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CHAPTER 2

Three Elixirs

This chapter is about genealogies. What I hope to show is the importance of the intellectual components of the elixir—the alchemy of the making of alchemy, if you will forgive the expression. My chief concern is with the religious elements that make up the genealogies of the three elixirs under discussion, but these intellectual components mix and aggregate with natural philosophic components as well. The descriptions of the elixirs involve a number of overlapping discourses, traditions, and very personal ideological commitments. While religion need not figure into any conception of the elixir, the nuances of theological or philosophical speculation have serious implications for how the various authors envisioned their alchemies. Roger Bacon relies on the Christian model of the perfect, resurrected body. Vitalis of Furno draws on the tradition of the theriac, but studiously avoids mention of alchemy, and John of Rupescissa ruminates on the physical nature of heaven. These small differences are important. One cannot disentangle the “science” from the nonscientific assumptions and traditions that inspire the creation of these substances without fundamentally misinterpreting them. For while it is true that every elixir is a cure-all, each elixir is not just a cureall. Genealogies clarify what generalizations obfuscate.

The pursuit of the elixir was one of two main tracks pursued by medieval alchemists, second in popularity to the transmutation of metals. Chrysopoeia and argyropoeia (transmutation of base metals into gold or silver, respectively) were the subjects of most medieval alchemical texts. The term elixir is derived from the Arabic al-iksīr, itself a translation of Greek xērion, a term used to describe the agent that transforms one substance into another.¹ Initially in Arabic alchemy the term “elixir” had nothing to do with healing human bodies, but rather with perfecting metals. Metals were understood to exist in a hierarchy, with gold at the top, followed by silver.² Medieval people generally differentiated metals phenotypically, that is, based on their appearance and observable characteristics, but medieval scholars also understood metals to have different elemental compositions related to primary qualities. Aristotle described four primary qualities (hot, dry, wet, cold) from whose interactions were made the four elements (fire, earth, air, water), which in turn, according to philosophers and physicians of antiquity, combined to make up the four humors. Hence, an al-iksīr perfected a metal by purifying it of its base qualities, but also by changing its primary qualities.³ For instance, tin is primarily dry, but gold is hot and silver is cold. An elixir can change those qualities. A medical elixir worked according to the same logic. It both purified the body and balanced or redistributed the body’s humoral qualities into a better arrangement.

While Western, Christian alchemists drew on the general idea of the elixir, they elaborated on its powers and production in ways not anticipated by their Islamic forebears. They seized particularly on the power of the elixir to heal and augment the human body. The justification for the potency of the elixir came from many sources, and the three elixirs presented in this chapter have very different alchemical and medicinal genealogies. Indeed, “elixir” was not a standard term for alchemical medicinals in the medieval period. Rather, authors named compounds “inestimable glory,” “burning water,” and “quintessence.” Still, the logic of purification and balancing or transforming humors was characteristic of these substances. Therefore, “elixir,” as I am using it, is simply a taxonomic term to denote an alchemical compound that has salubrious effects on the human body. That said, the terms used by the authors are important, and will be discussed in due course.

Knowledge about the elixir, and alchemy in general, emerged sporadically throughout the twelfth century. The first complete alchemical text to be translated from Arabic into Latin was likely the Morienus, completed by Robert of Ketton in 1144.⁴ Its preface states that it includes knowledge on alchemy “our Latinity does not yet hardly comprehend.” Evidence of the unfamiliarity of Latin authors with this new science comes from the occasional use of Western vernaculars as “intermediary” languages. Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek texts often found their way into local dialect prior to being translated into Latin.⁵ Rather than diffusing alchemy into vernacular culture, these intermediary translations were a means of coping with what must have seemed entirely new concepts.

As important as the translation of Arabic alchemical texts was the translation of the Aristotelian corpus, by which I mean of course not only the works of Aristotle, but works ascribed to him and commentaries on all these. One of the key texts was the Meteorologica. Gerard of Cremona had translated its first three books early in the twelfth century, and Henricus Aristippus the fourth in 1156. But the work did not take its full shape in the Latin West until after 1200, when Alfred of Sarashel added to the manuscript a copy of Avicenna’s De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum (On the congealing and joining of stones), a part of his Book of Remedy.⁶ What was probably the first original Latin treatise on alchemy, the 1257 Book on the Secrets of Alchemy of Constantine of Pisa, relied heavily on the fourth book of the Meteorologica, which included Aristotle’s theory of metals.⁷ Likewise Paul of Taranto, a Franciscan lector, authored early alchemical treatises that lean on Aristotle and his commenters.⁸ Paul (under his own name as well as that of “Geber”) also transmitted a theory on the generation of metals that linked them to the heavens. Contemporary astrological theory held that terrestrial objects were governed by heavenly bodies for which they had an affinity. For metals, the sun was related to gold, the moon to silver, and, predictably, Mercury to mercury. The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy includes this idea, but also holds that the celestial bodies were the origin of these metals.⁹ The idea was that heavenly rays penetrated the earth and congealed within it as metals, helping to explain the affinity between celestial and terrestrial.¹⁰ The celestial-terrestrial relationship would prove fertile ground for future alchemical speculation.

