“Our gold is a higher gold." Alchemist’s motto, source unknown.

Part 1: My Revelation.

I’m running a GURPS Steampunk campaign, and one of the players wanted to be a magician. He didn’t know the rules that well (after all, it’s GURPS), so I was thumbing through the GURPS Magic books and ran across the alchemy section. One of the NPCs was going to be an alchemist, so it seemed to fit the game.

What it didn’t fit is my conception of alchemy. So, onto the research and the books and the Intertubes.

My above-mentioned conception of alchemy was it was glorified chemistry. I remember high-school chemistry, where we had these soft-cover lab books stained with I can’t guess what, and it listed steps to add chemical X to chemical Y. And if we followed the steps correctly, then the litmus strip would turn pink or blue. If we didn’t follow the steps, we got hit with a ruler. Got to love Catholic high school. That, in my humble opinion, ain’t magic.

My first resource to everything magic, that wacky Mr. Zolar’s The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, was suspiciously mum on alchemy. Which shouldn’t be surprising. Zolar focuses on mystical works, not something as mundane and (dare I say) scientific as alchemy. Thomas Norton, a fifteenth century alchemist, also recognizes this dichotomy in his text Ordinal of Alchemy, separating the process of alchemy into two parts. First is the “gross work," the cleaning of the test tubes and mining and mixing. That is what the servants are used for (the medieval equivalent of research assistants, I guess). Then, the “subtle work," the instruction of the servants and the planning of the mixes, is performed by the scholar, the alchemist. The scholar must know what is wet and what is dry, what mixtures contain what humours and how to release the proper energies of each subject.

Take this back to gaming terms. If magic is the magician bending the universe to his or her will, the alchemist bends the universe just as easily. From Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic In the Middle Ages: “For the work to proceed correctly everything must be in proper concord. The alchemist’s mind must be in accord with the work itself, properly stable and comprehending. The workmen must be in accord with the craft, working in orderly shifts. The instruments must be in accord with the work, all the vessels having the proper shapes and materials." According to these alchemists, not anyone can pick up an alchemist’s workbook and start working. And the results of the alchemy? Paraclesus says it best in the Aurora of the Philosophers: “The Magi in their wisdom asserted that all creatures might be brought to one unified substance, which substance they affirm may, by purifications and purgations, attain to so high a degree of subtlety, such divine nature and occult property, as to work wonderful results." Get that one unified substance, and all your wildest dreams come true. You’re not trying to turn a litmus strip blue. You’re not even trying to turn lead into gold. You’re manipulating the very fabric of reality.

So, you had Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle and folks bringing a scientific method to magic and alchemy, democratizing the magic if you will, but you had an equal and opposite reaction of the magi saying that alchemy was possible only because of the will of the alchemists. Alchemy, they said, was a philosophy rather than a science. Bacon’s alchemists are standard scholars, intelligent and logical, the proto-Spocks. But if what Norton and Paraclesus says is true as well, then alchemy takes study and, perhaps, some innate talent (like a 5 point GURPS advantage). And instead of the scientist, you have the alchemist-turned-magician, working deceptively like these chemists but with completely different techniques and results, completely at odds with the scientific method. And you can throw into the mix Chaucer’s alchemists, mere charlatans staying one step ahead of the law, just to throw the players for a loop, and you have a three-way struggle for a craft. This struggle can be friendly, but what’s the fun in that? I’d aim for a covert war, complete with courtly intrigue, assassinations, and magical explosions. Heady stuff.

Part 2: Symbolism of Alchemy

If you want to read alchemist texts, you’re in for a world of hurt. Bacon and Boyle make sense, or as much sense as any scholar in that era did. But, let’s go back earlier. The first alchemist text is the Emerald Tablet. Here’s the translation of part of the tablet, from Sir Isaac Newton (as Kenneth Hite says in his Suppressed Transmission series, Newton “is seldom given his propers as one of the most devoted students of alchemy, angel-magic, Pythagorean optics...and Hermeticism in the history of the field." He recommends Isaac Newton: The Last Sorceror, by Michael White for more information):

1) Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
2) That wch is below is like that wch is above & that wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles of one only thing.
3) And as all things have been & arose from one by ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
4) The Sun is its father, the moon its mother,
5) the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth its nourse.

Got that? Again, my preconceptions had problems. “If alchemy is just glorified chemistry, then why are these texts so goofy?" But I missed the point. This isn’t alchemy-as-chemistry. This is alchemy-as-philosophy, or even alchemy-as-magic. It’s suppose to be encoded, obtuse, mystic.

There’s supposedly a course in understanding this, for the low low price of $46. I haven’t purchased this, preferring to buy a few gaming books instead. So, I have no clue, except that alchemy is closely tied to astrology, and all material has both masculine and feminine aspects. Alchemists have a set of symbols. There’s the aforementioned “Sun/Moon" being masculine and feminine. This duality is also reflected in “red metals" (gold, masculine) and “white metals" (silver, feminine) as well. From “The War of the Knights": “Learn to know the Astra of the metals, and mind that for the preparation of both Tinctures, the White and the Red, you are not at first to take the bodies of Silver or Gold". Just as chemical techniques purify metals, the alchemist is meant to purify the body, mind, and soul. Finally, there’s the Philosopher’s Stone, the “one unified substance" that Paraclesus says will work wonderful results, the least being transmuting base metals into gold.

In games I’ve been in, magic users have found a scroll of magic missile, or a scroll of fireball. This works from a game perspective. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Finding the scroll can be half the struggle, and decoding it (either by finding the key, finding someone to translate it, or trial and error) is the second shoe to drop. And it’s a short step from this level of symbolism to out and out riddles pointing to the X on the map.

And for your reading pleasure, here’s a set of other symbols, pulled from The Magician’s Handbook.

Powder.

Fumes.

Oil.

Magnet.

Wax.

Mercury.

Silver.

Aqua Vitae.

Orichalcum (a red metal envisioned by Plato, popular in Atlantis, and possibly used for magical purposes).

Volatile (the GM can have a lot of fun with this symbol).

Fixed.

To Boil.

To Mix.

To Rot.

Many many more can be found at Symbols.net and The Alchemy Web Site.

On a complete digression, does anyone remember The Arcanum? It was a 1984 game published by Bard Games, and it had a lot of the symbols in here, plus more. I never played it, but we used that world extensively in our D&D games. Even back then, I remember thinking that this game had a lot of flavor, at least compared to some of the worlds TSR was putting out. Turns out most of the flavor was copied from real life. And who couldn’t like a game that had Scholar as a character class? “A fight? Quick, to the library! I’ll research their fighting style to give the real fighters a +1 to hit." Kind of like Bards without their limited magic and thieving abilities.

Digression #2: one of my campaigns had a set of symbols used by cave dwellers, similiar to the "hobo symbols" used to mark down friendly houses, places to be wary of, and so forth. One of the players bought area knowledge (caves), so I gave her a dictionary of these symbols. Everyone else picked up on them eventually, but it added a lot of depth and fun player interaction whenever they found one of these symbols. "What does that symbol mean?" "My character doesn't answer, just starts running away." "Um, we follow her."

Before any more digressions, let me end this here and say that the next column is about invisibility and illusion. Until then.

Summon Game Material. This allows your character to summon dice, cards, or books used to run and play a game. Overuse of this may cause RGS (recursive gaming syndrome). Critical failure means you summon the Voynich Manuscript. Material requirements are a convention program or an empty Mountain Dew bottle.