Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  In Greek religion, Mercury was Hermes, the God of Going Back and Forth, an intergalactic go-between, a means of communication between humans and divinities, between life and death. In pre-Hellenic times, Egyptians called him Thoth. During the early Christian era, Hermes-Thoth evolved into a new figure called Hermes Trismegistus, or Thrice-Great Hermes, known for bestowing a body of esoteric knowledge called the Corpus Hermetica. (Purporting to be texts from ancient Egypt, many of them actually appear to date from around 200 CE.) One of the most important documents in the Hermetic canon is The Emerald Tablet, which contains the proclamation “that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below.”

  One commentary on The Emerald Tablet contends that the tablet’s meaning is that “the secret of everything and the life of everything is water.” This text, The Book of the Silvery Water and the Starry Earth, describes something called upper water—a divine spiritual water that represents the soul. There’s also lower water, the earthly, everyday water that nourishes the body. These two can be brought into contact with each other through the translating medium of mercury.

  Paracelsus latched onto this idea. In his books, mercury is spoken of as the spirit of water, living water, mare nostrum. Alongside the iliaster, he wrote of a psychical (rather than physical) principle called aquaster—meaning liquid of the cosmos, or star-water. This invisible watery force has quasimaterial qualities and is the wellspring and birthplace of iliaster, that “which animates and preserves the liquids in the body.” One way of thinking about it is as the fountain of the vital spirit. Paracelsus saw this as the basic element of creation, a radical moisture whose nontangible wetness nourished the universe with life force. If we could just tap into it, we’d live forever.

  Magical though it all sounds, Paracelsus was a late-Renaissance visionary who helped push us forward into that uncharted terrain we now call the Enlightenment. Although conflicted in many ways, wrote Jung, Paracelsus “was spared that agonizing split between knowledge and faith that has riven the later epochs”—a split we’re still agonizing over to this day.

  * * *

  As chemistry emerged out of alchemy, it started the long, slow process of concealing its religious implications. It kept its practical side, letting its mystical and cryptic aspects fall into obscurity. But the magical facet of science hasn’t disappeared entirely. Most immortalists today still feel that, as English philosopher John Gray has argued, “if only they are able to penetrate the secret order of things, humans can overleap natural laws.” In time, perhaps they (or “we,” as my friend Billy Mavreas would say) will be able to.

  For now, true scientific achievements involve nonglamorous technicalities and incremental advances that rarely correlate with the sensationalist way they’re depicted in the press, where they often have more in common with magical thinking than with science itself. Can technology really find a way to make us live forever? Or is that very idea a mythology that helps us to avoid thinking about a truth we can’t bear, that we have to die? To find out, I would need to speak with physical immortalists about how exactly they see us attaining eternal life. I’d need to ask real scientists to clarify the extent of their discoveries. And I’d need to learn more about the ways our ancestors attempted to live forever—none of which worked, of course. But exploring their failures sheds light on the reasons we continue to pursue immortality and helps explain why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we still believe we will be able to live forever.

  * * *

  1. “The truth, being identical with the divine, can never be perceived directly by us, we only behold it in the reflection, in the example, the symbol,” as Goethe wrote in “An Essay on Meteorology.”

  2. Khymia may also refer to the Arabic word for “substance” or “art.” Alternately, the term chem could have derived from the Egyptian term for “black,” from their oxidized silver jewelry. Yet another possibility is that khym sounds exactly like the Greek word for “mixing,” as in “mixing fire with mercury to make an immortality potion.”

  3. As they did for Chinese and Indian alchemists. (See the next chapter.)

  Part 3

  Science

  Magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena—of registering the shadows on the screen—of which we in this generation can form no idea.

  —J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough

  18

  Mercurial Times

  When all the ties of the heart are severed here on earth, then the mortal becomes immortal—here ends the teaching.

