I have so been looking forward to writing this since I thought of the idea a couple weeks ago. I was inspired by John Boyne’s A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, which takes place in the year 1 CE in the real world. In an infamous scene from the novel, a garment maker dyes cloth using silent princess flower, octorok eyeballs, and the tail of the red lizalfos—items players collect in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), a fantasy video game. This is what happens when you write what you don’t know and your “research” consists of reading the fifty-word summary Google gives you at the top of your search results.
Most of us aren’t writing “what we know” all the time. If you’re writing fiction with speculative elements (science fiction, fantasy, horror) then you’re necessarily writing some stuff you don’t know. I don’t know how to fly a spacecraft or open a portal to another dimension, for instance. Most of the people who write about those things don’t know how to do them. Nobody in the real world casts fireball spells or shape changes into a dog. That’s why it’s speculative (kind of). Sometimes there is nothing analogous in the real world but sometimes there is.
When it comes to making magic potions, at least, there’s precedent in alchemy. Alchemy is a real thing. It’s not chemistry with a little splash of magic. Alchemy is a branch of ancient philosophy and a protoscience with the goal of transmuting one substance (anything) into another (usually gold). The word chemistry comes from the word alchemy. Insofar as I can tell, chemistry is just alchemy but with the scientific method and also accepting that you won’t be creating gold from whatever materials you have lying around.
Historically, alchemy wasn’t only about turning base metals into gold. Alchemy was also used to create perfumes and cosmetics, medicines and drugs, explosives and fireworks, and to try to create the elixir of eternal life (if anyone was successful, they’re not telling).
Alchemy with or without magical elements is a great addition to fantasy and if you’re going to include an alchemist or alchemy in your manuscript you should try to get it right so you don’t accidentally write your characters throwing proprietary video game items around (oops).
My qualifications for creating an alchemy cheat sheet for authors are: (1) I’m an actual kitchen witch and I do alchemy in the kitchen on weekends to make stuff like candles, perfume, and skincare products; (2) I have played the absolute heck out of several video games that take alchemy very seriously; and (3) I actually did research for this article so you don’t have to (refs at the end).
I can’t go over absolutely everything to do with alchemy because I’m working under time and word-count constraints but I’m going to give you the best overview I can in the space and time that remain.
Tools and Equipment
The first thing you need to practice alchemy is some kind of still: You know, like for making liquor, except we’re making potions. An alembic and a retort are both types of stills used in alchemy.
A retort is a round glass or metal vessel with a long neck that points down and gets thinner as it goes. (See pictures of retorts.) It works by putting the substance you want to distill from in the round part and heating it so the vapor goes up the long neck and then condenses, pouring into whatever you have at the end of the neck to catch it. An alembic is like a double retort: Two round vessels connected by a neck (one end higher than the other). (See an article on alembics here.) An alembic or retort is your main tool for distilling liquids by transmuting them to gasses using heat and then allowing the gas to become liquid again on the other side. The round vessel part of an alembic or retort is called a cucurbic.
Alchemists also need a mortar and pestle, which many of us have in our kitchens even if we are not kitchen witches (I think?): A small bowl to hold substances for grinding, and a rounded, blunt instrument that fits inside for grinding with. (See mortars and pestles here.) You can use this in alchemy just like you might for cooking, to grind one thing (like a spice) into a fine powder, or to grind two things together into a mixture.
You probably also need a crucible, which is a ceramic, stoneware, or metal container you can heat things in—you need a container made of something that can withstand really high heat (I usually use stainless steel but I don’t melt metal). The word crucible gets its Arthur Miller–type meaning from this original word—to go through a high-intensity situation and come out stronger.
You also need a bain-marie, a hot water bath (or a double-boiler in kitchen-speak), to heat substances that can’t be exposed to direct heat like a flame or burner. You don’t need anything fancy to make a bain-marie, I just use a regular kitchen pot full of boiling water and then stick my vessel in there to melt stuff. To recap high school chemistry, water can only get to 212 degrees F (boiling) and then it starts releasing excess heat through steam to stay at 212. Consider that a stove burner on high can get to 300 degrees, your oven probably goes to 450 degrees or more, and a candle flame is around 2,000 degrees (a Bunsen burner is even hotter). That’s why boiling water is a slow and gentle way to melt something. Modern alchemists can also stick substances in the microwave for about 30 seconds at a time until melted (but not if you’re using a metal vessel).
