The Wise Artist: What It Takes to Complete the Work

My exploration of the ancient texts has changed how I think about Asao Shimanishi.
 At first, I went into the texts looking for insights into rock, fire, water, dissolution, and extraction, suspecting that a material operation was hidden within symbolic language. But as I moved deeper into The Six Keys of Eudoxus , I uncovered another set of descriptions that did not relate to process, but instead to the person. The text outlined the steps to follow, but it also described the character of someone capable of completing them.
 That is what this post is about. I will not be attempting to decode another text from antiquity, and will instead be taking a closer look at the places where the ancient portrait of the “ Wise Artist ” seems to describe Shimanishi with unusual precision: his privacy, persistence, reverence, failures, and willingness to submit himself to a long, hidden discipline.
 One of the most striking passages in all of The Six Keys occurs in the Second Key:
 “He who knows how to sublime the Stone philosophically, justly deserves the name of a philosopher, since he knows the Fire of the Wise, which is the only instrument which can work this sublimation. No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire, and this powerful agent, which works all the wonders of the Art: he who shall not understand it, and not know how to distinguish it by the characters whereby it is described, ought to make a stand here, and pray to God to make it clear to him; for the knowledge of this great Secret is rather a gift of Heaven than a Light acquired by the natural force of reasoning; let him, nevertheless, read the writings of the philosophers; let him meditate; and, above all, let him pray: there is no difficulty which may not in the end be made clear by Work, Meditation, and Prayer.”
 I have read this passage many times, and it moves me more deeply each time because it points to a part of the journey that work or study cannot overcome. Yes, one must read, work, meditate, observe, and remain devoted to the work. But Eudoxus says openly that knowledge of the Secret Fire can only come as “ a gift of Heaven. ”
 The Sixth Key then shows what that truth looks like inside the work itself:
 “The Sixth Key teaches the Multiplication of the Stone, by the reiteration of the same operation, which consists but in opening and shutting, dissolving and coagulating, imbibing and drying; whereby the virtues of the Stone are infinitely augmentable.”
 “I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom, for want of knowing the secret fire of the wise . . .”
 “But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
 “. . . which makes to run out of this plant (dry and withered in appearance) a water which wets not the hands, and which by a magical union . . . is dissolved into a viscous water—into a mercurial liquor, which is the beginning, the foundation, and the Key of our Art.”
 The work succeeds only through repetition, patience, failure, return, and a willingness to remain with the same rock long after partial successes have failed.
 Reading that, I began to think of the text as a description of a journey that selects for only a certain type of man. Those who lack patience abandon the work. Those who stay are changed by it.
 The writings can point, warn, and test, but they do not carry the practitioner to the end. He has to handle the materials, get them wrong, return to them, and remain humble enough for insight to be received.
 The Wise Artist
 What affected me most is the extent to which the text’s portrait of the “ Wise Artis t” appears to describe Shimanishi. Everything I have learned about him seems to fit: intensely private, never seeking recognition, prayerful, and almost unimaginably persistent.
 Eudoxus knows what it takes and expresses pity, “ I should much bewail ,” for a man who, after discovering the correct starting rock, “ having known the true matter, ” then “ spent fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, ” “ without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice,” for lack of knowledge of the “ Secret Fire. ”
 Shimanishi lived almost that exact pattern. He worked with rock, heat, water, and acids through repetition, failure, refinement, and return for nearly fifteen years. He had one stone, one challenge, and, like Eudoxus, the discipline to remain with it until it was overcome.
 Other aspects of Shimanishi’s journey deepen the resemblance. I have repeatedly been told that Shimanishi spoke of his discovery with reverence, not ownership, describing it as “ a gift from our Creator. ” At the only international conference he attended that I know of, during a lecture, he is said to have remarked, “W orking with this material is like working with the Angels, ” which is not the language of a typical scientist.
 If the Great Work is, as Eudoxus says, “ a gift of Heaven, ” then The Six Keys is describing not only a sequence of operations, but also the sort of person who can carry such a sequence through to completion: one marked by discipline, reverence, and a willingness to labor for years without recognition.
 By that measure, Shimanishi character astonishingly fits. Even more striking is that he never publicly revealed his “ Secret Fire, ” as the operational details remain known only to the men of the Shimanishi-Kaken company he left behind. That fact, too, places him within the circle that the 17th-century Eudoxus describes: “ No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire . “And that is only the first convergence.
 Another is the path he describes. Given that The Six Keys was never translated into Japanese, Shimanishi could never have used it as a guide, let alone understood it if he tried. He instead began with nothing more than a basic understanding that acids could dissolve certain minerals from rock and a hope that those minerals could be rendered active in water. From there, he worked alone, without a theory and without any assurance that the work would succeed. If these texts describe real processes, and I believe they do, then Shimanishi appears to have arrived at them independently, through experiment, devotion, and sustained attention to a single rock.
 The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the procedure. Shimanishi independently devised one that matched it.
 Sternbuchta’s Letter on the True Stone of Wisdom describes the properties of a substance. Shimanishi produced a substance with those properties.
 Both Eudoxus and Sternbuchta describe the character of a practitioner who might succeed, one shaped by long obscurity, long labor, and long attention to a problem that refuses an easy solution. Shimanishi’s life fits that description with extraordinary precision.
