Chapter VI: The Volcano Alchemist and the Rock Extract

In the previous three chapters, I presented the Rock–Water Circuit framework, a theory that integrates insights from geology, hydrology, biology, chemistry, and origin-of-life research. Those chapters established a central idea: the same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) mineral chemistry that formed in rock helped initiate life on early Earth and continues to operate today, continually reforming and releasing the mineral inputs on which all living systems depend.
 This conclusion should not be entirely surprising. Any planetary energy system capable of sustaining life over immense spans of time must also contain mechanisms that continually regenerate the energy gradients on which life depends. Without such renewal, the mineral systems supporting biology would gradually exhaust themselves.
 When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Rock—Water Circuit
 For billions of years, ISAW operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself. Water circulated through rock; mineral lattices hydrated and exchanged ions with passing water; electrochemical gradients formed and dissipated; and, ultimately, this energy architecture established the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.
 Then, in 1977, after more than a decade of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer succeeded in extracting the system’s mineral core, separating a geologically generated chemistry from its host rock and rendering it portable in liquid form.
 His name was Asao Shimanishi.
 What is remarkable about his accomplishment is that most scientific discoveries either identify previously unknown processes in nature or, in technology, create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work belonged to a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing one of nature’s primary energy-generating systems.
 This work was done by a single individual operating outside the scientific mainstream.
 Reconstructing the Life of Asao Shimanishi
 Over the past seven months of studying Shimanishi’s life and work, I have been challenged by the near-total lack of formal documentation of his personal life and professional accomplishments. That scarcity makes it difficult to speak with complete confidence about the full arc of his scientific journey.
 What follows, therefore, is drawn from the small body of material I was able to gather: a few oral histories from people in Japan who worked with him or for his company, and a translation of what appears to have been his only public interview, published in a Japanese magazine shortly before retirement. [i] I also drew on a first-person chapter in a limited-edition Japanese book called Rock Water , written nearly twenty years ago by colleagues, based on notes they had taken during lectures he delivered in China.
 Ultimately, I do not believe that Shimanishi knew he was extracting a foundational piece of planetary chemistry. His goal at the time was much more practical. To see how he came to it, however, we have to begin earlier, with the formation of the man himself.
 Asao Shimanishi was born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1926. After finishing high school in 1944, he first studied engineering, then entered Osaka Pharmaceutical College in 1946, in the difficult years just after the war. His earliest professional work was in pharmaceutical research, but the interests that would later define his life had begun much earlier. From childhood, he recalled a fascination with rocks and with the hidden processes by which the natural world seemed to sustain itself.
 One story about him that has been told to me since I first began studying Shimanishi concerns an experience he had in his early thirties. Sitting near the sea in meditation one day, he noticed a tree growing straight out of what appeared to be naked stone. There was no soil, no visible earth, only a narrow crack in a granite boulder from which the trunk rose, supporting a tree in full bloom.
 Image 1: Tree Growing Out of Rock

 That event appears to have influenced his decision to turn away from pharmaceutical research. He found himself less interested in the increasingly abstract sophistication of synthetic chemistry and the rapid advances of petrochemical and polymer science, and more drawn to working with what he called “natural starting materials,” with the sense that something extraordinary might still be discovered in them.
 Soon afterward, he encountered a senior colleague from his hometown who showed him what he called a “mysterious mineral”: vermiculite. He later referred to that moment as his “Encounter with the Stone” and described it in retrospect as serendipitous. He soon learned that vermiculite was the weathered form of an iron-rich black mica mineral called biotite, which contained an unusually large number and variety of mineral elements, in some analyses more than forty. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals still remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.
 He knew that common elements could be extracted from rock relatively easily with acidic or alkaline solutions, but his interest centered on the rarer trace minerals. What drew him onward was the possibility that, once dissolved as charged ions, such elements might display catalytic behavior and unusual reactivity. He also reasoned that for those minerals to become chemically active in a meaningful way, they would have to be dissolved in water. From that point on, his aim was clear: to produce an aqueous mineral solution extracted from rock.
 It was a simple idea, yet difficult enough to occupy the next decade and a half of his life. Outside work, he began devoting increasing amounts of time to what he himself described as a private obsession, a “castle in the air” project with no immediate practical application and no clear commercial objective, all the while aware that those who knew of his efforts regarded him as something of a fool.
 From the start, he had little success with the acids and methods he first selected. Yet he persisted for nearly fifteen years, driven by a single conviction: that a liquid solution containing broad mineral complexity might be of benefit to humanity. He tested combinations of different rocks, acids, and alkalis under varying conditions of heat and water, advancing only through failure, repetition, and adjustment, with a patience measured in years.
 He became, in his own words, captivated by the stone, so much so that he compared himself to someone being sucked in by its very name, hiru-ishi , “leech stone.” Working often late into the night, he continued experimenting, adjusting equipment, and enduring a grueling private research life. He later said that he barely noticed because he was so absorbed in it, and that under intense concentration, flashes of insight would sometimes come.
 The ambition itself was elemental: to extract minerals in a form that could move beyond a single volcano or spring and enter ordinary water, soil, and life.
 Finally, in 1977, he produced the exact liquid solution he had sought: a spectrum of minerals dominated by iron and sulfur, with dozens of other elements appearing in minute, yet still active, amounts. He named his extract Themarox, or “Rock Extract.”
 One clarification will help here. Themarox is the concentrated mineral extract itself. It is not used directly. When diluted into water, it transforms that water into what Shimanishi and his colleagues called “Rock Water.” Themarox is the source. Rock Water is the active medium through which biological effects occur.
 A Historically Unparalleled Achievement
 It is my opinion that his achievement is unique in the history of science. Although many scientific discoveries begin with moments of insight that then take years to develop into practical form, Shimanishi’s path was different. He spent well over a decade working by himself on a single technical problem until it finally yielded a solution.
 Further, other giants in the history of science had teams, theories, funding, or infrastructure. For instance, Pasteur refined revolutionary ideas within an ecosystem that steadily supplied recognition and resources. Although Mendel also worked alone for years and succeeded in mapping a single problem—genetics—he did so in approximately a decade less time. Tesla spent much of his life pursuing the idea of resonance as a transformative principle in energy and communication, but he never fully realized the system he envisioned.
 Thus, as far as I can tell, those who had come before him either had a combination of collaborators and institutional support or met with success more quickly.
 Sulfur chemistry became central to that process. In retrospect, aspects of it resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering: the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry. Under carefully controlled conditions, sulfuric-acid-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.
 The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica lattice. Crucially, those elements appeared primarily as sulfate salts, reflecting the sulfur chemistry central to his extraction process. In practical terms, this meant the minerals were already water-soluble and charged.
 The result was a liquid mineral extract with a composition akin to naturally mineralized waters, carrying a broad spectrum of ions that could alter the water’s electrochemical properties. What mattered, however, was what happened when it was diluted into water. The resulting water behaved differently. Murky water quickly clarified, while foul, stagnant water became clear and oxygen-rich. When added to ponds, tanks, or reservoirs, impurities and contaminants gathered into visible aggregates that settled to the bottom.
 What is fascinating is that this phenomenon mirrors what happens continuously in nature. In rivers, wetlands, and mineral springs, water is clarified by contact with rock surfaces, which release minerals into the water, causing dispersed particles and contaminants to coagulate and settle. What Shimanishi had unknowingly done was extract from rock a functional fragment of that mineral-water chemistry and render it usable through water in glasses, tanks, ponds, and irrigation systems.
 When applied to soils or irrigation water, crops grew with unusual vigor, grasses thickened, vegetables ripened, and fish in aquaculture ponds became more active and resilient. He and a growing number of colleagues began describing the transformed water as Rock Water.
 He obtained a patent for its use in purifying and clarifying brackish water. Eight years later, in 1985, his achievement led to the founding of Shimanishi Co., where he began producing Themarox, a citrus-colored liquid concentrate containing a broad and electrically active spectrum of minerals, fully dissolvable and readily absorbed. What is striking is that this mineral complex belonged to nature alone; it was not a synthetic invention so much as a successful release of a naturally embedded chemistry.
 A famous three-and-a-half-minute Japanese news segment captured one of the most dramatic demonstrations of Themarox’s clarifying power. [ii] At a polluted brackish pond at a well-known Shinto shrine in Tokyo, the minerals were used in a public cleanup event. The pond, popular with students who came to pray for success in entrance examinations and studies, reportedly went from brackish to clear in four hours.
 At roughly the two-minute mark in that segment, one catches what may be the only public footage of Shimanishi: smiling as he drinks the freshly treated water from a glass mug lowered into the pond on a rope. The same broadcast also showed smaller demonstrations. At 2:41, on the host’s desk, two cloudy fishbowls appear, each containing a single fish barely visible through the haze. One bowl is treated with Themarox, and the suspended particles rapidly clump together and sink, leaving the fish clearly visible and swimming in crystal-clear water.
 Rock Water: Agricultural and Aquaculture Applications
 Next, he directed his efforts beyond water treatment and into agricultural and aquacultural applications, testing water prepared with Themarox—what he and his colleagues called Rock Water—in agricultural trials, seed germination tests, and soil restoration initiatives in Japan and other countries.
 It did not take long for farmers to notice certain patterns in soil and crops.
 The rice didn’t just grow. The stalks were sturdier, more resistant to pests and insects, and the plants stayed upright instead of collapsing in wind and rain. Vegetable plots developed plants that grew with a vigor older farmers recognized from their youth. Golf courses began using Rock Water to ensure fuller, verdant, and more resilient grasses.
 In fish farms and ponds, operators added Themarox to their water systems, creating Rock Water, and watched as foul-smelling, low-oxygen water cleared. Fish that had been sluggish and prone to disease became more active and fed more vigorously. Eels raised in Rock Water reportedly reached market size in half the time, allowing two crops per year. Stocking density increased by 30 percent, partial water exchange was needed only every 4–6 months, survival was reported at 100 percent, and finished eels sold for 2,300 yen/kg or more, compared with a conventional market price of about 1,600 yen/kg.
 A few environmental engineers began using the solution in polluted lakes and lagoons, reporting improvements in water clarity, odor, algal blooms, and biota. As these uses expanded, the reports multiplied faster than the formal literature. Shimanishi did not work within academia, and his objectives were therefore not centered on research or publication. Instead, he relied primarily on demonstrations for customers to help grow his business. Even so, a small body of published studies and technical reports on the efficacy of Rock Water in agriculture does exist, including a UN internal report on a soil restoration project, a Japanese Ministry of Health field trial, a peer-reviewed seed germination study, and several later privately commissioned studies conducted in the US.
 However, when analyzed as a comprehensive evidence base, the studies demonstrated an extensive list of improved outcomes:
 Increased plant yield

