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Alchemy is a cosmic art by which parts of that cosmos – the mineral and animal parts – can be liberated from their temporal existence and attain states of perfection, gold in the case of minerals, and for humans, longevity, immortality, and finally redemption. Such transformations can be brought about on the one hand, by the use of a material substance such as ‘the philosopher’s stone’ or elixir, or, on the other hand, by revelatory knowledge or psychological enlightenment.
The merit of such a general definition is not only that it makes it clear that there were two kinds of alchemical activity, the exoteric or material and the esoteric or spiritual, which could be pursued separately or together, but that time was a significant element in alchemy’s practices and rituals. Both material and spiritual perfection take time to achieve or acquire, albeit the alchemist might discover methods whereby these temporal processes could be speeded up. As Ben Jonson’s Subtle says in The Alchemist, ‘The same we say of Lead and other Metals, which would be Gold, if they had the time.’ And in a final sense, the definition implies that, for the alchemist, the attainment of the goals of material, and/or spiritual, perfection will mean a release from time itself: materially through riches and the attainment of independence from worldly economic cares, and spiritually by the achievement of immortality.
The definition also helps us to understand the relationship between the alchemies of different cultures. Although some historians have looked for a singular, unique origin for alchemy, which then diffused geographically into other cultures, most historians now accept that alchemy arose in various (perhaps all?) early cultures. For example, all cultures that developed a metallurgy, whether in Siberia, Indonesia or Africa, appear to have developed mythologies that explained the presence of metals within the earth in terms of their generation and growth. Like embryos, metals grew in the womb of mother Nature. The work of the early metallurgical artisan had an obstetrical character, being accompanied by rituals that may well have had their parallel in those that accompanied childbirth. Such a model of universal origin need not rule out later linkages and influences. The idea of the elixir of life, for example, which is found prominently in Indian and Chinese alchemy, but not in Greek alchemy, was probably diffused to fourteenth-century Europe through Arabic alchemy. The biochemist and Sinologist, Joseph Needham, has called the belief and practice of using botanical, zoological, mineralogical and chemical knowledge to prepare drugs or elixirs ‘macrobiotics’, and has found considerable evidence that the Chinese were able to extract steroid preparations from urine.
Alongside macrobiotics, Needham has identified two other operational concepts found in alchemical practice throughout the world, aurifiction and aurifaction. Aurifiction, or gold-faking, which is the imitation of gold or other precious materials – whether as deliberate deception or not depending upon the circumstances (compare modern synthetic products) – is associated with technicians and artisans. Aurifaction, or gold-making, is ‘the belief that it is possible to make gold (or “a gold”, or an artificial “gold”) indistinguishable from or as good as (if not better than) natural gold, from other different substances’. This, Needham suggests, tended to be the conviction of natural philosophers rather than artisans. The former, coming from a different social class than the aurifictors, either knew nothing of the assaying tests for gold, or jewellery, or rejected their validity.
Aurifactional alchemical ideas and practices were prevalent as early as the fourth century BC in China and were greatly influenced by the Taoist religion and philosophy devised by Lao Tzu (c. 600 BC) and embodied in his Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life). Like the later Stoics, Taoism conceived the universe in terms of opposites: the male, positive, hot and light principle, ‘Yang’; and the female, negative, cool and dark principle, ‘Yin’. The struggle between these two forces generated the five elements, water, fire, earth, wood and metal, from which all things were made:
Unlike later Greco-Egyptian alchemy, however, the Chinese were far less concerned with preparing gold from inferior metals than in preparing ‘elixirs’ that would bring the human body into a state of perfection and harmony with the universe so that immortality was achieved. In Taoist theory this required the adjustment of the proportions of Yin and Yang in the body. This could be achieved practically by preparing elixirs from substances rich in Yang, such as red-blooded cinnabar (mercuric sulphide), gold and its salts, or jade. This doctrine led to careful empirical studies of chemical reactions, from which followed such useful discoveries as gunpowder – a reaction between Yin-rich saltpetre and Yang-rich sulphur – fermentation industries and medicines that, according to Needham, must have been rich in sexual hormones. As in western alchemy, Taoist alchemy soon became surrounded by ritual and was more of an esoteric discipline than a practical laboratory art.
Belief in the transformation of blood-like cinnabar into gold dates from 133 BC when Li Shao-chun appealed to the Emperor Wu Ti to support his investigations:
Summon spirits and you will be able to change cinnabar powder into yellow gold. With this yellow gold you may make vessels to eat and drink out of. You will increase your span of life, you will be able to see the hsien of the P’eng-lai [home of the Immortals] that is in the midst of the sea. Then you may perform the sacrifices fang and shang and escape death.
From then on, many Chinese texts referred to the consumption of potable gold. This wai tan form of alchemy, which was systematized by Ko Hung in the fourth century AD, was not, however, the only form of Chinese alchemy.
The Chinese also developed nai tan, or physiological, alchemy, in which longevity and immortality were sought not from the drinking of an external elixir, but from an ‘inner elixir’ provided by the human body itself. In principle, this was obtained from the adept’s own body by physiological techniques involving respiratory, gymnastic and sexual exercises. With the ever-increasing evidence of poisoning from wai tan alchemy, nai tan became popular from the sixth century AD, causing a diminution of laboratory practice. On the other hand, nai tan seems to have encouraged experimentation with body fluids such as urine, whose ritualistic use may have led to the Chinese isolation of sex hormones.
As Needham has observed, medicine and alchemy were always intimately connected in Chinese alchemy, a connection that is also found in Arabic alchemy. Since Greek alchemy laid far more stress on metallurgical practices – though the preparation of pharmaceutical remedies was also important – it seems highly probable that Arabic writers and experimentalists were ‘deeply influenced by Chinese ideas and discoveries’.
There is some evidence that the Chinese knew how to prepare dilute nitric acid. Whether this was prepared from saltpetre – a salt that is formed naturally in midden heaps – or whether saltpetre followed the discovery of nitric acid’s ability to dissolve other substances, is not known. Scholars have speculated that gunpowder – a mixture of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur – was first discovered during attempts to prepare an elixir of immortality. At first used in fireworks, gunpowder was adapted for military use in the tenth century. Its formula had spread to Islamic Asia by the thirteenth century and was to stun the Europeans the following century. Gunpowder and fireworks were probably the two most important chemical contributions of Chinese alchemy, and vividly display the power of chemistry to do harm and good.
As in the Latin west, most of later Chinese alchemy was little more than chicanery, and most of the stories of alchemists’ misdeeds that are found in western literature have their literary parallels in China. Although the Jesuit missions, which arrived in China in 1582, brought with them information on western astronomy and natural philosophy, it was not until 1855 that western chemical ideas and practices were published in Chinese. A major change began
