Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
alchemist into two figures, or two phases, of 'wrong alchemy'. The first
one is the 'mad alchemist', the miserable seeker who is obsessed with the
idea of gold-making and who spends all his money for nothing, ruins his
health and his family, loses his social reputation, and ends up in the
gutter. The second figure (or phase) is the tempting or 'cheating al-
chemist'. Like a junkie turned into a drug dealer, he tries to finance his
obsession by inducing the same obsession for gold-making in others.
Once his victims are infected and become 'mad alchemists', the 'cheat-
ing alchemist' uses some simple alchemical tricks to drain them dry.
Late medieval and early modern satires featuring the 'mad alchemist'
and the 'cheating alchemist' had a much more general moral than being
simply a critique of alchemical gold-making efforts. They were criticiz-
ing the striving for material goods, such as money, or physical health and
immortality, as in corresponding alchemist stories about 'elixirs of life'.
They were arguing for a spiritual life guided by moral and religious val-
ues. And by making kings, aristocrats, clerics, and representatives of
other social classes the blind victims of 'cheating alchemists', they were
denouncing the corruptness of their society. These alchemical figures
slowly faded during the seventeenth century, as writers employed new
figures, such as the 'miser' and the 'gamester', for propagating similar
moral messages.
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In addition, alchemy became extremely popular among
educated people, as indicated by the number of published topics in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And since most of the popular phi-
losophies of nature (from Aristotle to Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Newton,
and Leibniz) supported, or at least did not exclude, the transmutation of
metals, the stories lost some of their plausibility for mediating the gen-
eral message. It was not until the late eighteenth century that writers re-
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The 'miser', which goes back to Plautus's
Aulularia
(ca. 200 BC), was revived by
Lorenzino de Medici in his
Aridosia
(1536) and then became a popular theme, par-
ticularly in French comedies,
e.g
. de Larivey (
Les Esprits
, 1579), de Boisrobert (
La
Belle Plaideuse
, 1655), Chappuzeau (
L'Avare Dupé
, 1636), and, of course, Molière
(
L'Avare
, 1668). In England, the usurer Shylock in Shakespeare's
The Merchant of
Venice
was certainly influential. The 'obsessed gamester', who replaced the 'mad al-
chemist', was made popular, for instance, by Espinel (
Vida del Escudero Marcos de
Obregón
, 1618), Shirley (
The Gamester
, 1633), de la Forge (
La Joueuse Dupée
,
1663), Dancourt (
La Désolation des Joueuses
, 1688), and Dufresney (
Le Chevalier
Joueur
, 1697).
