The Real Life Alchemist in Harry Potter

Speaking of Harry Potter, one of the minor characters—Nicholas Flamel--was a real alchemist who lived in the 14^th century—which would have made him over 600 years old by the time the Potter books take place! Here’s how I tell his story in On Becoming an Alchemist.

In 1365, or thereabouts, Nicholas Flamel, a young scrivener living in Paris, purchased a gilded book for two florins. In an age when books were luxury items, two florins was ridiculously cheap. It was like finding the Gutenberg Bible on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble. He suspected the book had been stolen, or perhaps hidden then discovered by someone who had no idea of its value.

The volume was hand written on some strange material that looked to Flamel like shavings of tree bark. It was divided into three sections of seven leaves each, and every seventh leaf was covered with hand-painted images. The first page named the author as “Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher” then went on to rain down curses on anyone who dared to read further, unless he be a priest or a scribe. Though probably not the kind of scribe this Abraham had in mind, Flamel figured he was covered by the exemption, and went on reading.

He gathered that the book was a self-help manual for Hebrews who were having trouble paying their taxes to the Roman Empire. It claimed that base metals could be transmuted into silver and gold with the aid of a philosopher’s stone, and went on explain how to make one. The text was as forthright as a cookbook, but for one point: it neglected to specify the main ingredient, referring to it vaguely as the prima materia (i.e. first matter). This was about as helpful as saying, “The main ingredient is the main ingredient.”

There were, however, some beautiful illuminated figures illustrating the prima materia. One depicted a young man with winged feet whom Flamel took to be the god Hermes/Mercury. An old man with a hourglass on top of his head and a scythe in his hand was chasing after Mercury. Next came a picture of a flower with a blue stem and red and white petals, growing on a mountain top, surrounded by dragons and griffins. After this came a picture of a rose bush growing near a hollow oak tree. From the base of the rose bush sprang an underground stream. Many people were digging, trying to find the stream, while one man was trying to weigh it. The pictorial narrative concluded with an image of soldiers killing babies and collecting their blood.

Flamel made painstaking copies of the puzzling illustrations and showed them to every scholar he could find. Most of them were clueless, and scoffed at the notion of a philosopher’s stone. But one, a physician named Anselm, claimed to know exactly what the symbols meant, and went on to offer explicit instructions. He said, for example, that quicksilver (mercury) could only be fixed—that is, deprived of volatility—through a six year decoction in the blood of very young children.

Alas, Anselm’s exegesis proved “more subtle than true.” Flamel writes that it “sent me astray through a labyrinth of innumerable false processes for one and twenty years, it being always understood that I made no experiments with the blood of children, for that I accounted villainous.”

After twenty one years of being stuck at the very beginning, Flamel reckoned he’d better seek out the source of the text. Perhaps in Spain he could find a Jewish priest who would clue him in on the Cabbala. With his wife’s blessing, he set off on the traditional pilgrimage to the church of St. James Compostela. Though he failed to find such a priest in Spain, he met a merchant on the return voyage who introduced him to a very learned converted Jew named Master Canches. Based on Flamel’s copied illustrations, Canches immediately recognized the book. He was keen to know where the original might be found. Flamel offered to show it to him in exchange for an interpretation of the pictures. Canches agreed, and from him Flamel learned the identity of the prima materia. But before he could explain how to prepare it, Canches took sick. He died after seven days of profuse vomiting. Flamel buried him and returned home.

Now, at long last, he knew where to start. After three more years “pondering the words of the philosophers and proving various operations suggested by their study” he was at last able to prepare the basic ingredient. Once that was accomplished, the rest turned out to be so easy he “could scarcely miss.” He need only follow the book’s instructions word for word. On 17 January 1392, in the presence of his wife, he used the philosopher’s stone to transmute half a pound of mercury into pure silver. On the 25^th of April, he applied the stone to the half a pound of mercury and this time produced pure gold. After that, he and Peronelle went on to make gold together three more times. Together they endowed fourteen hospitals and seven churches, built three chapels, and restored seven cemeteries.

Did all this really happen? Hard to say. All historians know for sure is that Flamel was a real person who died in 1415 and was buried at the Church of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie. According to the inscription on the gravestone, Flamel, a scrivener, made numerous gifts to charity, including endowments to various churches and hospitals in Paris. In those days, a scrivener was roughly the equivalent of a typist—a low paid clerical worker. How did a scrivener manage to become a philanthropist?