  —Katha Upanishad (or, Death as Teacher)

  I knew at last that on the plane of Assembled Occasions

  One cannot escape from the secret laws of predestination

  —Bai Juyi, 772–846 CE

  UNTIL THE Neolithic revolution, bodies from different cultures around the world were painted red when buried in the earth. Decorating cadavers with vermilion signified the hope that even in death there is life, a returning to and from the earth. Powdered pigment of cinnabar—a hardened, red, metallic ore resembling the dried blood of the earth—was a typical dye used in these funerary rites.

  The discovery that heated cinnabar’s vapors condense into silvery, liquid mercury perpetuated the belief in its transformative powers. Just as cinnabar’s death becomes mercury’s life, ingesting mercury seemed to be a means of bringing shiny, new vitality into the eater. This notion captivated the elite of imperial China, where the science of chemistry began with efforts to manufacture physiological-immortality potions.

  As early as the Warring States Period (476–221 BCE), mineral-based philtres ostensibly bestowing longevity, if not eternal life, were being manufactured. Cinnabar and mercury were the main active ingredients. Medical treatises contained directives for grinding burnt minerals to the fine, ashy consistency of dust motes swirling in a sunbeam falling through a window. Aspirants to immortality were instructed to imbibe cinnabar formularies mixed with sow lard, vinegar, saltpeter, orpiment, realgar, sal ammoniac, and wine. The result? The twenty-five-year old Emperor Ai of Jin died in 365 CE, after overdosing on longevity drugs. He wasn’t the last leader to die trying to live forever. The fascination with chemical immortality reached an ironic apogee centuries later, during the T’ang dynasty (618–907 CE), when elixirs poisoned those hoping for precisely the opposite effect.1

  In that Golden Age of China, the capital, Chang’an, was the most important city in the world. The T’ang nobility’s insatiable desire for the fantastical fueled the importation of countless marvels. Among them, writes Eliot Weinberger in the New York Review of Books, were grains that could make you light enough to fly, crystal pillows that gave you hallucinations of faraway lands, and heat-emitting rhinoceros tusks powerful enough to warm entire castles. Little wonder then that the availability of mercury-based alchemical elixirs intended to make one live forever skyrocketed.

  One T’ang cinnabar votary, Emperor Ming (also known as Hsüan Tsung), managed to reign for forty-three years, living to the wizened age of seventy-seven. A few rulers later, however, Emperor Xianzong wasn’t as lucky. Alchemical pharmacists sold him golden concoctions that made him increasingly paranoid and demented. At age forty-two he was assassinated by palace eunuchs. Xianzong’s successor, Emperor Muzong, executed the mountebanks who’d formulated the poisonous preparations by forcing them to take their own medications. But then Muzong himself became an elixir convert, repeating the same mineral mistake. His tenure lasted four short, pain-filled years. Sixteen years later, horror upon horror’s head, Emperor Wuzong, too, started popping alchemical pills, becoming severely manic and “very irritable, losing all normal self-control in joy or anger.” Then he died.

  How could they have been so ignorant? For a simple reason: because they were human. Errare is our st
yle. But more precisely, in this case, emperors and aristocrats “considered themselves eminently suitable for survival,” as sinologist Joseph Needham wrote. Common valedictions at the time included “May you have a never-ending span, long life that lasts for ten thousand years.” Beyond fluffing high-ranking officials’ already inflated self-esteem, alchemists were canny salesmen, hinting at side effects such as prolonged stamina and increased sexual prowess. Their drugs could make you live—and love—longer. Like all psychotropics, these chemical preparations bestowed an initial sense of euphoric disorientation. This transient inebriation foreshadowed a breakthrough to true immortality, the pushers explained, enticing their marks further. Imperial elixir junkies perished seeking life, impelled by the same phototropism that draws moths to flames. The more they paid, the sicker they became. Overdoses were portrayed as premonitions of eternity, “temporary deaths” reframed as portals into everlasting life.

  Pharmaceutical tomes insisted that preparations be taken slowly, over time, unless one wanted to attain the unseen world immediately. “If you should desire to ascend to the heavens with all speed, the elixir is to be swallowed in a single dose; you will fall prostrate and die immediately. But if you wish to prolong your stay among men, you are to consume it little by little, and when at last it has all been taken, you will then find yourself an immortal.”

