April 1, 2021 • 27 mins
Our own Amelia Palka helps sort
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is job slete. I'm Helen Hong and I'm Matt
beat and today we're talking about the alchemist. So the
theory went that as medals age below the ground, they
grow and improve into better forms of metal, kind of
(00:22):
like a potato. I had a friend growing up who
would take apart computers and then try to put them
back together. I thought this was crazy, but it's hard
to deny our innate desire to tinker. We just like
to create stuff. But hey, what if we could create
money or cure all diseases and achieve immortality. Okay I
(00:49):
may have lost you with that last one, but those
were real aspirations for the job we are looking at
in today's episode. It's a job that first appeared in
ancient China, India, Egypt, and Greece, and it was so
common that pretty much every village had at least one.
(01:10):
So join us as today we are carefully mixing a
bunch of facts to look at the history of the alchemist. Well,
your intro was very trippy. I'm always tripping. Hey, Helen,
we we have chemistry, right. Yeah. Actually a lot of
our listeners say that we do. Thank you listeners. I
(01:33):
would argue that alchemy is the precursor to modern chemistry.
Chemistry deals with substances, so breaking it down to the
smallest level to see how these different substances interact and
combine and change and all this. Well, shoot, alchemy, I
mean they were doing that hundreds of years before modern chemistry.
(01:55):
The only thing I know about alchemists is there's a
very famous novel called The Alchemist, and most of that
story that actually doesn't involve alchemy. It's like this journey
of this person's in like self discovery. But I think
I do remember the alchemists in that book trying to
make gold. Yeah, that's actually the first thing I thought
(02:17):
of when I heard alchemists. And yeah, let's go over
the definition here of an alchemist just simply put. The
job was trying to transform things for the better. Oh,
this sounds me whenever I try to go on a jog,
I'm trying to better myself, Matt better myself by going
on a run. Good for you. Well, we actually have
(02:39):
an in house expert, don't we. Yeah, we got lucky
on this one, our own Amelia Palka, who is our
in house researcher. She's amazing and she happens to be
an expert on alchemists, so we'll hear from her telling
us about just how popular this profession was. So it's
impulse able to tell how many alchemists there were in
(03:02):
the past, because most of them did not actually run
around calling themselves alchemists. They usually had day jobs that
were normal medieval or early modern jobs. They worked leather,
or they were silversmiths, basically anything that would give them
a little bit of spear money to buy chemical ingredients
and to try and mix them together in their basement.
(03:23):
There was a small but very visible subset who referred
to themselves as an alchemist, and they had a really
great business model, which is they'd seek out royal patrons
and try and get these royals to give them lots
of money for research and development. Basically, I love that
they're like, hey, King, I know you want me to
(03:45):
make this lead into gold, but you know what I
need for that gold? Yeah, more on that in a
little bit. Because some of them were scam artists, I
mean alchemists believed in transmutation, and it was like a
very holistic attitude. It's about purity of mind and body
and spirit. Everything is connected you know, and that's why
(04:07):
it kind of delved into mysticism a little bit. Yeah,
and a lot of them didn't even call themselves alchemists,
right right. This word came later on. I did trace
it back to the ancient Greeks, and there's the Greek
word seema, which probably came from the word chima, which
means fluid. Eventually it was passed down to Arabic and
(04:30):
then that's the word chemilla, also means to transform. It
was passed from Latin to French to English. That's kind
of where it turned into alchemy, which if you think
about words like algebra, algorithm, alcohol, all those words that
have that a L before them, that's why we associated
with Arabic origin. I think it's the word that has
(04:53):
like throughout history that has always been around associated with
alchemy is experimentation, Like you're just like And that's why
that's why I said that these these guys were kind
of scientists before science was a thing. It must have
attracted a naturally extremely curious person. Definitely, let's look at
(05:13):
the actual goals of these alchemists, because I think in
many cases they were noble goals that they all had.
Alchemists had a pretty wide variety of goals in their heads.
Among others, they wanted to make gold. They wanted to
discover the Philosopher's Stone, which is kind of their golden snitch,
so to speak. They wanted to branch out into other
(05:34):
related fields like alchemical pharaceuticals and metal smith ing. Then
on the more magical side of things, they wanted to
study palm reading astrology, and they also wanted to make
life from nothing. Wait, there's so much packed in there
that I want to unpack some of it. So what
is a philosopher's stone and what is a golden snitch?
(05:56):
I didn't read the Harry Potter novels. I'm sorry, Well
I read the first one, so you could definitely say J. K.
Rolling was influenced by these things passed down from alchemists.
The original Philosopher's stone, like, it means different things in
different places. If you were able to get it, you
were able to live forever or yeah yeah, or you
(06:18):
could transform any metal into just pure gold if you
got it. Their pursuit of it, along the way, they
were actually accidentally finding out things that did help society.
They were the first ones who created hydrochloric acid and
sodium carbonate, things that we take for granted today. They
came up with new ways of experimentation that's still used today.
(06:43):
So I kind of lean on that side of like, yeah,
precursor to science. This is a ignore all the crazy stuff.
I think Amelia was saying every town had one. We
don't know for sure, but I you know, part of
it is just I like to think that, like, yeah,
no matter where you're at, there's the local alcohol messed.
