People Used to Straight Up Drink Gold

This is something that may be a little bit difficult for many of us in the modern-day to understand. Back in the day, people were trying to do everything they could to ensure that they lived as long as possible and that they were healthy while they were alive. You can see it today in things like anti-aging creams of dubious efficacy. And today’s story is about something even more dubious. People thought that they could improve their physical health by doing something incredibly strange.

I’ll explain with a quote from Exodus 32:19, in which Moses ascended the mountain to meet with the Lord. After receiving the 10 commandments from his Lord, Moses came down from the mountain, and he saw the people worshiping a golden calf that they had made. Moses took the golden calf burned it in fire, grounded it into powder, and sprinkled it upon the water. Moses made the children of Israel drink of it. The powder Moses sprinkled upon the water was gold dust. Drinking gold was a thing that dates back to biblical times. There was some kind of notion that it was imbued with magical properties. They weren’t doing clinical studies at the time; it had to have been based on just some sort of hunch.

It’s strange because gold has a long history throughout human civilization as a therapeutic agent, similar in some ways to silver. First, it was used as a metal, and then, of course, there’s the dust reference in biblical times. And then it was used as a soluble salt made by alchemists, the predecessors of chemists.

This is where we see the first instance of someone preparing gold water. In Egypt, drinking Goldwater was thought to enhance your youth, and our Vedic medicine today in India, red colloidal gold is still used for the same thing; rejuvenation, revitalization.

In the eighth century AD, an Arabian alchemist, Jabir made the biggest breakthrough in drinkable gold when he invented one of the few substances that can dissolve gold. If we’re being practical and a little bit mundane about it, you can use this substance to help you with gold extraction, you can use it to purify gold, but they wanted to use it for other things. They wanted to use it for its perceived curative qualities. And since then, alchemists spent 1000 years, maybe more trying to figure out where else they could go with this.

So we’re setting the stage here to say that gold was used for a lot of things. And we’ve got numerous cases across the world of people saying, 'gold is the cure for what ails you, regardless of what your symptoms might be. But as we’ve been foreshadowing, it takes off as an anti-aging trend during the Middle Ages. This is also the time when apothecaries aka predecessors of pharmacists would sell things like Scorpion oil and spider web elixirs.

Moving on to the 16th century, we have Henry II 's mistress and advisor who drank gold to stay youthful and attractive to her lover.

There was a study that was published in the British Medical Journal that Chronicles this. She might have had a little too much and according to toxicology reports, this eventually led to her death.

Diane de Poitiers was the infamous mistress of King Henri the second in France. She was also a well-taught, well-rounded, educated person. She studied music, hunting, languages. She was given what I would say a pretty high-end education for a young woman in the Renaissance era.

She married someone 39 years younger when she was 15. His name was Louis de Brézé. He was the grandson of King Charles VII. And he had served in the court of King Francis I. We have to remember the idea of marrying for romantic love is sadly a relatively recent invention in history. This may have been a political move. She served as the lady of waiting to Queen Claude. They had two daughters before Louie passed away in 1531, leaving Diane, 32 years old, wearing black and white as a symbol of mourning, and she would keep these colors for the rest of her life.

She became the mistress of Henry the second; their affair is believed to have begun when she was 35 and the king was 16. For a time, she was the most powerful woman in France, even more, powerful than the legitimate queen. When King Henri II passed away in 1559, Diane had a pretty precipitous fall from grace. She got banished, and eventually died at the age of 66. Contemporary reports said that she looked super young; everybody believed that her secret was drinking gold. Maybe that sounds like a caddy rumor spread but in this case, it turns out to be true.

Given how much time has passed since her death, you would reasonably assume that this would remain a rumor or an anecdote. However, we have the benefit of some forensic science. Three scientists in 2008 solved the case of Diane’s death and they did it in a somewhat grisly way. It involved some digging up of corpses. Enough time had passed; they were just bones and they did just that in 2008. This group of scientists unearths the bones of Poitier, and they were able to confirm that they were hers because they matched up to her Jawbone to a portrait of her and also a portrait of her leg bones documented after a riding accident which is pretty interesting detective work. They had access to some of her hair from a collection of her own. She kept it at the palatial country home where she was exiled to. Catherine de' Medici, who was King Henry II’s wife banished his mistress and she was allowed to live out her days at her Chateau, Eure-et-Loir, which was given to her by King Henry II.

In measuring those hair samples, they were able to find that they contained gold levels 500 times above normal tolerances. Also, a lot of mercury traces in there, which was another ingredient of this potion.

They also noted that there is a scientific basis for the reason that people might have said that she looked unusually young. That level of gold consumption can give you white skin from anemia and can give you fragile hair, bones, and teeth. And this is exactly the state she was in when she passed away. We’re getting some of this from an excellent article in The Telegraph. She was originally buried in a nice chapel. But during the French Revolution, her grave was desecrated and they threw her in a commoner’s grave. It took a long time for scientists to find her body.

That youthful complexion that it supposedly gave her which essentially was just being super pale was the result of anemia. There are better ways to keep that youthful glow than to drink toxic chemicals.

But in gold’s defense, it has been used pharmaceutically in the treatment of rheumatism. Luckily we have the benefits of the modern-day and our understanding of the science and chemistry involved in drinking or ingesting gold.

CLICK HERE to Return to Magazine

******** **************** **********************

Like what you read? Send me a gift below to help contribute to my next adventure!

You can also sign up for my mailing list here: https://bit.ly/3el7KKa