  Given the pain of prolonged mercury consumption, though, it was preferable to die fast. One official who fell ill after taking mercury described the pain as being akin to having a red-hot iron rod piercing him from head to toe. He felt flames billowing out of every orifice and joint. He vomited blood for ten years. He woke from sweat-drenched fevers with mercury pooled in his mattress. Cinnabar addicts ended up with ulcerous lesions all over their chests. They’d begin as wounds the size of rice grains, then gradually swell. The users’ necks would expand until the chin and the chest appeared continuous. After every bath, cinnabar dust would seep out of the sores and collect visibly at the bottom of the washbasin. By the ninth century CE, so many people were suffering from immortality potions that alexipharmics for elixir poisoning started being circulated. The Mysterious Antidotarium (Hsiian Chieh Lu) recommended a mixture of fruits, herbs, nuts, and deer glue stirred vigorously with a willow-wood comb.

  * * *

  “Elixir mania” hit during the medieval Chinese centuries, but it began much earlier. As early as the eighth century BCE, thinkers were discussing methods of “becoming an immortal.” In ancient Chinese thought, souls of the dead were believed to end up in the Yellow Springs, a shadowy underworld just below the earth’s surface.

  Lore had it that not everyone ended up in the Yellow Springs: some jackpot winners sprouted feathers and became immortal, ethereal, purified beings. They were humans in levitative, aerostatic, subtle bodies, the “spirits of just men made perfect.” They were able to roam interminably through the countryside and the Milky Way, freed from all physical wants, endlessly enjoying and meditating upon Nature’s bounty. By the fourth century BCE, a certainty arose that the technical means of attaining immortality—“not somewhere else out of this world, nor in the underworld of the Yellow Springs, but among the mountains and forests here and for ever”—was within reach. The only thing needed was to find and consume the elixir of immortality.

  As nonsensical as the concept may seem to us today, it grew wings with the emergence of Taoism somewhere around the third or fourth century BCE. Almost immediately, the Taoist movement branched in two directions. Classical, or philosophical, Taoism concerned itself with a contemplative, mystical approach to the ineffable, immaterial, ever-present and everlasting Tao, that which transcends everything the mind can conceptualize. Religious Taoism, on the other hand, offered a more practical and materialistic system focusing on health, medicine, and longevity. Both approaches had the same goal: to attain the great Tao. Spiritual and physical, they were two sides of the same coin. A more apt metaphor is the central symbol of Taoism: yin and yang. Laozi’s formative text, the Tao Te Ching, emphasized these interconnected, polarizing forces as the definitive enigma of Taoist cosmology (“Indeed, truth sounds like its opposite”).

  Both forms of Taoism recommended yogic postures, breathing techniques, and gymnastic exercises, but where philosophical Taoism aimed at a rigorous, meditative serenity in which the adept became okay with dying, religious Taoists believed that a combination of physical exertion, diet, and herbalism could extend physical life indefinitely. This second model, eventually responsible for the deaths of all those emperors and nobility, became known as hsien Taoism (hsien is variously translated as “immortal” or “living angel” or “enlightened and eternal sage”). The cult of the hsien promised, by definition, material and bodily immortality. “The conviction crystallised that there were many men who had liberated themselves from death, and were continuing in perpetual life,” wrote Needham. “This became a fixed belief in Qin and Han times, taken immensely seriously by emperor after emperor.”

  Chinese alchemy began with hsien hopes of prolonging adherents’ lives. It started as benign natural products—concoctions made from roots, herbs, berries, and animal parts—but soon began incorporating minerals, chemicals, and precious metals. To supply impatient Tao-hungry rulers who lacked the discipline and isolation needed for philosophical Taoist training, pharmacists sprung up offering soups of powdered gold and mercury: druggy elixirs of never-ending life.

