July 17, 2025 • 43 mins
Alchemy evokes sorcerers working by candlelight combining potions to create magical items, real Dungeons & Dragons stuff. But alchemy gets a bad rap. Alchemists had lofty goals like curing poverty and their work laid the foundation for science to come.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are here to
enchant you in this very special episode Stuff You Should Know,
which we'd like to also call the Facts of Life too.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah. I mean alchemy. I think a very appropriate topic,
taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in
that sense. Where were you talking about a different podcast?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
No, no, no, let's talk about what but I aim
to accomplish today.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Hey man, not only do you aim it, you are
aimed for it. You hit it right on the head.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, alchemy, Baby, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
What is the attempted a compliment? Yeah? Well yeah, when
we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least,
and I would assume most people kind of conjures images
of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars
and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure,
he's lit by candlelight, he's in a strange little laboratory.
(01:15):
He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create
some sort of magical potion or do something like that. Right,
if you know a little more about it, maybe you
think of Charlatans who trick people into investing in their
alchemical schemes of turning you know, lead into gold. But
it turns out that there's a lot more to it
(01:37):
than I ever realized, and the people involved were.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Not.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
They were a lot more interesting and a lot less
dumb and fraudulent than history is kind of cast the mass.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah. I always thought of alchemy as just from what
I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something
like a boring metal into gold, like you were talking about.
But it is I think interesting that modern science now
looks back and say and says, hey, you know what
I mean. Sure, it was a lot of bunk and
bs involved, but some of the foundations of modern chemistry
(02:15):
were there, even though that wasn't their intention. Really.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case
that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork
for the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Wow. What's cool about it too, is that, you know,
the Europeans, the medieval European you know, monks and sages
and scholars are the ones you typically think of at
least in the West when you think of alchemy, but
it's a I don't want to say worldwide, but it
really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of
different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for
(02:50):
immortality and glory. Yeah, tots, So we should say that
you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy
the Europeans as you think of it, all the way
back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for
the Western tradition, but Egypt even seemed to get it
(03:11):
from other places. Specifically, even back before Egypt, it seems
like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit
for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially
gave alchemy like its birth.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know,
the art or something like that, or maybe maybe you know,
some other word that they had that meant, you know,
some sort of transformation might be taking place. The word
alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually
French and English and medieval times. But yeah, I think
it's interesting that it followed that route, and it's also
(03:46):
not surprising that, you know, China was one of the
first to get involved in something like this, because I
feel like any time we're talking about ancient practices, China
always seems to be sort of leading the way in
one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Indeed, one of the reasons China was so heavy into
it was because the early alchemical like pursuits or purposes
were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they
cared so much about that was because the country had
a huge Taoist population, and Daoism is very much interested
(04:21):
in achieving immortality one way or another. And so China
and it's alchemists put together mercury, arsenic sulfur and said, here,
drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot
of people died from drinking those things, right, I mean,
you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know,
just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand
(04:43):
and walk off, like time to get to work, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there were some people that
suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know,
on the other side, and this is sort of the
the plus and minus side of some of these experiments,
they also whether or not purposefully or not, gave us
things we still use today, like you know, potassium nitrate.
(05:10):
So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride,
which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer like for
farms and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Mh. So, yeah, there were that is kind of a
tradition in alchemy of you know, they're trying to do
something else, but they still found useful stuff that we
still you know, make her use today. In China's whole
jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as
Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more
focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing,
(05:43):
and so the pursuit of you know, immortality through special
elixir just kind of became a moot point or a
moot point. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Uh yeah, I mean I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah,
maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we
should set our goals a little more.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Reasonably, right, let's just pretend like we don't care about
living forever.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality,
and they were also kind of like post Buddhists China,
like let's try and promote health, let's try and cure
some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold.
But you know, you'll see that kind of popping up.
That's why I think a lot of people the first
(06:24):
thing they think of is turning something into gold, because
that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists, because
gold was so revered either as like, you know, the
best metal, Go ahead and make your white snake joke.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold
wearing a T shirt that was the best metal.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, like the Devil's hands, the devil horns fingers, and
you know, also thinking like you know, perhaps like drinking
something that maybe liquid gold but it's really not liquid
gold that just turned the color gold could make you
healthier or maybe live forever.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, And in India they were trying to make gold
nut to get rich, but because like you were saying,
they were trying to balance health, restore health, like it
was just associated with healthy living essentially gold was.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
So then we reached the Mediterranean, that was another ancient
place and by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt
in three twenty two BCE. They found pretty quickly that
the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of
alchemy for a while, and the Greek said, Hey, I
(07:36):
like your style. Let's mix together our philosophy and our
understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy, and let's
produce something really great that medieval monks are really going
to go nuts for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, And I think this is like, I know we're
going to say this quite a bit, but I think
they were these early scientists were taking a stab at something,
you know, like sure there were Charlatans and stuff like that,
but this was so early on in the game, like
science is brand new, and they were like, hey, let's
try this thing and see if it works out. And
(08:10):
maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't
expect them to either. So like, I don't know, I
feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind
of tried to shine a little bit of light on
some of this stuff. Is like, hey, they were doing
their best back then, trying to get trying to get
involved in science at least, right.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
At least they were doing something you lazy sad.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, exactly. I mean this is when the first books
on it came out. That was one called The Translation
is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos
of Mende, and this is around two hundred BCE. A
lot of this was again about making you know, valuable
metals like gold and silver. But again it was the
(08:53):
first kind of preserved writing that we have on this.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, right, no, for sure. And he was also somebody
who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and
the processes, which would come to be very rare. As
alchemy developed, it became much more secretive. But this Greco
Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this
(09:19):
this specific kind of alchemy it's called Hellenistic alchemy that
laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. One of
the other big things that came out of it, or
another indicator of how important it was is there was
this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists,
the monks. His name was Hermes Trists Megistos. Just a
(09:43):
great name, not a good hotel check in name, but
it's a it's a great name.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Regardless how many times. Are you gonna hear that?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Right? And you would say it just like that too,
like real uncertain and unsteady like Hermes. I think. So
it was a combination, a straight up combination of Thoth
or Toth I think both the Egyptian god who invented writing,
the one with the ibis bird head, yeah, and Hermi's
the Greek messenger of the gods. Like this was a
complete syncret syncretization of those two, and later medieval monks
(10:19):
would describe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermi's.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
T Yeah, Hermi's t that's a that's a better check
in named by far? Is that t acer or t ee?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think it means like Hermi's third. The best I
think is what tris megistos translates to.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
All right, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
And this is this is one of those episodes to
chuck where when we say words we might accidentally cause
somebody to go poof and write something either appears or disappears,
So everybody'd be prepared for something to vanish.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I agree. Uh, And no one knew it that,
you know, Like when you look back on stuff like this,
it's kind of hard to parse out like who was
who was first, who was influencing who is sort of
spread around the world. There's is a theory that India's
belief system was basically just sort of brought over as
a maybe not as a book, but you know, brought
(11:11):
over wholesale from proto Arians in Central Asia, and they
were in the area between four and five thousand years ago.
