To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Secrets of Alchemy

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strangehams. Today, alchemy. The ancient art of transmutation, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, occult, pseudo -science. What possible relevance could it have for us today? You know, most people think of alchemy as the search for gold and how to transmute based metals into gold. Alchemy is so much more trying to talk about alchemy, is trying to talk about stardust. It is sort of this marriage of magic and science. Like, it doesn't really make sense, but it does also make a lot of sense. Alchemy. Still think it's for wizards and tall pointy hats? Prepare to be surprised. Firstness. You

You You You

You You You

You You Once upon a time,

science and magic were two sides of the same coin. Today, we learned science in school and save magic for children's books. But what if it were different? What would it be like to see the world as an alchemist? Alchemy itself has molded through different religions. Here's Sarah Dern, who at 25 years old sees alchemy as a spiritual practice. It was started in Alexandria and Egypt. And there were Egyptian gods interwoven into alchemy and Greek gods interwoven into alchemy. And then it sort of morphs in the middle ages into a Christian religion. A lot of Christian iconography goes into alchemy. It was sort of taking on different forms and different religious cloaks.

When reformation started to kind of bubble up and Protestant revolutions started happening, the Catholic Church became much more aware. Because it was always like this thing that happened sort of in dark rooms and out of sight. We can't have anyone saying that they have a direct connection to God. The only way to have a connection to God is through our priests. There was at that time these type of alchemists called the puffers, they would get hired by Rudolph II and like these different courts across Europe. A king, yeah, I can make you go real easy. And the king was like dope, this is great. You're hired. But we have evidence that they were like painting rocks gold.

And then the enlightenment happens and alchemy sort of gets replaced by chemistry. We're not all chemists but being curious about the world is its own sort of alchemy trying to see the magic in the every day. And if you put it that way, maybe practicing alchemy is just what we could all use today. To be clear, alchemy was an early kind of protochemistry. Practitioners using some of the same lab equipment we do today experimented with transforming matter from one state to another. They melted metal, turned liquids into gas, reduced solids to ashes and they also believed that if they could transform matter, why not the

spirit, the self? And that last part is what's attracting new followers today like Sarah Dern. As she told Charles Monroe Cain, alchemy saw the world with such curiosity and wonder and we're constantly investigating the world around them and like how do you get water into ice? Alchemy is for just so enamored by that transformation and then how ice goes back to water and then can become a gas. And they talk a lot about these seven transformations of alchemy and how each transformation is an opportunity to purify it. But then there's a whole other side of alchemy they call it esoteric alchemy where it's all about trying to purify yourself into its most reduced form. And it's sort of like, you know, hitting Nirvana, becoming enlightened.

Can you real quickly run through the seven steps? Sure. Just let's hear them. So it starts with calcination and then it moves to disillusion and then separation and then the conjunction phase and then fermentation distillation and coagulation is the last one. So what alchemy means to me is looking for transformation all around you. So every transformation we go through as human beings be it something traumatic like a car accident or just even reading a good book. That's an opportunity for transformation just like water moving into ice, moving into gas. Is this you right now, you know, 2020? Is this your religion or is this just a metaphor you use to help guide you? I mean, it's esoteric. It is this sort of mystical understanding of the world.

It sort of defies explanation in many ways, trying to talk about alchemy is trying to talk about stardust like it doesn't really make sense. But it does also make a lot of sense in terms of God is within in that we are all divine and that there's very practical ways to reach that divinity and kind of purify it. So it's just that's what's left of you. So what's interesting for me, I think, is that it's still grounded in a bunch of people in a lab a long time ago actually physically doing things. It's not just spiritual, it's also practical. I think that's something really appealing. That's why I got into alchemy. It is sort of this marriage of magic and science. At a time when those two things, there wasn't even conception that they would be different. When the Egyptians and the Arabs and the medievals were working with alchemy,

they saw it all as part of this like great work and sort of tribute to God. It was all connected. In the alchemist perspective, you had to actively be doing the experiments in order for the inner alchemy, you know, the inner work of becoming your purious gold in herself. There's probably a question I think a lot of curious people would be asking. How do I get into this? How do I start? Because it's so confusing and mystical and like I think people are like, how do they start? I think it can start with just, you know, like next time you're cooking, say you're cooking spinach for dinner. If you really look at the leafy greens, look at the leaves and how fresh it is and think about where it came from and the ground and the seed that it came from, and then you put it in your pan and you saute it with olive oil, and salt, and pepper, and then you put it on your plate, thinking about the transformation that