And then they believe that like, oh yeah, the alchemist
is like working on making lead into gold man He's
(07:05):
gonna be rich, I believe it or not. A lot
of people actually did think this was legit stuff. There
was relatively wide belief in alchemy. People in the past
didn't have this strict divide between science like chemistry, physics
and metaphysics like religion or any other stellar explanation for
the state of the world. So people who were seeking
(07:28):
explanations for why the world is the way it is,
they would take information from any source they could possibly get.
So alchemy was this kind of holistic mixed practice of chemistry,
metallurgy and a pretty diverse set of occultism. There were
a lot of skeptics, but it was very hard for
(07:51):
anyone to definitively disprove alchemy as a concept because they
didn't have the body of scientific knowledge that we have today.
You also have to remember that plenty of respected citizens
and scientists that we sometimes even respect today, like Sir
Isaac Newton, they totally thought it was real. And when
(08:12):
your crowned head of state is spending thousands of gold
coins trying to research this topic, at that point, you're thinking,
so many important people think it's real. Maybe it might
be that makes so much sense because they didn't have
the scientific knowledge that we have today. And so if
(08:32):
you did boil a metal when it turned into gas
and something else, then you'd be like whoa, Like how
does that even work? You would believe like, oh, I
wonder if that's the hand of God and some magical
thing is going on while this like you know it's
a chemical process, but you don't know that necessarily. Like
we look back on it now and like what were
(08:53):
they thinking? But yeah, we would all be doing the
same thing, trying to experiment. It is like so much
of scientific knowledge is based on trial and error, and
there's things that we just take for granted today that
came from you know, centuries of of just trial and art.
Some of it's going to be legit science and some
of it's going to be quackery. Right, yeah, let's talk
(09:13):
more about that quackery. It's fun stuff. So we there was, uh,
there is this branch of science called metallurgy that deals
with properties of metals and their production and purification. But
some of the alchemists ideas of metallurgy were a bit
out there. In the past. People didn't have the periodic
table of elements or any of the more advanced chemistry
(09:37):
related tools that we have at our disposal today, so
they weren't really quite sure how metals worked. And one
of the theories went that you can find a lot
of the lesser metals. You can find a lot of
copper and tin and even iron, but you can't find
that much gold. So the theory went that as metals
(09:58):
age below the ground, the grow and improve into better
forms of metal, kind of like a potato. They start
out like a tiny potato seed that's copper or tin
or one of the other inferior metals, and then after
many hundreds of years below the ground, they have grown
into a glorious Yukon gold potato, so to speak. They
(10:18):
could take this gold out of the ground, at which
point it would become inert. That's kind of like an
actual potato. Again. That's why the potatoes in your pantry
don't grow a pair of legs and walk away on you.
And they thought they could somehow coejola into growing above
ground much faster than the natural growth process below the ground.
(10:38):
That's really funny. Yeah, they say money doesn't grow on trees,
but some of them actually thought, hey, maybe it does,
or maybe it grows underground. I mean, it's funny, like
we make fun of that concept. But if you just
didn't have all the years of scientific knowledge that we've accumulated, now, yeah,
you would be like, I don't know how gold is made.
I have no idea. It's not. It doesn't. It wouldn't
(11:00):
seem that insane that, yeah, there's iron and there's gold,
and maybe if you leave the iron in the ground
long enough, it turns into gold, and then maybe if
we stare at it, it'll turn into gold faster. This
(11:26):
was before the electron microscope. This is before the periodic table,
and so a lot of what we knew about elements.
Was just pure experimentation, just seeing how substances changed. But
but did they actually do things to the lead or
like what were the processes like did they literally just
(11:46):
stand there and stare at the thing or did they
try doing things to it? Well, that's what alchemists did.
They were proactive, so yes, they tried different things to
kind of speed up the process. There was a very
large diversity in their methods, and this is partially because
alchemists were kind of secretive. You know, you don't want
to be the guy who tells everybody how to make gold.
(12:08):
The alchemists methods are often obscured, but a couple of
them have been decoded or otherwise have entered the public knowledge.
So one thing they liked to do was dissolve gold
or other metals in really powerful acids. Basically quite a
bad time if they splash out of your cauldron. They
liked making alloys of metals and mercury. Mercury is a
(12:32):
highly volatile metal. It is liquid at room temperature, and
it is also extremely toxic, and it moves in a
kind of alluring, hypnotic way. So they thought that since
it was so strange, that this was going to be
a particularly fruitful metal to try and transform. Pharmaceutical alchemy
(12:53):
was a branch of alchemy where they did make medicines
and potions and lixxers. I would not say most of
these medicines were particularly effective, but it did lay the
groundwork for what we today know as pharmaceuticals. Most of
their medicines were made with mercury or sulfur or other volatile,
(13:14):
mostly toxic chemicals. Like like a lot of them were
just useless, but you know, like to be honest, most
of the more poisonous. Yeah. Wow, I feel like this
is where the mad scientist like idea comes from. Right.
It's this guy is like in a secret bunker because
he doesn't want people to see how he's making the gold.
