The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe

Author:Lawrence M. Principe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.6. A modern “emblem” expressing the secret of the third key. Gold dissolves in acid, forming gold chloride; when the acid is distilled off, the gold chloride is decomposed by heat into gold and chlorine gas; the resultant gold is redissolved in acid, and so on.

A good laugh at Valentine’s hodgepodge of weird imagery and high-flown language would not be inappropriate. Such language, however, typifies seventeenth-century chrysopoeia. The third key (fig. 6.5) shows the red dragon in the foreground, and that strangely carnivorous rooster both eating a fox and being eaten by him in the background. What connections familiar to early moderns could form the basis for the metaphors? Roosters had long been linked to the Sun (they crow at sunrise), and the Sun in turn to gold. Rooster would then be the fourth Deckname for “gold,” previously encoded as king, Apollo, and Sulfur. The fox is a particular consumer of barnyard fowl (as in “a fox in the henhouse”), and consequently must be a new cover name for the acid that “eats” the gold. So, Valentine’s allegory can be deciphered as follows: the gold drinks in the acid (rooster eats fox), is dissolved by it (drowns in water), reappears when heat evaporates the acid (rooster brought back to life by fire), and is then redissolved by fresh acid (fox eats rooster) during cohobation. This interpretation seems plausible—it both fits the text and is chemically possible—but the process still seems like running in place.

The direction, however, to give gold “flying power” that would “raise him up” above the stars, seems totally absurd. These phrases imply that the gold is somehow to be made volatile. It seems impossible to make something so heavy, solid, and stable in the fire as gold evaporate! In fact, the volatilization of gold represented both a desideratum and a point of ridicule in the early modern period. To “make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed” was a guiding axiom for making the Philosophers’ Stone, and few substances are more “fixed” (that is, nonvolatile) than gold. Making it volatile would therefore seem to be a huge step toward fulfilling an instruction handed down from the “ancient sages,” and a clear sign that one was on the right path. At the same time, critics jeered at the notion as an example of foolish “alchemical fancy.” In the 1717 comedy Three Hours After Marriage, for example, a character posing as a Polish alchemist brags of his skills in transmutation. When asked by a doctor how he succeeded, the sham alchemist rattles off a list of operations on gold, including its volatilization. The doctor, who has studied chrysopoeia, becomes suspicious at this point and warns him to “have a care what you assert. The volatilization of gold is not an obvious process. It is by great elegance of speech called, fortitudo fortitudinis fortissima.”24

Despite being “the most difficult difficulty of the difficulty,” in 1895, long after both the alchemical claim to volatilize gold and its ridicule had faded from

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