An Extremely Oversimplified Guide To Medieval Alchemical Theory:
The medieval world was generally divided into three categories: Animals, Minerals, and Vegetables.
People had a solid handle on where vegetables came from. Plants come from seeds. You put them in the earth, give them plenty of air and sunlight, they produce more seeds and eventually they die.
Animals were a bit more complicated. Animals had to have sex. Medieval scholars didn’t know exactly how it worked, but they knew that animals could have sex and give birth. Additionally, it was thought that animals could be “generated,“ literally constructed via recipe like a cake. Many medieval magical texts contain what are essentially crafting recipes for rats or frogs.
Metals though, metals were tricky. Nobody could really figure out where exactly metals came from. They were under the earth, that much was understood, but exactly how and why deposits of ore formed was the center of intense debate among medieval alchemists. There were essentially three main theories:
First, let us establish that Alchemists were working from the Aristotelian view of the world. The world was made of four elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. These elements interacted through four causes: Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final.
Sulfur-Mercury Theory: This is the “traditional“ alchemical position pioneered by (the likely legendary) Jabir Ibn-Hayyan, but eventually reached Europe through the 1144 translation of the Book of the Composition of Alchemy. The theory itself posits that when sulfur and mercury are trapped beneath the earth and combined, metals are produced. Which metal is produced is based on the ratio of sulfur to mercury. The more balanced the ratio, the closer the metal would be to gold. This was the generally accepted theory among alchemists for most of the medieval era, but it is important to remember that every alchemist had their own spin on how metal generation worked.
Sulfur-Mercury-Salt Theory: The radical, upstart theory of wild mavericks like Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, who developed the theory in his text 1530 text, the Opus paramirum. Paracelcus conceptualizes sulfur and mercury not simply as physical substances, but as metaphysical essences necessary to all chemical change. The theory considers all change, not only the creation of metals, to have three components: A sulfur (the combustible element, the fuel which prompts change), a mercury (the thing which is changed), and a salt (the ash, the detritus given off by the change.)
Mercury Alone Theory: The fringe position, though one notably held by John Dee. This theory posits that all metals were simply the result of mercury trapped in the earth and subjected to various forces which “cooked“ it into the metals we know today. Dee specifically believed that it was stellar rays which “cooked” the metals, and that the ore produced was determined by astrology. This theory is also related to the “metallic seed“ theory of metals, which conceptualizes mercury as the seedbed into which tiny yet indestructible “seeds“ of metal can be planted, eventually transforming the mercury into the desired metal. This theory was actually tested and conclusively disproved by Sir Issac Newton, who dissolved metals in powerful acid and distilled the mixture to see if any “metallic seeds“ were left behind.
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