Pod Insights Unexplainable Who are we to fight the alchemy? About this episode Many alchemical texts are full of bizarre, metaphorical language. But what if there's interesting science hiding behind some of those metaphors?
Guest: Lawrence Principe, professor of the history of science and professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:37 Speaker 00 Lawrence Prinzippe has been interested in alchemy for a while now.
1:41 Speaker 02 Many years ago, and I won't say how many, when I was in high school, I was rooting about in the public library. Now, the usual reason I did this was because I was very interested in chemistry, often very interested in making fireworks and that sort of thing that teenagers like to do. And in this particular visit, I noticed that there were books, before I got to chemistry, on the history of chemistry. And there was a book I remember called "The Arts of the Alchemists."
2:15 Speaker 02 And I took it down off the shelf and I started thumbing through it. And it was filled with beautiful images and some facsimile pages of alchemical manuscripts. And at that point, I began to think, well, wow, what were they actually doing?
2:32 Speaker 00 Now, after that discovery, he did go on to make some fireworks.
2:36 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. I spent quite a great deal of time doing that when I was a younger person.
2:44 Speaker 02 Yes, and I still even have all my fingers and toes.
2:48 Speaker 00 But ultimately, the question of what the alchemists were actually doing stuck with him. In fact, he has devoted a sizable chunk of his career to answering it. He's now a professor of the history of science and a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins. And over the last few decades, he has helped turn our understanding of alchemy kind of on its head.
3:11 Speaker 00 So before I read about Lawrence's work, I thought alchemists were nothing more than either medieval quacks or single-minded obsessives who wrote fanciful books about turning lead into gold and achieving immortality. I thought they were a joke, essentially. And I thought this because that's been the cultural narrative about alchemy for a long time. But now Lawrence is one of several historians of science who've been rewriting that narrative. They have been recreating old alchemist experiments in modern day labs. And by doing this historical recreation, they have pieced together a new story, a story that is forcing people like me to reevaluate what I thought I knew,
3:55 Speaker 00 not just about alchemists, but also about the history of chemistry itself.
4:02 Speaker 00 So this is unexplainable. I'm Britt Pinkerton. And today on the show, what were the alchemists actually doing? Researchers like Lawrence don't have all the answers, but what they are learning is kind of transmuting alchemy from a joke into a fascinating chapter in the history of science.
4:41 Speaker 00 Okay, let's start with some basics. Like, what actually is alchemy?
4:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's actually a more difficult question than it sounds.
4:51 Speaker 00 Turns out, alchemy has a long history that stretches back millennia. And for a lot of that history, some of what people refer to as alchemy sounds a lot like what we might call chemistry. Because alchemists weren't always solely focused on making gold.
5:07 Speaker 02 It was one of the major goals of the alchemists. But it wasn't all that they did. They were interested as well in making medicines, for example, improved pharmaceuticals. But a whole range of sort of quotidian substances like cosmetics, perfumes, alcoholic drinks, metal alloys, all these sorts of things, dyes and pigments.
5:30 Speaker 00 When Lawrence was starting out, though, he was reading through the work of European alchemists who were trying to make the philosopher's stone. So the substance that was thought to transmute metals and also sometimes extend life. Basically, the kind of alchemy you read about in literary fiction that seems like a pointless pursuit, right? Or a whole lot of nonsense. And at least part of the reason that people have spent so much time thinking this kind of alchemy is nonsense is that if you read through alchemical books, a lot of them look like a bunch of nonsense. They are full of riddles and metaphorical language and stuff like...
6:08 Speaker 03 Take our fiery dragon that hides the magical steel in its belly with our magnet and mix them with torrid Vulcan. This will be easily done if Saturn beholds himself in the mirror of Mars. Vence is made our chameleon, our chaos.
6:28 Speaker 02 Well, just try to take that into the lab and do something with it.
6:32 Speaker 00 This language is, it turns out, intentionally confusing. Alchemists didn't necessarily want everyone to understand their books.
6:39 Speaker 02 First of all, if you think you're close to the way of making gold from cheap substances, you don't really want everybody else to know about it.
6:49 Speaker 00 So you might write stuff in weird coded language.