Roger Bacon and Inestimable Glory

In 1268, Bacon completed his Opus tertium (The Third Work), as part of a hastily written collection of texts that responded to a 1266 command of Pope Clement IV. The Opus tertium was a recension of the Opus minus (The Lesser Work), itself a recension of the Opus maius, a hastily written but voluminous tome he had sent to the pope probably in 1267. In this third work, Bacon writes that, for fear of alchemical secrets falling into the wrong hands, he has consigned some of the most vital secrets to his aide, John, from whom the pope can have this knowledge transcribed.¹¹ He also says that in addition to what John can convey verbally, there are two other sections Bacon had written obscurely, one in code (enigmatas) and the other in philosophical language so that a reader would assume Bacon was discussing medicine or natural philosophy rather than alchemy.¹²

We should not take this to mean that Bacon is short on detail or secretly skeptical about alchemy. In the short period since he had written the Opus maius after promising the pope he had already completed it, Bacon seemed more sanguine about alchemy, a notion bolstered by his later writings.¹³ In fact, he had taken a cautionary tone regarding alchemy in his Opus maius. Speaking about the medicinal use of alchemical gold, a substance Constantine of Pisa believed might be capable of halting the spread of leprosy, Bacon opined that the gold produced by alchemists was not of a particularly high grade.¹⁴ Interestingly, however, he said the same thing about gold found in nature, allowing that certain scientific arts might allow for the production of an even higher grade of gold. No doubt one of the reasons Bacon felt the need to create the Opus minus and Opus tertium was his evolving notion of alchemy.

In the Opus maius, Bacon had yet to align the practice of alchemy with what he called scientia experimentalis, troublingly translated with the cognate experimental science. By the time he wrote the Opus tertium, however, Bacon had divided the practice of alchemy into what he called “speculative” and “operative” alchemy. Operative alchemy was practiced, but not (fully) theorized. Operative alchemists could be skilled practitioners, but they did not comprehend the primary goal (finem principalem) of alchemy.¹⁵ Speculative alchemists, of whom Bacon said there were but a handful, understood the uses to which alchemy could be put in regard both to inanimate matter, such as metals, dyes, and tinctures, but also to animate or living matter. Living matter, chiefly the human body, was the province of the speculative alchemist.¹⁶

Living matter corresponded to inanimate matter, but was more complex.¹⁷ Like other Aristotelians, Bacon understood the four basic elements as arising from the four primary qualities (cold, dry, hot, wet).¹⁸ From the elements come the simple humors, which correspond to the standard humoral model: phlegm, choler, melancholy, and blood. The simple humors have “conjoined natures” (conjungentes naturae) of the elements, that is, one element and its particular qualities (cold and dry, hot and dry, cold and wet, and cold and dry) dominate.¹⁹ These humors, however, are not the same as bodily humors. The bodily humors are themselves a combination of simple humors. Each is dominated by one of the simple humors. So, bodily phlegm is a secondary humor, made up of four primary or simple humors, with primary phlegm dominant. Bacon’s system, then, makes animate bodies more complex expressions of humoral interaction than those found in inanimate bodies.²⁰ To make true blood, one had to purify bodily blood of the other simple humors mixed within it.

Given the relationship of humors to elements, Bacon considers alchemy one of the essential fields of knowledge for understanding living things, so long as it is married to scientia experimentalis.²¹ Jeremiah Hackett has distilled Bacon’s description of experimental science into three “prerogatives.”²² The first is the rigorous application of logic to observation and experience. The term “experience” is, in fact, closer to the meaning of experimenta than is the cognate “experiment.” Bacon argues that observation of phenomena can teach us new truths and even refute truths supplied by reason alone, as long as we apply our critical faculties to what is being observed. The second aspect of experimental science is the creation and manufacture of tools, weapons, and medicines. For instance, in addition to the elixir, Bacon proposes using experimental science to create giant mirrors capable of incinerating enemies at a great distance.²³ Finally, Bacon believes that experimental science can supply a reliable source of divination for knowing things of the past, present, and future. This generally relates to the observation of astrological phenomena, but his writings on the elixir suggest that human beings may be able to gain such knowledge instantly.²⁴