So it's you know, I don't know if there's a
lot to be gained from sort of debating who was
coming up with what first, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean it doesn't really matter. It's
those historians. They're kind of fixated around that kind of thing.
But you know, it is interesting to wonder, like where
culture came from because so much of it influences so
much else. It's not just in alchemy but in all
things basically. But you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he
(11:48):
actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of
alchemy is kind of like based on, Like this guy
was the guy he's like, here's how it's done, and
this is the ground rules for alchemy. Hey, everybody, his
name was those the most of Panopolists, and those of
the most of Panopolists wrote something like twenty eight books
on alchemy. And for a while they're like, we've only
(12:10):
got a couple of letters of this guy, but we
knew he was brilliant. Apparently they've been finding his stuff
all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't
realize they had it before. But a lot of his
writings have recently been rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, and his stuff. He's another one of those that
was pretty detailed in his writing and to have like
stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing. He was because
he was an alchemist obviously transforming metals or you know,
trying to transform metals. But he, like I said, he
was pretty specific. He would have write ups on like
exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he
(12:47):
was using. A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed
from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe
craft work, not the band, but you know crafting and
like like a bedazzle, yeah, like a dazzler or perfume making.
And he credited a lot of this stuff with a
Jewish woman named Maria, and he was like, you know
(13:08):
a lot, I've taken a lot of her methods and
a lot of her methods also transferred over to early
methods of cooking, like you know, French and Italian cooking methods.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, like a water bath, a bomb Marie or a
bonyo Maria is you know, like you know when you
melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan
that has water in it. Yeah, so you don't scorch it,
right exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria
who has lost a history aside from Zozimosa Panopolis's writings,
but she apparently taught him.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot
of this stuff to not make gold from lead.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah. I mean he definitely came up with some processes
that he figured out himself. And like you said, these
people were taking a stab at it. They were like,
what happens if I do this, and what happens if
I if I try that same thing with a different
metal or a different powder or something like that. So
they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation
that would lead to what we understand it as a science.
(14:07):
Those of most was doing this like he was one
of the first to do this. I also saw a definition.
I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not.
But he had an explanation or a definition of what
alchemy is. He said it was the study of the
composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the
spirit from bodies, and bonding the spirits within bodies. And
(14:31):
what are you saying, Like, if you stop and think
about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible. Yeah, He's saying. Alchemy
is the study of all the things we've observed about
the world around us, trying to figure out how that
stuff works, Like how does a soul come into a
body and become attached to it, how does it leave
it after death? What's the deal with water? That kind
of stuff. So like it was just them seeking to apply,
(14:55):
essentially a proto scientific understanding of the world as they understood.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It, Like what happens if I distilled this thing down
to its base form or create you know, you're gonna
hear a lot of talk about vapors, like you know,
boil something or heat something to create a vapor and
then smash it together with this thing. And now I've
just learned you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe,
but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes
(15:22):
properties of both materials if I combine these two things.
And while they may not have understood what the heck
that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what
they were doing was this right exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, So this whole jam that was laid down by
Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind
of combine their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world,
which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about you know,
what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air,
(15:55):
the four elements, that was the understanding of the world
that they were working. They were trying to figure things
out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution
to alchemy early on, which is science would later kind
of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset,
especially considering that Democritis, who was around around the same
(16:18):
time as Aristotle, remember him, he was the one who's like,
everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going
to use the word Adams yet.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right exactly. Good place for a break, yeah, I think so,
all right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a
little bit about the move into Europe. Right after this.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Okay, Chuck. So things were just kind of hanging around
from you know, three hundreds BCE, where the Egyptians and
the Greeks that kind of come together and created that
version of alchemy, and eventually the Arab world started to
rise and it started to go over here and go
over there, and wherever it went, it kind of took
(17:15):
this and that from each culture that it found interesting.
And one of the things that they did, they showed
up in Egypt and they said, Hey, I like this
alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last
few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually
helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning
that took place around this time in the Arab world.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, and you know, logging stuff describing stuff that would
later on again, you know, lay the foundation for legit
chemists of the future. And one of their theories was
that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically,
you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture,
(17:59):
and combining these different ways are going to have different outcomes.
Like to produce those vapors, you're going to have cold
water basically, and combine that with some sort of hot
moist air to create a vapor, and they would you know,
mix these things together and they would combine it with
mercury or sulfur or something like that and trying to
(18:20):
make gold once again, pray.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I think it's called christiopoia.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yeah, that's the technical term I think for trying to
make gold.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big, big names.
There are a few big names, but two that still
made it all the way through history. Rosie's who's known
as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time.
He was an alchemist. A contemporary I believe of his
named Jabir. He was well known as an early scientist.
(18:51):
Some people call him the father of chemistry. And these
guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't
just throw a handful of powder, something like, you know,
do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.
Just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution too,
was that they took a lot of these ancient texts,
(19:12):
translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated
into Latin, which is when things started to spread like
wildfire throughout Europe. In like the twelfth century.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot
we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is
the beginning in about the twelfth century when it moved
into Europe. And this was the time when Europe was shifting,
you know, to a university sort of a more academic
way of looking at things and away from the monasteries
who were I guess some of the more early you know,
(19:45):
science minded people. Yeah, and Christian scholars at the time
in Europe, they started to become a little more open
to say, like, hey, maybe we should you know, look
to other texts, ancient texts, even look from other cultures
to try and see if we can learn something from them.
And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid,
(20:06):
sulfuoric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs.
And this is where you'll hear more about things like
you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, Philosopher's Stone,
which we'll get into and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it,
I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came
from the Crusades. Europe just showed up and was like,
give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. Yeah,
you know, that would be my guess. But yeah, around
this time, so I read that the European alchemists, following
this tradition believed that in the ancient world they had
(20:43):
already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just
sounds so cool. Make a really cool like title for
a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book
or something. You know, are you making it Philosopher's Stone? No,
I think it's just kind of like it's just fit naturally.
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book,
Sorcerer's Stone. Okay, that's why asked if you were joking.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Not the Sorcerer's Stone. It's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the
Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
What a rip off. Okay, Well, we're talking about the
philosopher's stone, and that was a term for this substance
that supposedly was all over the place, But we just
didn't recognize the magical properties of it that you could
turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever. The perfect
version of that thing was because that was the thing.
(21:34):
Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal,
and all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever,
are we we're seeing them in the process of moving
naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. What they
were trying to do is figure out how those processes
worked so they could speed it up right, yeah, and
(21:57):
do it. Do it. But like that's where they got
the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold.
