The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

alchemist. He is also reputed to have been alive some three hundred years
after his recorded death. Paul Lucas wrote in 1712 that he met a Dervish
in the streets of Bursa in Turkey who said that he had come from
Uzbekistan. The Dervish related in great mirth that Flamel and his wife
were living in India. Ayurvedic Indian alchemy, called Rasa Shastra,
claims people alive today aged three hundred years. The Ayurvedic texts
repeatedly say gold is immortality. 1390
Following the translation of the great Arabian sources, the flurry
of Grail Romances and suppression of the Knights Templar, alchemy
became dormant for a further three hundred years. As we saw in Chapter
17, the Church had prohibited alchemy and all scientific investigation.
Only scattered Jewish alchemical scandals and anonymous alchemical
publications punctuated this blanket of silence.
Alchemy gave birth to modern chemistry in the sixteenth century.
The key event was when Antoine Lavoisier showed that water separated
into hydrogen and oxygen, and then recombined as water. He wrote that
oxygen sustained combustion, oxidized the elements and was susceptible
to recovery. Lavoisier summarized his big bang in chemistry with the
words:
Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, all is transformed.
Following his discovery, reason totally prevailed over
metaphysics in chemistry. For all his greatness, poor Lavoisier had a sad
end on the guillotine because he was also a State farmer-general at the
commencement of the French Revolution. Yet the new chemistry he
catalyzed made rapid scientific advances. It quickly distanced itself from
alchemy's inherent imposture and fraud.
The Rosicrucian influence then revived once more with Dr John
Dee, Shakespearean literature, the cautious writings of Paracelsus and the
mystical works of Fludd and Maier in the seventeenth century. This tiny
trickle received some impetus with the Invisible College and Royal
Society. It became a gentle stream when the English chemists and
physicists Robert Boyle, William Cooper, Eireneus Philalethes and Sir
Isaac Newton began to bring bona fide chemical and alchemical
investigations some respectability.
The tentative revival of alchemy then became a veritable flood in
the late eighteenth century with the popularity of Freemasonry in England
and Rosicrucianism among German Masonic-alchemical groups. It is at
this time that we see the emergence of groups with remarkable names
such as the Brothers of the Boiled Dew.
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