(13:37):
And he's like got the sulfur and the mercury and
then poof, he's dead. I mean, mercury is not something
you just want to mess around with without extra precautions.
And like, like Amelia said, a lot of this stuff
was poisonous. You had a lot of them not exactly
sure what was going to happen when they mixed two
(13:57):
things together. So also the pharmaceutical I mean, what was
up like with ancient medicine, like they're making their like
prescribing your mercury if you have a fever, and then
if something's wrong with you, they're like leech him, put
leeches on him, like I can't imagine. Well, because it
(14:17):
worked a little bit, So if it worked a little,
any progress was like, okay, alright, let's keep doing it.
I know it's a little it's a little weird. Let's
just keep doing it. Though it sexs to be you
if you had any kind of ailment in like their hundreds.
So it wasn't just the hundreds. I mean all the
way up to the nineteen hundreds, there were crazy cures
that were really just horrible for people, but they didn't
(14:38):
know any better. Like the example that first comes to mind, radium.
It was in toothpaste, it was in cosmetics. Some believe
that it treated impotence. Isn't radium like radioactive? Yes, it
was radioactive. People people were consuming it and like they were,
they were literally killing themselves, but they didn't know, like
(14:59):
they I thought that this was actually helping them. And
then of course who knows what today, what are we
consuming regularly that is actually just so damaging for us?
But no, one knows double stuffed oreos, I can tell
you right away. It's not even food, is it. I
mean it tastes good though they taste good. So so
(15:22):
far alchemy sounds mildly crazy. But also one of the
things that Amelia brought up is that making life from nothing?
What's that about. So one of the things alchemists wanted
to do was to create a little man called homunculous.
This was the era when you could go out and
hire a servant very easily, or you know, yet an
(15:42):
underling in other methods, but they wanted the complete obedience
of the homunculus. Alchemists had lots of ways to try
and achieve this, and most of them are pretty gross.
One of the slightly lest disgusting weeks was they'd try
and suck the life out of various inanimate objects or vegetables.
They would use like a test tube or straw to
(16:06):
literally suck the life out of it and put it
inside a little wax at all for example. This, while
pretty creative, was not actually successful. Unfortunately, it's creative but
not successful. Yeah. Basically, the idea of how muculous, which
(16:28):
was supposed to be this little creature that you could
potentially create and if you just mix the right ingredients.
And do you want to hear some of these ingredients
that we're proposed do? I do? I want to do?
I want to know? The first known account of the
production of the muculous is said to be in this
(16:50):
Arabic work called liber Vaca or translates to Book of
the Cow. These are the ingredients magician semen, animal blood,
a cow, sulfur magnet, green Tussia, which is a sulfate
(17:11):
of iron, and a large glass or a lead vessel.
I just can't believe this is real. I went to
many different sources, though this is legit. You do need
to mix some of these ingredients together to incimilate the cow,
and it involves like doing other things to the cow
(17:31):
that I won't get into, and placing this animal inside
a dark house where the sun never shines. And then meanwhile,
you have a mixture of ground sunstone, sulfur magnet, and
green tussia. You have to start with a sap of
white willow. Okay, at this point, you know you're waiting
on the cow to give birth to a quote unformed substance,
(17:57):
and then once that comes out, you need to place
it in the powder that you prepared, and then this
blob will grow a human skin and this will turn
into a hommoculous that will give you nightmares forever. You know.
(18:30):
Like up until this point, I felt like, Oh, alchemists
are cool. They're like the frontier of science and they're like, hey,
what happens if I do this? But this thing with
the homoculous sounds twisted. Yeah. The Catholic Church and medieval
Europe was just like, this is a little two even
out there for us, and a lot of this was
done in secret. Also why alchemists were a bit notorious
(18:54):
because they were scam artists. Alchemy as a science was
pretty expensive. You had to have lots of chemicals, lots
of tools, and for some experiments you had to have
gold to begin with, so alchemists tended to gravitate towards
generous patrons. Royal patrons were extremely popular choices because they
(19:18):
had nearly unlimited money by the standards of the day.
The most generous patron, or perhaps the biggest sucker, depending
on how you look at it, was Rudolf, the second
Holy Roman Emperor. There's a book about various alchemical scams
in the court of Rudolph the Second. It also happens
to have a bunch of other alchemical scams in it. Oh,
(19:42):
alchemical scams. Yeah. So the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second,
who she was referring to, he definitely was all about alchemy.
He would support it whenever possible. Okay, So there was
this famous alchemist named John D from glend and he
(20:02):
work for Rudolph the Second. He had this cauldron that
had a fake wax bottom, and so under the wax
there were gold nuggets and gold flakes. So when he
heated up the wax and it melted, what was left
were these little gold nuggets, and so they're like, oh, wow,
how did you do that. Rudolf the Second was like, yeah,
(20:22):
you're hired. But then over time they realized that what
John D was demanding to be paid to do this
wasn't really worth it, because you know, they weren't making
much money from this goal that he was I think
it's hilarious that he was like, I can make gold
and I need you to pay me to do it. Yeah.
