The Wise Artist: What It Takes to Complete the Work
After months of studying Shimanishi’s work in science, ancient texts, and Scripture, I now see him as someone shaped by failure, patience, reverence, and the kind of insight that can't be forced.
My exploration of texts from antiquity did more than help me interpret the chemistry of Shimanishi’s work. It also changed the way I saw Shimanishi himself.
At first, I was looking for insight into rock, fire, water, dissolution, and coagulation, and whether a material operation was hidden within symbolic language. But as I moved deeper into The Six Keys of Eudoxus, another portrait began to emerge. The text was not only describing the work. It was describing the kind of person capable of completing it.
That is what this post is really about. Not another attempt to decode a whole text, but a closer look at the places where the ancient portrait of the “Wise Artist” seems to map onto Shimanishi with unusual precision: his privacy, persistence, reverence, failures, and willingness to stay with one mystery until it finally yielded.
One of the most striking passages in all of The Six Keys occurs in the Second Key:
“He who knows how to sublime the Stone philosophically, justly deserves the name of a philosopher, since he knows the Fire of the Wise, which is the only instrument which can work this sublimation. No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire, and this powerful agent, which works all the wonders of the Art: he who shall not understand it, and not know how to distinguish it by the characters whereby it is described, ought to make a stand here, and pray to God to make it clear to him; for the knowledge of this great Secret is rather a gift of Heaven than a Light acquired by the natural force of reasoning; let him, nevertheless, read the writings of the philosophers; let him meditate; and, above all, let him pray: there is no difficulty which may not in the end be made clear by Work, Meditation, and Prayer.”
I have read this passage many times, and each time it moves me because it points to a part of the journey that work or study cannot guarantee. Yes, one must read, work, meditate, observe, and remain devoted to the work in front of him. But Eudoxus says openly that knowledge of the Secret Fire can only come as “a gift of Heaven.”
The Sixth Key then gives that same truth a lived dimension:
“The Sixth Key teaches the Multiplication of the Stone, by the reiteration of the same operation, which consists but in opening and shutting, dissolving and coagulating, imbibing and drying; whereby the virtues of the Stone are infinitely augmentable.”
“I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom, for want of knowing the secret fire of the wise . . .”
“But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
“. . . which makes to run out of this plant (dry and withered in appearance) a water which wets not the hands, and which by a magical union . . . is dissolved into a viscous water—into a mercurial liquor, which is the beginning, the foundation, and the Key of our Art.”
The work succeeds only through repetition, patience, failure, return, and a willingness to remain with the same material long after easier explanations have failed.
Reading that, I began to think of the text differently. The description of what the work requires struck me as a path that selects for only a certain type of man. Those who lack patience abandon the work. Those who stay are changed by it.
The writings can point, warn, and test, but they do not carry the practitioner to the end. The practitioner has to read, work, handle the materials, get it wrong, return to it, and remain with the problem long enough for insight to be received.
The Wise Artist
What affected me most is the extent to which the text’s portrait of the “Wise Artist” appears to map onto Shimanishi. Everything I have learned about him points in the same direction: intensely private, never seeking recognition, prayerful, and almost unimaginably persistent.
The author knows what it takes and expresses pity, “I should much bewail,” for a man who, after discovering the correct starting rock, “having known the true matter,” then “spent fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation,” “without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice,” for lack of knowledge of the “Secret Fire.”
Shimanishi lived almost that exact pattern. He worked with rock, heat, water, and acids through repetition, failure, refinement, and return for nearly fifteen years. He had one stone, one mystery, and, like Eudoxus, the discipline to remain with it until it finally yielded its answer.
Other aspects of Shimanishi’s character deepen the resemblance. I have repeatedly been told that Shimanishi spoke of his discovery with reverence, not ownership, describing it as “a gift from our Creator.” At the only international conference he attended that I know of, during a lecture, he is said to have remarked, “Working with this material is like working with Angels,” which is not the language of a typical scientist.
If the Great Work is, as Eudoxus says, “a gift of Heaven,” then The Six Keys is describing not only a sequence of operations, but also the sort of person who can carry such a sequence through to completion: one marked by discipline, reverence, and a willingness to labor for years without recognition.
By that measure, Shimanishi comes astonishingly close. Even more strikingly, he never publicly revealed his Secret Fire, as the operational details remain known only to the men of the Shimanishi-Kaken company he left behind. That fact, too, places him within the circle that the 17th-century Eudoxus describes: “No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire. “And that is only the first convergence.
Another is the path he describes. Given that The Six Keys was never translated into Japanese, Shimanish could never have used it as a guide, let alone understood it if he tried. He instead began with nothing other than a basic understanding that acids could dissolve minerals, and a hope that those minerals could be rendered active in water. From there, he worked alone, without a theory and without any assurance that the work would succeed. If these texts describe real processes, and I believe they do, then Shimanishi appears to have arrived at them independently, through experiment, devotion, and sustained attention to a single rock.
The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the procedure. Shimanishi independently devised one that matched it.
