Pseudo-Lull

Circulus digestionis, Pseudo-Lull, Opera Chemica, MS Florence Biblioteca Nazionale-Centrale, II, ill, 27, folio 25r (1472). With the permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale-Centrale, Florence. 

Pereira, Michela. Vegetare seu Transmutare The Vegetable Soul and Pseudo-Lullian Alchemy, in Fernando Dominguez Reboiras et al., eds., Arbor Scientiae Der Baum des Wissens von Ramon Lull (Brepols Turnhout, 2002). 

Figure 1 Pseudo ternary phase diagram. The dashed line (- -) is the boundary between the microemulsion (left) and emulsion (right) domains in the absence of monomers, i.e., in pure water. Addition of monomers (acrylamide + sodium acrylate) to water (1.25 mass ratio) extends the microemulsion domain up to the lull line (entire white area). Polymerization reactions have been carried out in the M area. (Isopar M is the oil). (From Ref 16.)...

These qualities led alchemists to infer that the quintessence of wine should be able to preserve living human bodies as well as it preserved meat. Unlike mineral acids, it was also a safe solvent for human ingestion. From this arose the notion that quintessence could be used both as an alchemical medicine for internal use and as an ingredient in the transmutation of metals. This theory was set out in great detail in one of the most influential alchemical treatises of the fourteenth century, the Liber de secretis naturae, seu de quinta essentia (The Book of the Secrets of Nature, or, concerning the Quintessence), attributed to the Majorcan philosopher Raymond Lull (ca. 1232-ca. 1316). Pseudo-Raymond described the quintessence as a vegetable mercury, or resolutive menstmum [23]. 

There are only two modem book-length studies of alchemy in Russian they are by the same author and are concerned with alchemy as a cultural phenomenon without reference to alchemy in Russia. Modem general histories of Russian science which include some history of chemistry have for the most part, until recently, avoided alchemy as a pseudo-science , more to be condemned as a western aberration than examined historically. Rainov s standard history of science in Russia up to the seventeenth century has no entry in the index for alchemy at all, although he does not ignore the subject entirely the Academy of Sciences standard history of Russian science denies, probably correctly, that Russian craftsmen ever engaged in alchemy or that there is any evidence for the existence of alchemy in Russia before the fifteenth century and Kuzakov in a recent work correctly notes that some non-alchemical works of what he calls, without further comment, the West European alchemists - Albertus Magnus, Ramon Lull and Michael Scot were known in seventeenth-century Russia but incorrectly states, as we shall see, that not a single alchemical treatise in Russian is known. 

Domus Galilaeana, Pisa (1972-73) and a Short Term F.A. Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London (1983). Her fields of research include Raimond Lull s natural philosophy, pseudo-Lullian alchemy, modem interpretations of alchemy and women and philosophy in the Middle Ages. Her recent books include The Alchemical corpus attributed to Raimond Lull, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts , vol. 18, London 1989 L oro deifilosofi. Saggio sulle idee di un alchimista del Trecento, Spoleto 1992. 

The first mention of nitric acid is in Pseudo-Geber s Inventione Veritatis, wherein it is obtained by calcining a mixture of niter, alum and blue vitriol. It was again described by Albert the Great in the 13th century and by Ramon Lull, who prepared it by heating niter and clay and called it "eau forte" (aqua fortis). 

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