(20:46):
It was causing them more to pay him than he
was getting for them. So that was that was ultimately
why Rudolph was like, yeah, we'll see a dude. So
we're there a lot of alchemy con artists and what
did like what happened when they got caught. We don't
know of a whole lot of them who were actually
con artists, but I would say it was a dangerous
(21:07):
time to be a con. There were some real threats
in this profession. The most obvious one would be that
you didn't please your wealthy patron, and in many cases
they could have you executed or jailed for failing to
please them. Another problem was that alchemy, although it wasn't
considered witchcraft, was not always accepted. In some cases, the
(21:32):
leaders of countries saw as a threat because if you
became richer than them, you could overthrow them, or at
least live more lucuriously than them, which is obviously unpleasing.
And most commonly of all, you could poison yourself. Alchemists
really liked using lead and mercury in their experiments, and
both of these are elements that have really common toxicity,
(21:55):
even in adults. Honestly, I think most of our modern
imagery of the like wacky capricious wizard comes from alchemists
who poisoned themselves. Again, mad scientists. Yeah, that makes sad.
That makes sense that they were like, I'm inhaling mercury
vapors and now I'm whoa, I'm loopy woo, and people
are like, Wow, that guy's nuts. It's interesting that like
(22:17):
the leaders of these countries would be like, well, this guy,
if he can make gold, can get richer than me.
Let's kill him. Yeah. So I mean they had to
be careful if I mean, that's probably why they were
not more con artists, because there were real consequences to
getting caught. I think because of this novel that I read,
The Alchemist years ago, like it seemed like more of
(22:38):
a noble profession. I guess it seemed noble, but at
the same time it seemed wacky that they were, like
they would spend all their lives trying to make gold
out of other things. Mercury has eighty electrons, gold has
seventy nine. So they were kind of onto something there,
I mean, like where they didn't really realize it at
the time because again this as well before the periodic
(22:59):
table understanding elements like they did later on. But I
think we should we should circle back here and say,
you know, it was more beneficial for progress than it
wasn't I mean the con artists notwithstanding, it sounds like
alchemy was important to the history, like the progress of
scientific knowledge, right, Like you needed to go down all
(23:21):
these weird rabbit holes and these weird dead ends to
come to the scientific knowledge that we have today. Yeah,
I mean, they used to think there were only four elements,
and so this was it. Like this planted the seeds,
so to speak. It really did pave the way for
folks like Robert Boyle, who was one of the seventeenth
century founders of modern chemistry. He essentially relied on some
(23:46):
of the work of these alchemists. That makes so much sense.
But you can't start from scratch to get to the
point of knowledge that we have today. You have to
do a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing.
And the scientific advancements we have today have to be
based on something. And it was, you know, standing on
the shoulders of alchemists who tried a bunch of things
that didn't work to get to the things that did work.
(24:09):
But I think still there's that the side of alchemy
that was just so deep into the supernatural, you know,
like they superstition really they had to get rid of
that superstition. With the Enlightenment, we see a shift, you know,
across all society and the way that they pursued knowledge
(24:29):
and understanding the natural world. And so of course this
is going to turn the tide. Alchemy's downfall really came
in the mid seventeen hundreds, the Enlightenment and the scientific Revolution.
They brought a sense of objectivism. They really didn't want
to mix metaphysical and physical disciplines. Many of the practitioners
(24:54):
were still religious, but they wanted to have experiments that
were explainable without any kind of magic. Over the course
of the seventeen hundreds, alchemy managed to position itself as
an opponent to this objective science because a lot of
people weren't actually happy with this this new science. They
wanted a science that was going to explain everything, not
(25:16):
just the physical world. They wanted the world within them
explained as well. But throughout the rest of the seventeen hundreds,
alchemy slowly started to wither and die off, and by
the early eighteen hundreds, I think it was fair to
say it was widely dead. Emilia said it was widely dead.
It's not fully dead. I mean, let's be honest here.
(25:37):
I'm just gonna say a broad statement here, but humans
today still have plenty of irrational beliefs. Oh gosh. Yeah,
they jumped to conclusions about things they don't understand. And
but also there's the folklore side of it that really
is just so strong, and cultures around the world, I mean,
(25:58):
think about anything to do with wizards, magicians, still witchcraft,
I mean yeah, and like even like in Korean culture,
I know, you know, there's like old wives tales of
like if you want to give birth to a boy,
you gotta eat such and such. Stuff like that is
completely not based in science, but people still kind of
(26:20):
believe in it. Old lives tyles. That's kind of yeah,
that's old alchemists tales, right hashtag Old Alchemist Tales. Special
thanks to Amelia Pulca, who we interviewed for this episode.