Sternbuchta’s Letter on the True Stone of Wisdom describes the properties of a substance. Shimanishi produced a substance with those properties.
Both Eudoxus and Sternbuchta describe the character of a practitioner who might succeed, one shaped by long obscurity, long labor, and long submission to a problem that refuses quick answers. Shimanishi’s life fits that description with extraordinary precision.
Any one of these points could be questioned in isolation, but taken together, they add up to something much harder to refute.
What makes this even more striking is that the insights and convergences we identified moved in two directions. Our scientific research helped us progress through the ancient texts, while the texts themselves suggested connections that shaped our understanding of modern science. Even now, I am not sure I could fully separate which parts of the final Rock–Water Circuit Theory came from the modern scientific literature and which from the texts of antiquity.
At this point, I do not think these convergences can be honestly dismissed as either a forced mapping, a retrospective construction, or a self-reinforcing interpretive framework. The consistency with which the texts map onto the science, the process, the product, and the person points to something way more serious. It suggests that these texts documented real knowledge of a material operation, what it produces, and the type of person required to bring it to completion, even if that knowledge was preserved in symbolic and guarded form.
That, to me, is the true significance of what has happened on this journey (a journey that is not over yet, by the way). I do not know how often, or if ever, history has presented a reciprocal illumination between ancient writing and modern practice. I only know that these documents appear to be real records of a scientific and material understanding that long predated the language we would now use to describe it.
What these chapters suggest is that “the labyrinth” described in alchemy has, in fact, been successfully navigated before, both in the older world and in modern times. But even that is not the full extent of the convergences gathered here.
The Fifteen-Year Echo
What first appeared in Shimanishi’s life began to echo again in MB’s.
Soon after he began importing Themarox directly from Shimanishi Kaken, MB enjoyed immense early success. Then, suddenly, in 2010, his business was nearly destroyed by the launch of a coordinated disinformation campaign. What followed, in his own words, were fifteen years of obscurity: years of persistence, study, and quiet labor.
He was able to make a living, and the business grew modestly over that period, largely within Amish farming communities across the Midwest, where farmers came to value Themarox for what they saw in their fields: stronger crops, less pest pressure, and a resilience they considered essential to their agriculture. But he never regained the wider distribution and awareness of Themarox that he had once achieved.
That pattern matters. The figure described in the Six Keys was not a man at the center of things. By the nature of the work, he was set apart, working outside recognition, outside status, and often in prolonged isolation. That recurring pattern seems, within these texts, almost to function as part of the work itself.
The same is true of companionship. Sternbuchta states it plainly:
“. . . to maintain you and your companion (because one alone cannot do the Work) then the thing becomes idle.”
That line immediately made me recall a moment in the first months of our collaboration, when MB told me that he had once said to a colleague that he needed someone who could help him move the work forward, someone, interestingly enough, whose background and character were oddly similar to mine. Our first meeting together, a dinner, ran for hours. We have been connected daily, if not many times daily, ever since. Later, as the work deepened in complexity, breadth, and difficulty, I came to feel the same thing from the other side. One day, after calling him to discuss a highly nuanced and esoteric connection to a scientific insight we had recently discovered, a sudden insight came upon me that I shared with him: there was no other person in the world I could have had that conversation with.
MB laughed, reminding me that for almost the entire twenty years before our collaboration, he, too, had had no one who could truly engage with the material at the level his decades of work had brought him to. We came to this from different directions, with different training and different instincts. Yet as I write these words, I cannot help feeling that the paths leading to our eventual intersection had been set long before.
Our work did not move in one direction. He would pour out decades of accumulated observations, intuitions, and partial syntheses, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in fragments, and they would immediately trigger questions that sent me into both modern and ancient literature. What I found there would then force him to clarify, defend, expand, or rethread what he had long held, while at other moments my research would uncover a missing link that fit directly into one of his older lines of thought.
As the book drew toward its close, I was struck to find that this kind of partnership is also stated in The Six Keys: “without the help of a faithful friend, one remains undoubtedly in this labyrinth.”
Both the Letter from Sternbuchta and The Six Keys suggest that, at some point, the work may require another person—someone capable of seeing, clarifying, or correcting what the solitary practitioner cannot.
MB then recalled an old line from Proverbs that he had long memorized: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The word "iron" hit hard for me, literally, not metaphorically, because it described something foundational to our work. We had already spent months tracing its centrality in the Rock–Water Circuit, in ISAW, and in the deep-to-surface gradient that feeds life through mineralized water, so to encounter that same word at the point where the texts speak of companionship and sharpening struck me as more than incidental.
Then there is a coincidence that MB and I both found amusing: my name, Pierre, literally means rock, while his, Matthew, means gift of God. Forgive me for the forced mapping, but I get a kick out of the fit between our names and two conditions that seem to recur throughout The Six Keys: a source rock and something received.
But there is something even more powerful than these convergences: at one point, the text itself appears to have altered the course of MB’s life.