just one side goes through at dinner. That's its own kind of alchemy. And if you can find wonder and sort of be curious in that, you're a step closer to how the alchemists saw the world or tried to see the world. Well, I mean, I thought you were going to say you're a step closer to God. Yeah, I mean, you are according to the alchemists. And I think to me. Sarah Dern is the author of the Beginner's Guide to Alchemy. Charles Monroe Kane talked with her. Science history students at Columbia University don't have to imagine what it was like to be an alchemist. If they take one of Professor Pamela Smith's colleagues,

they can spend a semester reading medieval alchemical manuscripts, translating recipes for making emeralds, returning silkworms into gold, and then they can recreate those experiments in a lab, which can be quite an adventure. So how do you make an emerald? Well, you take ground crystal, so ground rock crystal, which is mainly silica, and red lead, which is powdered bright orange lead, and a little bit of copper to make the green, and some salts, and you heat it all together, and we tried it, the grad students, and the postdoc who was working with them, tried it about ten times, and got kind of ashy ash just to ash to begin with. Then they got black glass. So

it really does take skill. And finally, on about the eighth try, they got green, beautiful green emeralds. Are they real emeralds? Oh no, I mean they're glass, right? They're colored glass. What's the weirdest ingredient you've had to try to find? Oh, that's such a good question. I mean, the students had to do all kinds of sourcing adventures. I mean, the adventures in sourcing was actually fascinating. To get silkworms, we found a supplier in Long Island or somewhere who could get a silkworm eggs, and we grew the silkworms, the student grew the silkworms, now it was winter, and he had to keep the silkworms at a constant temperature of about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. How did he do that? Yes, good question. The manuscript says to keep the silkworms in a vessel

in horse dung. And that's, it sounds, it sounds, oh well, I'll tell you a story about horse dung, but I mean, that sounds very exotic, but that's a very, very common thing that you see in recipes at this time, because horse dung and cow dung actually are host to thermothelic bacteria. So horse dung and cow dung stay at a constant temperature as long as the bacteria stays alive. So if you have composted horse or cow manure, you'll see how it steams in the morning. Well, that's because it's full of thermothelic bacteria. So actually, it's a very good way to keep something warm at a constant low temperature. So what did your students have to do, go around looking for fresh horse dung to surround your beaker full of silkworm eggs? Well, we tried that to start with. First of all, it was New York City, you know, we even called up the stables in New York City, but you know, there was no way that we could actually have a pile of manure composting anywhere on campus.

And besides it was winter and it wouldn't have worked. So what the student did was he found the top of the boiler in his building, in his apartment building. He made a special wooden box and kept the silkworms in this wooden box and fed the mulberry leaves. I'm trying to imagine this student explaining all of this to the super in his apartment building. Yes, exactly. Don't touch those, those are my silkworms. Yeah, exactly. It was amazing. He actually, you know, he hatched silkworms interestingly enough. So tell me about that, that silkworm recipe because that one, I mean, it's more than just a scientific formula. There's a lot of symbolism attached to it, right? Very much so. And this is the one that is about trying to make gold. Yes, that's right. And the timing of the whole recipe in terms of the liturgical calendar, the calendar of the church is very significant also. You know, St. John's Day is when it starts the summer solstice and

so on and so forth. So you have to do this at a certain time of year. It's not just you do, you know, get your hot dong and get your silkworm eggs and combine them, right? So then you take the silkworms, you grow them, and then you put them in a flask, all together, and you keep that flask and hot dong again. And they grow bigger, you continue to feed them egg yolks, and they grow bigger, and then you feed them gold leaf. And eventually the recipe says they will kill each other off and there will be one kind of super silkworm left. So you're raising cannibalistic silkworms that will then eat each other? And you're supposed to just watch until there's one winner who's vanquished and eaten all its brothers and sisters. Right. And so this is, and then you are supposed

