Nicholas Flamel

Nicolas Flamel
c. 1330 - March 22, 1418

Flamel was born in Pontoise, a town outside Paris, worked as a French scrivener and manuscript-seller. After his death - in Paris - Flamel developed a reputation as an alcemist - a reputation that has overshadowed his historical reality. Flamel was the attributed author of an alchemical book, published in Paris in 1612 as Livre des figures hiéroglypiques and in London in 1624 as "Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures". It is an exposition of figures purportedly commissioned by Flamel for a tympanum at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, long disappeared at the time the work was published. In its publisher's introduction Flamel's search for the Philosopher's Stone was described.

According to it, Flamel made it his life's work to understand the text of the mysterious 21-page book he had purchased, and that around 1378, he traveled to Spain for assistance with translation. On the way back, he reported that he met a sage, who identified Flamel's book as being a copy of the original Book of Abraham also known as the Codex. With this knowledge, over the next few years Flamel and his wife allegedly decoded enough of the book to successfully replicate its recipe for the Philosopher's Stone, producing first silver in 1382, and then gold.

According to the introduction to his work and the additional details that have accrued since its publication, Flamel would thus have been the most accomplished of the European alchemists, who would have learned his art from a Jewish converso on the road to Santiago de Compostela. The modern assertion that many references to him or his writings appear in alchemical texts of the 1500s, however, has not been linked to any particular source. The essence of his reputation is that he succeeded at the two magical goals of alchemy -- that he made the Philosopher's Stone which turns lead into gold, and that he and his wife Perenelle achieved immortality.