Not only would we confound ideas that originally had nothing to do with each other, but we would have to reject so many central aspects of alchemy that there would be no possibility of comprehending what held it together, and no hope of ultimately making more than superficial comparisons with the traditions of other cultures. Demarcating our field of investigation so as to include any ancient Chinese activity which might fall into the area of modern chemistry would allow the casting of the net wider, but at the cost of putting many of the alchemical adept's own concerns out of bounds. To pluck the 'advanced' elements out of the matrix and discard the 'retrograde' aspects is a procedure bound to lead to fundamental distortions, for the two regularly turn out to be integral and inseparable, one element defining the range of possibilities of the other. Theoretical conceptions never exist in a vacuum their implications and significance depend upon the matrices in which they are embedded. It is necessary to stress that the field of alchemical theory is defined here by what alchemists did, thought, and knew about. We shall study how these notions were adapted to alchemical concerns either by extending their definitions, or by creating new concepts or new connections to integrate them. In practice this means that we shall examine the application of the most fundamental and general notions of Chinese natural philosophy - the Five Elements, the Yin and Yang, the chhi, the trigram and hexagram systems of the 'Book of Changes', and so on - to the experience of the laboratory.
If we wish to understand the inner coherence of alchemical theories we must, for the moment, set aside the yardstick of modern chemistry (although it will still be essential as an exploratory tool) and try to reconstruct the alchemist's abiding goals, his own standards of success and failure, as clues to how his concepts determined both what he did in his elaboratory and how he rationalised unforeseen results.īy 'theory' we mean simply the attempt to explain alchemical phenomena systematically using abstract and non-anthropomorphic concepts. This shift in point of view is perhaps more radical than might at first appear.
Our focus now shifts from the Chinese alchemists' identifiable chemical and proto-chemical accomplishments to the assumptions and concepts with which they themselves sought to explain their methods and aims. 210-305.įor figures, characters, references, and footnotes see the original article. The Theoretical Background of Laboratory Alchemyįrom Joseph Needham et al.
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