to carefully, you know, the whole vessel is sealed closed. And then you're supposed to put a ring of coals around that vessel, carefully covered the vessel, the glass vessel is coated in clay so that it won't crack when you put the ring of charcoal around it. And then you're supposed to heat it to kill the silkworm and turn it into powder. And then you're going to have all this trouble of raising the silkworm and feeding it its brothers and sisters, and now you're going to kill it? Yeah, because that then burn it so that it creates this powder and this powder is supposed to be able to make things gold. The point about a recipe like this is not that it's necessarily pseudoscience, it seems as though the author practitioner had a very straightforward kind of practical approach to it, but I don't think it could ever actually work. And the importance of this recipe is in its symbolism and in its antiquity, these

people have the focus on the same kinds of questions we have, like what generates life? What can regenerate growth, like growth of a limb or growth of an organ? So the focus is the same, but the way they're answering them is often different within a different cosmic understanding. Yeah, so what fascinates me about this is the almost mystical symbolism attached to this because it seems like there are all these references to rebirth and resurrection, both the rebirth of the animals and then the death of the animals, and then coupled with the Christian calendar or the date of the resurrection, it sort of seems like it's part science or part chemistry, but with this strong mystical component. I mean, I guess it's mystical, it's religious, and you have to think that their whole world view at this time was very much shaped by religion. People understood nature through religious texts

and practices. So it's not surprising that something that gave rise to new life or gave rise to the ability to enable a medal or some other material would be compared to Jesus' resurrection. I know that seems maybe primitive to us today when science and religion are so often considered just antithetical to each other, but is there something that interests you and seems valuable to you about that worldview? You know, it's valuable in, I mean, knowledge has different statuses, right? We have a particularly pretty much instrumental view to the way that natural knowledge is pursued today. So people want to do something with it. They want to make natural materials, but they also want to understand the

universe. And there are simply different understandings of the universe. And I'll just say that I think that realizing those different understandings and not putting them on a hierarchy from primitive to modern is very important because if you think about something like sustainability, the worldview that saw humans as a part of nature and not a master of nature, the worldview that saw humans as a part of nature might have led to a different kind of attitude to nature that would not have landed us in this crisis. Now, you know, as a historian, you can't say what if there's not much value to that, but still to be aware that different ways of understanding the universe might have value, I think, is important. Is there any

practical value to recreating older, or a chemical experiments? Has anybody who's done this discovered anything that might actually be useful today? Yes. There was a literature professor at the University of Nottingham who wanted to try out a panacea, so something that was supposed to cure everything. And he worked with a biology lab, and they tried it out on various, you know, bacteria, and they found that it actually had an effect against MRSA, the very persistent bacteria that penicillin - yes, exactly. And it's now in trials there. I mean, you can find it

on the internet. Wow. But there's an example of something that was potentially extremely interesting to scientists, to medical researchers. Pamela Smith teaches History of Science at Columbia University, where she runs the Making and Knowing project. And if you want to try out one of those recipes yourself, you can explore the lab's new digital edition of a 1580s manuscript, Secrets of Craft and Nature, links on our website at ttbook .org. And what do you listen to while brewing up a potion or two? Alchemical music, of course. In the early 1600s, German alchemist Michael Meyer moved to the court of Emperor Rudolf II, and he became Rudolf's physician and counselor and composer.

This is one of 50 fugues, he wrote. They were published in 1617 in a book called Atalanta Fugians. It's full of alchemical symbols and incantations. And we don't know exactly what they were all for, but it's very speculated that this was music to be sung or performed, maybe even at critical moments during the alchemical practice. Do you hear all 50 fugues? Just go to our website at ttbook .org. Next, Isaac Newton and the alchemical roots of the scientific revolution. I'm Ann Strenchamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. I'm

Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. I'm Ann Strenchamps. No one did more to usher in the scientific revolution than Isaac Newton. Newton. The mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, the man who gave us Newton's laws of motion, Newton's laws of universal gravitation, Newtonian fluids. But Newton was also an alchemist. He spent half his life pursuing the philosopher's stone, and he kept his observations in secret coded notebooks and manuscripts.

