Dissolver of Worlds

In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe discuss the nature of the Alkahest, the universal solvent of alchemy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
I wanted to start off today by thinking about containers. Um,

(00:24):
if you ever look around a chemistry lab, you will
notice that there are a lot of containers made out
of glass. Glass is often thought of as the chemist's friend, right,
And this is because silica, the stuff that glass is
made out of, is generally chemically inert, not much reacts
with it, and glass is insoluble in in most solvents,

(00:47):
so it's not going to be leeching off and contaminating
your sample. But this is not true in all cases.
For instance, there's a chemical we've talked about on the
show before called hydrofluoric acid, the solution of hydrogen fluoride
or HF in water. Hydrogen fluoride is known to actually

(01:07):
corrode even glass, and there's some pretty good videos of
this that you can look up, like the YouTube channel
called Periodic Videos has one you can find where they
dissolve a glass light bulb in hydrofluoric acid. I think
while it's plugged in by the way, at least when
when the glass finally does dissolve and break off in
the liquid, the the filament inside the light bulb, I

(01:29):
recall is like sparking in the solution in a in
a very weak and creepy and cursed way. But it's
kind of disturbing to see even glass, the ultimate non reactor,
just getting sort of cleanly sheared off of the top
of a bulb when it's dipped into this this stuff
and then falling away and eventually just dissolving into it

(01:51):
and becoming a liquid itself. Regular glass, of course, is
made of silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide
or s I O two. And when you put glass
into hydrogen fluoride into hydrofluoric acid, the hydrogen fluoride breaks
the bonds between silicon and oxygen in silica to form
silicon fluorine molecules, and the result is the hydrofluoric acid

(02:15):
eats right through the solid glass. So here you've got
this material, this hydrofluoric acid, that cannot be stored in
regular glass containers, asked to be stored in special plastic
containers or it might eat right through the bottle and
spill everywhere. And this is a jumping off point for
today's episode, because we're gonna be looking at the question

(02:36):
of what if you were to imagine a material that
push the boundaries even farther, if there was a solvent
that that could dissolve everything it touched, a sort of
universal solvent. Yeah, this reminds me a lot of our
discussions in the episode on Hollywood Acid, the the way

(02:56):
that acids are sometimes presented in science fiction, especially where
you know, you you wound a xenomorph and it's so
it's it's acidic blood seems to just burn its way
through every floor, you know, all the way through the
hull of the ship. Yeah, precisely. So this will be
kind of a follow up episode to that, but but
going more into the history of alchemy and getting into

(03:19):
some of the metaphorical realms of these these high powered solvents. Now,
one thing this immediately relates to for me is a
thought experiment that I remember encountering from reading some of
the American philosopher Daniel Dennett's books, where um Dennett often
talks about a metaphor that he uses called universal acid.

(03:40):
It's basically exactly what we're describing here, but he doesn't
mean it in the pure material sense. Dinn It uses
the metaphor of universal acid to describe evolution. Uh And
and what he means there is that evolution is a
concept that is not just a theory in biology. It's
not just that when we discovered evolution by natural selection,

(04:02):
we could suddenly explain the diversity of species on Earth.
That was true, but it's also a sort of revolutionizing
world view that changes everything it touches. And so, to
quote from his summary of this idea from his book Intuition,
Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, then it writes, universal
acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat

(04:23):
through anything. But what do you keep it in? It
dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as
paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon
or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole
planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake,
after everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid?

(04:45):
What would the world look like? Little did I realize
that in a few years I would encounter an idea,
Darwin's idea bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid. It
eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves and
it's ake a revolutionized worldview with most of the old
landmarks still recognizable but transformed in fundamental ways. Now there's

(05:08):
a thing here where the metaphor I think might not
be the best one because we get Hollywood acid in
our brains, and when we think about Hollywood acid, Hollywood
acid doesn't just change, it destroys. Right. You put the
Batman in the Hollywood acid, and then the Batman is
no more. Yeah, I mean a lot of this though,
comes down to what we I mean when you talk

(05:29):
about things being destroyed. This is a very human viewpoint.
This is a very um, you know, organism based view
of things. That the Batman is destroyed in the acid,
that the the car is destroyed in the crash, that
or that even something is destroyed when it is um
you know, when it's just you know, a metal or

(05:50):
something and it's melted or it's uh or it's it's
it's it's put into some sort of an acid or
a base. But you know, it comes back to the
basic principle that matter can neither be uh, you know,
ultimately created or destroyed. Everything can only be transferred into
different states or broken down into different components. That's a
very good point. Yeah, from the sort of like chemical

(06:11):
view of the universe, nothing has been destroyed. But I
think it'd be fair to say that if you put
a batman in a bunch of sulfuric acid and then
you liberate all the possible water molecules from him and
just leave a bunch of elemental carbon, you could say,
in some sense the Batman has been destroyed conceptually at least, yes,
But I mean part of that is the difficulty of
then recreating a Batman, right because I mean we would

(06:36):
have to recreate not only the batman's body, but the
batman's psyche, and and you know, they're huge hurdles, not
only in terms of of science and our understanding of psychology,
but also time. It's a huge time investment to try
and reproduce another Batman. Right. So, so I don't know
if maybe he could have used a slightly better metaphor
for what he means, because what I think he means

(06:57):
is not that the concept of evolution destroys everything it
touches in culture, but rather it reacts with everything it touches,
so it leaves the world we knew before populated with
the same questions and beauties and wonders, but each of
them sort of now upgraded by a chemical reaction, each
one sort of changed somewhat by our new perspective. You

(07:19):
have a new scientific way of thinking about everything that
you knew before. Yeah, you know, I think this this
argument it certainly applies to evolution very strongly, uh, but
you know, into evolutionary theory. But it also can apply
to even um hypotheses that we've discussed in the show before.
You know that take for instance, the bi cameral mind

(07:40):
hypothesis by Julian Jaynes. That's an example of of of
a very infectious idea that once you have, if you've
really gotten into it, you it kind of can change
the way you think about so many other things. Um.
And then there are even less you know, controversial ideas
you can think of where once you have, once you
were alert to say a oh, just you know, certain

(08:02):
sort of psychological ideas about how, uh you know, how
things like trauma work. You know, uh, it changes the
way you think about reality because you have a different
way of processing what is going on or maybe going
on with other people and other groups and throughout history. Yeah,
and the metaphorical sense, I mean, all kinds of ideas

(08:23):
I guess can become a mental universal solvent. I would say,
in some cases with with more use than in other cases,
Like sometimes we just start applying an idea to everything
because it's really fun. And in other cases we start
applying idea an idea to everything because we get we
we at least believe we're getting some kind of analytical
use out of it, like it's explaining more than, uh

(08:46):
than than other ideas that we had previously. Though, I
would say, be cautious of any lens that seems to
explain everything, because you know, I've been through phases in
my life where I sort of like learned a new
analytical lens and then it explained literally everything in the world,
and you like, you gotta be careful about those that
usually you're probably over applying it at that point. Yeah,

(09:07):
Like if you if you just apply aliens to everything
and then it works, uh, you know, you're probably over
applying aliens. That There was actually a sample I hear
every now and then in a in a track where
someone saying, you know, listing off all these different things
and then saying you drop aliens in the middle of
this and everything makes sense. It's always true, it's always true.

