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The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong · Mark Chrisler

The Last Alchemist, Part Two

April 7, 2026·1 hr 7 min·4 clips
The first 800 years of alchemy are a dark forest of uncertainty because its practitioners wrote under pseudonyms and codes.
The alchemy trail is messy from the start. After an ad and a quick reset, the episode admits that the first eight hundred years, give or take, are a coded, pseudonymous dark forest. Nothing lines up neatly. The host treats early alchemy less like a clean origin story and more like a stack of manuscripts daring people to sound too certain. Bacon enters the story, though his enthusiasm for alchemy matters more than any obvious technical breakthrough. The excerpt frames his work as mostly borrowed from Jabir and other Arab alchemists. Then the law shows up. Pope John XXII's 1317 decretal, Spondent Quas Non Exhibent, becomes the episode's best example of history getting flattened later. The title is blunt: they promise what they do not deliver. That makes it sound aimed at fraud, not alchemy itself. Still, the host leaves the door open, because medieval arguments about alchemical gold had already tangled fraud with possibility. Fake gold mattered. Producing it, ordering it, or spending it could bring fines, prison, or defrocking for clergy. Later readers, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned the decretal into proof of religion's anti-scientific bias, particularly Catholicism. The episode pushes back on that shortcut. The anti-fraud reading has weight, but it does not clean up the whole mess. Augustus Magnus makes things worse, in a good way. His reported testing of alchemical gold shifts the question away from simple law versus science and toward something stranger: could artificial gold count as real? By the end, even the leftover material and mangled Renaissance-language pileup fit the point. Alchemy's history is coded, slippery, and deeply irritated by anyone trying to make it behave.

As heard by us

A sharp tour through alchemy's secrecy, uncertainty, and recurring suspicion of fraud.

The episode treats alchemy as a field of pseudonyms, codes, and argument, with gold-making always hanging between fraud and something harder to pin down. It is strongest when it lets that uncertainty shape the story.

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Why you'd press play

You want the weird, tangled road from Alexandria to a papal ban on alchemy.

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