The Stone That the Builders Refuse Shall Be the Head Cornerstone

Just as MB had been the one who first led me into alchemy, he had also been doing something else in parallel, almost from the beginning. While I was buried in Hermetic texts, trying to learn their grammar and meaning, he was sending me passages and fragments from Scripture in messages, in side conversations, in the margins of everything else we were doing.I resisted going there, not because I dismissed it, but because I was already too deep into alchemy. It had my full attention, and I knew that if I opened Scripture too soon, it would distract me from a path that kept making connections, and I wanted to see how far I could go.And yet, even while I avoided it, I started to suspect more and more that it would be fruitful. Everything I was learning to see in alchemy—cycles, materials, purification, collapse, and return—MB kept insisting was already present in Scripture. Not metaphorically. Literally. I knew I would have to face that claim eventually.Once we closed the Hermetic canon, I turned toward Scripture. I became quickly intimidated by the challenge of moving through that much text without losing the line of inquiry that had brought me there in the first place.When the Tool Matched the QuestionThis work did not require artificial intelligence to generate ideas or supply conclusions. However, it did require it to hold them in continuity. What made this possible was not speed or cleverness, but the ability to keep following the same question across geology, chemistry, biology, ancient texts, and modern data without losing the thread. Before this, the problem was simple: no human mind could hold all of that at once. AI made it possible to pursue the same line of inquiry across numerous disciplines and thousands of sources without losing continuity. I was able to ask the same simple questions about rock, water, salt, fire, and return without fatigue or forgetfulness. The same relationships that had always been present could finally be seen together rather than sequentially.I did not set out to use AI to cross boundaries. I used it the way one uses a microscope or telescope: to extend perception beyond the limits of unaided human attention. What surprised me was not what appeared, but how cleanly it aligned once those limits had been overcome.One World, Two ArchivesWhat that continuity made visible was that Scripture and alchemy were never describing different worlds. Once I turned toward Scripture with the same materials already in view—rock, water, salt, fire, spirits—I found myself reading across a second archive. The language was different. The world it described was the same.MB had opened the door to Scripture as a symbolic record of creation, and AI made it possible to move through that record at scale and speed. I could finally ask the blunt questions I had been inching toward for months. Where does Scripture speak of rock? Of stone? Of clay? Of water emerging from rock? Of salt, fire, brimstone, return to dust? What startled me was how little effort it required. The repetitions surfaced immediately. They recurred across books, authors, and centuries with remarkable consistency, and I remember stopping, sitting back, and feeling my pulse change, because by then it was no longer a single correspondence but an accumulation.Scripture named the same elements consistently, framing them in the contexts of creation, breakdown, purification, and renewal.Very quickly, I began to recognize the same physical processes I had already pieced together across geology, biology, chemistry, hydrology, and related sciences, and the overlap felt concrete and specific, grounded in my now deeper understanding of Earth’s cycles after months of scientific research.The major difference lay in the mode of description. Alchemy tracks the recurring process of formation, breakdown, purification, and renewal through matter and transformation. Scripture presents that same process through narrative, law, prophecy, and covenant, using the same materials while embedding them within events and history. Alchemy maps the structure of the cycle, while Scripture preserves its passage through human history. Both describe how order forms, collapses, and is restored through the same underlying movements of the world.By then, we had already assembled the science supporting theRock–Water Circuit Theory, and the connections between the Hermetic texts and that circuit had been firmly established. What I still needed to know was whether Scripture recorded evidence of that same circuit as well, and I became convinced that it would.And it did. In Scripture I found water emerging from rock, salt as covenant, fire as refinement, and dust as both origin and return. I was reading these passages as materially specific as much as symbolic. The texts read as if they carried assumptions about how matter is formed and about the conditions on which life depends for stability, renewal, and endurance.What Scripture provided were repeated material descriptions conveyed through symbolism, and those descriptions became far more intelligible once placed beside what modern science now knows. Scripture did not supply the detailed chemistry. Modern science did. What the ancient texts recorded was the sequence of the process—its unfolding, its breakdowns, and its renewals—while modern science supplied the mechanisms that explain it in material terms.The problem, then, was never accuracy. It was separation, because the ancient world documented the pattern while modern science identified the mechanisms, and once those two were seen together, I started to wonder why they had remained separated for so long.What No Single Discipline Can SeeModern scientific methods describe these processes with a level of detail unimaginable to the authors of Scripture. The chemistry is exact, the measurements are precise, and the mechanisms have been tested and are real. But they are most often described in isolation—geology here, biology there, chemistry somewhere else—not because broader questions are forbidden, but because modern science is structured that way for maximal advancement.But following a process across numerous scientific domains, to this point, has been too laborious.  It is slower, messier, harder to fund, harder to publish (I will report back on that shortly), and far more difficult to evaluate. Coordinating a Byzantine network of concepts, methods, and literatures across fields is inefficient compared with staying in one lane and going deeper, so most scientists, quite reasonably, choose the easier path: know one thing extremely well, and know more of it tomorrow.Modern scientific advances are increasingly rigorous, but they remain local. The result is fragmented knowledge. At one point, it struck me that what we were calling the Rock–Water Circuit was assembled from half a dozen scientific disciplines, and I could not think of another example in modern science that did the same. It began to seem possible that what we were doing was, at least in that sense, unusual, perhaps even unprecedented. That alone explains a great deal, but not all of it, because beyond the fragmented nature of modern science lies another limit, less visible and more consequential.At first, I thought human limitation, disciplinary fragmentation, and cognitive load were the boundaries I had been pressing against. But there was another one—deeper, quieter, and more absolute.The Boundary Beyond the BoundaryWhat eventually clarified itself in my mind was something I had already sensed without fully articulating: modern scientific inquiry is constrained by an unspoken restriction that runs beneath