(09:31):
So if there's anything like that, yeah, you could. You
can sub anything for aliens if if it feels like
it's a perfect fit, that it explains everything that it
that it absolutely dissolves all the mysteries of life. I
don't know, it's it's probably not the universal solvent you're
you're really looking for, but it can seem like that.
But before we get back into the fully metaphorical space,
but what it means to to think about the world

(09:52):
in terms of universal solvents. I want to actually consider
the the real material possibility of a universal solvent, especially
as it has figured into the history of alchemy, because
you probably know, even if you only have passing familiarity
with alchemy, that one of the endeavors of of alchemy

(10:13):
was this search for these sort of dream materials, these
holy Grail materials. What an author I'm going to be
quoting extensively in this episode, Lawrence Prince you pa calls
chemical arcana or I guess singular chemical arcanum. Uh, these
objects that are sort of the mcguffin's of alchemy, that
alchemists were requesting after. So one of these things might

(10:36):
be like the Philosopher's stone that could allow you to
transmute base metals into gold in the process known as chrysopoeia,
or other ones might be Actually I talked about one
in an artifact episode and it did not too long ago. Uh,
it's an idea that you can find going all the
way back to ancient Roman times, and that's the concept

(10:57):
of bindable glass. The vitrum flexile or vitram malley abel
that you could have glass that could be soft like
dough and shaped into into different you know, in whatever
form you needed. But another similar arcanum in alchemy was
the concept of alcahest a, a substance that would act

(11:17):
as a universal solvent that could break down anything. Now,
discussing alchemy is always a little bit difficult because alchemy
is somewhat controversially defined, like different people try to insist
on different historical understandings of exactly what alchemy was. I mean,
you can't say it's a it's the general output of

(11:38):
a group of certain scholars who, you know, we're kind
of secretive about their beliefs, and we're working with materials
in some way. I mean, it's a kind of slippery concept.
In English, the term has been used to refer to
a huge range of beliefs and behaviors, with special emphasis
on things done that that sound in some way related
to sorcery, the hermetic, and the occult, and these associations

(12:00):
are absolutely not without foundation. Like that they much of
alchemy does have a cult and and and supernatural connections.
But another way to understand alchemy, for the purpose of
today's discussion at least, is that it is sort of
the proto scientific study of the dynamics of matter, particularly

(12:21):
concerned with transforming one type of matter into another, or
of isolating the constituents of a material, refining that material,
or enhancing its alleged properties, many of which were perceived
to be medicinal properties. I know a lot of people
in the modern era when they think of alchemy, they
think about people trying to turn lead into gold, and

(12:43):
and then that was a preoccupation of some people in
the world of alchemy. But also a huge part of
alchemy was a quest for medicine. Yeah. I guess to
two points to make here. One is that we do
often think of that when we think of alchemy, we
may think of a very Western context and we think
of people who look like wizards, you know, or even
specifically someone who looks like John d or Merlin, Uh,

(13:05):
toying around with science stuff. You know. Alchemy is science
stuff what wizards do. Uh. But it is also important
to note that that alchemy and things that we think
of in English and in the end in the Western
world as alchemy, you also find that in the in
the Arabic world, you find it in in ancient India,
you find it in ancient China. Uh. You know. So

(13:27):
alchemy can very broadly speaking, be seen as kind of
a global effort of learned individuals trying to learn more
about the world. UM. I think one way to think
of it too is think about geographic discovery. You know,
people setting out on on voyages trying to find distant

(13:49):
lands that they know to exist or that they have
heard to exist. Sometimes those lands do not exist at all.
Sometimes they are you know, islands of the imagination. But
in the quest to find those play pass, they find
real places, and ultimately this leads up to a a
more accurate and more refined understanding of the world. Own

(14:10):
interesting parallel between alchemy and your geography example, during ages
of exploration, where people were trying to get away from
their home country and figure out what else was out
there that they could find. They're going to be different
levels of perspicacity and reporting, you know, because like whatever
you've discovered, you may think of this as, oh, this
is knowledge I want to share with the world, but

(14:31):
you may also very much think of it as like
kind of a trade secret or a personal you know,
this is something I've discovered for me and my my,
my buddies, and we need to keep this secret and
not let everybody else get in there before we've had
a good go at it. Yeah, and then you have
the pesky situation of discovering the real but keeping it
secret or only holding on to it because of your

(14:52):
quest for the unreal. And we've touched on this before
on the show before um when we were talking about
urine at point Urine's role in alchemy, and uh, I
forget that the exact chemical episode who were discussing this,
But the history of alchemy is full of such scenarios,
you know. I was reading actually a Washington Post article

(15:14):
from January eighteen by Ben Guarino that interviews Lawrence Princeipe,
one of the one of the authors who's an expert
on alchemy that we're gonna be talking about in this episode.
And this article ends up talking a lot about p
And there was one part I found very funny. It's
talking about how in Prince ships lab he will try
to recreate some some old alchemy experiments as they are

(15:38):
described from these these texts, and so the artifacts of
these experiments are all all around his lab. And and
the article here describes on the counter sits a large
jar labeled flim of acidified urine. More than one alchemical
recipe calls for human p. Prince Ship said. An old
Arabic text used the phrase the secret is within you,

(16:01):
probably meaning well, reader, you go figure it out, and
then it quotes Prince Bay saying, but some people took
that more literally, so they ended up using vast amounts
of urine. Oh that's wonderful. Yeah, and and that now
that they've had a second to reflect. It was our
our invention episode or episodes on the match stick. Uh yeah,

(16:22):
we're we're talking. I can't read. So we talked about
multiple people who used urine. At least one of the
main people who was big into two urine experiments. Was
was the seventeenth century alchemist Hinnig Brund who who really
specifically wanted urine from beer drinkers. So it was like,
go to the bars, get the drunks to p in
a bucket, and I will create a huge, a gigantic

(16:44):
vat of beer drinker p. Yes, yes it was brand
He was in search of the philosopher's stone um, but
in doing so made these discoveries that ultimately tied into
our understanding of a phosphorus and matches and you know,
or matches being the one of the the actual real
world and world inventions to come out of this quest

(17:06):
for the fantastic. But it's so funny also about like
misinterpreting the line the secret is within you two mean
like literally in your bladder, because that that seems just
just perfect for the world of alchemy, because there was
a lot of sort of metaphors and secret keeping, kind
of coded language. A Prince Pay talks in in one

(17:28):
interview I was watching about how you know, in some
alchemical texts, the author will not say the conventional names
of the chemicals that he's talking about. He might instead
of saying nitric acid. He will say the red dragon,
and instead of saying, um, you know, like add nitric
acid to this solution, he would say something like allow

(17:51):
the red dragon to consume the white eagle or something. So,
you know, it's kind of you have to like dig
through and figure out what all of these code words
refer to, not in every case, but in many. Yeah.
So it it makes looking back on some of these
recipes and ideas oftentimes confusing because like I'm reminded of
of the recipe that I looked at once for the

(18:12):
creation of a homunculous and it has this kind of
coded language in it. So sometimes it's hard to determine,
you know, how much of what you're looking at is
just abject occultism and in sorcery, and how much is
coded material referring to something more closely related to to
the world of chemistry and reality. Oh right, So like

(18:35):
is it actually asking for like a bat swing or
is it or is that a code for like saltpeter
or something. Yeah, And I guess you can you can
look at similar situations throughout our you know, the world
of language and spirituality and all. But um, I guess
one of the things to drive home with with alchemy
is that, yes, we're talking about ultimately a proto scientific sphere. Uh. One.

