What is Alchemy?

New Dawn Magazine: Superficially, everyone knows what alchemy is. It is an outmoded practice for changing base metal to gold. Although it was in its way an important precursor to present-day chemistry, today it is little more than a discarded superstition.

To understand alchemy in more than a simplistic way, one needs to take into account several strands of the alchemical tradition. They interconnect and interpenetrate, and to the outsider, the noninitiate (such as me), their relations are impossible to sort out in any kind of complete way. The first is the best-known kind: practical transformation of natural substances. Metals are not necessarily the best place to start...read more>>>...