[michael247]

For some time now I have been puzzling over the apparent disappearance of the interest in alchemy within the Byzantine Empire and then in the lands of Eastern Orthodoxy. After an initial flowering, up to circa 1000 AD and best represented by the writings of Stephanos of Byzantium, this subject simply disappears from among the scholarly pursuits of the Orthodox philosophers. This stands very much in contrast to what was about to happen in Western Europe from circa 1130 AD on. Can anyone suggest a factual explanation of this phenomenon? ("factual" in this case meaning the opposite of vague generalizations such as "alchemy is a pseudoscience", etc., in which I am not interested.)