Athanor
The athanor is a special furnace that was used by the alchemists . The name is derived from the Arabic word at-tannur for (baking) oven or water pipe.
Function and accessories of alchemical furnaces
Warming or heating played an important role in alchemical processes.
For example, an important process was distillation . By heating a liquid substance, it evaporated. The vapors condensed and were diverted into a still. The situation is very similar with sublimation : In this process, a solid substance was heated; their vapors are deposited in solid form at the cooler parts of the sublimation vessel. Another important process is digestion (from the Latin digerere, to digest ). The alchemist understood it to be a process of digestion or maturation. He put the substances in a tightly closed vessel and let them "mature" for a few days or weeks at a constant temperature.
In the Middle Ages it was a problem to regulate the heat supply to the ovens. After adjusting slides were invented in the 16th century with which the air supply could be regulated, it was also possible to achieve different degrees of heat in the same furnace. Before these adjusting slides existed, the alchemist had to have a separate furnace for each degree of heat required for a specific process.
The ovens were mostly built of bricks and cemented with a special oven clay. There were also metal furnaces made of copper or iron. Stoves were also made from clay. The heating material was wood or charcoal . Each furnace basically had an ash room, a fire room and a work room. However, these were not always separate from each other.
Furnace types
The athanor was also called the Philosophical Furnace , because the Philosopher's Stone ( lapis philosophorum ) was supposed to be made in it. In a philosophical oven , a substance could be treated with mild and even heat for a long time in a closed vessel. The structure of the furnace was in the shape of a tower and inside was an oval, sealed vessel ( philosophical egg ). This vessel contained the substance that was to be transformed into the Philosopher's Stone.
In the 16th century , the so-called comfort oven (also known as lazy Heinz or Piger Henricus ) was a type of oven that had a separate shaft for the fuel. The charcoal slipped steadily from this shaft so that used fuel was automatically refilled. So the alchemist didn't have to regularly add charcoal.
literature
- Bernhard Dietrich Haage: Alchemy in the Middle Ages. Ideas and images - from Zosimos to Paracelsus . Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf et al. 2000, ISBN 3-7608-1222-8
- Claus Priesner , Karin Figalla (Ed.): Alchemy. Lexicon of a Hermetic Science . Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-44106-8
Others
The Athanor Academy for the Performing Arts Passau is named after this "melting pot". Founder: David Esrig
The contemporary German painter Anselm Kiefer gave several of his large-format pictures the title Athanor , most recently the picture he painted for the Louvre in 2007 and which is permanently installed there.
The Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer founded a film production company called Athanor in 1992 , which works in his home and studio in Knovíz in Bohemia .