Except when laboratories work for defense or on technologies protected by patents, the modern chemist does not hide his equipment and research methods at all. On the contrary, a characteristic feature of the laboratory of the medieval alchemist was its absolute inaccessibility to prying curious views. Only in later times will alchemists work in premises known to everyone: the most illustrative example of this is the famous "Golden Lane", directly adjacent to the majestic Prague Castle, which got its name due to the fact that at the beginning of the 17th century numerous alchemists settled on it personally associated with Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg.
This desire to maintain secrecy was manifested, in particular, in the fact that special dampers were used, which served to hide from the eyes of passers-by the smoke that emanated during the performance of certain operations by alchemists.
We do not have, and not by chance, statistical or even rough estimates of the number of alchemical laboratories in France in the Middle Ages. Still small in number in the XII century, they became widespread in the XIV and XV centuries - then the laboratories apparently reached a significant number in large cities - in Paris during the time of Nicolas Flamel they numbered perhaps two or three hundred.
Laboratories were found everywhere: both in castles and palaces, and in the houses of ordinary townspeople and even miserable huts, in church parishes and monasteries, in cities and villages.
The laboratory, as a rule, was cramped and dark and necessarily had a pipe or chimney to remove the emitted gases and smoke. Often it was an underground kennel, but the old kitchen could also be used, and even a specially equipped room that occupied (which rarely happened) an entire floor.
Devices and tools
The alchemist usually possessed a very modest set of instruments and tools. Of particular note is the striking constancy of the rather uncomplicated technology of alchemists: from the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages and even in later times, the same objects were always used, which were used in their time by the Arabs, and before them - by the Greek alchemists of Alexandria, the variations concerned only details, minor details.
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The Great Work was to be performed either in a furnace or in a crucible. The alchemical furnace, called athanor, was fired with wood or vegetable oil (the presence of many wicks made it possible to regulate the intensity of heating), because real alchemists never used coal. An observation hole, arranged in the oven, made it possible to observe inside it the cooking of a philosophical egg (also called al-del - a word also borrowed from the Arabic language). The Philosophical egg had an ovoid shape (hence its name) and was made from baked clay or (which was more often, since the alchemist in this case could freely observe the transformations of primary matter) from glass or crystal.
The crucibles used by the dry path alchemists had a cross-shaped cavity (in French croix, from where the ancient name for the crucible comes from).
There were also various reservoirs and vessels for receiving used substances, devices for distillation, tongs, poker and hammers, bellows that served to fan the fire.
Dludel (back to him) was a cap of a distillation cube (alambik), but more often this word was used to designate a philosophical egg (glass or crystal retort).
Athanor sometimes had the shape of a tower. It is such an alchemical furnace, presented in section that allows you to see the fire, that appears on the right at the bottom of the central portal of Notre Dame Cathedral.
Alchemists used vessels and utensils similar to those used by the artisans of their era - ceramic and glass.
The Deutsches Museum in Munich possesses a significant collection of alchemical devices. There is also an exact reconstruction of a typical furnace used by alchemists.
Here is what Raymond Llull wrote about Athanor in his Clarification of the Covenant:
“… Our oven consists of two parts and must be well sealed at the joints around the perimeter. Its lid must fit perfectly tightly, so that when the stove is closed with its lid, there is an outlet in the depths through which the fire lit in it could feed. The putty filling the grooves of our oven is called the seal of Hermes."
The expression hermetic closure (tight, impenetrable closure) comes precisely from the seal of Hermes, which the alchemists of the Middle Ages used to close the philosophical egg.
The name pelican, given to the distillation apparatus used by medieval alchemists, is inspired by its very shape, which resembles the characteristic contours of the beak and neck of this bird. Raymond Llull continues his description:
“… Alambik is two vessels of the same size, capacity and height, connected to each other in such a way that the nose of one goes inside the other, so that the contents of both of them rise up under the influence of heat, and then, as a result of cooling, go down … O children, now you have an idea of our vessels, if only you are not tight on your ear."
However, the adepts could not, proceeding from the very image of the pelican, not come to the well-known legendary Christian symbol: this is the image (resurrecting in the memory of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for the salvation of all people) of a female pelican, which opened its beak, from which its cubs get food … This symbol will later, in the Renaissance, be used by secret hermetic societies.
For the success of numerous experiments, the alchemist was also highly desirable to determine the time as accurately as possible.
The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer readily sneered at the inaccuracy of the clock that existed at that time, saying that one could rather trust the crowing of a rooster than the striking of the clock on the abbey tower.
And yet the medieval alchemist possessed, if not a clock, in accuracy not inferior to modern chronometers, then at least already sufficiently accurate instruments for determining the time. The first of the great Western alchemists, the monk Herbert (who became Pope in 999, taking the name Sylvester II), constructed - “not without the help of the devil,” as popular rumor claimed - the clock when he was in Magdeburg (997), where he was summoned by the Holy Roman Emperor Opoya S. Bishop Titmar of Merseburg wrote in his chronicle about this: “Herbert constructed a clock in Magdeburg, which he calibrated with a pipe, directing it to the well-known [Polar] star, a guiding star for sailors.
Only at the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century did the pendulum appear, finally giving the watch the necessary reliability and accuracy.
In the 15th century, technical improvements became more and more ingenious.
If the water clock (klepsydra) has been known since Antiquity, then the sand clock - contrary to popular belief, due to the very simplicity of their mechanism, attributing their appearance to hoary antiquity - were invented only in the XIV century. It was at that time that they began to be used in the laboratories of alchemists. It was a very handy device due to its ease of use; Let us remind you that small mechanical watches appeared only in the time of Louis XV.
On the contrary, the sundial has been known since ancient times.
Nothing distinguished the daily life of a person in the Middle Ages from everyday life today as the opportunity for the first to use all his time, to free himself from the tyranny of regulations that prescribe the implementation of any business (important and not so important) in the shortest possible time. Indeed, for the alchemist, having complete leisure was absolutely necessary to carry out his work in the laboratory.
When you see before you an alchemical document of that era, first of all, you should resist the temptation to try to "translate" it into a technical language that is more understandable to people of our day. The very nature of ancient methods and craft techniques, which seem to us to be easily deciphered, can prevent their exact correspondence with the quantitative and qualitative criteria of a more distant era. “It is very unreasonable to approach a document of the Middle Ages with the criteria of the 20th century,” remarks Roger Karl. Medieval adepts, for example, did not at all take into account the strict quantitative requirements that we now see by themselves
taken for granted. When, for example, it is a question of heating an atiora and it is a question of "telling him the temperature of horse dung", it would not be easy, contrary to the first impression, to establish the exact thermal equivalent. Definitely a moderate temperature, but which one? As said, about the temperature of the manure, but at what stage of fermentation?
We also point out the presence of small mobile mirrors designed to capture solar and lunar rays, as well as weak impulses scattered in the atmosphere or coming from distant outer spaces.
There were no instruments to make accurate measurements of temperature and pressure in the Middle Ages, and alchemists, like their contemporary blacksmiths, had to rely solely on empirical control (for example, to monitor changes in the color of metals or bodies when they were heated with increasing intensity) …
One thing that never ceases to wonder is the nature of the tools used by the alchemists. The laboratory of a real alchemist, an adept, has always been distinguished by the simplicity inherent in the workshop of an artisan, while cluttering the laboratory with a multitude of all kinds of tools and heterogeneous, bizarre objects was a sign that exposed an ignorant prompter who did not know how to get down to business correctly.
Author: Serge Uten