Chapter XI: One Mechanism, Many Tongues
From Hermetic texts to the National Science Foundation, the pattern is consistent: life inherits an engine the Earth was already running. The tongues differ; the structure does not.
Eventually, I stopped treating alchemy as a separate subject. It became clear to me that it was describing the same engine as modern geochemistry, cosmology, and physics. The Emerald Tablet sketches the long cycle in Nature. Sternbuchta envisions the behavior of an extracted essence. The Six Keys zoom in on the exact steps of a process in the Work. Shimanishi, without any of those texts, extracted a phase of that cycle with his hands using modern techniques and technology.
So I stepped back and asked a simpler question: how many traditions, in how many languages, have been pointing at the same underlying mechanism all along?
And the oddest part is where that trail leads first: straight into the center of mainstream science, at the National Science Foundation, and from there, to mica.
The Engine Before Biology
Helen Hansma, a biophysicist at UC Santa Barbara who has also served as the longtime director of the National Science Foundation, proposed something that would have sounded outrageous not long ago: that life did not begin in ponds or vents, but between sheets of mica.
Her “Mica Hypothesis” suggests that layered silicate minerals formed natural nano-reactors, thin, charged compartments that concentrate ions, structure water, and generate mechanical energy through flexing and shear. These spaces, she argues, could have provided everything early chemistry needed before cells existed at all.
When I first read her work, I stopped short. Mica does not just host life in her model, it prepares it.
It supplies:
Structured water films
Potassium-rich lattices that mirror modern cells
Charge separation and confinement
Mechanical energy capable of driving polymerization
In other words, before biology existed, the Earth had already solved the problems biology would later inherit. The Emerald Tablet says this plainly: that which is above is like that which is below. Hansma simply translated it into biophysics.
Japan Never Needed a Tablet
Around this time, I also began wondering whether Shimanishi’s worldview had been shaped by something analogous to the Emerald Tablet. I knew he had never encountered Hermetic texts as the timelines simply do not overlap. So I started to explore how Japanese antiquity and theology spoke about life, matter, and order. I was looking for the underlying beliefs that shaped how the natural world was understood and portrayed, especially what was taken as a given rather than argued into existence.
What I found surprised me.
