Secrecy in Alchemy: The Gold Standard

Introduction

Throughout history, there have been few disciplines that have captured the imagination and curiosity of scholars and enthusiasts alike as profoundly as alchemy has. Amidst lofty ambitions to transmute base metals into gold, heal the sick, and prolong human life by close to a hundred-fold, alchemical knowledge was hidden beneath layers of code and cryptic language. Alchemy’s culture of secrecy became infamous, veiling its practitioners and their laboratories in layers of mystique and concealment. Though alchemy is the basis from which chemistry first sprang from, historiography usually portrayed alchemy and magic as mysterious and secretive, contrasting with the inherent openness of modern science. Indeed, “[a]ccording to this view, openness is a positive value that supports academic research. In contrast, secrecy, which is held rather to be historically characteristic of technology, magic, and alchemy, has been abandoned by modern science.”

Alchemy, as we will see, did value secrecy and concealment, but modern historical research challenges the stereotype of alchemy being a purely mystical field practiced by would-be wizards behind closed doors. Indeed, it would seem odd that a practice that gave us metallurgy and cosmetics and from which the advancements of modern chemistry came would only flourish in spite of its core values. Alchemy’s secrecy, then, must have had some positive attributes—by operating outside the confines of conventional scientific discourse, alchemists could explore unorthodox ideas and experiments with less risk of public scrutiny.

In this paper, I will explore the relationship between alchemy and secrecy, examining the methods of concealment the alchemical tradition and the significance of those methods within the culture of alchemy and within the wider culture of premodern Europe. I will also discuss the ways in which this culture of secrecy affected laboratory practice and alchemical theory itself.
To illustrate what is meant by concealment in the alchemical tradition, I will highlight the work of the famous alchemist Paracelsus and his use of allegory and word-substitution in his work “The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists”, which is included in a collection of his other writings on Hermetic Chemistry. Here I will show how his use of decknamen, or alchemical code-names, is a prime example of one of the most well-known and most frequently used techniques of alchemical secrecy. I will also use the work of 17th-century alchemist Basil Valentine as an example of allegorical and mythological language in alchemy. This was another technique often used to conceal the true meaning behind what were often clear and methodical laboratory instructions.

From establishing the techniques of alchemical secrecy I will move on to an examination of the culture of that secrecy both within alchemy and as a reflection of common ideas about truth and esoteric knowledge of the time. I will show that although alchemists were particularly secretive in their theory and practice, the openness with which we in the modern era have become accustomed to speaking and writing was not an ideal during the golden age of alchemy. I will also examine popular concepts in alchemy like “donum dei” or “gift from god” to explain some of the context behind why alchemists in particular would find value in the esoteric practice of their Art.

Finally, this paper will discuss some of the effects of secrecy on the theory and practice of alchemy itself. From the esoteric allegories of alchemical texts to the guarded rituals within the laboratory, secrecy shaped not only what alchemists knew but also how they came to know it. I will make particular note of the popularity of “books of secrets”, which provide an example of the common techniques that alchemists used to conceal their true recipes. These books as we will see were actually quite popular, and examining the reasons for this popularity, shows some interesting relationships between alchemical theory and practice, this proto-science moved closer to what we recognize today as chemistry and medicine.

In essence, I seek to explore what particular role secrecy played in the history of alchemy, particularly in the period where the Art was increasingly popular. Through an understanding of the techniques and culture of secrecy in the alchemical tradition as well as how those ideals shaped actual alchemical practice, I seek to illuminate some of the ways in which alchemy developed because (not in spite of) of its secretive culture, and eventually make a connection to its legacy in current chemistry and the halls of academia.

Secrets as Practice

The practice of Alchemy has long been shrouded in intentional mystery and secrecy. From its early days, practitioners held that alchemy was esoteric, available only to the cleverest minds who could decipher the hidden meaning in grimoires and recipe books. Indeed, “[t]he secret knowledge the occult philosopher claimed to possess consisted of doctrines intended solely for the initiate. It was to be kept hidden from the multitude lest they misunderstand and misuse it.”