 Reduced immature or poorly matured yield components

 Increased trace mineral incorporation into plant tissue

 Increased photosynthetic activity

 Increased antioxidant capacity

 Increased disease resistance

 Faster root establishment

 Accelerated vegetative growth and thicker stems and leaves

 Improved biomass accumulation efficiency

 Increased soil microbial diversity and density

 Improved balance among dominant bacterial species

 Reduced uptake of pesticides

 The number and diversity of the positive outcomes suggest that Rock Water represents a novel functional category in terms of its diverse beneficial impacts on soil, microbial, and plant health. Furthermore, although not formally documented, hundreds of compelling use cases were reported to the company and its representatives.
 To this point in history, no single conventional agricultural input—whether fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments—has been shown to influence all these metrics simultaneously. A summary of the above studies, along with links to the underlying reports, is provided in the endnote. [iii]
 The Rock Extract: Therapeutic Applications
 Readers may reasonably wonder how a physician ended up spending seven months at a computer, often eighteen hours a day, wandering far beyond the usual boundaries of medicine into mineralogy, water chemistry, geology, soil biology, agriculture, and origin-of-life research—a process that, I should admit, was not particularly kind to my own health.
 The explanation is simple. For the first time in my career, I had encountered something that appeared to influence physiology not only in patients, but across living systems more broadly: microbes, plants, animals, humans, and even the water systems that sustain them.
 In medicine, there is really no precedent for that. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy operates across biological kingdoms, much less extends its influence into soil and water.
 No physician expects a therapeutic principle to operate alike in bifidobacteria, basil, eels, potatoes, and people. The only other agent I could find with effects extending beyond mammals was aspirin, since its derivative, salicylic acid, participates in plant signaling. Although I found several studies on the use of salicylic acid in agriculture, its relevance appeared to stop there, as I found none related to water treatment.
 Although the discovery of such broad applications led me far outside medicine, my journey into the world of minerals and water first began when I encountered the work of a physician named Hisotake Nojima.
 Dr. Hisotake Nojima’s Super Mineral Solution
 Nojima was not an outsider to medicine. He rose within Japan’s public health system and served as director of the Sawara Health Center in Chiba Prefecture before later becoming head of a regional hospital. Yet during his years in practice, he became increasingly troubled by what he saw as a blind spot in modern medical thinking. Research, he wrote, had become almost entirely focused on organic molecules while largely ignoring the role of inorganic elements, metals, salts, and mineral ions in biological function.
 His interest deepened after he started treating patients with Rock Water. One of the first cases he described was of a town mayor with advanced gastric cancer. Surgery was being planned. The mayor’s family had heard that Nojima was quietly experimenting with a new ionized mineral solution. They were desperate.
 Nojima was still in an exploratory phase. He adjusted concentration, designed a high-dose oral regimen, and proceeded cautiously. Based on many later cases, he noted retrospectively that gastric cancers, because they are directly bathed in the mineral solution twice daily, often respond unusually fast.
 Within days, the mayor’s appetite returned. His pain diminished. He began to regain strength.
 Before gastric cancer surgery, surgeons repeat an endoscopy. The first had documented a clear malignant mass. When they returned to confirm the target, the mass was gone. The hospital physicians were, by his account, confused and effectively speechless.
 What struck Nojima was the disappearance of a documented tumor between two scopes, with no conventional therapy in between. He did not treat this as proof of a cure, but as the first signal that something fundamental was occurring that existing frameworks could not explain.
 Whatever the tumor biology was doing, equally notable were the systemic shifts he described: appetite, strength, sleep, and mood.
 Nojima then began offering the therapy to patients with advanced cancer who had exhausted surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. He repeatedly described observing pain subside and strength return. Imaging showed reduced tumor burden or halted progression. Infections improved unexpectedly. Chemotherapy became more tolerable.
 These were not isolated anecdotes in his book. They recurred in a pattern. Over time, Nojima came to understand what he was seeing as follows:
 “The minerals were restoring the body’s mineral architecture, and the body was doing the healing.”
 What Nojima Actually Claimed
 Because stories like the mayor’s invite distortion, restraint matters. Nojima never claimed universal cures. He documented recoveries, partial responses, stabilization, and non-responders. His insistence was that mineral architecture mattered to all of them. Many improved, some stabilized, and a few experienced remissions.
 He also acknowledged patients for whom mineral restoration could not reverse the decline.
 Author’s Note: The reports above come from Nojima’s own clinical writings and have not been independently verified through modern controlled clinical trials.
 What struck him instead was a recurring pattern: when the body’s mineral (or aqueous) environment was restored, physiological resilience often seemed to improve. In his writings, he summarized this idea with a phrase that appeared repeatedly throughout his books: the solution was helping restore what he called the body’s “mineral architecture.”
 Over the following years, he documented his experiences in several books (one of which was translated into English here in the US) and founded a nonprofit organization devoted to exploring the roles of minerals, nutrition, and environmental factors in chronic disease. At its height, he wrote, the organization had tens of thousands of members.
 Although his work remained largely unknown outside Japan and was never integrated into mainstream medical research, his clinical observations represent one of the earliest attempts by a modern physician to investigate the biological effects of a sulfated biotite-derived broad-spectrum mineral complex.
 Shimanishi also believed that the mineral spectrum in his solution could support numerous human biological processes. In his view, since minerals act as cofactors that activate enzymes throughout the body and enzymes require specific minerals to function properly, restoring mineral diversity to water could help restore normal biological activity.
 He claimed that health improvements reported by users arose from this mineral-enzyme interaction, though he acknowledged that medical claims were legally restricted and should be approached cautiously.
 Author’s Note: I recount the observations above as historical medical reporting rather than as evidence of established therapeutic effects.
 Carrying Rock Chemistry Into Water
 What Shimanishi isolated was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically organized state, much like the mineralized waters that have emerged naturally throughout history from geothermal systems distributed through the Earth’s crust. In the framework of ISAW and the Rock–Water Circuit, what Shimanishi did, unknowingly, was extract from rock and carry into water a redox-active chemical set that geology had assembled long before.
 What became of Shimanishi himself, and of the company that carried his extract forward, is harder to reconstruct, but no less important.
 What Became of Shimanishi’s Work
 On a recent trip to Japan, I tried to learn as much as I could about Shimanishi, including even the possibility of his whereabouts. I could find no record of his death, and the people still working at the company told me they had neither seen nor heard from him in many years. He would be 100 years old today. Although the Japanese are known for remarkable longevity, I could not determine whether he was still alive, but neither could I confirm that he was dead.
 I met only one man who had known Shimanishi well: Mr. Ishii, until recently the longtime majority shareholder of Shimanishi-Kaken and, at 86, still its plant manager. He told me that Shimanishi’s gifts did not lie in business or operations, and that around the year 2000 a bitter rupture developed between him and the company’s then president. That conflict ultimately led the owners to dissolve the company and sell off its assets. When the plant went up for auction, Shimanishi asked Mr. Ishii, apparently the one friend with the means to do so, to buy it to preserve the production of Themarox. Mr. Ishii did. Shimanishi stayed on and worked for a few months afterward, but it seems his heart was no longer in the new company. He told his colleagues that he wanted to retire, which in Japan, even at seventy-four, was highly unusual. They later learned that he had tried to attract investors to start a new company of his own but had not succeeded. No one has heard from him since.
 I came to see Mr. Ishii as the keeper of Shimanishi’s legacy, the man who ensured that his mission did not die with the collapse of the original company. Mr. Ishii shepherded it through several near-bankruptcies during the difficult years after the acquisition. In those early years, he had to rely on people like his younger brother, whom he asked to work for the company without pay. Even now, I believe the salaries remain modest, and the company’s leadership consists largely of retired Toshiba executives. In Japan, corporate men of that era were often forced to retire at 60. Yet many still have to find work afterward, since pensions alone are not enough to sustain a desired standard of living.
 MB first met those men when they worked without pay. When he asked them why they did so, they replied, “Because we believe what you believe.” MB has never forgotten that. Nor has he forgotten that when he reached out to them during their first conversation, they told him that he would be the sole importer to North America, an agreement they have honored for more than twenty years, based on a handshake.
 Coming into this small commercial world late in the writing of From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), I was struck by that degree of trust and shared mission. Learning that both parties had worked peacefully and successfully for twenty years on nothing more than a handshake moved me and gave me confidence. It deepened my trust in what we were building and strengthened my sense of responsibility to carry that shared mission forward.
 What the Ancients May Have Seen
 In Shimanishi’s own region of Japan alone, the accessible vermiculite reserves are sufficient for centuries, perhaps millennia, of human-scale application.
 This is not a scarce remedy.
 It is a geological inheritance.
 As detailed in From Volcanoes to Vitality [iv] , if understood and applied responsibly, Rock Water may represent a path for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, husbandry, and even human health.
 Beyond that aspiration, a separate question arose in the wake of my studies into Rock Water. If a specific mineral-water chemistry capable of organizing electrochemical energy has been operating quietly within rock for billions of years, and if a human being has now managed to isolate a working phase of that chemistry, then why do ancient traditions, alchemical writings, and even fragments of early scripture appear to describe processes that map so precisely onto this same mineral-water transformation?
 The chapters that follow explore how this pattern connects modern science with far older attempts to understand the relationship between matter, water, and the organizing forces of life.

