Can someone explain me the concept of the “alchemy” subject?
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Riddles are easy when you know the answer. When people were experimenting with alchemy, they did not know any answers that we do. They did know that certain things could be combined in certain ways and have different properties than the original material. For example, copper and tin can be combined to form brass which is substantially different from either copper or tin. The Greeks had developed a form of napalm, steel had been invented several times, people had started discovering chemical properties of things like urea and various acids. The ultimate hope was that you would be able to turn lead, a heavy, soft, gray, relatively worthless metal into gold, a heavy, soft, yellow expensive metal. Intuitively, this seems like a good approach – They seem to be about the same sort of thing and we know metals can be changed from one form to another.
The first problem was as a group – Alchemists were all incredibly suspicious of each other and were convinced that THIS time they would find the magic combination. This meant that they only rarely wrote things down and if they did it was usually encoded. This meant that their knowledge died with them. The second problem is that it means everybody is starting over from scratch every time. You can’t say that so-and-so tried this and it didn’t work so I’ll try something different you’re always trying to figure out every possible combination by yourself.
Second, they are dealing with a backlog of every known religion, every snake-oil salesman, every quack physician and starting to wonder is there truth in this or not? Many of the alchemic formulas involve symbols or prayers to various deities admist the elixirs and various metals – because for all they knew, maybe praying to a certain demon or writing a certain incantation would actually work. Throw in some good neurotoxins like mercury and lead, both alchemic favorites, and you are in for a wild ride of more or less randomly mixing different things together and seeing what happens. (For what it’s worth, we still have the same quackery today, this bottled water costs more because it was exposed to the light of the full Gemini moon while we sang quantum blessings at it and it will align your positive chakras better than regular water and is more energetic).
The greatest underpinnings of the modern age are the scientific method and open dissemination of ideas.
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