of the universe, nothing
Speaker 1: has been destroyed. But I think it'd be fair to
Speaker 1: say that if you put a batman in a bunch
Speaker 1: of sulfuric acid and then you liberate all the possible
Speaker 1: water molecules from him and just leave a bunch of
Speaker 1: elemental carbon, you could say, in some sense the batman
Speaker 1: has been destroyed conceptually at least, yes, But I mean
Speaker 1: part of that is the difficulty of then recreating a batman, right,
Speaker 1: because right, I mean we would have to recreate not
Speaker 1: only the batman's body, but the batman's psyche, and and
Speaker 1: you know, they're huge hurdles, not only in terms of
Speaker 1: of science and our understanding of psychology, but also time.
Speaker 1: It's a huge time investment to try and reproduce another Batman. Right, So,
Speaker 1: so I don't know if maybe he could have used
Speaker 1: a slightly better metaphor for what he means, because what
Speaker 1: I think he means is not that the concept of
Speaker 1: evolution destroys everything it touches in culture, but rather it
Speaker 1: reacts with everything it touches. So it leaves the world
Speaker 1: we knew before populated with the same questions and beauties
Speaker 1: and wonders, but each of them sort of now upgraded
Speaker 1: by a chemical reaction, each one sort of changed somewhat
Speaker 1: by our new perspective. You have a new scientific way
Speaker 1: of thinking about everything that you knew before. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think this this argument, it certainly applies to evolution
Speaker 1: very wrongly, uh, but you know, into evolutionary theory, but
Speaker 1: it also can apply to even um hypotheses that we've
Speaker 1: discussed in the show before. You know that take, for instance,
Speaker 1: the bi cameral mind hypothesis by Julian Jaynes. That's an
Speaker 1: example of of of a very infectious idea that once
Speaker 1: you have, if you've really gotten into it. You it
Speaker 1: kind of can change the way you think about so
Speaker 1: many other things. Um. And then there are even less
Speaker 1: you know, controversial ideas you can think of where once
Speaker 1: you have once you were alert to say, um, oh
Speaker 1: just you know, certain sort of psychological ideas about how
Speaker 1: uh you know, how things like trauma work. You know, Uh,
Speaker 1: it changes the way you think about reality because you
Speaker 1: have a different way of processing, uh, what is going
Speaker 1: on or maybe going on with other people and other
Speaker 1: groups and throughout history. Yeah, and the metaphorical sense, I mean,
Speaker 1: all kinds of ideas I guess can become a mental
Speaker 1: universal solvent. I would say in some cases with more
Speaker 1: use than in other cases, Like sometimes we just start
Speaker 1: applying an idea to everything because it's really fun. And
Speaker 1: in other cases we start applying idea an idea to
Speaker 1: everything because we get we we at least believe we're
Speaker 1: getting some kind of analytical use out of it, like
Speaker 1: it's explaining more than, uh than than other ideas that
Speaker 1: we had previously. Though, I would say, be cautious of
Speaker 1: any lens that seems to explain everything, because you know,
Speaker 1: I've been through phases in my life where I sort
Speaker 1: of like learned a new analytical lens and then it
Speaker 1: explained literally everything in the world, And like, you gotta
Speaker 1: be careful about those. Usually you're probably over applying it
Speaker 1: at that point. Yeah, Like if you if you just
Speaker 1: apply aliens to everything, yeah, and then it works. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're probably over applying aliens. And there was
Speaker 1: actually a sample I hear every now and then in
Speaker 1: a in a track where someone saying, you know, listing
Speaker 1: off all these different things and then saying, you drop
Speaker 1: aliens in the middle of this and everything makes sense.
Speaker 1: U always true. It's always true. So if there's anything
Speaker 1: like that, yeah, you could. You can sub anything for
Speaker 1: aliens if if it feels like it's a perfect fit,
Speaker 1: that it explains everything that it that it absolutely dissolves
Speaker 1: all the mysteries of life. I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 1: probably not the universal solvent you're you're really looking for,
Speaker 1: but it can seem like that. But before we get
Speaker 1: back into the fully metaphorical space, but what it means
Speaker 1: to to think about the world in terms of universal solvents.
Speaker 1: I want to actually consider the real material possibility of
Speaker 1: a universal solvent, especially as it has figured into the
Speaker 1: history of alchemy, because you probably know, even if you
Speaker 1: only have passing familiarity with alchemy, that one of the
Speaker 1: endeavors of of alchemy was this search for these sort
Speaker 1: of dream materials, these holy Grail materials. What an author
Speaker 1: I'm going to be quoting extensively in this episode, Lawrence
Speaker 1: Prince you pay calls chemical arcana or I guess singular
Speaker 1: chemical ar kanum. Uh. These objects that are sort of
Speaker 1: the mcguffins of alchemy that alchemists were requesting after. So
Speaker 1: one of these things might be like the Philosopher's stone
Speaker 1: that could allow you to transmute base metals into gold
Speaker 1: in the process known as chrysopoeia, or other ones might be.
Speaker 1: Actually I talked about one in an Artifact episode and
Speaker 1: it did not too long ago. Uh. It's an idea
Speaker 1: that you can find going all the way back to
Speaker 1: ancient Roman times, and that's the concept of bindable glass,
Speaker 1: the vitrum flexila or vitrum malle abel that you could
Speaker 1: have glass that could be soft like dough and shaped
Speaker 1: into into different you know, into whatever form you needed.
Speaker 1: But another similar arcanum in alchemy was the concept of
Speaker 1: alcahest a, a substance that would act as a universal
Speaker 1: solvent that could break down anything. Now, discussing alchemy is
Speaker 1: always a little bit difficult because alchemy is somewhat controversially
Speaker 1: find like different people try to insist on different historical understanding.
Speaker 1: Is of exactly what alchemy was. I mean, you can't
Speaker 1: say it's a It's the general output of a group
Speaker 1: of certain scholars who, you know, we're kind of secretive
Speaker 1: about their beliefs, and we're working with materials in some way.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a kind of slippery concept. In English,
Speaker 1: the term has been used to refer to a huge
Speaker 1: range of beliefs and behaviors, with special emphasis on things
Speaker 1: done that that sound in some way related to sorcery,
Speaker 1: the hermetic, and the occult, and these associations are absolutely
Speaker 1: not without foundation. Like that they much of alchemy does
Speaker 1: have occult and and and supernatural connections. But another way
Speaker 1: to understand alchemy, for the purpose of today's discussion at least,
Speaker 1: is that it is sort of the proto scientific study
Speaker 1: of the dynamics of matter, particularly concerned with transforming one
Speaker 1: type of matter into another, or of isolating the constituents
Speaker 1: of a material, refining that material, or enhancing its alleged properties,
Speaker 1: many of which were perceived to be medicinal properties. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people in the modern era when
Speaker 1: they think of alchemy, they think about people trying to
Speaker 1: turn lead into gold. And then then that was a
Speaker 1: preoccupation of some people in the world of alchemy. But
Speaker 1: also a huge part of alchemy was a quest for medicine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess to two points to make here. One is
Speaker 1: that we do often think of that when we think
Speaker 1: of alchemy, we may think of a very Western context,
Speaker 1: and we think of people who look like wizards, you know,
Speaker 1: or even specifically someone who looks like John d or Merlin, Uh,
Speaker 1: toying around with science stuff. You know, alchemy is science
Speaker 1: stuff what wizards do. Uh. But it is also important
Speaker 1: to note that that alchemy and things that we think
Speaker 1: of in English and uh in the end, in the
Speaker 1: Western world as alchemy, you also find that in the
Speaker 1: in the Arabic world, you find it in in ancient India,
Speaker 1: you find it in ancient China. Uh. You know. So
Speaker 1: alchemy can very broadly speaking be seen as kind of
Speaker 1: a global effort of learned individuals trying to learn more
Speaker 1: about the world. Um. I think one way to think
Speaker 1: of it too. Is think about geographic discovery. You know,
Speaker 1: people setting out on on voyages, trying to find distant
Speaker 1: lands that they know to exist or that they have
Speaker 1: heard to exist. Sometimes those lands do not exist at all.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they are, you know, islands of the imagination. But
Speaker 1: in the quest to find those places, they find real places,
Speaker 1: and ultimately this leads up to a a more accurate
Speaker 1: and more refined understanding of the world. Own interesting parallel
Speaker 1: between alchemy and your geography. Example, during the ages of exploration,
Speaker 1: where people were trying to get away from their home
Speaker 1: country and figure out what else was out there that
Speaker 1: they could find. They're going to be different levels of
Speaker 1: perspicacity and reporting, you know, because like, whatever you've discovered,
Speaker 1: you may think of this is, oh, this is knowledge
Speaker 1: I want to share with the world, But you may
Speaker 1: also very much think of it as like kind of
Speaker 1: a trade secret or a personal You know, this is
Speaker 1: something I've discovered for me and my my, my buddies,
Speaker 1: and we need to keep this secret and not let
Speaker 1: everybody else get in there before we've had a good
Speaker 1: go at it. Yeah, and then you have the pesky
Speaker 1: situation of discovering the real but keeping it secret or
Speaker 1: only holding on to it because of your quest for
Speaker 1: the unreal. And we've touched on this before on the
Speaker 1: show before um when we were talking about urine at
Speaker 1: some point urine's role in alchemy, and uh, I forget
Speaker 1: that the exact chemical episode we were discussing this. But
Speaker 1: the history of alchemy is full of such scenarios, you know.