all disciplines, namely, that explanation must stop short of saying that nature was created, ordered, or intended by God. In Chapter VII,“The Questions Science Won’t Ask,”I examined the consequences ofmethodological naturalism, which came to dominate in the nineteenth century: the rule that scientific explanation must restrict itself to testable, observable phenomena and set aside questions of purpose, even when the order and functional coherence of living systems make such questions difficult to avoid.I crossed the boundary of methodological naturalism before I even knew what it was. I still remember the first dinner MB and I ever had together, our first meeting in person, when he began telling me what he thought he was seeing in the old texts and where he believed this work was leading. I remember feeling a little overwhelmed, almost incredulous, because he was effectively suggesting that I was brushing up against something “supernatural,” and I suspect the few drinks I had that night helped me take it in without fully grappling with it. The conversation ran for hours, covered a great deal of ground, and that particular moment dissolved into the rest of the evening. For months afterward, our focus remained where it had begun, deep in the biochemistry of minerals.By the time I turned seriously toThe Six Keys, I knew I was studying something that did not belong wholly inside conventional science, yet the crossing itself went by almost unnoticed. I did not experience it as a dramatic rupture. I took it up the way I would have taken up a dense paper on mitochondria, reading closely, pushing on the details, and trying to see how tightly the pieces fit. Once I became convinced that those texts contained descriptions of Shimanishi’s work with a specificity that should have been impossible, the whole thing still felt, in one sense, like an intellectual exercise, a puzzle I wanted to push as far as it would go. That was not because it lacked excitement. Quite the opposite. More than once, after one decoding or another, I would call MB almost breathless, half-delirious with excitement and shock. But even then, as a former mathematics major, I think I was still experiencing it more as the satisfaction of solving a hard problem than as a man sitting still with what solving it might actually mean.That, in retrospect, is what matters here. I did not set out to challenge methodological naturalism. I did not even know it had a name, and I certainly did not think I was wandering into philosophy or theology. I was following mechanisms. I kept tracing the same mineral-water cycle across domains, across timescales, and across texts, ancient and modern, without first asking which questions were permitted. I did not begin this work with a conclusion about design. I simply refused to rule it out in advance, and that single choice altered the shape of what could appear. If the Earth is the product of intelligence, then coherence, efficiency, and self-perpetuation should be visible in its most fundamental systems. If it is not, then whatever order appears should be fragile, accidental, and short-lived.Then something unexpected happened. The relationships between modernity and antiquity did not fragment when they crossed those boundaries. They aligned. The same cycle modern science could describe with extraordinary precision was already present in ancient texts—recognized, named, and preserved without the chemistry, but with astonishing fidelity to the process itself. I could only see that coherence once both limits were loosened: once mechanisms were allowed to speak across disciplines, and once design was no longer ruled out in advance.Once that became clear, a line of Scripture I had encountered countless times began to register in an entirely different way.The Stone the Builders RefusedThe boundary I had crossed hit home for me one day when I came across a line I had heard countless times before and, alongside it, an interpretation that struck me.“The stone that the builders refuse, shall be the head cornerstone.”—Psalm 118:22 (KJV)Traditionally, the cornerstone is understood as referring to Christ. Here, I am reading it in a different but related way: as the refusal of something foundational, i.e., a belief in God as our Creator, by those responsible for building.I had heard that line before—sang it along with Bob Marley for most of my life—but I had never really stopped to ask what it meant. I discovered that the builders are the ones who decide what counts as foundational: religious authorities, scholars, and experts. To refuse a stone is to judge it unsuitable, irregular, or incompatible with the prevailing model. Yet the stone chosen for the cornerstone fixes the alignment of the entire structure, determining its orientation, load-bearing capacity, and long-term stability. If a critical stone is rejected when it should have been selected as load-bearing, the entire structure is compromised from the outset.At that point, the verse began to read like a description of what I had already been seeing in modern science. Methodological naturalism, as I had understood it, functions precisely by refusing certain categories at the outset, especially intention, purpose, and design. In that reading, “the stone” is the possibility that the Earth has been designed, and the rejection of that possibility is not ancient at all, but relatively recent, hardening in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Darwinian chance became the default explanatory frame for biology and even cosmology.I had already pondered the implications of believing we had discovered a similar mechanistic and structural relationship across geology, hydrology, chemistry, and biology. What had initially looked fragmented had resolved into a closed, self-perpetuating system. The idea of design started to look like a true cornerstone. What would modern science allow those alignments to point to when laid out together? I knew that science could describe each instance in isolation. Whether it could follow those alignments across domains to their implications rested on the question of whether it would reject the stone.What remained was to gather the scriptural evidence carefully enough and lay it out clearly enough that the implications would be hard to ignore. If modern science were to continue rejecting the stone, I wanted to make that as difficult as possible.I invite those interested to read my next post and let me know how I did in terms of “defending the stone”: “Water From The Rock Is More Than A Metaphor.”Note to readers:What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir”: rock opened, minerals rendered mobile, and water transformed through contact with that chemistry.Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.Primora Bioemerged from that same effort, delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.Subscribe nowFrom Research to Practice - Links Below ImageAurmina– The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking WaterPrimora Bio- Bringing Life Back To SoilLeading Edge Clinic- Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 StatesThe War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the PandemicThe Blueprint of Life- The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and HealthFrom Volcanoes to Vitality-The Untold Story of Asao ShimanishiThe War on Chlorine Dioxide- The Medicine That Could End MedicineMedical Musings- A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: Scripture and alchemy began to read as two archives of the same world. Once the evidence began to come into focus, the rejected stone looked increasingly like the cornerstone of reality.


