Alchemy

Late alchemy, i.e. just about all alchemy after about 1600, and certainly all alchemy after 1750 or so, is really about two things at once. On the one hand, you’re trying to transmute base metals into pure ones; famously, you’re changing lead into gold, but there’s also copper into gold, lead into silver, quartz into diamond, and so forth. At the same time, you’re trying to transmute yourself, by an analogy called the microcosm: since Man is a microcosm of the Universe, as HermesTrismegistus^? says, a transmutation in the universe can cause a transmutation in a human body. In its extreme forms, the whole point is to become essentially immortal and perfect, as Adam was in Eden (for Judeo-Christians, anyway; there are similar Chinese and Hindu conceptions). In ordinary practice, of course, this exceptional goal is long-term, and in the short term the alchemist would like to transmute human bodies in the sense of healing sickness.

In the late Victorian era, of course, the sciences are beginning an unprecedented transmutation of their own in biology, what with CharlesDarwin^? and FrancisGalton^? and so forth; as such, you have a wide range of options here. You could go quite traditionalist, and swot up a lot of alchemical terminology: the BlackKing^?, the WhiteLady^?, the RedMan^?, etc. There are a huge number of books that present this stuff; a visit to the occult or New Age section of your local library will give you all you need and a lot more. But you can also go with a scientific take on this, which requires you to talk the scientific doublespeak while simply bearing in mind the basic microcosmic analogy. By one reading at least, Frankenstein would be a good example of such alchemy; certainly Victor refers to Paracelsus^? as an important source (though he says CorneliusAgrippa^? was more so, and he wasn’t any too fond of alchemy).

If you want to play an alchemist, you need to think up a “take.” If you want to go the science route, you might want to read up on Sir FrancisGalton^?, the inventor of Eugenics^?; you should be able to find endless material for seriously disturbing but interesting alchemical chatter here.

The difficulty is going to be using alchemy in play. One possibility is simply to limit yourself to some healing and maybe what are in video games called “power-ups”; just beware that these not get predictable—after all, a “potion” isn’t going to work the same on two patients, except for the Philosopher’s Stone, which you do not have. In fact, it’s probably wise to remember that a lot of alchemy in the medical sphere was about iatro-chemistry, i.e. the use of inorganic chemicals to affect disease. While it seems almost certain that Paracelsus actually cured a case of syphilis by the use of arsenic, as later became a standard cure (see Out of Africa), he was after all Paracelsus, and besides people improperly dosed with arsenic die. Not to mention, of course, people dosed with arsenic, mercury, and antimony all at once.

See Alchemy^?

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004