Alchemy History and Folklore Podcast

This month we look into the history of alchemy and the worldview and aims of early alchemists. 
Find out how metal gets married, why poisons are good and how humans reflect the entire universe. 
 
Transcript:
‘From a man and a woman make a circle, then a square, then a triangle, finally a circle, and you will obtain the philosopher’s stone.’
Hello, welcome to the History and Folklore podcast, where we look at different folk beliefs through history and how these beliefs shape people’s perceptions of nature. In this episode we will be looking at alchemy, what alchemists were hoping to achieve, and what alchemical theories can tell us about how people perceived the natural world.
Alchemists are often depicted as eccentric men in dark rooms conducting strange experiments with toxic and expensive chemicals with the aim of living forever or of turning lead into gold. Their experiments are often seen as being haphazard, illogical and dangerous, a stereotype that goes back a long way as seen in a legend regarding Roger Bacon and Thomas Bungay, thirteenth century friars who apparently blew themselves up in an alchemy experiment. This story was later adapted to the stage in a comedy written by sixteenth century playwright Robert Greene. However, alchemy has a complex history and the observations and experiments of alchemists around the world have helped shape our understanding of chemistry, metallurgy and medicine.
It is believed that the origins of alchemy stretch back to ancient Egypt, with Plutarch describing alchemy as ‘the Egyptian art’. It has been argued that the ‘chem’ part of the word alchemy derives from the Egyptian word ‘km’, which meant the black land, a term used to differentiate between the black fertile soil of the Nile valley and the barren desert sand that surrounded it. Assuming this origin, the arabic word ‘al-kimiya’ was claimed by Egyptologist EA Wallis Budge to mean ‘the Egyptian science’, however this origin has been refuted by others who claim that there is no evidence of the word ‘kmt’ ever being used for anything resembling alchemy in Egypt, and it is therefore likely that this supposed translation is a case of folk etymology, where a well-known similar sounding words are erroneously linked.
Others point toward alchemy having a Greek origin, arguing that the ‘chem’ portion of alchemy originates from the Greek word ‘chemia’, which first appeared in the fourth century and was used to refer to the art of metalworking, particularly the creation of gold and silver from base metals.
It is clear that the influences of alchemy are varied, and draw from a mixture of technology, philosophy and science from areas and cultures as wide ranging as Iran, India, Egypt and Greece. Metal workers in Egypt were highly skilled and were known to be able to create alloys that mimicked the appearance of gold and silver. They also created a body of knowledge that grouped metals according to their external characteristics which was built on their experience of working with them.
As well as this, the city of Alexandria became an intellectual hub and, following the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 330BC, attracted scholars from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, allowing different ideas to develop and merge. Two theories that developed during this period were particularly influential in the formation of later alchemical practice. The first was Aristotle’s theory on the composition of matter, which adopted an older idea that everything was made up of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, and built on it by hypothesising that these elements could be changed by the application of heat, cold, wetness or dryness.
The second was a philosophy that originated in Persia and claimed that the human body was a smaller version, the microcosm, of the larger universe, the macrocosm. The microcosm-macrocosm theory claimed that the study of the universe would g