Speaker 1: I was reading actually a Washington Post article from January
Speaker 1: eighteen by Ben Guarino that interviews Lawrence Prince you pay,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the authors who's an expert
Speaker 1: on alchemy that we're gonna be talking about in this episode.
Speaker 1: And this article ends up talking a lot about p
Speaker 1: and there was one part I found very fun. It's
Speaker 1: talking about how in prince hips lab he will try
Speaker 1: to recreate some some old alchemy experiments as they are
Speaker 1: described from these these texts, and so the artifacts of
Speaker 1: these experiments are all all around his lab. And and
Speaker 1: the article here describes on the counter sits a large
Speaker 1: jar labeled flim of acidified urine. More than one alchemical
Speaker 1: recipe calls for human p. Prince Ship said. An old
Speaker 1: Arabic text used the phrase the secret is within you,
Speaker 1: probably meaning well reader you go figure it out, and
Speaker 1: then it quotes Prince saying, but some people took that
Speaker 1: more literally, so they ended up using vast amounts of urine.
Speaker 1: Oh that's wonderful. Yeah. And and now that I've had
Speaker 1: a second to reflect, it was our our invention episode
Speaker 1: or episodes on the matchtick. Uh yeah, we're we're talking.
Speaker 1: I can't rea. So we talked about multiple people who
Speaker 1: used urine. At least one of the main people who
Speaker 1: was big into it to urine experiments was was the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century alchemist Hinnig Brund who who really specifically wanted
Speaker 1: urine from beer drinkers. So it was like, go to
Speaker 1: the bars, get the drunks to p in a bucket,
Speaker 1: and I will create a huge, a gigantic vat of
Speaker 1: beer drinker p. Yes. Yes, so it was brand He
Speaker 1: was in search of the Philosopher's stone, um, but in
Speaker 1: doing so made these discoveries that ultimately tied into our
Speaker 1: understanding of phosphorus and matches and you know, or matches
Speaker 1: being the one of the the actual real world and
Speaker 1: world inventions to come out of this quest for the fantastic.
Speaker 1: But it's so funny also about like misinterpreting the line
Speaker 1: the secret is within you two mean like literally in
Speaker 1: your bladder, because that that seems just just perfect for
Speaker 1: the world of alchemy, because there was a lot of
Speaker 1: sort of metaphors and secret keeping, kind of coded language.
Speaker 1: A Prince Pay talks in in one interview was watching
Speaker 1: about how, you know, in some alchemical texts, the author
Speaker 1: will not say the conventional names of the chemicals that
Speaker 1: he's talking about. He might instead of saying nitric acid,
Speaker 1: he will say the red dragon, And instead of saying, um,
Speaker 1: you know, like add nitric acid to this solution, he
Speaker 1: would say something like allow the red dragon to consume
Speaker 1: the white eagle or something. So, you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of you have to like dig through and figure out
Speaker 1: what all of these code words refer to, not in
Speaker 1: every case, but in many. Yeah, So it it makes
Speaker 1: looking back on some of these recipes and ideas oftentimes confusing,
Speaker 1: because like I'm reminded of of the recipe that I
Speaker 1: looked at once for the creation of a homunculous and
Speaker 1: it has this kind of coded language in it. So
Speaker 1: sometimes it's hard to determine, you know, how much of
Speaker 1: what you're looking at is just abject occultism and in sorcery.
Speaker 1: And how much is coded material referring to something more
Speaker 1: closely related to to the world of chemistry and reality?
Speaker 1: Oh right, so like is it actually asking for like
Speaker 1: a bat swing or is it or is that a
Speaker 1: code for like saltpeter or something? Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: you can. You can look at similar situations throughout our
Speaker 1: you know the world of language and spirituality and all.
Speaker 1: But um, I guess one of the things to drive
Speaker 1: home with with alchemy is that, yes, we're talking about
Speaker 1: ultimately a proto scientific sphere. Uh. You know, this is
Speaker 1: one though, in which scientific considerations are either inherently mingled
Speaker 1: with philosophic and supernatural ideas, or at the very least
Speaker 1: are heavily susceptible to flowing into those subjects. And is
Speaker 1: the author um Mercia Eliade put it in the Forge
Speaker 1: and the Crucible quote Alchemy posed as a sacred science,
Speaker 1: whereas chemistry came into its own when substances had shed
Speaker 1: their sacred attributes. Oh that's interesting, I mean, yeah, One
Speaker 1: thing I we want to talk about as we go
Speaker 1: on is the ways that different uh practitioners of the
Speaker 1: alchemy period didn't they weren't just looking for chemical formulas,
Speaker 1: but they really thought chemicals meant something. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: you you can imagine too where this gets. You know,
Speaker 1: we can't look at something without working without you know,
Speaker 1: without our brain beginning to ponder over the possible metaphors there.
Speaker 1: You know, how does this relate to me? Um And
Speaker 1: maybe we're we get we're a little further from that now,
Speaker 1: but you know, we have to sort of put ourselves
Speaker 1: in the mindset of of older uh, you know, experimentors.
Speaker 1: And uh, this is where I want to bring up
Speaker 1: some of the some of the thoughts that Terrence McKenna
Speaker 1: brought to the table concerning alchemy um And and I
Speaker 1: think he I think he made he made some good,
Speaker 1: good points on the topic. He gave a series of
Speaker 1: lectures on alchemy in the late nineties um And touched
Speaker 1: on this. And I want to read a quote from
Speaker 1: it from a transcription. In this he is citing Iliade
Speaker 1: it also putting his own spin on things. Quote. The
Speaker 1: shaman is the brother of the smith. The smith is
Speaker 1: the metallurgist, the worker in metals. And this is where
Speaker 1: alchemy has its roots. We who take this for granted,
Speaker 1: have no idea. How mysterious and powerful this seemed to
Speaker 1: ancient people, and in fact it would seem so to
Speaker 1: us if we had anything to do with it. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many of us are welders or castors of metal.
Speaker 1: It's a magical process to take, for instance, cinnabar, a
Speaker 1: red soft ore, and by the mere act of heating
Speaker 1: it in a furnace, it will sweat liquid mercury onto
Speaker 1: its surface. We have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science,
Speaker 1: where we have mind firmly separated out from the world.
Speaker 1: We take this for granted. It's effortless because it is
Speaker 1: the ambiance of the civilization that we've been born into.
Speaker 1: But in an earlier age, some writers would say, a
Speaker 1: more naive age. But I wonder about that mind and
Speaker 1: matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature, so
Speaker 1: that the sweating of mercury out of cinnabar is not
Speaker 1: a material process. It is a process in which the
Speaker 1: mind and the observations of the metal worker maintain an
Speaker 1: important role. Well, I don't know what to think about
Speaker 1: that claim about the idea the role of the mind
Speaker 1: in the transformations, but I think he's absolutely right that
Speaker 1: like you know, it's one of the frustrations of the
Speaker 1: modern world is that we rely so on so much
Speaker 1: um science and technology in the background of our lives
Speaker 1: that we can lose sight of the sheer wonder that
Speaker 1: that is on, you know, visible if you're actually watching
Speaker 1: these processes unfold in firsthand. Yeah. I mean we talk
Speaker 1: about technological metaphors all the time on the show. How
Speaker 1: how often we think about our own cognition in terms
Speaker 1: of computers and cameras and digital recordings and so forth,
Speaker 1: uh and photoshop, etcetera. You know, and and these can
Speaker 1: all be useful, but they can also distort and create
Speaker 1: a a distorted version of what's actually going on inside
Speaker 1: the mind or outside of it. And yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you know, if you were to put yourself in someone
Speaker 1: who day in and day out, was not using an iPhone,
Speaker 1: was not using a PC or a GO or a
Speaker 1: Mac or whatever, but was instead, uh working with the
Speaker 1: base materials and with metals and chemicals and trying to
Speaker 1: figure out their properties. Like this would be the primary
Speaker 1: way that they would also think about the mind. I
Speaker 1: mean it it makes perfect sense to me, like these
Speaker 1: would be there, this would be their telephone, their television,
Speaker 1: their computer. These would be the ways that they might
Speaker 1: then self reflect. Well, yeah, I mean it's it's apparent
Speaker 1: that witnessing chemical reactions suggested to people some kind of deep,
Speaker 1: underlying spiritual reality that was like more than just uh
Speaker 1: an idea about like different types of atoms and how
Speaker 1: they can fit together, but suggested like like big truth.
