Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  We can only do that, as Foucault wrote, “at the unattainable end of an endless journey.” Still, we overburden our scientific enterprises, appointing them to fix all of humanity’s intractable problems. What we often expect from knowledge is the same thing we demand from fairy-tale love: to be exempt from the human condition, to fuse into a oneness with the Other, to attain permanent perfection. But hearts do get broken. And our lust for knowledge entails a similar peril, as Adam and Eve found out.

  Despite the myriad accomplishments of our technological society, there are limits to what we can understand. We can never completely integrate all knowledge into ourselves as knowledge. To know the truth of the universe would be to experience every speck of agitation and indifference occurring over the vastness of every galaxy and black hole and nebula at every single moment always.

  The hope that accruing knowledge will lead to omniscience is akin to imagining that creativity will grant us supernatural powers. It’s magical thinking. Scientific breakthroughs are real and will continue changing our lives, but the longing to unveil all mysteries is an impossible fantasy. Science isn’t a technique for solving the insoluble; only magic is, and magic by definition isn’t real. The more we penetrate into nature’s secrets, the clearer it becomes that we really will die. We stop conjuring. We abide.

  Prospero exemplifies the human journey from magical thinking to adulthood. Once he gives up on the dark arts, he grasps just how fragile life is. From there on in, he says, “Every third thought shall be my grave.” This anticipation of death is as exaggerated as our denial of death is in youth. Still, freed from self-enchantment, Prospero finally understands what he really is: mortal. It’s what we all are. Realizing it, we can sleep in peace.

  Magic is like avoiding reality. Inattention and misdirection keep us from noticing the way things really are. But we can move beyond illusions. W. H. Auden, writing on The Tempest, described art as the alternative to magic. Rather than something entertaining or consoling (i.e., magic) that distracts people from their true condition, art allows others to “become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.” Art can be a mirror that shows us reality. Under magic’s distorting influence, Auden felt, death is inconceivable, an intellectual fiction.

  Enlightenment thinkers believed that art ought to liberate us from our painful involvement in reality. But now we don’t expect art to lift us into some higher state of nonbeing. Its purpose is to help us feel, to help us find meaning, to help us confront the details of life as they truly are, composed of grief, suffering, and loss—as well as contentment, relaxation, and fulfillment.

  * * *

  Goethe wrote at length on the duality of pleasure and anguish, on the necessity of creative struggle. His Faust begins as a young alchemist who calls on spirits to grant him a vision of nature’s innermost force. He wants to see the fountainhead. Conjuring, he glimpses the fundamental machinery of existence, a kind of surging liquid energy. A spirit appears. Faust, being mortal, cannot comprehend him. The entity vanishes, leaving Faust suicidal.

  Not long after, Mephistopheles materializes and offers to provide Faust with a moment so wonderful—one in which he comes to an understanding of the elemental mysteries of the universe, perhaps?—he’ll want it to last forever. In exchange, should such a moment occur, he’ll then spend eternity in hell with Mephistopheles. Faust agrees, but says he doesn’t want simple pleasure; he wants joyous pain, refreshing frustration, loving hate. He wants to be able to suffer and bear the suffering.

  At the end of his life, however, having created homunculi, traveled through time, and come as close to divine creation as a human can get, Faust concludes that it’s not for us to be gods. “There is no view to the Beyond from here,” he realizes. The sacred remains hidden in a flash of the unknowable. Glimmers are all we’re granted.1 Going blind, finally capable of accepting his fallibility, Faust renounces sorceries. “I must clear magic from my path,” he vows. “Forget all magic conjurations.” He abjures supernatural aid and comes to an acceptance of this world’s imperfection, of humanity’s mortality. He breaks the spell. “Illusions are such fun,” Mephistopheles mutters. “If only they would stay with one.” An illusion is something that promises to set our souls free. That’s magic. We can’t “escape” from life. We can’t return from adulthood to childhood.

