Hey dear community, as always I would like to welcome you to my contribution and hope you had a day full of interesting experiences! In this article, I would like to address an exciting topic and hope you are able to expand your knowledge.
Here you can see pictures of minerals as well as some illustrations that are supposed to represent a slightly different kind of alchemical laboratories, underground laboratories. In the past, it often happened that alchemists were not welcome to everyone because of their work and there were people who wanted to get to their recipes and in order to have to pursue their mystical work in peace, some alchemists began to build underground laboratories which were usually built with a thick wall of stone and had long tunnel networks and if people discovered the laboratories or complications came, the alchemists were able to escape quickly. Often there were several entrances to the laboratories and these underground networks were often found under cities or villages and only the learned alchemists knew about the entrances and the equipment was pretty much the same as in the laboratories of the surface and recently I went into more detail about the typical equipment of the old alchemists in a post and if you want more about it, you will find my contribution here. These laboratories were much safer and so they could easily store valuable objects such as metals there without fear that someone would find them and traces of the laboratories appear again and again in old writings and it is assumed that there were hundreds or even thousands of them and in some of these underground facilities even some alchemists are said to have lived. In some countries there still traces of these laboratories such as in the Czech city of Prague, which at that time was considered an important center for alchemists this occult science was not popular with everyone and as a result there was stigmatization of many alchemists and the scholars were forced to find new ways and built numerous laboratories in the underground. One of the most important promoters of alchemy in Prague at that time was Emperor Rudolf II (1552 - 1612) who invested many resources in the construction of these laboratories and these buildings were so complex and even had access to castles or other buildings and also in other European countries there were underground facilities in which the alchemists could pursue their experiments undisturbed.
Thanks a lot for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about alchemy! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens and created the others with AI!