  * * *

  The alchemists were known as fangshi—chemical intuitives, recipe gentlemen, masters of methods. Sometimes these medical magicians died imbibing their own mineral whimsicalities, but usually they lived cushy lives sponsored by wealthy, easily blandished patricians. It wasn’t hard to find buyers for something like “the subtle potion of the Flying Springs that brings one to the land of deathlessness, where the feathered ones are.” An early reference tells of one such itinerant mendicant during the Warring States Period who convinced a prince of Yen that he knew the techniques of deathlessness. The prince sent emissaries to learn the full teachings. Unfortunately, the sage died before he could fully transmit his secrets. The prince, furious, punished his men for their dilatoriness. It never occurred to him that if the old shaman couldn’t make himself live forever, then he certainly couldn’t help anyone else live forever.

  By the second century BCE, charlatans abounded, as contemporaneous reports testify: “There were thousands of magician-technicians in the regions of Yen and Chhi who glared around and slapped their thighs, swearing that they were the real experts in the arts of achieving the life of the holy immortals.” These bug-eyed leg-slappers found a ready sucker in Emperor Wu of Han—so receptive to becoming immortal that he’d built a high-elevation copper tower atop a mountain in hopes of harvesting heavenly dew, the nectar or manna he believed would ensure eternal life.

  Around 130 BCE, a thaumaturge called Li Shao-chun, who came highly recommended by the Marquis of Shen-Tse, told Emperor Wu to make a certain sacrifice to the spirits of the furnace, which would cause primordial supernatural beings to appear. These ancients would help transmute cinnabar dust into yellow gold plates, utensils, and drinking vessels. Meals consumed with these would grant prolonged longevity. In time, the emperor would be able to visit the blessed immortals on holy islands to the east. Appropriate oblations were to be made to these eternal, perfected ones. “Then,” the intermediary whispered, “you, too, will never die.”

  These holy islands, located somewhere in the Bohai Sea, were thought to lack roots, so they just floated around aimlessly on the backs of fifteen tortoises. The emperor’s fangshi Li Shao-chun swore that once, on a boat, he’d met an immortal inhabitant of these isles who’d found the flower of deathlessness. Named Anqi Sheng (Master Anqi), this entity remains hidden to all unless they’ve followed the prescribed measures for materializing him. Once successfully evoked, Anqi Sheng would divulge all the secrets of transcending the human condition. Another wizard named Luan Ta backed up Li Shao-chun’s account, saying that he, too,
had encountered Anqi Sheng.

  Venerable precedents had been set for such stories, as the first emperor of unified China, Qin Shi Huang, himself claimed to have met and discoursed with Anqi Sheng for three straight days. Subsequently, he endeavored to reconnect with the immortals on their home turf in the blessed isles. On three separate occasions he sailed into the Bohai Sea in search of the elusive archipelago of eternal life. He skulked along beaches, gazing out at the ocean in hopes of glimpsing the islands. The older he got, the more frantically he searched. He ended up dispatching his official court sorcerer, Xú Fú, alongside hundreds of male and female stewards, into the unknown. They set out on ornate, silk-sailed ships with orders not to return without the elixir of eternal life. They suspected that Anqi Sheng and his fellow immortals lived on Zhifu Island (today a peninsula connected to mainland China). The hunch proved incorrect. Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s doctors ended up poisoning him with a mixture of powdered jade and rare-earth elements.

  He was buried in a jewel-and-pearl-encrusted subterranean tomb protected by the now-famous Terracotta Army. More than seven hundred thousand men labored on his necropolis, an underground microcosm of the entire universe. Geomancers selected an auspicious spot near Mount Li. Entire rooms were carved from jade. The ceilings were painted with a zodiacal firmament, traces of stars, cosmic dots, and heavenly bodies. The mausoleum’s pièce de résistance was a mechanically operated stream of flowing mercury. They filled the inner sanctum with statues of singing musicians, pirouetting dancers, and acrobats frozen midflip. After the emperor’s liver failed from the toxic elixir, his cadaver was carried into the hypogeum, behind gates that locked themselves automatically. Numerous Goonies-style booby traps were installed to deter grave robbers. Tons of soil concealed the entranceway. A forest sprung up over the tumulus, and almost two thousand years went by before some peasants stumbled onto a life-size clay soldier while digging a well in 1974.