The earliest alchemical texts we have access to today “carried injunctions to secrecy and deployed various methods of preserving it, such as the use of Decknamen and their extension into allegories.”

The use of secrecy in alchemical texts originated mainly out of a necessity to protect trade secrets, though “this tendency [towards secrecy] was enhanced in the Jābirian writings by alchemy’s connection to a secretive and esoteric Shi’ite sect,

and by the addition of the dispersion of knowledge technique, which may have served primarily to cloak the multiple authorship of the corpus.”

To make sure that alchemical secrets were understood only by that initiate minority, alchemical authors employed various methods of encryption in their writings. The art of alchemy has a turbulent history as well, where the practice went through periods of being legal or illegal depending on region, ruler, and religious attitude at various points in history. Alchemy’s esoteric nature fed into its secrecy, and its secrecy fed back into its perception as occult.

In first discussing the techniques of secrecy employed by alchemists, there arises an important distinction. This distinction is that between “‘secret as content’ versus ‘secrecy as practice.’” Making this distinction allows us to build a “useful framework for understanding alchemical rhetorics of secrecy and their relationship to alchemical cryptography.”

In this section, I will primarily discuss the techniques of alchemical secrecy (secrecy as practice) before moving onto the idea of secrets as content in later sections of this paper. The separation of secrets as content and secrets as practice means that the two concepts will not always coincide with each other. Indeed, “[m]any handbooks… containing ‘‘secrets’’ that only a selected audience is supposed to know are in fact widely publicized (secret without secrecy), while the secrets of some esoteric circles seem banal or empty once they are uncovered (secrecy with-out a secret).”

The culture of secrecy within the alchemical tradition is a performative one, “which employs a variety of techniques” to achieve this performance.”

Decknamen

One of the more well-known techniques of secrecy used by alchemists is the use of code-names or decknamen. The use of decknamen is a “performative gesture (secrecy as practice) as much as it is a means of encrypting information (secret as content)” in which code names are assigned to which alchemical concepts or ingredients will vary based on context, author, and time period. Regardless, there are several which are very common among authors and well-known in their meanings. A quick glance at the sections covered in The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists by Paracelsus reveals several uses of decknamen. Those section headings include titles like “Concerning the Green Lion” and “Concerning the Red Lion”. The “Green Lion” and “Red Lion” are code names for antimony and potable gold. Under his heading for the Red Lion, he instructs the reader to “take the lion in the pelican” and refers to the substance you acquire after the instructed distillation as the “Oil of the Sun.” The “pelican” is the codename for a particular type of glassware used for distillation, and the “Sun” is commonly used to mean the noblest of the metals—gold.

Other Methods

Decknamen is one of the more well-known methods of secrecy specific to alchemy, but alchemists used many other techniques to conceal the true meaning of their words, often in combination with each other. A helpful reference is found in the paper “Situating ciphers among alchemical techniques of secrecy” by Sarah Lang out of the Austrian University of Graz. There she lists decknamen and “specialist terminology”, along with “dispersion of knowledge (dispersio), “iconic symbols and codes”, “alphanumeric knowledge charts,” “monoalphabetic ciphers”, “mythoalchemical allegories”, as well as several other techniques of concealment.

Many alchemical recipes can be understood in the context of myths, fables, and religious references. The following excerpt is from 'Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat, von dem grossen Stein der Uralten...' or “The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine”, originally published in 1599.

“Fixed salt has imparted to warlike Mars a hard, firm, and durable body, which is evidence of the generosity of his soul; nor can fire be said to have much power over it. And if its strength be united to the beauty of Venus, I do not say but that a precious and harmonious result may be obtained. For the phlegmatic or humid quality of the Moon may be heated with the ardent blood of Venus, and the blackness of Venus removed with the strong salt of Mars”

Secrecy: The Cultural Angle

The use of decknamen and various ciphers within the alchemical community is indicative not only of the culture of the field of alchemy but also a strong emphasis on secrecy within the wider culture of medieval and premodern Europe. Indeed, “when we peer deeply into the intellectual and moral life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, we must be struck by how intensely aware its writers and thinkers were of the phenomenon of dissimulation… Many of them viewed the world they lived in as filled with duplicity.”

