The other root of alchemy was the Egyptian art of counterfeiting—or, to take a kinder view, making cheap alloys that looked like gold and silver.
Egypt has produced wonderfully skilled artisans and jewellers from the early dynasties to the present, and the art of imitating precious metals had been stimulated by the discovery of mercury about the third century B. C.
It was found, for instance that a good ersatz gold can be made by combining silver arsenic, and sulfur. Later philosophers who read of these metallurgical feats wondered whether the Egyptians hadn't really made gold, since the alloy looked like gold and a metal's appearance was deemed one of its most essential qualities.
Pliny the Elder said that Emperor Gaius Caligula made a little gold by heating arsenic sesquisulphide, but concluded that the method was impractical. After this early reference to gold-making come several fragmentary works on alchemy from the first seven centuries of our era, published under the names of (pseudo-) Demokritos, Synesios, Zosimos Olympiodoros, and Stephanos. These early references point to vigorous alchemical activity in Roman times, centering in Egypt.
With the decline of the Roman Empire, alchemy spread. It flourished in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. However, of the many treatises that have come down from this period, most are so full of magic, mystery and amphigory as to be practically unintelligible. One reads:
A serpent is stretched out guarding the temple. Let his conqueror begin by sacrifice, then skin him, and after having removed his flesh to the very bones, make a stepping-stone of it to enter the temple. Mount upon it and you will find the object sought. For the priest, at first a man of copper, has changed his color and nature and become a man of silver; a few days later, if you wish, you will find him changed into a man of gold.
How much good would this do a practical chemist setting out to make gold?
The real pioneer of Muslim alchemy was Abu Musa Jabir ibn-H ayyan whom Europeans called Geber. He lived about the eighth century and revived the almost forgotten experimental methods of Archimedes and other Hellenistic scientists. Of the many Arabic works attributed to him, some are adaptations of Greek alchemical works. Others show considerable chemical knowledge such as the preparation of lead carbonate and the reduction of arsenic and antimony from their sulphides. About 200 medieval Latin works were ascribed to Jabir, but most of these were mere pseudepigrapha written under Jabir's name for reasons of prestige.
Jabir probably originated the hypothesis that all substances were compounds -of sulfur and mercury. This theory partly replaced Empedokles' four-element hypothesis. But Jabir's sulfur and mercury were not the ordinary substances known by these names. His Sulfur (we capitalize it to distinguish it from common sulfur) was the "principle" of combustibility and color, while his Mercury or Azoth was the principle of liquidity and luster. Thus gold and silver were nearly pure Mercury. Like the Greeks, Jabir tended to confuse things with qualities. Other alchemists added a third principle, Arsenic or Salt, the "principle of solidity."
With the decline of the Caliphate as a result of the Turkish invasions in the tenth and eleventh centuries the intellectual center of Islam shifted from Baghdad to Spain, and thence alchemy spread to Western Europe. From the eleventh century on Europeans read translations of Arabic alchemical manuscripts and decided to become alchemists themselves. Many wrote their own treatises under the names of their Muslim predecessors or, later, under the names of distinguished European scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas.
Thus there grew up an immense and unreadable corpus of alchemical literature. The Byzantine and Arabic works had been heavily magical, telling of visions of the tail-biting snake Ouroboros (an old Egyptian magical symbol) and of the seven heavens of the planets. They invoke Hermes Trismegistos and affirm that the sages hide the secret of transmutation for fear of the anger of demons. Sometimes these works preserve the old Hellenistic-Egyptian counterfeiting formulas, but so distorted by repeated translations as to be scarcely recognizable.
The European alchemists followed this tradition. Their treatises had such flowery titles as "The New Pearl of Great Price", "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" or "An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King". To hide their meaning from the "vulgar", they saw fit "to vaile their secrets with a mistie speech" by such code-names as "Royal and Magnificent Blood of a Gray Dove" for red lead and "Product of the Daughters of the Bulls of Athens" for honey. Paracelsus used "Red Lion" for gold and "Green Lion" for copper sulphate."Dragon's Blood" might be almost anything, even "real" dragon's blood since that rare substance was a commonplace of magical recipes.
The seven metals were often called by the names of the planets: "Sun" for gold, "Moon" for silver, "Mars" for iron, and so on. Some alchemists devised symbols like those of astrology for their substances and illustrated their books with pictures full of kings, lions dragons, naked people, skeletons, mountains, and other symbolic objects. Western alchemists achieved such masterpieces of obscurity as this:
But if you add to the Eagle the icy Dragon that has long had its habitation upon the rocks, and has crawled forth from the caverns of the earth, and place both over the fire, it will elicit from the icy Dragon a fiery spirit which, by means of its great heat, will consume the wings of the Eagle, and prepare a perspiring bath of so extraordinary a degree of heat that the snow will melt away upon the summit of the mountains, and become of water, with which the invigorating mineral bath may be prepared, and fortune, health, life, and strength restored to the King.
This special jargon might have been helpful had there been a Society of Alchemical Engineers to standardize the terms. As there wasn't, the number of symbols increased with each new treatise, running into the thousands. Alchemists sometimes began their tracts with protests against the "obscure and allegorical style" of their colleagues, and then went ahead to write as cryptically as their predecessors.
One of the most celebrated pieces of alchemical writing, the "Tabula Smaragdina" or "Emerald Tablet," comprised a collection of aphorisms which goes back to early Muslim alchemy and perhaps farther. Medieval accounts tell how Alexander the Great found a slab of emerald inscribed with Phoenician characters in the tomb of Hermes in a cave near Hebron, reading:
1. I speak not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
2. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
3. And as all things were produced by the mediation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation.
4. Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carried it in its belly, its nurse is the earth.
5. It is the cause of. all perfection throughout the whole world.
6. Its power is perfect if it be changed into earth.
7. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
8. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and inferior. Thus you will obtain the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
9. This thing is the fortitude of all fortitude, because it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates every solid thing.