Speaker 1: So that applied to everything, you know, that that alchemy could,
Speaker 1: in its own way, become a one of these metaphorical
Speaker 1: universal solvents that it explains everything about about God and
Speaker 1: the universe and humankind in our minds. Now, since I
Speaker 1: did mention McKenna, one might easily say, well, for Terence McKenna,
Speaker 1: surely mushrooms psychedelics were kind of the universal solvent. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I can certainly that can you can certainly make a
Speaker 1: case for that, especially within certain works of his you know,
Speaker 1: the Food of the Gods, etcetera. Um, that's kind of
Speaker 1: a case where you can say, oh, you drop mushrooms
Speaker 1: in the middle of this and everything makes sense. Um. Oh,
Speaker 1: did he suggest that Paracelsis took mushrooms? Uh? No, Actually
Speaker 1: he in these lectures, he he really took quite the
Speaker 1: opposite approach and that's why I want to share one more, uh,
Speaker 1: snippet from from this lengthy lecture series, which by the way,
Speaker 1: you can find online um in several places, either in
Speaker 1: you know, audio form or transcribed. But this is what
Speaker 1: he had to say. Quote. I will not claim and
Speaker 1: do not in fact think it is so that there
Speaker 1: was anything of eartly psychedelic in the sense of pharmacologically
Speaker 1: based about alchemy. When we look back through the alchemical literature,
Speaker 1: there's very little evidence that it was far pharmacologically driven.
Speaker 1: Only when you get to the very last adambirations of
Speaker 1: out of the alchemical impulse in someone like Paracelsus, do
Speaker 1: you get use of opium. It is interesting that the
Speaker 1: great drugs of modern society were accidentally discovered by alchemist
Speaker 1: in their research distilled alcohol as a product of alchemical work.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned, opium was very heavily used of
Speaker 1: the Paracelsian school. But what they possessed was an ability
Speaker 1: to liquefy their mental categories and then to project the
Speaker 1: contents of the mind onto these processes and read them back. Now, um,
Speaker 1: real quick, uh, Paracelsus, We'll we'll get back to Paracelsus
Speaker 1: in a bit, But this is an individual of fourteen
Speaker 1: nine three or fourteen ninety four through fifteen forty one,
Speaker 1: a Swiss physician and alchemist of the German Renaissance, and
Speaker 1: he made a number of contributions to modern met iCal science.
Speaker 1: And he's come up before on the show. I think
Speaker 1: in our episodes on the Trident, on dangerous foods, on Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: and on blood drinking, which I guess are all areas
Speaker 1: where you might well imagine that the realms of chemistry
Speaker 1: and UH and alchemy might come together to some degree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Paracelsus is considered one of the sort of granddaddy's of alchemy.
Speaker 1: Um Paracelsis is his nickname. By the way, it's worth
Speaker 1: mentioning his real name, which was Philippus Areolas, the Ephrastus
Speaker 1: Bombastus von Hohenheim. I like that Bombastus. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there's some question about whether the word bombastic comes from
Speaker 1: his name, because he he would throw down like Paracelsis
Speaker 1: would get into it. In fact, I want to read
Speaker 1: a a passage from a book that that I'm going
Speaker 1: to be referring to for the rest of the episode,
Speaker 1: that is by Lawrence imprincepe called The Secrets of Alchemy
Speaker 1: that was published in by the University of Chicago Press.
Speaker 1: Uh Princeps professor at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in the
Speaker 1: history of science and technology, and he's written a ton
Speaker 1: about alchemy and its role in the development of science.
Speaker 1: But um, there's a passage from his book where he
Speaker 1: briefly introduces the figure of Paracelsus, and he does it
Speaker 1: like this. He says, Paracelsis spent much of his life
Speaker 1: wandering from town to town, generally stirring up trouble wherever
Speaker 1: he went with his iconoclastic and quick tempered ways. It
Speaker 1: has been claimed erroneously that the word bombastic in the
Speaker 1: sense of pampas speech derives from his name. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that was he's saying. No, that is not where it
Speaker 1: comes from. But I have encountered that erroneous claim. Prince
Speaker 1: pay goes on. Paracelsis is best known as a vociferous
Speaker 1: critic of traditional medicine. His writings, frequently imitated in style
Speaker 1: by later followers, are filled with vitriolic and sarcastic condemnations
Speaker 1: of physicians, apothecaries, and the entire medical establishment. It is
Speaker 1: reported that he publicly burned the medical where Things of
Speaker 1: Ibben Sinah, standard texts for medical education at the time,
Speaker 1: as a sign of his contempt. Paracelsis's other provocative habits
Speaker 1: included lecturing for the short time he gave medical lectures
Speaker 1: in Basle and writing in his native Swiss German rather
Speaker 1: than Latin, and promoting the use of German medicinal plants
Speaker 1: over more established classical Mediterranean ones. He was a strong
Speaker 1: advocate of alchimia, but only as one of the pillars
Speaker 1: of medicine, that is to say, for its ability to
Speaker 1: prepare pharmaceuticals and to explain bodily functions. He showed no
Speaker 1: interest in chrisopoeia and occasionally wrote contemptuously of it, and again,
Speaker 1: chrisopoeia is the is the attempt to transmute base metals
Speaker 1: into gold. It's interesting, all these are our attributes of
Speaker 1: someone who very much wanted to dissolve the rigidity of
Speaker 1: the of of the establishment. You know, you could you
Speaker 1: could look at them acting as a kind of trying
Speaker 1: to act as a kind of universal solvent within their
Speaker 1: own culture. Thank yeah, And I guess that should bring
Speaker 1: us to the concept of the universal solvent itself, because
Speaker 1: Paracelsis wrote of something called alcohest, but Paracelsis meant something
Speaker 1: different by it. Paracelsis wrote of alcohest as a type
Speaker 1: of medicine for treating a bad liver. But in the
Speaker 1: wake of Paracelsis, some later alchemists would take the idea
Speaker 1: of alcohest as a universal solvent and really run with it. Now,
Speaker 1: Remember again, as I said earlier, alchemy is often concerned
Speaker 1: with the search for these particular chemical arcana in princeps terms.
Speaker 1: So again, this might be a method for transmuting base
Speaker 1: metals into gold, doing the process of chrisopoeia. Uh. It
Speaker 1: turns out that this is despite the fact that some
Speaker 1: people are still trying to do this today. This is
Speaker 1: not really possible by conventional chemical means, Like gold as
Speaker 1: as we have it here on Earth is forged. It's
Speaker 1: it's a product of nucleosynthesis that occurs in some of
Speaker 1: the most violent phenomena in the universe, like neutron star
Speaker 1: collisions or exploding you know, stars at the end of
Speaker 1: their lifespan. Uh. Like, you can't turn lead into gold.
