What if alchemy was real

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Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. This painstaking process of decoding allowed researchers, for the first time, to attempt ambitious alchemical experiments. The use of gold to make more gold would have seemed entirely logical to alchemists, Principe explains, like using germs of wheat to grow an entire field of wheat.

Principe mixed specially prepared mercury and gold into a buttery lump at the bottom of a flask. Then he buried the sealed flask in a heated sand bath in his laboratory. The mixture of metals had grown upward into a structure resembling coral or the branching canopy of a tree minus the leaves. Its practitioners mainly sought to turn lead into gold, a quest that has captured the imaginations of people for thousands of years.

However, the goals of alchemy went far beyond simply creating some golden nuggets. Alchemy was rooted in a complex spiritual worldview in which everything around us contains a sort of universal spirit, and metals were believed not only to be alive but also to grow inside the Earth. When a base, or common, metal such as lead was found, it was thought to simply be a spiritually and physically immature form of higher metals such as gold.

To the alchemists, metals were not the unique substances that populate the Periodic Table , but instead the same thing in different stages of development or refinement on their way to spiritual perfection. As James Randi notes in his "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural," "Beginning about the year and reaching its flower in medieval times, alchemy was an art based partly upon experimentation and partly upon magic. Early investigators of natural processes centered their search on a mythical substance they knew as philosopher's stone, which was supposed to possess many valuable attributes such as the power to heal, to prolong life, and to change base metals into precious metal — such as gold.

Historian Nevill Drury, in his book "Magic and Witchcraft," notes that, "The word alchemy is thought to derive from an Egyptian word, 'chem' or 'qem,' meaning black — a reference to the black alluvial soils bordering the Nile We know that the Greek word 'chyma,' meaning to fuse or cast metals, established itself in Arabic as 'al kimia' — from which alchemy is derived.

Having the ability to turn lead into gold has obvious benefits these days, but ancient alchemists did not seek to change base metals into gold simply out of greed; as Drury notes, "The alchemists did not regard all metals as equally mature or 'perfect. A 'golden' human being was resplendent with spiritual beauty and had triumphed over the lurking power of evil.