Alchemists will also need stirring rods (metal or glass), eyedroppers, funnels, bottles, jars, and flasks. Some substances react to metal (for instance, calcium bentonite clay is supposed to) so sometimes you need to use glass. When in doubt I just use glass (or Pyrex, which your fantasy world may or may not have).
Processes
Most or all of alchemy is about the process of transmutation, which means to change something from one form to another. All the other processes I’m going to talk about are ways of doing that. There are twelve core alchemical processes but I won’t go into all of them here because some of them are really not specific to alchemy (fermentation? More like alechemy, am I right?) and some of them I’m not personally familiar with and don’t know much about. The ones I’ve included are the ones I think you’d most likely describe in potion-making.
A big one is distillation. Distillation, to distill something, is to purify it through a process of heating and cooling. Boiling and condensing—going back and forth from liquid to gas to liquid again—to remove impurities. For instance if you dissolve salt in water and then you want to get that salt back out you can distill the saltwater solution by heating until the water turns into a gas (steam), leaving the salt behind in the original vessel, and then condense the steam back into water. It’s the same principle as evaporation but faster.
The opposite of distillation is to make a solution, which is to dissolve one substance into another. The substance you are dissolving is the solute and the substance you’re dissolving into is the solvent. Not all solutions are liquids.
Digestion in alchemy does not refer to dissolving something in your stomach acid but to heating a substance slowly over a long period of time (like weeks). Calcination refers to heating a solid compound to a high temperature but staying under its melting point in order to bring about thermal decomposition. Congelation is allowing or causing something to thicken or congeal; this is also called crystallization. Cooling water until it turns to ice is an example of congelation. Ceration is the process of applying liquid and heat to a dry, hard substance to soften it.
Substances
The three essential or principle substances in alchemy are salt, mercury, and sulfur. Several schools of early alchemy believed all substances could be made from, or broken down into, these three things.
A solvent, as I mentioned above, is any substance that you can dissolve solutes in. Water and alcohol are common. There is a theoretical substance called alkahest that is believed to be the universal solvent, that could dissolve any other substance.
A substance is acidic if its pH is below 7 and basic if its pH is above 7. Note that not all acids are corrosive. For instance, hyaluronic acid—which is found naturally in human eyes and joints and which some of us smear on our face every day to keep it hydrated.
Waxes are soft solid compounds that melt at low temperatures into a viscous liquid. Wax is notably used for candles but it’s also used in a lot of cosmetics and skincare products. Waxes come from animal, vegetable, and petrochemical sources. I won’t get into what all esters are in chemistry generally—mainly because I have no idea—but when you combine a fatty acid and a fatty alcohol together you get a wax ester, like carnauba or candelilla. Also beeswax; bees are little alchemists too I guess. Fun fact: Jojoba oil is a liquid wax ester, not an oil.
Speaking of oils, an oil is any substance that is hydrophobic (won’t mix with water) and lipophilic (mixes with other fats and oils). Oils also come from animal, vegetable, and petrochemical sources and are used for all sorts of things. An oil you can put right on somebody’s skin is a carrier oil and a concentrated plant oil with medicinal or aromatic properties is an essential oil. Essential oils are distilled from plants and the byproduct of making essential oil is a hydrosol, sometimes called a floral water.
Consider that oils and waxes from petrochemical sources probably would not be available in most high-fantasy settings. That rules out paraffin wax (created in the 1830s in the real world) and mineral oils.
Other Terminology
An imp’s ear, or imp, is one-thirty-second of a fluid ounce. A dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce. There must be a cute name for one-sixteenth of a fluid ounce, too, but I don’t know it. A third of a dram was once called a scruple. A coffret is a small case (coffer) that holds a set of perfume or oil samples.
A shop that sells primarily medicines produced through alchemy could be called an apothecary (that’s also the name for the person who works there).
An off-label use for alchemy in the middle ages was the creation of homunculi (single: homunculus), a small, living copy of a person. Remember, alchemists from many regions were bigtime obsessed with creating life (like homunculi) through transmutation and creating an elixir for prolonging life indefinitely (the philosopher’s stone) also through . . . transmutation. Homunculi should not be confused with golems, which are made from clay and then imbued with life magically.
My big hope for today’s article is, if you write fantasy that features an alchemist (or you’re going to, one of these days), you will bookmark this page and come back to it if you need some fun and accurate details for your story. If you don’t write that kind of stuff and don’t want to, then I hope it was an interesting and fun read. If it wasn’t, then I don’t know why you read all the way to the end. You have no one to blame for that but yourself.
References
Inside the Alchemist's Workshop
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