  Nor can we understand. We’ve been thrust into a world we didn’t make, a world whose ultimate explanation will always elude us. Heidegger calls this sensation thrownness. As we tumble, we can only know that we can’t know. Alchemy won’t help; neither will science. Just as Prospero and Faust turn their backs on the deceptions and misapprehensions of magic, we all need to be vigilant about succumbing to the lure of a magical version of science, a science many believe is capable of improving everything indefinitely.

  * * *

  The notion that physical immortality might be something we can engineer goes back to a time when magic and science were indistinguishable. Throughout the first millennium CE, esoteric Daoist and Tantric longevity potions were concocted from mercury, cinnabar, and sulfur in a practice known as kim or chin. Transliterated into Arabic as al-khymia,2 the combining of mineral elements and turning base metals into gold became known in Europe around the twelfth century as alchemy, which gradually morphed into what we today call chemistry. One of its goals was the discovery of an elixir that could make a person live forever.

  Science, as we now conceive it, did not exist at that point (the word scientist only became commonplace in the mid-1800s). But in thirteenth-century Europe, systematic and experimental approaches to nature began to emerge from the medieval darkness. British philosopher Roger Bacon (born c. 1214 CE) put forth a distinction between magic aimed at commanding or appeasing spirits, and magic that dealt with the factual mysteries of nature, such as rainbows, waves, and clouds. He called this second approach “natural magic.” Unlike occult, otherworldly magic, which dealt in miracles and was the rightful domain of religion, natural magic had practical applications. Using the experimental method, the secrets of this world could be explored—and, more important, explained. Science, Bacon posited, was magic that actually worked.

  A Franciscan friar and “excellent wise man,” Bacon was known as Dr. Mirabilis, the “wondrous doctor.” He believed that the study of natural philosophy didn’t simply confirm the facts of nature—it also complemented a devoutly religious life. Bacon depicted science as something that reinforced one’s faith in God, as opposed to the damnable magic of conjuring spirits, which, beyond being irrational and heretical, he noted, was altogether impossible.

  Over the past few decades, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing science and religion as incompatible, but in Bacon’s time, they were deeply entwined. Most researchers until modern times found nothing strange in worshipping God and doing experimental studies. Copernicus viewed his galactic investigations as a religious activity that filled him with awe. Newton’s discoveries were predicated on the existence of God, the all-powerful “Mechanick” of the cosmos. (Newton’s formulas established that absolute space is equidistant to the Creator’s omnipresence.) Darwin firmly believed in the soul’s immortality. Einstein spoke of a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists,” of a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.

  Science began as tests seeking to prove the reality of the sacred, and Bacon’s natural magic was intended as such. The knowledge of our material surroundings leads to divine knowledge, he argued; and everything knowable stems from God. His book The Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth portrays aging as a curable disease. Its cause? Insalubrious living. With the correct use of healthsome ingredients, everyone should be able to live at least as long as biblical patriarchs such as Methuselah, who died at the age of 969. For Bacon, science was a way to perfect ourselves, even to attain physical immortality. According to his scientific calculations, maintaining our innate moisture entailed ingesting precise dosages of seven ty
pes of medicine, each containing various vital principles.

  He prescribed powders made from gold, pearl, or coral. The connective tissue from a stag’s heart works wonders for energy levels, he counseled. Eating vipers and serpents was also highly recommended, as they are reborn by shedding their skins. (Dragons contain the most vital spirit, but they are hard to come across, Bacon granted, unless you happened to be in Ethiopia.) The best remedy of all is breathing in the exhalations of virgin girls. The word gerocomy refers to the idea that a certain “vital principle” can be absorbed by aged men through proximity to young maidens. Bacon swore that it rejuvenates even the dustiest old fogey. Despite being charged with “suspected novelties” by the Vatican, Bacon himself lived almost to eighty, far longer than most of his contemporaries.

