Quote:
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Originally Posted by Tatsuko
… Alchemy is supposed to be about physical immortality.
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Although Tatsuko is speaking in and references letters that write in terms foreign to modern Science (and largerly incompatible with it, IMO), his position on alchemy agrees with what I know of its history. Although the popular perception of alchemy is that it concerned the search for a method of transmuting base metals into gold, it appears to have been more the search for a medical therapy to produce physical immortality.
Generations of members of the “esoteric brotherhood” of alchemy, including such famous scientists as Newton, give evidence in their writing that finding a way to live forever was their main goal. In some documents, it’s suggested that gold transmuted from base elements might provide a key ingredient in a medicine required by such a therapy, in others, mercury, or many other more complicated recipes. The “'hieros gamos” (“holy coupling”) Tatsuko mentions, which likewise has been taken by many people to mean many different things, including an individual becoming in some sense equally male and female, 2 individuals of opposite sex becoming in some sense a single individual, or, as in the linked-to letters in post #1, homosexuality.
Many alchemists appear to have believed that alchemical physical immortality had been achieved by previous people, most notably the biblical king Solomon, Lazarus, and Jesus Christ. Some alchemists claimed to have personally achieved physical immortality, and be hundreds or thousands of years old.
There’s substantial evidence that alchemists wrote in personal codes, and sometimes wrote purposeful nonsense intended to throw their contemporaries and antecedents off track, a practice strongly rejected by modern Science.
I enjoyed the fictional description of alchemy in Neal Stephenson’s recent (very long!) novels,
”The Baroque Cycle”. Personally, however, I find study of esoterica in general and alchemy in particular to be, though intellectually stimulating and enjoyable, ultimately unproductive. The community of students of the esoteric include hobbyists, believers, and, unfortunately, some outright frauds, charlatans, and thieves. The boundaries between these classes can be blurry. Beware.
