= = = = = MEDIEVAL METROLOGY PART 4 = = = = =
Why has gold been a standard** for so many centuries? Partly because it’s a suitable standard in a metrology sense. It doesn’t mix easily with other elements, it doesn’t degrade with time, and it can be purified and verified. But metrology doesn’t explain the deep attraction of gold. We don’t feel a similar passion for the cesium second standard or the iridium kilogram standard.
The answer: Gold is a sacrament. It behaves exactly like religious sacraments.
Alchemists knew it, and their secular descendants in chemistry knew it whether they admitted it or not. Alchemists were obsessed with transmuting other metals into gold because gold was sacred, not because gold was valuable. They were transmuting earthly souls into spiritual souls. Early astronomers had the same mindset. They were exploring the stars and planets to explore God.
= = = = = The Trial of the Pyx
Golden metrology had the same black and red ceremonies as Christian transubstantation. The Trial of the Pyx, developed around 1280 AD, was explicitly sacramental. Pyx is a box originally used for communion wafers. From wafers to coins is a short metaphorical distance. Similar shape and size, physical representations of value or energy transferred from one person to another. The trial was thus a form of alchemy, purifying metals to purify our understanding of God. Modern chemistry descended from alchemy in the same way that astronomy descended from astrology. Both lost their divine meaning and spark. And the spark was literal in both sciences.
The pyx ceremony was a mix of church and medieval village court. All of life was sacramental, all of life was devoted to Natural Law balancing of powers.
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The procedure, condensed from an 1837 parliamentary report:
= = = = = START REHASH:
[First the metrology part:]
The Chancellor of the Exchequer directs proper offices to be prepared at Westminster for the business, and orders the standard weights and trial pieces to be produced for the service. Upon the day appointed the Mint officers and jurors attend. After the jurors have been sworn by the King’s Remembrancer, the Lord Chancellor gives his charge to the jury, showing the cause of their assembling, the importance of the business, and submitting the examination of the monies to their care and skill as artists conversant with the several processes.
The jury proceeds to the Duchy Court, where the pyx, the standard weights and trial pieces are laid before them, with exact accounts of the coinage from the last trial. The jurors, being now the King’s weighers, tellers and assayers for the time, examine the ensealed packets in the pyx by the accounts, tell out the coin, weigh it and calculate the remedy allowed.
[Then the sacrament part:]
They then melt a portion of the several coins and make trial of the masses so melted, as also of the standard trial plates, in presence of the Mint officers, by the usual process of assaying in furnaces erected for the occasion. Comparing in their balances the assays of the coin with the assays of the trial plates, they determine and declare the state of their fineness, all which they draw up in the form of a verdict and sign it. The Lord Chancellor calls over the jury, reads the report, which the foreman declares to be their verdict, and the Chancellor gives it to the Remembrancer to be recorded. After which, the jury having finished their business, immediately depart.
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The Pyx Chapel was in the vaults of the Jewel Tower in London. The chapel had room for an audience, like a church or a courtroom.
= = = = = First the metrology part:
The altar, like the pyx, was originally used in church services. Polistra and friends are using their three keys to open the three locks on the pyx itself.
Inside the pyx was one day’s production of each type of coin by the Mint.
The testers would check the entire sample for weight and appearance, then pull out a few of each type for full assaying.
= = = = = Then the sacrament part: = = = = =
Assaying metal in cupels is amazingly old and unchanged. The cupel itself hasn’t changed in centuries. It’s a communion cup, made more like concrete than ceramic. Powdered bone ash or wood ash is mixed with water plus a little molasses or stale beer. The cupel is molded under high pressure then allowed to sit and cure for months. Cupels are available today, still made from bone ash. Instead of molasses the newer ones use magnesium.
Cupellation relies on a basic difference in reactivity between ‘noble metals’ and ‘base metals’. The silver or gold to be tested is weighed first, then wrapped in a sheet of lead.
The coin in the cupel is inserted into the muffle, a ceramic pan.
Then the muffle goes into the oven for about 10 minutes at 800 degrees.
When heated near the melting point, gold doesn’t react with oxygen but base metals like tin and copper do. The tin and copper oxidize and mix with the lead wrap, absorbing into the porous cupel. The gold itself is left unabsorbed.
At the moment of absorption there’s a flash of light and a spectrum of colors. (The blick.) After cooling the gold can be weighed to compare with the coin before purifying.
The metal becomes bright and shining, and prismatic colours suddenly flash across the liquid, and undulate and cross each other, followed by the metal becoming very brilliant and clear, and at length fixed and solid.
Alchemists paralleled the blick to purifying the soul.
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Previous in this series:
Intro
Tally sticks
Aunsell weight
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** When I say gold is a standard, I mean standard in the metrology sense, not a standard currency. Gold was one of many currencies for centuries, but the main currency was ALWAYS credit and trust. Tally sticks, hawala, drafts, banknotes, checks, scrip, Paypal. All are symbols of trust, not a physical barter. Some of them, like tally sticks, automatically enforce trust. What we learned in school about the history of money was crap. Real historians and bankers and economists, even in the 1800s, recognized that gold was a measuring baseline for transactions, only incidentally an actual currency.
Polistra's Mill 