Before the advent of the telescope and microscope, the key optical instrument by which a natural philosopher could pry into the secrets of nature was the alembic, or distillation column. (The craft of shaping glass was essential to all the three devices: one which looked above, one which looked below, and one which looked through.)

The dramatic world inside crystalline retorts and flasks — the transparent chemical apparatus inside which materials transformed constantly under the action of heat — was as rich to behold as the world outside the vessel, transforming everyday under the heat of the golden sun. The seven known metals of antiquity were gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, mercury; and strangely enough, including the sun and the moon, there were seven known planets. The time of human civilisation itself unfolded in cycles of seven days of the week.

In The Secrets Of Alchemy , science historian Lawrence M Principe writes that, “Partly based on the correlation between the seven planets and seven metals, the greatest of the naked-eye astronomers, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) — who maintained a chymical laboratory in his Danish castle-observatory named Uraniborg — referred to chymistry as “terrestrial astronomy” or “astronomy below.” This startling comparison, adds Principe, echoes the ancient principle of sameness found in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus : “Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.” (In short: as above, thus below.)

Therefore, the alembic was seen as a microcosmic analogue of the universe itself, a “philosopher’s egg” reflecting the cosmic egg; the vapours inside were reflections of clouds in the sky. This is evident from the highly cryptic but ornate illustrations and diagrams that accompanied many alchemical texts. In the words of Jörg Völlnagel, the curator at Berlin State Museums, “Both Splendor solis (1530s) and Donum Dei (late 1400s) include images of the so-called peacock stage, the colorful apparition part of the transmutation process. In contrast to Donum Dei, which depicts the chemical reaction as a series of brightly colored dots inside a black flask, the painter of Splendor solis opted to use a figurative symbol, the peacock contained within a glass vessel.”

“These containers also exhibit a remarkable likeness to medieval depictions of the fetus inside the womb,” adds Völlnagel, “— for they bear a striking resemblance to the motif of the homunculus, a human being generated artificially within the alchemist’s alembic.”

Due to its association with chrysopoeia (gold-making), which provoked fears of counterfeit coinage among other things, Western alchemy was often under attack from many quarters, including monarchs, the church and other scientists. This resulted in some remarkable attempts to align themselves with Christian motifs, as in the Tractatus Parabolicus (circa 1350), which compares the chemical tortures suffered by alchemical mercury to the torments suffered by Jesus Christ, before he is “raised” on the cross to divinity, like a purified vapour in distillation.

Within the long history of alchemy (or chymistry ) the art of vaporising substances in order to separate its constituents would become an all-encompassing cosmology. This parallel is clearly depicted in Mundus Subterraneus , a 1665 atlas of the underworld by Athanasius Kircher, which shows how the Earth’s internal fires propel chemical liquids upward and into the atmosphere, as if the planet itself were a gigantic and complex distillation column. To paraphrase historian Kerry Magruder, in Kircher’s image: “The fire-ducts give rise to hot springs and minerals. Volcanoes provide air to the geocosmic circulation and, like alchemical spiracles or chimney furnaces, offer an outlet for fumes rising from the fires. The mountains like bones of the Earth provide a secure skeletal structure.”

There is a strong correspondence between the “artificial life” of Paracelsian alchemy such as the homunculus (or fully formed miniature human being), and the intense waves of “artificial intelligence” in the digital age. Through this alchemic revival, or digital alchemy, one seeks to imbue giant deserts of data with meaning through various algorithms. The mere terminology (and indeed, the mathematics of it) invokes the ghost-like apparition of alembics — instead here we have sorting algorithms (like distillation, one is called the “bubble sort”), neural networks that operate via ‘gradient descent’ (or condensing vapours), generative adversarial networks (two algorithms that react to each other, like chemicals).

The digital screen is then our crystal flask, philosopher’s egg or hermetic vase reborn as smartphone — in which we watch the torments of miniature humans, thrown upward by Facebook likes and retweets, or drowned by neglect on timelines that boil and bubble like chemical soups, into which billions of people throw their own photographs to create miniaturised selves (the selfie as homunculus). A lot of the time, this alchemical process is corrupted by impurities in code, and instead of the perfect homunculus, what appears are half-formed chimeras, decapitated beasts, and monsters dance upon the alchemical stage of the world.

Rohit Gupta explores the history of science as Compasswallah; @fadesingh

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