Chapter VIII: Alchemy: The First Mineral Science
Alchemy began to resolve once its words stopped behaving like labels and started functioning as roles. With Shimanishi’s process as the key, the labyrinth opened.
Living Water, Mechanized
Up to this point, I have argued that certain physical systems, particularly those involving minerals, water, charge, and structure, display a level of organization that modern scientific frameworks struggle to fully explain once questions of purpose are excluded. That argument stands on contemporary chemistry and physics alone. What follows is something different.
What I did not expect, and certainly did not go looking for, was that the same processes we described in the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, and in the foundational ISAW chemistry underlying it, appeared to be described—symbolically but consistently—in a body of texts written long before modern scientific language existed.
One of the first things that grabbed my attention was that water appeared at the center of everything: in modern chemistry and biology, and in the older symbolic languages as well. But that recognition was only the beginning. As From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV) neared what I thought would be its completion, a series of connections to ancient literature began to emerge that no longer seemed to belong within that book.
That is where this book began. It also explains why FVTV remains unfinished. I had expected to complete it first, but this material intervened and demanded to be written. Even so, FVTV has not released its hold on me, and I must return to it as soon as this manuscript is submitted.
By that point, I had already followed water through mineral interfaces, charge separation, proton flow, biological organization, and the larger cycling of life itself. What I had not expected was to discover how many traditions had already described water as possessing unusual and even transformative properties.
Hermetic and alchemical texts spoke of “Living Water” and of baths in which matter is dissolved and recomposed. Scripture spoke of “waters of life,” “living fountains,” and of the Spirit moving over the waters at creation. Daoist alchemists described circulating inner fluids that renew the body.
For a long time, I would have read all of that as metaphor, or as spiritual language without a clear physical meaning. But once we had Shimanishi’s process in hand, numerous phrases from both the alchemical texts and Scripture began mapping with striking fidelity onto both his method and the Rock–Water Circuit Theory.
What modern science now describes in the language of chemistry, physics, and biology, older traditions described in symbolic language. Water was not treated as a passive background. It was treated as the active medium that carries, dissolves, mediates, renews, and enables transformation. Once I saw that, the question changed. It was no longer a question of whether the language was poetic. It was whether the poetry was describing something that modern science would only later describe more precisely.
That is the question this chapter begins to test, and it requires first setting aside what most of us think alchemy is.
Alchemy’s Real Aim
Alchemy long predates the medieval caricature most people now associate with it. Its roots span from roughly 3000 BC in Egypt, to Hellenistic Hermeticism in the first centuries AD, then to the eighth century in Islam, where the first laboratory chemistry appears, and finally into Renaissance Europe, where Paracelsus explicitly linked minerals to medicine.
However, when people hear the word alchemy, most immediately think of medieval cranks trying to turn lead into gold. That is an unfortunate misconception because, in practice, alchemy was actually the first experimental mineral science, employing methods such as dissolving, extracting, purifying, crystallizing, and distilling. What is less widely recognized, and what took me months to understand, is that beyond mineral chemistry, its deeper aim was restoration: the restoration of matter, of water, and of the human body.
Among the major streams of Western alchemy, the Hermetic tradition became one of its most enduring and influential, shaping how generations of alchemists understood nature, transformation, and the aim of the Work. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, it treated nature as intelligible, unified, and governed by hidden correspondences between visible and invisible processes. From that tradition emerged the concept of the Great Work.
At first, I misunderstood that phrase, thinking it referred to a text or a body of teaching. In alchemy, it refers instead to a process: the transformation of matter from a corrupted or base state into one that is purified, ordered, and incorruptible. The material expression of that process was the medicine, tincture, or elixir sought by the alchemists—what later traditions would call the Golden Elixir or Elixir of Life.
I, too, had always thought of alchemists as cranks chasing wealth. As I began to study them, I quickly learned that the “gold” they kept referring to was metaphorical rather than literal, denoting purity, coherence, incorruptibility, and restored life. Their obfuscation of the word gold was intentional, to protect themselves, as they were trespassing into forbidden territory: natural transformation, healing, creation.
