Alchemy

The real history of the art of transformation: what alchemists claimed, what they did at the furnace, and how their search for gold became chemistry and a language for inner change.

• Maria the Jewess and the Bath That Bears Her Name The bain-marie is named for an alchemist of Roman Egypt. She almost certainly did not invent it, and almost nothing she wrote survives.
• Zosimos of Panopolis: The First Real Alchemist and His Nightmare Around 300, an Egyptian alchemist described stills, furnaces and a dream of a priest cut apart at an altar. To him, all of it was chemistry.
• Nicolas Flamel: The Scribe Who Became an Alchemist After He Died Nicolas Flamel was a Paris scribe who died in 1418. The book that made him the most famous alchemist in history appeared nearly two centuries later.
• The Alchemist Who Boiled Urine Looking for Gold and Found Phosphorus Around 1669 a Hamburg alchemist distilled stale urine and got a solid that glowed. He was the first named discoverer of an element, and he was never paid in full.
• Paracelsus: The Doctor Who Burned the Textbooks In 1527 a Swiss physician threw medicine's sacred text on a bonfire. Or so the story goes. What he did afterward mattered more.
• Isaac Newton's Secret Life as an Alchemist A 1936 auction revealed that the author of the Principia wrote about a million words on alchemy. Here is what the manuscripts really show.
• What Is the Philosopher's Stone? It was a powder, a medicine, a symbol of Christ and a crime in England. What alchemists really claimed, and what historians now think they were doing.
• Why Carl Jung Spent Thirty Years Studying Alchemy A Chinese manuscript in 1928 sent Jung into the alchemists' books. Historians now say he misread them.
• The Seven Stages of the Great Work Calcination to coagulation is a tidy modern list. The historical record offers four colors, twelve gates and no agreement at all.