Alchemy was configured as a discipline in antiquity whose most famous goal was the transformation of lead into gold, in particular through the search for the Philosopher’s Stone that would help this feat, as well as for the so-called Elixir of Life.
Our finiteness led hundreds to find a way to free ourselves from our ultimate end, but the truth is that through the centuries we have not been able to find the substance that would grant us neither eternal youth nor eternal life.
This did not stop important scientists such as Isaac Newton himself, to whom we owe the laws of gravity, from trying to create their own elixir. The proof of this experiment is in a manuscript dating from the 17th century that is in the safekeeping of the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Pennsylvania.
In the manuscript is a copy of the recipe that George Starkey, an American-born alchemist who used to write under the pseudonym Eireanus Philalethes, had written. There it can be found that the recipe includes the combination of “a part of Fiery Dragon, some Virgin Diana, and at least seven Mercury Eagles.”
These are ingredients that, of course, tell us little today; particularly when most alchemists used to write in code so that no one else could steal their recipes or their knowledge. Alchemy and the experiments they conducted to “transmute” from one element to another would become the forerunner of science, as such and some would say even the origin of disciplines such as chemistry and physics.
It also explains the procedure for creating Starkey’s “Sophic mercury,” an ingredient believed to be key to the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. According to the National Geographic report, this ingredient was obtained by repeatedly distilling mercury and heating it with gold, which caused both metals to alloy in a particular way.
Behind the transcription of Starkey’s recipe, Newton would make his own notes on his experimentation and how he attempted to sublimate lead, for example. Beyond such annotations, though, we have no way of ascertaining whether the physicist created the Sophic mercury or the Philosopher’s Stone as such, and only speculation remains as to how his work on alchemy might have influenced his scientific work.
No doubt this will not be the only information to emerge about Newton’s alchemical work after Cambridge University sold some of the physicist’s work to organizations such as the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