6:52 Speaker 02 Moreover, alchemy was actually illegal in terms of the transmutation of base metals into gold in a number of countries, mostly because people were afraid that, oh, what if this guy in his cellar starts making all this gold? Well, then the value of gold becomes zero because you can make it and your entire economy and political stability goes out the window.
7:21 Speaker 00 These various bans didn't stop people from doing alchemy, but again, they meant that chemical writing was often bizarre and full of metaphors, especially as you got to the late 14th century, 15th century and beyond.
7:33 Speaker 02 And once you have that kind of metaphorical language, people just sort of go crazy with it. So instead of saying this material and that material, they'll say the Red King and the White Queen, the Wolf, the Lion that Devours the Sun and so forth. And instead of describing anything that could possibly seem to be like a chemical formula, let's say, they become dream sequences or metaphorical stories. You know, I fell asleep one day and I saw a king come to take a bath and he took off his clothes and he got into the water and he melted away and blah, blah, blah. And all this sort of very rich, extravagant, really bizarre kind of language.
8:17 Speaker 00 Your fiery dragons and your Saturns beholding themselves in the mirrors of Mars.
8:22 Speaker 02 And so you can see why it is that alchemy, until very recently, in terms of historical understanding, has simply not been understood because it just looks so weird.
8:37 Speaker 00 And listen, if I were a historian, I too would probably not read through something that sounded like the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and think it looked like solid science. So it's maybe not surprising that there were a lot of interpretations that argued that alchemy was something else. There were 19th century writers who thought that the practice was more about transforming the self than about transforming real things in the laboratory, with one author saying, you know, mercury in an alchemical text could be read as a metaphor for a clear conscience, for example. Or in the 20th century, Carl Jung reinterpreted alchemy as a kind of psychological phenomenon.
9:15 Speaker 02 So when I started trying to learn about alchemy in the late 70s and early 80s, I did not have a lot of books that helped.
9:24 Speaker 00 Still, there were people who were curious about whether some alchemists might have been doing something non metaphorical. And Jung, Lawrence P. Pynchipe was one of those people. He enjoyed chemistry. He knew enough to make his own fireworks safely. And in some of these authors' private and even public writings, there were things that looked less like fanciful metaphors and more like a series of instructions. So he figured one way to figure out if any of these texts had real practical advice, or if they were all just imagery, was to see if he could follow the instructions and produce results. So when he went off to college, that's what he tried to do.
10:06 Speaker 02 I was extremely fortunate to have chosen the University of Delaware to go to as an undergraduate. And I happened to mention my interest to one of the faculty there. And he said, oh, let me check on something and get back to you. Well, it turned out the university had purchased a huge collection of books in the history of science from an Italian chemical engineer, as I recall. And this faculty member actually got me access to them. Well, I couldn't have been more happy at that point, having free run of this amazing collection of alchemical and early chemical books. And to make it even better,
10:49 Speaker 02 the chemistry department itself actually let me use some unused student laboratories to try to replicate these processes.
10:59 Speaker 00 He selected one specific text written by a pretty famous alchemist.
11:05 Speaker 02 A text by a supposed Benedictine monk, who went under the name of Basilius Valentinus, which is a fake name if anyone's ever heard one. A text written in 1604 on the properties and the preparations of the element antimony.
11:22 Speaker 00 Antimony is a brittle, silverish, toxic metalloid that makes an appearance in a lot of different texts, including this one.
11:29 Speaker 02 I chose that document in particular because it was unusually clear. It did not have the sort of wild metaphors. It seemed to at least to have what were rather straightforward recipes.
11:44 Speaker 00 And for his recreation, Lawrence picked instructions that the book claimed were "simple," this way of making something called "the glass of antimony," which was basically taking antimony, manipulating it in specific ways until you got a kind of brittle, golden glass. So young undergrad Lawrence got some antimony and got to work.
12:05 Speaker 02 All right, well, I started feeling really bad about this because the author says, "Well, just because I'm being complete, I'm going to tell you how to make this, but everybody knows how to make it." Yeah, well, I tried for months to make it, and it never worked.
12:19 Speaker 00 He was following the instructions and getting gunk, not glass. Not the best sign if you're trying to entertain the idea that these old texts from the 1600s describe legitimate experiments.
12:32 Speaker 02 You don't immediately think, "Well, there's something wrong with me." You probably think there's something wrong with the author.
