Thoth in Egyptian religion, a god of the moon, of reckoning, of learning, and of writing. He was held to be the inventor of writing, the creator of languages, the scribe, interpreter, and adviser of the gods, and the representative of the sun god, Re.
Thoth became credited by the ancient Egyptians as the inventor of writing (hieroglyphs), and was also considered to have been the scribe of the underworld. For this reason, Thoth was universally worshipped by ancient Egyptian scribes.
Worship of Thoth began in Lower Egypt most likely c. 6000-3150 BCE and continued through 323-30 BCE, the last dynastic era of Egyptian history, marking Thoth's veneration as among the longest of the Egyptian gods or any deity from any civilization.
Alchemy was rooted in a complex spiritual worldview in which everything around us contains a sort of universal spirit, and metals were believed not only to be alive but also to grow inside the Earth.
Issac Newton spent much of his adult life pursuing another interest, alchemy, whose goals included finding the philosopher's stone, a substance that allegedly could turn ordinary metals like lead and iron into gold.
The word vitriol comes from the Latin word vitriolus, meaning "small glass", as those crystals resembled pieces of colored glass. Oil of vitriol was an old name for concentrated sulfuric acid, obtained through the dry distillation (pyrolysis) of vitriols.
Distillation is a process used to separate mixtures and purify liquids that was used by alchemists and natural philosophers to experiment in hopes of making gold, the Elixir of Life, and a range of medical cures.
Cinnabar is a mineral with a reddish-brown colour and is the most common source of mercury in nature. The significance of its red colour and difficulty with which it was refined implied to alchemists its connection with the search for immortality.
The energies of Niter are also referred to as the force of Kundalini, or spiritual forces. In alchemy, this is the Secret Fire. To the Salt, belongs the force of Prana, or Vital Energy.
Physical alchemy deals with altering and transforming the properties in the physical world, spiritual alchemy is connected with freeing your spiritual self from your fears. Alchemy is the art of transformation, inner liberation, and change.
A Puffer is a nickname for an alchemist who is preoccupied with transmuting base metals into GOLD and SILVER and who ignores the spiritual or philosophical side of Alchemy. Puffers earned their nickname from their penchant for the use of bellows and forges
Alchemy is the very old study and philosophy of how to change basic substances into other substances. It also studied how substances were related to magic and astrology. People who studied alchemy were called alchemists.
To the ancient Egyptians themselves, their country was simply known as Kemet, which means 'Black Land', so named for the rich, dark soil along the Nile River where the first settlements began.
In the first century AD, Hermes Trismegistus wrote the "forty-two books of Hermes", which covered all fields of knowledge, and are considered the basis for alchemical knowledge. The greatest alchemist of that period was Zosimos of Panopolis around 300 AD.
Empedocles was a Greek philosopher who is best known for his belief that all matter was composed of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Some have considered him the inventor of rhetoric and the founder of the science of medicine in Italy.