Alchemy

116 cards · Hard

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Alchemy

116 cards · Artist Don Butto

One sign did several jobs at once. Alchemy matched the seven metals known to the ancients to the seven wandering planets, so a single mark meant gold and the Sun, or lead and Saturn, or iron and Mars, and those same seven named the days of the week. A page of it is metallurgy, astronomy and a calendar in the same breath.

The notation was meant to be difficult. An alchemist worked alone and wrote for himself, or for the few men he trusted, so recipes travelled under cover names and every adept drifted toward a private set of marks. That is why one substance can carry a dozen different signs, and why much of what survives is still only half legible.

Hennig Brand was chasing the philosopher's stone in Hamburg in 1,669, working from the theory that gold could be drawn out of the human body. He boiled down an enormous quantity of urine, left the residue to putrefy, roasted it with sand and charcoal and condensed the vapour. What collected glowed in the dark. He had not made gold. He had made phosphorus, and become the first person known by name to discover an element.

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