How Different Civilizations Described the Same Natural Reality

At a certain point, researching alchemy no longer felt like an esoteric pursuit. Once I began to recognize that the texts were describing the same Rock–Water Circuit we had arrived at through modern literature in geochemistry, cosmology, biology, and physics, I could no longer dismiss them.That led to a simple question: if this level of insight was recorded here, where else might it appear? What other traditions, texts, or cultures might contain comparable observations about the processes underlying the Rock–Water Circuit?And the oddest part is where that trail led first: straight into the center of mainstream science, to the National Science Foundation, and from there to black mica.The Engine Before BiologyHelen Hansma, a biophysicist at UC Santa Barbara who also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, proposed something that would have sounded outrageous not long ago: that life did not begin in ponds or vents, but between sheets of mica.Her “Mica Hypothesis”…Read more

Summary: The Rock–Water Circuit began showing up everywhere: in alchemy, Scripture, black mica origin-of-life theory, and Japan’s instinctive reverence for mineral water, volcanic stone, and natural order.


His Mission: Saving Lives and Souls With Chlorine Dioxide

Missionary Daniel Healy treats a child with malaria in a hospital ward in Guinea-Bissau in 2011. ( Photo by Scott Hodges )

 Part 4 of a series on chlorine dioxide by Mary Beth Pfeiffer. Here are Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 .

 When he is in the United States, Dan Healy is a substitute gym teacher in his home city of Bakersfield, California. But when he sets foot into a tattered city or village in West Africa—in sojourns that last as long as his money does—he transforms.
 Since 2007, in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Senegal, this Christian missionary has likely saved more lives in a single week than the finest American doctor may in a year.
 If Healy is a twenty-first century Clark Kent-turned-Superman, his superpower is chlorine dioxide.
 He may not scale buildings in a single leap. But armed with a simple pathogen-killing molecule—two atoms oxygen, one atom chlorine—he quells typhoid. He brings toddlers back from the ravages of malaria, which annually kills 425,000 African children under five years old. He takes out asthma, tapeworms, fungal infections, and whole-body rashes. He saves teeth to boot. All this with an oxidizing substance with almost no side effects that is used with government blessing to purify the water of 12 million Americans .
 Granted I cannot verify all of these reports by Healy, who first told his story as “ Dave the Missionary ” in a 2021 documentary on chlorine dioxide called The Universal Antidote . But in addition to detailed interviews with Healy, who decided to forego anonymity for the first time, I was able to speak with key witnesses to his work.
 A missionary couple who visited a pediatric ward with Healy in 2011 in Guinea-Bissau, a small country on the Atlantic Ocean south of Senegal, said they were “amazed” to see malaria quickly resolve in ill children after one chlorine dioxide treatment. Malaria infection of the brain is commonly fatal to 15 to 25 percent of children, even with hospitalization and advanced care.