That's what they were trying to do, was move lead
into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And
the way that they thought you could do that was
with the Philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, And you mentioned earlier that they would operate a
little more in secrecy later on, and this is kind
of where we are now now. They would operate, maybe
they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but
it was kind of shrouded in secrecy. A lot of
times they would use like codes and symbols and metaphor
and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And
(22:34):
there were a handful of European alchemists that you know,
we should probably go over a little bit. The first
of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He
was a German philosopher in the thirteenth century, and he
was a friar, a Dominican friar, and he studied the
work of these Arab alchemists, because like we said, it
kind of came over from there, and the ancient Greek philosophers,
(22:57):
which you know, as we mentioned, kind of did those
two world of philosophy and science or this kind of science.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Right right. So there was another guy. I mean, there's
a bunch that we could talk about, John d, Arthur
d Roger Bacon. They were all alchemists who contributed to
our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of
was jonder Roque Telaude de jonder Roche Telaude. I think
I got it that second time.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
That sounds good to me. But German is my non specialty.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
He was, he was he was trying to figure out
chris poia chrysal poya, which is again transforming things into gold.
The thing is and this is a really good example
or way to point this out. He was a Franciscan monk.
He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter
of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty. So
(23:49):
many times the alchemists are like, all they wanted to
do is like just make gold and be rich. They
were just greedy magicians essentially. No, it's not the case.
They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted
to find the elixir of life to end disease. Like,
they had really big, big goals that they were trying
(24:09):
to reach. And he was a good example that he
wanted to give the Catholic Church the ability to make
gold so that they could fund themselves better.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Essentially, yeah, I took a vowed poverty in my twenties.
I think you did too.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Oh yeah, yeah, it was forced on me.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So one of the things that he did too, which
is pretty interesting, I think, is he got talked about
sort of distilling things down to their purest form. He
did that with booze, and he's distilled it down to aqua.
How would you pronounce that? Vita aqua vite, aqua vite.
He called it the fifth essence of wine or the
quinta essentia. And this goes back to Aristotle again, this
(24:50):
idea that you know it's something different than those four
classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot he
pronounced his name, but let's just call him Doctor R.
Said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down
to its purest form of alcohol and I put meat
in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like
(25:11):
it is. It stops this decay. And he wasn't. He
didn't think he had tapped into a new way to
preserve meat. He thought like, hey, maybe this stops things
from aging, and maybe this alcohol is a cure.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
All right. He went on to create the my tie.
Oh nice, another one. This guy's my favorite. Paracelsus. His
real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolis Bombastis von Hoheim, but
we'll call him phil Hohenheim Hohenheim. Yeah, well, he went
by Paracelsus. I think we talked about him in our
(25:44):
poison episode or there was some episode, because he was
famous for saying the dose makes the poison like you
can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you,
which is a really important understanding at the time. But
he was one of the ones who led the way
of secrecy because he believe that what the alchemists were
doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe,
and that this information was way too potent to just
(26:07):
have out there. So he was one of the ones
that led the charge in that. He also was known
as questioning Galen's thousand year old idea of the four
humors being the cause of disease. Paracelsus was like, no,
I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe
even little tiny bugs or something like that that get
in your throat and then into your stomach and then
(26:28):
just really screwed things up down there. Yeah, that's me
paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus. So he was a straight
up genius. Yeah for his time. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, I'm sure they came but right back at him
and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile.
That's the problem. He's like, you sure, like this other
stuff could be making us sick.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
He's like again, with the bile.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
There was also Nicholas Flamel I guess or Flammeel. I'm
not sure how you would pronounce that, but I think
Flamel Flamel. Okay. He is the one who was credited
to discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He was just a mere
bookseller in the fourteenth and I guess fifteenth centuries. And
he said, I got a book. I purchased a book,
(27:11):
and it was in a language that was so hard
to translate. It took me twenty one years. But once
I finally cracked that code. In that book was the
information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this
is what I don't understand. He got rich, But did
he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what
(27:31):
I couldn't figure out.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
No, the later alchemists, like starting around the seventeenth century,
they created a legend about him, saying that he had
created the Philosopher's Stone, so you know, he could turn
anything into gold, and that's how he got rich.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yeah, but how did he where? How did he get rich?
I still look out because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh
that's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him.
I got because he really was well known. He's recorded
historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly they endowed
like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches
(28:12):
that are some of them are still around today. And
he was known for putting alchemical messages kind of encoded
in the buildings, like on plaques or in oventories or
something like that. Yeah, so he definitely was an alchemist.
He definitely was rich. But it was this legend that
grew up around him that he was one of the
(28:32):
few who actually found the Philosopher's Stone, almost his Sorcerer's stone,
man see gets in there.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be
one hundred and fourteen, but records say he was between
eighty and one hundred and fourteen. So that's a pretty
big gap there, a wide range. Yeah, thirty four years.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It is pretty wide, but even eighty back in the
fourteen hundreds early fourteen was pretty respectable, I guess.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.
That was one thing that as far as we know,
no one ever created, right, but all of the alchemists
in Europe were after this trying to figure this out,
while at the same time also performing all these other
experiments just in case they didn't figure out how to
do the Philosopher's Stone. They were figuring out how to
do it the hard way too. There was also another
(29:24):
thing that they were famous for trying to create, which
are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature
that they wanted to create so that they could study
how life begins or like Zosimos had said, you know
how how the spirit bonds to the body. Like, that's
(29:46):
the kind of thing they're trying to figure out by
creating many humans. And they had all sorts of I
think it's fair to call it wacky ideas of how
to create a homunculus.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus
is fun in and of itself. But yeah, there's something
called the Book of the Cow. This is an Arabic
book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something
to do with. And there was a recipe for a
homunculus in there, which is one a Monculye, and it
involved in seminating a you, which is I guess that's
(30:16):
a female sheep, right with human sperm. Don't ask cow.
I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Had too many ways to do that back then.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
I'm sure they had their methods, and you would have
a berth and it would be some sort of shapeless
form at that point, and then you need to treat
it with specific stuff materials, put it in a glass container,
and then it grows into a tiny person.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah. I don't think that this ever worked, but they
I guarantee some people tried it for sure.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Oh I bet. I mean you have to have some
excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right, Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh that's going to stay with me like Sorcerer's Stone Chuck.
Every time I see the word you eat, it reminds me.
There was this Happy Days episode where Richie was writing
in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl
that he liked well in a place where he knew
that she was going to walk home from high school
(31:13):
for this. And he drew I and then the heart
and then the you like a sheep, and the girl
comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it
and she's like, I love sheep, and he's like, it's
a you, I love you. But the way that she
said I love sheep just always it stuck with me,
like the weird thing you said about inciminating sheep and
(31:36):
Sorcerer's Stone will always.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Yeah with me, and it probably taught you the lesson
like never put yourself out there with a girl.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
That's yeah, that was definitely your line you got from
Richie Cunningham. For sure.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
I had forgotten completely about that, and as you started
to tell that story, I completely remembered it just like
flooded back to me. That's funny.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
There's one other one too. This was a Brady Bunch
one that I always think of whenever I think of
I heart sheep when I see the word you. So
we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing.
There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friend
stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Okay, I remember this.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
So happened that like a bunch of officials from the
school were came over for coffee to the Brady House
while the goat was there, and they had to move
it from room to room and hide it, and Greg
finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding
in this really awkward position and the face he makes
when they opened the closet doors. I can't imagine how
many takes they did to get it just that perfect.
