Comment by krapp

7 days ago

One has to remember that alchemy was as much a religious and spiritual pursuit as anything resembling proto-science, and understand that occultists were working from a worldview which was nominatively deterministic - meaning the names and properties of things in the natural world held inherent power and reflected a higher, divine nature ("as above, so below")

The transmutation of metals in alchemy is a metaphor for the transmutation of the soul, from its base and sinful nature ("lead") to divinity ("gold".) The means of purifying one was the means of purifying the other, and the "philosopher's stone" alchemists often sought to achieve this was credited for doing both.

Also... it was often an easy grift to get room and board (and money) from wealthy patrons.

Here is a good /r/AskHistorians thread about this[0].

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114vo4m/alch...

1 comment

krapp

tanseydavid 7 days ago

Thank you for this. Here's a pull quote from the linked article:

    Broadly speaking, alchemical writings are not just concerned with the 
    manipulation of physical matter; rather, alchemy can be viewed as a 
    philosophy that synthesizes chemistry and spirituality. A common overarching 
    idea is that transmuting materials is directly analogous to the purification 
    of the soul - alchemists were, in general, trying to advance *spiritual* 
    enlightenment as well as *intellectual* enlightenment. It's important to 
    understand this mindset in order to grasp what they were trying to achieve 
    with metallurgy.