 An assistant who worked for Healy for six years told of successfully treating high-ranking officials in Guinea-Bissau’s ruling party—and many others—with CD for malaria, typhoid, and even diabetes. The word got out, he said, and the report that started spreading was: “That clinic is good. They have good medicine.”

 A senior consultant physician in Sierra Leone, Dr. Kojo Carew, said he attended a meeting in 2025 with Healy and the country’s Deputy Minister of Health after which Healy was permitted to treat with chlorine dioxide and other natural remedies as long as he followed regulatory rules.

 Subscribe now

 Dr. Carew, who is an Examiner of the West African College of Physicians, was actively involved in treating Ebola patients and, moreover, using chlorine dioxide to prevent infection in their families during the 2014 outbreak in West Africa. The pestilence in Sierra Leone was traced to the funeral of a beloved natural healer; some 365 mourners died from Ebola, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent.
 In his hospital, Carew’s Ebola patients were treated with an ozone and oxygen gas mixture. In the community, however, Carew, who founded the West African Society of Integrative Medicine, gave chlorine dioxide to quarantined families in three of the nation’s sixteen districts. There, hundreds and likely thousands of people had been exposed to Ebola by family members who had been taken to hospitals.
 “Those in quarantine were given a single dose of CD which appeared effective in stopping the spread of the disease,” Dr. Carew told me. Other districts that did not similarly treat residents in quarantine “had a lot of problems with people coming out positive.”
 As a result of that experience, Carew said he would like to see “an outside researcher” study the use of chlorine dioxide.
 Although chlorine dioxide played a heroic role then against Ebola, it is still not an approved medical treatment in Sierra Leone, or elsewhere.
 Healy knows this. He stays “under the radar,” avoiding local boards that monitor malaria, for example. He relies on a wide circle of contacts and carefully navigates the rules of African survival.
 “When people arrive on the verge of death,” for example, “I would pay a taxi to take them to a hospital and would not treat them,” he said. “When somebody dies, it wouldn’t be out of the question they could bring brothers and just kill us.”
 Share

 Missionary Dan Healy talks to patients in a hospital in Guinea-Bissau who saw him treat children in a malaria ward with chlorine dioxide and requested the treatment for themselves. Healy treated children there for several years as an independent healer without hospital credentials. Many quickly recovered, which was confirmed by other missionaries, including Karen Hodges (right, in green). ( Photo courtesy Dan Healy )

