Seth Goldstein

The History of Alchemy

Practiced in civilizations across the world from ancient times up through the 19th century, the early proto-scientific and philosophical discipline of alchemy is most widely understood as the quest to achieve the transmutation of base metals into the precious metals of gold or silver, as well as the creation of a panacea, which promised to cure all disease, rendering immortality a fate not only reserved for the gods. Taking the commonality of properties of the known metals (gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury) as evidence of a commonality of composition, alchemists operated on the assumption that they might somehow correct the composition of the base metal, rendering it pure gold. To do so, they needed the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir, which would speed up that process of transmutation which, occurring naturally underground, would require the passage of thousands of years.

We might imagine the history of alchemy as a curious double-helix, its Eastern and Western strands decidedly separate but linked by certain commonalities. The Eastern strand of the history of alchemy finds its root in China, where alchemy was closely linked with the pursuit of health through traditional Taoist forms of medicine (specifically Acupuncture and Moxibustion, a therapy that uses mugwort herb to stimulate the circulation of blood through warm regions of the body and key acupuncture points). In that it was not so much concerned with the transmutation of base metals to previous metals, Chinese alchemy stood apart from its Western cousin, but it had its own version of the Philosopher’s Stone, which they called the Grand Elixir of Immortality.

But it is Egypt that promises to remain immortal when it comes to the discussion of the history of alchemy, its position of privilege perhaps embedded in the word alchemy itself. The etymology of the word is contested, traced to the Arabic al-kīmiya or al-khīmiya, meaning “cast together”, “pour together” or “weld”, as well as to the Persian Kimia, meaning “gold.” Others, though, read al- kīmiya as “the Egyptian [science]”, having been borrowed from the Copic word for “Egypt”, or kēme, which is itself derived from a chain that leads back to the ancient Egyptian term for the color black and the country of Egypt itself, kmt.

It is the god Thoth (also referred to as Hermes-Thoth) to whom mythology attributes the honor of being the founder of Egyptian mythology. It his forty-two Books of Knowledge, Thoth wrote in part on alchemy, but it is his Emerald Tablet, preserved Greek and Arabic translations, that is said to form a critical foundation in the alchemy of the West. Like Thoth’s Emerald Tablet, the only works of Egyptian alchemy available today have survived through such Greek and Arabic translations. As the Macedonians conquered Egypt in the 4th century, so came Greek language and culture in tow – and any Egyptian writings on alchemical philosophy and practice were likely burned as a part of Diocletian’s attempts to suppress a 292 revolt in Alexandria, that center of knowledge which figured so prominently in our histories of Automata and Algorithm.

There in Alexandria, the Greeks brought their philosophies of Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism together with the Egyptian hermetic philosophy, the principle tenet of which is called the macrocosm-microcosm belief: “in truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.” That central belief, that the exterior world, or the macrocosm, affects the human body, or the microcosm, interacted with the belief that numbers rule the universe, that the universe could be explained by examining natural phenomena and that the world was created in a flawed manner, thereby rendering it imperfect (Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism, respectively, and grossly oversimplified) to create a tradition that left us with the idea that everything in the universe was formed from the elements earth, air, water and fire.

As the Greeks adopted Egyptian alchemical knowledge and traditions, so adopted the Romans the knowledge and traditions of the Greeks. But Christianity then swept through the empire, bringing Christian philosophies, and particularly those of Augustine, into contention with Hermetic ideals. Augustine believed experimental philosophy to be evil and ungodly, maintaining people could understand God through reason and faith. Augustine’s philosophies were in turn used to argue that alchemy was evil and ungodly. But alchemy already had its niche in the Christian tradition, grandfathered in by Greek and Roman culture. As medieval Europe saw Christian philosophers challenge Augustinian doctrine, its alchemists worked from the contributions from the Islamic world, which became the premier stage for scientific and alchemical development after the fall of Rome.

