In this book, Ripley inducts the reader into the ‘twelve gates’ of the alchemist’s work to create the Philosopher’s Stone. In one of these, The Compound of Alchemy, he touches on the secrets of turning base metal into gold, by ‘the right and perfectest meanes’. Ripley called alchemy ‘this sacred science’ and several important alchemical works are attributed to him. Ripley was not only a leading churchman and one-time chamberlain to Pope Innocent VIII but also one of the foremost alchemists in 15th-century Europe. George Ripley was a canon at Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire. Read more about: Mysteries The magical life of John Dee Here we look at six of the most famous alchemists from British history. German ruler Frederick of Wurzburg kept special gallows for hanging alchemists. Sir Isaac Newton experimented, St Thomas Aquinas was a keen practitioner, and Charles II even had an alchemy laboratory built in his private chambers. Some of the greatest thinkers of medieval and early modern Britain dabbled in alchemy. Until Robert Boyle’s writings on chemistry in the 1660s, alchemy was seen as a legitimate and respectable natural study. It found its way to medieval Europe and became a pursuit that, like the Holy Grail, gripped the imagination and inspired the bold and the bright.

These secretive scientists were the alchemists.Īlchemy has its roots in antiquity, particularly Ancient China, Greece, and Egypt. Their quest was to turn ordinary metals into gold and to create an elixir of life, a substance that gives immortality.

For centuries, mysterious scholars toiled away in secluded laboratories in search of an elusive goal – the Philosopher’s Stone.

Decks containing elixir of immortality