ABSTRACT
This optimistic message contained within an often violent narrative is fundamental to the practice of alchemy itself. The primary goal of alchemy is presented as the transmutation of metals, from baser to nobler ones.1 In particular, alchemists focused on the production of gold, considered a mystical metal and associated with the sun, and silver, associated with the moon.2 Some of the earliest origins of alchemy lie in Egyptian techniques of amalgamation and even forgery, the records of which are no longer available to us, the earliest extant sources dating from about the third century AD.3 The development of western alchemy can be linked to that of gnosticism, described as the
1 Paracelsus: “Alchemy is nothing else but the set purpose, intention, and subtle endeavour to transmute the kinds of the metals from one to another. According to this, each person, by his own mental grasp, can choose out for himself a better way and Art, and therein find truth …” (The Coelum Philosophorum, in The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, p. 16).