12:38 Speaker 00 But Lawrence did not write off Basil Valentine because he figured his experiment was not actually a perfect recreation. He was using bunsen burners and other modern equipment and antimony that came from a chemical supplier, not exactly what Basil had access to back in the day. Maybe something about his modern tools was throwing things off. And so he experimented a little bit. He went to a mineral shop, for example, to try and get antimony in a form that was closer to what Basil would have had.
13:06 Speaker 02 I even tried to get it from Hungary, or what was Hungary in Basil Valentine's day, to see if I could get something that was quite similar.
13:15 Speaker 00 What he eventually figured out was that Basil was probably working with something that had some impurities in it, like sand. And that probably would have added some silica to the mix. And so he tried things again, but this time with some silica added.
13:29 Speaker 02 And you just need about 2% of silica. And- Wow, it becomes a beautiful, transparent glass. So it was a matter of the impurity that was in the original material.
13:42 Speaker 00 He'd done it. He had shown that, this recipe at least, was a real set of instructions that he could follow in the present day.
13:49 Speaker 02 I was exhilarated by this. People have criticized alchemical writers for reporting imaginary effects, or just making things up, or being sloppy workers. But my argument was, maybe we need to just look a little bit closer and give these texts enough free space and enough time to justify themselves by looking more deeply, by being less judgmental, and trying to get into the mindset, as much as is possible, of the original authors. And that is, after all, what historians are trying to do.
14:30 Speaker 00 This was a victory, obviously. But it wasn't the biggest victory. Because, yes, Florence had successfully done an experimental recreation from an alchemist's book. But it was for a pretty simple glass experiment. And there's nothing in modern chemistry that suggests you can't make glass. So he started to wonder about the wackier stuff that alchemists were writing about, like the weird metaphor language and the philosopher's stone.
14:58 Speaker 02 When you've got something like the philosopher's stone that's supposed to turn one element into another, that modern chemistry tells us shouldn't happen, then you're getting a little bit deeper into the thick of things, I think.
15:12 Speaker 00 I think so, too. So after the break, we will go deeper into the thick of things.
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19:14 Speaker 00 So, as an undergrad, Lawrence Principe used experimental recreation to show that a recipe for making glass, published by an alchemist back in the 1600s, was in fact a legitimate recipe. But he still had questions, especially about the parts of alchemical texts that were more fanciful or more weird.
19:33 Speaker 02 What I was trying to do was to figure out, well, why did people believe that they were able to transmute base metals into gold? What made them write these texts with often the wild imagery? What's really going on there?
19:52 Speaker 00 He started working with a text of a 17th century alchemical author.
19:55 Speaker 02 His real name was George Starkey. He was born in Bermuda in 1628. He went to England and he started circulating or writing texts under the pseudonym of Irenaeus Philolathes, which is Greek for the peaceful lover of truth.
20:13 Speaker 06 That's such a difference from George Starkey.
20:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, yeah, Irenaeus Philolathes is really George.
20:20 Speaker 00 George was interesting to Lawrence because in his public work, he was as metaphorical and flowery as the next guy. But in his private letters and his lab notebooks, his instructions were clearer and followable. And he talked a lot about his theories about alchemy.
20:37 Speaker 02 And one of his theoretical ideas is that if you want to make gold, he uses a sort of agricultural metaphor, that gold has within itself a seed. And if you can find the right kind of metallic water to cause it to grow, you should be able to make more gold, just like you take one grain of wheat, you put it in the ground, you get more wheat back. So it's this agricultural metaphor.
21:04 Speaker 00 Apparently, there is a school of alchemical thought that believed that just like there is a seed of an apple inside an apple, there's also a seed of gold inside of gold, and that you could use the right kind of mercury to free that seed, which would result in a philosopher's stone that could change other stuff also into gold. So in this vein, one of George's projects was to make this special philosophical mercury.
21:29 Speaker 02 He claimed that you could make a particular kind of mercury, quicksilver, right, prepared in a special kind of way, that when mixed with gold and heated in a flask would, as he calls it, vegetate. So this sounds extraordinarily unlikely.
21:47 Speaker 00 As a 21st century chemist, Lawrence was pretty skeptical that mercury was going to do anything that you would describe as vegetating. But he did have these rough instructions from George about how to make this happen. So he took some mercury and tried to do a version of what George did.