(32:40):
But it's one of the great all time shots of
seventies television.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
If you ask me, did the goat was he wearing
like a like a cape or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember that.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah. I'm going to send you that clip because it's
worth watching.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
All Right, So I guess we need to take our
second break, yes, and then we'll come back with more
talk of seventies television right after this. All right, So
(33:26):
we have talked sort of hinted at the fact that
alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years,
and there's a more modern sort of view of it
as like that, hey, they were doing the best that
can at least that's what Chuck said. And some of
the foundations they laid for modern chemistry you're actually kind
of valuable. And that's kind of where we're at now.
(33:47):
A lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate,
maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened,
which is also valuable. What else, oh.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Well, I mean just the very fact that these guys
were carrying out experiments like before then philosophers just said
like Aristotle, like this is what everything's made of, earth, wind, fire, water.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Trust me.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
No one asked him exactly, No one asked him, how
do you know that? Or anything like that, and he
really you know, I'm not saying he was a fraud
or anything, but he didn't use any scientific experimentation. It
was the alchemists who started that. They were the ones
who started working in the lab with specific measures of
materials and then very importantly recording their results, so they
(34:32):
were documenting what they were finding. These are all just
the basic outlines of the scientific method today.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, And I mean the word chemistry actually comes from
alchemy in about the seventeen eighties, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy,
doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry
that can happen, Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Like romantic chemistry, right, So so a rom com what
they have in there, romantic chemistry. That understanding and use
of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the
word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes, by
almost two hundred years.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, it's a good point. And there were also some
pretty major players that we you know revere as our
scientific forebears that were involved in stuff like this, who
maybe try to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton.
And this is like well into the eighteenth century when
Isaac Newton was doing his thing, and he was like, yeah,
maybe we could make gold from other materials and maybe
(35:35):
I'm not gonna you know, I'm also into some occult
and spiritual concepts, but I'm going to kind of play
that down and keep that all under the table for
now and it will only be discovered later.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, underneath his roughle puffy pirate shirt, he had the
best metal T shirt.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
On well, and people that were in charge of sort
of keeping up with his story and his records they
kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect
his image, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah. Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing
two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe.
One like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know
and love is like the world's first true scientists. At
the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well, like
(36:19):
he was looking into the whole thing like you know that. Yeah,
essentially he was trying to figure it out. He apparently
believed or his paper said that he thought alchemy was
this ancient wisdom that God had directly given humans and
that alchemists were figuring out we're learning like that this
was like divine, a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially,
(36:43):
and like like you said, his papers were kept private
just to preserve his image for centuries, and then finally
they started to get published and people started to understand
him a little more. And I saw a really interesting
quote at some point that one of his biographers said
that Isaac Newton was not the first scientists, he was
the last alchemists. WHOA, Yeah, And I mean it doesn't
(37:05):
necessarily make sense to you if you when you first hear,
but it's very much like how say a bird evolved
out of a dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not
a true bird. The first bird was the first true bird.
And in that same way, the point they were making
was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists
(37:26):
evolved out of, but he was not that he was
part alchemists too.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's a good point. There were, you know, even
some more modern world leaders that were like, you know,
these guys were trying to make gold and I know
that didn't work out, but like, maybe we could try,
because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold.
Maximilium the second and Rudolph the second and this was
sixteenth and seventeenth century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they
(37:52):
were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help
financially support these alchemists because you never know, maybe they
can maybe they can tap into this elixir of life
or get us untold amounts of gold.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah. I also saw Henry the sixth not only gave
some like I think fifteen or sixteen alchemists official royal
licenses to produce alchemical gold, he took what they used
and minted it into coins. So supposedly there was no
It was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with
(38:26):
a little bit of water and it produces some alloy.
Once you clean it up. That looks a lot like gold,
but it's much lighter. There's coins out there still today
to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry the
sixth commission and that Britain's gold coins were made out
(38:46):
of for a little while.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
I would guess, so and that is ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, a little bit, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, I would even say more than a little bit.
I'd say a lot of bit.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Okay. The Academy Royale des Sciences in France is founded
in sixteen sixty six, and that's when they said, all right,
this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in
our curriculum anymore. We're not going to look at astrology.
We're gonna move into the modern era of the seventeenth
century version of the modern era. And that's what they did.
(39:19):
They kind of shut all that stuff down as like
the official scientific as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, And the whole thing kind of continued on the
nineteenth century still had alchemists in it. The upshot of
that whole thing was that they were frauds, charlatans, and
they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad
name to our modern ears. But also science when it
was really when it really developed it, it had a
tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it
(39:48):
evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing.
Same thing with alchemists, like it was just so dumb
and backwards. Science is the truth. It just based disavowed alchemy,
even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah, but
now it is nice, kind of refreshing that today science
(40:09):
is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing,
but this is our grandfather. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less
embarrassing than father.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
I don't know, it depends on the air of the
grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff
at Thanksgiving. You know.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Yeah, I strive to be if I ever am a grandfather,
just to be the sort of sweet, doddering old guy
that everyone just thinks is fun and funny.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
You definitely will be, man, no controversy about. I think
you're also though, one of those grandfathers who's also a
beloved dad.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Too, which is well, so far, so good.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
It's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Uh. One more thing about alchemy. I when I was
studying listened to a bunch of Dungeon synth. I know
I've mentioned it before, Okay, but in particular I was
listening to albums by which Bolt. Okay, it's really good stuff. Man,
if you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music.
You could do a lot worse than listening to witch Bolt,
(41:09):
all right, And then it also jogged my memory when
I mentioned Dungeon Synths. A couple of years ago. We
got an email from somebody named the loan Enchanter who
has a Dungeon synth label called High Mage Productions, and
you can go check them out on band camp. But
they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were
lost because I sent them to Jerry, and she's like,
(41:30):
I have never heard either of these, so we can
look for some High Mage Production jingles coming in the future.
Thank you very much for that.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Casting. I'm going to check out witch Bolt.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
What a great name it really is, and their album
covers are amazing too. I bet Okay, Well that's it
for Alchemy everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done,
and that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
This is a correction on me. I can't believe I
missed this. I feel like a dummy. Hey guys, when
you mentioned heavy metal parking Lot on the Sunset Strip
episode the Greatest Heavy Metal Short Documentary of All Time,
Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spearrus she made Decline of
the Western Civilization, so I goofed that up. I was
(42:16):
totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization. Another great documentary.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot? Then I have.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently Jeff Krulik and John
Hayne made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's beyond satire and
encapitulates a moment in time that was magical. They also
made and this I didn't know, they also made a
documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
No.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
So that's pretty fun. I'm gonna have to check that
one out. That is from That's with best regards from
matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio, with a ps, I love
you both, Perry very much.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Thanks a lot, matthew T. Right back at you. And
if you want to be like matthew T and correct Chuck.
