Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of “ether”.
At the time these various “light” flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be “pure”, and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the “perfect” predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word “quintessential”, which literally means “fifth essence”, to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It’s also where we get the word “ethereal” to mean “otherworldly”, “light”, “ghostly”, etc.
It’s for similar reasons that we use the word “spirit” to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something’s essence is it’s spirit.
Of course what they called “spirits” or “essences” were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that’s what they thought was going on.
Sort of
Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of “ether”.
The term “ethyl”, as in ethyl alcohol or ethanol, similarly traces its origins back to “ether”.
At the time these various “light” flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be “pure”, and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the “perfect” predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word “quintessential”, which literally means “fifth essence”, to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It’s also where we get the word “ethereal” to mean “otherworldly”, “light”, “ghostly”, etc.
It’s for similar reasons that we use the word “spirit” to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something’s essence is it’s spirit.
Of course what they called “spirits” or “essences” were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that’s what they thought was going on.