Alchemy and Alpennia
May. 5th, 2015 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjIt being my official book-promotion day, I'll remind folks that you still have a chance to be in the drawing for a free e-book of The Mystic Marriage by commenting on my guest-blog at Women and Words. (Open until Friday.)
A couple weeks ago when soliciting for blog ideas, someone asked for more about alchemy. While the way I use alchemy in The Mystic Marriage is founded on the real-world history of the field, there are a few extra quirks I threw in, both to make it fit with the existing fantasy aspects and to personalize it a bit.
Real-world alchemy never set out to be apart from physical causation. It was, like so many early proto-sciences (like the relationship of humoral theory to medicine), an attempt to understand and manipulate the world using a massively incomplete understanding of physical principles and based on a world-view that assumed certain supernatural forces as facts of life (such as astrological influences). Beyond that, alchemy always had a tension between being a physical art and a spiritual one, between considering its basic concepts to be symbolic and allegorical and considering them to be "real" and causal.
I retained most of these tensions and presuppositions in setting up how alchemy "works" in the world of Alpennia. (And the historic tension between alchemy as a serious field and as a venue for fraud plays out just the same.) I shifted the focus of Antuniet's art onto gemstones in part because it allowed me to personalize the details a bit more, but in part because--as she herself says--transmuting metals produces no long-term value if it only creates a glut of the precious metal markets. So I brought in another topic with a long tradition of pseudo-science: the mystical properties of stones. It turns Antuniet's "product" into something that can be personalized and uniquely valuable. This aspect was a lot of fun to research and every single property that's mentioned in the book is based on some historic lapidary catalog. The twist I added was combining the concept of transmutation and gemstone properties.
One fascinating thing I discovered in researching the real chemistry of synthetic gemstones (because, of course, I wanted to have actual science as the invisible underlayer of the techniques) was that the first experimental successes occurred within decades after the setting of my book. Of course, Antuniet's alchemy is not synthesizing stones by actual physical means--not with the equipment in a standard alchemy lab. And she's not just working on the macro-crystals that form the standard set of "precious" gems, but on many of the micro-crystalline and mixed stones as well. This is where the magic comes in. I picked apart the standard steps in the traditional alchemical process and mapped them roughly to chemical processes: dissolving, recombination, applying extreme physical conditions to induce chemical change, and so forth. But the "magical" forces at work are able to create the necessary temperatures, pressures, and mixing forces, and can speed up chemical reactions. My intent was for all the physical reactions to be theoretically possible (with a certain amount of handwaving over the layering technique).
The other part of my intent (in terms of the underlying "rules" of my world-building) is that the use of the astrological alignments and the symbolic role-playing is as real and necessary as the details of the Saints' Mysteries are in invoking miracles. (One make take that "as real as" however one wants.) A difference between them is that while the ability to elicit miracles from the saints is as dependent on random personal ability as it is on using the proper rituals and paraphernalia, I've strongly implied that alchemy can be performed by anyone, no matter whether they are "sensitive" to esoteric forces or not. (But, as with miracles, a "sensitivity" is invaluable when doing experimental development work!) Whether alchemy behaves more as a "science" because that's how the people of this universe expect it to behave is left entirely open for the reader's interpretation.
So there are three components to how alchemy works: an underlayer of real-world physical chemistry, a mechanism of non-physical causation that operates in ways parallel to the function of miracles in my world but acts via real-wold chemical principles, and a basic world-building rule that the mystical properties ascribed to precious stones (and non-precious ones, for that matter) in our own history are "true" in the world of Alpennia and can produce actual physical effects.
The research was immensely enjoyable. In addition to sifting through various versions of the basic alchemical processes and synthesizing a set of functions and rules to use (which I try not to lay out too explicitly), and tossing in the names of some historical alchemists (as well as a few made-up ones), I made great use of the nexus of alchemical interest at the late 16th century court of Rudolph II in Prague. Rudolph really did gather together alchemists from all over Europe (including the Englishmen John Dee and Edward Kelley though -- unlike most writers who are working on 16th century alchemy -- I haven't included them at all). The bookstore where Antuniet found her precious volume is, in my mind, located on the Zlaty Ulice--the "Golden Lane" near Prague Castle, whose name is traditionally associated with alchemy (or maybe only goldsmiths, but where's the fun in that?). Anselmus DeBoodt was an actual jeweler working at the court of Rudolph II who wrote various treatises on gemstones. Both Antuniet's book and the idea that he was an alchemist of synthetic gemstones are entirely my invention.
In a world where alchemy "really works", the idea that Prague continued to be a hotbed of alchemical scholarship two centuries later seems eminently plausible. And the idea that the Holy Roman Empire (of which Bohemia was a part at the time of my novel) would be deeply interested in the political possibilities of the work is only to be expected.
