Sophistical alchemy

True alchemy archimia verd) transmutes not only the accidents of things, but also their substance, so that the artificial gold produced will be identical to natural gold, even in its medical virtues. Sophistical alchemy archimia sofisti-catd), on the other hand, transmutes only the accidents of matter, so that the base metals may appear to be gold or silver, but will retain their base substance intact (Newman 136). False alchemy is necromancy. 

As the new atomic science, through ever more sophisticated detectors, opened a realm that could not be directly perceived by the physical senses, occult chemistry offered an alternative, a mode of scientific experimentation that could attempt to claim legitimacy through its scientific writing, charts, and visual illustrations of data while it also connected the human psyche to the subatomic world through a direct form of perception—that is, clairvoyance. (Theosophists argued that clairvoyance was indeed a sense faculty.) The conception of alchemy that supported such a vision was the spiritual alchemy we... 

Alchemy, which provided the theoretical basis for metallurgy, gradually changed this. It added a deeper sophistication to ideas about the nature and transformation of matter, providing a bridge between the old and new conceptions of the elements. 

This book follows Sommering and his contemporaries as they struggled to define what it meant to practice alchemy in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. The dramatic burst of interest in alchemy in this period was accompanied by a great deal of disagreement about some of the most fundamental facets of alchemical practice. What was the best way to gain alchemical expertise, and what kinds of things could alchemists actually produce Was alchemy simply a way to create medicines and precious metals, or must practitioners combine that work with a more sophisticated intellectual or even spiritual project Should they sell their knowledge to patrons or other practitioners Debates about alchemical ideas and practices were hardly new in the sixteenth century, of course from the time... 

Sixteenth-century students of alchemy thus had an extraordinarily rich and diverse textual tradition to which to turn. Medieval authors provided both sophisticated discussions of alchemical theory and material on practice, while an ancient thread, revived in the Renaissance, stressed the more... 

Why was alchemy such a compelling subject At first sight it seems to be an odd blend of the bizarre and the practical. The stories of transmutations are incredible, bordering on fairy tales, but the equipment that the alchemist used in his laboratory was technically advanced for its time. Why were such sophisticated scientific methods used in the pursuit of such mystical ideas What were the beliefs that lay behind this occult science ... 

Despite these hostile comments early in the Pirotechnia, Biringuccio s chapter on alchemy near the end of the book is a model of restraint. In this chapter, he divides alchemy into two branches, one of which is a just, holy, and good way, while the other is sophistic, violent, and unnatural. 45 The practitioners of the first path claim to be imitators and assistants of nature and work by first purging bodies of their defects and then augmenting their virtues. Even if the goal of this art is vain, it is still a worthwhile enterprise,... 

Nye completely excludes alchemy from her account—this is an important omission that follows in the steps of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography of science. I. Stengers and B. Bensaude-Vincent s History of Chemistry, published only a few years after Nye (1994), showed how fundamental concepts of chemistry, such as analysis, isolation and purification were developed to a high degree of sophistication. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, W. Newman and L. Principe provided a wealth of documentary evidence to support the inclusion of alchemy in the history of chemistry. Tara Nummedal discusses the versatility of alchemy s promotion of chemistry. 

The buried edifice of matter theory that we have unearthed provides a window into the remarkable degree of interaction between theory and practice that was possible in medieval and early modern alchemy. It can only be cause for surprise that Paul of Taranto was already maWg sophisticated use of the reduction to the pristine state to refute Thomistic theories of mixture and the unity of forms and to support a corpuscular theory in the High Middle Ages centuries before Sennert and Boyle made the same move. Equally startling, perhaps, is the way in which early modern thinkers such as Libavius and Sennert yoked Aristotle s meteorology to the matter theory of the alchemists in order to produce a picture of the... 

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