As the economist John Maynard Keen said when he bought them at auction, Newton was not the first of the age of reason he was the last of the magicians. Well science historian William Newman has now decoded and even reproduced some of those experiments, and he's written the definitive book on the subject, Newton the Alchemist. Steve Paulson has been reading it. There are a couple of things you have to know about alchemy in the 17th century. First day it was the chemistry of its day, or as historians now call it, chemistry spelled CHY. This emerging science seemed to have the amazing capacity to transform matter itself. So potentially you could change one substance into anything else. And the other thing, practicing alchemy was dangerous, especially if we're got out that you were good at. There are lots of stories about how alchemists were locked up by vindictive rulers who wanted to extract their

secrets and wouldn't hesitate to use torture, for example. And some of these stories are actually true. For example, there was an alchemist in the early 18th century named Johann Friedrich Bertger, who was locked up by a Saxon ruler named Algos the Strong, and actually Algos managed to turn him away from his transmutational efforts so that he invented porcelain. And that's actually the origin of the miceen porcelain industry and Germany goes back to this man Bertger, an alchemist. The only thing worse than being a successful alchemist, being a fraud. There were also alchemical charlatans who were playing the noble courts of Europe in the 16th and 70th century for all they were worth. If they were exposed as frauds, they would typically be executed and

often in quite nasty ways. So was alchemy considered a kind of magic? That's an interesting question. Like most of these questions, things can get complicated and nuanced, but to Newton at least alchemy and magic were distinct. I think in his mind, magic was associated mostly with demonic magic. There is yet another feature, though, and that comes out in a letter that he wrote to Henry Oldenburg in 1676, who was the secretary of the Royal Society. And in it, Newton is very concerned about the fact that Robert Boyle, who by the way is sometimes called the father of modern chemistry, who was a devoted alchemist himself, Newton is concerned about the fact that Boyle has revealed too much about a so -called fact. He would like to commend Boyle to high siloes.

He's really worried. That word will get out. Why? He's worried that scientific secrets of a really radical sort are going to be loosed upon the world, and as a result, tremendous damage could occur. In the ultimate prize, everyone was competing to discover the philosopher's stone. They even have descriptions of it. It was typically thought to be a sort of ruby, red material that was fusible in the heat, and you added it to a molten metal, and it would instantaneously transmute it into gold, or in some cases silver. Many people also thought that it was a panacea. It could also cure the human body of any sort of illness. Today, most of us know the philosopher's stone as a plot point

in the first Harry Potter movie, but it wasn't a fairy tale to Newton. He was obsessed with trying to uncover the laws of nature, secrets maybe even deeper than the laws of physics. An alchemy was science back then. Newton ran experiments in his lab and kept reams of notebooks. In fact, he wrote approximately a million words on alchemy over his lifetime. It's just sort of, you know, one damn thing after the next, right? And the problem for an historian like Bill Newman, these alchemical notebooks were written in code. For example, he refers to something that he calls the green lion in his experimental notebooks. Nobody's been able to figure out exactly what that meant to him. He talks about, for example, the two serpents. He also talks about something he calls, suffix salamuniac. But what are these things? So it's hard to figure out what

exactly Newton was doing, but his experiments involved mixing and boiling various metals and ores and dipping them into acids, basically breaking down these substances in order to transform them. Newton was trying to create more and more volatile compounds. He was trying to replicate processes that he believed to be taking place under the surface of the earth. So he had a theory that metals are being generated within the earth, always. The earth, according to Newton, is a living being. He calls it a sort of cosmic vegetable, right? So this is what Newton thinks is happening within the earth. And it involves heating up materials, vaporizing them. That's really important for understanding what he's trying to do in the laboratory because he's interested in replicating what's going on beneath the surface of the earth. This work in the lab could be dangerous. In fact, Newman has reproduced a number of Newton's experiments at some personal risk. So this is actually a rather

exciting process. You get a quite vigorous reaction with a lot of boiling and heat given off. And also quite poisonous red fumes of nitrogen dioxide. So the first time I did this, I got some boiling over of the solution. I've always been very careful to do it under a fume hood because I knew that it was likely to release this poisonous gas. But anyway, it's exciting all the same. I've done it many times, and you just have to be careful and control the situation. So you have to remember, Newton was doing all of this in secret. It was very different from his work in physics and optics, which he did want the world to know about alchemists, on the other hand, had their own private networks and back channels for communicating with each other. They certainly presented themselves as a sort of a secret club. The term adept was used for someone who had actually attained the philosopher's stone. We actually reached the limits of the alchemical enterprise.