Chuck loves that kind of thing, you can wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom as an email, and send
it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are here to
enchant you in this very special episode Stuff You Should Know,
which we'd like to also call the Facts of Life too.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah. I mean alchemy. I think a very appropriate topic,
taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in
that sense. Where were you talking about a different podcast?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
No, no, no, let's talk about what but I aim
to accomplish today.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Hey man, not only do you aim it, you are
aimed for it. You hit it right on the head.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, alchemy, Baby, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
What is the attempted a compliment? Yeah? Well yeah, when
we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least,
and I would assume most people kind of conjures images
of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars
and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure,
he's lit by candlelight, he's in a strange little laboratory.
(01:15):
He's doing all sorts of weird stuff to basically create
some sort of magical potion or do something like that. Right,
if you know a little more about it, maybe you
think of Charlatans who trick people into investing in their
alchemical schemes of turning you know, lead into gold. But
it turns out that there's a lot more to it
(01:37):
than I ever realized, and the people involved were.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Not.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
They were a lot more interesting and a lot less
dumb and fraudulent than history is kind of cast the mass.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah. I always thought of alchemy as just from what
I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something
like a boring metal into gold, like you were talking about.
But it is I think interesting that modern science now
looks back and say and says, hey, you know what
I mean. Sure, it was a lot of bunk and
bs involved, but some of the foundations of modern chemistry
(02:15):
were there, even though that wasn't their intention. Really.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case
that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork
for the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Wow. What's cool about it too, is that, you know,
the Europeans, the medieval European you know, monks and sages
and scholars are the ones you typically think of at
least in the West when you think of alchemy, but
it's a I don't want to say worldwide, but it
really kind of ties together traditions from a bunch of
different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for
(02:50):
immortality and glory. Yeah, tots, So we should say that
you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy
the Europeans as you think of it, all the way
back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for
the Western tradition, but Egypt even seemed to get it
(03:11):
from other places. Specifically, even back before Egypt, it seems
like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit
for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially
gave alchemy like its birth.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know,
the art or something like that, or maybe maybe you know,
some other word that they had that meant, you know,
some sort of transformation might be taking place. The word
alchemy itself was first used in Arabic and then eventually
French and English and medieval times. But yeah, I think
it's interesting that it followed that route, and it's also
(03:46):
not surprising that, you know, China was one of the
first to get involved in something like this, because I
feel like any time we're talking about ancient practices, China
always seems to be sort of leading the way in
one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Indeed, one of the reasons China was so heavy into
it was because the early alchemical like pursuits or purposes
were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they
cared so much about that was because the country had
a huge Taoist population, and Daoism is very much interested
(04:21):
in achieving immortality one way or another. And so China
and it's alchemists put together mercury, arsenic sulfur and said, here,
drink this a lot of times. And surely a lot
of people died from drinking those things, right, I mean,
you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still, you know,
just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand
(04:43):
and walk off, like time to get to work, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there were some people that
suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know,
on the other side, and this is sort of the
the plus and minus side of some of these experiments,
they also whether or not purposefully or not, gave us
things we still use today, like you know, potassium nitrate.
(05:10):
So they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder and ammonium chloride,
which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer like for
farms and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Mh. So, yeah, there were that is kind of a
tradition in alchemy of you know, they're trying to do
something else, but they still found useful stuff that we
still you know, make her use today. In China's whole
jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as
Buddhism spread throughout the country because Buddhism is much more
focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing,
(05:43):
and so the pursuit of you know, immortality through special
elixir just kind of became a moot point or a
moot point. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Uh yeah, I mean I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah,
maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we
should set our goals a little more.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Reasonably, right, let's just pretend like we don't care about
living forever.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality,
and they were also kind of like post Buddhists China,
like let's try and promote health, let's try and cure
some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold.
But you know, you'll see that kind of popping up.
That's why I think a lot of people the first
(06:24):
thing they think of is turning something into gold, because
that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists, because
gold was so revered either as like, you know, the
best metal, Go ahead and make your white snake joke.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I wasn't going to. I was just thinking of gold
wearing a T shirt that was the best metal.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, like the Devil's hands, the devil horns fingers, and
you know, also thinking like you know, perhaps like drinking
something that maybe liquid gold but it's really not liquid
gold that just turned the color gold could make you
healthier or maybe live forever.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, And in India they were trying to make gold
nut to get rich, but because like you were saying,
they were trying to balance health, restore health, like it
was just associated with healthy living essentially gold was.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
So then we reached the Mediterranean, that was another ancient
place and by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt
in three twenty two BCE. They found pretty quickly that
the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of
alchemy for a while, and the Greek said, Hey, I
(07:36):
like your style. Let's mix together our philosophy and our
understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy, and let's
produce something really great that medieval monks are really going
to go nuts for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, And I think this is like, I know we're
going to say this quite a bit, but I think
they were these early scientists were taking a stab at something,
you know, like sure there were Charlatans and stuff like that,
but this was so early on in the game, like
science is brand new, and they were like, hey, let's
try this thing and see if it works out. And
(08:10):
maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't
expect them to either. So like, I don't know, I
feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind
of tried to shine a little bit of light on
some of this stuff. Is like, hey, they were doing
their best back then, trying to get trying to get
involved in science at least, right.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
At least they were doing something you lazy sad.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, exactly. I mean this is when the first books
on it came out. That was one called The Translation
is Natural and Mystical Things by an Egyptian named Bolos
of Mende, and this is around two hundred BCE. A
lot of this was again about making you know, valuable
metals like gold and silver. But again it was the
(08:53):
first kind of preserved writing that we have on this.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, right, no, for sure. And he was also somebody
who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and
the processes, which would come to be very rare. As
alchemy developed, it became much more secretive. But this Greco
Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this
(09:19):
this specific kind of alchemy it's called Hellenistic alchemy that
laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. One of
the other big things that came out of it, or
another indicator of how important it was is there was
this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists,
the monks. His name was Hermes Trists Megistos. Just a
(09:43):
great name, not a good hotel check in name, but
it's a it's a great name.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Regardless how many times. Are you gonna hear that?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Right? And you would say it just like that too,
like real uncertain and unsteady like Hermes. I think. So
it was a combination, a straight up combination of Thoth
or Toth I think both the Egyptian god who invented writing,
the one with the ibis bird head, yeah, and Hermi's
the Greek messenger of the gods. Like this was a
complete syncret syncretization of those two, and later medieval monks
(10:19):
would describe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermi's.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
T Yeah, Hermi's t that's a that's a better check
in named by far? Is that t acer or t ee?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think it means like Hermi's third. The best I
think is what tris megistos translates to.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
All right, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
And this is this is one of those episodes to
chuck where when we say words we might accidentally cause
somebody to go poof and write something either appears or disappears,
So everybody'd be prepared for something to vanish.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I agree. Uh, And no one knew it that,
you know, Like when you look back on stuff like this,
it's kind of hard to parse out like who was
who was first, who was influencing who is sort of
spread around the world. There's is a theory that India's
belief system was basically just sort of brought over as
a maybe not as a book, but you know, brought
(11:11):
over wholesale from proto Arians in Central Asia, and they
were in the area between four and five thousand years ago.
So it's you know, I don't know if there's a
lot to be gained from sort of debating who was
coming up with what first, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean it doesn't really matter. It's
those historians. They're kind of fixated around that kind of thing.