Appearing foolish was one way to escape persecution. Their heavy reliance on symbolism also served a separate, practical purpose: discouraging untrained imitators from injuring or killing themselves with mercury vapor, arsenic, acids, and explosive distillations. The gold metaphor itself functioned as a filter. As one historian put it, “the alchemists hid nothing; they wrote plainly, but only for those capable of reading.”
And that last clause matters more than it sounds like it should. Because alchemical language is difficult in a different way. Chemistry is difficult because it is technical. Alchemy is difficult because it is built to mislead a literal reader. It is written to defeat the reader who assumes words behave like modern nouns. The same term can shift meaning from one line to the next while remaining faithful to the underlying process it is describing. If you read these texts literally, you get a false map. But you can also get a false map by making the opposite mistake: correctly identifying what a term refers to in one passage, then assuming it must carry that same meaning everywhere else.
That, to me, is where the real difficulty began, because it was only after the scientific picture had taken shape that I began to see how such language might be describing something real.
Entering the Labyrinth
We arrived at the Rock–Water Circuit through the modern scientific literature, following biochemistry, geochemistry, hydrology, and origin-of-life research wherever the evidence led. Piece by piece, a core architecture came into view: a complete cycle in which mineral chemistry formed slowly in rock, was opened and mobilized by water, entered living systems, returned over long geologic time to rock, and eventually reentered water to begin the cycle again. That last recursive movement—from life back to rock, and from rock back into water—is where MB and I believe our work extends current origin-of-life science.
During that same period, MB kept drawing my attention to older texts—alchemical writings, fragments of Scripture, symbolic passages he believed preserved knowledge of mineral processes, sulfur chemistry, and the larger planetary order. At first, I did not know what to do with them. My attention was fixed on the modern literature and on determining whether the full cycle we thought we were seeing could be justified on scientific grounds alone.
Only after that modern picture had sufficiently taken shape did I begin looking more seriously at what MB had been showing me for months. By then, I had a more detailed understanding of the physical processes he believed the texts described, but little fluency in the symbolic language of alchemy. It took far longer than either of us expected to determine what each word meant literally in context. But little by little, decoding word by word, the resemblances he had intuited stopped feeling superficial or coincidental.
The symbolic language began resolving into specific, repeatable physical operations. That distinction matters because throughout what follows, when I use the term Art, I mean the chemistry of Shimanishi’s laboratory process, and when I use Nature, I mean the larger Rock–Water Circuit as it operates in the world.
The chapters that follow trace that realization step by step. This is the point at which the book enters the labyrinth: in alchemy, it refers to a deliberately constructed interpretive maze designed to defeat anyone who reads the text literally. It took MB and me months of failed readings, internal contradictions, cross-checking, and repeated returns to the primary texts to find a way through it.
That labor was justified only because what stood at the center was the possibility that a real, repeatable, material process had been recognized, encoded, and transmitted across history long before modern science possessed the means to describe it in its own language.
But before giving the reader the key we eventually built, I need to show why these texts resist literal reading so aggressively in the first place.
The Failure of Literal Reading
Every word that appears central is capitalized—Sun, Moon, Sulfur, Mercury, Body, Spirit, Stone—and nearly all of them fail on first contact. At first, I assumed I was reading poorly. Then I assumed the texts were inconsistent. Then I assumed they were mostly mystical poetry, and that any “mapping” I thought I saw was simply pattern matching. But the failures had a peculiar quality. They were not random. They were the kind of failures you get when a wrong assumption has been baked into the whole problem from the start.
Of all people, I should have recognized that, given that my university degree was in mathematics. You can do a great deal of math with a wrong assumption. You can even get answers that look right, for a while. And then, two pages later, the whole structure collapses. That was my experience of the Hermetic canon.
Mercury was the worst offender. I read it as a material. Then as water. Then as a mineral. Then as “something shiny.” Each reading worked briefly, then failed elsewhere. The same was true for Sulfur. The same was true for Body. Even Stone, of all words, refused to sit still on a single meaning.
