How the English Made the Philosopher’s Stone
Alchemical manuscripts and books are filled with creatures that seem utterly fantastical today: green lions, winged hermaphrodites, kings devouring their own children, dragons, and even unusual depictions of Christ. Yet for alchemists, these figures were not simply products of a vivid imagination. Behind many of them were very real operations involving substances that could be observed in the laboratory.
In this lecture, we will explore how English and European alchemists searched for the philosopher’s stone and how their experiments were transformed into elaborate allegories. Why might a chemical substance be depicted as a lion, the death of a metal as a dismembered king, or the combination of two substances as the marriage of a man and a woman? And can we understand the meaning of these images today by recreating an early experiment?
In recent years, this is precisely what historians of science have increasingly been doing together with chemists and archaeologists. By studying surviving laboratories, vessels, recipes, and traces of substances, researchers can reconstruct alchemical processes and, in some cases, literally reproduce the products that early modern authors called the philosopher’s stone.
We will see that alchemy was not merely a search for a way to turn base metals into gold. It was a distinctive system of knowledge about matter, in which laboratory practice, text, and image constantly complemented one another. Alchemical images could serve as a way of describing changes in colour, the combination of substances, evaporation, crystallisation, and other transformations in a world where modern chemical formulae and the scientific language familiar to us today did not yet exist.
Finally, we will try to understand how close alchemists really came to creating their philosopher’s stone - and what modern laboratory reconstructions can reveal about their mysterious recipes and imagery.
The lecture will be given by Sergey Zotov - British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, PhD in History.
This event will be held in Russian.
Arc Space London • Tottenham Mews 13, W1T 4AQ London, England, United Kingdom
