Life elixir
The elixir of life (Arabic: Al-ḥaya, Ottoman Turkish: Ab-ı Hayat, Old Turkish: Bengisu) also known as the elixir of immortality, is a legendary potion that guaranteed eternal life.
It was one of the goals pursued by many alchemists as a remedy that would cure all diseases (the universal panacea) and prolong life eternally. Some of them, like Paracelsus, achieved great advances in the pharmaceutical field. It is related to the philosopher's stone, a mystical stone that would transform metals into gold and supposedly create the system.
History
Chinese
In ancient China, they tried to find the elixir with various methods. In the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shi Huang entrusted the alchemist and explorer Xu Fu with the task of finding the miraculous elixir. He made two trips to the eastern Bohai Sea to find the elixir, but on the second trip he never returned; although some legends affirm that he reached the Japanese archipelago. In addition, in ancient China it was believed that ingesting some minerals, such as cinnabar, hematite, and jade, could cause a life to last longer than normal, despite the high mercury content of cinnabar. Gold was considered especially potent for this process. Other substances, such as mercury, were also considered life-extending, but most are actually toxic. The fame of the elixir was declining as Buddhism advanced, with its idea of immortality.
India
Vedic groups also believed in a link between eternal life and gold. This idea was probably acquired from the Greeks, when Alexander the Great invaded India in 325 B.C. C.. It is also possible that from India it ended up in China, or vice versa.
However, the idea of the elixir of life is not as popular anymore, because Hinduism, the first religion in India, has other ideas of immortality.
If we have to start with a definition, we will say that alchemy was an ancient technique practiced in the Middle Ages, whose main objectives were to discover a substance that would transmute ordinary metals into gold and silver and to find ways to prolong human life indefinitely. Alchemy has been the mother of current Chemistry, and those mysterious alchemists, fleeing from religious precepts and the Inquisition, laid the foundations of what later became modern scientific development.
Egypt
Born in ancient Egypt, alchemy began to flourish in Alexandria in the Hellenistic period. Around the same time, a school of alchemy developed in China. Already in the writings of some Greek philosophers the first chemical theories are anticipated. It is believed that the Roman Emperor Caligula supported experiments to produce gold from orpiment, a sulfide of arsenic, and that the Emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of all Egyptian works related to the chemistry of gold and silver, in order to stop such experiments.. Zosimus of Panopolis (about 250-300), discovered that sulfuric acid was a solvent for metals and released oxygen from the red oxide of mercury.
Alchemy is based on the Aristotelian doctrine that "all things tend to reach perfection". By considering the other metals imperfect with respect to gold, it was assumed that nature would eventually turn them into gold. Already by the IV century, a skilled alchemist, using magic rituals and astrology, could reproduce in his workshop that natural process.
Arabia
In Arabia, under the Abbasid caliphates from 750 to 1258, a school of pharmacy flourished. The first known work of this school is the work that was disseminated in Europe in its Latin version, entitled De alchemia traditio summae perfectionis in duos libros divisa, attributed to the Arab scientist and philosopher Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in West as Geber. This work, which we can consider as the oldest treatise on chemistry proper, is a compilation of everything that was believed and known at that time. Arab alchemists worked with gold and mercury, arsenic and sulfur, salts and acids, and became familiar with a wide range of what we now call chemical reagents. Their scientific belief was in the potential for transmutation, and their methods - mainly blind attempts - led them to find numerous new substances and invent many useful processes.
Europe
Alchemy, as happened with the rest of Arab science, was transmitted to Europe through Spain, thanks to the extraordinary flourishing that science and the arts experienced in Al-Andalus during the Middle Ages. The earliest extant works of European alchemy are those of the English monk Roger Bacon and the German philosopher Albertus the Great; both believed in the possibility of transmuting lesser metals into gold.
Roger Bacon believed that gold dissolved in aqua regia was the elixir of life. Alberto Magno dominated the chemical practice of his time. In the 15th century, the Italian scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, the Mallorcan polygraphist Ramon Llull and the Benedictine monk Basilius Valentinus also contributed much, by way of alchemy, to the progress of chemistry, with its discoveries of the uses of antimony, the manufacture of amalgams and the isolation of the spirit of wine, or ethyl alcohol.
Important collections of formulas and techniques from this period include Pyrotechnics (1540) by the Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio; About metals (1556), by the German mineralogist Georgius Agricola; and Alchemy (1597), by Andreas Libavius, a German naturalist and chemist.
The most famous of all alchemists was the Swiss Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim 1493-1541). He maintained that the elements of compound bodies were salt, sulfur, and mercury, representing earth, air, and water, respectively; he considered fire as imponderable or not material. However, he believed in the existence of an undiscovered element, common to all, of which the four elements of the ancients were simply derived forms. Paracelsus called this main element of creation alcaesto, and he maintained that if it were found, it could be the philosopher's stone, the universal medicine and the irresistible solvent.
