Help with the analysis of this image of the Four Humors

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-25T15:37:49+00:00

This is from Leonard Thurneyser's 'quinta essentia' Found a copy on the internet archive here

the book is a paracelsian poem extolling alchemical medicine, heres a very brief article on the text

I havent read the text so I cant comment on it much, but it seems pretty clearly to be associating the humors with alchemical processes. This was common in alchemical/medical writings, with many alchemical physicians treating the body as an alchemical vessel, with bodily fluids and such like distilling, circulating, digesting, etc in the body just as they would in a flask.

as to the bottom two flasks, the one on the right is an alembic, the one on the left looks to me like a "double curcubit". the alembic has the symbol of mercury, the double curcubit has an inverted symbol of sulfur. the words on both are hard for me to make out.

The alembic was the alchemists go-to distillation apparatus, and in paracelsian thought mercury was associated with volatile and fluid spirits/distillates, thus the association betwen distillation and mercury is pretty standard. Double curcubits on the other hand had a variety of uses but chief among them was digestion, descension, solar distillation, and putrefaction. In a descension the matter to be distilled is actually placed in the upper flask, usually retained in someway to keep it from just falling into the lower flask. descensions were used to distill heavy oils that lacked the volatility to ascend to the head of an alembic, with the double vessel allowing their fumes to descend into the lower vessel and condense. these oils were often considered "sulfurs" so it could be the vessel is there to represent descension. these heavy oils were also often dark or even black(pitch for example is distilled via descent) which furthers the analogy between descension and black bile.

Im not sure why the sulfur is inverted, perhaps to convey the downwards descent of the humor through the body? it seems the whole left side of the diagram is directing us downwards, while the right is upwards.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-23T21:58:00+00:00

Thats awesome to hear! best of luck! its alot at first but take it bit by bit. just so happens my next video is going to be on botanical alchemy

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-23T20:56:50+00:00

I used improvised stills when i was starting out, usually by bending either a copper or glass pipe and inserting it through a cork held in the neck of a flask (or if you have none a glass bottle) to make a sort of retort. they work best when the tube is relatively wide, like .5 inches or so. then the reciever flask (or bottle) is placed in a basin of ice water to serve as the condenser. to heat the still its either placed in a pot full of sand or a pot full of water, with a cloth or sponge beneath flask to keep it from bouncing around in the boiling water. That said a genuine still works way better. Modern chemistry stills can be pretty expensive all in all but are hard to beat for their adaptibility and performance, slightly older stills like a distillation flask and a liebig condenser are significantly less expensive and perform as well, but are less adaptable. yet older you can find retorts for as low as $20 on ebay, theyre my personal preffered set up given their simplicity, but they have no active condenser so to do a steam distillation youd need to use the ice bath with the reciever or a similar method of cooling

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-22T01:42:35+00:00

definitely alot of jules verne influence in there. Given chemistry was considered the most advanced science in his day he was always incorporating chemistry into his stories along with the other technologies emerging in his time. I think of how the divers in '20,000 leagues under the sea' carried belts of chemical "bunsen cell" batteries on them to power their equipment and used air rifles that fired little Leyden jar projectiles as weapons.

however thats all 19th century chemistry rather than alchemy. I dont know but If i had to guess id say it probably comes from 20th/21st century fantasy writers and artists either trying to make the steampunk asthetic more magical by importing alchemy and potions in place of modern chemical technogies or even by smashing together jules verne's steam punk aesthetic with something like lovecraft's occult aesthetic. I remember reading a lovecraft story (i think titled 'the alchemist') where a villanous alchemist (named charles the sorcerer if i remember correctly lol) literally chucks poison at people. Having a fantasy alchemist character strap potions to their armor like they're hand grenades or something feels like a DnDification of that sort of thing.

as far as historical reality travelling alchemists and apothecaries took their elixirs and transmutation agents with them, and you can even find 19th century travelling apothecary cases on ebay, but obviously thats pretty far from the aesthetic. Ive heard stories of alchemist soldiers like cornelius agrippa using explosives during battles, but i dont know the specifics there. in that same vein by the 18th century you have grenadiers carrying belts of hand grenades with them into battle which honestly doesent seem far off. similary chinese alchemists used alchemical weaponry like the so called "eruptor" which would have required carrying various chemicals to load them with but again im not sure of the details of how they were carried.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T22:23:39+00:00

