Research on Indian alchemy is included in the publication of The Alchemical Body by David Gordon White. [48] A modern bibliography of Indian alchemical studies was written by White. [49] Esoteric systems developed that mixed alchemy with a broader occult hermeticism and merged it with magic, astrology, and Christian Kabbalah. [77] [78] A key figure in this development was the German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), who received his hermetic training in Italy in the schools of humanists. In his De Occulta Philosophia, he tried to merge Kabbalah, Hermeticism and Alchemy. He helped spread this new mixture of hermeticism beyond the borders of Italy. [79] [80] The elemental system used in medieval alchemy also comes from Jabir. Its original system consisted of seven elements, including the five classical elements (ether, air, earth, fire and water), as well as two chemical elements representing metals: sulfur, “the stone that burns,” which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. [doubtful – discuss] [ref. needed] Soon after, eight elements developed, with the Arabic concept of the three metallic principles: sulfur gives flammability or combustion, mercury gives volatility and stability, and salt gives strength. [54] [verification needed] [best source needed] [doubtful – discuss] The atomic theory of corpuscularism, in which all physical bodies possess an inner and outer layer of tiny particles or particles, also has its origin in Jabir`s work. [55] This is the law of equivalent exchange as defined at the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It governs the laws of alchemy, the highest form of science in the series, and much of the series: energy cannot be destroyed or generated, only transformed or replaced by something of equal value.
This is the version of the story of the “price of magic,” their way of allowing the characters to do what is effectively witchcraft in an otherwise almost realistic turn-of-the-century setting. Power must obey this rule. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the center of alchemical development shifted to the Islamic world. Much more is known about Islamic alchemy because it was better documented: in fact, most of the earlier writings that have survived over the years have survived as Arabic translations. [51] The word alchemy itself is derived from the Arabic word al-kīmiyā (الكيمياء). The early Islamic world was a melting pot of alchemy. Platonic and Aristotelian thought, which had already been adopted in one way or another in Hermetic science, was assimilated by Syriac translations and scholarship in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. In the revival of alchemy in the 19th century, the two most seminal figures were Mary Anne Atwood and Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who independently published similar works on spiritual alchemy. Both had a completely esoteric view of alchemy, as Atwood claimed: “No modern art or chemistry, for all its secret claims, has anything in common with alchemy.” [99] [100] Atwood`s work influenced later authors of the occult revival, including Eliphas Levi, Arthur Edward Waite, and Rudolf Steiner. Hitchcock, in his Remarks on the Alchemists (1855), attempted to justify his spiritual interpretation by asserting that alchemists wrote about a spiritual discipline under a materialistic guise in order to avoid accusations of blasphemy from church and state. In 1845, Baron Carl Reichenbach published his studies on the odic force, a concept with some similarities to alchemy, but his research did not enter the mainstream of scientific discussion.
[101] In the Renaissance, the Hermetic and Platonic foundations of European alchemy were restored. The beginning of the medical, pharmaceutical, occult and entrepreneurial branches of alchemy followed. Philosophy – Alexandria acted as a melting pot for the philosophies of Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism, which formed the origin of the character of alchemy. [32] An important example of the roots of alchemy in Greek philosophy, which comes from Empedocles and was developed by Aristotle, was that all things in the universe were formed from just four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.