This is a good indicator that Bacon meant something rather different from experimental science by scientia experimentalis. In the Opus tertium he even calls certain branches of scientia experimentalis “magical (magicus).”²⁵ In one sense, this is atypical of Bacon’s work, since he generally uses the term “magic” to describe deceits.²⁶ On the other hand, the breadth of sciences Bacon recommends includes a number of practices that are defined, certainly today and often in medieval culture, as magical. Divination and the utterance of “words of power” are just as much a part of Bacon’s program as geometry. Thus, Bacon’s use of the term “magic” tends to have ethical and religious overtones. The medieval approach to magic was to define it in opposition to religion. Modernity retains the tendency to define magic as part of a binary, but the modern definition tends to contrast it with science.²⁷ The problem here is that, well into the early modern period, the magic-science binary was not distinct, given the conviction that, as Michael Bailey has put it, “the natural world was conceived as a direct manifestation of the supernatural order.”²⁸

Bacon is quite aware of the problem of terminology. One of the reasons he advocates so strongly for scientia experimentalis is that too many of its practices have been discarded as magical or sorcerous, when they should belong to the natural philosopher.²⁹ Bacon argues that the application of scientia experimentalis, especially critical observation, can help sort out what is magical and what is not.³⁰ Bacon uses the example of a magnet to prove this point. People are easily fooled, he argues, when a fraudulent magician uses a magnet to attract iron. By uttering incantations or scrawling sigils on the ground, the magician makes people think that these activities move the iron, when it is in fact the natural property of the magnet.³¹ On the other hand, Bacon does not reject magical words or symbols wholesale, griping at one point that women and demons have “abused characters and incantations written by the wise.”³² Therefore, scientia experimentalis enfolded a wide variety of practices, linking them through a particular methodology.

One linkage in particular bears special mention, namely, the relationship between astrology/astronomy and medicinal or speculative alchemy. As noted in the prior section, the connection between celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies (of any kind) was understood to be quite strong. Bacon himself was a fierce defender of the merits of astrology and reinforced the link between celestial bodies and human physiology.³³ The effect of celestial motion on the human changed from moment to moment, and intersected with a person’s humoral make-up, what Bacon called complexion. The effect of both the stars and the humors (themselves partly determined by the position of the stars at one’s birth) exerted significant force on human behavior. The notion that physiology was somewhat determinative in regard to behavior has a history dating back to Aristotle, but Christian theologians had resisted the idea of deterministic forces compelling behavior. One had to be free if sin was to be a meaningful category. Bacon is careful to maintain that complexion inclines people to action, but does not obviate free choice.³⁴ Rather, Bacon hoped to use astrology and alchemy to mitigate the negative effects of the humors and stars and intensify the positive.

Bacon took a moderately declensionist view of human bodies and their complexion. He agreed that biblical writings demonstrated that humans once had much longer lifespans, which had shortened gradually since the exile from Eden. At the same time, he did not think that this was a necessary condition of human existence. Sinfulness and immoderation had polluted humanity’s ancestors, who passed on these defects to their children, where they were compounded over succeeding generations and shortened the human lifespan. Because this was an “accidental,” not a necessary, condition of the world, human lifespans were subject to expansion as well.³⁵

Bacon recounts a number of tales (hearsay for the most part) to prove the truth of this statement. (As much as Bacon championed observation and reason, he was also prone to rely on the authority of anyone worthy of belief.³⁶) For instance he relates the tale of a peasant who found in a field a golden vessel full of liquid that bestowed on him sixty years of youth.³⁷ He also discusses the benefits of consuming dragon flesh, including both health and mental acuity.³⁸ These medicines might seem miraculous, but Bacon regards their effects as resulting from their composition: “That liquor which the rustic drank is thought to have approached an equality of elements far beyond ordinary food and drinks.”³⁹

This equilibrium is one of two theoretical keys to Bacon’s elixir. As he puts it in the Opus maius, “If the elements should be prepared and purified in some mixture, so that there would be no action of one element on another, but so that they would be reduced to pure simplicity, the wisest have judged that they would make a perfect medicine.”⁴⁰ Such perfect mixtures are supposedly inaccessible through nature, making the administration of medicine a fraught pursuit. One of the concerns of medieval pharmacy was to ensure that medicines did not further disrupt the bodily imbalance that caused the ailment in the first place, or reverse it in such a way as to cause a different ailment or death. Apart from physical injuries, medieval observers considered illnesses to arise out of a humoral imbalance. Too much blood, for instance, (a hot and wet substance) could produce certain kinds of fevers. Hence pharmaceutical documents engage in a great deal of discussion of the properties of various herbs, stones, foods, and liquids that might go into a medicine. What might be healthy for a feverish woman may not be good for a healthy man. Yet an elementally balanced compound, such as Bacon’s elixir, had the potential to restore humoral equilibrium by purifying the body of the excess substance and conferring upon it what it lacked, regardless of a person’s original complexion.

