Alchemy in Europe and the Middle East

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of the ancient Hermetic corpus and a concurrent revival of Neoplatonism introduced learned Europeans to ancient connections among alchemy, gnosis, and magic. Alchemy's renewed associations with magic and nature's occult forces broadened the primarily technical and natural philosophical discussions of alchemy of the Middle Ages. Hermetic philosophers began to reenvision themselves as operators who might use knowledge of nature to manipulate their world.

At the same time, alchemy's practical utility gained prominence in the sixteenth century, primarily through the work of the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) and his followers. Although he did not deny the possibility of alchemical transmutation, Paracelsus focused mainly on alchemy's medical applications, advocating a new kind of alchemical medicine, known as chimiatria or iatrochemistry, in which practitioners used alchemical distillation and extraction to isolate the quintessence of matter for medicinal purposes. These powerful (and often controversial) new alchemical drugs were designed to attack the specific disease, in contrast to traditional humoral medicine, which sought to treat the balance of humors within the body as a whole. On the theoretical level, Paracelsus also offered a new understanding of matter, complementing the ancient four elements with the tria principia or tria prima, adding salt to the two medieval principles of matter (sulfur and mercury). By refining alchemical matter theory and re-situating medicine on a new foundation of alchemy, Paracelsus and his followers gave the ancient art a new prominence both in the study of nature and in the practice of medicine.

Transmutation remained a prominent goal for many alchemists, particularly the consumers of a burgeoning trade in printed alchemical books. By the sixteenth century, alchemy had burst the bounds of the world of scholarship and found a much wider audience in Europe. In particular, alchemy's central image of purification and ennoblement resonated with religious reformers such as Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, and the German mystic Jakob Böhme, all of whom drew on alchemical metaphors and imagery in their writings. Alchemical authors also made explicit connections between alchemy and Christianity. Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), for instance, specifically articulated such connections, comparing the healing power of the philosophers' stone to the redemptive powers of Christ in the Ampitheatrum sapientiae aeternae solis verae of 1595.

Urban readers, literate artisans, and learned ladies also took an interest in alchemy, consuming popular vernacular alchemical literature that tended to focus on the practical benefits of the art, particularly the production of precious metals, gemstones, and medicines. Many self-trained alchemists ultimately found employment among Europe's courts, where many princes generously supported practical and theoretical alchemical work. Faced with an increasingly crowded field of practitioners and no traditional markers of authority such as university degrees, licenses, or guilds, those who consumed alchemical knowledge and products struggled to make their own decisions about what constituted legitimate alchemy. With such a wide variety of people both seeking out knowledge and claiming to be alchemists, new debates emerged in the sixteenth century about what true alchemy was and who could legitimately claim to practice it.