 [i] https://www.bodyrevitaliser.nl/en/aquarevitaliser/aquarevitaliser-ionized-mineral-extract/the-discoverer-and-inventor-dr-shimanishi-from-jap/
 [ii]

 [iii] https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-efficacy-of-themarox-in-agriculture?r=iutjw
 [iv] https://fromvolcanoestovitality.com/

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 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: Asao Shimanishi spent fifteen years trying to release minerals from rock into water. What he produced may have isolated a working phase of Earth’s life-sustaining chemistry.


Chapter VII: The Questions Science Won’t Ask

Rules That Violate Function
 In the ICU, I was constantly running into policies, protocols, and rules that defined what I was supposedly “allowed” to do for a patient. What I did not yet understand was that not all rules serve the same purpose. Some genuinely protect patients. Others protect institutions. It was the latter that got me every time. To everyone else, and sometimes even to me, it probably looked like I simply didn’t like rules.
 What I reacted to, instinctively and viscerally, were rules that violated function.
 The most absurd example I ever encountered came on my first day running an ICU at the University of Wisconsin.
 I walked into a patient’s room and did what I had done thousands of times before. I checked the ventilator: synchrony, pressures, volumes. The patient was struggling. I made a few adjustments.
 When I turned around, the room had gone silent.
 Faces were pale. Eyes were wide. Someone finally said it.
 “You’re not allowed to touch the ventilator.”
 This wasn’t because I was a trainee. I was literally the new ICU director they had recruited from New York City, where I had spent a decade teaching mechanical ventilation to pulmonary and critical care specialists. I had read Martin Tobin’s Principles and Practice of Mechanical Ventilation twice. The thing was the size of two Bibles. Ventilators were my obsession.
 None of that mattered.
 It turned out that the ICU I had accepted leadership of had a long-standing policy: no physician, fellow, or attending, novice or expert, was permitted to adjust a ventilator unless a respiratory therapist (RT) with six weeks of mechanical ventilator training at a vocational school was physically present at the bedside.
 The reason became clear almost immediately. Decades earlier, someone—likely undertrained, overtired, and working in a different era—had made a ventilator error. A patient had been harmed. The hospital had been sued. Instead of fixing training or clarifying responsibility, the institution did what institutions often do: it outlawed judgment.
 From that moment forward, physicians were prohibited from directly managing the single most important machine in critical care.
 The consequences, in my mind, were grotesque.
 Fellows in training to become ventilator experts were functionally barred from touching ventilators. Overworked clinicians deferred adjustments because finding an RT took too long. Patients labored, desaturated, turned red, and struggled in plain view while care was delayed by rules about who was allowed to touch the machine.
 I was written up for breaking that rule. On my first day. Welcome to Wisconsin.
 Then, a month later, I entered the room of a severely flow-starved, cyanotic patient in distress and unconsciously did what physicians are trained to do: I changed numerous settings and rescued the patient, only to have the RT walk in afterward. Later, the email arrived.
 Policy violation.
 Palm to forehead. Clown world.
 I was so furious that I immediately set out to change the policy, and the effort consumed months. Undoing it required innumerable committee meetings and sparked institutional trench warfare. In the end, I won, but not by reason.
 Someone higher up had finally, and quietly, intervened, I suspect out of fear that I would resign if the policy remained in place (I was certainly thinking about it). At last, fellows were allowed to manage ventilators. Training improved. Patient care improved.
 As a result of that experience, I never attempted to change an institutional policy again.
 Rules That Outlaw Judgment
 Looking back, I now see that episode as the first time I encountered a system that prohibited the very knowledge it required in order to function well. This chapter exists because, during the research for this book, I kept running into a similar kind of dysfunction.
 Again and again, I found that certain texts from antiquity seemed to describe, with unsettling precision, the very material processes I was uncovering in relation to Shimanishi’s work. Yet each time I followed one of those connections further, I developed the sense that my questions were entering territory they were not supposed to enter.
 I slowly discovered that what I had assumed were legitimate scientific questions were, in the modern world, more often relegated to metaphysics, philosophy, or theology.
 I did not come into this book trying to “prove” anything metaphysical. In From Volcanoes to Vitality , I began with a much narrower question: why these minerals seemed to restore such striking vitality in my patients. Following that question led me first into the mechanisms of minerals in biology, then into the role of water, and from there into a broader recognition that the loss of vitality was not confined to my patients but appeared to run through modern life more generally. I expected chemistry, physiology, and perhaps even physics. I assumed the data would be messy, but that I would eventually arrive at least some partial explanations, and maybe even a few confident conclusions. I did not expect the work to lead me into questions that science seemed unable to contain.
 I began to sense that the same kind of gatekeeping I had encountered in medicine was also operating more broadly in science. As I tried to understand why certain questions felt as though they were crossing a boundary, I discovered the words for the territory they were entering: teleology and design.
 I learned that teleology and design had long belonged to philosophy, especially metaphysics, natural theology, and the philosophy of nature.
 I also began to see a distinction between the mechanistic questions that led to the writing of FVTV and the questions that arose once I began studying texts from antiquity and Scripture. My questions had become teleological: they were asking what minerals and water were for. They also began pressing toward the question of design: whether ISAW and the Rock–Water Circuit were, in some sense, designed.
 That was when I learned that modern science no longer accepts or meaningfully engages such questions, even though questions about what things are, how they are ordered, and whether their organization reflects purpose were, for most of human history, a normal part of serious thought.
 When Science Banned “Why”
 In the mid-nineteenth century, a conceptual framework that would later be called methodological naturalism argued that scientific inquiry should restrict itself to observable, testable, reproducible mechanisms within nature, while setting aside questions of purpose, meaning, or ultimate origin.
 This notion was advanced to make science more operationally powerful, espoused by thinkers such as Comte, Mill, and Huxley, and later adopted broadly by scientific institutions. The argument was that science should restrict itself to what is experimentally accessible in order to protect itself from speculation, theology, and unfalsifiable claims.
 As I began reading about methodological naturalism, I initially found it both practical and reasonable. The scientific method is extraordinarily powerful within its domain, and it needs boundaries in order to function. What struck me only later was that, over time, gaps in understanding began to form as entire categories of scientific reasoning quietly disappeared.
 What disappeared first was the permission to ask what a system is for. And once that permission narrowed, the further question of design—whether a system’s persistent organization toward an end reflects intention—was pushed even farther outside what was considered acceptable.
 Teleology and design ask related but distinct questions, and those questions lead to different kinds of explanation. Teleology asks what a system is for, describing it in terms of the ends it serves or the functions it reliably accomplishes. Design asks whether such persistent organization toward an end is best understood as the product of intention. Mechanistic explanation, by contrast, confines itself to asking only how an outcome is produced and to describing the sequence of causes through which it occurs.
 A strictly mechanistic description of the heart’s function would say that cardiac muscle contracts rhythmically in response to electrical signaling. A teleological explanation would say that the heart exists to pump blood through the body. A design-oriented account would say that a structure so precisely ordered toward that end suggests intention.