 Dying children, brought back
 Healy is not a doctor. He is a guy who went to Africa in 2007 with two weeks of tropical disease training, the inspiration of books he’d read on natural medicine, and an unshakeable faith. He did not know how that would play out until he got malaria at the start of his first mission, and he thought he might die.
 “I had CD with me but I didn’t trust it. I thought I’m not gonna take it and went with quinine and anti-malaria drugs,” he told me. Ten days later, vomiting, feverish, and losing sight, hearing, and sleep, he decided at 2:30 in the morning, “I gotta try my own medicine.”
 Within perhaps an hour, Healy fell into a restful sleep. The disease broke; it was over. To convince himself it had really worked, he later gave thirty-three malaria-positive patients chlorine dioxide in water, then tested them again the next day, he said. All were negative.
 Healy had discovered first-hand why NASA in 1988 first called chlorine dioxide the “universal antidote [that] killed bacteria, viruses, and fungi on or shortly after contact, yet was nontoxic to humans, animals and plants.”
 The light went on for Healy, an independent Christian missionary without affiliation to any organization: “God gave me the idea to start a clinic as a way to get into villages I couldn’t access without CD. I could help people—spiritually and physically.”
 From 2010 to 2015, Healy would visit overcrowded, understaffed malaria wards at the main hospital in the capital of Guinea-Bissau.
 Without formal authorization but with learned clinical experience, he offered six to seven drops of chlorine dioxide in a cup of water to sick children at various malaria stages, some with bleeding lips. “You can tell just before they die,” he told me. “There’s a certain look. They can’t focus on you.”
 Again and again, he saw delirious children quickly recover, “laughing and running around,” with parents “crying and hugging” their youngsters—and him.
 “Just where there’s no hope, you go in and you give them something that cost me a penny per application, and you just save, save the kids,” he said. “There’s no better feeling.”
 In his first ten years of treatment, Healy said he used just forty pounds of the dry material called sodium chlorite that when activated by citric or hydrochloric acid makes chlorine dioxide. That was enough to treat perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 people, he said, which may be why CD is not on any list of recommended pharmaceuticals.
 It’s cheap. It’s widely available, including online. It can’t be patented. NASA’s 1988 article foresaw “broad potential” for chlorine dioxide in lung cancer, skin diseases, and herpes. That did not come to pass.
 Scott and Karen Hodges, missionaries from Bakersfield, accompanied Healy on his rounds in the infant malaria ward in 2011. Although they had made other trips as missionaries, they were unfamiliar with, and leery of, chlorine dioxide.
 “Some (children) wouldn’t drink it,” Scott Hodges said of the hospital visit. “Their mothers were skeptical of foreigners.” Some did take it and in a short amount of time—“a heartbeat” he said at first, but then reconsidered—the treatment kicked in.
 “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. How quick—it was like immediate—like a day. My wife and I were amazed.”
 Karen Hodges texted me on her post-treatment observation: “Hours later or the next day, not exactly sure, but seeing that child after treatment . . . there was a tremendous difference,” she wrote. “The child was probably healed, the mother of the child was so appreciative, very heartwarming to see.”
 Scott Hodges was impressed enough of chlorine dioxide’s benefits that he successfully used it, along with other natural remedies, when his late-stage cancer relapsed in 2015. He had been told to call hospice.
 “Eleven years later, I’m still here,” he said.
 Medicine and Jesus
 Curious Outlier , as he is known, is a critical care nurse who produced what is perhaps the seminal documentary on chlorine dioxide in 2021 that included Healy’s story. He was compelled by it. I was too.
 “If it wasn’t legit, Muslims would not be inviting a Christian into their communities and allowing the gospel to be brought in with it,” he said. “They told him that he could share Jesus as long as he brought his medicine. Seeing is believing.”
 Zito Da Silva, Healy’s assistant at his clinic in Guinea-Bissau from 2009 to 2015, recalled a woman in her mid-twenties who had recently developed a full-body skin condition that was oozing a watery substance. She was very sick, he said. “She thought she was going to die.”
 Da Silva, who was in charge while Healy was away, had treated serious illnesses before, including malaria and typhoid fever, mainly using chlorine dioxide and other natural remedies like neem leaves and moringa.
 But he was scared by the enormity of the woman’s condition, for which he had no name. Two other clinic workers were similarly horrified.
 The first thing the staff did was say a prayer.
 Then Da Silva mixed a chlorine dioxide solution that he applied to her skin. That night, he had awful dreams. Within perhaps a week, during which she returned for topical and oral treatments, the woman’s skin cleared.
 “She got healed,” said Da Silva, thirty-seven years old and living in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I reached him by phone. “God did a miracle,” he said. “That medicine is very effective,” a word he used repeatedly in our conversation.
 In a similar but not identical case— documented in photographs—another African woman’s disfiguring rash was also reportedly resolved with topical CD application.
 Healy and the people who work for him are part medic, part missionary. “It’s hard to say what I love more,” he said. “I love them both.”
 “They are interested in your medicine,” said Da Silva, who is now earning a computer science degree. “Therefore, they listen to you about Jesus.”
 Of note, the clinic’s patients included many government officials, among them the national Assembly president and the former prime minister, both Muslim.
 Share
 CD denied before
 Five years and a pandemic later, Healy, now sixty-eight years old, is still saving bodies, souls, and, yes, teeth, in Africa. A five-minute chlorine dioxide rinse—four drops in an ounce of water—routinely resolves teeth abscesses and infections. He uses it on his own teeth to keep the dentist at bay.
 When Healy returns to Africa in July, he will likely move his clinic in Koidu, Sierra Leone, because of pressure from local doctors to pay unaffordable “oversight” fees. Similarly, he moved around after the assassination of the Guinea-Bissau president in 2009 and things changed. “They are on you. Paperwork became difficult,” he said.
 The current plan is to open shop in the neighboring country of Guinea, with the help of a long-time Australian friend. There, Healy believes leaders of the large Fulani and Housa tribes may be open to his medicine—support he desperately needs.