They were considered to be a kind of superhuman in a way, not only for the fact that they had actually, according to the stories, arrived at the philosopher's stone, but also for their ability to conceal their knowledge while also revealing it to those who were worthy to have it. They were considered to be the chosen sons of God. I mean, this was a term that was actually used. But it raises the question of whether Newton regarded himself as some kind of mystic. Maybe not in the modern religious sense, but as if he had access to or wanted to have access to secret knowledge in the Gnostic sense. I think in that old sense of mysticism, yes, the sense that alchemy was a form of secret knowledge that had to be imparted by word of mouth or else had to be intuited by someone who had special abilities, special cognitive powers.

Newton never did find the philosopher's stone, though he did create a number of new metallic compounds, some of which have never been reproduced to this day. And there's one more thing about Isaac Newton. He had the right temperament to be an alchemist. By all accounts, he was obsessive, arrogant, and generally not a nice person to be around. Yeah, probably one of the least nice people to be around. Yeah, Newton was a loner. When you got close to him, it was dangerous because he could turn on you. I think perhaps some of Newton's personality traits can be explained if you think of him as somebody who was trying to become an adept, an alchemical master, because the adept swore themselves the ultimate loners, because anyone

you trusted might reveal that you have the knowledge of the body would have wanted to steal it. You get the sense that given Newton's personality didn't like a lot of people that actually that fit pretty well with a life and alchemy, because you had to be very quiet and secretive about it. Yes, exactly. And also the alchemist was supposed to be essentially smarter than everybody else. And Newton had no doubt that he was smarter than everyone else. And he was right. Actually. That's William Newman talking with Steve Falson. Newman is a historian of science at Indiana University and author of Newton, the alchemist. If you were an alchemist in the 16th century, the place to be was

Prague, and the court of Emperor Rudolph II, the most famous occult adepts in Europe flocked there. John D. Edward Kelly, Nostradamus, alchemy left its mark on Prague, and also on our producer Charles Monroe Kane, who lived there as a young man. He says the checks are still uncovering alchemical secrets. Case in point. The Speculum alchemy eye, now a UNESCO world heritage site. It was discovered just in 2002. So it was not that long ago. Prague had this huge flood. All of Bohemia was just completely flooded by the lots of a river. And afterwards, your workers are cleaning up everywhere and taking out mud and the like, what the hell? This passage led to a basement of a house, old house, not only old house. I'd looked it up. It's from 980.

And so they followed this path underground. They found a dusty alchemical laboratory that had been clearly bricked up for centuries ago. They found loads of old alchemical books, the furnace where the alchemists would burn things down to try to create gold. Loads of beakers and bottles, they found one that contained 77 herbs, masteraded an alcohol and opium. In courted to the book, they found you take it to induce a days of the senses. The greatest thing they found hanging upside down from the ceiling was a mummified alligator. There aren't alligators in Europe, man. There must have been like a dragon. I mean, it's the 16th century when this was built.

The sunburned Prague was like 25, 26 years old. I was still pretty naive about the world, but it was definitely a good place to be in your 20s. That's for sure. Probably the thing that captures Prague for me. I was around this internet cafe, and this guy who's a friend of a friend wanted to be able to check his email there. We hit it off. He's this aristocratic guy from England. And I said, why are you in Prague? He said, well, with some people in a film crew, we believe we found a bunker from Hitler hidden in this town a couple hours away. We're going to go break into the bunker to see if it's filled with Nazi gold. So I went. I went. I'm like, it's cruel. I went

as me and a couple of my friends and him, and we had the film crew and the sound crew, and we went and there was a huge argument amongst the people on the crew. We're all conspiracy theorists, like you couldn't believe. One, if we kept doing this, would we find gold? Or two, would we find remnants or blueprints for flying saucers? Because these people believe that Hitler was involved in flying saucer technology, because like an alien, it landed in Germany, and he used it to create technology. So what's we're looking for? So that's just interesting, and you don't know if it's half true, and these guys are full of crap. But they're these old buildings and frescoes, and you kind of get caught up in it. This guy, he was the head of the alchemy collection at the National Library. He came with us flying the gold, by the way. Every time he would greet us, he would say, Charles, paradise of the world, labyrinth of the heart, which is why he would say every time, which is from this old, old book from the

alchemical time. A young Kaminas, this was in 1623, that's the name of the book. But I have to say, though I found alchemy confusing, and I was 100 % sure what it was, I like this idea of transformation, or even more so, this idea of transmutation, of like metaphorically just changing. So that's why I take away from alchemy is this idea of that. The other thing I take away from it is like, I don't know, I'm in my mid -50s, I'm fairly educated, I know a bunch of stuff. Where's the mystery? I don't have a lot of that in my life. I'm not 10 anymore, you know what I mean? And to me, that's why people got excited in 2002 when the flood discovered this place, because it's like, oh, here's like the last of this, the last of this like idea that there's mystery.