 The same distinctions can be seen in cosmology. A mechanistic account would say that geological cycles redistribute elements through rock, water, and atmosphere in ways later used by biological systems. A teleological account would say that Earth’s mineral cycles are organized to sustain life. A design-oriented view would say that a system so precisely ordered toward life-enabling and life-sustaining ends is best understood as intended.
 The problem is that, in the wake of methodological naturalism, modern science moved toward an almost exclusive focus on mechanism while resisting questions of purpose and largely avoiding questions of intention.
 For most of human history, however, teleological and design-oriented reasoning were not treated as intellectual embarrassments. Aristotle called teleology “final causation.” Engineers use both forms of reasoning instinctively. Physicians rely on them constantly. You cannot practice medicine without asking what an organ is for, and, especially in medical school, you cannot fail to notice how precisely each organ’s structure is arranged to achieve that end.
 Although the intellectual narrowing that began in the nineteenth century indeed made science extraordinarily powerful within its newly chosen domain, it also carried a cost: entire modes of reasoning were pushed outside the frame.
 When Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Expanded Past Its Domain
 Once teleology and design were removed, science went on describing systems that were unmistakably ordered, functionally coordinated, and often astonishingly well fitted to specific ends, but it did so in language that, to me in hindsight, now seems oddly evasive. Systems with clear functional orientation were said to have “emerged.” Architectures that looked purpose-built were redescribed as “self-organized.” Intricate coordination and governance were acknowledged only as “highly complex,” as though complexity could ever serve as an explanation.
 The words changed, yet the systems they were describing did not. However, the explanatory work still had to be done by something, and that, in my view, is where evolution began expanding beyond its proper domain, at least conceptually. What had originally been a theory of change within living systems gradually became part of a broader habit of explaining everything as arising from prior conditions over time through incremental transformation.
 I am not interested in debating evolution itself, though I have read some intriguing critiques of it. My point is narrower and, I think, more important: evolutionary theory was developed to explain how biological traits change over time within living systems, and yet we now use it, consciously or not, as part of a framework for explaining almost everything.
 Even if one grants evolution all that it legitimately explains, the enormous prior structure that made it possible remains to be accounted for: a rock in space embedded with a mineral chemistry that, when carried by water, creates energy gradients, redox chemistry, and mineral cycling that power all life on Earth. Evolution unfolded atop those prior conditions. It explains how living systems change over time, but it does not explain where the system itself came from, why it exists, or why it is so precisely ordered.
 I find it striking that this same conceptual posture appears to have subtly or overtly infiltrated our understanding of planets, stars, and even the universe itself, even though these domains are not alive, do not reproduce, and thus cannot undergo biological selection. It increasingly seems to me that many scientists now carry on their work guided by a broad assumption that change over time can stand in for origin, and that is why the deepest question keeps getting deferred rather than answered: what produced the initial conditions in the first place?
 I should also admit that, for most of my career, I did not explore questions of origin either and, in retrospect, had unconsciously accepted the easy notion that everything that currently exists came from things before, usually over some incomprehensibly long period of time. Part of what made that posture so easy to adopt was that, even if I had tried to pursue teleological or design questions, I would have had no way to produce the quantity or quality of evidence considered “sufficient” to prove anything.
 Insufficient Evidence
 Those words now bring a smile to my face, because they remind me that I have a single tattoo, acquired at the age of fifty-three in the middle of the global war on ivermectin. I got it partly on a whim and partly to bond with my then fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted her first tattoo. On my left shoulder, in block print, are the words INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
 At the time, it was my own private rebuke to the entire world of academics, experts, and authorities that kept insisting that ivermectin did not work, and that anyone claiming otherwise was doing so on the basis of “insufficient evidence,” even though I knew from the first patient I treated that it worked. But in the context of this book, and this chapter, the phrase has now taken on a different meaning, and I find that interesting.
 As a clinician-scientist, I never spent time pursuing teleological or design arguments because I assumed there was no point. Any argument along those lines would, by definition, never have sufficient evidence to satisfy the standards of modern science, and so the whole territory seemed futile before it was even entered.
 And yet here we are. The next five chapters are, in effect, my attempt to marshal a historically unusual kind of evidence, one capable of supporting teleological and design arguments in a way I once would have assumed impossible. If I have changed, it is because I followed the evidence far enough that the old prohibitions no longer held, not because I “found religion.”
 Where the Explanations Ran Out
 As I worked through the mineral chemistry underlying ISAW, then followed that chemistry forward into biology and backward into geology, I found myself being pushed beyond mechanism and toward questions of function, teleology, and design. And the reason was simple: every field kept pointing back to the same architecture—iron, sulfur, aluminum, water, and charge. The same mineral logic repeated across scales. The same boundary principles governed rocks, microbes, plants, animals, and humans.
 The deeper I went, the less randomness I saw. Instead, I kept finding systems that were internally consistent and remarkably well governed. At some point, I realized I was no longer just describing mechanisms. I was describing systems that behaved as though they were organized to do something, and that realization is what forced this chapter into existence.
 What I am questioning, then, is something else entirely: the claim that evolution is sufficient as a total explanation of life and reality. During my months-long immersion in mineral science, I never came across examples of chaos or randomness accidentally producing order. What I saw, again and again, was order giving rise to more order. I found systems, from cosmology to biology, in which basic structure determined which processes could occur within them, and those processes, once underway, worked to keep that structure intact. In other words, the arrangement shaped the behavior, and the behavior continuously reinforced the arrangement. I was looking at systems that appeared built to sustain themselves.
 And once I began developing a sense of what these systems were arranged to accomplish, I started to ask: how did such a system come into being at all? A serendipitous geochemical accident, a spontaneous arrangement of extraordinarily coordinated parts, cycling endlessly through time, with both minerals and water never exhausted, only redistributed, moving through different forms, locations, and functions before reentering the cycle?
 Ultimately, the question became more literal: how does a universe governed by conserved energy, coherent order, and reusable architectures give rise to life at all—and then to systems so fertile, diverse, and self-sustaining that they emerge wherever conditions permit?
 The next step in that inquiry comes from history. More specifically, it comes from a body of texts that carried forward, in symbolic form, a kind of knowledge I once would have dismissed as impossible to verify and therefore impossible to use. This is where the evidence changes category, and where this book moves into its real center.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 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: A rule can safeguard life or outlaw judgment. From the ICU to modern science, this chapter asks what happens when systems forbid the very questions required to understand life.


