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Alchemy (from the Arabic word al-kīmīā, الكیمیاء) is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. [1] In its Western form, alchemy is first attested in a number of pseudepigraphical texts written in Greco-Roman ...
Magnum opus (alchemy) In alchemy, the Magnum Opus or Great Work is a term for the process of working with the prima materia to create the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition, attached to laboratory processes and chemical color changes, used as a model for the ...
In alchemy and philosophy, prima materia, materia prima or first matter (for a philosophical exposition refer to: Prime Matter), is the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical magnum opus and the creation of the philosopher's stone. It is the primitive formless base of all matter similar to chaos, the quintessence or aether.
Philosopher's stone. The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771. The philosopher's stone[a] is a mythic alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold or silver [b]; it was also known as "the tincture" and "the powder". Alchemists additionally believed that it could be used ...
Alkahest. Image of Alchimia, the embodiment of alchemy. Woodcut published by Leonhard Thurneysser in 1574. Thurneysser was a student of Paracelsus. In Renaissance alchemy, alkahest was the theorized "universal solvent ". [nb 1] It was supposed to be capable of dissolving any composite substance, including gold (then not considered an element ...
Paracelsus was born in Egg an der Sihl [], [18] a village close to the Etzel Pass in Einsiedeln, Schwyz.He was born in a house next to a bridge across the Sihl river.His father Wilhelm (d. 1534) was a chemist and physician, an illegitimate descendant of the Swabian noble Georg [] Bombast von Hohenheim (1453–1499), commander of the Order of Saint John in Rohrdorf.
The word alchemy was derived from the Arabic word كيمياء or kīmiyāʾ [1] [2] and may ultimately derive from the ancient Egyptian word kemi, meaning black. [2] After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Islamic conquest of Roman Egypt, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Caliphate and the Islamic civilization.
The homunculus is commonly used today in scientific disciplines such as psychology as a teaching or memory tool to describe the distorted scale model of a human drawn or sculpted to reflect the relative space human body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex (the sensory homunculus) and the motor cortex (the motor homunculus).