The Stone of the Wise

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Alchemy, which paralleled chemistry much as astrology did astronomy, probably arose in the eastern Mediterranean in Roman times. Later it flowered in the Islamic world and in medieval Europe, but with the scientific revolution it split off from chemistry proper and slowly declined as the great chemical discoveries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries undermined its position.

Well, just what was alchemy? A philosophy, - an art, and (its practitioners thought) a science. As a philosophy it dealt with the nature of matter; as a science it formulate laws governing the changes in material substances; as an art it was carried on with furnaces, vessels and reagents as was chemistry.

But alchemy differed from chemistry in two ways. First, it was based upon magical concepts of the analogistic universe, full of sympathetic forces and occult connections. Secondly, while chemistry studies the behavior of matter for a vast variety of industrial and medical purposes, alchemy narrowly pursued the secrets of changing base metals into gold and of making the Elixir of Life to confer health and immortality. Some alchemists even sought the alkahest or universal solvent, though the smarter ones asked: what would you put in it if you got it?

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