Chapter VIII: Alchemy: The First Mineral Science

Living Water, Mechanized
 Up to this point, I have argued that certain physical systems, particularly those involving minerals, water, charge, and structure, display a level of organization that modern scientific frameworks struggle to fully explain once questions of purpose are excluded. That argument stands on contemporary chemistry and physics alone. What follows is something different.
 What I did not expect, and certainly did not go looking for, was that the same processes we described in the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, and in the foundational ISAW chemistry underlying it, appeared to be described—symbolically but consistently—in a body of texts written long before modern scientific language existed.
 One of the first things that grabbed my attention was that water appeared at the center of everything: in modern chemistry and biology, and in the older symbolic languages as well. But that recognition was only the beginning. As From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV) neared what I thought would be its completion, a series of connections to ancient literature began to emerge that no longer seemed to belong within that book.
 That is where this book began. It also explains why FVTV remains unfinished. I had expected to complete it first, but this material intervened and demanded to be written. Even so, FVTV has not released its hold on me, and I must return to it as soon as this manuscript is submitted.
 By that point, I had already followed water through mineral interfaces, charge separation, proton flow, biological organization, and the larger cycling of life itself. What I had not expected was to discover how many traditions had already described water as possessing unusual and even transformative properties.
 Hermetic and alchemical texts spoke of “Living Water” and of baths in which matter is dissolved and recomposed. Scripture spoke of “waters of life,” “living fountains,” and of the Spirit moving over the waters at creation. Daoist alchemists described circulating inner fluids that renew the body.
 For a long time, I would have read all of that as metaphor, or as spiritual language without a clear physical meaning. But once we had Shimanishi’s process in hand, numerous phrases from both the alchemical texts and Scripture began mapping with striking fidelity onto both his method and the Rock–Water Circuit Theory.
 What modern science now describes in the language of chemistry, physics, and biology, older traditions described in symbolic language. Water was not treated as a passive background. It was treated as the active medium that carries, dissolves, mediates, renews, and enables transformation. Once I saw that, the question changed. It was no longer a question of whether the language was poetic. It was whether the poetry was describing something that modern science would only later describe more precisely.
 That is the question this chapter begins to test, and it requires first setting aside what most of us think alchemy is.
 Alchemy’s Real Aim
 Alchemy long predates the medieval caricature most people now associate with it. Its roots span from roughly 3000 BC in Egypt, to Hellenistic Hermeticism in the first centuries AD, then to the eighth century in Islam, where the first laboratory chemistry appears, and finally into Renaissance Europe, where Paracelsus explicitly linked minerals to medicine.
 However, when people hear the word alchemy , most immediately think of medieval cranks trying to turn lead into gold. That is an unfortunate misconception because, in practice, alchemy was actually the first experimental mineral science, employing methods such as dissolving, extracting, purifying, crystallizing, and distilling. What is less widely recognized, and what took me months to understand, is that beyond mineral chemistry, its deeper aim was restoration: the restoration of matter, of water, and of the human body.
 Among the major streams of Western alchemy, the Hermetic tradition became one of its most enduring and influential, shaping how generations of alchemists understood nature, transformation, and the aim of the Work. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, it treated nature as intelligible, unified, and governed by hidden correspondences between visible and invisible processes. From that tradition emerged the concept of the Great Work.
 At first, I misunderstood that phrase, thinking it referred to a text or a body of teaching. In alchemy, it refers instead to a process: the transformation of matter from a corrupted or base state into one that is purified, ordered, and incorruptible. The material expression of that process was the medicine, tincture, or elixir sought by the alchemists—what later traditions would call the Golden Elixir or Elixir of Life.
 I, too, had always thought of alchemists as cranks chasing wealth. As I began to study them, I quickly learned that the “gold” they kept referring to was metaphorical rather than literal, denoting purity, coherence, incorruptibility, and restored life. Their obfuscation of the word gold was intentional, to protect themselves, as they were trespassing into forbidden territory: natural transformation, healing, creation.
 Appearing foolish was one way to escape persecution. Their heavy reliance on symbolism also served a separate, practical purpose: discouraging untrained imitators from injuring or killing themselves with mercury vapor, arsenic, acids, and explosive distillations. The gold metaphor itself functioned as a filter. As one historian put it, “the alchemists hid nothing; they wrote plainly, but only for those capable of reading.”
 And that last clause matters more than it sounds like it should. Because alchemical language is difficult in a different way. Chemistry is difficult because it is technical. Alchemy is difficult because it is built to mislead a literal reader. It is written to defeat the reader who assumes words behave like modern nouns. The same term can shift meaning from one line to the next while remaining faithful to the underlying process it is describing. If you read these texts literally, you get a false map. But you can also get a false map by making the opposite mistake: correctly identifying what a term refers to in one passage, then assuming it must carry that same meaning everywhere else.
 That, to me, is where the real difficulty began, because it was only after the scientific picture had taken shape that I began to see how such language might be describing something real.
 Entering the Labyrinth
 We arrived at the Rock–Water Circuit through the modern scientific literature, following biochemistry, geochemistry, hydrology, and origin-of-life research wherever the evidence led. Piece by piece, a core architecture came into view: a complete cycle in which mineral chemistry formed slowly in rock, was opened and mobilized by water, entered living systems, returned over long geologic time to rock, and eventually reentered water to begin the cycle again. That last recursive movement—from life back to rock, and from rock back into water—is where MB and I believe our work extends current origin-of-life science.
 During that same period, MB kept drawing my attention to older texts—alchemical writings, fragments of Scripture, symbolic passages he believed preserved knowledge of mineral processes, sulfur chemistry, and the larger planetary order. At first, I did not know what to do with them. My attention was fixed on the modern literature and on determining whether the full cycle we thought we were seeing could be justified on scientific grounds alone.
 Only after that modern picture had sufficiently taken shape did I begin looking more seriously at what MB had been showing me for months. By then, I had a more detailed understanding of the physical processes he believed the texts described, but little fluency in the symbolic language of alchemy. It took far longer than either of us expected to determine what each word meant literally in context. But little by little, decoding word by word, the resemblances he had intuited stopped feeling superficial or coincidental.
 The symbolic language began resolving into specific, repeatable physical operations. That distinction matters because throughout what follows, when I use the term Art , I mean the chemistry of Shimanishi’s laboratory process, and when I use Nature , I mean the larger Rock–Water Circuit as it operates in the world.
 The chapters that follow trace that realization step by step. This is the point at which the book enters the labyrinth: in alchemy, it refers to a deliberately constructed interpretive maze designed to defeat anyone who reads the text literally. It took MB and me months of failed readings, internal contradictions, cross-checking, and repeated returns to the primary texts to find a way through it.
 That labor was justified only because what stood at the center was the possibility that a real, repeatable, material process had been recognized, encoded, and transmitted across history long before modern science possessed the means to describe it in its own language.
 But before giving the reader the key we eventually built, I need to show why these texts resist literal reading so aggressively in the first place.
 The Failure of Literal Reading
 Every word that appears central is capitalized—Sun, Moon, Sulfur, Mercury, Body, Spirit, Stone—and nearly all of them fail on first contact. At first, I assumed I was reading poorly. Then I assumed the texts were inconsistent. Then I assumed they were mostly mystical poetry, and that any “mapping” I thought I saw was simply pattern matching. But the failures had a peculiar quality. They were not random. They were the kind of failures you get when a wrong assumption has been baked into the whole problem from the start.
 Of all people, I should have recognized that, given that my university degree was in mathematics. You can do a great deal of math with a wrong assumption. You can even get answers that look right, for a while. And then, two pages later, the whole structure collapses. That was my experience of the Hermetic canon.
 Mercury was the worst offender. I read it as a material. Then as water. Then as a mineral. Then as “something shiny.” Each reading worked briefly, then failed elsewhere. The same was true for Sulfur. The same was true for Body. Even Stone, of all words, refused to sit still on a single meaning.
