Alchemy, Science and the Quest for Immortality
Monday, January 19th, 2009My earlier two-episode vampire analysis has prompted me to thinking about the quest for immortality, which is probably as old as mankind. The first known hero story, that of the Sumerian Gilgamesh, has the prince unsuccessfully seeking the plant that would bestow him immortality. In the Bible, the first human beings, Adam and Eve, were apparently created immortal only to lose the gift due to evil temptation. Adam and Eve’s story assumes that humanity was initially meant to be immortal. But if immortality is the natural state of mankind, would it be possible to recover it by some means?
I shall conspicuously pick from the countless attempts at achieving immortality those related to alchemy. Commonly described as the art of making gold, alchemy often had the goal of achieving life-extension or immortality. In fact, scholars consider that life extension, not gold was the foremost goal of Chinese alchemy (1). In the West, the attainment of the elixir vitae was initially secondary to the art of goldmaking (2). The first author to emphasize it was the Arab alchemist Jabir (3). He conceived of the “elixir vitae”, another name for the magical Philosopher’s Stone, which transformed metals into gold. The alchemists who came to possess the Stone would then be expected to live many years, or even forever.
From this concept an entire legend of immortal alchemists was born. One of the earliest embodiments was the French alchemist Nicholas Flamel (1330 – 1418), which was reputed to have faked his own death (4) and was recently featured in a novel as an ‘immortal’ (5). The Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, though less associated with alchemy, was portrayed as having lived several hundreds of years in Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal (6). Yet perhaps the most influential ‘immortal’ in his age was the mysterious Count of St Germain, whom I have talked about in my previous article. He was reputed to have lived hundreds or even thousands of years, a legend that he apparently cultivated as well (7).