Speaker 1: That is just not a human power, I guess, unless
Speaker 1: you're talking maybe about I don't know, like like tiny
Speaker 1: amounts of it in particle colliders or something, you know,
Speaker 1: atomic experiments that accelerate protons to extremely high speeds and
Speaker 1: collide with things. And even in that case, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I just can't rule it out there by conventional chemical means,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about significant amounts of matter, you cannot
Speaker 1: turn base metals into gold. That would require rearranging the
Speaker 1: nucleus of an atom, which we just don't have the
Speaker 1: power to do, right. And maybe if you were John
Speaker 1: d and you could actually, um, you know, if you
Speaker 1: were actually going to capture or utilize an angel and
Speaker 1: you could somehow tap into their powers there they're just
Speaker 1: like base energy level, then okay, maybe maybe would be possible,
Speaker 1: But but not without any like additional supernatural add ons
Speaker 1: to the chemical understanding that we have. Right. And so
Speaker 1: while the transmutation of base metals like lead into gold
Speaker 1: is probably the best known quest of alchemy, Prince Pay
Speaker 1: writes a lot about how alchemy was so much bigger
Speaker 1: than that it. Alchemy was not just the greedy gold
Speaker 1: slog of people who had you know, Mida's brain, uh like,
Speaker 1: it was generally the study of chemical change, and the
Speaker 1: study of chemical change is a really important and fascinating
Speaker 1: subject that helps you understand sort of unlocks all of
Speaker 1: the other physical sciences. I already mentioned the idea of
Speaker 1: of recipes for bendable glass. I think this is a
Speaker 1: much more obscure one, but I just bring it up
Speaker 1: because I did an episode on it. A big part
Speaker 1: of alchemy, as we've already mentioned, was concerned with refining
Speaker 1: and improving medicines. But of course another holy grail of
Speaker 1: alchemy was the universal solvent alcohest. And so the place
Speaker 1: where alcohest really comes into the picture is in work
Speaker 1: of the influential Flemish chemist and physician Jean Baptista van Helmont,
Speaker 1: who lived fifteen seventy nine to sixteen forty four. Uh,
Speaker 1: and of van Helmont is responsible for has more of
Speaker 1: a legacy than you might expect. Van Helmont is responsible
Speaker 1: for coining the English word gas. Uh. He was one
Speaker 1: of the first people, maybe the first, to identify a
Speaker 1: gas other than general air, when he differentiated carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: as a distinct form of matter from the rest of
Speaker 1: the gas in the atmosphere. Apparently, the word gas that
Speaker 1: he coined comes from the Greek word chaos. Now, Prince
Speaker 1: Bay writes that van Helmont is the is the origin
Speaker 1: of this search for alcohest as the as the universal solvent,
Speaker 1: but notes that Paracelsus, as I already said, had used
Speaker 1: the word alcohest previously, and this was again for a
Speaker 1: very special medicine for the liver. But Van Helmont would
Speaker 1: take that word alcohest and start using it to describe
Speaker 1: a hypothetical substance that would be able to dissolve any
Speaker 1: other substance, the universal solvent. And apparently a Paracelsus had
Speaker 1: a similar idea for a universal solvent that would have
Speaker 1: been a material called circulated salt or cell circulatum um.
Speaker 1: But but for van Helmont, alcohest became not just something
Speaker 1: that you wanted to be able to make, but something
Speaker 1: that was fundamental in understanding the very nature of matter.
Speaker 1: Because Van Helmont held a fascinating and mostly wrong but
Speaker 1: maybe not entirely wrong, at least sort of in the
Speaker 1: direction of being right in some interesting ways, a view
Speaker 1: of matter that had these qualities, and it brought in
Speaker 1: ideas from medicine and theology and previous studies of chemicals.
Speaker 1: But the idea was that Van Helmont believed basically everything
Speaker 1: is made of water, that water is quote the base
Speaker 1: material substratum of all substances. You drop water in the
Speaker 1: middle of this and everything makes sense very good. Um.
Speaker 1: So this was a departure from previous ideas about the
Speaker 1: constituents of matter. Again, Paracelsus had written about something called
Speaker 1: the tria prima, which means the three primary things. And
Speaker 1: Paracelsus he did not originate this idea fully either. He
Speaker 1: was building upon the pre existing chemical knowledge, mostly passed
Speaker 1: down from Arabic scholars who had written that some metals
Speaker 1: and minerals could really be reduced to fundamental constituents, which
Speaker 1: were mercury and sulfur. Uh. This was not correct, but
Speaker 1: it did show a tendency of thinking that was scientifically useful,
Speaker 1: which was the idea that matter could be decomposed into
Speaker 1: its constituent parts, different chemical parts that would come together
Speaker 1: to make molecules of familiar substances, which is very true
Speaker 1: and the basis of what would become the real science.
Speaker 1: It's of chemistry. And so Paracelsus is picking up on
Speaker 1: this idea. Uh. And he concluded that it was not
Speaker 1: just that some metals and minerals were could be broken
Speaker 1: down into mercury and sulfur. He concluded that basically all
Speaker 1: material could be broken down into three things mercury, sulfur,
Speaker 1: and salt. Again factually wrong but a a but trending
Speaker 1: in a useful direction in terms of ways of thinking
Speaker 1: about matter. Yeah, kind of coming back into what we're
Speaker 1: talking about with destruction, Like if you were to destroy anything,
Speaker 1: what would remain? What are the things that make up
Speaker 1: the whole? Sure? Uh? And I actually wanted to go
Speaker 1: into a brief digression on paracelsus is mingling of theological,
Speaker 1: metaphysical and protoscientific thinking from a paragraph in prince Ship
Speaker 1: base book that that I found really interesting. So in
Speaker 1: writing about Paracelsus is idea of the Tria prima prince
Speaker 1: ship A writes quote. These three chemical principles provided a
Speaker 1: terrestrial material trinity that reflected the celestial immaterial trinity as
Speaker 1: well as the human triune nature of body, soul, and spirit. Further,
Speaker 1: Paracelsus endeavored to generate an entire world system embracing the
Speaker 1: whole of theology and natural philosophy as an alternative to
Speaker 1: and he no doubt hoped ultimately a substitute for prevailing
Speaker 1: contemporaneous systems. For him, chemical processes provided the fundamental model
Speaker 1: for explaining natural processes in the physical universe as well
Speaker 1: as within the human body. For example, the cycle of
Speaker 1: rain through sea, air, and land was for Paracelsus a
Speaker 1: great cosmic distillation the formation of minerals underground, the growth
Speaker 1: of plants, the generation of life forms, as well as
Speaker 1: the bodily functions of digestion, nutrition, respiration, and excretion, where
Speaker 1: for him inherently chemical processes, God himself is the master chemist.
Speaker 1: His creation of an ordered world out of primordial chaos
Speaker 1: was akin to the chemist's extraction, purification, and elaboration of
Speaker 1: common materials into chemical products, and his final judgment of
Speaker 1: the world by fire, like a chemist using fire to
Speaker 1: purge impurities from precious metals. Paracelsis system has been called
Speaker 1: a chemical world view, and it proved remarkably influential in
Speaker 1: succeeding generations. So for Paracelsis, not only did he inspire
Speaker 1: the later search for a literal universal solvent that we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about, but it seems very much
Speaker 1: again in the metaphorical in the mind space alchemy was
Speaker 1: his universal solvent. It it explained everything. I remember. Van
Speaker 1: Helmont would go on to break with Paracelsus in believing
Speaker 1: that matter could be reduced beyond the Tria prima ultimately
Speaker 1: always down to what it was made of at bottom,
Speaker 1: which was water. So why would Van Helmont think that
Speaker 1: ultimately everything was made of water? Well, his reasoning was
Speaker 1: partly theological. Part of it was the primacy of water
Speaker 1: in the Genesis account of creation. Uh. And this also
Speaker 1: calls to mind how in the recent Nile episode we
Speaker 1: discussed the prominence of water, not just in the Biblical
Speaker 1: creation story, but it's probably at least in the estimation
Speaker 1: of the scholar David Leming, the single most common theme
Speaker 1: in creation narratives around the world, if you like, compare
Speaker 1: all of the world's religions creation myths. He says, the
Speaker 1: thing that is in the most of them is water,
Speaker 1: you know, primordial cosmic oceans. Yeah yeah. And then oftentimes,
Speaker 1: like we discussed in that episode, we even would think
Speaker 1: of the cosmos as ocean. Uh yeah, So, I mean
Speaker 1: you would if it's not in the beginning there's some
Speaker 1: void or some just empty space of darkness, which I
Speaker 1: guess to a large point, you could be a large
Speaker 1: part point you could say is derived from our modern
Speaker 1: popular understanding of of what outer space is. They've never
Speaker 1: been to space. They don't know what space was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the vast emptiness was the ocean, that was the that
Speaker 1: was the vast mystery, the vast primordial body. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't just these theological influences. Van Helmont also based this
Speaker 1: belief in the material primacy of water on physical experiments
Speaker 1: that he conducted in the lab. So here's an example,
Speaker 1: as described by Principe. In Van Helmont's most famous experiment,
Speaker 1: he planted a willow tree sapling that he had weighed beforehand.
Speaker 1: The willow tree was five pounds, and he planted it
Speaker 1: in a container with two hundred pounds of soil. Then
Speaker 1: he watered the tree for five years, and at the
Speaker 1: end of five years, the tree had grown from five
Speaker 1: pounds to a hundred and sixty nine pounds. It had
Speaker 1: gained about thirty three or thirty four times its original weight.
