Alchemy

Alchemy is a body of practices and speculations, both technical and symbolic, aimed at transmuting metals into gold and at seeking an elixir of long life, two powers attributed to the philosopher's stone. Inherited from Greco-Roman Egypt and then from the Arab world, it flourished in Europe from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century and contributed to the birth of chemistry. On the spiritual level, it is read as an inner transformation, an interpretation that Carl Gustav Jung developed in psychology.