Alchemy | part 1

 Feed the army, change sex and gain immortality: why the aristocrats of the past were engaged in alchemy

 The AST publishing house has published a book by the cultural anthropologist and author of The Knife, Sergei Zotov, The History of Alchemy. The Journey of the Philosopher's Stone from the Bronze Age to the Atomic Age ”- a summary of the history of the Hermetic sciences. The Knife publishes a fragment about why gold-making from an art available to individuals has become a popular area of ​​knowledge, why Swedish alchemists needed the blood of boys and how stones in coffins were turned into gold.

 In the XVI-XVIII centuries. in the territory from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, many alchemical centers arise. Kings and dukes, princes and ladies of the court, popes, bishops and priests have been unprecedentedly actively sponsoring laboratories or even trying to get the coveted elixir themselves.

 By investing a lot of money in experiments, they hoped to get a lucrative income and get rid of financial difficulties, prolong life or be cured of diseases. Scientists and crooks from all over Europe came to these centers in search of easy money.

 The spread of alchemy in modern times was also served by the theory, popularized by the Swiss alchemist Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541), that the human body can be treated with drugs based on metals, for example, with the help of drinking gold. <…> Italy: the magical gate

 Already in the XVI century. Italian aristocratic families such as the Medici sponsor alchemists and even try to create the Philosopher's Stone themselves. Francesco I Medici (1541-1587) is seriously interested in gold-making experiments. His half-brother, illegitimate younger brother Giovanni Medici (1567-1621) will also become a well-known alchemist.

 Especially for natural philosophical research, Francesco in 1572 built a remarkable architectural monument, the secret study "Studiolo" in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Studiolo served as a kind of laboratory with a museum and library.

 Inside, the room was decorated with frescoes on hermetic subjects. Allegories of the four elements are depicted on the vaults, and on medallions in the walls there are paintings with scenes corresponding to the elements of air, water, fire and earth. In another image, we see work in the alchemical laboratory, among the experimenters - the Medici himself and his assistants (see ill. 1).

 Il. 1. Images taken from the book "History of Alchemy" by Sergei Zotov. Moscow, AST. 2020

 Along with Florence, Rome in modern times becomes one of the largest alchemical centers. Passion for alchemy in Rome continues unabated in the 17th century: Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), who converted to Catholicism, flees to the city. She organizes a distillary at Palazzo Riario, where she tries to get a red elixir on her own.

 The queen is in correspondence with one of the Roman cardinals about alchemy and expresses the opinion that the Philosopher's Stone can, among other things, help to grow plants out of season.

 She gathered around her many talented goldsmiths. One of them, the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara, in 1680 builds an "alchemical gate" with mysterious symbols in Rome to perpetuate the result of the transmutation that a stranger made in 1669 in the Palazzo Cristina, who immediately after that mysteriously disappeared into thin air (see Fig. 2).