Speaker 1: But he also measured the soil that the tree had
Speaker 1: been planted in, and he discovered that the soil weighed
Speaker 1: almost exactly the same as it did when he planted it. Thus,
Speaker 1: and Helmont concluded that water alone had been transformed into
Speaker 1: all of the substances that make up the tree, the wood,
Speaker 1: the leaves. This is all just water that has been
Speaker 1: somehow transformed into higher forms of water, more solid forms
Speaker 1: of water. And in a way he was he was
Speaker 1: partially correct. I mean, much of the bodies of living
Speaker 1: organisms is made of water. Uh. But also without understanding
Speaker 1: the science of photosynthesis, Van Helmont didn't realize that the
Speaker 1: carbon content of the tree, which is the bulk of
Speaker 1: its nonwater weight, was actually from carbon dioxide from the air,
Speaker 1: which is absorbed from the atmosphere by the leaves, and
Speaker 1: then a chemical reaction powered by energy from the sunlight
Speaker 1: breaks apart the CEO two so that it can be
Speaker 1: used to make these carbon molecules that the tree needs
Speaker 1: to make its body. Again, we've talked about this on
Speaker 1: the show a million times, but it's one of the
Speaker 1: most astounding facts that you know, trees are made out
Speaker 1: of air. But without this knowledge of photochemistry and botany,
Speaker 1: it was somewhat reasonable for for Van Helmont to believe
Speaker 1: that what had gone into the tree was simply what
Speaker 1: he had put into it, which was water. That's the
Speaker 1: only thing he'd added to it. So how did this
Speaker 1: system of this this protean water based matter work well?
Speaker 1: To read a section from from Prince Pay describing Van
Speaker 1: Helmont's thinking quote, the various transformations of water, he argued,
Speaker 1: are managed by semina or seeds capable of organizing water
Speaker 1: into other substances. Most materials can be turned back into
Speaker 1: primordial water through heating and cold, thus establishing a continuous
Speaker 1: cycle of creation and destruction. Fire destroys substances by turning
Speaker 1: them into gas again, a word Van Helmont coined from chaos,
Speaker 1: a non condensable substance more subtle than any. Vapor gas
Speaker 1: rises to the upper parts of the atmosphere, where, exposed
Speaker 1: to extreme cold, it returns to elemental water that falls
Speaker 1: with the rain. The alcohest performs this return to water
Speaker 1: more quickly and usefully, so it base. Everything is made
Speaker 1: of water, and we're just seeing different forms of water.
Speaker 1: And if you get something really hot in a fire,
Speaker 1: it will transform. It will transform not only into liquid water,
Speaker 1: but sort of beyond this point into a gas that
Speaker 1: floats up into the atmosphere. Then when it's up in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, it cools down, turns back into liquid water
Speaker 1: and falls as rain, So it's sort of water to water,
Speaker 1: wet to wet worldview. And then the alcohest comes in
Speaker 1: as a universal solvent because it seems to serve the
Speaker 1: function of reducing all matter back down to the state
Speaker 1: of liquid water without degrading it in the process. So,
Speaker 1: according to Van Helmont, if you were to heat a
Speaker 1: substance mingled with alcohest, it will first be reduced to
Speaker 1: its proximate ingredients. These would be sort of the middle
Speaker 1: constitut wins right before you get all the way to water.
Speaker 1: It will break down into some other things first, and
Speaker 1: these would be comparable to Paracelsis idea of the Tria prima.
Speaker 1: But then further heating with alcohest will reduce even these
Speaker 1: proximate ingredients to the ultimate base material, which is water.
Speaker 1: So from Van Helmont's point of view, the alcohest was
Speaker 1: was not a chemical arcanum because it would turn your
Speaker 1: lead into gold and make you rich. It was actually
Speaker 1: desirable as the ultimate research tool. Alcohest would have been
Speaker 1: the ultimate implement for studying what every type of matter
Speaker 1: is made of. And there's a there's a sentence from
Speaker 1: Van Helmont quoted in print based book, where he writes,
Speaker 1: there is no more certain genus of acquiring knowledge than
Speaker 1: when one knows what is contained in a thing and
Speaker 1: how much of it there is. So how would you
Speaker 1: do this? Well? Van Helmont thought that if you could
Speaker 1: stop the reaction between alcohest and the material in question
Speaker 1: at just the right time, and then distill the alcohest
Speaker 1: to remove it, you would be left with what was
Speaker 1: called the first essence, or the ins prem um, and
Speaker 1: this ins prem um would be there in the container
Speaker 1: left behind as a kind of crystall in salt. And
Speaker 1: so you could make better medicines this way, for instance,
Speaker 1: because the this ins prem um would have the medicinal
Speaker 1: powers of whatever substance that you had been working on,
Speaker 1: but it would remove all of the toxic or noxious
Speaker 1: uh sort of side effects and impurities that could be
Speaker 1: caused by the original medicinal thing. And thus, in Van
Speaker 1: Helmont's view, the alcohest was a tool for research. It
Speaker 1: was a tool for what was called chemi atria, or
Speaker 1: the development of medicines through chemistry. Now, Van Helmont claimed
Speaker 1: that he had been able to make alcohest. He's like,
Speaker 1: I figured it out. I know how to do it,
Speaker 1: I can prepare it. But he never revealed his secret recipe,
Speaker 1: and many other scholars struggled in vain to discover Van
Speaker 1: Helmont's formula of for the universal solvent. Uh. Some at
Speaker 1: various points believed they had found it. For example, Prince
Speaker 1: sites a laboratory notebook entry by the seventeenth century Colonial
Speaker 1: American alchemist George Starkey, who wrote quote at Bristol on
Speaker 1: twentieth March sixteen fifty six, God revealed to me the
Speaker 1: whole secret of the liquor alcohest let eternal blessing, honor
Speaker 1: and glory be to him. So I'm not sure exactly
Speaker 1: what he discovered, but I do not think it was
Speaker 1: a real universal solvent. I like that it's described as
Speaker 1: the liquor alcohest Like imagine if alcohest was a liquor,
Speaker 1: would it be impossible to make a cocktail with it?
Speaker 1: Would it always like break the cocktail back down into
Speaker 1: its uh it's primary ingredients? You probably wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: drink it. Yeah, do you would just melt? You just
Speaker 1: become water? Right, I always wanted to be water. It's
Speaker 1: the ultimate in refreshment though. Right, that's good marketing. Now,
Speaker 1: I was looking at another book by Lawrence Prince about
Speaker 1: alchemy called The Transmutations of Chemists Tree, and this is
Speaker 1: chemistry spelled with a an intentionally archaic spelling c h
Speaker 1: Y M I S t r Y, which is UH
Speaker 1: to distinguish it from the modern science of chemistry. UH.
Speaker 1: This was published in by University of Chicago Press, and
Speaker 1: in this case UH princepe is discussing the efforts of
Speaker 1: alchemists like Jan von Helmont to perform chemical analysis of
Speaker 1: materials such as the bodies of plants. Where the idea was, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can use fire to break materials down into their
Speaker 1: constituent parts. But the problem is that fire, while it
Speaker 1: will decompose the materials into the approximate constituents, fire was
Speaker 1: deceitful as it would corrupt to those constituents in the process.
Speaker 1: And of course the solution was alcahast, which could break
Speaker 1: things down without corrupting them in the process. And there's
Speaker 1: a part here where alcohost is referred to as better
Speaker 1: than fire. It is the fire of Gehenna, which that's
Speaker 1: a biblical metaphor. It's a metaphor for igno many as
Speaker 1: destruction that is used in the Bible. That is often
Speaker 1: a little little Bible interpretation note, often translated into English
Speaker 1: Bibles as hell. Uh. The previous show guest bart Erman,
Speaker 1: who's a secular Bible historian. He explains that this translation
Speaker 1: is actually really misleading. It's actually reading later theology about
Speaker 1: the afterlife into the original text. Uh. And he argues
Speaker 1: that Gehenna in the original text is not supposed to
Speaker 1: refer to a place of eternal suffering afterlife, but in
Speaker 1: fact it was a real place. It is basically a
Speaker 1: desolate valley that was um It was historically associated with
Speaker 1: human sacrifice, and so, according to Irman, being sent to Gehenna,
Speaker 1: as is often discussed in the New Testament, has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with an afterlife of eternal suffering, but rather
Speaker 1: as a sort of it's a squalid and unceremonious annihilation.
