Quicksilver and Quick-thinking: Insight into the Alchemy of Mercury A new interdisciplinary research to discover the chemical reality of ancient alchemical recipes

Ancient alchemical recipes represent an invaluable source to understand how our ancestors described and conceptualised nature. Such recipes were often dismissed as nonsense, or even interpreted as mere allegories for spiritual practices of self-purification. Our research adopts a totally new interdisciplinary outlook through collaboration between chemists and historians of science, to investigate one of the most intriguing of elements, that is mercury. A corpus of ancient sources —in Greek, Latin and Syriac—was scoured in search of information on the extraction of mercury from cinnabar. Following the sources, we replicated the recipes and explored the viability and feasibility of the reactions, as well as the technical underpinnings of the texts, in order to disclose the practical dimensions of ancient alchemy and an unexpected variety of reactions.