Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Alchemy

Paracelsus, the father of modern medicine and a contemporary of Luther and Fugger, writes in detail about spirits. Their life is similar to human lives: spirits eat, drink, have sex with one another, and even marry, but they don’t have souls. Spirits of the mine can pass through a solid rock mass, like a person moving through the air. Sometimes they come to an agreement with a human being, seduce him or take him into service. Kobolds, also known as mine fairies, are harmless; the metal cobalt is even named after them. Gnomes can be useful, although they are cunning and treacherous; trolls are dangerous. In the German Alps, gnomes were represented as little old men equipped with beards and tails. In Sweden, mine spirits were most often described as alluring women. The Swedish geologist and alchemist Urban Hjärne participated in a witch trial in 1676. An official of the Royal Bureau of Mines, he was a renowned scholar with international connections; a member of the Royal Society in London, he spent several years in Paris. But Hjärne voted that two of the women who had had sexual relations with the devil should be burnt on a bonfire. This was one of the last witch burnings in Europe.

Alchemists had a broad knowledge of natural magic; they were also metallurgists, physicians and astronomers. Paracelsus taught that the world consists of three universal ‘principles’ – the principle of salt, the principle of sulphur and the principle of mercury. God designated one of the elements, fire, to separate these principles. In 1661 the scientist and alchemist Robert Boyle, one of the directors of the English East India Company, published his treatise The Sceptical Chemist , which was directed against Paracelsus. The world consists not of three principles and four elements but of a countless number of atoms, which bump into each other in chance encounters. The chemical elements are primary substances that cannot be taken any further apart. Boyle thought it possible that elements could transmute; in his world there was no ether, but lead could nevertheless become gold.

From Sweden to Peru, the miners’ lives were shaped by their ores, just as the neighbouring peasants’ lives were shaped by their cereals and cattle. The peasants lived on the surface; they ploughed their land and the land of their masters. The mines went deep underground, the furnaces reached up into the sky, and the wealth that they produced also had peaks and troughs. The peasants lived by tradition and calculation; they knew what they would do in winter and what in summer, which field would be ploughed the following year and which would lie fallow. The miners and blacksmiths lived by secret knowledge combined with sheer fluke. In every mining town, local legends told about how metal was found there by chance: in Tyrolean Schwaz a peasant woman wandering across a field with her cow stumbled across a nugget of silver. In Saxon Halle a shiny gleam of ore revealed itself on a roadside verge while someone was transporting salt. These were unheard of treasures; but then strangers who didn’t speak the local language tasted and smelt the ore, dissolved it in urine, crushed it to a powder and heated it in crucibles. Alchemists believed that metals grew in the earth in the same way as plants; they sought the magic words that would allow them to smelt lead into gold. But their mystical language really helped them to distinguish metals, purify ore, plan mines, reinforce them and pump the water out. These people often belonged to the medical profession; the bowels of the earth seemed to them to be a living organism which could experience growth, convulsions and bloating with gases. The juices of the earth, such as mercury, entered into a sexual union with metals such as silver. Monotheism was left at the entry to the mine and the smelting furnace; within them ‘prejudices’ ruled. Witches and trolls were the true rulers of the mines; physiological analogies and poetic metaphors were the tools of the craft. But they did help to control the highly complex processes of smelting, casting, forging and tempering.