(19:00):
You know, this is one though, in which scientific considerations
are either inherently mingled with philosophic and supernatural ideas, or
at the very least are heavily susceptible to flowing into
those subjects. And as the author um Mercia Eliade put
it in the Forge and the Crucible quote, alchemy posed
as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came into its own

(19:22):
when substances had shed their sacred attributes. Oh that's interesting,
I mean, yeah, One thing I do want to talk
about as we go on is the ways that different
uh practitioners of the alchemy period didn't They weren't just
looking for chemical formulas, but they really thought chemicals meant something. Yeah. Yeah,
And you you can imagine too where this gets. You know,

(19:45):
we can't look at something without working without you know,
without our brain beginning to ponder over the possible metaphors there.
You know, how does this relate to me? Um? And
maybe we're we get we're a little further from that now,
but you know, we have to sort of put ourselves
in the mindset of of older Uh, you know, experimentors.

(20:06):
And uh, this is where I want to bring up
some of the some of the thoughts that Terence McKenna
brought to the table concerning alchemy. Um and and I
think he I think he made he made some good,
good points on the topic. He gave a series of
lectures on alchemy in the late nineties um and touched
on this. And I want to read a quote from
it from a transcription. In this he is citing Iliade,

(20:28):
but also putting his own spin on things. Quote. The
shaman is the brother of the smith. The smith is
the metallurgist, the worker in metals. And this is where
alchemy has its roots. We who take this for granted,
have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to
ancient people, and in fact, it would seem so to
us if we had anything to do with it. I mean,

(20:48):
how many of us are welders or casters of metal.
It's a magical process to take, for instance, cinnabar, a
red soft ore, and by the mere act of heating
it in a furnace, it will sweat liquid mercury onto
its surface. We have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science,
where we have mind firmly separated it out from the world.

(21:09):
We take this for granted. It's effortless because it is
the ambiance of the civilization that we've been born into.
But in an earlier age, some writers would say, a
more naive age. But I wonder about that mind and
matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature, so
that the sweating of mercury out of cinnabar is not
a material process. It is a process in which the

(21:30):
mind and the observations of the metal worker maintain an
important role. Well, I don't know what to think about
that claim about the idea the role of the mind
in the transformations, but I think he's absolutely right that,
Like you know, it's one of the frustrations of the
modern world is that we rely so on so much

(21:50):
um science and technology in the background of our lives
that we can lose sight of the sheer wonder that
that is on, you know, visible if you're actually watching
these processes unfold in firsthand. Yeah, I mean, we talked
about technological metaphors all the time on the show. How
how often we think about our own cognition in terms

(22:12):
of computers and cameras and digital recordings and so forth,
uh and photoshop, etcetera. You know, and and these can
all be useful, but they can also distort and create
a a distorted version of of what's actually going on
inside the mind or outside of it. And yeah, I

(22:33):
think you know, if you were to put yourself in
someone who day in and day out, was not using
an iPhone, was not using a PC or a GO
or a Mac or whatever, but was instead, uh working
with the base materials and with metals and chemicals and
trying to figure out their properties. Like this would be
the primary way that they would also think about the mind.

(22:54):
I mean it, it makes perfect sense to me, Like
these would be there, This would be their telephone, their television,
their computer. These would be the ways that they might
then self reflect. Well, yeah, I mean it's it's apparent
that witnessing chemical reactions suggested to people some kind of deep,
underlying spiritual reality that was like more than just an

(23:17):
idea about like different types of atoms and how they
can fit together, but suggested like like big truth so
that applied to everything. You know, that that alchemy could
in its own way become a one of these metaphorical
universal solvents, that it explains everything about about God and
the universe and humankind in our minds. Now, since I

(23:38):
did mention McKenna, one might easily say, well, for Terence McKenna,
surely mushrooms, psychedelics were kind of the universal solvent. And yeah,
I think I can certainly that can you can certainly
make a case for that, especially within certain works of
his you know, the Food of the Gods, etcetera. Um,
that's kind of a case where you can say, oh,
you drop mushrooms in the middle of this and everything

(23:59):
makes sense. Um. Oh, did he suggest that Paracelsus took mushrooms? Uh? No,
Actually he in these lectures, he he really took quite
the opposite approach. And that's why I want to share
one more, uh snippet from from this lengthy lecture series,
which by the way, you can find online um in
several places, either in you know, audio form or transcribed.

(24:22):
But this is what he had to say. Quote. I
will not claim and do not in fact think it
is so that there was anything overtly psychedelic in the
sense of pharmacologically based about alchemy. When we look back
through the alchemical literature, there's very little evidence that it
was far pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the
very last adamirations of the out of the alchemical impulse

(24:45):
in someone like Paracelsus, do you get use of opium.
It is interesting that the great drugs of modern society
were accidentally discovered by alchemist in their research distilled alcohol
as a product of alchemical work, and as I mentioned,
opium was very heavily used. Um of the Paracelsian school.
But what they possessed was an ability to liquefy their

(25:07):
mental categories and then to project the contents of the
mind onto these processes and read them back. Now, um,
real quick, uh, Paracelsus. We'll we'll get back to Paracelsus
in a bit. But this was an individual of four
or four through fifteen forty one, a Swiss physician and
alchemist of the German Renaissance, and he made a number

(25:27):
of contributions to modern medical science. And he's come up
before on the show, I think in our episodes on
the Trident, on dangerous foods, on Frankenstein, and on blood drinking,
which I guess are all areas where you might well
imagine that the realms of chemistry and UH and alchemy
might come together to some degree. Yeah, Paracelsus is considered

(25:47):
one of the sort of granddaddy's of alchemy. Um. Paracelsis
is his nickname. By the way, it's worth mentioning his
real name, which was Philippus Areolas, the Ephrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.
I like that Bombastus. Yeah, I think there's some question
about whether the word bombastic comes from his name because

(26:09):
he he would throw down like Paracelsis would get into it.
In fact, I want to read a a a passage
from a book that that I'm going to be referring
to for the rest of the episode. That is by
Lawrence in Prince Shop called The Secrets of Alchemy that
was published in by the University of Chicago Press. Prince
HP is professor at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in the

(26:32):
history of science and technology, and he's written a ton
about alchemy and and its role in the development of science.
But um, there's a passage from his book where he
briefly introduces the figure of Paracelsus, and he does it
like this. He says Paracelsis spent much of his life,
wandering from town to town, generally stirring up trouble wherever
he went with his iconoclastic and quick tempered ways. It

(26:55):
has been claimed erroneously that the word bombastic in the
sense of pompous beach derives from his name. Okay, so
that was he's saying. No, that is not where it
comes from. But I have encountered that erroneous claim. Bridge
Bay goes On. Paracelsis is best known as a vociferous
critic of traditional medicine. His writings, frequently imitated in style

(27:16):
by later followers, are filled with vitriolic and sarcastic condemnations
of physicians, apothecaries in the entire medical establishment. It is
reported that he publicly burned the medical writings of Ibben Sinah,
standard texts for medical education at the time, as a
sign of his contempt. Paracelsis's other provocative habits included lecturing

