Alchemy and Alchemists

Basic Ideas and Themes
Our view of alchemy in the West is dominated by that of a mediaeval pre-chemist in a fume-filled laboratory, a solitary figure working endlessly amidst bubbling flasks and studying ancient cryptic texts in a futile quest to turn lead into gold. They have perhaps received financial backing from a rich man who is keen to expand his wealth even further, but they are really just wasting his money. Once it became known that alchemy supposedly had the power to make the practitioner immensely wealthy, the art began to attract frauds like flies to a dung heap. These were known as ‘puffers’, a reference to the bellows used to maintain the laboratory fire.
If the alchemist is genuine, he may inadvertently make a discovery that proves useful, but not in the way the alchemist or his backer had hoped. Alcoholic distillation was discovered in the alchemist’s laboratory, for instance, and so was phosphorus. If the alchemist is not genuine, he will exhaust his backer’s funds, and continue to move from town to town, impressing the rich and gullible with his laboratory demonstrations, and hoping that the authorities don’t catch up with him.
The swindlers are the ones who usually find their way into literature and painting. Ben Jonson’s play is perhaps the most famous example, overshadowing Chaucer’s earlier Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The two works deal with false alchemy, and Jonson and Chaucer seem to have had first hand knowledge of the subject; that they might both have lost money to fraudulent alchemists has been suggested as the motive behind the writing of both pieces.
The real alchemists, the workers unconcerned with becoming fabulously wealthy, are more shadowy figures. We could assume that they would be educated, given to keeping their own counsel and

Alchemy can also be seen to have played a part in the arts and culture. Jonson’s play is no doubt the most celebrated example, and Blackadder the Second the most recent, but alchemical ideas have also found their way into the works of Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Mann, the art of Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, countless books in the self-help sections of bookshops, and into more recent novels such as Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread Prize-winning novel The Chymical Wedding, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.

Alchemical books were often profusely illustrated. Anyone familiar with the history of Western art will, however, find the images strangely timeless and possibly a little shocking. There are pictures of people tearing their own hearts out, or of bodies being dismembered. People are shown as cripples, as if to mirror their crippled or limited understanding of the art, or the world (if indeed there is ultimately a difference). Sexual imagery is strong, with the alchemical archetypes of the King and Queen frequently portrayed engaging in sexual intercourse. In others, a man has a tree growing out of his body where his penis should be. Men and women merge, not just in the sexual act, but to become hermaphrodites. It seems clear that these images were to be read or meditated upon, not merely looked at. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that, whatever sort of gold the alchemists were looking for, they had in fact discovered the unconscious, and that their frequently strong, challenging images were portraits of various states of consciousness that could lead us into a greater understanding of ourselves.