Speaker 1: It's sort of equivalent to telling somebody that they're going
Speaker 1: to die and be thrown into a garbage dump. Not
Speaker 1: nice ide way, but but somewhat different than the idea
Speaker 1: of everlasting suffering in hell. Yeah. So, ultimately, if you're
Speaker 1: putting a garbage dump, and I guess in the right conditions,
Speaker 1: you are going to break down and become a part
Speaker 1: of the natural world again, get to become your tree
Speaker 1: a prima and then and then water. I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: But in Gehanna, it sounds like it would have been
Speaker 1: we know, it wouldn't be like a modern garbage dump.
Speaker 1: It would be a place where you break down or
Speaker 1: probably partially consumed by scavenging beasts that you know, ultimately, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, pretty cushy. Anyway, that that was just a
Speaker 1: Bible nerd side note, so it probably doesn't figure in
Speaker 1: here because I would guess Van Helmont is is referring
Speaker 1: to the supernatural hell interpretation. So alcahest is much better
Speaker 1: than earthly fire. It's like a holy supernatural fire. But
Speaker 1: again Van Helmont writes about how the alcahest could decompose
Speaker 1: matter into its tree a prima or its constituent parts
Speaker 1: and then eventually back into water with no compromise or
Speaker 1: destruction of the pretties along the way, and uh, and
Speaker 1: Principa writes about how, again we mentioned earlier, this could
Speaker 1: be used to make better medicines, and in this section
Speaker 1: he actually mentions what a couple of these medicines would
Speaker 1: have been. Quote Van Helmont describes several pharmaceuticals he claims
Speaker 1: to have prepared using the alcohest, most notably a cure
Speaker 1: for kidney and bladderstones made from a mineral he calls lutus,
Speaker 1: and an elixir of life prepared from Lebanon cedar. Would
Speaker 1: the only obstacle in this glorious royal road for chemistry
Speaker 1: was that no one knew how to prepare Van Helmont's alcohest.
Speaker 1: I guess the obvious is is the is the truth
Speaker 1: that if the alcahest was possible, if there was a
Speaker 1: universal solvent to be found, then surely modern chemistry would
Speaker 1: have found it in the wake of alchemy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so here we revealed that there are several flaw as
Speaker 1: to the fundamental assumptions on which the the Alcohest was based.
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing is that Van Helmont's conception of
Speaker 1: all material ultimately being based on water is not true.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that modern chemistry is is without
Speaker 1: some really exceptional, exquisite dissolvers that will maybe while maybe
Speaker 1: not being universal solvents, will break down lots of stuff,
Speaker 1: a shocking amount of stuff. Uh so a couple that
Speaker 1: are worth mentioning. One I wanted to talk about is
Speaker 1: the chemical known as aqua regia, which the name literally
Speaker 1: means royal water in Latin. It's made with one part
Speaker 1: nitric acid and three parts hydrochloric acid. It is extremely corrosive.
Speaker 1: It's a liquid with a reddish orange color that can
Speaker 1: not only cause severe burns if you touch it, it
Speaker 1: can literally dissolve otherwise nonreactive metals like gold and platinum.
Speaker 1: Aqua Regia briefly came up in our episode on heavy Water,
Speaker 1: I think because we were talking about the historical anecdote
Speaker 1: where the chemists George to Heavish had to h had
Speaker 1: had to quickly find a way to hide the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize medals, which I think we're made of gold in
Speaker 1: the laboratory of Nils Bore when the laboratory was being
Speaker 1: captured and searched by the Nazis, and he ended up
Speaker 1: dissolving the metals in Aqua regia to prevent them from
Speaker 1: being found out. So Aqua Regia sounds refreshing. Is not refreshing, though,
Speaker 1: do not buy a bottle of it at your local
Speaker 1: convenience store. Not a good Lacroix flavor, maybe better than
Speaker 1: coconut oh I love coconut. Coconut Coconut's a good lacroise
Speaker 1: you do for me at least at the beach, and
Speaker 1: as long as it's cold. But if it warms up
Speaker 1: and I'm not at the beach, then uh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: certainly both of those are true. Then yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: want any part of it. I'm a picky so I. I
Speaker 1: I do love the soda waters, I like the lacroise.
Speaker 1: I like most flavors, uh and and I like real
Speaker 1: coconut stuff, but the coconut lacroix. Something about it. It's like,
Speaker 1: for me, it's like drinking sunscreen. Something's wrong. I think
Speaker 1: maybe that's why I like it, because it kind of
Speaker 1: tastes like what sunscreen historically smelled like. And so it's
Speaker 1: like it's like drinking the the you know, the alchemical
Speaker 1: truth of the beach um while at the beach. So
Speaker 1: I can go on even better on these uh, these dissolvers.
Speaker 1: There's one thing I've been reading about called Piranha solution.
Speaker 1: This is this is a class of industrial and laboratory
Speaker 1: grade cleaning solutions colloquially known as Piranha solutions. And you
Speaker 1: can guess how they got their name. They are typically
Speaker 1: used as a ruthless and very dangerous way to strip
Speaker 1: all residue of organic molecules from a container, surface, or substrate. Now,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that it has it is it is getting closer.
Speaker 1: It sounds like to what we think of as as
Speaker 1: Hollywood acid, but in doing so, it invokes Hollywood piranhas. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's making you think of what's the James Bond
Speaker 1: movie where you only live twice? Right with the bridge
Speaker 1: that goes over the piranhas. And if you like, that's
Speaker 1: your bad performance review means that your fish food. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one with Donald pleasants is blowfeld. So a
Speaker 1: common formulation of Piranha solutions extremely dangerous material would be
Speaker 1: three parts sulfuric acid or H two S O four
Speaker 1: and one part hydrogen peroxide, which is H two O two.
Speaker 1: Piranha solution is from everything I read, extremely temperamental. Mixing
Speaker 1: the elements in the wrong order, or in the wrong ratio,
Speaker 1: or in the presence of the wrong contaminants can immediately
Speaker 1: lead to explosions. It seems like there are just lots
Speaker 1: of ways that using it can lead to explosions. More
Speaker 1: on that in a bit, so I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out, Okay, how exactly does this stuff work? Um,
Speaker 1: there was a helpful podcast episode I found. The Royal
Speaker 1: Society of Chemistry has a podcast called Chemistry and Its Element,
Speaker 1: though sometimes I see it referred to just as the
Speaker 1: Chemistry World podcast. Chemistry World is their magazine, their publication.
Speaker 1: But this podcast episode was hosted by Sam Tracy, and
Speaker 1: it's about Piranha solution, and I appreciated the way Tracy
Speaker 1: explained what the solution does at the molecular level. First
Speaker 1: of all, I wanted to point out Tracy notes that
Speaker 1: it's not just named Piranha Solution for its ability to
Speaker 1: to dissolve all organic matter that it comes into contact with,
Speaker 1: but perhaps also for its tendency to boil vigorously when
Speaker 1: it's in the presence of organic matter. So like in
Speaker 1: that scene and you only live twice where the piranhas
Speaker 1: started attacking somebody, it looks like the water has been
Speaker 1: put on the boilers, bubbles everywhere. Yeah, almost as if
Speaker 1: um a a bubbling mechanism was placed underwater to create
Speaker 1: the illusion of a horde of piranhas um, you know,
Speaker 1: tearing something apart in movie fashion. Actually, here's something I
Speaker 1: want to see. Uh, answer this question if you were
Speaker 1: actually attacked by a school of piranhas. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they even swarm like that in reality, I kind
Speaker 1: of doubt it. But if you were, would it would
Speaker 1: it would the water boil like that? Or would it
Speaker 1: look very calm on the surface. Well, I think we
Speaker 1: should answer this question into an episode on piranhas. I
Speaker 1: don't know that i've i've ever we've ever devoted an
Speaker 1: episode to piranhas. So let's let's come back to it.
Speaker 1: They're they're beautiful fish. Okay, So how does it work? Well?
Speaker 1: Paranha solution again, as I mentioned as two main ingredients,
Speaker 1: has sulfuric acid H two S O four and hydrogen
Speaker 1: peroxide H two O two. So if you imagine a
Speaker 1: glass container with organic residue of glucose sugar stuck to
Speaker 1: the inside, uh, and imagine this is exposed to a
Speaker 1: Piranha solution for cleaning. Each of the two ingredients plays
Speaker 1: a different role in cleaning the sugar away. So sugar,
Speaker 1: of course, is an organic molecule. It's a carbohydrate molecule
Speaker 1: with the formulas C six H twelve O six at
Speaker 1: least that's glucose. Different types of sugar of different chemical compositions,
Speaker 1: but it's got carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and when exposed
Speaker 1: to concentrated sulfuric acid, this acid acts as an aggressive
Speaker 1: dehydrating agent, so it will chemically react to remove water
Speaker 1: molecules as much as it can, So the sugar molecules
Speaker 1: will get broken apart, and the sugar will lose hydrogen
Speaker 1: and oxygen atoms in the form of water vapor H
Speaker 1: two O. And So if you have a molecule like
Speaker 1: sugar that's based on carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and you're
Speaker 1: rapidly pulling hydrogen and oxygen off of it, what are
Speaker 1: you going to have left over a lot of carbon?
