# data[].attributes.body
This article tells of alchemy in Egypt, spreading to the Greeks, India and china's own interpretation and how the Arabians introduced alchemy to Europe and a basic over view of their differing core beliefs. a major pseudoscience red flag here is ancient wisdom, an example being that the Chinese alchemists believed stone was the "pill of mortality",  i would not personally take stone. also references to "Qigong, to manipulate the chi or life force of the body" relating to mystical energy.

# data[].attributes.body
In the center of the seven-pointed star is the gray center representing earth, the green circle for water, and the blue circle of clouds for air, while the yellow or golden seven-pointed star represents fire. There are letters around the seven-pointed star spelling out the word, Prima Materia, the First Matter. representing the beginning of alchemists process. Arranged around the star are the seven circles which each has a seven-pointed star within them. Each of these circles corresponds to one of the seven planets of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, and Luna. (http://www.jwmt.org/v1n9/imagery.html)

# data[].attributes.body
by Jeff Kovacevich

# data[].attributes.body
This video covers the Three primes, the four elements, the 7 vital metals associated with planets and corresponding human essence, the 7 steps to the alchemy of transformation and overall mainly the spiritual aspect and way of life through theses concepts that people attained higher states of awareness. "converting the lead or lower states of consciousness into gold (higher states of consciousness)"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Fundamental Teachings of Ancient Alchemy and Hermeticism

# data[].attributes.body
The alchemists prayer is a mantra to begin an experiment and invoke the power of some almighty force into the work.  First reason to believe is antigenicity, calling upon the ultimate godhead for power and guidance. there is also an emotional connection by whoever wrote the article because he begins by saying " All true Philosophers of the natural or Hermetic sciences begin their labors with a prayer" suggesting a bias in terms of authenticity to those who do not pay homage to the most high

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read scriptures and important texts about Alchemy

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains how alchemy branches into modern science and is worthy of credibility, not to take away the genius of scientists at the cusp of novelty but respect their roots.  one of the limitations and flaws mentioned in this article is that alchemists recorded their data and finding in a type of symbolic and metaphorical making it unreliable to accurately understand. the red flag proof by verbosity, he uses a lot of examples but very little facts are provided, an example being paragraph 4, I'm not sure how this experiment worked on a scientific level so i don't see its relevance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Throughout much of the 20th century, the academic community had little patience with alchemists and their vain efforts to transmute base metals into gold. Any contemporary scholar who even dared to write about alchemy, historian Herbert Butterfield warned, would "become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe."

But, in the 1980s, some revisionist scholars began arguing that alchemists actually made significant contributions to the development of science. Historians of science began deciphering alchemical texts-which wasn't easy. The alchemists, obsessed with secrecy, deliberately described their experiments in metaphorical terms laden with obscure references to mythology and history. For instance, text that describes a "cold dragon" who "creeps in and out of the caves" was code for saltpeter (potassium nitrate)-a crystalline substance found on cave walls that tastes cool on the tongue.

This painstaking process of decoding allowed researchers, for the first time, to attempt ambitious alchemical experiments. Lawrence Principe, a chemist and science historian at Johns Hopkins University, cobbled together obscure texts and scraps of 17th-century laboratory notebooks to reconstruct a recipe to grow a "Philosophers' Tree" from a seed of gold. Supposedly this tree was a precursor to the more celebrated and elusive Philosopher's Stone, which would be able to transmute metals into gold. The use of gold to make more gold would have seemed entirely logical to alchemists, Principe explains, like using germs of wheat to grow an entire field of wheat.

Principe mixed specially prepared mercury and gold into a buttery lump at the bottom of a flask. Then he buried the sealed flask in a heated sand bath in his laboratory.

One morning, Principe came into the lab to discover to his "utter disbelief" that the flask was filled with "a glittering and fully formed tree" of gold. The mixture of metals had grown upward into a structure resembling coral or the branching canopy of a tree minus the leaves.

What intrigues Principe and his fellow historians, though, is the growing evidence that the alchemists seem to have performed legitimate experiments, manipulated and analyzed the material world in interesting ways and reported genuine results. And many of the great names in the canon of modern science took note, says William Newman, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington.

Robert Boyle, one of the 17th-century founders of modern chemistry, "basically pillaged" the work of the German physician and alchemist Daniel Sennert, says Newman. When Boyle's French counterpart, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, substituted a modern list
of elements (oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and others) for the ancient four elements (earth, air, fire and water), he built on an idea that was "actually widespread in earlier alchemical sources," Newman writes. The concept that matter was composed of several distinctive elements, in turn, inspired Sir Isaac Newton's work on optics-notably, his demonstration that the multiple colors produced by a prism could be reconstituted into white light.

Other scholars have at times responded to this idea with outrage. Principe was once confronted at an academic conference by a member of the audience who was "literally shaking with rage that I could defame Boyle in this way." But younger academics have taken up alchemy as a hot topic. The early revisionist research, says Principe, "cracked open the seal and said 'Hey, look everybody, this is not what you thought it was.'"

In a mark of that new acceptance, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany, will present a show, beginning in April, that-along with alchemy-influenced artworks, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Anselm Kiefer-will include an exhibit on Principe's "Philosophers' Tree" experiment.

Does this new view of alchemy make the great names in the early history of science seem more derivative and thus less great? "We were just talking in my class about the rhetoric of novelty," says Principe, "and how it benefits people to say that their discoveries are completely new." But that's not how scientific ideas develop. "They don't just sort of come to someone in a dream, out of nowhere. New scientific ideas tend to develop out of older ones by a slow process of evolution and refinement."

From that perspective, the scientific revolution may have been a little less revolutionary than we imagine. Better to think of it as a transmutation, like the alchemists' quest to change lead into gold.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alchemy May Not Have Been the Pseudoscience We All Thought It Was

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout much of the 20th century, the academic community had little patience with alchemists and their vain efforts to transmute base metals into gold. Any contemporary scholar who even dared to write about alchemy, historian Herbert Butterfield warned, would "become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe."

# data[].attributes.body
A fire is lit beneath a crescent moon creating steam, in alchemy this picture refers to the process of distillation, removing water from solutions to create a more pure form of the substance you were trying to isolate. (http://www.jwmt.org/v1n9/imagery.html)

# data[].attributes.body
Perfect man is from the German alchemist Johnann Basil Valentine’s Azoth of the Philosophers, published in 1659.
here is a lot of symbolism going on here but all in all it is man surrounded by all the aspects that may meditatively or physical come in to play during practice for example the sun and the moon, male and female energy, the sun can also be a symbol for the element fire and gold.