Think of them like poetic Rorschach tests: their power lies not in what they tell you, but in what they stir loose from the bottom of your internal well.

Alchemists weren’t just chasing gold; they were pursuing perfection—of substance, of soul, of knowledge itself. Their laboratories were temples, their retorts instruments of prayer, and their failures as sacred as their successes.

Today, a sentence sits on a page like a fossil in shale—useful perhaps, but dead. But to the magician-scribes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, writing was alive. Not metaphorically—literally.