Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Note on front cover page. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Practical alchemy began in Egypt and there was not much distinction between gold-making and gold-faking. The Egyptians called their country Khem which means black earth and the art of the ‘black land’ became alchemy. The alchemists had two main to turn base metal into gold and to discover the elixir of life. The possibility of the former was envisaged by the earliest writer on chemistry to be identified Zosimos who lived in the third century AD. From the beginning there were two strains in alchemy the practical men and the armchair theorists. There were those who laboured in laboratories and before furnaces which they kept burning for month after month and those who preferred to think about it creating theories for the bemusement and confusion of the practical alchemists. The rise of Christianity in the west was an important factor in alchemy and analogies were seen between the transmutation of base metal into gold and the transfiguration of man through stress and at worst purgatory. These analogies were pursued well into the nineteenth century when it became only too evident that practical alchemy had not lived up to its promise: the treatises dealing with furnaces alembics pelicans and stills were said to be really symbolical and the furnaces stills and other alchemical apparatus was Man himself. Throughout its long history of nearly two thousand years alchemy surrounded itself with secrecy and mystery. Sometimes