History of Alchemy

This is my timeline of Alchemy and all the influences it received and produced.  This is a work ...

What is known of how much chemistry was done before 600 BC?  Lots, and none. We have artifacts. ...

There are four Egyptian creation myths, all similar. The different creation myths have some el...

Plato inherited the four-element idea from Empedocles. About 360 B.C. he wrote Timaeus where the ...

Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, is considered one of the best minds the world has every produc...

Diogenes tried hard to challenge the ideas underpinning alchemy. He was a troll, attending lectur...

Alexander III, son of Philip of Macedon, was at the age of 16 a pupil of Aristotle. As his pupil ...

Alchemy, astrology and Magic always seem to go together. They were combined in the early renaissa...

Democritus around 350 B.C. had a nice theory of atoms. He said any bit of matter can be divided u...

The first writings we have on Alchemy are recipes. A little obscure philosophy, mostly instructio...

After Alexander, all trade was done in Koine Greek ("common" or "shared" Greek, pronounced "coin-...

There were three women alchemists early on, all famous. Mary Prophetess (or Maria the Jewess, amo...

Two papyri were discovered in Thebes, in Egypt from about 300 A.D. They were part of a trove of p...

There were many types of alchemy. The most entertaining are the wildly-descriptive allegories, an...

Gnosticism was a religious way of life, originating in Israel and Egypt just after the time of Ch...

No name is better known in alchemy than Hermes Trismegistus. His name is Hermes. Trismegistus is ...

Stephanos of Alexandria wasn't really from nor lived in Alexandria. He was from Constantinople, i...

The question is always asked in discussions of alchemy with students: given what the alchemists d...

I keep an Alchemy Journal. It's like a Grail Diary but more notes and less exploration. I use Liv...

What of Roman alchemy? Rome was the inheritor of Greek thinking, and Rome had a close interaction...

Chinese alchemy is the first documented, but they always had their own version of alchemy. I don'...

Alchemy on the India subcontinent was largely about health, medicine and longevity. It was tied i...

The four-element theory combined with transmutation from Aristotle was adopted wholesale into med...

There is one YouTube channel which stands out for good alchemy discussion: ESOTERICA by Dr. Justi...

By 600 A.D. Egypt was being run the Byzantine Roman empire (Constantine moved the seat of Roman r...

Of the many fascinating Arabic texts impinging on alchemy and science, I will only address a few ...

Jabir ibn Hayyan is a central figure in Arabic alchemy. Working from about 750 AD he also preserv...

Okay, I know it's hard to read so much. Here's the short version, as told by me: Mercury-Sulfur ...

Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī is thought to have written a very important Arabic text, known in La...

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī worked about 900 A.D. as a physician and alchemist. His ...

Abu Ali ibn Sīnā, 'Avicenna' in Europe, was the greatest of the Golden Age of Islam intellectuals...

In 200 AD, the land of Spain was occupied and controlled by Rome. When Rome began to decline in 4...

We don't know the identity of Artephius, but he is very early for European alchemy, right at th...

Albertus Magnus, "Albert the Great", was a German who became a monk then a university lecturer, a...

Roger Bacon (1219 - 1292) was also a monk (Franciscan friar) teaching at the University of Paris....

Arnold of Villanova, born near Valencia, Spain, in 1235, was a renowned physician and contrarian....

Raymond Lull (or Ramon or Lully or Llull or Lullii, 1232 - 1315) is a highly influential author. ...

Geber was invented in Europe, probably after 1300 AD. he wrote in Latin, was not a numerologist, ...

Petrus Bonus wrote one very influential work, The New Pearl of Great Price in 1330 AD. This book ...

John Dastin (or Dastyn or Dastain or Dausten) defended alchemy when it was attacked by Pope John ...

Symbols have almost always been used in alchemy. It took two forms: typographic symbolism, litera...

There is a long history of alchemists conning the gullible out of their riches. We've just seen a...

Nicholas Flamel is probably the most famous non-existent alchemist. I think he didn't not exist, ...

In the 1500's and 1600's, a series of compilations of alchemical texts were published. This has a...

George Ripley (1415 - 1490) holds a semi-special spot in my alchemical education. He wrote a long...

On May 29th, 1453, the great city of Constantinople, which stood for over 1000 years, assaulted b...

Behind Nicholas Flamel in popularity as an alchemist is Paracelsus, born Theophrastus Philippus A...

Aurum Potabile, drinkable gold, was a Paracelsian idea based on the perfection of gold being used...

In the early 1600's there was one emperor, Rudolf II in Prague, who funded much alchemy. The sto...

Peter Rami, or in Latin, Petrus Ramus, was a student at the Collège de Navarre in 1536. He starte...

The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians, was founded in Germany in 1614 by the publica...

Robert Fludd was a great defender of Rosicrucianism, a successful London physician, the punching ...

Relatively unknown person, published a short leaflet with a long title: A Caveat for Alchymists, ...

With the advent of printing, 1440, and etching to make sturdy images, came the emblem books. Prin...

We have reached the point in the history of science that events considered fundamental to the dev...

We recently read some blogs here "translated by J.F.M.D." This is John French, M.D., Paracelcian ...

George Starkey was an American, Harvard-educated, who moved to England in 1650 to be closer to th...

Elias Ashmole, like his contemporary Robert Boyle, bridges alchemy and chemistry. He loved old th...

If we didn't have a Robert Boyle, we'd have needed to invent one. Boyle was the son of the wealth...

Isaac Newton was an alchemist. In terms of years of work, he was far more an alchemist than a phy...

There is no date for the death of alchemy. What we see is a long series of changes to the four el...

This is a huge question for me. Why did alchemy persist, as an idea, from 300 B.C. to about 1750 ...

Another important question. Why study it, if it didn't give us chemists anything important?  I t...

Is alchemy gone? To answer that, say exactly what alchemy was. Alchemy was a complete reliance o...