A couple weeks ago when soliciting for blog ideas, someone asked for more about alchemy. While the way I use alchemy in The Mystic Marriage is founded on the real-world history of the field, there are a few extra quirks I threw in, both to make it fit with the existing fantasy aspects and to personalize it a bit.
Real-world alchemy never set out to be apart from physical causation. It was, like so many early proto-sciences (like the relationship of humoral theory to medicine), an attempt to understand and manipulate the world using a massively incomplete understanding of physical principles and based on a world-view that assumed certain supernatural forces as facts of life (such as astrological influences). Beyond that, alchemy always had a tension between being a physical art and a spiritual one, between considering its basic concepts to be symbolic and allegorical and considering them to be "real" and causal.
I retained most of these tensions and presuppositions in setting up how alchemy "works" in the world of Alpennia. (And the historic tension between alchemy as a serious field and as a venue for fraud plays out just the same.) I shifted the focus of Antuniet's art onto gemstones in part because it allowed me to personalize the details a bit more, but in part because--as she herself says--transmuting metals produces no long-term value if it only creates a glut of the precious metal markets. So I brought in another topic with a long tradition of pseudo-science: the mystical properties of stones. It turns Antuniet's "product" into something that can be personalized and uniquely valuable. This aspect was a lot of fun to research and every single property that's mentioned in the book is based on some historic lapidary catalog. The twist I added was combining the concept of transmutation and gemstone properties.
One fascinating thing I discovered in researching the real chemistry of synthetic gemstones (because, of course, I wanted to have actual science as the invisible underlayer of the techniques) was that the first experimental successes occurred within decades after the setting of my book. Of course, Antuniet's alchemy is not synthesizing stones by actual physical means--not with the equipment in a standard alchemy lab. And she's not just working on the macro-crystals that form the standard set of "precious" gems, but on many of the micro-crystalline and mixed stones as well. This is where the magic comes in. I picked apart the standard steps in the traditional alchemical process and mapped them roughly to chemical processes: dissolving, recombination, applying extreme physical conditions to induce chemical change, and so forth. But the "magical" forces at work are able to create the necessary temperatures, pressures, and mixing forces, and can speed up chemical reactions. My intent was for all the physical reactions to be theoretically possible (with a certain amount of handwaving over the layering technique).
The other part of my intent (in terms of the underlying "rules" of my world-building) is that the use of the astrological alignments and the symbolic role-playing is as real and necessary as the details of the Saints' Mysteries are in invoking miracles. (One make take that "as real as" however one wants.) A difference between them is that while the ability to elicit miracles from the saints is as dependent on random personal ability as it is on using the proper rituals and paraphernalia, I've strongly implied that alchemy can be performed by anyone, no matter whether they are "sensitive" to esoteric forces or not. (But, as with miracles, a "sensitivity" is invaluable when doing experimental development work!) Whether alchemy behaves more as a "science" because that's how the people of this universe expect it to behave is left entirely open for the reader's interpretation.
So there are three components to how alchemy works: an underlayer of real-world physical chemistry, a mechanism of non-physical causation that operates in ways parallel to the function of miracles in my world but acts via real-wold chemical principles, and a basic world-building rule that the mystical properties ascribed to precious stones (and non-precious ones, for that matter) in our own history are "true" in the world of Alpennia and can produce actual physical effects.
The research was immensely enjoyable. In addition to sifting through various versions of the basic alchemical processes and synthesizing a set of functions and rules to use (which I try not to lay out too explicitly), and tossing in the names of some historical alchemists (as well as a few made-up ones), I made great use of the nexus of alchemical interest at the late 16th century court of Rudolph II in Prague. Rudolph really did gather together alchemists from all over Europe (including the Englishmen John Dee and Edward Kelley though -- unlike most writers who are working on 16th century alchemy -- I haven't included them at all). The bookstore where Antuniet found her precious volume is, in my mind, located on the Zlaty Ulice--the "Golden Lane" near Prague Castle, whose name is traditionally associated with alchemy (or maybe only goldsmiths, but where's the fun in that?). Anselmus DeBoodt was an actual jeweler working at the court of Rudolph II who wrote various treatises on gemstones. Both Antuniet's book and the idea that he was an alchemist of synthetic gemstones are entirely my invention.
In a world where alchemy "really works", the idea that Prague continued to be a hotbed of alchemical scholarship two centuries later seems eminently plausible. And the idea that the Holy Roman Empire (of which Bohemia was a part at the time of my novel) would be deeply interested in the political possibilities of the work is only to be expected.
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no subject
Date: 2015-05-05 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-05 08:46 pm (UTC)Still need to look for some basic references on canal hydrodynamics....