Are You an Alchemist?

The Alchemist by Mattheus van Helmont

Alchemy is to Science as Paganism is to Religion. The former were foundational for the formalized institutions that would come later. And now that we have these big, shiny things, we laugh off alchemy and paganism.

What's interesting is that most people are still alchemists. They aren't very calculated and don't tend to follow a methodology and certainly aren't trying to prove anything. They're just trying to make bread and wash their hair and soothe their fussy children. Science might claim to have solved those problems, but we've known those answers for thousands of years.

It's pretty clear to everyone that nuanced domestic tasks cannot be boiled down to a five step program. Just a few months ago, I realized that'd I'd been washing my hair wrong, for as long as I've been doing that, probably to my follacle's detriment. I had no idea what it actually felt like to have completely cleaned my hair, but as far as I knew I was doing everything right. I thought my hair looked bad because there was something wrong with me, but turns out it was just a build-up of oil and minerals in between visits to the salon.

It gets me wondering what other things I'm doing by the book which are actually not right. This is a classic case of you don't know what you don't know. I couldn't have even come up with a question for my hair stylist to figure this out. It was actually an accident, as I was trying to figure out why my skin was dried out and itchy. As it often does, Reddit provided answers.

There's just so much knowledge that we acquire through experience, so many little tips we pick up from the people in our lives. It'd be silly to try to put these kinds of things in a book, or write instructions for handling every last edge case. People either figure things out, or they don't and find ways to cope. So, we just tinker our ways through life.

All of it, from the learning to the cope, is alchemy. A scientist may be able to study things, and simplify the situation in order to validate a hypothesis. But even if they make progress, they almost never come close to creating grand theories of reality. And even then, for you and me, the grand theories don't hinder our daily lives. We learn about gravitational force well before we learn the theory, if we ever do at all.

So, how do we get people to embrace alchemy in it's fullness? Is it as simple as telling them that every time they bake bread they are performing a magical act? Does there need to be a sustained crisis of faith in Science? Can we just point to successful alchemists and tell people that they can have that too if they just do a little tinkering of their own?

Or do we need to go further upstream? Do we need to get people in touch with their senses so that they're capable of perceiving small changes? At the end of the day, reveling in your vitality is a pretty powerful force. People are often unaware of the severity of their situation until it has improved. Can we somehow prime people to anticipate this kind of thing?

All I know is that embracing the spirit of alchemy has done amazing things for me. And I know for a fact it does for others too. I'll leave you with a tangential Twitter thread I wrote earlier, which is ostensibly about alchemy: https://twitter.com/boldlybryan/status/1617219971842547716