She is a researcher here at jobs Elete and Hey,
(26:40):
if you've ever dropped a mentos into a two leader
coke bottle and had an explosion that made you kind
of an alchemist, tell us if you've done any other
crazy experiments like that on your own tweet us at
job Sleet Pod Job Sleete is produced for I Heart
Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You. It's
(27:01):
hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt beat
That's Me. The show was conceived and produced by Steve
Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott. Our editor is
Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka, our production coordinator
is Angie Hymes, and theme music is by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to our I Heart Radio team
(27:24):
led by Nikki Etre, Katrina Norvell, Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hatti, Kador,
Will Pearson connal Burne and Bob Pittman
This is job slete. I'm Helen Hong and I'm Matt
beat and today we're talking about the alchemist. So the
theory went that as medals age below the ground, they
grow and improve into better forms of metal, kind of
(00:22):
like a potato. I had a friend growing up who
would take apart computers and then try to put them
back together. I thought this was crazy, but it's hard
to deny our innate desire to tinker. We just like
to create stuff. But hey, what if we could create
money or cure all diseases and achieve immortality. Okay I
(00:49):
may have lost you with that last one, but those
were real aspirations for the job we are looking at
in today's episode. It's a job that first appeared in
ancient China, India, Egypt, and Greece, and it was so
common that pretty much every village had at least one.
(01:10):
So join us as today we are carefully mixing a
bunch of facts to look at the history of the alchemist. Well,
your intro was very trippy. I'm always tripping. Hey, Helen,
we we have chemistry, right. Yeah. Actually a lot of
our listeners say that we do. Thank you listeners. I
(01:33):
would argue that alchemy is the precursor to modern chemistry.
Chemistry deals with substances, so breaking it down to the
smallest level to see how these different substances interact and
combine and change and all this. Well, shoot, alchemy, I
mean they were doing that hundreds of years before modern chemistry.
(01:55):
The only thing I know about alchemists is there's a
very famous novel called The Alchemist, and most of that
story that actually doesn't involve alchemy. It's like this journey
of this person's in like self discovery. But I think
I do remember the alchemists in that book trying to
make gold. Yeah, that's actually the first thing I thought
(02:17):
of when I heard alchemists. And yeah, let's go over
the definition here of an alchemist just simply put. The
job was trying to transform things for the better. Oh,
this sounds me whenever I try to go on a jog,
I'm trying to better myself, Matt better myself by going
on a run. Good for you. Well, we actually have
(02:39):
an in house expert, don't we. Yeah, we got lucky
on this one, our own Amelia Palka, who is our
in house researcher. She's amazing and she happens to be
an expert on alchemists, so we'll hear from her telling
us about just how popular this profession was. So it's
impulse able to tell how many alchemists there were in
(03:02):
the past, because most of them did not actually run
around calling themselves alchemists. They usually had day jobs that
were normal medieval or early modern jobs. They worked leather,
or they were silversmiths, basically anything that would give them
a little bit of spear money to buy chemical ingredients
and to try and mix them together in their basement.
(03:23):
There was a small but very visible subset who referred
to themselves as an alchemist, and they had a really
great business model, which is they'd seek out royal patrons
and try and get these royals to give them lots
of money for research and development. Basically, I love that
they're like, hey, King, I know you want me to
(03:45):
make this lead into gold, but you know what I
need for that gold? Yeah, more on that in a
little bit. Because some of them were scam artists, I
mean alchemists believed in transmutation, and it was like a
very holistic attitude. It's about purity of mind and body
and spirit. Everything is connected you know, and that's why
(04:07):
it kind of delved into mysticism a little bit. Yeah,
and a lot of them didn't even call themselves alchemists,
right right. This word came later on. I did trace
it back to the ancient Greeks, and there's the Greek
word seema, which probably came from the word chima, which
means fluid. Eventually it was passed down to Arabic and
(04:30):
then that's the word chemilla, also means to transform. It
was passed from Latin to French to English. That's kind
of where it turned into alchemy, which if you think
about words like algebra, algorithm, alcohol, all those words that
have that a L before them, that's why we associated
with Arabic origin. I think it's the word that has
(04:53):
like throughout history that has always been around associated with
alchemy is experimentation, Like you're just like And that's why
that's why I said that these these guys were kind
of scientists before science was a thing. It must have
attracted a naturally extremely curious person. Definitely, let's look at
(05:13):
the actual goals of these alchemists, because I think in
many cases they were noble goals that they all had.
Alchemists had a pretty wide variety of goals in their heads.
Among others, they wanted to make gold. They wanted to
discover the Philosopher's Stone, which is kind of their golden snitch,
so to speak. They wanted to branch out into other
(05:34):
related fields like alchemical pharaceuticals and metal smith ing. Then
on the more magical side of things, they wanted to
study palm reading astrology, and they also wanted to make
life from nothing. Wait, there's so much packed in there
that I want to unpack some of it. So what
is a philosopher's stone and what is a golden snitch?
(05:56):
I didn't read the Harry Potter novels. I'm sorry, Well
I read the first one, so you could definitely say J. K.
Rolling was influenced by these things passed down from alchemists.
The original Philosopher's stone, like, it means different things in
different places. If you were able to get it, you
were able to live forever or yeah yeah, or you
(06:18):
could transform any metal into just pure gold if you
got it. Their pursuit of it, along the way, they
were actually accidentally finding out things that did help society.
They were the first ones who created hydrochloric acid and
sodium carbonate, things that we take for granted today. They
came up with new ways of experimentation that's still used today.
(06:43):
So I kind of lean on that side of like, yeah,
precursor to science. This is a ignore all the crazy stuff.
I think Amelia was saying every town had one. We
don't know for sure, but I you know, part of
it is just I like to think that, like, yeah,
no matter where you're at, there's the local alcohol messed.