(27:38):
for the short time he gave medical lectures in Basle
and writing in his native Swiss German rather than Latin,
and promoting the use of German medicinal plants over more
established classical Mediterranean ones. He was a strong advocate of
alchimia but only as one of the pillars of medicine,
that is to say, for its ability to prepare pharmaceuticals

(27:58):
and to explain body the functions. He showed no interest
in chrisopoeia and occasionally wrote contemptuously of it. And again,
chrisopoeia is the is the attempt to transmute base metals
into gold. It's interesting, all these are our attributes of
someone who very much wanted to dissolve the rigidity of
the of of the establishment. You know, you could you

(28:21):
could look at them acting as a kind of trying
to act as a kind of universal solvent within their
own culture. Yeah, And I guess that should bring us
to the concept of the universal solvent itself, because Paracelsus
wrote of something called alcohest, but Paracelsis meant something different

(28:45):
by it. Paracelsis wrote of alcohest as a type of
medicine for treating a bad liver. But in the wake
of Paracelsis, some later alchemists would take the idea of
alcohest as a universal solvent and really run with it.
I remember, again, as I said earlier, alchemy is often
concerned with the search for these particular chemical arcana in

(29:07):
princeps terms. So again, this might be a method for
transmuting base metals into gold doing the process of chrysopoeia. Uh.
It turns out that this is despite the fact that
some people are still trying to do this today. This
is not really possible by conventional chemical means. Like gold
as as we have it here on Earth is forged.

(29:27):
It's it's a product of nucleosynthesis that occurs in some
of the most violent phenomena in the universe, like neutron
star collisions or exploding you know, stars at the end
of their lifespan. Uh. Like, you can't turn lead into gold.
That is just not a human power, I guess, unless
you're talking maybe about I don't know, like like tiny
amounts of it in particle colliders or something, you know,

(29:48):
atomic experiments that accelerate protons to extremely high speeds and
collide with things. And even in that case, I'm not sure.
I just can't rule it out there by conventional chemical means,
if you're talking about significant amounts of matter, you cannot
turn base metals into gold. That would require rearranging the
nucleus of an atom, which we just don't have the

(30:09):
power to do right, and maybe if you were John
d and you could actually um, you know, if you
were actually going to capture or utilize an angel and
you could somehow tap into their powers. Uh, they're they're
just like base energy level. Then okay, maybe maybe it
would be possible, but but not without any like additional

(30:29):
supernatural add ons to the chemical understanding that we have. Right,
and so, while the transmutation of base metals like lead
into gold is probably the best known quest of alchemy,
Prince Bay writes a lot about how alchemy is so
much bigger than that it. Alchemy was not just the
greedy gold slog of people who had you know, Mida's brain,

(30:51):
uh like, it was generally the study of chemical change.
And the study of chemical change is a really important
and fascinating subject that you understand, sort of unlocks all
of the other physical sciences. I already mentioned the idea
of of recipes for bendable glass. I think this is
a much more obscure one, but I just bring it
up because I did an episode on it. A big

(31:14):
part of alchemy, as we've already mentioned, was concerned with
refining and improving medicines. But of course another holy grail
of alchemy was the universal solvent alcohest. And so the
place where alcohest really comes into the picture is in
the work of the influential Flemish chemist and physician Jean
Baptista van Helmont, who lived fifteen seventy nine to sixteen

(31:37):
forty four uh, and of van Helmont is responsible for
has more of a legacy than you might expect. Van
Helmont is responsible for coining the English word gas. Uh.
He was one of the first people, maybe the first
to identify a gas other than general air, when he
differentiated carbon dioxide as a distinct form of matt from

(32:00):
the rest of the gas in the atmosphere. Apparently the
word gas that he coined comes from the Greek word chaos. Now,
Prince Bay writes that Van Helmont is the is the
origin of this search for alcohest as the as the
universal solvent, but notes that Paracelsus, as I already said,
had used the word alcohest previously, and this was again

(32:23):
for a very special medicine for the liver. But Van
Helmont would take that word alcohest and start using it
to describe a hypothetical substance that would be able to
dissolve any other substance the universal solvent, and apparently a
Paracelsus had a similar idea for a universal solvent that

(32:44):
would have been a material called circulated salt or cell
circulatum um. But but for van Helmont, alcohest became not
just something that you wanted to be able to make,
but something that was fundamental in understanding the very nature
of matter. Because Van Helmont held a fascinating and mostly

(33:04):
wrong but maybe not entirely wrong, at least sort of
in the direction of being right in some interesting ways
a view of matter that had these qualities, and it
brought in ideas from medicine and theology and previous studies
of chemicals. But the idea was that Van Helmont believed,
basically everything is made of water, that water is quote

(33:28):
the basic material substratum of all substances. You drop water
in the middle of this and everything makes sense very good. Um.
So this was a departure from previous ideas about the
the constituents of matter. Again, Paracelsus had written about something
called the Tria prima, which means the three primary things,

(33:51):
and Paracelsus he did not originate this idea fully either,
he was building upon the pre existing chemical knowledge, mostly
passed down from Arabic scholars who had written that some
metals and minerals could really be reduced to fundamental constituents,
which were mercury and sulfur. Uh. This was not correct,
but it did show a tendency of thinking that was

(34:13):
scientifically useful, which was the idea that matter could be
decomposed into its constituent parts, different chemical parts that would
come together to make molecules of familiar substances, which is
very true and the basis of what would become the
real science of chemistry. And so Paracelsus is picking up
on this idea. Uh. And he concluded that it was

(34:35):
not just that some metals and minerals were could be
broken down into mercury and sulfur. He concluded that basically
all material could be broken down into three things mercury, sulfur,
and salt. Again factually wrong, but a a but trending
in a useful direction in terms of ways of thinking

(34:56):
about matter. Yeah, kind of coming back into what we're
talking about with destruction, Like, if you were to destroy anything,
what would remain? What are the things that make up
the whole? Sure? Uh, and I actually wanted to go
into a brief digression on paracelsus is mingling of theological, metaphysical,
and protoscientific thinking from a paragraph in prince Ship base
book that that I found really interesting. So in writing

(35:17):
about Paracelsus is idea of the Tria prima, prince ship
A writes quote. These three chemical principles provided a terrestrial
material trinity that reflected the celestial immaterial trinity as well
as the human triune nature of body, soul, and spirit. Further,
Paracelsus endeavored to generate an entire world system embracing the

(35:41):
whole of theology and natural philosophy as an alternative to
and he no doubt hoped ultimately a substitute for prevailing
contemporaneous systems. For him, chemical processes provided the fundamental model
for explaining natural processes in the physical universe as well
as with the human body. For example, the cycle of

(36:03):
rain through sea, air, and land was for Paracelsis a
great cosmic distillation. The formation of minerals underground, the growth
of plants, the generation of life forms, as well as
the bodily functions of digestion, nutrition, respiration, and excretion, where
for him inherently chemical processes, God himself is the master chemist.

