Egypt. No other country on earth has been held in such high esteem for so many millennia. Generations of seekers have gone to the portals of her temples to learn the secrets of magic. While many civilizations have possessed religious institutions, no other country has so thoroughly created a culture in which the spiritual world ruled every aspect of daily life than the land of mummies, tombs, gods, and pharaohs.
In Egypt, the gods were ever-present and were so real that to speak of "religion" as we experience it in modern life would be false. The ancient Egyptian language did not have a word for religion as we know it, only magic-and more precisely, magical power. Everything in Egyptian life was classed according to its perceived amount of magical power. Gods rose and fell on it, and humans could rule the gods through it. Egyptian life focused around the ever-present energies of life and how to harness them for now and the afterlife.
Egypt is said to have even given her name to early alchemy, as Egypt is known as the "land of Khem" or the "black earth." While we attribute Egypt with being the home of alchemy and its god Thoth, or Hermes in his Greek incarnation, with being the father of alchemy, other lands have contributed as well. China and India have highly developed alchemical laboratory traditions that have been practiced in unbroken lines since their inception.
It is in the West, however, that we see some of the most fascinating aspects of the Great Art developed. Here, Babylonian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic methods were worked side by side. Arab trade most likely also introduced Chinese and Indian methods into the Middle East and, ultimately, Europe. These diverse traditions were amalgamated in an attempt to discover the process for creating the Philosopher's Stone, or the Stone of the Wise.
Said to confer the ability to transmute base metals into gold, prolong life, and cure all diseases, the Philosopher's Stone was a mineral creation made most famous by the fourteenth-century French alchemist Nicholas Flamel and his wife, Perenelle. With it, it is said, they created the Elixir of Immortality and were seen alive three hundred years after their recorded deaths. While the kind of mineral work the Flamels undertook is beyond the scope of this text, a few simple experiments with the considerably easier and less dangerous herbal work of alchemy will demonstrate why many thought these extraordinary claims about the Flamels to be true.
This idea of a Stone-or of an actual physical object as a means of bringing about dramatic changes in the health and, above all, the spiritual consciousness of an individual-is the basis for most experiments in all three kingdoms the alchemist will progressively work through. Anyone familiar with the idea of talismans, or ritually charging objects such as liquids or metals for a specific purpose, already has a sense of how an alchemical tincture or Stone functions.