Media Insights and Commentaries
Pardoning Witches,
Gucci,
Ohio Drumming,
Medicine Path Inmates
Code of Civility,
Fairways and Waterfalls
Witches Apology,
Hauntings,
Sorcerers beheading,
Iron Age Toombs
Satanic Group bekons Public
School/Witchcraft,
Osiris Statue Resurrected
Chinese Cave Fire Study,
Earliest man-Made Stone
Coffin Unearthed,
Woman Sues,
Mt Olympus on Fire,
Mt Shasta,needs help
PC'S guide in Cave
Structure Unearthed,
Pyramid Power,
Worlds Largest Cauldron
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Its easy to understand why.Some,such as Edward Kelley in the 16th century,were outrageous fakers and phonies.According to one modern author,Kelley was a "charlatan with severed ears,a secucer and medium."His ears had been removed as punishment for forgery,forcing him to grow his hair long and lank afterward.
He was eventually imprisioned for killing a coutier and refused to yield up the formula of the Philosopher's Stone even under torture.After two unsuccessful escape attempts,he killed himself in 1597 by taking poison smuggled to him in jail by his wife.
Is such a view still tenable,or is there a danger of treating alchemists with too nuch condescension four centuries later?Were alchemists all charlatans like Kelley(the traditional view),or were they scientific pioneers,as some scientists now claim?
Piyo Rattansi believes there were indeed imposters in the ranks of medieval alchemists but there were also men of integrity genuinely striving for a new philisophical and scientific understanding of the world.
Rattansi,emeritus professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College,London.is impressed by the fact that Sir Isaac Newton's writings on alchemy-half a million words-"quite dwarf his scientific papers."
"In the 17th century England there were essentially two views of alchemy,"says Rattansi,"one represented by Ben Jonson's play 'The Alchemist' that alchemists were cynically trying to gull the rich,and the other by Marlow's 'Faustus' which attributed knowledge of the deepest forces of nature to alchemists.Newton's view inclined more to the 'Faustus' view that to Ben Jonson's."
As a chemistry teacher at Highgate School in London for almost half his life,Andrew Szydlo knows the school labratory well and is quick to endorse Rattansi's positive conclusion about alchemists.Szydlo is passionately keen that traditional alchemy,still mired in the popular mind in an aura of medieval mumbo-jumbo,be given its proper scientific due as the true antecent of modern chemistry.
Szydlo recently managed to evoke the spirit of the alchemical forebears during a lecture on the "Chemical Elements" as part of Britain's National Science Week.
A passionate advocate of alchemists,he swung a teapot of liquid nitrogen high over his head,sending thick white vapor up to the ceiling of the stage.
"I just wanted to change this conception that we have today a greater capacity for insight and are more intellectually competent than the people of the past,"says Szydlo,who is seen by friends as a direct descendant of the alchemists he supports.
His views are supported within the broader scientific community,says Richard Brzezinski,who trained as a physicist and now divides his time as a freelance science and history writer between London and Warsaw."The contribution of the alchemists in the development of science has been acknowledged in academic works from the 1930s on,but this awareness has not percolated down to the population in general,"says Brezezinski.
Szydlo is so incensed about the distortions suffered by "respectable"alchemists he has suggested to Pavel Seifter,the Czech ambassador in London,that Prague,once the world center for alchemical activity,be designated a center for international alchemical studies.
Alchemists flocked to Prague,"like gnats to sweet wine" after Emporer Rudolf II moved his court there in 1583 and laid the foundations for what one author called an "academy of the occult" by offering unprecedented patronage to scholars,scientists and magicians.
"What I proposed to the ambassador,and through him to president(Vaclav)Havel,is that an Institute for Alchemical Studies be established in Prague Castle,"said Szydlo."The aim would be for international scholars to collect and coordinate research material on alchemy and to direct where new research should be undertaken."
Szydlo's own personal alchemical hero is Michal Sedziwoj,APolish Doctor now better known by his latinized name of Michael Sendivogius,whose works were studied bt Newton and who was active in Prague at the same time as Kelley.
In Szydlo's view,Sendivogius's most memorable scientific contribution was the theory that there was a "universal spirit" or vapor pervading all matter,which predated by more than 100 years the discovery of oxygen.
In his "Novem Lumen Chymicum," Sendivogius wrote:"Man was created of the Earth,and lives by vertue of Aire;for there is in Aire a secret food of life whose invisible congealed spirit is better than the whole earth."
Sendivogius's theory may have had dramatic practical application in London in 1621 when 12 oarsmen are reputed to have roweed the first recorded submarine in a three-hour voyage from Westminster to Greenwich.The vessel was built by Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel.Szydlo believes Drebbel may have learned how to produce oxygen from Sendivogius's theory that the "secret food of life"(oxygen)could be manufactured by heating saltpeter.
Skeptics in the scientific establishment are wary of the theory that an obscure Polish alchemist could have made a discovery normally attributed to the late 18th century.
Szydlo syas there are persuasive reasons why Sendivogius was sparing-at least in public-with details of his scientific theories and experiments:"Alchemists were highly secretive and believed only the worthy should be enlightened.I am convinced that Sendivogius had the ability to bring about changes which he himself could not explain.He was certainly a showman,but not a charlatan."
Alchemy was and is a "Spiritual AND Scientific Study and Practice...You cant have one without the other..
The "Universal Spirit" Just Might get upset being Ignored except only as a scientific principle.; )
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