The Alchemist's Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

Renaissance-it’s a sub-current that keeps resurfacing all throughout history.’ The professor stretched back in the worn leather chair as he spoke, adopting the tutor pose that was second nature to him. ‘Though heaven knows what they were up to, or
thought
they were up to-turning lead into gold, creating magical potions, elixirs of life, and all the rest of it.’
    ‘I take it you don’t believe in the possibility of an alchemical elixir that could cure the sick?’
    Rose frowned, noticing Ben’s deadpan expression and wondering where he was going with this. ‘I think that if they’d developed a magic remedy for plague, pox, cholera, typhus, and all the other diseases that have ravaged us through history, we’d have known about it.’ He shrugged. ‘The problem is it’s all so speculative. Nobody really knows what the alchemists might have discovered. Alchemy’s famous for its inscrutability-all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, secret brotherhoods, riddles and codes and supposed hidden knowledge. Personally I don’t think there was much substance to any of it.’
    ‘Why all the obscurity?’ Ben asked, thinking of the reading he’d been doing over the last couple of days, running Internet searches on terms like ‘ancient know ledge’ and ‘secrets of alchemy’ and wading through one esoteric website after another. He’d turned up a wide variety of alchemical writings, ranging from the present day back to the fourteenth century. They all shared the same baffling and grandiose language, the same dark air of secrecy. He hadn’t been able to decide how much of it was genuine and how much was just esoteric posturing for the benefit of the credulous devotees they’d been attracting over the centuries.
    ‘If I wanted to be cynical I’d say it was because they didn’t actually
have
anything worth revealing,’ Rose grinned. ‘But you’ve also got to remember that alchemists had powerful enemies, and perhaps some of their obsession with secrecy was a way of protecting themselves.’
    ‘Against what?’
    ‘Well, at one end of the scale there were the sharks and speculators who preyed on them,’ Rose said. ‘Once in a while some hapless alchemist who’d bragged too loudly about gold-making would be kidnapped and made to tell how it was done. When they failed to come up with the goods, which of course they probably always did, they’d end up hanging from a tree.’ The professor paused. ‘But their real enemy was the Church, especially in Europe, where they were forever burning them as heretics and witches. Look what the Catholic Inquisition did to the Cathars in medieval France, on the direct orders of Pope Innocent III . They called the liquidation of an entire people God’s work. Nowadays we call it genocide.’
    ‘I’ve heard of the Cathars,’ Ben said. ‘Can you tell me more?’
    Rose took off his glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. ‘It’s a terrible story,’ he said. ‘They were a fairly widespread medieval religious movement that mainly occupied the part of southern France now known as the Languedoc. They took their name from the Greek word
Catharos
, meaning “pure”. Their religious beliefs were a little radical in that they regarded God as a kind of cosmic principle of love. They didn’t attribute much importance to Christ, and may not even have believed he existed. Their idea was that, even if he had existed, he certainly couldn’t have been the son of God. They believed that all matter was fundamentally crude and corrupt, including human beings. For them, religious worship was all about spiritualizing, perfecting and transforming that base matter to attain union with the Divine.’
    Ben smiled. ‘I can see how those views might have upset the orthodoxy a little.’
    ‘Absolutely,’ Rose said. ‘The Cathars had essentially created a free state that the Church couldn’t control. Worse, they were openly preaching ideas that could seriously undermine its credibility