(36:27):
His creation of an ordered world out of primordial chaos
was akin to the chemist's extraction, purification, and elaboration of
common materials into chemical products, and his final judgment of
the world by fire, like a chemist using fire to
purge impurities from precious metals. Paracelsis system has been called

(36:47):
a chemical world view, and it proved remarkably influential in
succeeding generations. So for Paracelsis, not only did he inspire
the later search for a literal universal solvent that we're
gonna be talking about, but it seems very much again
in the metaphorical, in the mind space, alchemy was his
universal solvent. It it explained everything. I remember. Van Helmont

(37:10):
would go on to break with Paracelsus in believing that
matter could be reduced beyond the tria prima ultimately always
down to what it was made of at bottom, which
was water. So why would van Helmont think that ultimately
everything was made of water? Well, his reasoning was partly theological.

(37:31):
Part of it was the primacy of water in the
genesis account of creation. Uh and this also calls to
mind how in the recent Nile episode we discussed the
prominence of water not just in the Biblical creation story,
but as probably at least in the estimation of the
scholar David Leming, the single most common theme in creation
narratives around the world, if you like, compare all of

(37:53):
the world's religions creation myths. He says, the thing that
is in the most of them is water. You know,
primordial cosmic oceans. Yeah. Yeah. And then oftentimes, like we
discussed in that episode, we even would think of the
cosmos as ocean. Uh so, I mean you would if
it's not in the beginning there's some void or some
just empty space of darkness, which I guess to a

(38:16):
large point, you could be a large part point you
could say is derived from our modern popular understanding of
of what outer space is. They've never been to space,
they didn't know what space was. Yeah, the the vast
emptiness was the ocean. That was the that was the
vast mystery, the vast primordial body. But it wasn't just

(38:37):
these theological influences. Van Helmont also based this belief in
the material primacy of water on physical experiments that he
conducted in the lab. So here's an example, as described
by Prince you Pay. In Van Helmont's most famous experiment,
he planted a willow tree sapling that he had weighed beforehand.
The willow tree was five pounds, and he planted it

(39:00):
a container with two hundred pounds of soil. Then he
watered the tree for five years, and at the end
of five years the tree had grown from five pounds
two hundred and sixty nine pounds. It had gained about
thirty three or thirty four times its original weight. But
he also measured the soil that the tree had been

(39:21):
planted in, and he discovered that the soil weighed almost
exactly the same as it did when he planted it. Thus,
Van Helmont concluded that water alone had been transformed into
all of the substances that make up the tree, the wood,
the leaves. This is all just water that has been
somehow transformed into higher forms of water, more solid forms

(39:46):
of water. And in a way he was he was
partially correct. I mean, much of the bodies of living
organisms is made of water. Uh. But also without understanding
the science of photosynthesis, Van Helmont didn't realize that the
car been content of the tree which is the bulk
of its non water weight, was actually from carbon dioxide

(40:06):
from the air, which is absorbed from the atmosphere by
the leaves, and then a chemical reaction powered by energy
from the sunlight breaks apart the CEO two so that
it can be used to make these carbon molecules that
the tree needs to make its body. Again, We've talked
about this on the show a million times, but it's
one of the most astounding facts that you know, trees
are made out of air. But without this knowledge of

(40:30):
photochemistry and botany, it was somewhat reasonable for for Van
Helmont to believe that what had gone into the tree
was simply what he had put into it, which was water.
That's the only thing he'd added to it. So how
did this system of this this protean water based matter
work well to read a section from from Prince Pay
describing Van Helmont's thinking quote, The various transformations of water,

(40:54):
he argued, are managed by semina or seeds capable of
organizing water into other substances. Most materials can be turned
back into primordial water through heating and cold, thus establishing
a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. Fire destroys substances
by turning them into gas again, a word Van Helmont

(41:17):
coined from chaos. A non condensable substance more subtle than
any vapor. Gas rises to the upper parts of the atmosphere,
where exposed to extreme cold, it returns to elemental water
that falls with the rain. The alcohest performs this return
to water more quickly and usefully, so it base everything

(41:39):
is made of water, and we're just seeing different forms
of water. And if you get something really hot in
a fire, it will transform. It will transform not only
into liquid water, but sort of beyond this point into
a gas that floats up into the atmosphere. Then when
it's up in the atmosphere, it cools down, turns back
into liquid water falls as rain. So it's sort of

(42:02):
water to water, wet to wet worldview. And then the
alcohest comes in as a universal solvent because it seems
to serve the function of reducing all matter back down
to the state of liquid water without degrading it in
the process. So, according to Van Helmont, if you were
to heat a substance mingled with alcohest, it will first

(42:23):
be reduced to its proximate ingredients. These would be sort
of the middle constituents. Right before you get all the
way to water, it will break down into some other
things first, and these would be comparable to Paracelsis idea
of the Tria prima. But then further heating with alcohest
will reduce even these proximate ingredients to the ultimate base material,

(42:44):
which is water. So from Van Helmont's point of view,
the alcohest was was not a chemical arcanum because it
would turn your lead into gold and make you rich.
It was actually desirable as the ultimate research tool. Alcohest
would have been the ultimate implement for studying what every
type of matter is made of. And there's a there's

(43:07):
a sentence from Van Helmont that's quoted in print based
book where he writes, there is no more certain genus
of acquiring knowledge than when one knows what is contained
in a thing and how much of it there is.
So how would you do this? Well? Van Helmont thought
that if you could stop the reaction between alcohest and
the material in question at just the right time, and

(43:29):
then distill the alcohest to remove it, you would be
left with what was called the first essence or the
ends prem um. And this ends primum would be there
in the container left behind as a kind of crystalline salt.
And so you could make better medicines this way, for instance,
because the this ins prem um would have the medicinal

(43:50):
powers of whatever substance that you had been working on,
but it would remove all of the toxic or noxious
uh sort of side effects and impure at ease that
could be caused by the original medicinal thing. And thus,
in Van Helmont's view, the alcohest was a tool for research.
It was a tool for what was called kimi atria,
or the development of medicines through chemistry. Now Van Helmont

(44:14):
claimed that he had been able to make alcahest. He's like,
I figured it out, I know how to do it.
I can prepare it. But he never revealed his secret recipe,
and many other scholars struggled in vain to discover Van
Helmont's formula for the universal solvent. Some at various points
believed they had found it. For example, Princepa sites a

(44:34):
laboratory notebook entry by the seventeenth century Colonial American alchemist
George Starkey, who wrote quote at Bristol on twentieth March
sixteen fifty six. God revealed to me the whole secret
of the liquor alcohest let. Eternal blessing, honor and glory
be to him. So I'm not sure exactly what he discovered,
but I do not think it was a real universal solvent.

(44:57):
I like that it's described as the liquor alcohest I
imagine if alcohoest was a liquor, would it be impossible
to make a cocktail with it? Would it always like
break the cocktail back down into its uh it's primary ingredients.
I mean you probably wouldn't want to drink it. Yeah,
if you would just melt, you just become water. Right,
I always wanted to be water. It's the ultimate in

(45:18):
refreshment though. Right, that's good marketing. Now. I was looking
at another book by Lawrence prince pay about alchemy called
The Transmutations of Chemistry, And this is chemistry spelled with
a an intentionally archaic spelling c h y M I
S t r y, which is uh to distinguish it
from the modern science of chemistry. Uh. This was published

(45:40):
in by University of Chicago Press, and in this case
Prince pa is discussing the efforts of alchemists like Jan
von Helmont to perform chemical analysis of materials such as
the bodies of plants, where the idea was, yeah, you
can use fire to break materials down into their constituent parts.
But the problem is that fire, while it will decompose

(46:03):
the materials into the approximate constituents, fire was deceitful as
it would corrupt to those constituents in the process. And
of course the solution was alcahost, which could break things
down without corrupting them in the process. And there's a
part here where alcohost is referred to as better than fire.
It is the fire of Gehenna, which that's a Biblical metaphor.