How romantic of a notion than some guy underground in Prague trying to invent gold. Charles Monroe Kane is our senior producer. He writes more about his Prague adventures in his memoir, Lithium Jesus. Coming up, where do you think you would go to find alchemy today? One writer says to the meth labs of rural Missouri. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. .

When anthropologist Jason Pine traveled to rural Missouri, he wound up spending a lot of time observing underground meth labs, and he came to a startling conclusion that the meth cooks of the Ozarks are today's alchemists, turning base metals into gold. His book The Alchemy of Meth is a brutal look at the process. When Charles Monroe Cain sat down with Pine, he wanted to know how easy it is to make meth. Well, meth is shockingly easy to make. For the reason that the materials are entirely accessible, they're all around us, and they are ordinary,

banal, everyday consumer products that can be broken down and recombined. And these include lithium batteries, Neuriatric acid, which is found in Dreno, instant cold packs. I don't want to give the full recipe. No, that's fine. Yeah. You know, I was in a bar last night with a bunch of my friends. I was talking about this interview, so we looked up a recipe. I have a friend who's a biochemist, and he's like, oh my god, that is so easy to make. But he also mentioned how dangerous it was. So making meth is like, it can blow up right at any moment. Yes, absolutely. It's incredibly dangerous. If we focus on the newer recipe, it's called the one pot recipe. And that's all of the ingredients put in a single plastic soda bottle or a gatorade bottle. And the tricky thing about this process is, although it's quicker and it's smaller, produces a smaller batch, you have to continually monitor it by shaking the bottle in order to speed up

the reaction. And then what they call burp the bottle, open the lid a bit to release the pressure. If you miss a step there, the pressure will build. The acid will burn a hole in the side of the bottle and start converting that into like a spray can of acid fire before it eventually explodes. It isn't a little explosion either. No, it is catastrophic. It is hot, hot fire and big. And it's immense. It's terrifying. It's funny. And I'm not trying to belittle the people that make it or do this, but you're kind of picture in the person who makes meth. These aren't people who are like following all the basic chemical practices. These are people who likely are on meth themselves. It seems incredible. That situation, if you have someone on or addicted to drug making the drug, that's extremely dangerous. That seems like that's rot for horribleness. Yes. It's a recipe for disaster. Although

many cooks say that using meth makes cooking meth easier. Their concentration is at its highest. They also are on alert for police that may come and bust them. And also they enjoy the mastery that they feel of recombining chemicals to produce something extremely powerful and valuable. So this is an enjoyable experience. People don't make meth. People don't create meth. People cook meth. It's always cooking. And the guy that that is the person that creates it for the dealers is the cook. That's such an intimate word, cooking. Why do you think the word cooking is used? Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. The materials are lateral to any kind of, any kind of, to a kitchen. But cooking is something is an act that occurs in a home. It is something that produces

a result, a product that is shared intimately. Recipes are shared through family generations. They're coveted. But it has that feeling of my grandma making cookies. Like she had a specific recipe of one kind of sugar cookie. And that was passed down to me. And then, you know, it's interesting is it seems a little twisted that the recipes and the cooking method is now for making in a listed material, for making drugs. Yes, this is an overarching quality of meth cooking of the phenomena of methamphetamine production is that it's like ordinary life tweaked, distorted. There's lots of different ways say a chocolate chip cookie could be made, right? A lot of variants, not butter, butter, baking powder, baking soda, both, whatever. But there's some constant to making a chocolate chip cookie. You got to flour, you got to chip, right? But in making meth, if I understand it correctly, there's one constant you have to have no matter how you do it. And that's pseudo -affedron. But the thing