  * * *

  Bacon’s work was indebted to that of another important medical pioneer, Jābir ibn Hayyān of Persia. He famously sought a rejuvenating tincture called al-iksir—the elixir. He never found it, but he did invent fireproof paper and develop glow-in-the-dark ink. And he was already emphasizing the importance of experimentation in the ninth century CE: “The first essential in chemistry is that thou shouldest perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to glean anything concrete from Jābir’s experiments, as his writing is prolix to the point of impenetrability—an intentional maneuver. “The purpose is to baffle and lead into error everyone except those whom God loves and provides for,” he wrote in The Book of Stones.

  Baffling though they may be, works of his such as Investigation of Perfection and The Book of Eastern Mercury were translated and made available to Europeans like Bacon by the twelfth century. As alchemy rose in prominence, disputes about its limitations were raised, but no one knew its capacities with any certainty. The esteemed Persian physician Avicenna, also known as Ibn-Sina, decreed that it simply wasn’t possible to transmute base metals into gold, but that panaceas of eternal youth would eventually be uncovered by chemicomedical researchers.

  Both ideas captivated European alchemists,3 who pursued ars aurifera alongside seeking the arcanum universale: the philosopher’s stone, the preserver of the macrocosm, the miraculous stone that is no stone. Its liquefied version could make one live forever, they thought. Most alchemists from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries hoped to drink the quintessence of the universe, possibly made from water of gold (whatever that may have been).

  Misguided though such efforts seem in retrospect, they were an important step toward what we now consider scientific chemistry. Medieval alchemists learned how to alloy copper with zinc (yielding goldlike brass); they figured out how to make porcelain; they invented distilling equipment; and they harkened the scientific method’s approach by performing experiments over and over.

  During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, every major European town had its own “laborer of the fire” toiling away in a shady apothecary. Capitalizing on the hope that alchemy could find a way around death, countless swindlers rooked the upper classes with bogus medicaments for eternal life.

  Researchers also harmed themselves in their chimerical fossicking, ending up half-asphyxiated by arsenic fumes or going blind from noxious vapors. Many physicians from that epoch who are well respected today (such as Newton) also performed alchemical research, which was essentially their term for “science.” Newton died of mercury poisoning, as did countless gilders. Mercurous nitrate causes erratic, flamboyant behavior; its use by milliners in felting hats gave rise to the expression mad as a hatter.

  * * *

  In the late 1700s, a Scottish quack named James Graham, Servant of the Lord, O.W.L. (Oh, Wonderful Love), became the talk of London for claiming anyone could live to 150 simply by making regular visits to his private clinic, the Temple of Health. He encouraged valetudinarians to rub themselves with his patented aethereal balsam. He also advocated earth baths, in which naked patients climbed into holes in the ground and were covered neck deep in mud. He spoke of the salutary effects of thoroughly washing one’s genitals in cold water or, even better, in ice-cold champagne. His most in-demand device, however, was the celestial bed, a massive stallion-hair-filled mattress supported by forty glass pillars that administered mild shocks of electrical current. Graham’s clients hoped the effects of “holding venereal congress” in the bed would help them live longer, if not forever.

  During that same era, the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer made a fortune convincing people that the secret to health and longevity resides in a special fluid coursing through our circulatory system. This invisible electrical fluid, he said, is an internal ether subject to blockages. Fortunately, the cure lay in using “animal magnetism” to unblock the inner fluid. Brandishing magnets and a wand, Mesmer would stand with one foot in a bucket of water and stare deeply into patients’ eyes (whence the term mesmerizing). Sometimes his methods worked. But, of course, we didn’t yet understand the vagaries of the placebo effect.