And then they believe that like, oh yeah, the alchemist
is like working on making lead into gold man He's
(07:05):
gonna be rich, I believe it or not. A lot
of people actually did think this was legit stuff. There
was relatively wide belief in alchemy. People in the past
didn't have this strict divide between science like chemistry, physics
and metaphysics like religion or any other stellar explanation for
the state of the world. So people who were seeking
(07:28):
explanations for why the world is the way it is,
they would take information from any source they could possibly get.
So alchemy was this kind of holistic mixed practice of chemistry,
metallurgy and a pretty diverse set of occultism. There were
a lot of skeptics, but it was very hard for
(07:51):
anyone to definitively disprove alchemy as a concept because they
didn't have the body of scientific knowledge that we have today.
You also have to remember that plenty of respected citizens
and scientists that we sometimes even respect today, like Sir
Isaac Newton, they totally thought it was real. And when
(08:12):
your crowned head of state is spending thousands of gold
coins trying to research this topic, at that point, you're thinking,
so many important people think it's real. Maybe it might
be that makes so much sense because they didn't have
the scientific knowledge that we have today. And so if
(08:32):
you did boil a metal when it turned into gas
and something else, then you'd be like whoa, Like how
does that even work? You would believe like, oh, I
wonder if that's the hand of God and some magical
thing is going on while this like you know it's
a chemical process, but you don't know that necessarily. Like
we look back on it now and like what were
(08:53):
they thinking? But yeah, we would all be doing the
same thing, trying to experiment. It is like so much
of scientific knowledge is based on trial and error, and
there's things that we just take for granted today that
came from you know, centuries of of just trial and art.
Some of it's going to be legit science and some
of it's going to be quackery. Right, yeah, let's talk
(09:13):
more about that quackery. It's fun stuff. So we there was, uh,
there is this branch of science called metallurgy that deals
with properties of metals and their production and purification. But
some of the alchemists ideas of metallurgy were a bit
out there. In the past. People didn't have the periodic
table of elements or any of the more advanced chemistry
(09:37):
related tools that we have at our disposal today, so
they weren't really quite sure how metals worked. And one
of the theories went that you can find a lot
of the lesser metals. You can find a lot of
copper and tin and even iron, but you can't find
that much gold. So the theory went that as metals
(09:58):
age below the ground, the grow and improve into better
forms of metal, kind of like a potato. They start
out like a tiny potato seed that's copper or tin
or one of the other inferior metals, and then after
many hundreds of years below the ground, they have grown
into a glorious Yukon gold potato, so to speak. They
(10:18):
could take this gold out of the ground, at which
point it would become inert. That's kind of like an
actual potato. Again. That's why the potatoes in your pantry
don't grow a pair of legs and walk away on you.
And they thought they could somehow coejola into growing above
ground much faster than the natural growth process below the ground.
(10:38):
That's really funny. Yeah, they say money doesn't grow on trees,
but some of them actually thought, hey, maybe it does,
or maybe it grows underground. I mean, it's funny, like
we make fun of that concept. But if you just
didn't have all the years of scientific knowledge that we've accumulated, now, yeah,
you would be like, I don't know how gold is made.
I have no idea. It's not. It doesn't. It wouldn't
(11:00):
seem that insane that, yeah, there's iron and there's gold,
and maybe if you leave the iron in the ground
long enough, it turns into gold, and then maybe if
we stare at it, it'll turn into gold faster. This
(11:26):
was before the electron microscope. This is before the periodic table,
and so a lot of what we knew about elements.
Was just pure experimentation, just seeing how substances changed. But
but did they actually do things to the lead or
like what were the processes like did they literally just
(11:46):
stand there and stare at the thing or did they
try doing things to it? Well, that's what alchemists did.
They were proactive, so yes, they tried different things to
kind of speed up the process. There was a very
large diversity in their methods, and this is partially because
alchemists were kind of secretive. You know, you don't want
to be the guy who tells everybody how to make gold.
(12:08):
The alchemists methods are often obscured, but a couple of
them have been decoded or otherwise have entered the public knowledge.
So one thing they liked to do was dissolve gold
or other metals in really powerful acids. Basically quite a
bad time if they splash out of your cauldron. They
liked making alloys of metals and mercury. Mercury is a
(12:32):
highly volatile metal. It is liquid at room temperature, and
it is also extremely toxic, and it moves in a
kind of alluring, hypnotic way. So they thought that since
it was so strange, that this was going to be
a particularly fruitful metal to try and transform. Pharmaceutical alchemy
(12:53):
was a branch of alchemy where they did make medicines
and potions and lixxers. I would not say most of
these medicines were particularly effective, but it did lay the
groundwork for what we today know as pharmaceuticals. Most of
their medicines were made with mercury or sulfur or other volatile,
(13:14):
mostly toxic chemicals. Like like a lot of them were
just useless, but you know, like to be honest, most
of the more poisonous. Yeah. Wow, I feel like this
is where the mad scientist like idea comes from. Right.
It's this guy is like in a secret bunker because
he doesn't want people to see how he's making the gold.