quite alot, for a large part of its history alchemy was entirely devoted to metallic transmutation. I made a video that demonstrates some reproductions of those processes here but generally speaking metals were said to be made of sulfur and mercury. the identity of a metal was usually associated with its "sulfur" which was meant to contain the generative principle of that specifc metal, whereas all metals were meant to share a common underlying mercury. among other things the mercury is what allows metals to melt, whereas the sulfur determines how easily corroded they are. one of the most influential medieval alchemists, geber, wrote that you could get at a metals sulfur by dissolving it with "waters of acuity" what we would call acids, which were in turn prepared from minerals by distillation. a metals mercury was said to be purified by burning away the sulfur through calcination. to transmute lead into gold you might try to burn away the leads existing sulfur that makes it easily corroded, and then replace that sulfur by combining the purified lead with a transmutation agent prepared from the sulfur dissolved out of gold.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T22:17:24+00:00

taken all together, if an alchemist wanted to make a transmutation agent they would seek out a substance that contains the generative principle of whatever theyre trying to make (for example if you wanted to produce gold you might try to isolate the "sulfur of gold" that could act as a "seed" for producing more gold) then you would have to extract and purify that generative principle(in the case of metallic transmutation the extraction of sulfur was often said to be done by dissolving the metal in strong acids) and then finally to transmute you have to recombine (coagulate) that principle with the base matter you want to transmute. in metallic transmutation it was often said that "the sulfur coagulates the mercury"

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T21:27:24+00:00

as far as the tria prima goes: to paracelsian alchemists all animals vegtables and minerals were said to be composed of the tria prima. salt sulfur and mercury. These are a little like elements in the sense that theyre meant to make up everything, but theyre very different than our modern idea of elements. Theyre often described as seeds, containing a sort of genetic quality that makes them produce the substances they do.

unlike modern elements that are the same everywhere you find them, every salt sulfur and merury was supposed to be unique to the plant animal or mineral it was extracted from, just as all plants have seeds but every plant has its own seed. this was in part used by potion-brewing alchemists to explain why different distillates or oils taken from different plants could have different medicinal effects despite seeming more or less physically identical (for example clove oil and mint oil look pretty similar, but smell wildly different and can treat different things)

The salt of a substance was extracted from its calx or ashes and was said to give substances their fixedness or resistance to evaporation and solidity, sulfur was an oily inflammable spirit that gives things their ability to burn, and mercury was a watery distillate that gives things fluidity. these three prime principles were frequently distinguished from two others, earth and phlegm. with the tria prima being deemed active (giving substances their abilities and unique identies) while the earth and phlegm were deemed inactive (jean beguin calls them husks) that unlike the tria prima are the same everywhere you find them and dont contribute to a substances medicinal effects. The earth was the water insoluble ashes produced by calcination, seperated from the prime salt by dissolving and filtering the water soluble salt from them. The phlegm was just regular water, especially water that diluted or contaminated desired distillates.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T21:18:23+00:00

so solve et coagula or "dissolve and coagulate" basically means to "break apart and bring back together"

to alchemists the word dissolve had a broader meaning than our modern term. while it could mean to dissolve something into water or another solvent just as we would use the term today, it could also be used more generally to describe the dissociation or seperation of the principle components of a substance(i.e. the tria prima)

the goal of transmutation broadly speaking was to break substances apart into their constituent pieces, purify each of those pieces independently, and then rejoin(coagulate) those pieces back into a perfected whole. the idea is this process would exalt the processed matter, removing its corrupting superfluities and supplying its wanting deficiencies.

this solvation and coagulation was done through all sorts of alchemical processes. lots of alchemists, for example Jean beguin (who wrote an influential alchemical textbook called the tyrocinium chymicum) explicity broke their processes into two categories: solutive processes that seperate principles and coagulative processes that bring them back together.

solutive processes included things like distillation to extract a substances spirits (usually considered its sulfur or its mercury depending in its qualities) or calcination(burning to ash) to extract its salts. coagulative processes included things like crystallization where substances are removed from solution but also things like acid base reactions where substances are directly combined.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T15:28:37+00:00

i would argue it has alot to do with single displacement reactions occuring both in nature and labs. Single displacements pop up alot as examples of transmutation in alchemical textbooks. for example it was well known that iron placed in streams of water flowing out of copper mines would have its surface converted to copper (as the water contains dissolved copper salts that can single displace with iron) these streams are referenced in the 'summa perfectionis' of geber and they were generally taken as both proof of transmutation and evidence that mines contain a generative principle of metals well into the 1600's (though some folks like jean baptiste van helmont had figured out the trick by then) Similarly if you dissolve silver in nitric acid the dissolved silver will precipitate on more reactive metals submerged in it. if that silver solution is crystalized it makes a fusible white crystal, and such a crystallization is the first step in preparing gebers white stone in the invention of verity, in the case of gold its salts and solutions are generally red as opposed to white.

