Bolus of Mendes was an active Pythagorean. He believed that all matter in its endless diversity was no more than a superficial appearance of an underlying harmonic unity. Accordingly, he considered the forms of matter to be malleable, that one form could be transmuted into another, that lead, for example, could be changed into gold. Yet he was not solely a mystic; he had gained practical skills in chemistry and metallurgy.
In short, Bolus of Mendes was a crucial figure both for the transmission of Pythagorean traditions into Egypt and for the subsequent development of what became known as alchemy.9 And this was to merge with the later Hermetic writings – the Books of Hermes – which themselves combined Egyptian and Pythagorean mystical themes. They may indeed owe a direct debt to Bolus and his associates. But for the moment this cannot be any more than a suspicion. His true role might be clearer if we had the complete text of a book he wrote, entitled Physical and Mystical Matters. Unfortunately only fragments of this have survived the millennia.
Bolus’ writings reveal him as intelligent and honest, as always acting from the highest of motives, although it seems that he was regarded as rather conservative by his students. In one of the fragments from his book he complains about the ‘young’ who refuse to believe in the virtues of the art he was teaching10 – a cry of frustration which could apply to any era and any teacher ever since.
Through such excerpts, Bolus emerges as a very human figure, an ancient equivalent perhaps of a university professor or church minister: conservative, well-meaning, a safe pair of hands for any tradition. Which simply increases the shock when it is discovered just how much the modern classical establishment dislikes him. Professor Peter Fraser, for example, author of an otherwise fascinating study of Alexandria under the Greek rulers, complains bitterly about Bolus being a prime force in the ‘decline of Alexandrian and indeed of Greek science’.11 Whatever could it be about Bolus which would cause such animosity? In any case, Greek science had hardly begun; Hipparchus, Hero and Ptolemy were all yet to be born. What is it that has really upset Professor Fraser?
The answer is that here we touch upon a very sensitive point for he academic world which has led to a muddying of the philosophical pool from which Bolus emerges. To put it bluntly, mystical philosophy frightens orthodox academics. It is worth looking, for a moment, at why this should be.
Modern Scholars and the Manipulation of History
Ideas create belief systems: it is these which can cause imperial adventures, mass movements and wars.
Belief systems are rather like a computer program: they serve to handle and interpret data – in this case, observed events in the world – but are themselves neither right nor wrong. That is a function solely of the data, the events themselves.
Thunder and lightning may erupt; the same night a king may die. The meaning of these events is dependent upon which belief system one subscribes to. Many cultures have considered a conjunction of a storm with a king’s death as proof of the displeasure of the gods who will then need appeasing by some ritual. Others regard the storm as literally causing the royal death, in which case any ritual appeasement would be too late. Yet another system considers the events arbitrary, unconnected and devoid of any meaning whatsoever. This last is the interpretation fostered by our modern belief system, that underpinned by science.
The modern world can largely be seen as an expression of the belief system created by the ancient Athenian philosopher Aristotle. For it was he who first advanced the idea that only reason can discover the true nature of our reality. Reason meaning the use of intellectual argument, logic, deduction, scepticism and all other such processes. Aristotle saw no value in revelation.
Christianity, which might be expected to take a contrary view, is also greatly influenced by Aristotle’s approach. In the thirteenth century his philosophy was married to Church dogma by Thomas Aquinas; over the succeeding century a pattern of theology was created which has persisted ever since.
But reality encompasses more than that which we can see, touch, smell, taste, measure, weigh and generally record. There is the part of our reality which is after, or beyond, the physical, the so-called metaphysical or supernatural; that part which encompasses things we call divine.
Dogmatic theology tends to localize the divine aspect in particular spheres of its own. Other religious thought has it that the divine cannot be so localized; rather, it infuses every part of creation – both the physical and metaphysical. And, further, that this divine part of existence can be directly experienced by anybody – through revelation – given the requisite training or conditions of life.
This is the view put forward by Pythagoras. And by Plato. And by Bolus of Mendes. And by the Hermetic teachings. Of course, it runs in complete opposition to that of Aristotle and his followers.
To support Aristotle’s legacy, a concerted – and generally successful – attempt has been made to fragment, isolate and generally impugn all evidence which might suggest that revelation could be maintained within a continuous philosophical tradition. As a result, those such as Pythagoras and Bolus of Mendes are presented as isolated figures paddling futilely against the current of history, the major force of which is assumed to reside upon reason, logic and rationality.
Rather, the example of Bolus of Mendes reveals that an ancient mystical tradition, based upon revelation but with practical aims and deriving in the main from Pythagoras (who himself drew from Egyptian, Babylonian and Zoroastrian elements) not only survived but was maintained through the centuries, eventually to arrive in Egypt where it flourished in a soil already fecund with its own magical and mystical teachings.12
Bolus of Mendes was not a sudden spontaneous efflorescence; he was part of a long Pythagorean tradition which has been largely ignored by history. Furthermore this tradition not only continued after Bolus but it thrived and expanded. Often it was expressed as alchemy or as works of Hermes Trismegistus. Despite the absence of written texts, we can be confident of this survival because of the testimony of an alchemist, Zosimus. He flourished over 500 years later in Panopolis, a city beside the Nile in Upper Egypt, now called Akhmim.