(13:37):
And he's like got the sulfur and the mercury and
then poof, he's dead. I mean, mercury is not something
you just want to mess around with without extra precautions.
And like, like Amelia said, a lot of this stuff
was poisonous. You had a lot of them not exactly
sure what was going to happen when they mixed two
(13:57):
things together. So also the pharmaceutical I mean, what was
up like with ancient medicine, like they're making their like
prescribing your mercury if you have a fever, and then
if something's wrong with you, they're like leech him, put
leeches on him, like I can't imagine. Well, because it
(14:17):
worked a little bit, So if it worked a little,
any progress was like, okay, alright, let's keep doing it.
I know it's a little it's a little weird. Let's
just keep doing it. Though it sexs to be you
if you had any kind of ailment in like their hundreds.
So it wasn't just the hundreds. I mean all the
way up to the nineteen hundreds, there were crazy cures
that were really just horrible for people, but they didn't
(14:38):
know any better. Like the example that first comes to mind, radium.
It was in toothpaste, it was in cosmetics. Some believe
that it treated impotence. Isn't radium like radioactive? Yes, it
was radioactive. People people were consuming it and like they were,
they were literally killing themselves, but they didn't know, like
(14:59):
they I thought that this was actually helping them. And
then of course who knows what today, what are we
consuming regularly that is actually just so damaging for us?
But no, one knows double stuffed oreos, I can tell
you right away. It's not even food, is it. I
mean it tastes good though they taste good. So so
(15:22):
far alchemy sounds mildly crazy. But also one of the
things that Amelia brought up is that making life from nothing?
What's that about. So one of the things alchemists wanted
to do was to create a little man called homunculous.
This was the era when you could go out and
hire a servant very easily, or you know, yet an
(15:42):
underling in other methods, but they wanted the complete obedience
of the homunculus. Alchemists had lots of ways to try
and achieve this, and most of them are pretty gross.
One of the slightly lest disgusting weeks was they'd try
and suck the life out of various inanimate objects or vegetables.
They would use like a test tube or straw to
(16:06):
literally suck the life out of it and put it
inside a little wax at all for example. This, while
pretty creative, was not actually successful. Unfortunately, it's creative but
not successful. Yeah. Basically, the idea of how muculous, which
(16:28):
was supposed to be this little creature that you could
potentially create and if you just mix the right ingredients.
And do you want to hear some of these ingredients
that we're proposed do? I do? I want to do?
I want to know? The first known account of the
production of the muculous is said to be in this
(16:50):
Arabic work called liber Vaca or translates to Book of
the Cow. These are the ingredients magician semen, animal blood,
a cow, sulfur magnet, green Tussia, which is a sulfate
(17:11):
of iron, and a large glass or a lead vessel.
I just can't believe this is real. I went to
many different sources, though this is legit. You do need
to mix some of these ingredients together to incimilate the cow,
and it involves like doing other things to the cow
(17:31):
that I won't get into, and placing this animal inside
a dark house where the sun never shines. And then meanwhile,
you have a mixture of ground sunstone, sulfur magnet, and
green tussia. You have to start with a sap of
white willow. Okay, at this point, you know you're waiting
on the cow to give birth to a quote unformed substance,
(17:57):
and then once that comes out, you need to place
it in the powder that you prepared, and then this
blob will grow a human skin and this will turn
into a hommoculous that will give you nightmares forever. You know.
(18:30):
Like up until this point, I felt like, Oh, alchemists
are cool. They're like the frontier of science and they're like, hey,
what happens if I do this? But this thing with
the homoculous sounds twisted. Yeah. The Catholic Church and medieval
Europe was just like, this is a little two even
out there for us, and a lot of this was
done in secret. Also why alchemists were a bit notorious
(18:54):
because they were scam artists. Alchemy as a science was
pretty expensive. You had to have lots of chemicals, lots
of tools, and for some experiments you had to have
gold to begin with, so alchemists tended to gravitate towards
generous patrons. Royal patrons were extremely popular choices because they
(19:18):
had nearly unlimited money by the standards of the day.
The most generous patron, or perhaps the biggest sucker, depending
on how you look at it, was Rudolf, the second
Holy Roman Emperor. There's a book about various alchemical scams
in the court of Rudolph the Second. It also happens
to have a bunch of other alchemical scams in it. Oh,
(19:42):
alchemical scams. Yeah. So the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second,
who she was referring to, he definitely was all about alchemy.
He would support it whenever possible. Okay, So there was
this famous alchemist named John D from glend and he
(20:02):
work for Rudolph the Second. He had this cauldron that
had a fake wax bottom, and so under the wax
there were gold nuggets and gold flakes. So when he
heated up the wax and it melted, what was left
were these little gold nuggets, and so they're like, oh, wow,
how did you do that. Rudolf the Second was like, yeah,
(20:22):
you're hired. But then over time they realized that what
John D was demanding to be paid to do this
wasn't really worth it, because you know, they weren't making
much money from this goal that he was I think
it's hilarious that he was like, I can make gold
and I need you to pay me to do it. Yeah.