22:03 Speaker 02 Mixed it up with a bit of gold, put it in a flask, sealed it up, and started heating it.
22:08 Speaker 00 Again, Lawrence works in a modern lab, so he was not exactly replicating all the steps, like because he was using mercury, which is toxic, he was working under a ventilation hood, for example. But he had the substance sealed in a flask.
22:21 Speaker 02 What's called the philosophical egg, a round bottom flask with a very long neck that you put the ingredient in and then you seal. And I had it buried in a sand bath in a thermostatically controlled heating mantle. He doesn't give us a correct degree of heat that has to be added. And so it took several weeks. And it just sat there as sort of a gray, slightly bubbly mass. So what I started doing is I started increasing the heat very slightly every few days before I went home. And one morning, I went in, took the flask up out of the sand, and what the night before
23:05 Speaker 02 had been an amorphous mass of sort of gray, slimy stuff, there was a beautiful glittering silver tree inside the flask.
23:18 Speaker 00 What?
23:20 Speaker 02 Well, that's sort of the result I had. I put it back in the sand bath. I sat down in my desk and sat there for several minutes, quite concerned that I'd actually lost my mind.
23:33 Speaker 00 What do you mean, a tree?
23:37 Speaker 02 Well, what had been just at the very bottom of the flask had grown upwards to fill the entire flask with a trunk and what we would call dendritic growths of a brilliant silver color.
23:51 Speaker 00 What?
23:52 Speaker 02 Yes, I have photos. I've even published photos of that.
23:57 Speaker 00 Now, this does not mean that modern chemistry is wrong, or that either mercury or gold grows like a tree. But the mercury in the flask did take a shape that looks tree-like. And so suddenly, George's vegetative language was beginning to make more sense to Lawrence, which is one really clear thing that experimental reconstruction can give a historian like him.
24:27 Speaker 02 So when they talk about this bizarre metaphorical description, it's not necessarily just their imagination, or just a series of literary or metaphorical images. It actually, in some cases, has this concrete visual experience behind it.
24:49 Speaker 02 Part of the reason I study this is why does alchemy persist so long? Well, I think that they were actually seeing remarkable things. Maybe not the actual transmutation of lead into real gold. Nevertheless, imagine just for a second, if I, as a late 20th, early 21st century chemist, was absolutely shocked by this and thought that I had lost my mind. What would that have done to a 17th century alchemist who is convinced that a vegetative theory of the growth of metals is the right explanation?
25:32 Speaker 02 He would surely have said, wow, it really works. I'm going to work twice as hard to take this on to the next steps of making the philosopher's stone, because I've seen this amazing thing.
25:45 Speaker 00 Based on his work so far, Lawrence has developed a kind of hypothesis that he's exploring. So his idea here is that the early parts of some of these texts, the first few steps, they're more like this tree of mercury situation. They're doable, practical experiments. But then, as the texts move on, he thinks they become more hypothetical.
26:09 Speaker 02 Experience transitions to expectation. I've got a theory of how this is supposed to go. I've seen it work this far. What should happen next, as a kind of extrapolation, are the next few steps. I haven't gotten them to work, but here's the way they should work.
26:31 Speaker 00 And then, a lot of these books end with a description of the philosopher's stone that he thinks is just copied from other older books. So not drawn from personal experience. It's kind of like a description of what they're all working towards, or how they will know that they got things right.
26:46 Speaker 02 That's my working hypothesis right now. How many alchemical texts of the thousands that are out there this actually works with? I can't say, but I can cite several where it does seem to work pretty darn well.
26:59 Speaker 00 Is there any part of you that's like?
27:02 Speaker 06 The first few steps don't seem to be metaphorical. Maybe they were just making philosopher's stones.
27:11 Speaker 02 Oh, I often wish that. I did have the former dean of my university once come by and say, wow, if I can't balance the budget, I'm going to be coming to your lab for some help.
27:25 Speaker 00 So there's still some imagination at work in alchemical tax. But Lawrence and other historians like him have shown that there's also some real stuff to be found as well. Stuff that's grounded in repeatable experimentation. And this new perspective has also changed how Lawrence and others look at some of the early figures of the scientific revolution. Isaac Newton studied alchemy, for example, as did Robert Boyle, a leading light in early modern chemistry.
