I'm going to engage my psychology brain and say that the word "alchemy" conjures up some... interesting pictures when you are first exposed to it. Unless you've already looked into this topic; my bets are on crazy people and/or scammers in the medieval times, maybe attempting to turn lead into gold, maybe pseudoscience, or something along those lines. But this book is surely teaching you that everything, yes, everything deserves to be given a fighting chance, evaluated on its merits and faults, with self-awareness and full knowledge of the subject!

So, what is alchemy? To oversimpify things, i would say it's making things better. Or transmuting things. And to overcomplicate (and maybe give an incomplete yet more descriptive description) i would say it's transmuting "lesser" (lead) things into perfect things (gold) through three (or four) phases and twelve (or fourteen) stages, depending on who you ask; there are a few good books on this which go into more detail. And if you ask me, there's three phases. But anyway;

Is making lead into gold to just make loads of money what alchemy is/was? No. The goal was making the philosopher's stone, which was said to be able to turn things into gold; Though don't get it twisted; there were people who  definately tried to use "alchemy" to scam people, but there are people who try to use anything to scam people. This idea that alchemy was just a way to make loads of money through either making gold or being paid money to research making gold by kings or nobles is generally not true and also i would say close or even in the category of "so untrue and misinfomed it's slightly insulting because it shows you haven't done any research".

And oftentimes there is the kind of reduction of alchemy to "its just the predecessor to chemistry from when we were stupid and didnt know anything" but this isn't really true either. Alchemy is less concerned with the exact atomic numbers of things and descovering everything and is moreso to do with pureness; making things more "pure". 

There are a few different things you can do with alchemy; spiritual alchemy, mental alchemy, and physical alchemy. Physical alchemy is much different in practice nowadays, it's mostly working with herbs and plants. There is definately some cool stuff to look into around physical alchemy if that does interest you. 

The phases are usually the concepts people work with with alchemy, they were what was used historically, though i prefer to use the stages as a better tool of explaination, the phases are important. The phases are nigredo, the blackening, then albedo, the whitening, and finally rubedo, the reddening. A few searches about these will send you into a very interesting rabbit hole.

But anyway; to give a good idea of what alchemy is and what its parts are (so that maybe you could even apply them if something comes up in which it seems like a good idea to do so); i'm going to give a (very general) overview of each of the phases, what happens, and why, what it can do, the physical aspects, the spiritual aspects, whatever is most important about each one.

Though again remember this is a wild oversimplification and you can and should do your own research on this if you want to.

The 7 Stages

1. Calcination

The first stage, calcination, is literally burning the thing; burning away impurities. To create something new, we have to destroy the old. And whatever outward form the thing presented as being is gone.

2. Dissolution

The ashes are then dissolved into liquid, the rigid softens, the hidden parts that have been afraid to come to the surface show up.

3. Seperation

Extracting the pure from the impure, seperating the fine elements from sediment; what is genuine and what isn't. And by seperating things out, they can be seen more clearly.

4. Conjunction

In the conjunction, existing elements are combined to create a new union, integrating things, harmonies between polarities. A kind of marriage happens here, and as a result of that marriage, an unborn "child" is formed.

5. Putrefaction

In putrefaction, or fermentation, the old self decays and decomposes, and the rebirth of the new self, new life, the "child of the conjunction" is born. The forces of the spirit from the heights descend and enter the purified thing below.

6. Distillation

In distillation, "sacred fire" is used to boil the mixture to further purify it and remove the rest of the impurities.

7. Coagulation

The final stage is coagulation, where the liquid begins to thicken and become more solid, the true self solidifies, balance is achived.

Spiritual Development

I want to go over one other important thing to mention in of spiritual and self-development in general, but important to say because many people miss it. 

It will hurt, and you will come to find out that many parts of this are much easier said than done. It will effect you to the core, When i, or other authors talk about these things, which are understood by the reader well but (unless experienced before) not fully because these things are (all at the same time) spiritual archetypes, experiences, and intellectual concepts.

When something really bad happens, it's easy to fall into this kind of "god has abandoned me" mindset, but, when these things happen, it's important to realise that, actually, this is it! This is the bad which happens which means the good can happen later. It's oftentimes hard to even fathom the idea that something good can happen after this bad, and that's not to say "it gets better" in the kind of almost cheesy way you hear all the time, but to say that you'll see, and this is me telling you, so maybe a few weeks, months or years after you might think something along the lines of "that weird book might have been right.."

And that's not to glorify or romanticize bad things; bad things are bad, and when we need to be very realistic otherwise we risk a kind of luciferic impulse where bad things aren't actually bad and "i don't care about this situation because it is beneath me", and also toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is dangerous. We're kind of working with the same principle as the positivity exercises here; we need to work with/through the bad, not try to avoid or ignore it, and do what needs to be done, in terms of you and in terms of the situation; but life is not a prison where bad things happen often and never get better. Even though it might not feel like it.

But the more i try to explain something which is wholly experiential the more random little details i have to explain and the less adequately i can explain what i mean, so i'll leave it here;

You might already know what i'm talking about here, and if you don't, you'll see.

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