(20:46):
It was causing them more to pay him than he
was getting for them. So that was that was ultimately
why Rudolph was like, yeah, we'll see a dude. So
we're there a lot of alchemy con artists and what
did like what happened when they got caught. We don't
know of a whole lot of them who were actually
con artists, but I would say it was a dangerous
(21:07):
time to be a con. There were some real threats
in this profession. The most obvious one would be that
you didn't please your wealthy patron, and in many cases
they could have you executed or jailed for failing to
please them. Another problem was that alchemy, although it wasn't
considered witchcraft, was not always accepted. In some cases, the
(21:32):
leaders of countries saw as a threat because if you
became richer than them, you could overthrow them, or at
least live more lucuriously than them, which is obviously unpleasing.
And most commonly of all, you could poison yourself. Alchemists
really liked using lead and mercury in their experiments, and
both of these are elements that have really common toxicity,
(21:55):
even in adults. Honestly, I think most of our modern
imagery of the like wacky capricious wizard comes from alchemists
who poisoned themselves. Again, mad scientists. Yeah, that makes sad.
That makes sense that they were like, I'm inhaling mercury
vapors and now I'm whoa, I'm loopy woo, and people
are like, Wow, that guy's nuts. It's interesting that like
(22:17):
the leaders of these countries would be like, well, this guy,
if he can make gold, can get richer than me.
Let's kill him. Yeah. So I mean they had to
be careful if I mean, that's probably why they were
not more con artists, because there were real consequences to
getting caught. I think because of this novel that I read,
The Alchemist years ago, like it seemed like more of
(22:38):
a noble profession. I guess it seemed noble, but at
the same time it seemed wacky that they were, like
they would spend all their lives trying to make gold
out of other things. Mercury has eighty electrons, gold has
seventy nine. So they were kind of onto something there,
I mean, like where they didn't really realize it at
the time because again this as well before the periodic
(22:59):
table understanding elements like they did later on. But I
think we should we should circle back here and say,
you know, it was more beneficial for progress than it
wasn't I mean the con artists notwithstanding, it sounds like
alchemy was important to the history, like the progress of
scientific knowledge, right, Like you needed to go down all
(23:21):
these weird rabbit holes and these weird dead ends to
come to the scientific knowledge that we have today. Yeah,
I mean, they used to think there were only four elements,
and so this was it. Like this planted the seeds,
so to speak. It really did pave the way for
folks like Robert Boyle, who was one of the seventeenth
century founders of modern chemistry. He essentially relied on some
(23:46):
of the work of these alchemists. That makes so much sense.
But you can't start from scratch to get to the
point of knowledge that we have today. You have to
do a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing.
And the scientific advancements we have today have to be
based on something. And it was, you know, standing on
the shoulders of alchemists who tried a bunch of things
that didn't work to get to the things that did work.
(24:09):
But I think still there's that the side of alchemy
that was just so deep into the supernatural, you know,
like they superstition really they had to get rid of
that superstition. With the Enlightenment, we see a shift, you know,
across all society and the way that they pursued knowledge
(24:29):
and understanding the natural world. And so of course this
is going to turn the tide. Alchemy's downfall really came
in the mid seventeen hundreds, the Enlightenment and the scientific Revolution.
They brought a sense of objectivism. They really didn't want
to mix metaphysical and physical disciplines. Many of the practitioners
(24:54):
were still religious, but they wanted to have experiments that
were explainable without any kind of magic. Over the course
of the seventeen hundreds, alchemy managed to position itself as
an opponent to this objective science because a lot of
people weren't actually happy with this this new science. They
wanted a science that was going to explain everything, not
(25:16):
just the physical world. They wanted the world within them
explained as well. But throughout the rest of the seventeen hundreds,
alchemy slowly started to wither and die off, and by
the early eighteen hundreds, I think it was fair to
say it was widely dead. Emilia said it was widely dead.
It's not fully dead. I mean, let's be honest here.
(25:37):
I'm just gonna say a broad statement here, but humans
today still have plenty of irrational beliefs. Oh gosh. Yeah,
they jumped to conclusions about things they don't understand. And
but also there's the folklore side of it that really
is just so strong, and cultures around the world, I mean,
(25:58):
think about anything to do with wizards, magicians, still witchcraft,
I mean yeah, and like even like in Korean culture,
I know, you know, there's like old wives tales of
like if you want to give birth to a boy,
you gotta eat such and such. Stuff like that is
completely not based in science, but people still kind of
(26:20):
believe in it. Old lives tyles. That's kind of yeah,
that's old alchemists tales, right hashtag Old Alchemist Tales. Special
thanks to Amelia Pulca, who we interviewed for this episode.
She is a researcher here at jobs Elete and Hey,
(26:40):
if you've ever dropped a mentos into a two leader
coke bottle and had an explosion that made you kind
of an alchemist, tell us if you've done any other
crazy experiments like that on your own tweet us at
job Sleet Pod Job Sleete is produced for I Heart
Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You. It's
(27:01):
hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt beat
That's Me. The show was conceived and produced by Steve
Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott. Our editor is
Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka, our production coordinator
is Angie Hymes, and theme music is by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to our I Heart Radio team
(27:24):
led by Nikki Etre, Katrina Norvell, Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hatti, Kador,
Will Pearson connal Burne and Bob Pittman
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