(46:26):
It's a metaphor for ignominious destruction that is used in
the Bible. That is often a little little Bible interpretation note,
often translated into English Bibles as hell. Uh. The previous
show guest bart Erman, who's a secular Bible historian. He
explains that this translation is actually really misleading. It's actually

(46:48):
reading later theology about the afterlife into the original text. Uh.
And he argues that Gehenna in the original text is
not supposed to refer to a place of eternal suffering
after life. But in fact it was a real place.
It is basically a desolate valley that was um It
was historically associated with human sacrifice. And so, according to Irman,

(47:10):
being sent to Gehenna, as is often discussed in the
New Testament, has nothing to do with an afterlife of
eternal suffering, but rather as a sort of it's a
squalid and unceremonious annihilation. It's sort of equivalent to telling
somebody that they're going to die and be thrown into
a garbage dumpy. Not nice either way, but but somewhat
different than the idea of everlasting suffering in Hell. Yeah.

(47:33):
So ultimately, if you're putting a garbage dump, and I
guess in the right conditions, you are going to break
down and become a part of the natural world again,
get to become your tria prima and then and then water,
I guess. Yeah. But in Gehenna it sounds like it
would have been It wouldn't be like a modern garbage dump.
That would be a place where you break down or

(47:54):
probably partially consumed by scavenging beasts that you know, ultimately
you know pretty could anyway that that was just a
Bible nerd side note. So it probably doesn't figure in
here because I would guess Van Helmont is is referring
to the supernatural hell interpretation. So alcahest is much better
than earthly fire. It's like a holy supernatural fire. But

(48:17):
again Van Helmont writes about how the alcahest could decompose
matter into its tria prima, or its constituent parts, and
then eventually back into water with no compromise or destruction
of the properties along the way. And uh, and Principe
writes about how, again we mentioned earlier, this could be
used to make better medicines, and in this section he

(48:38):
actually mentions what a couple of these medicines would have
been quote. Van Helmont describes several pharmaceuticals he claims to
have prepared using the alcohest, most notably a cure for
kidney and bladder stones made from a mineral he calls lutus,
and an elixir of life prepared from Lebanon cedar wood.
The only obstacle in this glorious royal road for chemistry

(49:01):
was that no one knew how to prepare Van helmonts alcohestan.
I guess the obvious is is that is the truth
that if the Alcohest was possible. If there was a
universal solvent to be found, then surely modern chemistry would

(49:23):
have found it in the wake of alchemy. Yeah, and
so here we revealed that there are several flaws to
the fundamental assumptions on which the the Alcohest was based.
I mean, one thing is that Van Helmont's conception of
all material ultimately being based on water is not true.
But that doesn't mean that modern chemistry is is without
some really exceptional, exquisite dissolvers that will, maybe while maybe

(49:48):
not being universal solvents, will break down lots of stuff,
a shocking amount of stuff. Uh So, a couple that
are worth mentioning. One I wanted to talk about is
the chemical known as aqua regia, which the name literally
means royal water in Latin. It's made with one part
nitric acid and three parts hydrochloric acid. It is extremely corrosive.

(50:12):
It's a liquid with a reddish orange color that can
not only cause severe burns if you touch it, it
can literally dissolve otherwise nonreactive metals like gold and platinum.
Aqua Regia briefly came up in our episode on heavy Water.
I think because we were talking about the historical anecdote
where the chemist George to Heavish, she had to had

(50:34):
had to quickly find a way to hide the Nobel
Prize medals which I think we're made of gold in
the laboratory of nils Bore when the laboratory was being
captured and searched by the Nazis, and he ended up
dissolving the metals in Aqua Regia to prevent them from
being found out. So Aqua Regia sounds refreshing. Is not refreshing, though,

(50:55):
do not buy a bottle of it at your local
convenience store. Not a good lacroix flavor, maybe better than coconut. Oh,
I love coconut. Coconut coconut is a good lacroise you
do for me at least at the beach, and as
long as it's cold. But if it warms up and
I'm not at the beach, then uh yeah, it's certainly
both of those are true. Then yeah, I don't want
any part of it. I'm a picky so I do

(51:18):
love the soda waters, I like the lacroise, I like
most flavors, uh and and I like real coconut stuff,
but the coconut lacroise something about it. It's like, for me,
it's like drinking sunscreen. It's something's wrong. I think maybe
that's why I like it, because it kind of tastes
like what sunscreen historically smelled like. And so it's like
it's like drinking the the you know, the alchemical truth

(51:42):
of the beach um while at the beach. So I
can go on even better on these uh, these dissolvers.
There's one thing I've been reading about called Piranha solution.
This is this is a class of industrial and laboratory
grade cleaning solutions colloquially known as per Ranna solutions, and
you can guess how they got their name. They are

(52:04):
typically used as a ruthless and very dangerous way to
strip all residue of organic molecules from a container, surface,
or substrate. Now, it's interesting that it has it is
it is getting closer. It sounds like to what we
think of as as Hollywood acid, but in doing so,
it invokes Hollywood piranhas. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah yeah. So

(52:26):
it's making you think of what's the James Bond movie
where you only live twice? Right with the bridge that
goes over the piranhas and if you like, that's your
bad performance review means that your fish food. Yeah, that's
the one with Donald pleasants is blowfeld. Oh yeah. So
a common formulation of Piranha solutions extremely dangerous material would

(52:47):
be three parts sulfuric acid or H two S O
four and one part hydrogen peroxide, which is H two
O two. Piranha solution is, from everything I read, extremely temperamental.
Seeing the elements in the wrong order, or in the
wrong ratio, or in the presence of the wrong contaminants
can immediately lead to explosions. It seems like there are

(53:09):
just lots of ways that using it can lead to explosions.
More on that in a bit. So I was trying
to figure out, Okay, how exactly does this stuff work? Um,
there was a helpful podcast episode I found. The Royal
Society of Chemistry has a podcast called Chemistry and Its Element,
though sometimes I see it referred to just as the
Chemistry World podcast. Chemistry World is their magazine, their publication.