about pseudo -affedron is that you can't get that at home depot. Like how do you get pseudo -affedron? Well, it's very easy to get thanks to lobbyists of the pharmaceutical industry who have fought any kind of regulation of the circulation of the drug. I'm talking about pseudo -affedron -based cold medicine. So pseudo -affedron is found in pseudo -fed, wall -fed, and many other types of drugs that now there is a law, and I think it's nationwide, it comes from what's called the combat meth act where if you want to buy that cold medicine, you have to sign your name with the pharmacist and you only get a maximum of two boxes per month. Right. But it's the secret sauce for meth, and lots of meth is being made, so there's certainly people are getting it, right? Yes. It is the core molecule that needs to be transformed. Your book is called the Alchemy of meth, and when I was reading the book, I think I first

started thinking that this was going to be just a metaphor, but I realized it's not. I was realizing that if I went into dollar general in Walgreens and got all these banal things and put them all together and made something that made me euphoric and also made me money, and probably in some instances gave me pride for what I was doing. I was doing the alchemical tradition, right? I was turning base metal into gold. Do you really see these cooks as alchemists? Yes, I do, and I'm glad you say that this is not merely a metaphor. It isn't. I consider meth cooking to be the late industrial incarnation of alchemy. For some of the reasons that you mentioned, it's turning base matter, ordinary, common matter, even garbage into something, transmuting it into something of great value, like gold, or the elixir of life. Right. And I think for that reason, it's important to understand what meth does, how it feels. Your book is filled with all these passages from

alchemists, from the Renaissance, and from medieval times. And it really struck me that they were striving to achieve the elixir of life, to achieve the base metal of gold. But it seems that these meth cooks, they've achieved it. They've literally achieved the elixir of life. Do you see it that way? Do you see that they've actually reached this pinnacle that other alchemists have been striving for for a long time? Yes and no. Yes, because the elixir of life is contextual. What it means today is different perhaps than what it meant in medieval or Renaissance times. Today, the elixir of life means to be alert, ready, courageous, social, productive, to slip on the shoes that are laid out for you, that you can become the great productive being and participant in a late capitalist economy that expects you to extract more and more energy and potential from yourself beyond what is humanly

sustainable. And meth cooks, meth users, feel that way. It sounds American. You know, yes. In the context that I studied, it was also because people needed to work longer hours, longer, and longer hours to make a sustainable or a living wage. People are really just taking it to work harder, or are they taking it to escape for their lives? I noticed a lot of people are taking it to work longer, longer hours. And they got on it on the job. They were passed past it by colleagues that, hey, tried this. You can pick up an extra shift. You can work faster. You can bear this job better because the drug actually makes repetitive what ordinarily might be boring activities enjoyable.

Sure, there is an element of escape as well. It feels good. And everything around you suddenly is transformed into something beautiful. So if you're living conditions or your social life, you're the state of the economy, your sense of possibility in the world. If they're all wilted, dwindling, meth can correct that. And so meth does give that sensation of hope. Actually, the kind of pleasure that you receive from the drug is different from other drugs, like opioids, let's say, with opioids, you might want to slip out of the world and cocoon and not participate as much. But with meth, you get the kind of pleasure that's called anticipatory pleasure, rather than consumatory pleasure, which is a kind of satiation where you've consumed something good and then you feel good. With meth, you take it and you feel excitement about

something good to come. It hasn't arrived yet. And that's like hope. It is hope. That's exactly the definition of hope. Anticipation, positive anticipation of things to come. And that's hope. Yeah. You know, you're writing your book that what you're saying is logical consequence. Where do you, okay, you're in that county in Missouri. Where does it go? What happens next? Wow. You ask a hard question. I am, I have to say, personally doing the fieldwork was really difficult and killed whatever hope I did have. I don't know where it's going. It is. Anthropologist

Jason Pine's book is called The Alchemy of meth, a decomposition. Charles Monroe Kane talked with him. I just want to say, as a staff, we struggled with the end of that interview. It's a pretty hopeless place to leave a show. So I want to go back for a sec and remind you that we started the hour talking about alchemy as a way of thinking that just might have something to offer us today. Not recipes for gold, but a way to bridge the gap between scientific and magical or mystical worldviews. The alchemists understood their quest for knowledge as an investigation of wonder, curiosity as a path to grace. And in our angry, fearful, polarized world today, curiosity is still one of the best ways I know to transform brute certainty into what the poet John Keats called negative capability, the radical beauty of uncertainty. And these times, maybe that's the gold we need.

Thanks for listening.