27:55 Speaker 02 Robert Boyle certainly knew his alchemical literature. He depended upon some alchemical writers. In fact, our friend George Starkey that I mentioned to you was schooled, tutored essentially, in the practice of chemistry by George Starkey.
28:14 Speaker 06 What? They knew each other?
28:16 Speaker 02 Oh, yes.
28:18 Speaker 00 Robert Boyle, in fact, knew about the vegetative theory of mercury.
28:21 Speaker 02 Yes, Starkey entrusted him with the secret of how to do that. And he spent the next 40 years of his life trying to get it to completion.
28:34 Speaker 00 If you think alchemy is total nonsense, that might seem like a stain on Boyle's reputation. But if you've redone the experiment and seen that this mercury tree stuff was doable chemistry, then maybe it seems less out of character.
28:47 Speaker 02 People have sort of imagined there to be some great discontinuity in the development of chemistry or in the development of the sciences. With what I like to refer to as the arrogance of the present, thinking that old people were dumb and look here, the light dawned suddenly and now we're modern. And we just see that this is just not true. And in fact, the truth of the matter is much more interesting to see this gradual accumulation of information, the refining of ideas, sometimes the discarding of theories in favor of a new one, but that's a gradual process that happens over time. And I think certainly in the case of chemistry, this is the case.
29:35 Speaker 00 Lawrence is not the only person working in this space. And in the time since he and his partner in reconstruction, Bill Newman, started publishing about alchemy, the field's gone through kind of a revolution.
29:46 Speaker 02 One of the things that I am shocked by is that now alchemy has dozens and dozens of people, some absolutely astonishing younger scholars as well, working on it. So it's become a hot topic in a sense. The other thing that I find equally surprising is that this experimental reproduction of chemical processes or early processes as a tool, as a historical tool in the history of science, has also become now suddenly mainstream.
30:19 Speaker 00 If not mainstream, then at least more popular. And experimental recreations can't give researchers everything, right? Even if Lawrence recreated every detail of a medieval lab perfectly, which he doesn't try to do, he's always going to be a 21st century chemist, operating in a 21st century framework.
30:40 Speaker 02 Clearly, when I'm looking at something, anything, it doesn't matter, when I'm looking out the window, I am interpreting it through all sorts of lenses that have been created by the social, political, emotional, religious context of 2026. And my historical actors, in the same way, have their own mental landscape constructed by 1354 or 1661.
31:11 Speaker 00 So there will always be limits to what anyone can learn about the past by reconstructing it. But still, when I think about the experimental tradition in science, right? The idea that you try things to see what shakes out. I think it's really fitting that the history of science is incorporating that approach, too. And maybe it's not surprising that some big field-changing ideas have come out of the attempt.
31:43 Speaker 00 If you would like to read more about alchemy, Laurence Prinzipé's book, The Secrets of Alchemy, is a great place to start. It has a lot of information about the history of alchemy that we couldn't fit into this episode, and a great section about how alchemy got such a terrible reputation. Also, if you want to read more about turning lead into gold, in doing the research for this episode, I learned that physicists have actually turned a very small amount of lead into some very short-lived gold by using a particle accelerator. So I will link to a Nature article about that in the transcript.
32:22 Speaker 00 This episode was produced by me, Bert Pinkerton. It was transmuted into, if not gold, then at least a better version of itself, by my editor, Joanna Solotaroff. Jo Plord did the mixing and the sound design. Noam Hassenfeld does our music. Melissa Hirsch checks our facts. Jorge Just, Meredith Hodnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm, and Amy Padula are the fact that large raindrops are shaped like hamburger buns. And my thanks to Jennifer Rampling, Angela Krieger, and Bruce Moran for speaking to me for this episode and helping me better understand both alchemy and the history of science. Thanks also to Matthew Jordan for sending me down this rabbit hole
33:03 Speaker 00 to begin with. If you have thoughts about alchemy or things about the history of science you think we should explore, please email us. We are at [email protected] . We are always open to your ideas, and we really love hearing about your research as well. If you would like to support this show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members. You get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you also get to know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you have signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We're as good as gold. No alchemy required.
33:47 Speaker 00 Thank you. We also really appreciate those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform or shared Unexplainable episodes with people in your life. You are also golden in my eyes. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.
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