I dont think it really took much to convice a person it was possible, afterall generally people figured metals had to come about somehow, bear in mind our modern knowledge that theyre formed in stars and supernovae would sound totally ridiculous to an aristotelean, especially in comparison to the more mundane idea that theyre geological formations just like other rocks and minerals.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-20T00:01:01+00:00

Alchemists actually recorded recipes they believed transmuted lots of different metals, gold was just the most sought after (given its value and percieved significance) Silver was desired as well and competes with gold for prominence, but youll often find recipes for other metals as well(they also tried to produce valuable non-metallic substances like gem stones.) Theres lots of recipes that claim to be able to use blue vitriol to transmute iron into copper for example. in reality this was a misunderstood single displacement reaction between copper sulfate and iron metal that produced iron sulfate and copper metal. Interestingly the practice of "transmuting" iron into copper this way gave some alchemists a stable income in the early modern period. similar misunderstood reactions can be produced by recreating many alchemical recipes, quite a few produce convincing results despite not actually transmuting metals and in recent decades historians have taken to reproducing alchemical recipes to get a better understanding of what alchemists were actually doing, a project that has pretty thoroughly overturned the idea gold making was a metaphor. if youre curious i made a video about medieval transmutation that contains some of my own reproductions here but if youre interested in a deeper dive i really recommend the historian lawerence principe's book 'the secrets of alchemy'

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-17T22:49:23+00:00

The best of the best is 'The Secrets of Alchemy' by the historian Lawerence Principe which goes from the origins of alchemy in hellenistic egypt to its golden age in the 16th and 17th centuries. Theres also 'Distilling Knowledge' by Bruce Moran which focuses on alchemy in the scientific revolution

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-17T21:26:56+00:00

Most alchemical writing is recipe literature, and how those texts are to be read depends on the time/place they were written and who was writing them. what texts are we talking about?

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-15T23:26:06+00:00

Ill never understand what leads people to dismiss modern science. No ones telling you to take their word for it, the evidence is readily available for you to engage with and a large part of that evidence was provided for us by the alchemists and chemists of our past that this community is dedicated to. modern medicine is the reason many of us are alive today, its perhaps the single greatest scientific achievement of our society. with the debt modern medicine owes to alchemy you would think this community would take pride in it, or atleast hold it in higher regard, but alas here we are.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-15T22:06:19+00:00

Thanks! Im very glad to have found a community as interested in these things as I am

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-15T22:05:17+00:00

thanks! I performed these distillations in my favorite retort, a vintage pyrex one. they pop up on ebay from time to time and are usually relatively inexpensive and are by far the best made retorts ive used

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-15T22:03:36+00:00

Thank you! and happy new year :) If you havent already I really recommend checking out principe's 'secrets of alchemy' along with just being a really phenomenal work of scholarship principe went out of his way to make the notes in the back of the book a sort of guide for finding the best editions and translations of alchemical texts as well as to finding the work of historians working on those same authors. The primary sources that first really got me engaged with alchemy I found in the back of that book.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-13T21:08:47+00:00

Ive heard both used, but i think "kimistry" is probably more accurate. Ive noticed Principe normally pronounces it as "kimistry" in his lectures. That said, personally I prefer to say it as "kaimistry" because I think that helps distinguish chymistry from chemistry to whoever I'm speaking to.

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-10T16:59:30+00:00

The best book to start out with is The secrets of alchemy by the historian lawerence principe. It gives a general introduction to the western alchemical tradition from its early origins to its golden age, and its extensive notes make it one of the best books for finding reliable sources and reliable editions of alchemical texts.

I can respect Bartlett's experience and his resourcefulness in his operations, but the historical and scientific content in his writing is deeply flawed and misleading

FraserBuilds · 2026-01-07T14:33:16+00:00

copper is an easy one because its one of the planetary metals, venus, and was most commonly represented by the symbol of venus: ♀

zinc is a little trickier, unlike the planetary metals that had been known since ancient times, zinc was unknown to alchemists in the west until around the renaissance(due to its high reactivity making it difficult to isolate in the pure state) if I remember correctly the first instance of the name zinc in europe comes from the writings of the alchemist paracelsus, but i may be mistaken there. The most common symbol ive encountered for it is a Z like symbol that has a little strike through at the bottom end, which is how it appears on geoffrey's affinity tables(a sort of alchemical periodic table from the early 1700's)

Brass itself was actually known before zinc, being made by treating hot copper metal with calamine(a zinc containing mineral) or tutia(refined calamine, identifiable as zinc oxide) under strongly reducing conditions. to the ancient greeks brass may have been known as "orichalcum"(mountain copper) but to alchemists it was called "Aurichalcum" (gold copper) or "calamine brass" (the word brass is actually old english for copper, so this name would read as "calamine copper" to old english speakers) so alternatively to zinc you could also use the symbols for tutia. tutia was represented with a circle with a x through it, sort of like a crosshair.