Islamic alchemists were responsible for the technique of distillation; they discovered sulfuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids – and, perhaps most importantly, that the latter two could be mixed together and used to dissolve gold, the noblest of metals. The philosopher Jabir Ibn Hayyan, referred to in English as Geber, remains one of the most influential writers in the history of alchemy, for it was he who sought after the artificial creation of life in the laboratory. He described the elements in terms of their hotness, coldness, dryness and moistness – qualities which could be altered in the laboratory and rearranged, thus resulting in a new metal. He thus introduced the search for the philosopher’s stone, a central thrust of the Western alchemical tradition.

Though many philosophized about alchemy in the early stages of the millennium, some historians argue that the first alchemical experimentation in medieval Europe did not occur until the 13th century, when Roger Bacon is said to have brought on the search for the elixir of life. Bacon’s contributions to science were widespread: in addition to his work in alchemy, he analyzed convex glasses and lenses, invented spectacles, theorized about the telescope and, lest we forget, created the talking head automaton.

Bacon’s European contemporaries were to a great extent members of the clergy, those who had access to and the education to read the world’s assembled alchemical oeuvre. As the 13th century drew to a close, there was an established architecture of alchemical belief, including the aforementioned macrocosm-microcosm theories, the four elements and the four qualities. But most importantly, these Christian alchemists believed that their art could reunite man and God – for if man’s soul had been divided with Adam’s fall, so could the separate parts be purified and brought together again. These philosophies would be struck down in the next century, with the edict of Pope John XXII against alchemy removing clergymen from its practice.

The alchemy of the next three hundred years was thus one of a much different character. Alchemists returned their efforts to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, and influential figures like Nicolas Flamel and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa contributed to a major shift in the classification of the art – namely, alchemy went from being characterized as a mystical philosophy to that of an occultist magic. This shift set alchemy up to be struck down by the thinkers of the Age of Reason, who favored rigorous experimentation over such seeds of ancient wisdom. The prescient Paracelsus, perhaps the most important alchemist during the Renaissance, had perceived the occultist label a threat to the alchemical arts as a whole, and as such, he pushed back, casting some occultist threads and Gnostic philosophies out of his alchemical fabric, choosing to focus his efforts on using chemicals and minerals in medicine to achieve a healthy balance in human bodies. But the work of Paracelsus could still not overcome all that occultist image carried with it, all the fallout created by the charlatans and cons who promised transmutation but produced trash.

We might read the intentions of the earliest alchemists as the same as those of the Internet alchemists of today: above all else, the these alchemists concern themselves with the study of changes in the material world and how they might be able to harness the power of these changes for their own purpose and benefit. These solitary materials scientists, mixing various elements together to render their combinations far more valuable than the sums of their parts, set the stage for the Internet alchemists of today, who, in harnessing the power of the changes of Internet media and create entities which are far more valuable.

This alchemy takes place in large part in the act of naming – a company, an index, a domain, a category, a database class – for in that move to name, the Internet alchemist creates something far more than simply a representation of some external object or idea.

Thanks to Maggie Dillon for helping with this research

My encounter last month with Valleywag over avant garde playright and director Brecht resonated enough in the blogosphere so as to make this site the top result now for the query "seth brecht" or "brecht seth." And so thanks to some kind Attention alchemy, I have become an authority on the subject of Brecht (at least among Seths) in the eyes of the great Pagerank algorithm.

While this doesn’t belong up there with Soros’ "Real Time Experiment" in the Alchemy of Finance as an example of market manipulation, it  show how one can etch oneself into the way that Google resolves your queries- by using a popular blog to link to you in a certain context, and by routing many of its readers along for the collective experience of you.  Soros explains the reflexivity of markets: the way one perceives a market can in fact impact the behavior of the market.  He made billions off of this insight.  The reflexivity of Attention markets is similarly based on the premise that one’s perception of Attention influences its supply.

