What is alchemy?

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TheMarriedKnight

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Up to what I know alchemy is about people trying to create a philosopher stone in order to obtain power equal to God, which is evil. I’m I right or is there more to it?
 
It was the medieval precursor to chemistry. The idea was that you could change base metals, like lead, to precious metals like gold.

You can actually change one metal to another, but you have to start with a metal higher in the periodic table, as I recall. So it won’t do you much good to change uranium to gold. (It might not have been uranium; it’s been half a century since I took chemistry. But I know I figured it out once and it was not a profitable idea.)
 
Alchemy was an early attempt at chemistry. Stuff that we think is pretty obvious today was an utter mystery back then. As far as I know, alchemists did not aspire to be like God. More likely, they wanted to obtain much-needed resources like metals, or get rich by making gold from inexpensive lead.
 
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So is alchemy as a whole evil? because history says they used it to true to be like God.
 
To the primitive mind, science appears to be magic. So it’s quite possible that alchemists thought chemistry was magic or connected to the spiritual.

Whether it is evil depends on the alchemist’s intentions. Alchemy is not evil for those who want only to understand and master nature. It could be evil for those who want only riches and power.
 
Are you or someone you know attempting to perform alchemy?

Are you or someone you know experiencing a temptation to attempt to perform alchemy?

-Fr ACEGC
 
TheMarriedKnight said:
Up to what I know alchemy is about people trying to create a philosopher stone in order to obtain power equal to God, which is evil. I’m I right or is there more to it?
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It was a system of symbols designed to conceal certain spiritual practices from those who were uninitiated. Many of the practices were sexual in nature (think tantra in Hinduism or Buddhism), and those who practiced them would have been met with scorn or persecution if it was clear what they were doing, so they obscured it in a labyrinth of symbols.

The medieval alchemist Paracelsus basically says as much in one of his essays:
But if any shall understand either common or Chymical Gold to be the substance of this sacred body, he is much mistaken; for a glorious Spirit will not appear, save in a body of his own kinde.
– Paracelsus, Urim and Thummim shewed to be made by Art, and are the same with the Universal Spirit, corporate and fixed
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So he’s admitting here that all the discussion of changing lead into gold was a decoy, because they weren’t actually interested “common” or “chemical” gold, but something spiritual.

He further states:
The end is directed to invent works in Gold, Silver and Brass; which is not to be understood according to the sound of words, but according to the intent of all Distillation, to extract the inward part, and manifest the central vertue: for where the perfection of the matter is glorious, the perfection of the form is more glorious. – ibid.
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So here he says that “Gold, Silver and Brass are not to be understood according to the sound of the words…” In other words, when you hear them talking about “gold,” “silver,” or “brass,” those words do not mean what they sound like (“gold,” “silver,” or “brass”), they mean something else entirely. The metals are meant to be understood allegorically.

And yes, many of those people did involve themselves in studies of physical chemicals or medicine (as Paracelsus did), but as he explains in that essay, the true meaning of alchemy and the creation of the philosopher’s stone had nothing to do with those physical experiments.

Once you understand that they’re not talking about physical metal, things like the Emerald Tablet or those cryptic alchemical drawings like the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine start to make a lot more sense.
 
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@Viki63

Well, we can create gold from lead or other common elements but the process itself is so energy-exhaustive that it’s far cheaper to mine it. Nobody can currently make any money off of it 😁
 
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There were some people like Saint Albertus Magnus (the mentor of Thomas Aquinas) who treated Alchemy as any science, i.e. proto-Chemistry.

There were others who mixed Alchemy with occultism and used it to be rich (including Isaac Newton it seems).

So, just like Astrology, morally it was a mixed field (no pun intended).
 
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It is a beautiful spiritual system that is perfectly compatible with Christianity (and some would argue, convincingly, that Christianity is a form of it at it’s core). It isn’t evil. Anything can be done for evil intentions though. See the book of Lambspring for an example of it: The Hermetic Museum, Vol. I: The Book of Lambspring

here is a lecture on some of the symbolism:

 
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I would never practice alchemy and neither does anyone. No, I have no temptation to use alchemy. I just want answers to know if it’s entirely evil or a science because I heard it’s something that was used to try to create a stone that grants people power equal to God (which is an evil thing to do).
 
@AlbMagno

Isn’t astrology pretty much just trying to learn secret knowledge from the stars? (like the equivalent of divining from sheep intestines)

There were naturalists in the ancient world who tried to understand things based on the movement of the stars but that was separate from astrology, no?
 
I used to think that but once here in CAF someone linked this article which says that at least in Scholastic times, Astrology (as a predictive method) was acccepted in metaphysics.

Of course, I am not one of those Catholics that thinks that everything that Thomas Aquinas wrote or did is infallible and hyper-essential, so, if you are like me, you can also think that Aquinas and their Scholastic peers were mistaken in this…
 
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That explanation sounds more like a scientific hypothesis but I guess way, way back in the good old days that stuff was a bit muddled.

In fairness, the moon and the weather can affect people’s moods so I guess it’s not all completely wrong. 😁 The more you know.
 
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Viki63 said:
You can actually change one metal to another, but you have to start with a metal higher in the periodic table, as I recall.
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You can use a lower metal and either fusion or some method that turns a neutron into a proton and electron to raise the atomic number. But, as someone else mentioned, the expense far exceeds any gain. Doing it for a few atoms in research isn’t too hard. Visible amounts are another story.
 
TK421 said:
Well, we can create gold from lead or other common elements but the process itself is so energy-exhaustive that it’s far cheaper to mine it. Nobody can currently make any money off of it 😁
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That is correct. As far as I know, the only cost-effective process is to make ‘artificial’ diamonds. There is at least one company that makes them.
 
Alchemy could be considered the founding father of modern chemistry.
 
:+1:That’s so funny, I nearly fell off my chair in laughter 🤣 As to the question on whether it is evil or not I tend to agree with @Beryllos
Beryllos said:
Whether it is evil depends on the alchemist’s intentions. Alchemy is not evil for those who want only to understand and master nature. It could be evil for those who want only riches and power.
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After all, we generally do not consider modern science to be evil. As with anything it has great capacity for good as well as bad.
 
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