 I would get excited. I would think, this is it. This time it fits. And then I would carry that “solution” into the next paragraph, only to watch it fall apart.
 The resolution came when I stopped demanding that the words behave like labels and started treating them as roles. That is because alchemy does not use nouns the way modern language does. It uses what I came to understand as role-grammar: nouns are used to describe functions or processes, not things or people. However, that understanding solved only half the problem, because they are often used as nouns as well. Thus, the interpretive rule I came up with was that nouns describe functions or properties of those functions—except when they don’t. Not super helpful. Thus, readers get lost when they decide too early what a word refers to and then force that meaning in other contexts.
 Shimanishi’s work had given us a concrete operational system, which became the reference point against which these texts could be tested. At first, the parallels felt uncanny, even strange. But the deeper we went, and the more rigorously we checked each term against the chemistry and against the extract itself, the more Shimanishi’s work kept allowing us to move forward.
 That allowed us to discover other alchemical “tricks.” We figured out that they also use the same words to describe the same physical operation, even when the step in the process changes. The operation remains constant, while the material it acts upon changes. Once that became clear, more confusion fell away. Nothing fundamentally new was being introduced.
 Another difficulty, and one that took us much longer to appreciate than it should have, was the sheer repetition of the alchemical texts. They do not simply describe a process or a property once and move on. They return to the same operation again and again, sometimes in the very next sentence, but under altered metaphors, altered terms, or altered emphases. To a literal reader, this feels like constant movement, as though new steps are being introduced at every turn. In reality, the text circles the same act, describing it from different symbolic angles until the reader either sees the operation beneath the language or becomes completely lost in the language itself.
 To make this more concrete, let me give an example of the kind of interpretive mistake that kept derailing me. One such mistake forced me to revise an earlier assumption I had made about a line from The Emerald Tablet , which you will meet soon: “The Father thereof is the Sun, the Mother the Moon.” I had initially treated those as stable referents, mapping biotite onto the Sun and vermiculite onto the Moon. But that reading began to collapse as soon as I followed the process more carefully. The language was not pointing to fixed substances. It was pointing to roles within an interaction.
 In this framework, the Sun does not name a rock. It names the activating principle: the force that penetrates, transforms, and brings about change. In the core chemistry we had identified, that role is most consistently fulfilled by sulfur, whether expressed as sulfated rainwater in the atmosphere or as sulfuric acid in Shimanishi’s laboratory.
 The Moon, by contrast, names the receptive body: the matrix that receives that action, opens, and yields its contents. In this cycle, that role can apply both to the closed mineral body, biotite, and to its opened form, vermiculite. What changes is not the role but the condition of the body receiving the work.
 Seen this way, “the father is the Sun and the mother the Moon” is not assigning fixed identities. It is describing an interaction. The active principle meets the body that has already been opened, transformed, and made to yield its essence.
 Body and Spirit often work the same way: not as fixed substances, but as role terms that can shift with scale and context.
 The words had not been inconsistent. I had been trying to hold them still.
 Then we arrive at the three capitalized terms that sent me deepest into the labyrinth: Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. Because these words are so difficult and so unstable in the texts, it helps to state their core meanings as simply as possible at the outset.
 • Sulfur is activation: heat, oxidation, transformation
• Mercury is mediation: mobility, dissolution, transport
• Salt is fixation: structure, stability, persistence
 In Nature, sulfur appears as sulfur-bearing water over time, while Mercury refers to the mobile aqueous mineral medium moving through stone—that is, again, water. In Art, Mercury is the mercurial solvent doing the extracting and carrying—that is, sulfuric acid.
 It gets better. Later, when we reach The Six Keys of Eudoxus , it uses both the words Sulfur and Mercury to describe the role of sulfuric acid. It took us months to see that.
 Again, the words move but the process does not.
 What follows is the interpretive framework that MB and I arrived at after months of sustained study, failed readings, internal contradiction, cross-checking, and repeated return to the primary texts. To our knowledge, no prior interpretation has mapped these terms with this degree of operational and material precision. They stand or fall by whether they hold together across texts, chemistry, and scale. What allowed any of this to move beyond speculation was that we did not approach the texts empty-handed. We already possessed detailed knowledge of a real process against which their language could be tested.
 The Key We Had in Hand
 As described earlier in the book, we started with a reasonably accurate and specific understanding of the method Shimanishi used to extract minerals from rock. Or so we thought. For several months, we had one crucial step wrong: we assumed he started with biotite, or black mica, when in fact he started with vermiculite derived from biotite. Once we realized our error, many interpretive mistakes were resolved.
 Over long geologic periods, acidic, sulfated rainwater gradually weathers biotite, leaching its potassium and transforming it into a more porous, hydrated vermiculite. Sulfur participates throughout that opening, helping drive protonation and destabilization that allow water to enter and initiate the internal activation of its mineral chemistry.
 Shimanishi did not begin with that closed parent mineral. His material was vermiculite: biotite already weathered into the receptive, expanded form from which mineral essence could be drawn. In his laboratory process, sulfuric acid did not perform the first geological opening. It acted on the mineral only after Nature had already prepared it.
 Another crucial step took us a while to understand. Shimanishi learned that the vermiculite had to be dried first. If sulfuric acid were applied while interlayer moisture remained trapped within the vermiculite, the mineral would shatter violently. But once the vermiculite had been air-dried, the acid could enter “without violence”— a phrase you will soon meet—and draw its mineral essence into solution.
 The result was a clear aqueous extract that leaves vermiculite’s aluminosilicate framework intact while releasing its mineral chemistry in sulfated ionic form, with iron, sulfur, and aluminum at its core, alongside magnesium, calcium, manganese, titanium, and a broad spectrum of ultratrace and rare-earth elements.
 That sequence—a closed mineral body, its opening through sulfur and water, the removal of all moisture, the entry of a mediating fluid, and the extraction of a concentrated, sulfated mineral essence—was the operational key we had in hand from the beginning, though we did not yet fully understand it. Once Shimanishi’s method became clear to us, the alchemical texts began to resolve into a coherent process, even when the same sequence appeared under different names. That is how the texts first became readable.
 With that framework in place, the three principal texts no longer appeared as disconnected curiosities, but as differently angled descriptions of the same underlying process.
 A Novel Interpretive Framework
 Taken together, the three alchemical texts we will present in the following chapters span the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and, in our reading, describe the same underlying chemical processes across nearly a thousand years of expression.
 What I am about to present is not the conventional understanding of these works, nor something I assume will be accepted simply because I wrote it. It is the interpretation MB and I arrived at by repeatedly testing these texts against Shimanishi’s process and the larger Rock–Water Circuit.
 To our knowledge, these texts have not been interpreted in this operational and materially specific way before. I say that carefully, because I do not mean that no one has ever seen part of what we are describing. Many readers have recognized isolated themes, symbols, or structural features. What appears not to have been done is to map the three works together onto a coherent physical process with this degree of chemical, operational, and cross-textual precision.
 In our reading, The Emerald Tablet presents the larger recurring cycle: the world-order in which above and below, ascent and descent, generation and return are held together. The Six Keys of Eudoxus presents the guarded sequence by which a mineral essence is brought forth from stone: the openings, dissolutions, separations, washings, coagulations, and fixations. Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom by Theosophia Sternbuchta presents the portrait of that essence once produced: the medicine, tincture, or elixir, and its properties. The next three chapters walk through these readings one text at a time, not in historical order, but in the order most useful for decoding them.
 I invite these conclusions to be criticized, tested, and weighed against alternative explanations. If they fail, we will readily revise, refine, or abandon them. If they hold, then something long preserved in symbolic language has become newly interpretable. Either way, what follows should be read as an argument to be examined, not a doctrine to be accepted.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 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: Alchemy began to resolve once its words stopped behaving like labels and started functioning as roles. With Shimanishi’s process as the key, the labyrinth opened.


Chapter IX: The Emerald Tablet: A Map of the Rock–Water Circuit

Of the three texts, the Emerald Tablet comes first, not only because it is the oldest, but because it gives the map: the recurring natural cycle itself, the world-order in which above and below, ascent and descent, generation and return are held together. Foundational to the Hermetic tradition, it is most often treated as mystical or symbolic literature and only rarely read as a compressed description of underlying processes. We understand it differently. In our reading, it preserves, in ancient symbolic language, the same Rock–Water Circuit described in Chapters III through V in modern scientific terms.
 The Emerald Tablet , attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, survives in Arabic sources from roughly the early medieval period, around the sixth to eighth centuries AD. The translation used here is the Steele and Singer rendering, whose English most closely matches the phrases cited throughout this chapter. I reproduce the text first so the reader can see the whole before we turn to selected lines.
 True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true.
That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation.
The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon.
The wind carried it in its womb, the earth is the nurse thereof.
It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the whole world.
The power thereof is perfect.
If it be cast on to earth, it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.
With great sagacity it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior.
Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee.
This thing is the strong fortitude of all strength, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance.
Thus was this world created.
Hence will there be marvellous adaptations achieved, of which the manner is this.
For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I hold three parts of the wisdom of the whole world.
That which I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed.
 In what follows, I do not attempt to decode every line of the Tablet. For the sake of brevity, I focus on a small number of central passages that, in our view, map most clearly onto the modern scientific pattern described in our Rock–Water Circuit Theory. We arrived at these readings by testing one interpretation after another against the chemistry, Shimanishi’s process, and the text’s internal consistency.
 “And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation, and the power thereof is perfect.”
 Within the Rock–Water Circuit, this describes the recurring physical cycle of ISAW. Iron-sulfur-aluminum-water chemistry is first fixed into rock during formation. Later, acidic, sulfate-bearing rainwater begins weathering biotite, gradually opening and destabilizing its structure. As that opening proceeds, sulfur remains an active participant, helping drive the proton activity, electron flow, and mineral destabilization that liberate charge and transfer stored redox potential into water.
 As discussed more fully in Chapter VI, the aluminum question is central to the theory because although aluminum’s role is foundational in the geologic phase, aluminum itself is not carried forward into biology as an element. The conditioned water released from weathered biotite then carries its mineral chemistry into soils and living systems—into plants, animals, and eventually us.
 But not every element is transferred directly. Iron and sulfur continue into life as active participants in redox chemistry and energy transfer. Aluminum does not. In geology, it helps form the aluminosilicate matrix that provides the structural and electrochemical setting in which the first biological architectures arise. The amino acids, membranes, enzymes, and protein-based cellular structures that later take over comparable organizing and redox-supporting functions in biology emerge from a mineral scaffolding that aluminum helped build. Biology carries forward not elemental aluminum, but the functional logic of the structures it first made possible.
 After death, those minerals return to the Earth, where over long spans of time they are again gathered into rock. But the cycle does not end there. Through weathering, that mineral chemistry is reopened, remobilized, and carried back into water, where it can once again enter soils, living systems, and the processes of life. That recursive return—from rock into water, into life, back into rock, and back into water again—is what gives the system its continuity.
 The “single act of adaptation” points to the mediating operation by which what is fixed becomes mobile, what is latent becomes active, and what is organized geologically is later reorganized biologically. Within the Rock–Water Circuit, that role is most consistently fulfilled by water. Water receives charge from rock, carries mineral chemistry into life, returns those same materials to the Earth, and then receives them again as rock is reopened through weathering. The power is “perfect” because the system does not consume its source. Energy is transferred, reorganized, and renewed through continuous circulation.
 “The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon.”
 Referring again to ISAW chemistry and its cycle, we no longer understand the Sun and Moon here as fixed substances, but as roles within a generative transformation. The Father, identified with the Sun, names the activating and penetrating principle, which in this system is most consistently expressed through sulfur: whether carried in acidic, sulfated rainwater in Nature or as sulfuric acid in Art. The Mother, identified with the Moon, names the receptive mineral body: the matrix that receives that action, opens under it, and yields its contents.
 Seen this way, the line describes not two things but a union. The Father joins the Mother. The Mother receives, opens, and yields. And the child is the product of that union: the liberated mineral essence drawn forth from the opened body. In nature, this unfolds slowly through weathering; in Shimanishi’s process, sulfuric acid performs the same operation directly, entering the prepared vermiculite and extracting its essence into solution.
 “The wind carried it in its womb; the earth is the nurse thereof.”
 The Tablet now restates the same process under a different set of roles: no longer the union itself, but the cycle by which its active chemistry is carried and returned. Here, the “wind” names the phase of atmospheric transport, especially the dispersal of sulfur-bearing compounds through the air. What is carried is not the whole mineral system, but its most mobile and reactivating component: the sulfur chemistry that moves between domains and helps restart the cycle. Joined to water in the atmosphere and returned through rain, it reenters the mineral world in a chemically active form capable of reopening rock and setting its stored mineral potential into motion.
 “The earth is the nurse thereof.”
 A nurse does not initiate a thing. A nurse feeds and sustains what has already been brought forth. Here the earth is the nurse because it is the enduring mineral matrix within which opened rock slowly releases its chemistry into water and soil. Vermiculite is one crucial part of that nursing function: an opened mineral body whose expanded lattice releases mineral charge in a slow, buffered, and governed way. Iron, magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, and ultratrace elements enter water already prepared to carry them onward. In that sense, the earth nurses by feeding mineral chemistry into the waters and soils that sustain life.
 In our reading, the earth nurses through weathered rock, especially vermiculite, which slowly feeds mineral chemistry into the waters and soils that sustain life.
 What the Tablet records is therefore a closed loop: union, transport, return, nourishment, and renewal. Once this is seen, the Emerald Tablet begins to read like the compressed description of a real process, one that can be traced, tested, and reconstructed in the physical world.
 “It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the whole world.”
 In our reading, this points to the foundational source of usable energy: the separation and attraction of unlike charges, the basic polarity by which potential energy is stored and made available to power life. In Earth’s systems, minerals do not create that polarity, but they provide the material structures through which energy is held, organized, directed, and released. Their charged lattices store electrochemical potential and help govern its transfer across environments. In planetary terms, we believe that same principle is expressed in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where electron-rich fluids rising from the depths of Earth meet more proton-rich, oxidized waters at its surface above.
 “This thing is the strong fortitude of all strength, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance.”
 In our reading, this “thing” is mineralized water: water carrying a redox-active mineral chemistry in mobile form. Iron and sulfur provide the energetic core, but water is the medium that gives that chemistry reach, allowing it to move through what is subtle and enter what is solid. Around that core lies a broader mineral symphony that helps govern the energetic processes sustaining life.
 “Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee.”
 In our reading, “the glory of the brightness” refers first to illumination: the clarity that appears when the process is finally seen as a whole rather than in fragments. “Obscurity” names the opposite condition—the confusion, concealment, and misreading that prevail when the pattern has not yet been recognized. But because the Tablet is describing not only a text to be understood but a process active in nature, that brightness also extends into vitality itself: the generative order that appears wherever the cycle is intact and its chemistry remains in motion.
 When the Whole Came Into View
 Taken together, the lines “That which is above is like to that which is below… to accomplish the miracles of one thing,” and “it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven.” Again, it doth descend to earth, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior,” appear, in our reading, to be alchemical repetitions of the same underlying order. The first states that order; the second restates it as circulation. This is one way alchemy repeats the same operation under different images.
 Scientifically, that underlying order can be read across two scales. At the level of the Rock–Water Circuit, it may refer to sulfur-bearing rainwater descending from the sky and meeting iron-rich mineral bodies in the earth, where stored chemistry is opened and made mobile, then lifted, transformed, and returned again through circulation.
 At the broader planetary level, we believe the same order appears in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where alkaline, electron-rich fluids rising from depth meet more proton-rich and oxidized waters above.
 On that reading, the line “Thus was this world created” becomes central. The Emerald Tablet presents, in compressed symbolic form, a generative order of the world itself: the recurring cycle through which energy, mineral chemistry, water, and life remain linked across ascent, transformation, nourishment, and return.
 What it does not yet give us is that mineral chemistry in concentrated form—the same chemistry that powers Nature’s cycle. For that, we must turn from the map of the cycle to a text concerned not with the world-process as a whole, but with the nature of the essence brought forth from it.
 We turn, then, to Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom .

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 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 Emerald Tablet, one of the oldest and most important Hermetic texts, becomes a map of the Rock–Water Circuit: an ancient symbolic record of ascent, descent, mineral transformation, and return.


Chapter X: Letter From Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Stone

If the Emerald Tablet gave the cycle, Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom by Theosophia Sternbuchta gives the portrait of the essence brought forth from within it. Her letter does not primarily describe how that essence is extracted. It describes what it is like once brought forth: a hidden thing drawn from stone, activated, multiplied, and rendered capable of restoration.
 The letter appears to originate in the late seventeenth century and was later printed in Berlin in 1779. MB first encountered it in 2006, when it was passed along to him by an acquaintance. Interestingly, after discovering the letter, he attempted to contact a professor of antiquities to discuss it. Soon afterward, the page with Letter from Sternbuchta disappeared. For nearly twenty years, he searched the internet for it periodically. Although he had mentioned it in passing a few times during our initial work together, I had never seen it, so I knew little of what it really contained.
 One day, as our alchemical research deepened, he discovered it on an archived Wayback Machine page dated June 5, 2002. The page introduced it as follows:
 “This is a never-before-published letter from a female spiritual alchemist of the late seventeenth century. It is a complement to the kinds of spiritual treatises found in works available in The Divine Couple , edited by Robert Faas, and in Wisdom’s Book: The Sophia Anthology , edited by Arthur Versluis.”
 Because the archived page includes a notice restricting duplication, I do not reproduce the full text here. Instead, I quote only the passages necessary for analysis. Readers who wish to read the full letter can do so at this link. Its meaning will likely be much clearer after working through the interpretation that follows.
 Who Sternbuchta Is—and Isn’t
 Alchemy occupied dangerous territory. Its practitioners could be accused of heresy, fraud, sorcery, or economic subversion, with gold making chief among them. For that reason, alchemical authors rarely wrote as identifiable individuals. Names were chosen to signal standing within the Great Work rather than to denote lineage, biography, or authorship. Even so, real historical alchemists, obscure as many were, usually left some trace.
 Sternbuchta appears to be a constructed name. No historical figure can be securely traced to it, and no record survives beyond the letter itself. Whatever the reason for that, the text puts very little emphasis on personal identity.
 In alchemical writing, feminine voices often mark receptivity, containment, and discernment more than ordinary authorship. “Theosophia” suggests divine wisdom as known through nature. “Stern” points toward what is fixed or celestial. “Buch” means book or record. Taken together, the name suggests a role more than a person.
 When I first read the letter, I had not yet undergone what alchemy calls “preparation,” what I would describe more simply as learning to read role-grammar. In that state, the text sounded mystical and cryptic to the point of unintelligibility. Only later, once the chemistry was understood—once we had worked directly with the minerals and grasped the operations Shimanishi used—did those same lines begin to resolve into specific, testable meanings.
 What follows is how MB and I came to understand the letter after months of reconstruction. It is not a traditional reading. It is one assembled from the ground up.
 She writes of a hidden essence drawn from stone, activated by heat, mediated by a mercurial medium, purified in stages, and rendered capable of restoring what had been corrupted. She emphasizes circulation, repetition, and return, and insists that the substance is not consumed by use, but instead “multiplies” in virtue.
 What finally became clear to me was that Sternbuchta is not primarily concerned with giving the full procedure. She describes the nature, value, and restorative power of the mineral essence once produced, while preserving only a few glimpses of the steps by which it is brought forth. The letter is written in a symbolic language that conceals the process from a literal reading while preserving it for those who understand the operations behind it.
 Sternbuchta’s Letter, Decoded
 Before going further, I should briefly restate the basic interpretive rule. The roles assigned to Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt below are not inventions of ours, but part of the alchemical tradition itself. What mattered for our work was learning to read them as functions within a process rather than as fixed substances. At the risk of repetition, I present the key again here so the passages that follow are not read literally:
 • Sulfur: activity, heat, oxidation, transformation
• Mercury: fluidity, mediation, transport, dissolution
• Salt: structure, stability, fixation
 Let’s start with the first.
 “Form and materia are two substances, which are our field and magnet, because every agens needs its corresponding receptacle. . .”
 “Materia” refers to a raw earthly mineral. “Forma” is an activating force, that is, a fire-, water-, or sulfur-driven action. The marriage of form and matter mobilizes dormant mineral chemistry into a bioactive ionic form outside the mineral body: able to interact with water, bind impurities, structure charge, and restore balance. Read this way, the passage mirrors Shimanishi’s Themarox, produced by sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite.
 “One sulfuric, one mercurial. . . king and queen. . . greatest enmity until united.”
 Hermetic texts consistently describe Sulfur as solar, active, and fiery, and Mercury as receptive, dissolving, and mediating. In this passage, those opposing roles map cleanly onto sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite: sulfuric acid supplies the activating force while vermiculite serves as the receptive mineral body, and together they mediate the release of mineral essence from rock into water.
 “This tincture is powerful enough to be used as medicine. . . prevent all illnesses.”
 In alchemical language, “medicine” refers to a substance that restores order and coherence, while “illness” names any state of corruption, imbalance, or decay within a system, not a specific biomedical condition.
 • “This is the multiplication in quality . . .”
• “The tincture . . . is multiplied in its virtue”
• “The multiplication in quantity proceeds thus”
 In the older literature, multiplication did not refer to an increase in mass, but to an increase in effect, a gain in virtue disproportionate to the quantity applied. In modern terms, it describes a function whose influence extends far beyond its physical volume.
 This is one of the strongest reasons I believe Shimanishi effectively produced what the alchemical tradition called the Golden Elixir. A single milliliter of Themarox can clarify up to ten liters of water. Aurmina, a 10 percent dilution of Themarox, can clarify roughly one liter. For centuries, the Golden Elixir was described as possessing this same multiplicative property. One of the first observations Shimanishi made about his mineral extract was that it behaved in precisely this way.
 A First Reading
 At this point, the reader has enough of our key in hand to begin recognizing some of Sternbuchta’s recurring patterns without full guidance. What follows is a small cluster of phrases from the letter that can now be read more fruitfully than they could at the outset. They circle the same relations and operations repeatedly—one of alchemy’s most characteristic habits—and they prepare the reader for the even more elaborate repetitions of The Six Keys of Eudoxus .
 Descriptions of the person who might succeed in the work appear in phrases such as:
 • “Whoever wants to do something fruitful in this work should turn to it with all his diligence, work, and care.”
• “One cannot hurry the work.”
• “Whoever can make them lay together . . . can thus unite them inseparably and make something corporeally new.”
 Descriptions of the substance itself, referred to as “medicine” in the alchemical sense, appear in phrases such as:
 • “That is truly the beginning of our true medicine.”
• “He can be certain of an unending treasure.”
• “This tincture is powerful enough to be used as medicine . . . to restore the human body . . . with the highest usefulness.”
 The language also repeats the same underlying polarity already seen in the Emerald Tablet : activating forces and receptive bodies.
 • “One lunar, the other solar.”
• “Make them lay together . . . unite them inseparably.”
• “King and queen . . . though in enmity, must be joined.”
 And again and again, the letter returns to the actions of sulfur chemistry:
 • “The spirit of its father”
• “To extract out of it the Fixed Salt, which is the Blood of our Stone.”
• “One is mercurial, the other sulphuric.”
• “Mercury of the Wise, its secret fire.”
• “Enkindle the metallic sulphur through their fiery spirit.”
 What Sternbuchta Sees Clearly
 It became clear to me that Sternbuchta was not giving a practical recipe for producing such a substance. What she gives instead is more obliquely related to process: a symbolic account of the kind of union, activation, and work by which such a substance would be brought forth. Alongside that, she gives a portrait of what it would be like once produced, and of the kind of person who might succeed in the work. The letter is a remarkably precise description of both the medicine itself and the conditions under which it comes into being.
 For the sequence of steps needed to produce the essence, we must turn to a different kind of text.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now
 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: Sternbuchta does not give the recipe; she gives the portrait. Her letter describes the hidden essence drawn from stone—activated, multiplied, and capable of restoring what has fallen into disorder.