Page:Edward Thorpe — History of Chemistry, Volume I (1909).pdf/21

Rh of our era, and is but a variant of that which, according to Jewish writers, led to the expulsion of man from Paradise. A similar myth was current among the Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, and Magi. We trace it in the legend of Sibylla, who demanded, as the price of her favour to Phœbus, not only length of years, but a knowledge of the divine arcanum. Some of the ecclesiastics who elaborated these myths are particular in their accounts of the mysteries thus imparted. They included the use of charms, a knowledge of gold and silver and precious stones, the art of dyeing, of painting the eyebrows, etc.—the kind of arcana, in fact, which women in all ages were presumably most keen to know. It is, however, significant that in all allusions to chemia, even after the translation of the seat of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, it is implied that a knowledge of it was a sacred mystery to be known only to the priesthood, and jealously guarded by them. It was characteristic of writers who had affixed an eternal stigma on Eve to make the sex in general answerable for an illicit knowledge of “things unfit for men to know.”

For, in reality, chemistry originated with men, and it was not so much in the love of women as of wine that it took its rise.

The manufacture of alcohol by processes of fermentation is probably the oldest of the