But you know, it is interesting to wonder, like where
culture came from because so much of it influences so
much else. It's not just in alchemy but in all
things basically. But you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he
(11:48):
actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of
alchemy is kind of like based on, Like this guy
was the guy he's like, here's how it's done, and
this is the ground rules for alchemy. Hey, everybody, his
name was those the most of Panopolists, and those of
the most of Panopolists wrote something like twenty eight books
on alchemy. And for a while they're like, we've only
(12:10):
got a couple of letters of this guy, but we
knew he was brilliant. Apparently they've been finding his stuff
all over the Arabic world in libraries that they didn't
realize they had it before. But a lot of his
writings have recently been rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, and his stuff. He's another one of those that
was pretty detailed in his writing and to have like
stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing. He was because
he was an alchemist obviously transforming metals or you know,
trying to transform metals. But he, like I said, he
was pretty specific. He would have write ups on like
exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he
(12:47):
was using. A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed
from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe
craft work, not the band, but you know crafting and
like like a bedazzle, yeah, like a dazzler or perfume making.
And he credited a lot of this stuff with a
Jewish woman named Maria, and he was like, you know
(13:08):
a lot, I've taken a lot of her methods and
a lot of her methods also transferred over to early
methods of cooking, like you know, French and Italian cooking methods.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, like a water bath, a bomb Marie or a
bonyo Maria is you know, like you know when you
melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan
that has water in it. Yeah, so you don't scorch it,
right exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria
who has lost a history aside from Zozimosa Panopolis's writings,
but she apparently taught him.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot
of this stuff to not make gold from lead.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah. I mean he definitely came up with some processes
that he figured out himself. And like you said, these
people were taking a stab at it. They were like,
what happens if I do this, and what happens if
I if I try that same thing with a different
metal or a different powder or something like that. So
they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation
that would lead to what we understand it as a science.
(14:07):
Those of most was doing this like he was one
of the first to do this. I also saw a definition.
I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not.
But he had an explanation or a definition of what
alchemy is. He said it was the study of the
composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the
spirit from bodies, and bonding the spirits within bodies. And
(14:31):
what are you saying, Like, if you stop and think
about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible. Yeah, He's saying. Alchemy
is the study of all the things we've observed about
the world around us, trying to figure out how that
stuff works, Like how does a soul come into a
body and become attached to it, how does it leave
it after death? What's the deal with water? That kind
of stuff. So like it was just them seeking to apply,
(14:55):
essentially a proto scientific understanding of the world as they understood.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It, Like what happens if I distilled this thing down
to its base form or create you know, you're gonna
hear a lot of talk about vapors, like you know,
boil something or heat something to create a vapor and
then smash it together with this thing. And now I've
just learned you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe,
but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes
(15:22):
properties of both materials if I combine these two things.
And while they may not have understood what the heck
that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what
they were doing was this right exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, So this whole jam that was laid down by
Zosimos and Bolos and the early Egyptians who eventually kind
of combine their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world,
which is really important because Aristotle's thoughts about you know,
what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air,
(15:55):
the four elements, that was the understanding of the world
that they were working. They were trying to figure things
out within that context. So Aristotle had a huge contribution
to alchemy early on, which is science would later kind
of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset,
especially considering that Democritis, who was around around the same
(16:18):
time as Aristotle, remember him, he was the one who's like,
everything's made up of atoms. I just am not going
to use the word Adams yet.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right exactly. Good place for a break, yeah, I think so,
all right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a
little bit about the move into Europe. Right after this.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Okay, Chuck. So things were just kind of hanging around
from you know, three hundreds BCE, where the Egyptians and
the Greeks that kind of come together and created that
version of alchemy, and eventually the Arab world started to
rise and it started to go over here and go
over there, and wherever it went, it kind of took
(17:15):
this and that from each culture that it found interesting.
And one of the things that they did, they showed
up in Egypt and they said, Hey, I like this
alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last
few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually
helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning
that took place around this time in the Arab world.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, and you know, logging stuff describing stuff that would
later on again, you know, lay the foundation for legit
chemists of the future. And one of their theories was
that production of different kinds of matter starts out basically,
you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture,
(17:59):
and combining these different ways are going to have different outcomes.
Like to produce those vapors, you're going to have cold
water basically, and combine that with some sort of hot
moist air to create a vapor, and they would you know,
mix these things together and they would combine it with
mercury or sulfur or something like that and trying to
(18:20):
make gold once again, pray.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I think it's called christiopoia.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yeah, that's the technical term I think for trying to
make gold.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big, big names.
There are a few big names, but two that still
made it all the way through history. Rosie's who's known
as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time.
He was an alchemist. A contemporary I believe of his
named Jabir. He was well known as an early scientist.
(18:51):
Some people call him the father of chemistry. And these
guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't
just throw a handful of powder, something like, you know,
do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time.
Just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution too,
was that they took a lot of these ancient texts,
(19:12):
translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated
into Latin, which is when things started to spread like
wildfire throughout Europe. In like the twelfth century.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, I promised talk of Europe and I just forgot
we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is
the beginning in about the twelfth century when it moved
into Europe. And this was the time when Europe was shifting,
you know, to a university sort of a more academic
way of looking at things and away from the monasteries
who were I guess some of the more early you know,
(19:45):
science minded people. Yeah, and Christian scholars at the time
in Europe, they started to become a little more open
to say, like, hey, maybe we should you know, look
to other texts, ancient texts, even look from other cultures
to try and see if we can learn something from them.
And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid,
(20:06):
sulfuoric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs.
And this is where you'll hear more about things like
you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, Philosopher's Stone,
which we'll get into and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it,
I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came
from the Crusades. Europe just showed up and was like,
give us everything, including all of your books on alchemy. Yeah,
you know, that would be my guess. But yeah, around
this time, so I read that the European alchemists, following
this tradition believed that in the ancient world they had
(20:43):
already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just
sounds so cool. Make a really cool like title for
a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book
or something. You know, are you making it Philosopher's Stone? No,
I think it's just kind of like it's just fit naturally.
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book,
Sorcerer's Stone. Okay, that's why asked if you were joking.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Not the Sorcerer's Stone. It's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the
Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
What a rip off. Okay, Well, we're talking about the
philosopher's stone, and that was a term for this substance
that supposedly was all over the place, But we just
didn't recognize the magical properties of it that you could
turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever. The perfect
version of that thing was because that was the thing.
(21:34):
Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal,
and all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever,
are we we're seeing them in the process of moving
naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. What they
were trying to do is figure out how those processes
worked so they could speed it up right, yeah, and
(21:57):
do it. Do it. But like that's where they got
the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold.
