10. Thus were all things created.
11. Thence proceeded wonderful adaptations which are produced in this way.
12. Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, possessing the three parts of the philosophy in the whole world.
13 That which I had to say concerning the operation of the Sun is completed.
At least forty-eight books have been written to explain the "Emerald Tablet", but at best it expresses in a vague way the principles of sympathism and analogism that underlie all sympathetic magic.
Besides their belief in the four Elements, the four Qualities, and the three Principles, the alchemists entertained the notion that metals grew from seeds in the earth like vegetables. Some thought that the heavenly bodies impregnated the earth, and that gold, for instance, was the child of the sun; tin, of Jupiter; and copper, of Venus. Others believed that Nature was trying to make the perfect metal, gold and that base metals were abortive or defective efforts in this direction. Or they thought that metals evolved changing from one to another and moving up the scale to gold. The alchemist's job was to synthesize gold by speeding this natural process.
There was some questions as to whether the end-product would be common gold or some mysterious new "Gold of the Philosophers," also called ios (Greek for "tarnish"). The idea of this supergold was based upon the appearance of a purplish or iridescent film on the surface of some alloys under certain treatments.
Accounts of dramatic discovery of magical books like the "Emerald Tablet" are a common feature of pseudepigraphic (falsely attributed) works, especially those about occult matters. For instance, the alchemical treatise "Concerning the Seven" was said to have been discovered in the tomb of the mythical King Kyranides at Troy, while the "Book of Images of the Moon" turned up in a golden chest. The medieval practice of asserting that a book was received under mysterious circumstances, to lend it spurious authority, is an old custom that has not yet died out, as witness Madame Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine" and Joseph Smith's "Book of Mormon".
Even when they did not resort to such melodramatics medieval alchemists commonly ascribed their books to long-dead famous men—even to those, like Raymond Lully whose authentic works show that they did not believe in alchemy.
Thus, astrology was analogistic astronomy, so alchemy was analogistic chemisty, full of religous mysticism, Neoplatonic symbolism, and thaumaturgic magic. Alchemists, working on the magical principle of "as above, so below," believed they were operating on the planes of matter and spirit at the same time. As men had spirits or souls, they believed, metals must have them too.
Following the laws of sympathetic magic, they thought that actions on the spiritual plane affected reactions on the material one. Hence they modelled their chemical processes on the Catholic Mass. or on the creation-myth of Genesis, or on the Crucifixion, or on the reproduction of organisms. They sought moral purity while trying to purify their materials, and tried hard to get their wives with child while "marrying" their Philosophical Sulfur and Mercury. With all these distractions and irrelevancies, it is not surprising that their findings were small for the effort expended.
They were also misled by their passion for gold, which men had originally chosen as their favorite money-stuff not for occult virtues but because of its rarity and chemical torpor. But because of its use as a medium of exchange, the alchemists looked upon it as a "perfect" or "noble" metal attributed magical properties to it, and even used it as a medicine, useless though it is for this purpose.
Obviously, if the alchemists had succeeded in making gold on a large scale they would have defeated their own ends by cheapening the metal. This inflationary possibility does not seem to have worried them much, though Thomas Norton cautioned them not to reveal their secrets to the vulgar, lest some rascal thereby "remove from their hereditary thrones those legitimate princes who rule over the peoples of Christendom."
A few anti-alchemical laws were passed, but not to prevent inflation. The English law of 1404, for instance, made gold-making a felony because of the fear that the king might get his hands on the power and so become independent of Parliament. This act, however, soon fell into abeyance, and English patents or licenses were issued in the fifteenth century to "labor by the cunning of philosophy for the transmutation of metals with all things requisite to the same at his own cost, provided that he answered to the King if any profit grow therefrom." The pious Henry VI issued four such patents in 1544 to several priests and monks, reasoning that they, with their experience of transubstantiation of the Host at Mass, should be well fitted to change metals.
Laws against magic did not much affect alchemy because the men of that time considered alchemy science rather than magic. Alchemists were not usually molested unless caught in fraud. But if they had little to fear from the law, they were liable to be seized by some greedy prince or noble in order to extort the secret of the Stone from them. In 1575 Duke Julius of Brunswick roasted a woman alchemist alive in an iron chair because she failed her promise to give him a gold-making formula.
In another case the fat Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton was said to have effected several transmutations, and the story got around. In 1602 Seton toured Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, eloping with the daughter of a citizen of Munich in the process. Then the Elector of Saxony summoned him to Dresden where, failing to wheedle his secret out of him, he had the alchemist jailed and tortured.
Then Michael Sendivog, a young Slavic alchemist living in Dresden, heard of Seton's plight. Sendivog sold some property in Krakow and used the money to bribe the guards to let him visit the prisoner. Seton promised Sendivog the secret of transmutation in exchange for his freedom. Sendivog got the guards drunk and spirited Seton away to Krakow, but Seton reneged on his promise on the pretext that it would be sinful to disclose such awful Hermetic mysteries. When Seton died from the effects of the torture about 1603, Sendivog married his widow in hope she might have Seton's secret, but in this too he was disappointed.
Then Sendivog obtained the patronage of Emperor Rudolf II, who, though a haughty and unlikeable man with intervals of insanity, was an enthusiast for the sciences and pseudo-sciences and subsidized the astronomers Brahe and Kepler, Once an avaricious Moravian noble kidnapped Sendivog to wring his secrets from him. When Sendivog escaped and complained to Rudolf, the emperor confiscated the noble's estate and gave it to the alchemist.
Before he died in 1646 at 84, Sendivog had been councillor of state to four successive emperors. He revised and published some of Seton's manuscripts. In one of these in a dialogue between Mercury, Nature, and an Alchemist, Sendivog's disillusioned alchemist candidly admits:
Now I see that I know nothing; only I must not say so. For I should lose the good opinion of my neighbors, and they would no longer entrust me with money for my experiments. I must therefore go on saying that I know everything; for here are many that expect me to do great things for them... There are many countries, and many greedy persons who will suffer themselves to be gulled by my promises of mountains of gold.
The most dramatic incident in the biographies of alchemists is, of course, their successful transmutation of metal. In the commonest form of this story, the alchemist after struggling without success for years, meets a mysterious stranger who gives him a small quantity of the Stone. With this the alchemist makes some gold, but when he goes to look for his benefactor, the adept has vanished.
One of the best-known of these tales concerns the Belgian savant Jean Baptiste van Helmont. This gifted physician of Brussels (1577-1644) performed notable work in physiology and chemistry and invented the word "gas". He was, however, a disorderly and superficial thinker, of whom it was said "He wanted to be learned in a brief time and easily and therefore rushed through all- the sciences without lingering by any." The "nobility of character" his friends attributed to him did not stop him from claiming to possess the alkahest, or from writing: