The Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Shortly after Emperor Wu’s death, philosophers started cautioning against immortality potions, explaining, “There is no such thing as the Tao of the immortals, ’tis but a fable of those who like to talk about weird things.” In the second century CE, however, a significant alchemical treatise called The Kinship of the Three was published (it is still considered the world’s oldest book of alchemy). In 366 CE, a volume of documents called Confidential Instructions for the Ascent to Perfected Immortality appeared. A philosopher of that time, claiming to know the recipe for walking on water (eat cinnamon, onion extract, and bamboo sap mixed with turtle brains for seven straight years), shared his own formula for an immortality drug: “Take three pounds of genuine cinnabar, and one pound of white honey. Mix them. Dry the mixture in the sun. Then roast it over a fire until it can be shaped into pills. Take ten pills the size of a hemp seed every morning. Inside of a year, white hair will turn black, decayed teeth will grow again, and the body will become sleek and glistening. If an old man takes this medicine for a long period of time, he will develop into a young man. The one who takes it constantly will enjoy eternal life and will not die.”

  * * *

  Concurrently, other nonchemically derived yet equally out-there antiaging methods emerged. Medics started investigating whether mercury’s beneficial effects might be attained through exercises. Just as scientists today have identified dopamine-producing regions in the hypothalamus, specialists in the Three Kingdoms period wrote about cinnabar fields in the body and the brain. Activating our cinnabar-based embryo of immortality requires doing handstands or hanging upside down, so that our sexual fluids flow into the head.

  Sex played a vital role in Chinese yoga.2 As a Jin-dynasty official wrote, “One branch of Taoists seeks solely by means of the art of intercourse to achieve immortality.” Numerous how-to sex texts outlined the genital gymnastics initiates had to master to reach eternal life. A fundamental tenet of male Chinese sexological magic entailed penetrating a female lover without reaching climax. Ejaculating not only prevents immortality—or so the reasoning went—it also upsets the Five Viscera, does damage to ching channels, and causes the hundred illnesses. And just as sperm beget children, they devised, injaculating could only lead to inner birth and then eternal life—especially if the nonejaculating penis in question is able to absorb the woman’s chi, or energy, by “drinking” up her orgasm. As Sun Ssu-miao’s Priceless Prescriptions explains, “If one is able to mount just twelve women without ejaculating, this makes a man youthful and handsome. If one can have intercourse with ninety-three women and remain locked, one will live for ten thousand years.”

  This form of coitus reservatus was intended to reconnect practitioners with their prenatal paradise (wu-chi). But it wasn’t all just oceans of tingly restraint. After doing three thousand practices and perfecting eight hundred exercises, aspirants had to stroke the zither without strings, blow slowly on the flute without holes, and spend 5,048 days nurturing the mysterious pearl that hovers above the void. Then, after eating the pearl, they’d sprout wings and soar away to a feathery eternity.

  Women seeking perpetual life through sexuality had their own precepts, grouped together under the banner of “solo meditation.” Various manuals of feminine self-cultivation promised immortality in a mere three years, using a combination of techniques such as gripping the stork, straddling the crane, directing sweet dew to the crimson palace, letting the splashing stream of true juice overflow from the fountain of the heavenly gate, and massaging breasts until they take on the consistency of walnuts and the solo meditator feels “suspended like a cascade, white as silk.”

  Dissenting Taoist leaders believed all these sexual and chemical activities were futile, akin to clutching a piece of jade and hurling oneself into a fire. Their assessment gradually became the consensus,3 but it took centuries and countless deaths for interest in immortality blends to slowly peter out. A high-society fad for cinnabar flared up again in the twelfth century. Around that time, Song-dynasty medics started testing philtres on death-row inmates. Despite a success rate of zero percent, alchemists still argued that they simply hadn’t perfected the recipe yet: “We cannot deny the possibility of the existence of methods for transforming people into feathered immortals.” The finest peculiarity of belief is that believers do not recognize themselves as believers.

  * * *

  India experienced its own alchemical heyday in the Middle Ages. Experiments with mercury-based potions were being described as early as the fourth century BCE, synchronously with the earliest documented Chinese forays. Like Taoism, Indian religion is best known in the West for its contemplative paths, but it also had a pragmatic side. Numerous meditative, ritualistic, and physico-sexual disciplines were developed in hopes of attaining physical immortality—of transforming oneself into a diamond body or a sound-emitting crystal capable of sparkling forever.

  Beginning in the sixth century CE, various salvific systems grouped under the heading of Tantra spread across India. Some forms of the practice were more yogic and spiritual; others emphasized the use of elixirs. Marco Polo, in his travels, reported encountering ciugi (yogis or gurus) on the Indian coast who could live to two hundred by drinking potions made of quicksilver and sulfur mixed with water.

  The most important book of Indian herbo-metallic alchemy is the Rasarnava (Flow of Mercury), an anonymous treatise dating from the eleventh or twelfth century CE. It describes procedures for manufacturing globules of mercurial ash that, when kept in the mouth for an entire month, bestow a life span of 4,320,000 years. Pills made from smoke-sight-vedha mercury held under the tongue for three-quarters of a year render one both omniscient and omnipotent. Hatha-yogic breathing exercises were another means of becoming God: if you could just hold your breath long enough (meaning at least twenty-four years), you’d absorb sufficient pranic juju to gain complete mastery over the entire universe.

  As with esoteric Chinese Tantra, bodily fluids played an important role in the Siddha tradition.4 Sperm was seen as having vivifying effects, especially if raised along the spinal cord toward the crown chakra. Other life-extending liquids best expressed themselves if hydraulically drawn up into the genitalia. Through urethral suction, mercury, water, menstrual blood, and other liquids were sucked into the yogi’s penis hole. This permitted fluids to then be sublimated into a sacred nectar of immortality. To expedite that process, initiates occasionally swallowed their yogis’ saliva. Some gurus would even dab droplets of their semen onto the tongues of followers in the belief that it would be cranially transmuted into a death-defying balm.

  Such arcane notions go back to the earliest Indian Vedas, which described a mysterious immortalizing liquid called soma. One famous passage states, “We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods.” The Holy Grail for medieval Indian alchemists was to materialize that soma, the cosmic fluid of life. Soma was also sometimes spoken of as soma-rasa, or soma juice.

  The word rasa (as in the alchemical handbook the Rasarnava) refers to the flowing, liquid elements of life. Water, juice, rain, syrup, sap, plant resins, tears, and other bodily liquids—all fluids are manifestations of divine rasa, the symbolic source of existence, the basic mythological element of creation.

  * * *

  Any mythology relies on ritual, on the repeated practice of a certain behavior. Today, we all worship technology constantly: checking e-mail, turning on machines, flicking light switches. We’re all trying as hard as possible to cram ourselves into our computers: making art on them, being entertained and informed by them, feeding them information, meeting friends with them, even falling in love through them. We are teaching machines who we are, telling them everything there is to know, programming them with intelligence in the hopes that they will develop consciousness. And if not, we’ll scan the contents of our brains into hard drives and speed things along. Soon, modern immortalists assure us, we’ll become computers.

  * * *

&nb
sp; 1. Of the various sources consulted for this chapter, Joseph Needham’s multivolume Science and Civilisation in China played such a pivotal role it deserves to be singled out here. For more, please see the sources section.

  2. Those desirous of pointers are directed toward Douglas Wile’s Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics Including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts (1992), which recounts the intricacies of how women can shoot golden mystery elixir into a man’s urethra, thereby “completing the work of immortality.”

  3. By the Ming period Chinese alchemy found itself in an irreversible decline.

  4. Caveat emptor: My primary source on Indian tantrikas is David Gordon White, a professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara who is open to the possible existence of “bodies immortalized through the use of mercurial preparations.”

  19

  Preservation’s Particulars: Longevity and Longing

  We don’t crave immortality, but we must reach out to the limits of what is possible for mankind.

  —Pindar, Odes

  You have to get old. Don’t cry, don’t clasp your hands in prayer, don’t rebel; you have to get old. Repeat the words to yourself, not as a howl of despair but as the boarding call to a necessary departure.

  —Colette, Les Vrilles de la Vigne

  IN 1912, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his breakthroughs into sutures and vascular surgery, medical biologist Alexis Carrel started a tissue culture of fibroblast cells from the heart of a chicken embryo. He placed the muscle cells in a stoppered flask and had lab assistants replenish the culture medium regularly. The culture proliferated, as he expected it would. Regularly nurtured with fresh poultry extract, the cells stayed alive for another three and a half decades. His findings proved—or so he thought—that cells are naturally immortal. “Death is not necessary,” Carrel wrote, it is “merely a contingent phenomenon.” Soon, he predicted, we would be engineering human tissues from cell clusters and growing replacement organs in vitro. Growing old would be a thing of the past. We, like cells, are meant to live forever.

  He was wrong about cells living forever. Fifteen years after Carrel’s death, scientists realized that cells, like us, senesce and then die. But his predictions regarding regenerative medicine may now be getting closer to reality. In recent years, scientists studying tissue engineering managed to print out a fully beating, three-dimensional, two-chamber mouse heart using a modified desktop, ink-jet printer. By filling the ink cartridge with cells, they’ve been able to “publish” functional human kidneys.

  This is a time when we can grow human ears on the backs of mice and implant culture-grown lungs into rats. In the near future, specialists say, whenever we need replacement body parts, from blood vessels to bladders, we’ll use rejection-proof artificial organs grown in laboratories using our own cells. “By putting in the parts you need, you’ll be able to extend life by several decades,” explains Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “We may even push that up to 120, 130 years.”

  Bolstered by such promising discoveries, our understanding of aging is changing rapidly. Outside the field of organ regeneration, other genuine life-extending breakthroughs are being made in model test species. In 2011, Nature reported that dying worms yellow with a pigment called Thioflavin T (or Basic Yellow 1) makes them live 60 to 70 percent longer than the norm. There’s more. Researchers are currently finding clues to longevity everywhere from Texan bat caves (where biochemists are investigating the role of misfolding proteins in long-lived bats) to the soil of Easter Island (where antifungal microbes known as rapamycin can raise the life expectancy of mice by 30 percent or more). Spermidine, a molecular compound found in human semen as well as grapefruit, has also been proven to significantly prolong the life span of worms, fruit flies, and yeast.

  These strange-sounding experiments are yielding findings that could affect our lives. Will longevity research yield breakthroughs leading to immortality? Tinkering with the genes in yeast or roundworms has real effects on longevity in those species; that doesn’t mean those genes will perform similarly in humans. And experiments on human cells in vitro do not guarantee similar functioning in vivo. So dying yourself golden yellow will be useless—unless you plan on standing really, really still in an urban center’s touristic thoroughfare. It won’t help you live longer, but sightseers will likely throw consolatory pennies at you.

  * * *

  There’s no documented validity to any life-extension strategy, but that hasn’t deterred the making, selling, and buying of countless longevity creams, potions, and pills. For $36.95 you get a one-month supply of micronized Longevinex™ capsules, “designed to help Americans live longer.” For $39.95 you get 120 ml. of Clustered Water™, a solution of water organized into clustered structures that ostensibly rejuvenates interstructural cells. For $159 you get 0.7 fluid ounces of Rejuvity’s Ageless Renewal Serum™, containing a specially formulated concentration of Repair-Plex™. Unfortunately, once you start using it, you shouldn’t stop: “If discontinued, then the aging process of the skin simply continues,” explains the website. The fine print on such products can be a great way of pushing more product.

  We’ll believe anything—and belief is our most powerful panacea. As scientists conducting clinical drug trials know, placebos are often as potent as medication. If we simply believe we are taking a drug that fixes our problem, our problem can end up fixed—even if we’re just taking a sugar pill. The way belief affects healing is called the expectancy effect. In studies, placebos have proven effective in treating everything from minor headaches and depression to sore joints, irritable bowel syndrome, and skin conditions. Dermatologists can dab inert water onto patients’ warts while explaining that it’s a treatment that eliminates unwanted viral lumps. In 48 percent of such cases, the warts disappear.