Indeed, this premodern era coincided with what is considered to be the golden age of alchemy. At the same time, conflicts between alchemical theory and religious doctrine lead to the art being frequently outlawed, made legal, and outlawed again. Even before the premodern period, alchemy relied heavily on religious allegory, and many justifications for alchemy were theological. Many of the allegories that the alchemists used in their writings were not only mythological but also religious. The creation of the philosopher’s stone was linked to the resurrection of Christ, in that “[j]ust as Christ had to be crucified in order to redeem humanity,… so too must the alchemist’s materials undergo similar torments, even death and resurrection, before they could in turn ‘redeem’ base metals as the philosophers’ stone.”

For a long time the gold-making goals of transmutational alchemy were put towards the concern with theological problems like the war against the antichrist. Alchemists like the millenarian John of Rupescizza (d. 1362) were particularly encouraged towards transmutational alchemy to make gold to fund this prophesized war. In the medieval period into the premodern, not just the use of but what kinds of allegorical concealments alchemists used is revealing. The formulation of allegorical links between religion, mythology, and alchemy “tells us something crucial about premodern ways of thinking… premoderns tended to conceive of and visualize the world in multivalent terms, where each individual thing was connected to many others by webs of analogy and metaphor.” The way in which alchemy, astrology, theology, philosophy, and medicine were all interconnected “stands in contrast to the modern tendency to compartmentalize and isolate things and ideas into separate disciplines.”

Additionally, the art of “reading between the lines” is something that was a wider cultural value; alchemists were not the only ones who dissimulated or concealed, and indeed even within the majority religion, esoteric readings of scripture were often very popular and well-regarded. In general,

“Belief in the existence of a hidden knowledge containing higher truths unattainable except by the penetration of certain mysteries goes far back in Western thought. Not only was this notion characteristic of some of the religious and philosophical cults of Greco-Roman antiquity; it also formed an important strand of ancient Christian tradition. In the third century it became the basis of the church father Origen's enormously influential method of interpreting the Bible.”

Origen said of the hidden meaning of the scriptures that “[t]he inspired meaning is not recognized by all, but only by those who are gifted by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the word of wisdom and knowledge.”

This idea is familiar to practitioners of alchemy as it parallels the idea of “donum dei”, that skillful alchemical work is something that is gifted by god. Not just anyone can become a great alchemist. Thus, it became important to hide the true meaning of alchemical experiments from people who may not be gifted by God with such aptitude. The alchemist Paracelsus has a similar sentiment in his preface to The Book of Vexations where he addresses the reader. He begins by promising the “gentle Reader, and zealous Student of this Art” that he will communicate knowledge that was “derived by those ancient Sages, to whom the secret of our Art was first revealed by God for the health and happiness of earthly life.”

The rest of the volume is written in allegory and code, in accordance with the alchemical tradition.

Theory and Practice

Here, the distinction between secrets as content and secrets as practice becomes relevant once again. In particular, the popularity of “Books of Secrets” in the medieval period is an indication of how the cryptic writings of alchemy were actually consumed by people. The answer is that these books of secrets were widely distributed, popular books—secrecy without secrets. William Eamon writes in “Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science,”

“Why did these writings capture the imagination of Europe in the Middle Ages, and why did their popularity and authority persist for so long? One reason, perhaps, is that they were linked with a literary tradition comprising works that promised to reveal the esoteric teachings of revered philosophers like Aristotle and Albertus Magnus. Such writings appealed forcefully to the medieval mind, which was inclined to believe that everything knowable was contained in ancient sources… [B]ooks of secrets promised to give readers access to secrets of nature and the arts which might be exploited for material gain or for the betterment of the human condition.”