According to Zosimus, for these 500 years, the alchemical tradition had been secretly maintained in the Egyptian temples.
Zosimus of Panopolis, an Egyptian Alchemist
Zosimus wrote a great encyclopaedia of alchemy around AD 300; sections of it still survive. But this was only part of his writing: twenty-eight other books were attributed to him. Such productivity suggests more stability than was the case, for the times were far from tranquil, especially for an active alchemist. Zosimus’ life coincided with profound changes in the Roman Empire. It moved from the vociferous paganism of Diocletian (emperor 284–305) to the self-righteous Christianity under Constantine (emperor 312–37). Both rulers proved detrimental to the study of alchemy. Diocletian so disliked it that he ordered all texts referring to alchemy to be gathered up and burned. And once Christianity became an accepted and influential religion, it too condemned the art.
Zosimus reveals some very interesting information about the place of alchemy in ancient Egypt. Several times he stresses the important role of the priesthood in maintaining the tradition in secrecy. He explicitly mentions ‘those priests who preserve copies of alchemical books in their temples’.13
He points out that all workers in alchemy – by which he would have included chemistry – served the pharaoh and were not allowed to work on their own account.14 Furthermore it was forbidden by royal decree to publish any of the alchemical secrets. Which was why, Zosimus explained, so little information survived regarding the art’s history.15
Alchemy was certainly still being practised in at least some temples during Zosimus’ lifetime. He reported visiting an ancient temple at Memphis in order to make a close examination of an alchemical furnace there.16 It is known too from other sources that the priests of Memphis were famous in antiquity both for their alchemy and for their skill in magic, which they apparently taught in undergro
und shrines.17 The Christian theologian Jerome, writing fifty or more years later, reported that even in his day their occult skill remained widely famed.18
The alchemical secrets were inscribed in the temples using some form of code, cipher or arcane symbolism. Zosimus writes that they were carved on ‘stelae in the darkness and depths of the temples in symbolic characters’,19 adding that even if someone were to be bold enough to obtain entrance to the temples and gain access to these hieroglyphic texts, it would not help them, for, ‘If one had neglected to learn the key, one could not decipher the characters…’20
This reminds us of the comments made about Pythagoras; these are found in a work by Porphyry who was writing about the same time as Zosimus. Porphyry describes three types of writing used by the ancient Egyptians: the common style, hieroglyphics and a symbolic writing.21 The fact that two unrelated but contemporary writers make identical claims about a ‘secret’ interpretation of Egyptian writing again raises the question of why the Egyptologists
Egypt under Greek rule at the time of the rise of mystical alchemy.
are so silent on this subject. Perhaps such inscriptions have been found but have been misunderstood and mistranslated by archaeologists who are unable to discern the symbolic from the literal.
Zosimus was a dedicated and highly skilled practical alchemist. He reveals too, in his writings, a detailed knowledge of chemistry, in its modern sense, and describes the wide range of technology which was available to the ancient laboratory worker.
Technical Alchemy
Alchemists worked hard at their trade. Many of the technological skills and laboratory techniques known were undoubtedly developed by them. Certainly they developed equipment. They differentiated between some eighty specialist items: furnaces of various types, ceramic dishes and crucibles, glass phials and flasks, files, spatulas, tongs, hammers, sand-baths and water-baths, filters made of cloth and linen, funnels, pestles and mortars, alembics and a host of other instruments and vessels, most of which remain useful today.
Much of their work involved heating. Either gently in horse-dung or water-baths, or fiercely in furnaces fanned ever hotter by sweating assistants plying large leather bellows or blowing through tubes. They heated solids so hot and so long that they were reduced to powder or were vaporized.
And they invented distillation. This led to an active commercial industry for the production of perfumes, such as rose-water, so valued by the medieval Islamic world, made by gently heating rose petals until the aromatic oils distilled out. And, inevitably, during the twelfth century, alchemists discovered that distilling wine gave rise to a medicine which induced conviviality: alcohol.
The alchemists would habitually heat, distil and re-distil the same product over and over again, hundreds of times, for months or for years, in search of their elusive goal, the production of the purest essence of all: the ruby-red Philosopher’s Stone. Powder taken from this stone was reputed to have the power of transmuting base metals into gold.
The Arab alchemist Geber described processes involving upwards of 700 distillations before the required changes would occur. Modern chemists have never attempted to replicate these time-consuming procedures so they do not know whether there is any validity in them. As we shall see, there may be.
While there is no absolute agreement over the process by which the Philosopher’s Stone was made, most texts list a series of seven stages beginning either with mercury or a mixture of mercury and sulphur. Each stage in the process is generally described as being lengthy, of several months or a year, during which time the furnace must be maintained and kept at a constant heat. The fourteenth-century alchemist and monk John Dastin wrote that when mercury was converted into the red elixir it took the use of a gentle fire for 100 days. If it should go out, the process would need to be begun again.