I would get excited. I would think, this is it. This time it fits. And then I would carry that “solution” into the next paragraph, only to watch it fall apart.
The resolution came when I stopped demanding that the words behave like labels and started treating them as roles. That is because alchemy does not use nouns the way modern language does. It uses what I came to understand as role-grammar: nouns are used to describe functions or processes, not things or people. However, that understanding solved only half the problem, because they are often used as nouns as well. Thus, the interpretive rule I came up with was that nouns describe functions or properties of those functions—except when they don’t. Not super helpful. Thus, readers get lost when they decide too early what a word refers to and then force that meaning in other contexts.
Shimanishi’s work had given us a concrete operational system, which became the reference point against which these texts could be tested. At first, the parallels felt uncanny, even strange. But the deeper we went, and the more rigorously we checked each term against the chemistry and against the extract itself, the more Shimanishi’s work kept allowing us to move forward.
That allowed us to discover other alchemical “tricks.” We figured out that they also use the same words to describe the same physical operation, even when the step in the process changes. The operation remains constant, while the material it acts upon changes. Once that became clear, more confusion fell away. Nothing fundamentally new was being introduced.
Another difficulty, and one that took us much longer to appreciate than it should have, was the sheer repetition of the alchemical texts. They do not simply describe a process or a property once and move on. They return to the same operation again and again, sometimes in the very next sentence, but under altered metaphors, altered terms, or altered emphases. To a literal reader, this feels like constant movement, as though new steps are being introduced at every turn. In reality, the text circles the same act, describing it from different symbolic angles until the reader either sees the operation beneath the language or becomes completely lost in the language itself.
To make this more concrete, let me give an example of the kind of interpretive mistake that kept derailing me. One such mistake forced me to revise an earlier assumption I had made about a line from The Emerald Tablet, which you will meet soon: “The Father thereof is the Sun, the Mother the Moon.” I had initially treated those as stable referents, mapping biotite onto the Sun and vermiculite onto the Moon. But that reading began to collapse as soon as I followed the process more carefully. The language was not pointing to fixed substances. It was pointing to roles within an interaction.
In this framework, the Sun does not name a rock. It names the activating principle: the force that penetrates, transforms, and brings about change. In the core chemistry we had identified, that role is most consistently fulfilled by sulfur, whether expressed as sulfated rainwater in the atmosphere or as sulfuric acid in Shimanishi’s laboratory.
The Moon, by contrast, names the receptive body: the matrix that receives that action, opens, and yields its contents. In this cycle, that role can apply both to the closed mineral body, biotite, and to its opened form, vermiculite. What changes is not the role but the condition of the body receiving the work.
Seen this way, “the father is the Sun and the mother the Moon” is not assigning fixed identities. It is describing an interaction. The active principle meets the body that has already been opened, transformed, and made to yield its essence.
Body and Spirit often work the same way: not as fixed substances, but as role terms that can shift with scale and context.
The words had not been inconsistent. I had been trying to hold them still.
Then we arrive at the three capitalized terms that sent me deepest into the labyrinth: Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. Because these words are so difficult and so unstable in the texts, it helps to state their core meanings as simply as possible at the outset.
• Sulfur is activation: heat, oxidation, transformation
• Mercury is mediation: mobility, dissolution, transport
• Salt is fixation: structure, stability, persistence
In Nature, sulfur appears as sulfur-bearing water over time, while Mercury refers to the mobile aqueous mineral medium moving through stone—that is, again, water. In Art, Mercury is the mercurial solvent doing the extracting and carrying—that is, sulfuric acid.
It gets better. Later, when we reach The Six Keys of Eudoxus, it uses both the words Sulfur and Mercury to describe the role of sulfuric acid. It took us months to see that.
Again, the words move but the process does not.