Speaker 1: So if you've ever seen this experiment where you douse
Speaker 1: sugar and sulfuric acid, there there are a lot of
Speaker 1: videos you can look up online. Um, usually you will
Speaker 1: have like a beaker with a bunch of sugar in it.
Speaker 1: Somebody douses it and sulfuric acid and then stirs it
Speaker 1: up with a glass pipette. Uh, the sugar will first
Speaker 1: turn brown and then black and then give off all
Speaker 1: of these fumes. I think it's giving off both water
Speaker 1: vapor and noxious fumes of sulfur dioxide. So you shouldn't
Speaker 1: do this experiment without you know, supervision of somebody who
Speaker 1: knows what they're doing, because it gets very hot and
Speaker 1: it puts off these fumes. It can be dangerous potentially.
Speaker 1: But but what eventually ends up happening is that the
Speaker 1: carbon residue that's left over from the reaction of the
Speaker 1: acid with the sugar, this carbon residue will start to
Speaker 1: climb out of the beaker in a looming column like
Speaker 1: a giant tube worm or snake that is made out
Speaker 1: of charred soit uh And you can find a whole
Speaker 1: genre of carbon snake pictures online from demonstrations of this reaction.
Speaker 1: They're pretty great. Yeah, they can be quite impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all praise be to the carbon snakes. But Sam Tracy
Speaker 1: in in this podcast, I was talking about mentions that
Speaker 1: the role of sulfuric acid is twofold quote. It's acidity
Speaker 1: catalyzes the reaction and being a hygroscopic substance, it combines
Speaker 1: with the water, releasing a great quantity of heat, meaning
Speaker 1: the reaction cannot go in the reverse direction and can
Speaker 1: only proceed to completion. But of course this alone would
Speaker 1: not make a cleaning agent because sulfuric acid alone would
Speaker 1: tend to simply eat up organic molecules, strip them of
Speaker 1: what water can be pulled out of them, and leave
Speaker 1: a ton of black elemental carbon in its wake. And
Speaker 1: that is not clean. Like, you don't want black elemental
Speaker 1: carbon stuck to your glass surfaces or your electronics or
Speaker 1: your you know, your wafer chips, whatever whatever it is
Speaker 1: you're trying to clean. So this is where the hydrogen
Speaker 1: peroxide comes in. Hydrogen peroxide serves to eat away the
Speaker 1: remaining carbon byproduct that would have been left over from
Speaker 1: the acids attack on the carbohydrate. Uh So, hydrogen peroxide
Speaker 1: H two O two will react with the elemental carbon
Speaker 1: by donating oxygen atoms to the carbon, which combined to
Speaker 1: produce carbon dioxide gas, which floats away in the air,
Speaker 1: eventually leaving your substrate clean of all organic material. So hypothetically,
Speaker 1: you you have and again i'm not advising to do this,
Speaker 1: it's extremely dangerous, but what would happen is you have
Speaker 1: a glass container or an electronics part, whatever it is
Speaker 1: you're trying to clean off. It's got a little bit
Speaker 1: of organic MATERI areal on it, maybe some sugar or
Speaker 1: some other kind of carbohydrates something like that, and you
Speaker 1: add this solution to it. It is UH. The organic
Speaker 1: materials are ripped apart by the acid, and then the
Speaker 1: remaining carbon is just removed and evaporated by the hydrogen peroxide.
Speaker 1: I was reading about many ways that the piranha solution is,
Speaker 1: as I've said several times now, extremely dangerous. This is
Speaker 1: not one to try it with a home chemistry set,
Speaker 1: as it can easily explode and cause severe injuries and burns.
Speaker 1: I was reading a story that was sent to UH
Speaker 1: in a letter to Chemical Engineering News by a couple
Speaker 1: of researchers in the year nineteen nine that was about
Speaker 1: multiple accidents that had occurred in university labs with Piranha solutions.
Speaker 1: One where a container of paranha solution was sitting stored
Speaker 1: in a fume hood and about a week after it
Speaker 1: was mixed, it just spontaneously exploded. Another one they talked
Speaker 1: about is UH it occurred at Cornell University, where I
Speaker 1: think what happened is that some Piranha solution was accidentally
Speaker 1: and very unfortunately mixed with acet tone and this caused
Speaker 1: a violent explosion that like ripped apart the hood that
Speaker 1: it was under severely injured the person who was working
Speaker 1: on it. They ended up, you know, covered in this
Speaker 1: corrosive liquid with a bunch of glass embedded in them.
Speaker 1: So it is not something to screw around with. So
Speaker 1: not literal alcahist, not a literal universal solvent, but but
Speaker 1: parana solution will get you a lot of the way there.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you know, at this point we're reaching
Speaker 1: the end of the podcasts, and I think the only
Speaker 1: only way to really go at this point is to
Speaker 1: at least briefly discuss new age occult thinking and um
Speaker 1: also tech biz lingo. Okay, let's let's start with with
Speaker 1: the with the new age, new age and occult psych
Speaker 1: and psychedelic thinking, basically discussing universal solvent is a metaphor. Now.
Speaker 1: Earlier in our discussion, I brought up Terrence McKinnon his
Speaker 1: lectures on alchemy, and again McKenna said that he didn't
Speaker 1: see much of a a connection between alchemy and psychedelics. Uh,
Speaker 1: those certain important uh pharmacological discoveries would come out of alchemy.
Speaker 1: For the most part, psychedelics were the domain of the shaman.
Speaker 1: But of course other schools of thought would later on
Speaker 1: in human history come back to alchemy, uh and it's
Speaker 1: sacred and obscure dimensions and find new meanings there. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, we see that with the unions, and we
Speaker 1: also see that with psychedelic and new age thinking as well. Again,
Speaker 1: you know, you're dealing with with recipes that are dealing
Speaker 1: you know, talking about the red dragon and using code words,
Speaker 1: but also dealing in philosophical and magical ideas. It's irresistible
Speaker 1: to come back and sort of um, you know, and
Speaker 1: view your own meaning into it and uh and and
Speaker 1: perhaps even rediscover aspects of your your your current, your
Speaker 1: contemporary system by breathing it into this archaic apparatus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, I think alchemy. Concepts from alchemy
Speaker 1: were very popular to be played around with by like
Speaker 1: a lot of uh the sort of new religious movements
Speaker 1: of the late nineteenth century. Yeah, and and really this
Speaker 1: ultimately fits the basic format of alchemy throughout history. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of alchemy, even you know, you know, in
Speaker 1: the old days, revolved around looking back at old texts,
Speaker 1: piecing together bits from old texts, and trying to to
Speaker 1: break new ground understand what these these other authors were
Speaker 1: talking about, and uh in creating some new frame of
Speaker 1: meaning around it. You know, something that alchemy also has
Speaker 1: in common with religious texts is pseudonymous writings. Uh so
Speaker 1: in in for example, in the early centuries of Christianity,
Speaker 1: a huge thing that would often go on is like
Speaker 1: you would write a new book that you know, you
Speaker 1: would want to be taken as scripture that would advance
Speaker 1: your view of the correct theological interpretation of Christ. But
Speaker 1: you'd be like, well, and nobody knows who I am,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to say that this was written by St. Peter,
Speaker 1: and so you know, this is the Gospel of Peter, Like,
Speaker 1: this is definitely not written by Peter. Um the people.
Speaker 1: We're doing this kind of thing all the time. The
Speaker 1: same thing happened with alchemy. People would write pseudonymously as
Speaker 1: like you know, as one of the great masters of alchemy. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: this was by Paracelsus, but it actually wasn't. It was
Speaker 1: just some somebody well, you know in in In dealing
Speaker 1: specifically with it with alcohest and the idea of a
Speaker 1: universal solvent. You know, I looked through some of the
Speaker 1: writings of uh and and lectures of mckinna. I looked
Speaker 1: through uh iLiad's work and uh, you know, it's possible
Speaker 1: I missed something, but I didn't find any case where
Speaker 1: either of them specifically spoke or wrote about the alcahest um. However,
Speaker 1: you do see the alcohest pop up in New Age
Speaker 1: and psychedelic literature as a metaphor in some cases for
Speaker 1: psychedelic compounds. Um, you know, a way of thinking about
Speaker 1: with something like the psilocybin can do in the mind.