In some way too, the astrological moment was deemed important. The alchemist Nicholas Flamel is recorded as first having created the ‘Stone’ around noon on Monday 17 January 1382; then from ‘half a pound of mercury’ he made the equivalent weight of pure silver. Again, using this ‘red stone’ at 5.00 p.m. on 20 April the same year, he transmuted a similar quantity of mercury into gold.22 However we are to take this, by the time Flamel died in 1417, he and his wife had founded fourteen hospitals, three chapels and seven churches in Paris, together with other works at Boulogne.
Alchemical Secrets: The Red Powder
In the seventeenth century, when it developed, experimental science soon began to repudiate its alchemical roots. The early scientist Robert Boyle – discoverer of ‘Boyle’s Law’ – was a firm advocate of the new experimental methods: he wrote contemptuously of the alchemists, ‘that their writings, as their furnaces, afford as well smoke as light’.23 And, obviously miffed by the difficulty and complexity of the alchemical tomes he had struggled to make sense of, he sarcastically noted that if their authors had truly desired secrecy, ‘they might less to their own disparagement, and to the trouble of their readers, have concealed it by writing no books, than by writing bad ones’.24
Yet over the last two decades it has been conclusively proved that alchemy continued to fascinate Robert Boyle to the point where he conducted his own secret experiments into transmutation. To hide his interest he began writing his reports on these experiments in a highly complicated and varied secret code using the Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabets. These coded texts were revealed in 1992 to amount to hundreds of pages.25 It is worth asking who were these texts concealed from? And why? At the very least it is a measure of the seriousness with which Boyle took alchemy.
Boyle, it can now be shown, firmly believed that the transmutation powder existed. And, furthermore, he believed that adept – wise initiates – knew well the secret of its production and use. He made considerable efforts to contact these adepts and gain access to their secrets. We do not know whether he was successful in his quest; but he did make some very curious statements on the subject.
In one unpublished dialogue held in the archives of the Royal Society of London, Boyle speaks of his belief that the ‘red powder’ from the Philosopher’s Stone existed in the hands of the adepts and that it could be used not only to make medicines or to transmute base metals into silver and gold, but also to contact supernatural spirits.26
Boyle finally discovered what he termed a ‘subtil’ mercury for alchemical use but he never revealed how he had made it.27 He also secretly made, or received, some alchemical powder which he called ‘red earth’. At his death, in 1691, he left a portion of this ‘red earth’ to his friend John Locke, philosopher and Fellow of the Royal Society. Locke passed some on to another friend, Sir Isaac Newton, who from 1703 was President of the Royal Society, and thus at the very heart of the developing scientific establishment.28
Newton, a monumental figure in the history of science, shared this strong interest in alchemy. He and Boyle together had secret meetings with alchemists – while at the same time they were publicly deriding them.29
Newton’s strong interest in alchemy was hidden for many years. At his death, in 1727, many of his papers were burned; many others were marked ‘not fit to be printed’ and kept by the family. The full extent of his alchemical interests was not discovered until these papers came up for auction in London in 1936. At the auction, 121 lots concerned alchemy. As a result scholars discerned the dominating character of these alchemical interests to his life. It became clear that Newton firmly believed ‘that the ancients knew all the secrets at one time’.30
Professor Betty Dobbs, who studied Newton’s papers, concluded, ‘It may safely be said… that Newton’s alchemical thoughts were so securely established on their basic foundations that he never came to deny their general validity…’31
We are allowed to harbour doubts about the reality of Flamel’s or Dastin’s success in making the Philosopher’s Stone and in transmuting base metal into gold. It was long ago, and perhaps some dramatic licence was taken in the later reports. But, given the scientific ri
gour exercised by Boyle and Newton towards their experiments, and given the existence of their detailed papers on the subject, we are right to wonder exactly what was occupying their time. Something, certainly. But what are we to make of their long dedication to a lengthy treatment of mercury, hoping to create a wondrous red substance: a stone or an elixir?
In their case, the alchemical process cannot have been exclusively symbolic since Boyle and Newton were well aware of the distinction, and anyway, if symbolic, there would be no reason for Boyle to have used elaborate codes or for Newton to secrete his papers. Could the alchemists have discovered certain techniques yet to be developed by orthodox science but uncovered by Boyle and Newton?
Could repeated distillations or slow heating over long periods of time cause such change within an element or compound that it might literally transmute into a product with quite extraordinary properties?
Has anything of this type ever been demonstrated by modern science?
The blunt answer is, ‘Well, er, yes.’
The Threat of Red Mercury
Since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the loosening of tough central control, criminal organizations there rapidly gained in strength. Once established, they soon began seeking links with overseas crime syndicates. From 1991, high-level meetings were held with Italian crime godfathers from the Mafia, Comorra and ’Ndranghetta. Close links were forged with them, facilitating the laundering of money and the trade in drugs and illicit nuclear materials.32 The latter had become available with the administrative chaos and shortage of funds in the Soviet nuclear industry and armed forces. There was no such shortage of funds on the part of those regimes desperate to purchase them.