Perhaps the most powerful example Bacon employs to explain this theory is an example known to all his readers: Adam in the Garden. Adam, writes Bacon, was immortal only so long as he ate from the Tree of Life. Adam’s body was, like all terrestrial bodies and compounds, made up of elements and humors that acted upon one another. It was subject to change, that is, to corruption, and therefore to dissolution. Because the humors acted upon one another, there could be both imbalance and waste. Hence Adam, like all people, needed to eat to rebalance his humors. Regular food, as noted earlier, has particular humoral qualities as well. While a thoughtful diet (that is, one based on food that replenishes lost humors and mitigates excess humors) is vital for health, it never perfectly balanced one’s complexion. The fruit of the Tree of Life, however, had “elements approaching equality,” and could have kept Adam alive indefinitely.⁴¹ Just as we have seen in Chapter 1, Bacon is reading Genesis as natural philosophy. Bacon agreed that the interpretation of scripture relied on natural philosophy, but here we get a clear example of Christian doctrine driving alchemical theory. Had the Bible been a text that merited only spiritual reflection, it is hard to conceive of Bacon developing the elixir along the lines he did.

Adam’s body was, of course, superior to postlapsarian ones (Bacon predictably makes no mention of Eve’s body), but in one sense all bodies are the same. Every human body is naturally immortal (naturalis immortalis), meaning it can exist indefinitely provided it has a balanced complexion.⁴² Bacon is again following scriptural warrant, specifically Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the apostle describes the resurrected dead as uncorrupted (incorrupti) and immortal. (Vulg. 1 Cor 15: 50–54) The fact that the resurrected dead must have perfect, uncorrupted, and incorruptible bodies is the foundation of Bacon’s notion that human body is capable of being perfected.⁴³ What Bacon adds to scripture is a philosophical explanation for this idea. The resurrected dead, according to Bacon, are endowed with an equality of elements, which allows them to exist physically forever.⁴⁴

This is not wild extrapolation or speculation on Bacon’s part. Augustine ruminated on resurrected bodies, and Peter Lombard included a discussion of the physiology of resurrected bodies in his Sentences, the principal theological textbook of the scholastic era.⁴⁵ A number of Franciscan masters, including Bonaventure, composed (or dictated) commentaries on the Lombard’s sentences, and any student in theology in the thirteenth century could expect to listen to masters’ lectures on individual questions for years. Bacon’s use of the resurrected body as a model for the effects of the elixir was significant, not only because of the impact of religion on alchemical theory, but also because the discourse was familiar to his confreres and the intellectual elite. Bacon’s theory of the elixir was not particularly influential, but that does not mean it was misunderstood or obscure. Moreover, Bacon was quite careful to maintain that these perfect bodies would die when God wanted them to (though not due to illness or old age).⁴⁶ This accorded with the kind of perfect (resurrected) bodies found in some contemporary hagiographies.⁴⁷

The resurrected, and therefore complexionally balanced body was characterized by four specific qualities, called dowries (dotes), so labeled by William of Auxerre and discussed in the Sentences.⁴⁸ The dowries are claritas, agilitas, subtilitas, and impassibilitas. While Bacon does not refer to these per se, it is clear from his description of the elixir’s effects that the dowries are on his mind. While the dowries are often translated by their English cognates, it is important to remember that scholastics considered each of them to encompass a number of different qualities.⁴⁹ The gifts are not just infusions. They also speak to the removal of defects. Elixirs are substances that not only purify through the removal of unwanted qualities, but also confer what is missing. Thus Bacon’s belief that an elixir can act to create a perfect body is wholly consistent with both scholastic dialogue on perfect bodies and alchemical theory.

Impassibilitas has a double meaning. On the one hand it is related to the Greek apatheia, an inability to suffer as well as a freedom from base passions. Thomas Aquinas refers to it as quies, freedom from the passions, and Bonaventure calls it a “perfect disposition.”⁵⁰ Physiologically speaking it meant imperviousness to corruption. The composition of elements within an impassible body could not be changed. Bacon provides an example of this idea by discussing the not so fortunate resurrected bodies in Hell. Their flesh could burn eternally while never being consumed by the flames.⁵¹ Claritas describes the luminous quality of perfect bodies—a well-attested aspect of the resurrected dead and of saintly bodies.⁵² Subtilitas speaks to the refinement of the body’s particles to the point that these fine particles can pass intact through other bodies; the resurrected can walk through walls. Agilitas is the ability to move one’s body according to the wishes of the soul without limitations, to float or levitate. Bacon does not delve much into these latter three dowries, though there are some implications of claritas when he discusses how one concocts the elixir.