(53:33):
But this podcast episode was hosted by Sam Tracy and
it's about Piranha solution and I appreciated the way Tracy
explained what the solution does at the molecular level. First
of all, I wanted to point out Tracy notes that
it's not just named Paranha solution for its ability to
to dissolve all organic matter that it comes into contact with,
but perhaps also for its tendency to boil vigorously when

(53:57):
it's in the presence of organic matter. So like in
that scene and you only live twice, where the piranhas
started attacking somebody, it looks like the water has been
put on the boilers, bubbles everywhere. Yeah, almost as if
um a bubbling mechanism was placed underwater to create the
illusion of a horde of piranhas um, you know, tearing
something apart in movie fashion. Actually, here's something I want

(54:19):
to see, Uh, answer this question if you were actually
attacked by a school of piranhas. I don't know if
they even swarm like that in reality, I kind of
doubt it. But if you were, would it would it
would the water boil like that? Or would it look
very calm on the surface. Well, I think we should
answer this question into an episode on piranhas. I don't
know that I've i've ever we've ever devoted an episode

(54:40):
to piranhas. So let's let's come back to it. They're
they're beautiful fish. Okay, So how does it work well?
Piranha solution again, as I mentioned as two main ingredients
as sulfuric acid H two S O four and hydrogen
peroxide H two O two. So if you imagine a
glass container with organic residue of glucose and sugar stuck
to the inside, uh, and imagine this is exposed to

(55:03):
a Piranha solution for cleaning. Each of the two ingredients
plays a different role in cleaning the sugar away. So sugar,
of course, is an organic molecule. It's a carbohydrate molecule
with the formulas C six H twelve O six. At
least that's glucose. Different types of sugar have different chemical compositions,
but it's got carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and when exposed

(55:25):
to concentrated sulfuric acid, this acid acts as an aggressive
dehydrating agent, so it will chemically react to remove water
molecules as much as it can, so the sugar molecules
will get broken apart and the sugar will lose hydrogen
and oxygen atoms in the form of water vapor. H

(55:46):
two O and so if you have a molecule like
sugar that's based on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and you're
rapidly pulling hydrogen and oxygen off of it, what are
you going to have left over a lot of carbon? So,
if you've ever seen this experiment where you douse sugar
and sulfuric acid, there there are a lot of videos
you can look up online. Um usually you will have

(56:07):
like a beaker with a bunch of sugar in it.
Somebody douses it and sulfuric acid and then stirs it
up with a glass pipette. Uh, the sugar will first
turn brown and then black and then give off all
of these fumes. I think it's giving off both water,
vapor and noxious fumes of sulfur dioxide. So you shouldn't
do this experiment without you know, supervision of somebody who
knows what they're doing, because it gets very hot and

(56:30):
it puts off these fumes. It can be dangerous potentially.
But but what eventually ends up happening is that the
carbon residue that's left over from the reaction of the
acid with the sugar, This carbon residue will start to
climb out of the beaker in a looming column like
a giant tube worm or snake that is made out
of charred sit uh. And you can find a whole

(56:52):
genre of carbon snake pictures online from demonstrations of this reaction.
They're pretty great. Yeah, they can be quite impressive. Yeah,
all praise be to the carbon snakes. But Sam Tracy
in in this podcast, I was talking about mentions that
the role of sulfuric acid is twofold quote. It's acidity
catalyzes the reaction and being a hygroscopic substance, it combines

(57:15):
with the water, releasing a great quantity of heat, meaning
the reaction cannot go in the reverse direction and can
only proceed to completion. But of course this alone would
not make a cleaning agent, because sulfuric acid alone would
tend to simply eat up organic molecules, strip them of
what water can be pulled out of them, and leave
a ton of black elemental carbon in its wake. And

(57:37):
that is not clean. Like, you don't want black elemental
carbon stuck to your glass surfaces or your electronics or
your you know, your wafer chips, whatever whatever it is
you're trying to clean. So this is where the hydrogen
peroxide comes in. Hydrogen peroxide serves to eat away the
remaining carbon byproduct that would have been left over from
the acids attack on the carbohydrate. Uh So, hydrogen oxide

(58:00):
H two O two will react with the elemental carbon
by donating oxygen atoms to the carbon, which combined to
produce carbon dioxide gas, which floats away in the air,
eventually leaving your substrate clean of all organic material. So hypothetically,
you you have and again I'm not advising to do this,
it's extremely dangerous, but what would happen is you have

(58:22):
a glass container or an electronics part, whatever it is
you're trying to clean off. It's got a little bit
of organic material on it, maybe some sugar or some
other kind of carbohydrates something like that, and you add
this solution to it. It is uh the organic materials
are ripped apart by the acid and then the remaining
carbon is just removed and evaporated by the hydrogen peroxide.

(58:45):
I was reading about many ways that the Piranha solution is,
as I've said several times now, extremely dangerous. This is
not one to try it with a home chemistry set,
as it can easily explode and cause severe injuries and burns.
I was reading a story that was sent to UH
in a letter to Chemical Engineering News by a couple
of researchers in the year nineteen nine. That was about

(59:07):
multiple accidents that had occurred in university labs with Piranha solutions.
One where a container of Paranha solution was sitting stored
in a fume hood and about a week after it
was mixed, it just spontaneously exploded. Another one they talked
about is UH it occurred at Cornell University where I
think what happened is that some Piranha solution was accidentally

(59:28):
and very unfortunately mixed with ascet tone and this caused
a violent explosion that like ripped apart the hood that
it was under, severely injured the person who was working
on it. They ended up, you know, covered in this
corrosive liquid with a bunch of glass embedded in them.
So it is not something to screw around with. So
not literal alcohost, not a literal universal solvent, but but

(59:50):
Paranha solution will get you a lot of the way there.
All right, Well, you know, at this point we're reaching
the end of the podcast, and I think the only
only way to really go at this point is to
at least briefly discuss New Age occult thinking and um
also uh tech doz lingo. Okay, let's let's start with

(01:00:10):
with the with the New Age, New age and occult
psych and psychedelic thinking, basically discussing universal solvent as a metaphor. Now.
Earlier in our discussion, I brought up Terrence McKinnon his
lectures on alchemy, and again McKenna said that he didn't
see much of a connection between alchemy and psychedelics. Uh.
Those certain important pharmacological discoveries would come out of alchemy.

(01:00:32):
For the most part, psychedelics were the domain of the shaman.
But of course other schools of thought would later on
in human history come back to alchemy uh, and it's
sacred and obscure dimensions and find new meanings there. So,
for instance, we see that with the unions, and we
also see that with psychedelic and New Age thinking as well. Again,

(01:00:52):
you know, you're dealing with with recipes that are dealing
you know, talking about the red dragon and using code words,
but all so dealing in philosophical and magical ideas. It's
irresistible to come back and sort of um, you know,
and view your own meaning into it and uh and
and perhaps even rediscover aspects of your your your current

(01:01:15):
your contemporary system by breathing it into this archaic apparatus. Yeah,
if I'm not mistaken, I think alchemy. Concepts from alchemy
were very popular to be played around with by like
a lot of the uh, the sort of new religious
movements of the late nineteenth century. Yeah. Yeah, and and
really this ultimately fits the basic format of alchemy throughout history.