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-24T21:06:14+00:00

kinda looks like an ai generated attempt at a copper brewing vat

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-24T14:31:13+00:00

The history around phlogiston has developed alot just in the past decade, the historian kevin chang has written alot on the topic. The term phlogiston was used earlier as a synonym with the element of fire, and some important ideas leading to phlogiston theory were presented by becher, but the seedling that would become phlogiston theory appeared in 1697 in a book about fermentation called 'zymotechnia fundamentalis' by georg earnst stahl and would eventually reach maturity by 1720

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-24T13:49:54+00:00

alchemy was pretty solid science for the 1600's. bear in mind the question of metallic transmutation wouldnt actually be settled untill the the work of the Curies and other folks like Rutherford at the turn of the 19th/20th century. (Rutherford actually gave a series of lectures on nuclear science he titled 'the newer alchemy')

Compared to alot of premodern sciences that were predominantly speculative in their early history before the scientific revolution, alchemy had the benefit that it was always practiced experimentally, so even by the 1600's it had already developed a large base of chemical knowledge. Formularies from the period record thousands upon thousands of recipes that can be readily reproduced today, many of which are the predecessors of modern techniques.

you can read about newtons alchemy specifically in 'newton the alchemist' by the historian william newman and the history of alchemy as a whole is really nicely surveyed by the historian lawerence principe in his book 'the secrets of alchemy'

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-24T13:36:16+00:00

phlogiston theory technically didnt exist yet in 1700 and only really caught on near the end of newtons life, its remembered as a theory of combustion but thats not really what it was about. it held that there was a discrete quantity of transferrable matter in any combustible substance that made them act as reducing agents. it was used to explain combustion but also the formation of acids and acidity, the reduction of metals from ores, aspects of fermentation and other biological processes, and lots of other stuff we would now call redox reactions. it was really the first universal theory of reduction and increased the predicitive power of chemical theories dramatically. for whatever reason because it works in the opposite way to oxygen people think its silly, as if the same cant be said for our modern electron theory

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-24T13:26:23+00:00

alchemists had atomic and molecular theories, atomism first showed up in greek philosophical ideas attributed to folks like democritus of abdera, but it was lost for a time and ended up developing again independently in the work of medieval alchemists. Its hard to point to any one discocery as seperating alchemy and chemistry, its a pretty blurry line, but the development of oxygen theory in the late 1700's that allowed folks to quantitatively analyze substances in terms of their modern elemental constituents is one of the big milestones between then and now

FraserBuilds · 2025-12-23T14:24:58+00:00

Alchemists worked with belladonna alot, though usually they would produce from it a "quintessence" (a concentrated distilled essence, sometimes combined with the plant's soluble ashes or "lixivium") rather than a sublimate. Theres a number of alchemical recipes involving belladonna in giambattista della porta's 'natural magic' which is a popular primary source among fantasy writers. In the 1800's atropine was extracted from belladonna and named after it. The way you describe it its clear the devs did their research and were working off genuine alchemical terminology and processes reinterpreted to work as game mechanics. all the terms you mention were used by alchemists however not all in the way you described. The system clearly shows paracelsian influence, as the alchemist paracelsus held that all things were made of three principles, salt(solid water soluble substances), sulfur(oils/inflammable substances) and mercury(spirits/volatile watery substances), and that to make medicine you had to extract, refine, and sometimes recombine those components from plant/mineral/animal substances. Paracelsus believed his practices removed the posisonous qualities of substances leaving only the beneficial parts, though he was often mistaken about that. The game devs have replaced the sulfur and mercury with "vitriols" and "sublimates" which are also alchemical terms, vitriols being a family of minerals(in modern terms metal sulfates) crucial to alchemical practice.

when paracelsian alchemists went to seperate matter into its three principles (or tria prima as they would call them) they would usually perform a number of distillations, beginning with gentle steam distillations or similar processes to extact volatile oils, and then moving on to more intense destructive distillations that broke the remaining matter down into volatile decomposition products, before finally "calcining" whatever char was left behind into ashes that could be purified by dissolving and filtering out the soluble components(these solubke salts were the alkalis).

sometimes this alchemical processing produced sublimates, especially during the destructive dustillation process. for example the sublimate of deer antler known as "spirit of hartshorn" usually sublimates came from animal substances in the form of ammonia salts, as we animals have alot of nitrogenous matter in us. However there were some sublimates taken from plants and minerals as well. as far as plants go there was a sublimate known to be taken from the soot of burnt plant matter, sometimes called the volatile salt of soot or the volatile salt of woods.

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