Alchemists like Michael Maier and Heinrich Khunrath wrote tracts exposing fraudulent claims of gold making. Pseudo-alchemical transmutation was outlawed and publicly mocked beginning in the fourteenth century. The impossibility of the metallic transmutation had been debated amongst alchemists, philosophers and scientists since the Middle Ages. While alchemists often understood chrysopoeia as a metaphor for a mystical, or religious process, some practitioners adopted a literal interpretation, and tried to make gold through physical experiment. Alchemists pursued the philosopher's stone, capable of chrysopoeia – the transformation of base metals into gold. The term transmutation dates back to alchemy.
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