Before dismissing the sethbrecht as a random blog divet, maybe theater is a useful metaphor for understanding the evolution from API to Alchemy.  As you know, I have been trying to negotiate the transition for a number of months.  I was focused on tracing the pure conversion of our automatic data algorithms into Attention streams, but I was having a difficult time describing how our unique streams collide- other than simply calling it Alchemy.

A few months ago I asked Goldhaber how his book on Attention was coming along.  He perked up and said that he had a new title for it, All the world’s a stage: the emerging attention economy and how it distinctly differs from the economies of industry, markets and money that we are used to. Maybe this meant that understanding electronic Attention had something more fundamental to do with theater.  Since I studied dramatic literature in college, this was not so foreign to me.  The hallmark of modern theatre’s avant garde (Meyerhold, Pirandello, Brecht, et al) was the participation of the viewer in the mode of theatrical production. Take, for example, Brecht’s Lehrstucke (learning plays) from the 1920’s. According to Wikipedia,

Brecht described them (Lehrstucke) as "a collective political meeting" in which the audience is to participate actively. One sees in this model a rejection of the concept of the bureaucratic elite party where the politicians are to issue directives and control the behaviour of the masses…

We can look at this audience as active participant model as an early prototype for contemporary social media. In the theater of the avant garde, the writer, director and actors all attempted to directly engage the behavior of the audience.  Brecht’s infamous alienation effect was simply a feature set and interface that reminded the audience (aka user) that he was not to get lost in the experience of the media but instead needed to participate in changing it:

For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as distancing effect, estrangement effect, or alienation effect). Such techniques included the direct address by actors to the audience, transposition of text to third person or past tense, speaking the stage direction out loud, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was, in fact a construction and, as such, was changeable.  from Wikipedia Entry on Brecht

This experience of being on stage, and using the stage as a means of changing user behavior, is something that is personal to me.  I remember when I was 14 years old performing on the stage at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

It was a bitter February evening during the week and I was standing on the stage dressed like an Italian kid fresh off of Ellis Island, with stiff-heeled shoes, an annoying beret and lots of make-up.  The play was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, adapted by Robert Brustein. I was standing on stage behind my mother, played by sitcom Alice’s Linda Lavin, looking out at the audience, watching them watch me. On the stage behind me was most of the actual ART resident acting group, behaving as if they were in the midst of rehearsals for Gozzi’s King Stag, which was in fact being directed then by Andrei Serban. They started the performance all smiles and inside jokes until the door at the back of the theatre opened up and so appeared a family of actors, including me as the youngest son, searching for our author ("any author will do…") who might finish our play.

One of the best descriptions of pure theater that I have come across is by the famous Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski. More than anybody, Grotowski was the prototypical green, organic metaphysician of the stage.  He fled communist Poland after WWII, invigorated the downtown NY avant garde scene in the late 60’s, taught theory at UC Irvine in the 80’s, and ended up practicing what he preached on a remote Italian island before he died a few years ago.  In his classic text, Towards a Poor Theatre, from 1968, Grotowski writes:

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion….

This "relationship of perceptual, direct, communion" is very close to what I am trying to express with the notion of the readerverse- a place or moment where the reader and writer are both fully engaged in the cooperative process of creating something original (ie Alchemy) by virtue of the  unique, real-time data streams that they surface to eachother.  For a while I struggled to come up with a real-world object that best emblematized the readerverse: a mirror? a shadow? a trail we leave behind? But now I am fairly sure that the readerverse is best expressed as a stage, where we create social media with a sequence of clicks and tags and queries.

And so here we are, beginning to realize that by virtue of paying Attention in the same electronic theatre, that we are creating some strange performance for eachother, by eachother, with eachother.  This is the primal social media expression, one that despite its rough amateur mechanics nevertheless promises a profound shift in the way media is created.  I defer to Steve Gillmor, whose silence about the imminent integration of the Gesture Bank and the AttentionTrust Extension, belies a remarkably prescient insight he had almost two years ago:

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content… And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine… With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It’s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view… attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.  Steve Gillmor, Waiting for Attention, March 2005