The word “secret” in this context is close to “trade secret”—these books contained mainly recipes and tutorials for experiments written in alchemy’s typical cryptic style. These books made up a significant genre, notably separate from what would have been considered “conventional scientific literature”. This tells us two important things about medieval science: “there was, on the one hand, an ongoing experimental tradition (which is frequently unnoticed); and on the other hand, a separation of theory from practice.”

However, by the premodern golden period of alchemy, theory and practice became integrated with each other. Alchemists believed that understanding the fundamental properties of substances was essential for unlocking their transformative powers. Laboratory practitioners guarded their methods closely. By using their symbolic language and cryptic terminology as discussed in previous sections, alchemists made sure that their protocols were intentionally obscure to outsiders, including other alchemists and patrons who would fund their experimentation. At the same time, however, the integration of theory and practice influenced laboratory practices by emphasizing the importance of systematic observation, documentation, and reflection on experimental results. One of the hallmarks of premodern alchemy was in fact its empirical and experiment-based results. Alchemists were not sharing with outsiders, but they were increasingly viewing empirical results as important indicators of the strength of their various theories.

Conclusion

Alchemy’s secrecy, from the perspective of modern science, seems entirely counterproductive to progress. The way that science is done today is built foundationally on openness and straightforwardness, on peer review and careful replication of experiment. The idea that anyone could assert any fact of nature without having their result verified or following a standard procedure of hypothesis to result is almost laughable in the modern age. However, alchemy’s cryptic way of sharing knowledge did not stop it from becoming foundational to metallurgy, modern chemistry, and cosmetics. Additionally, science and religion are seen by many today to be opposites. To find any mention of a deity in a scientific paper or laboratory instruction would be an extremely rare thing, and the ideal for any kind of scientific writing is to be as secular, unbiased, clear, and straightforward as possible. However, as we have seen, these ideals are relatively modern. It was not just the alchemists who wrote in allegory, double-speak, and cipher, though the study of alchemy is and was almost synonymous with that careful secrecy. The secrecy with which the alchemists operated, especially in the pre-modern period, was very much a product of its environment. In turn, alchemy’s own early history with esotericism made these ideals of secrecy stronger and contributed to the ways in which the theories formed and the laboratories operated.

Though it is easy to view alchemy as obsolete or as a failed faculty, the modern study of chemistry was built on the shoulders of alchemists. Though they never truly made it into the halls of the university or found a way to transmute lead into gold, many of the laboratory practices, distillation methods, and ways of thinking that alchemists developed helped create the field of chemistry that we recognize and study today. The idea that alchemists had that one could break down matter into its constituents to make new materials may reflect an early attempt at characterizing what we know now are chemical reactions between elements—materials made up of only one kind of atom.

Likewise, the influence of alchemy as an esoteric, secretive art left its mark as well, though perhaps that mark is not so unique. Humans have sought after occulted knowledge for a very long time—the idea that one must be uniquely intelligent, well-reasoned, or blessed in order to understand or be worthy to understand certain difficult concepts is an attractive one. Academia today is rife with the idea of the learned few, and especially in the natural sciences, there is a pervasive but usually unspoken idea that some faculties are simply too difficult for the general public. Conversely, there is a sense that if a person is able to easily grasp these difficult faculties like mathematics, physics, and chemistry, they have some inherent gift towards it—our very own ideal of “donum dei”.

Works Cited

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Lang, Sarah. "Situating ciphers among alchemical techniques of secrecy." Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings, 2023. doi:10.3384/ecp195698.

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Valentine, Basil. The Last Will and Testament of Basil. Valentine, Monke of the Order of St. Bennet: Which Being Alone, He Hid Under a Table of Marble, Behind the High-altar of the Cathedral Church, in the Imperial City of Erford: Leaving it There to be Found by Him, Whom Gods Providence Should Make Worthy of It. To which is Added Two Treatises the First Declaring His Manual Operations. The Second Shewing Things Natural and Supernatural. Never Before Published in English. 1671.

Valentine, Basil. The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine. Translated by Adam McLean. 1599.

Zagorin, Perez. “Occultism and Dissimulation.” In Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe, 255-88. Harvard University Press, 1990.