What follows is the interpretive framework that MB and I arrived at after months of sustained study, failed readings, internal contradiction, cross-checking, and repeated return to the primary texts. To our knowledge, no prior interpretation has mapped these terms with this degree of operational and material precision. They stand or fall by whether they hold together across texts, chemistry, and scale. What allowed any of this to move beyond speculation was that we did not approach the texts empty-handed. We already possessed detailed knowledge of a real process against which their language could be tested.
The Key We Had in Hand
As described earlier in the book, we started with a reasonably accurate and specific understanding of the method Shimanishi used to extract minerals from rock. Or so we thought. For several months, we had one crucial step wrong: we assumed he started with biotite, or black mica, when in fact he started with vermiculite derived from biotite. Once we realized our error, many interpretive mistakes were resolved.
Over long geologic periods, acidic, sulfated rainwater gradually weathers biotite, leaching its potassium and transforming it into a more porous, hydrated vermiculite. Sulfur participates throughout that opening, helping drive protonation and destabilization that allow water to enter and initiate the internal activation of its mineral chemistry.
Shimanishi did not begin with that closed parent mineral. His material was vermiculite: biotite already weathered into the receptive, expanded form from which mineral essence could be drawn. In his laboratory process, sulfuric acid did not perform the first geological opening. It acted on the mineral only after Nature had already prepared it.
Another crucial step took us a while to understand. Shimanishi learned that the vermiculite had to be dried first. If sulfuric acid were applied while interlayer moisture remained trapped within the vermiculite, the mineral would shatter violently. But once the vermiculite had been air-dried, the acid could enter “without violence”—a phrase you will soon meet—and draw its mineral essence into solution.
The result was a clear aqueous extract that leaves vermiculite’s aluminosilicate framework intact while releasing its mineral chemistry in sulfated ionic form, with iron, sulfur, and aluminum at its core, alongside magnesium, calcium, manganese, titanium, and a broad spectrum of ultratrace and rare-earth elements.
That sequence—a closed mineral body, its opening through sulfur and water, the removal of all moisture, the entry of a mediating fluid, and the extraction of a concentrated, sulfated mineral essence—was the operational key we had in hand from the beginning, though we did not yet fully understand it. Once Shimanishi’s method became clear to us, the alchemical texts began to resolve into a coherent process, even when the same sequence appeared under different names. That is how the texts first became readable.
With that framework in place, the three principal texts no longer appeared as disconnected curiosities, but as differently angled descriptions of the same underlying process.
A Novel Interpretive Framework
Taken together, the three alchemical texts we will present in the following chapters span the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and, in our reading, describe the same underlying chemical processes across nearly a thousand years of expression.
What I am about to present is not the conventional understanding of these works, nor something I assume will be accepted simply because I wrote it. It is the interpretation MB and I arrived at by repeatedly testing these texts against Shimanishi’s process and the larger Rock–Water Circuit.
To our knowledge, these texts have not been interpreted in this operational and materially specific way before. I say that carefully, because I do not mean that no one has ever seen part of what we are describing. Many readers have recognized isolated themes, symbols, or structural features. What appears not to have been done is to map the three works together onto a coherent physical process with this degree of chemical, operational, and cross-textual precision.
In our reading, The Emerald Tablet presents the larger recurring cycle: the world-order in which above and below, ascent and descent, generation and return are held together. The Six Keys of Eudoxus presents the guarded sequence by which a mineral essence is brought forth from stone: the openings, dissolutions, separations, washings, coagulations, and fixations. Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom by Theosophia Sternbuchta presents the portrait of that essence once produced: the medicine, tincture, or elixir, and its properties. The next three chapters walk through these readings one text at a time, not in historical order, but in the order most useful for decoding them.
I invite these conclusions to be criticized, tested, and weighed against alternative explanations. If they fail, we will readily revise, refine, or abandon them. If they hold, then something long preserved in symbolic language has become newly interpretable. Either way, what follows should be read as an argument to be examined, not a doctrine to be accepted.
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Now, I know why vermiculite so interested be as a young child. We used to start seedlings in peat pots filled with it.