(01:01:39):
Like a lot of alchemy even you know, you know,
in the old days, revolved around looking back at old texts,
piecing together bits from old texts, and trying to to
break new ground, understand what these these other authors were
talking about and uh and creating some new frame of
meaning around it. You know. Something that alchemy also has
in common with religious texts is pseudonymous writings. Uh so

(01:02:03):
in in for example, in the early centuries of Christianity,
a huge thing that would often go on is like
you would write a new book that you know, you
would want to be taken as scripture that would advance
your view of the correct theological interpretation of Christ. But
you'd be like well, and nobody knows who I am,
so I'm going to say that this was written by St. Peter,
and so you know, this is the Gospel of Peter. Like,

(01:02:25):
this is definitely not written by Peter. Um. The people
were doing this kind of thing all the time. The
same thing happened with alchemy. People would write pseudonymously as like,
you know, as one of the great masters of alchemy. Yes,
this was by Paracelsus, but it actually wasn't. It was
just some somebody well, you know, in in in dealing
specifically with it with alcohoest and the idea of a

(01:02:46):
universal solvent. You know, I looked through some of the
writings of uh and and lectures of McKinnon. I looked
through uh iLiad's work, and uh, you know, it's possible
I miss something, but I didn't find any case where
either of them specifically spoke or wrote about the algohoest um. However,
you do see the alcohoes pop up in New Age

(01:03:08):
and psychedelic literature as a metaphor in some cases for
psychedelic compounds. Um, you know, a way of thinking about
what something like the psilocybin can do in the mind.
But it reminds me a little bit of McKenna's arguments
of the argument that psychedelics in the West may have
enabled Buddhism to spread more thoroughly through Western thought. I'm
not sure I agree with them completely on that, but

(01:03:30):
I think it's a it's a valid point that as
a culture's understanding of consciousness changes, it does open them
up to the discovery and rediscovery of various spiritual concepts. Okay, So,
in if you're thinking in the Terence McKenna type vein,
the idea is that, uh is that the use of
psychedelics would have broadly enabled sort of reduced the mind

(01:03:52):
to its trie a prima or to its more proximate
constituents without degradation, allowing uh more different types of states
of mind to be accessed, as opposed to the narrower
window of different ways you can think based on your
cultural upbringing. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And and yeah,
I like this idea. I like the idea of using

(01:04:12):
alcoholst as a as a kind of metaphor for anything
that like breaks down unuseful rigidity and thought or culture. Um. Yeah,
and and and I also like the idea of of
of psychedelics being seen as some sort of universal solvent potentially,
and and and again you know you then the breaking
down of things that I think it also drives home
that it's a delicate process and you know what you're doing,

(01:04:34):
and you don't want to you know, to to go
too far and dissolve too much. Uh but uh, you know,
breaking down the mind that's too rigid to melt right. Um.
The one point mckinna does point out that there's this, um,
this alchemical aphamism that in in in Latin is dissolutio
at coagulato, which we were just discussing this off mic. Uh,

(01:04:59):
like this basically break down to the dissolving and m
and the coagulation of things to break things down and
then things build back up. Um, and that that ultimately
this is all one needs to know about like the
nature of reality. Uh, you know, the the alchemical truth
of things. And uh, I think this is you know,
this is this is a basic idea that you can

(01:05:21):
apply to the physical world. But also too you can
you can see how readily one could take to this
as a as as a psychological concept as well, and
certainly a psychedelic concept. You know, the idea of breaking
things down. But then but then that rigidity is going
to is going to return. There's gonna be some coagulation
that's going to take place again, you know, I do.

(01:05:42):
Before we end, though, I want to come back to
something that I think we touched on earlier, which is
the potential dangers of of seeing the world in terms
of universal solvents. I mean, one thing we learned as
alchemy passed away and gave way to modern chemistry is
that there is in fact no such thing as a
as a universe solvent in chemistry. I mean, there are
solvents that will dissolve lots of things, but but there

(01:06:05):
is no universal acid in the Daniel Dennett sense. And
I wonder if that is also a lesson that should
be applied in in the metaphorical way, sort of coming
back against everything we've talked about in this episode, because I,
I mean, I really do believe that a huge amount
of trouble and confusion in the world comes from people
getting overly attached to a certain lens of viewing the

(01:06:28):
world or or analytical tool or new strategy and thinking
that it will solve everything, uh, that it will answer
all questions that it will solve all your problems, you know,
like I feel like that that that is something that
we all have a tendency for, but it's it's very
dangerous and something to watch out for in yourself. And

(01:06:49):
one of the weird ways I was thinking about this
is actually pulling us away from the the mysterious worlds
at the intersection of you know, theology and metaphysics and
science in chemistry. I was thinking about this in terms
of tech business because I was just thinking about all
of the different universal solvents that we have witnessed come

(01:07:10):
and go over the years working in digital media, and
they come and they go, and they come and they go,
and so I'm thinking about the universal solvents of search
engine optimization. You remember when like everything on the Internet
suddenly had to change to be search engine optimized, and
it kind of ruined a huge amount of content that
was good previously and then was just destroyed by optimization

(01:07:32):
for Google search results. And then that kind of and
then you know, they change how their search results are
calculated anyway, so it becomes obsolete later on. And then
I remember the the u GC revolution. At some point
it was like, well, everything's got to be user generated content,
you know, and everything is Wikipedia now, yeah, and so
and that sort of destroyed everything in its path, and

(01:07:53):
then that kind of went away, and you know, the
various pivot to videos and the optimization for the Facebook
news eat and then that, and then the pivot to
blockchain and everything. You know. It's like every every few
years in our business space, we we see a universal
solvent come along that maybe changes some things, maybe destroys

(01:08:13):
some things, and maybe maybe hopefully there are some things
that are relatively unscathed by it. But then it just
goes along on its own way. And and usually h
these things do not actually solve all the problems and
do not will not last forever. Well, I guess it
ultimately comes down to who is applying a supposed universal solving, right,
and it generally comes down to these these businesses of disruption.

(01:08:36):
It is about dissolving the rigidity of the of some
aspect of the industry. But it comes back to that
that that alchemical truth that we just laid out right,
the dissolution and coagulation there, And it's not so much
the dissolution that they're into. It is the eventual coagulation
because they wish to be the masters of that coagulation.

(01:08:57):
You know, I want I don't want to make everything
free so that it remains free. I want to make
everything free because I have a new model of how
to charge for it, you know. Uh. And that's what
we see time and time again with these different disruption
strategies you want to disrupt, they take uh, you know,
cable television, right, I mean, it's just it's it's it's classic.

(01:09:18):
You know, all these uh, these services that came along
to cut our costs and cut our chords, and you know,
and we're at the point now where, yeah, if you
want to watch everything that everyone's talking about, you're spending
as much money as you were as you were probably
spending in previous decades on your your cable and your
satellite and so forth. So it's just but just the
structure of it and the masters of it having some

(01:09:40):
cases changed. Yeah, I mean, I guess it is often
that you're just finding that you go through destruction and
then there's some kind of return to a new equilibrium.
But um, but along the way, I would just say,
be careful not to be led astray or to lose
too much to something that seems like it. I guess
anything that seems like it does anything the universal solve
and where the panacea, I mean, nothing actually works in

(01:10:03):
every case. And even if something is good, it's something
it's it's not good at everything, right, It just might
just reduce your product um to a to a carbon husk. Right,
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close the
alchemical books on this one. But I'm sure we will

(01:10:23):
return to alchemy in the future when we deal so
much with the history of of science and uh, and
you know in the history of religion and spiritual concepts
as well, that inevitably, uh, alchemical topics will arise once more,
and and I look forward to it. And hey, uh,
maybe we'll do an episode in Piranhas in the near
future as well. I love a good a good biology

(01:10:45):
exploration as well. In the meantime, if you like to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you know where to find them. There in the Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed, where you can get
wherever you get your podcasts. You'll find Core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, you'll find Artifact episo. It's on Wednesdays.
Listener mails. On Monday's Fridays, you'll find episodes of Weird
House Cinema. That's where we just talk about a weird

(01:11:06):
movie with little or no concern for science or alchemy,
uh either. And then on the weekends we air a
little bit of a repeated form of a Vault episode.
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,

(01:11:26):
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. First The Town

(01:12:03):
by a Father