Speaker 1: But it reminds me a little bit of mckinna's arguments
Speaker 1: about the argument that psychedelics in the West may have
Speaker 1: enabled Buddhism to spread more thoroughly through Western thought. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I agree with them completely on that, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a it's a valid point that as
Speaker 1: a culture's understanding of consciousness changes, it does open them
Speaker 1: up to the discovery and rediscovery of various spiritual concepts. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: in if you're thinking in the Terence mckinna type, vein,
Speaker 1: the idea is that, uh, is that the use of
Speaker 1: psychedelics would have broadly enabled sort of reduced the mind
Speaker 1: to its tree a prima or to its more proximate
Speaker 1: constituents without degradation, allowing h more different types of states
Speaker 1: of mind to be accessed as opposed to the narrower
Speaker 1: window of different ways you can think based on your
Speaker 1: cultural upbringing. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And and yeah,
Speaker 1: I like this idea. I like the idea of using
Speaker 1: alcoholst as a as a kind of metaphor for anything
Speaker 1: that like breaks down unuseful rigidity and thought or culture. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and I also like the idea of of
Speaker 1: of psychedelics being seen as some sort of a universal
Speaker 1: solvent potentially. And and again you know you then the
Speaker 1: breaking down of things that I think it also drives
Speaker 1: home that it's a delicate process and you know what
Speaker 1: you're doing, and you don't want to, you know, to
Speaker 1: to go too far and dissolve too much. Uh but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, breaking down the mind that's too rigid to
Speaker 1: melt right. Um. The one point McKenna does point out
Speaker 1: that there's this, um, this alchemical alphamism that in in
Speaker 1: in Latin is dissolutio at coagulato, which we're just discussing
Speaker 1: this off, Mike. Uh, Like this basically breaks down to
Speaker 1: the dissolving and um and the coagulation of things to
Speaker 1: break things down and then things build back up UM,
Speaker 1: and that that ultimately this is all one needs to
Speaker 1: know about like the nature of reality. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the the alchemical truth of things. And uh, I think
Speaker 1: this is you know, this is this is a basic
Speaker 1: idea that you can apply to the physical world but
Speaker 1: also to you can you can see how readily one
Speaker 1: could take to this as a as as a psychological
Speaker 1: concept as well, and certainly a psychedelic concept. You know,
Speaker 1: the idea of breaking things down. But then but then
Speaker 1: that rigidity is going to is going to return. There's
Speaker 1: going to be some coagulation that's going to take place again,
Speaker 1: you know, I do. Before we end, though, I want
Speaker 1: to come back to something that I think we touched
Speaker 1: on earlier, which is the potential dangers of of seeing
Speaker 1: the world in terms of universal solvents. I mean, one
Speaker 1: thing we learned as alchemy passed away and gave way
Speaker 1: to modern chemistry is that there is in fact no
Speaker 1: such thing as a as a universal solvent in chemistry.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are solvents that will dissolve lots of things,
Speaker 1: but but there is no universal acid in the Daniel
Speaker 1: Dennett sense, and I wonder if that is also a
Speaker 1: lesson that should be applied in in the metaphorical way,
Speaker 1: sort of coming back against everything we've talked about in
Speaker 1: this episode, because I, I I mean, I really do believe
Speaker 1: that a huge amount of trouble and confusion in the
Speaker 1: world comes from people getting overly attached to a certain
Speaker 1: lens of viewing the world or or analytical tool or
Speaker 1: new strategy and thinking that it will solve everything. Uh,
Speaker 1: that it will answer all questions, that it will solve
Speaker 1: all your problems. You know, Like I feel like that
Speaker 1: that that is something that we all have a tendency for,
Speaker 1: but it's it's very dangerous and something to watch out
Speaker 1: for in yourself. And one of the weird ways I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this is actually pulling us away from
Speaker 1: the the mysterious worlds at the intersection of you know,
Speaker 1: theology and metaphysics and science and chemistry. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about this in terms of tech business because I was
Speaker 1: just thinking about all of the different universal solvents that
Speaker 1: we have witnessed come and go over the years working
Speaker 1: in digital media, and they come and they go, and
Speaker 1: they come and they go, and so I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: the universal solvents of search engine optimization. You remember when
Speaker 1: like everything on the Internet suddenly had to change to
Speaker 1: be search engine optimized, and it kind of ruined a
Speaker 1: huge amount of content it was good previously and then
Speaker 1: was just destroyed by optimization for Google search results. And
Speaker 1: then that kind of and then you know, they change
Speaker 1: how their search results are calculated anyway, so it becomes
Speaker 1: obsolete later on. And then I remember the the u
Speaker 1: GC revolution. At some point it was like, well, everything's
Speaker 1: got to be user generated content, you know, and everything
Speaker 1: is Wikipedia now, yeah, and so and that sort of
Speaker 1: destroyed everything in its path, and then that kind of
Speaker 1: went away, and you know, the various pivot to videos
Speaker 1: and the optimization for the Facebook news feed and then that,
Speaker 1: and then the pivot to blockchain and everything. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like every every few years in our business space,
Speaker 1: we we see a universal solvent come along that maybe
Speaker 1: changes some things, maybe destroys some things, and maybe maybe
Speaker 1: hopefully there are some things that are relatively unscathed by it.
Speaker 1: But then it just goes along on its own way.
Speaker 1: And and usually these things do not actually solve all
Speaker 1: the problems and do not will not last forever. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess it ultimately comes down to who is applying
Speaker 1: a supposed universal solving, right, and it generally comes down
Speaker 1: to these these businesses of disruption. It is about dissolving
Speaker 1: the rigidity of the of some aspect of the industry.
Speaker 1: But it comes back to that that that alchemical truth
Speaker 1: that we just laid out right, the dissolution and coagulation there,
Speaker 1: it's not so much the dissolution that they're into, it
Speaker 1: is the eventual coagulation because they wish to be the
Speaker 1: masters of that coagulation. You know, I want I don't
Speaker 1: want to make everything free so that it remains free.
Speaker 1: I want to make everything free because I have a
Speaker 1: new model of how to charge for it, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's what we see time and time again with
Speaker 1: these different disruption strategies. You want to disrupt they take uh,
Speaker 1: you know, cable television, right, I mean, it's just it's
Speaker 1: it's it's classic, you know, all these uh, these services
Speaker 1: that came along to cut our costs and cut our chords,
Speaker 1: and you know, and we're at the point now where, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to watch everything that everyone's talking about,
Speaker 1: you're spending as much money as you were as you
Speaker 1: were probably spending in previous decades on your your cable
Speaker 1: and your satellite and so forth. So it's just but
Speaker 1: just the structure of it and the masters of it
Speaker 1: having some cases changed. Yeah, I mean, I guess it
Speaker 1: is often that you're just finding that you go through
Speaker 1: destruction and then there's some kind of return to a
Speaker 1: new equilibrium. But um, but along the way, I would
Speaker 1: just say, be careful not to be led astray or
Speaker 1: to lose too much to something that seems like it.
Speaker 1: I guess anything that seems like it does anything, the
Speaker 1: universal solvent or the panacea. I mean, nothing actually works
Speaker 1: in every case. And even if something is good, it's something,
Speaker 1: it's it's not good at everything, right, It just might
Speaker 1: just reduce your product um to a to a carbon husk. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close the
Speaker 1: alchemical books on this one, but I'm sure we will
Speaker 1: return to alchemy in the future when we deal so
Speaker 1: much with the history of sigen ants and UH, and
Speaker 1: you know in the history of religion and spiritual concepts
Speaker 1: as well, that inevitably, UH alchemical topics will arise once more,
Speaker 1: and and I look forward to it. And hey, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll do an episode in Piranhas in the near
Speaker 1: future as well. I love a good a good biology
Speaker 1: exploration as well. In the meantime, if you like to
Speaker 1: check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you know where to find them. There in the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind podcast feed, where you can get
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. You'll find core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays. You'll find artifact episodes on Wednesdays, listener
Speaker 1: mails on Mondays. Fridays you'll find episodes of Weird how Cinema.
Speaker 1: That's where we just talk about a weird movie with
Speaker 1: little or no concern for science or alchemy uh either.
Speaker 1: And then on the weekends we air a little bit
Speaker 1: of a repeating the form of a vault episode. Huge
Speaker 1: thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact debt Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
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