 Healy, an itinerant African missionary who goes where people want his healing services, is planning to start a clinic in Guinea. He is shown here with his office manager, Victor, in Sierra Leone.

 Healy follows in the footsteps of others who have observed the power of chlorine dioxide.
 In the 1980s, as reported in the book The War on Chlorine Dioxide , a U.S. engineer was tasked with building a water purification facility in remote Nigeria to contain a cholera outbreak. When he mistakenly used too much chlorine dioxide to clean the water, the engineer told the book’s author Dr. Pierre Kory, he received reports that not only was cholera under control, but malaria was being eradicated. He and his team thought the government would be ecstatic. They were instead drummed out of the country.
 Decades later, a 2012 Ugandan Red Cross Society study documented the resolution of malaria parasites within a day in the blood of 154 people treated with chlorine dioxide. Although the project was sanctioned and videotaped, its findings were subsequently disavowed .
 In both episodes, chlorine dioxide apparently risked upsetting the tenuous social order that is Africa. For Nigerian officials, the grim reality was that malaria was nature’s way of checking human population and if cured would lead to mass starvation.
 “We didn’t have a solution to the big problem,” the engineer on the 1980s project told me for an article in March. “How are you going to feed the kids? I’ve agonized over this, lost sleep over this.”

 Dan Healy‘s assistant, Victor, mixes chlorine dioxide for a patient during a home visit in Sierra Leone.

 How to help
 Healy hopes that by revealing his name for this article, others might be encouraged to contact him ( dhealy3@gmail.com ) to learn what he knows and help spread and continue his work.
 Healy doesn’t fear even Ebola, which is on the rise in Africa. “I wouldn’t even sweat it,” he said.
 “God has protected me and he’s using this medicine to do crazy good stuff.”
 RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: In Africa, missionary Dan Healy has used chlorine dioxide for almost two decades to heal illness while also preaching the gospel. “It’s hard to say what I love more,” he said.


The Interpretive Key to the 2,000 Year Old Hermetic Canon

Up to this point, the focus has been on decoding the underlying operation described symbolically within three select texts from the Hermetic canon. What follows is the product of that decoding: a set of operational definitions that render the wider canon legible by anchoring its language to a real material process.
 To our knowledge, this is the first operational reconstruction of the core roles encoded across the Hermetic and alchemical canon.
 I am aware that the magnitude of that claim may not appear credible to most. Alchemical texts have been read symbolically for so long that another “interpretation” can sound like one more speculative reading added to an already crowded field.
 However, we have gone far beyond any other single interpretation because our decoding framework applies to all texts in the canon. The key that I am about to present to you has been tested across multiple texts, multiple interpretive angles, and challenged against multiple AI engines.
 Until the key can be broken or shown to fail within these or other Hermetic texts, we believe it provides the most concrete evidence to date that ancient writings preserved operational knowledge of sophisticated geochemical processes, both in Nature and in the laboratory.
 Despite the guarded symbolic language in which that knowledge was preserved, the processes being described — specifically the roles, materials, sequence, and product — can now, through our framework, be understood in modern scientific language with surprising precision.
 That would make this more than a set of literary interpretations. It would make it an operationally interpretive key.
 For those wondering why I have detoured into this material, or how it relates to health, the answer depends on the larger argument of both books. This chapter provides a major pillar of evidence for the conclusion of The Blueprint of Life , while From Volcanoes to Vitality explains why this same mineral-water chemistry matters biologically, agriculturally, and environmentally. If both of those arguments are ever understood, this detour will no longer be remembered as one.
 At the risk of brief repetition, and because the table that follows requires it, I should restate the role of each text. The Emerald Tablet , The Six Keys of Eudoxus , and Letter from Sternbuchta on the True Stone of Wisdom describe geochemical processes from three different angles: the order of the geo-atmospheric mineral-water cycle in Nature, the sequence by which its core chemistry is brought forth through Art, and the properties of the minerals which power it. Their language shifts, repeats, and sometimes appears to contradict itself because the process was being guarded. Once that process was reconstructed independently of the texts themselves, the symbols began resolving into specific meanings.
 One interpretive rule matters before the reader turns to the table. In alchemical texts, terms such as Sulfur, Mercury, Salt, Fire, and Stone do not name fixed substances. They name roles within a process.
 The table below does not attempt to catalog every possible referent. It presents one internally consistent decoding of those roles onto a specific, real process: the Rock–Water Circuit and its laboratory extraction in Shimanishi’s work , as described in Sternbuchta and The Six Keys . In this framework, sulfur-bearing atmospheric chemistry and sulfuric acid are treated as different expressions of the same activating role.
 These two scientific constructs allowed us to see that the same word could carry different meanings depending on the stage and context of the operation, and that those meanings remained coherent across the texts. Again, the table was only made possible by anchoring the symbols to two processes that could be observed, tested, and reproduced: one in Nature (the Rock-Water Circuit Theory ) and one in Art ( Shimanishi’s extraction) .
 The one material central to both of the above is the rock called biotite, or black mica. It is that parent mineral that the Emerald Tablet describes as “the one thing all things arose from.”
 The interpretive key recently underwent a final refinement when we discovered that The Emerald Tablet is not just describing the surface weathering of biotite. It also describes the larger geodynamic cycle by which this mineral body is formed deep below the Earth’s surface, lifted toward the surface, opened by water above, released into life, and eventually returned to depth through burial and reformation. “As above, so below.”
 The later alchemical texts narrow that planetary process into Art: they begin with the already opened body, vermiculite, and describe the operation by which sulfuric acid draws forth its concentrated essence.
 Table 1. The Ariadne Key: Role Concordance Across the Hermetic Canon
 The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the sequence of operations by which a mineral essence is drawn from its rock parent and brought into concentrated form. The Letter from Sternbuchta describes the resulting essence: what it is like, how it behaves, and what it does once produced. The Emerald Tablet describes the natural cycle itself: the cycle in Nature by which biotite is formed, opened, released, circulated, and returned to form, only to re-enter the cycle. The table below does not force identical vocabulary across the canon; it shows how the same underlying operation appears under different symbolic emphases.

 Canonical interpreters of alchemy have long agreed on the structural logic of these texts: the Stone is the product of conjunction, not the substrate; Mercury is a principle, not elemental metal; Sulfur is an activating force; and the Secret Fire is a penetrating solvent rather than literal flame. Across psychological, historical, and esoteric schools—Jung, Newman, Principe, Fulcanelli, and Canseliet—there is broad agreement on these points, even where interpretations diverge.
 What our work advances is the material specificity of the terms. The canon was trying to describe a real process, but it did so without naming the substances identifiably. That is why the language stayed open for centuries. Until the process and its product were realized in the world, the symbols could not be fixed to a single meaning. What was missing was the operation itself.
 In 1977, after almost 15 years of determined effort, Shimanishi’s successful method provided the missing reference. Through his work with vermiculite-derived mineral chemistry, he devised an extraction process that produced a substance whose properties correspond strikingly to what the canon had long described under different symbolic names. Once that reference existed in the modern world, the language of the texts could finally be anchored to a working operation rather than to speculation. It was only through Shimanishi’s work that the canon became legible.
 The Three Works
 There is one more feature of this work that needs to be addressed. We return to a line in The Six Keys that I originally interpreted in Chapter XI as referring to the three steps in the process of producing the Golden Elixir:
 “But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”
 The Six Keys went over these three steps “or works” repeatedly, using constantly shifting language and metaphor: 1) biotite weathering to vermiculite, 2) sulfuric acid penetrating the porous stone, and 3) mineral essence being released.
 I am no longer sure that is the line’s primary meaning. As I sat writing this chapter, reflecting upon the coherence of these three texts, separated by hundreds or thousands of years, another strange resonance occurred to me: our journey through the Hermetic canon was also confined, almost unbelievably, to just three works , as that line above state s.
 The Hermetic and alchemical canon is vast—far beyond the three texts decoded in this book. In fact, neither MB nor I have ever knowingly engaged with any other texts from the Hermetic or alchemical traditions. At one point, I tried to get a sense of how much of that literature remained outside our attention, and the scale of it was staggering. And yet the number of texts that actually entered our lives, held our attention, and ultimately yielded a coherent framework were just these three: The Emerald Tablet , The Six Keys of Eudoxus , and The Letter from Sternbuchta .
 That would not be especially remarkable if these were the three most obvious, most widely read, or most accessible texts in the tradition. But they are not. The Emerald Tablet is foundational and famous, yes. However, The Six Keys is known only within a small alchemical community. It has no mainstream scientific or academic visibility, is not commonly taught, cited, or discussed, and almost no educated reader has ever heard of it. If that is not obscure enough, it is almost impossible to describe the level of obscurity that has been accorded to Sternbuchta .
 It is so obscure as to be scarcely accessible at all and, in our case, only re-entered the work through an archived trace after more than two decades of inaccessibility. And yet it was precisely this most marginal of the three that proved indispensable. Without Sternbuchta, I do not think we could have defended the coherence of the whole. The Tablet gave the cycle. Eudoxus gave the guarded operations, but it was Sternbuchta that gave the missing bridge: the nature, value, and behavior of the essence once brought forth. Remove any one of the three, and the structure weakens. Remove Sternbuchta in particular, and I do not think it holds.
 That leaves me with a question I cannot fully answer. Why these three? Why, out of such a vast literature, did the work remain so narrowly confined? Why did MB and I, coming to this from different directions and at different times, engage no other text—nor ever seek to? And why did it turn out that only when these three were finally placed together did the canon begin to yield a coherent, material, and operational interpretation?
 Finally, why does this line from the Six Keys now affect me more and more deeply each time I read it?
 “But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”