When the Text Entered the Work
Long before I entered this work, MB had once attempted to work through the same problem Shimanishi had already solved. He was introduced to Themarox in 2004, and soon after, he started a business selling it at health and wellness events.
His first encounter with an alchemical text occurred afterward when an acquaintance showed him the Letter from Sternbuchta. Given his unusually high level of discernment, he immediately recognized it as a serious text relevant to his work.
Soon after, he was forced to make a decision that put his business in peril. He cut off contact with his only source of Themarox because he could no longer tolerate the man’s dishonesty and unreliability. As a result, MB found himself with little choice but to attempt the extraction himself.
Working with vermiculite sourced from Canada, he applied the same general principles and succeeded, at least in part, in producing an aqueous mineral extract viable enough to sell and sustain a business.
And yet, even in that success, there were discrepancies he could not ignore. The color was different. The behavior was different. Most importantly, it did not clarify water as the original. He initially understood these differences in conventional terms—variation in mineral composition, especially iron—and continued forward because what he had made was real, useful, and not infrequently validated by others.
Then, almost two years later, he encountered The Six Keys of Eudoxus.
He has told me that the First and Second Keys immediately struck him as describing a real process, one he recognized as corresponding to both Shimanishi’s work and his own efforts. But there was one line that cut through everything else with unusual force: “one must make use of the citrine Mercury,” together with the warning “not to be deceived on this point.”
That word—citrine—stopped him. The color of what he had made was clear. And he knew the color of Shimanishi’s extract: golden-yellow. He understood the passage to mean that, among the possible liquors or “Mercuries,” one had to begin with the correct one, and that it had to be golden-yellow.
Another line struck him just as strongly: “even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career . . .” He read those phrases as warnings—not simply about error, but about direction.
In that moment, although he knew his extract was useful, he began to doubt its truth.
He concluded that what he had produced, however real and however effective, was a partial approximation of the substance described in the texts. Out of conviction, he stopped.
What makes MB’s story especially striking is that his trajectory runs in the opposite direction from the one in The Six Keys. The Keys are written for someone trying to discover the “Secret Fire.” MB, by contrast, had first come into contact with the true substance through Shimanishi’s work, knew what his Secret Fire was, and then he attempted to reproduce it himself. In that sense, the text did not lead him toward the Golden Elixir. It led him back to it.
The author, in that Sixth and last key, as he reminisces on his life, describes the same situation;
“But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
Even after the practitioner comes to know something of the Secret Fire, he will fail in his “first career.” MB had decided to stop working with the material rather than attempt to refine his method further. That is when he reached out to Shimanishi Kaken in Japan. From the outside, that decision could have looked like a retreat. In reality, it was realignment: a willingness to accept that he had come close to the process described in the texts, but had not yet arrived at the true substance.
The Point at Which the Work Became Personal
I should say something here that I am not entirely comfortable saying, but I do think the path I have found myself on bears mentioning, because it now seems to me to echo, in its own much smaller way, the same pattern I have been tracing in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB.
By the time I reached this chapter, I had spent nearly nine months almost entirely inside this work. What began as an intrigue with Shimanishi’s extract widened into a much larger journey through mineral science, water, agriculture, geology, and hydrology, and only then narrowed into alchemy, where the work became more demanding still—an extended cycle of reading, failed interpretations, returns to the same passages, and a kind of fixation on a single problem that did not release its hold.
What also struck me was that this stretch of work was unlike any other period in my life. I do not think I can say that strongly enough. I had already lived through a highly demanding academic and medical career—two decades in one of the most intense specialties in medicine, years of teaching, writing, publishing, and working at a pace that ICU colleagues even remarked on repeatedly. That was followed by five years of uninterrupted pressure during Covid, trying to save lives while fighting institutions that weren’t.
Yet, these nine months required an unprecedented amount of labor and concentration. Outside of seeing patients and trying to preserve time with my wife, I was almost continuously at my desk, reading, researching, writing, and returning to the same material. It was narrower, more isolating, and, in many ways, far more consuming than anything I had done before.
Another new dimension for me was that I did not reach this point through speed, cleverness, or by expertly reading, understanding, and organizing information. I was instead forced to stay with the material for a long time, asking the same questions again and again, and working through repeated failed interpretations. The easier readings gave way first. Only then did deeper meanings begin to appear. This dynamic happened on the science side, too. From Volcanoes to Vitality is undergoing its 5th revision, driven by the iterative developments of its core conceptual framework and theory.
What I am trying to say is that, at a certain point, I began to feel trapped in the same pattern of work I was trying to describe.
I am not claiming equivalence with Shimanishi, nor with the author of The Six Keys. But the path described in these texts—prolonged effort, isolation, and repeated failure before finally emerging—began to look like a requirement for the work itself.
Ultimately, I arrived at a point where the texts changed from the disconnected historical artifacts that they initially appeared to be into a coherent record of something real and still alive.
Note to readers:
What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, what these texts described centuries ago. Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) is a diluted form of his extract, and is part of my effort to bring this mineral chemistry into practical use. For those interested in encountering the work beyond the page, Aurmina is its modern expression.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
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