A Short History

The thing we call alchemy first started being alchemy in Egypt in the early Christian era.  Hermetism, which began in Egypt with the persons who wrote under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, spawned alchemy in Greaco-Roman times. You might make a case for alchemy being born in the shrines of the Far East, the schools of Greek antiquity, or the Egyptian priestly class, and indeed alchemy is a child of earlier philosophies, but we don’t have alchemical texts before the third century CE.

Early alchemists of the Greaco-Roman era wrote their mystical texts under grand pseudonyms like “Moses”, “Isis”, “Ostanes”, and “Cleopatra”. Pseudonyms have been a constant feature of alchemy since, further obscuring the timeline. Alchemy is often viewed as the quest for manufactured gold (or chrysopoeia), an occupation of practical chemists of the day.

When the Islamic Golden Age made its thrust through Egypt in the 8th and 9th centuries, alchemy was adopted by the Arabs. We have alchemical texts today thanks to their survival in the Arabic language. Medieval Islam contributed important new Hermetic texts such as the Emerald Tablet. Essential strides were also made in early chemistry and the two fields are not easily separated.

Alchemy made its way into Europe in twelfth-century Toledo. Much of European alchemy turned into white-people batshit conflated with proto-chemistry. By the time of Chaucer and Jonson, it was fodder for comedians. In the fifteenth century, the Corpus Hermeticum was translated into Latin. Alchemists now understood the assignment. A religious version of alchemy came back to the forefront during the Protestant Reformation. This is the era I pull from.

(It’s maybe best not to say “spiritual alchemy” as we’re told this is an invention of the Victorian Occult Revival. The most prominent historians of alchemy are slowly correcting this, and connecting Hermetic Spirituality to later religious alchemies.)

Over the next five hundred years other permutations of alchemy came and went, and it was all very confusing. Magnificent advances were made in the field of physical chemistry. Let’s ignore them.

For a much longer treatment of the subject, with an emphasis on the physico-chemico, see Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (2012).