That's what they were trying to do, was move lead
into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And
the way that they thought you could do that was
with the Philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, And you mentioned earlier that they would operate a
little more in secrecy later on, and this is kind
of where we are now now. They would operate, maybe
they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but
it was kind of shrouded in secrecy. A lot of
times they would use like codes and symbols and metaphor
and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And
(22:34):
there were a handful of European alchemists that you know,
we should probably go over a little bit. The first
of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He
was a German philosopher in the thirteenth century, and he
was a friar, a Dominican friar, and he studied the
work of these Arab alchemists, because like we said, it
kind of came over from there, and the ancient Greek philosophers,
(22:57):
which you know, as we mentioned, kind of did those
two world of philosophy and science or this kind of science.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Right right. So there was another guy. I mean, there's
a bunch that we could talk about, John d, Arthur
d Roger Bacon. They were all alchemists who contributed to
our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of
was jonder Roque Telaude de jonder Roche Telaude. I think
I got it that second time.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
That sounds good to me. But German is my non specialty.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
He was, he was he was trying to figure out
chris poia chrysal poya, which is again transforming things into gold.
The thing is and this is a really good example
or way to point this out. He was a Franciscan monk.
He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter
of fact, he had taken a vow of poverty. So
(23:49):
many times the alchemists are like, all they wanted to
do is like just make gold and be rich. They
were just greedy magicians essentially. No, it's not the case.
They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted
to find the elixir of life to end disease. Like,
they had really big, big goals that they were trying
(24:09):
to reach. And he was a good example that he
wanted to give the Catholic Church the ability to make
gold so that they could fund themselves better.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Essentially, yeah, I took a vowed poverty in my twenties.
I think you did too.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Oh yeah, yeah, it was forced on me.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So one of the things that he did too, which
is pretty interesting, I think, is he got talked about
sort of distilling things down to their purest form. He
did that with booze, and he's distilled it down to aqua.
How would you pronounce that? Vita aqua vite, aqua vite.
He called it the fifth essence of wine or the
quinta essentia. And this goes back to Aristotle again, this
(24:50):
idea that you know it's something different than those four
classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot he
pronounced his name, but let's just call him Doctor R.
Said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down
to its purest form of alcohol and I put meat
in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like
(25:11):
it is. It stops this decay. And he wasn't. He
didn't think he had tapped into a new way to
preserve meat. He thought like, hey, maybe this stops things
from aging, and maybe this alcohol is a cure.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
All right. He went on to create the my tie.
Oh nice, another one. This guy's my favorite. Paracelsus. His
real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolis Bombastis von Hoheim, but
we'll call him phil Hohenheim Hohenheim. Yeah, well, he went
by Paracelsus. I think we talked about him in our
(25:44):
poison episode or there was some episode, because he was
famous for saying the dose makes the poison like you
can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you,
which is a really important understanding at the time. But
he was one of the ones who led the way
of secrecy because he believe that what the alchemists were
doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe,
and that this information was way too potent to just
(26:07):
have out there. So he was one of the ones
that led the charge in that. He also was known
as questioning Galen's thousand year old idea of the four
humors being the cause of disease. Paracelsus was like, no,
I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe
even little tiny bugs or something like that that get
in your throat and then into your stomach and then
(26:28):
just really screwed things up down there. Yeah, that's me
paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus. So he was a straight
up genius. Yeah for his time. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, I'm sure they came but right back at him
and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile.
That's the problem. He's like, you sure, like this other
stuff could be making us sick.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
He's like again, with the bile.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
There was also Nicholas Flamel I guess or Flammeel. I'm
not sure how you would pronounce that, but I think
Flamel Flamel. Okay. He is the one who was credited
to discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He was just a mere
bookseller in the fourteenth and I guess fifteenth centuries. And
he said, I got a book. I purchased a book,
(27:11):
and it was in a language that was so hard
to translate. It took me twenty one years. But once
I finally cracked that code. In that book was the
information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this
is what I don't understand. He got rich, But did
he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what
(27:31):
I couldn't figure out.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
No, the later alchemists, like starting around the seventeenth century,
they created a legend about him, saying that he had
created the Philosopher's Stone, so you know, he could turn
anything into gold, and that's how he got rich.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yeah, but how did he where? How did he get rich?
I still look out because he wasn't turning stuff into gold.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh
that's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him.
I got because he really was well known. He's recorded
historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly they endowed
like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches
(28:12):
that are some of them are still around today. And
he was known for putting alchemical messages kind of encoded
in the buildings, like on plaques or in oventories or
something like that. Yeah, so he definitely was an alchemist.
He definitely was rich. But it was this legend that
grew up around him that he was one of the
(28:32):
few who actually found the Philosopher's Stone, almost his Sorcerer's stone,
man see gets in there.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be
one hundred and fourteen, but records say he was between
eighty and one hundred and fourteen. So that's a pretty
big gap there, a wide range. Yeah, thirty four years.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It is pretty wide, but even eighty back in the
fourteen hundreds early fourteen was pretty respectable, I guess.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.
That was one thing that as far as we know,
no one ever created, right, but all of the alchemists
in Europe were after this trying to figure this out,
while at the same time also performing all these other
experiments just in case they didn't figure out how to
do the Philosopher's Stone. They were figuring out how to
do it the hard way too. There was also another
(29:24):
thing that they were famous for trying to create, which
are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature
that they wanted to create so that they could study
how life begins or like Zosimos had said, you know
how how the spirit bonds to the body. Like, that's
(29:46):
the kind of thing they're trying to figure out by
creating many humans. And they had all sorts of I
think it's fair to call it wacky ideas of how
to create a homunculus.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus
is fun in and of itself. But yeah, there's something
called the Book of the Cow. This is an Arabic
book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something
to do with. And there was a recipe for a
homunculus in there, which is one a Monculye, and it
involved in seminating a you, which is I guess that's
(30:16):
a female sheep, right with human sperm. Don't ask cow.
I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Had too many ways to do that back then.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
I'm sure they had their methods, and you would have
a berth and it would be some sort of shapeless
form at that point, and then you need to treat
it with specific stuff materials, put it in a glass container,
and then it grows into a tiny person.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah. I don't think that this ever worked, but they
I guarantee some people tried it for sure.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Oh I bet. I mean you have to have some
excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right, Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh that's going to stay with me like Sorcerer's Stone Chuck.
Every time I see the word you eat, it reminds me.
There was this Happy Days episode where Richie was writing
in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl
that he liked well in a place where he knew
that she was going to walk home from high school
(31:13):
for this. And he drew I and then the heart
and then the you like a sheep, and the girl
comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it
and she's like, I love sheep, and he's like, it's
a you, I love you. But the way that she
said I love sheep just always it stuck with me,
like the weird thing you said about inciminating sheep and
(31:36):
Sorcerer's Stone will always.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Yeah with me, and it probably taught you the lesson
like never put yourself out there with a girl.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
That's yeah, that was definitely your line you got from
Richie Cunningham. For sure.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
I had forgotten completely about that, and as you started
to tell that story, I completely remembered it just like
flooded back to me. That's funny.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
There's one other one too. This was a Brady Bunch
one that I always think of whenever I think of
I heart sheep when I see the word you. So
we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing.
There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friend
stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Okay, I remember this.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
So happened that like a bunch of officials from the
school were came over for coffee to the Brady House
while the goat was there, and they had to move
it from room to room and hide it, and Greg
finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding
in this really awkward position and the face he makes
when they opened the closet doors. I can't imagine how
many takes they did to get it just that perfect.
(32:40):
But it's one of the great all time shots of
seventies television.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
If you ask me, did the goat was he wearing
like a like a cape or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember that.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah. I'm going to send you that clip because it's
worth watching.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
All Right, So I guess we need to take our
second break, yes, and then we'll come back with more
talk of seventies television right after this. All right, So
(33:26):
we have talked sort of hinted at the fact that
alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years,
and there's a more modern sort of view of it
as like that, hey, they were doing the best that
can at least that's what Chuck said. And some of
the foundations they laid for modern chemistry you're actually kind
of valuable. And that's kind of where we're at now.
(33:47):
A lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate,
maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened,
which is also valuable. What else, oh.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Well, I mean just the very fact that these guys
were carrying out experiments like before then philosophers just said
like Aristotle, like this is what everything's made of, earth, wind, fire, water.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Trust me.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
No one asked him exactly, No one asked him, how
do you know that? Or anything like that, and he
really you know, I'm not saying he was a fraud
or anything, but he didn't use any scientific experimentation. It
was the alchemists who started that. They were the ones
who started working in the lab with specific measures of
materials and then very importantly recording their results, so they
(34:32):
were documenting what they were finding. These are all just
the basic outlines of the scientific method today.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, And I mean the word chemistry actually comes from
alchemy in about the seventeen eighties, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy,
doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry
that can happen, Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Like romantic chemistry, right, So so a rom com what
they have in there, romantic chemistry. That understanding and use
of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the
word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes, by
almost two hundred years.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, it's a good point. And there were also some
pretty major players that we you know revere as our
scientific forebears that were involved in stuff like this, who
maybe try to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton.
And this is like well into the eighteenth century when
Isaac Newton was doing his thing, and he was like, yeah,
maybe we could make gold from other materials and maybe
(35:35):
I'm not gonna you know, I'm also into some occult
and spiritual concepts, but I'm going to kind of play
that down and keep that all under the table for
now and it will only be discovered later.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, underneath his roughle puffy pirate shirt, he had the
best metal T shirt.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
On well, and people that were in charge of sort
of keeping up with his story and his records they
kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect
his image, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah. Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing
two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe.
One like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know
and love is like the world's first true scientists. At
the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well, like
(36:19):
he was looking into the whole thing like you know that. Yeah,
essentially he was trying to figure it out. He apparently
believed or his paper said that he thought alchemy was
this ancient wisdom that God had directly given humans and
that alchemists were figuring out we're learning like that this
was like divine, a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially,
(36:43):
and like like you said, his papers were kept private
just to preserve his image for centuries, and then finally
they started to get published and people started to understand
him a little more. And I saw a really interesting
quote at some point that one of his biographers said
that Isaac Newton was not the first scientists, he was
the last alchemists. WHOA, Yeah, And I mean it doesn't
(37:05):
necessarily make sense to you if you when you first hear,
but it's very much like how say a bird evolved
out of a dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not
a true bird. The first bird was the first true bird.
And in that same way, the point they were making
was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists
(37:26):
evolved out of, but he was not that he was
part alchemists too.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's a good point. There were, you know, even
some more modern world leaders that were like, you know,
these guys were trying to make gold and I know
that didn't work out, but like, maybe we could try,
because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold.
Maximilium the second and Rudolph the second and this was
sixteenth and seventeenth century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they
(37:52):
were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help
financially support these alchemists because you never know, maybe they
can maybe they can tap into this elixir of life
or get us untold amounts of gold.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah. I also saw Henry the sixth not only gave
some like I think fifteen or sixteen alchemists official royal
licenses to produce alchemical gold, he took what they used
and minted it into coins. So supposedly there was no
It was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with
(38:26):
a little bit of water and it produces some alloy.
Once you clean it up. That looks a lot like gold,
but it's much lighter. There's coins out there still today
to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry the
sixth commission and that Britain's gold coins were made out
(38:46):
of for a little while.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
I would guess, so and that is ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, a little bit, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, I would even say more than a little bit.
I'd say a lot of bit.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Okay. The Academy Royale des Sciences in France is founded
in sixteen sixty six, and that's when they said, all right,
this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in
our curriculum anymore. We're not going to look at astrology.
We're gonna move into the modern era of the seventeenth
century version of the modern era. And that's what they did.
(39:19):
They kind of shut all that stuff down as like
the official scientific as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, And the whole thing kind of continued on the
nineteenth century still had alchemists in it. The upshot of
that whole thing was that they were frauds, charlatans, and
they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad
name to our modern ears. But also science when it
was really when it really developed it, it had a
tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it
(39:48):
evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing.
Same thing with alchemists, like it was just so dumb
and backwards. Science is the truth. It just based disavowed alchemy,
even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah, but
now it is nice, kind of refreshing that today science
(40:09):
is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing,
but this is our grandfather. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less
embarrassing than father.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
I don't know, it depends on the air of the
grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff
at Thanksgiving. You know.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Yeah, I strive to be if I ever am a grandfather,
just to be the sort of sweet, doddering old guy
that everyone just thinks is fun and funny.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
You definitely will be, man, no controversy about. I think
you're also though, one of those grandfathers who's also a
beloved dad.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Too, which is well, so far, so good.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
It's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Uh. One more thing about alchemy. I when I was
studying listened to a bunch of Dungeon synth. I know
I've mentioned it before, Okay, but in particular I was
listening to albums by which Bolt. Okay, it's really good stuff. Man,
if you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music.
You could do a lot worse than listening to witch Bolt,
(41:09):
all right, And then it also jogged my memory when
I mentioned Dungeon Synths. A couple of years ago. We
got an email from somebody named the loan Enchanter who
has a Dungeon synth label called High Mage Productions, and
you can go check them out on band camp. But
they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were
lost because I sent them to Jerry, and she's like,
(41:30):
I have never heard either of these, so we can
look for some High Mage Production jingles coming in the future.
Thank you very much for that.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Casting. I'm going to check out witch Bolt.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
What a great name it really is, and their album
covers are amazing too. I bet Okay, Well that's it
for Alchemy everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done,
and that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
This is a correction on me. I can't believe I
missed this. I feel like a dummy. Hey guys, when
you mentioned heavy metal parking Lot on the Sunset Strip
episode the Greatest Heavy Metal Short Documentary of All Time,
Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spearrus she made Decline of
the Western Civilization, so I goofed that up. I was
(42:16):
totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization. Another great documentary.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot? Then I have.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently Jeff Krulik and John
Hayne made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's beyond satire and
encapitulates a moment in time that was magical. They also
made and this I didn't know, they also made a
documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
No.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
So that's pretty fun. I'm gonna have to check that
one out. That is from That's with best regards from
matthew T from Cleveland, Ohio, with a ps, I love
you both, Perry very much.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Thanks a lot, matthew T. Right back at you. And
if you want to be like matthew T and correct Chuck.
Chuck loves that kind of thing, you can wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom as an email, and send
it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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Josh Clark
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