  Placebos may not cure all illnesses, but inactive substances do alleviate symptoms and offer therapeutic relief in those who believe that they will work. Faith heals. It isn’t sufficient for patients to simply take a placebo without knowing what its effects are: they have to trust that the prescribed remedy will help in order for it to work. If the medical specialist who administers the sham pill explicitly tells patients that it will resolve their complaint, the condition can be cured by a placebo. But if the patient doesn’t believe that the treatment will work, it definitely won’t. (In fact, if we believe the treatment is bad for us, a totally unharmful dummy drug can aggravate a patient’s condition and cause other injurious effects. This is called a nocebo.) Belief, it seems, has the possibility to be as curative as many drugs or treatments.

  The placebo effect isn’t fully understood but it appears to be a result of the way beliefs interact with endorphins, the body’s self-made opioids. “The poppy fields of the mind” spring into bloom when the body experiences extended physical activity (as in runner’s high), spicy foods, or intense pain; they are also linked to religiosity. In fMRI scans of test subjects exposed to low-level electric shocks, the pain receptors in their brains light up. When they are given a placebo ointment, however, their brains behave differently. Even though they are being administered the exact same shocks, their pain receptors remain inactive. Instead, the endorphin-manufacturing quadrants of the brain become engaged. “Our brain really is on drugs when we get a placebo” is how the scientists behind these tests explain it. A similar thing occurs to religious believers. When administered shocks while being asked to look at an image of the Virgin Mary, Catholics don’t feel the pain. Their pain receptors shut off, and instead their internal apothecary kicks in.

  Belief and placebo are deeply linked, which is why we’re so open to suggestion. All marketers need to do is make consumers trust in them, and their products will have certain positive effects—as long as they aren’t actually harmful. Unfortunately, some antiaging remedies are hazardous to our health. With the rise in availability of modern-day youth elixirs at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the US government formed a Special Committee on Aging to investigate these potions’ supposed benefits. The congressional report’s title summarized their findings: “Anti-Aging” Products Pose Potential for Physical and Economic Harm.

  * * *

  Unstudied though these products often are, their performance is akin to that of any placebo—it might have an effect. Stem-cell activating and resveratrol-laden age-management nostrums may not help prevent visible signs of aging, but it doesn’t really matter if they work. What matters is that consumers believe they will work. Hopes for creaselessness are bolstered into faith by hypnotic ad copy in fashion magazines: hydroxy acids have exfoliatory antioxidant powers. Kinetin causes humectant agents to remain on the skin longer. Hyaluronic acid’s renewing properties are legion. Copper peptides are where it’s at. You mean you aren’t yet taking the age-decelerating coenzyme Q10?

  Marketers often use scientific-sounding jargon, but a 2011 study of wrinkle-reduction creams found that “at best the products had a small effect, and not on everyone.” In other tests, those that sell for inflated prices were outperformed by no-name moisturizers. Double-blind trials show that about 20 percent of participants’ wrinkles can be improved slightly to moderately after six months of serums, while about 12 percent of participants’ wrinkles improve simply when taking placebos.

  That hasn’t stopped women from risking delirious sums on the off chance they might shrink a wrinkle. The cost of a 16.5 oz. jar of Crème de la Mer (which bioferments the curative powers of the sea into a light-and-sound-wave-treated elixir users are encouraged to “apply day and night—for a lifetime”) is $1,900. Carita’s “infinitely rare antiaging formula” Diamant de Beauté, containing pulverized diamonds (which obviously makes facial skin last forever), costs $600 for 1.7 ounces. Ads for SK-II, one of the priciest beauty brands in the world, tell of a Japanese monk crafting the cream’s secret formula, a nutrient-rich fluid called Pitera: “After many experiments, he discovered a liquid that seemed to defy aging.”