  Eighteenth-century Parisian aristocrats were easily swindled by colorful crooks peddling elixirs of eternal life. One miracle docteur sold a concoction consisting almost entirely of tap water. The Count of Saint Germain was a self-promoting “wonderman” who “never dies and knows everything.” He manufactured immortality potions for wealthy patrons and claimed to be capable of astral travel: “For quite a long time I rolled through space. . . . I saw globes revolve around me and earths gravitate at my feet.” Rather than a real count, Saint Germain was simply a dazzling scoundrel. “As a conversationalist he was unequaled,” marveled Casanova, in his memoirs. Only one other courtier-impostor even came close, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (real name: Giuseppe Balsamo). Like all hucksters worth their salt, Cagliostro pushed amulets and nostrums. Living forever was merely a matter of payment. Not immortal himself, he perished during the Inquisition.

  Graham, Mesmer, Saint Germain, Casanova, and Cagliostro all lived during times not entirely different from our own. “They were received into the centre of a small, skeptical and libertine world that had, in principle, rid itself of prejudice,” explains the Romanian historian of longevity Lucian Boia. “These people who pretended to believe in nothing at all, except, to some extent, in philosophy and science, were ripe to be caught in any trap that a person of speculative intelligence could set. Because they believed in nothing, they were ready to believe anything.”

  When we think (or pretend) that we don’t believe, we’re setting ourselves up. It’s human nature. Death demands it of us. We’re so unconsciously desperate to believe in the possibility of immortality that we can be suckered easily—if we don’t have a belief system in place already.

  * * *

  It can be hard to distinguish between science and folly. The well-respected empiricist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the earliest advocates of the scientific method. He also considered youthfulness to be a vital moisture in the body that could be replenished in various ways. He recommended wearing scarlet waistcoats and self-medicating with anything redolent of fresh earth or newly turned-up soil, such as strawberry leaves, raw cucumbers, vine leaves, and violets.

  The sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus innovated and introduced the concept of chemicals as medication. Before him, all the way back until Galen, healing remedies in the Western world were primarily plant-based, rather than chemically derived drugs. An impetuous, pudgy warlock with scalpel eyes and a no-bullshit attitude, Paracelsus argued that alchemy’s aim was medicine rather than gold. His discovery that mercury helped cure syphilis yielded a salve used until 1910. Alongside his medical innovations, he also is credited as being the first to articulate (however gropingly) the concept of the unconscious. Jung considered him a pioneer in the study of psychology.

  Interestingly, Paracelsus had no problem advocating the use of sorcery in helping patients. “Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessib
le to human reason,” he wrote. “For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.” An example of this secret wisdom, according to his treatise on longevity called De Vita Longa, is learning how to live for a thousand years, even forever. Like Jābir and Bacon, he spoke of attaining a life without end, although he himself died in his late forties, without ever finding that mercury-based potion of immortality.

  Paracelcus’s medical practice was predicated upon the existence of a physical thing called iliaster that keeps bodies alive. Iliaster is a compound word from two Greek morphemes: hyle, meaning physical matter, and astron, meaning of the cosmos. In Paracelsus’s teaching, iliaster is a substance from the heavens animating life here on earth, a kind of astral secretion produced naturally within the body. This celestial-cum-terrestrial stuff is our vital spirit, the essence of existences, “the true spirit in man, which pervades all his limbs.” It originates within the Great Mysterie, the source of all created things. Paracelsus used words like breathlike or vaporous when describing iliaster, what we today might call energy—or the life force.

  This energy dissipates as we age—but Paracelsus believed it could be replenished. He considered mercury to be a key ingredient. Just as bodily iliaster consists of internally transmuted mercury, alchemical iliaster can also be crafted through an elusive blend of mercury, sulfur, and salt. (Mummified remains were thought to contain traces of iliaster, so they were also incorporated into the mélange.)

  For Paracelsus, mercury had abstract qualities beyond its slippery chemical properties. As a growth stimulator, he said, it allows humans to develop from children to adults, at which point it starts to run out. If prepared quicksilver (what Paracelsus called the “eternal liquor”) were added to the bloodstream in adulthood, one could conceivably live forever. Mercury also allowed the lower, physical world to come into contact with—or be transformed into—the higher, spiritual world.