Alchemy

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resided within in the individualities of the
various metals, that in it their various substances were incorporated.
This black powder was mystically identified with the underworld form of the
god Osiris, and consequently was credited with magical properties. Thus
there grew up in Egypt the belief that magical powers existed in fluxes and
alloys. Probably such a belief existed throughout Europe in connection
with the bronze-working castes of its several races. Its was probably in
the Byzantium of the fourth century, however, that alchemical science
received embryonic form. There is little doubt that Egyptian tradition,
filtering through Alexandrian Hellenic sources was the foundation upon
which the infant science was built, and this is borne out by the
circumstance that the art was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and
supposed to be contained in its entirety in his works.

The Arabs, after their conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, carried
on the researches of the ...

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the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, the heyday of alchemy,
in the theory and practice of the art. The same sentiments and processes
are found expressed in the later alchemical authorities as in the earliest,
and a wonderful unanimity as regards the basic canons of the great art is
evinced by the hermetic students of the time. On the introduction of
chemistry as a practical art, alchemical science fell into desuetude and
disrepute, owing chiefly to the number of charlatans practicing it, and by
the beginning of the eighteenth century, as a school, it may be said to
have become defunct. Here and there, however, a solitary student of the
art lingered, and in the department ...

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