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Alchemy (from Arabic: al-kīmiyā; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, khumeía) [1] is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. [2] In its Western form, alchemy is first attested in a number of pseudepigraphical texts ...
Aug 2, 2016 · The Surreal Art of Alchemical Diagrams. Derived from the Arabic root "kimia", from the Coptic "khem" (referring to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta), the word "alchemy" alludes to the dark mystery of the primordial or First Matter (the Khem). The discovery of this elusive original matter, from which all others are deemed simply polluted ...
Nov 14, 2016 · A 16th-century engraving of an alchemist mixing ingredients into a cauldron. Philalethes’s writing was a tough nut to crack, even for someone like William Newman, a historian of alchemy and early chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington. Newman worked on Philalethes’s texts on and off from 1978 to 1994.
- Zosimos: at Alchemy’s Foundations
- John of Rupescissa: Alchemy Against The Antichrist
- Cyprien Théodore Tiffereau, Alchemist of The 19th Century
In the cosmopolitan crossroads of Greco-Roman Egypt, the two streams of craft traditions and philosophical traditions coexisted. Their merger—probably in the third century AD—gave rise to the independent discipline of alchemy. The intimate mingling of the two traditions is evident in the earliest substantial texts we have about chrysopoeia [gold ma...
John of Rupescissa (or Jean de Roquetaillade) was born about 1310 in the Auvergne, in central France; he attended the University of Toulouse and then became a Franciscan friar. In doing so he was influenced by the ideas of a branch of the order known as the Spirituals, who opposed the increasing institutionalization of the Franciscan order as it gr...
Some 19th-century practitioners headed in new methodological directions. They continued to pursue metallic transmutation, but in new ways that often drew on contemporaneous scientific discoveries. In the mid-1850s, for example, the chemist and photographer Cyprien Théodore Tiffereau (1819–after 1898) presented a series of papers to the Academy of S...
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May 19, 2016 · An 16th century engraving of an alchemist using flute, as depicted in The mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy by C. J. S. Thomson (1897) via Wikimedia Commons Understanding the process of distillation–the purification of a substance or the creation of a concentrate from a liquid mixture–occupied considerable experimental interest ...
Aug 1, 2006 · Ryan Donnell for The New York Times. At the turn of the 17th century, King Henry IV of France surrounded himself with alchemists who sought to resurrect plants from their ashes and experimented ...
Mar 29, 2024 · alchemy, a form of speculative thought that, among other aims, tried to transform base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold and to discover a cure for disease and a way of extending life. Alchemy was the name given in Latin Europe in the 12th century to an aspect of thought that corresponds to astrology, which is apparently an ...