Paracelsus maintained that disease came from outside, which is why he created various mineral remedies with which the body could defend itself. He identified the characteristics of numerous diseases, such as goiter and syphilis, and used ingredients such as sulfur and mercury to combat them. Many of his remedies were based on the belief that like cures like, which is why he was a forerunner of homeopathy. Although Paracelsus's writings contained elements of magic, his revolt against the ancient precepts of medicine freed medical thinking, allowing it to follow a more scientific path.
The alchemist's task was inextricably linked to his Atanor -the producer of the "secret fires"-, the stove where the first works of alchemical metallurgy were carried out. He usually describes it as square or prism shaped. Nearby is a tower connected by a tube to one of the sides. The tower is filled with coal that, when ignited, communicates its heat through the tube, keeping it at a constant temperature. Also standing out in the alchemists' laboratory was a kind of casserole, deep, full of sifted ashes, on which the flasks or containers containing the material on which they work, in its different states, must be placed. This matter will be heated, in each case at a different time and at different and varied temperatures. The ashes must completely surround the vessel, protecting it from external action, like a true and authentic Grail bowl. The exact function of this protective mission is that of all traditional sacred vessels, from the famous "Dagda Cauldron" to the mysterious "Containers of Eternal Youth" of popular legends.
Writings dating back to the I Century a. C. show the close link between alchemy and astrology, magic and secret symbolism. And it is that, first of all, the "Tabula Smaragdina" is attributed to hermeticism, in which the totality of knowledge about alchemy is summarized in the form of a thesis. Actually these texts are considered as the basic texts of esoteric alchemy.
The currently known edition is based on an Arabic sample from the XII century, which is rooted in and based on at the same time in Greco-Alexandrian sources of the first centuries after Jesus Christ. The greatest representative of this alchemy, Zosimus of Panopolis (approximately 3rd or 4th century AD), describes the interior idea of the ennoblement of alchemy as a vision in which the body, freed from the flesh, becomes spirit and gradually associated with the soul of God. And so the later Greek alchemists devoted themselves mainly to giving theoretical prominence to these alchemical principles. Alchemy, still very sterile in its practical part, gained new impulses after the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs (8th century century).). The Arabs were especially interested in the useful part of alchemy, improving laboratory techniques, such as the distillation process, then inventing the alembic, which was a precursor distillation medium for the famous retort. This new technique could be used for the manufacture of essential oils. The theoretical knowledge of the Arabs on alchemy has been transmitted in a compendium of works that goes back to Jabir Ibn Hayyan, which translated into Latin would come to say "Giver or Transmitter".
The atanor itself is fundamentally accompanied by distilling vessels that were used by religious scholars in the mysterious operations that led to obtaining medicinal liquors and the water of life or "Aquae Vitae". Most of these concoctions began being used as panaceas for illnesses -like Elixir emuls- and ended up becoming artisanal sources of income. This gave rise to liqueurs such as Benedictines, Chartreuses, Mistelas, beers and other local varieties of distilled alcohol.
We can divide the history of alchemy into three periods: the first, from 1200 to 1300 of our era, alchemy was a manual ability that demonstrated its usefulness through the coloring of metals, making believe that it was about transmutations. There is an ancient grimoire attributed to Alberto Magno that exhaustively deals with this subject. The second period, from 1300 to 1600 AD, was characterized by the rise of alchemy among educated people who became interested in its enormous prospects. Thus Valentinus in Germany and Norton in England excelled at the task, both theoretically and practically. The work was based and focused on the manufacture of "The Philosopher's Stone" or "Lapis Philosophorum", with whose help it was hoped to be able to manufacture the wonderful and unique gold, a material so desired by the Princes. Another of the motors that moved researchers towards alchemy was the search for a universal medicine that would cure all diseases and be a source of "Eternal Life". The most important representative of that group of exalted and chosen men was Paracelsus.
Their influence on popular culture
- In the saga The Immortals of Alyson Noël.
- In the book of Journeys of Gulliver, by Jonathan Swift, near the end, when Gulliver leaves the Academy.
- In the Anime and Fullmetal Alchemist sleeve, where the philosophal stone is intended to dominate the world and overcome God.
- In the book Tuck Everlasting.
- In the book Elíxir (2010) by Hilary Duff, he deals with the topic and also in his second part Devoted (2011).
- In the video games The Sims 2, where it is achieved by raising aspirations and in Rayman 2, the great escape, although in Castlevaina (any of its versions) the elixir serves to completely cure the player, as well as in the Final Fantasy deliveries.
- In the video game Constantine cures John to fight the demons.
- In the book The alchemist of the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho.
- In the collection of books by The Alchemist: The secrets of the immortal Nicolas Flamel.
- In the video game Touhou Project, two characters named Kaguya Houraisan and Fujiwara no Mokou, who took the Elixir of Life and managed to be immortal.
- In Kingdom Hearts video games the elixir appears, which gives a character to select: Life Points and Magic Points.
- In the Dragon Ball series, Master Roshi drank from this elixir obtaining immortality (hereinafter his nickname "the oldest man in the world").
- In The Mystery of Anubis.
- On the Seikon non-Qwaser sleeve.
- In the first book of the Harry Potter saga, Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone, being desired by the villain Lord Voldemort.
- In 5 comic elements of Jesulink, there is the Alcaesto element.