 I will not be answering that now. My understanding of why these texts appeared in our lives comes later in this series, when the work’s larger understanding comes into view. At present, I will only record the improbability of it. A line that speaks of “three works” that “ have a great deal of analogy to each other ” and which “ designedly speak in equivocal terms ” now strikes me as providing an uncannily precise description of the journey through the Hermetic canon that we just completed. Perhaps that is nothing. Perhaps it is only one more coincidence in a project already full of them. However, I find it impossible to dismiss it as an accident.
 What the Texts Are Describing
 Although neither Sternbuchta nor The Six Keys of Eudoxus uses the phrase “Golden Elixir,” both texts describe the same class of substance that Western alchemy more commonly calls the Philosopher’s Stone, the tincture, the medicine, the Universal Medicine, the Water of Life, or the elixir of life. In Chinese Daoist alchemy, the corresponding idea is named more directly as the Golden Elixir, or jindan . I use “Golden Elixir” here as cross-traditional shorthand, not as a literal quotation from these texts.
 The support for that identification is not the name, but the properties. Sternbuchta calls it a “Universal-tincture,” “ our true medicine,” and “an unending treasure,” “powerful enough… to restore the human body,” and describes its “multiplication in quality” and “multiplication in quantity.” The Six Keys calls it the “Stone of the philosophers,” “Water of Life,” “precious liquor,” “Universal Medicine,” and “precious juice” drawn from the Stone. Across both texts, the same pattern recurs: a hidden essence brought forth from stone, rendered active through the Work, multiplied in virtue, and capable of restoration.
 That is why, in the chapters above, I have used “Golden Elixir” as the simplest name for the substance these texts appear to describe.
 The Work Completed
 Nearly two millennia after the cycle in Nature first appeared in the alchemical tradition, the core chemistry it described appears to have been realized as a tangible material that can be produced, carried, and applied: a concentrated mineral essence corresponding operationally to the sequence described in The Six Keys of Eudoxus and behaviorally to the properties described in Sternbuchta’s letter.
 What had been missing until now was the Rock–Water Circuit Theory , a scientific framework that could integrate deep mineral formation, geodynamic ascent, sulfated weathering, water chemistry, sulfur cycling, mineral lattices, biological uptake, and geologic return into a single coherent process. Once biotite is understood as the imprisoned body, vermiculite as the naturally opened and receptive matrix, sulfur as the activating force, and the mercurial principle as the mediating carrier, the canon resolves without contradiction.
 In our reading, neither biotite nor vermiculite is itself the Philosopher’s Stone. In Art, it is the concentrated, multipliable mineral essence the alchemists described as the Golden Elixir and that Shimanishi produced as a rock extract. Although The Emerald Tablet does not name the Philosopher’s Stone, it describes something even more fundamental: a complete generative cycle. In our reading, what the later alchemical texts called the Stone corresponds to that cycle itself.
 The ambiguity of the canon preserved the process by requiring that Nature complete the first transformation before Art could continue it. The closed stone, biotite, had to be opened into a receptive body, vermiculite, before sulfuric acid could extract its essence. In that sense, the Stone, in the later alchemical sense of the Golden Elixir, waited to be realized in material form; before that, it could only be named, symbolized, and pursued.
 That the puzzle appears to have been solved based on the work of someone entirely outside alchemy leaves the deepest question. How could the alchemists have gained such precise knowledge of both the cycle in Nature and the means of bringing its core chemistry into form?
 We will revisit that question later in the book, but for now, the operative core of the Hermetic canon is closed. Rock, water, sulfur, heat, and time remain at work.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 Note to readers:
 What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir.” Aurmina , a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.
 Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.
 So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

 From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: The modern science supporting the Rock-Water Circuit Theory, along with knowledge of Shimanishi's technique, allowed us to construct an interpretive key to the alchemical canon from 3 ancient texts.