From Newish, to ancient....
Quote:Did Monks Try to Make Gold?
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
May 5, 2006 A ceramic cone unearthed at a remote British abbey might indicate that Cistercian monks implemented the Benedectine motto "ora et labora" (pray and work) with another rule: "make gold."
On display for the first time at Bylands Abbey, which was founded in 1137 by Cistercian monks in North Yorkshire, the cone is what's known as an alembic.
The delicate apparatus, 8 inches tall and 6 inches across the base, originally sat on top of a "cucurbit" a heated gourd-shaped pottery vessel that held a boiling concoction. Vapors given off by the boiling mixture would have passed though a small hole at the cone's apex into a pipe connected to a condenser.
The alembic could have been used in medicinal preparations, to distill alcoholic spirits by monks who fancied an illicit tipple, or in pursuit of the alchemist's dream gold.
"Since no chemical traces have been found on the surface, we have no way of being certain of its use. However, we know that certain Cistercians, as with other monks, did experiment in alchemy," Kevin Booth, English Heritage's senior curator in the North, told Discovery News.
Born in ancient Egypt, where it flourished in the Hellenistic period, alchemy is considered the forerunner of chemistry.
Following the Aristotelian theory of elements, which stated that all things consisted of fire, air, water and earth, the early alchemists believed that gold could be obtained by altering the elements in a base metal.
A little shift in one metal's composition would have made a metal of low esteem, such as lead, turn into tin, iron, copper, mercury and finally, gold. Alchemists would have also tried to stimulate transmutation with a specific agent the legendary philosopher's stone.
The Cistercians, known as the White Monks to distinguish themselves from the largest black-robed Benedictine congregation, banned alchemy in 1317. Despite the ban, rumors had it that the monks at Bylands Abbey had long tried to create gold.
Indeed, the alembic would support the account of 15th-century scholar Richard Dove of Buckfast, who described how one monk, Richard Archebold, saddled the Order with great debts in an attempt to "pursue the unattainable."
In 1470, Archebold wrote the abbot claiming he had managed to convert an amalgam of metals into gold, and asked for a loan in order to continue his experiments. By 1479, Archebold and the Bylands monks had accumulated substantial debts.
"This is an interesting story, but we should not run out the more likely uses, such as distilling alcoholic spirits. If the alembic had been found in association with mercury, then I would suspect alchemy. There was an example of this from a monastic site in Stamford, Lincolnshire, which contained other evidence of alchemy," archaeologist Glyn Coppack, author of The White Monks: Cistercians in Britain, told Discovery News.
Indeed, the Stamford vessel was found near a urinal: Urine, with quicksilver, was considered an essential ingredient of the alchemist's art.
"The line between religion and science was very blurred in those days. These findings do not directly support the claim of monks trying to make gold, but they certainly add to that possibility, Booth said.
Pages: 
Interesting News Article Thread (Read 880570 times)