 Any one of these points could be questioned in isolation, but taken together, they add up to something much harder to dismiss.
 What makes this even more striking is that the other insights and convergences we identified moved in two directions. Our scientific research helped us progress through the ancient texts, while the texts themselves suggested connections that shaped our understanding of modern science. Even now, I am not sure I could fully separate which parts of the final Rock–Water Circuit Theory came from the modern scientific literature and which from the texts of antiquity.
 At this point, I do not think these convergences can be argued as forced connections, a retrospective construction, or a self-reinforcing interpretive framework. The consistency with which the texts describe the science, the process, the product, and the person points to something way more powerful. It suggests that these texts documented real knowledge of a material operation, what it produces, and the type of person required to bring it to completion, even if it was preserved in symbolic and guarded form.
 That, to me, is the true significance of what has happened on this journey. I do not know how often, or if ever, history has presented a reciprocal illumination between ancient writing and modern practice. I only know that these documents appear to be real records of a scientific and material understanding that long predated the language we would now use to describe it.
 What these chapters suggest is that “the labyrinth” described in alchemy has, in fact, been successfully navigated before, both in the older world and in modern times. But there is something even more powerful than these convergences: at one point, one of the ancient texts altered the course of MB’s life.
 When the Text Entered the Work
 Long before I entered this work, MB had once attempted to solve the same problem Shimanishi had already solved. He was introduced to Themarox in 2004, and soon after, he started a business selling it to farmers and at health and wellness events.
 Soon after, he was forced to make a decision that put his business in peril. He cut off contact with his only source of Themarox because he could no longer tolerate the man’s dishonesty and unreliability. As a result, MB found himself with little choice but to attempt the extraction himself.
 Working with vermiculite sourced from Canada, he applied the same general principles and succeeded, at least in part, in producing an aqueous mineral extract viable enough to sustain his business.
 However, there were discrepancies he could not ignore. The color was different. The behavior was different. Most importantly, it did not clarify water as the original. He initially understood these differences as due to variation in mineral composition, especially iron, and continued because what he had made was real, useful, and, often enough, validated by others.
 Then, almost two years later, an acquaintance showed him The Six Keys of Eudoxus .
 He told me that as he started to read it, the First and Second Keys immediately struck him as describing a real process, one he recognized as corresponding to both Shimanishi’s work and his own efforts. But there was one line that cut through everything else with unusual power: “one must make use of the citrine Mercury,” together with the warning “not to be deceived on this point.”
 That word— citrine —stopped him. The color of what he had made was clear. And he knew the color of Shimanishi’s extract: golden-yellow. He understood the passage to mean that, among the possible liquors or “ Mercuries, ” one had to begin with the correct one, and that it had to be golden-yellow.
 Another line struck him just as strongly: “even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career . . .” He read those phrases as warnings—not simply about error, but about direction.
 In that moment, although he knew his extract was useful, he began to doubt its truth.
 He concluded that what he had produced, however real and however effective, was a partial approximation of the substance described in the texts, and that it was not the one he should commit his efforts to. Out of conviction, he stopped selling it.
 What makes MB’s story especially striking is that his trajectory runs in the opposite direction from the one in The Six Keys . The Keys are written for someone trying to discover the “ Secret Fire. ” MB, by contrast, had first come into contact with the true substance through Shimanishi’s work, knew what the Secret Fire was, and then he attempted to reproduce it himself. In that sense, the text did not lead him toward the Golden Elixir. It led him back to it.
 The author, in that Sixth and last key, as he reminisces on his life, describes the same situation;
 “But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
 Even after the practitioner comes to know something of the Secret Fire, he will fail in his “first career.” MB had decided to stop working with the material rather than attempt to refine his method further. That is when he reached out to Shimanishi Kaken in Japan. From the outside, that decision could have looked like a retreat. In reality, it was realignment: a willingness to accept that he had come close to the process described in the texts, but had not yet arrived at the true substance.
 That decision brought MB back to the original source. He reached out to Shimanishi-Kaken, began importing Themarox directly from Japan, and for a brief period the work seemed ready to enter the world more widely. Then came the next echo.
 The Fifteen-Year Echo
 What first appeared in Shimanishi’s life began to echo again in MB’s life.
 Soon after he began importing Themarox directly from Shimanishi Kaken, MB enjoyed immense early success. Then, suddenly, in 2010, his business was nearly destroyed by the launch of a coordinated disinformation campaign. What followed, in his own words, were fifteen years of obscurity, the same obscurity that befell both Eudoxus and Shimanishi: years of persistence, study, and quiet labor.
 He was able to make a living, and the business grew modestly over that period, almost entirely within Amish farming communities across the Midwest, where farmers came to value Rock-Water for what they saw it do in their fields: stronger crops, less pest pressure, and a resilience they considered essential to their agriculture. But he never regained the wider distribution and awareness that he had once achieved.
 Similarly, the figure described in the Six Keys was not a man at the center of things. By the nature of the work, he was set apart, working outside recognition, outside status, and often in prolonged isolation. This recurring pattern in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB seems, within these texts, a requirement of the work itself.
 The same is true of companionship. Sternbuchta states it plainly:
 “. . . to maintain you and your companion (because one alone cannot do the Work) then the thing becomes idle.”
 That line immediately made me recall a moment in the first months of our collaboration, when MB told me that a few years earlier, he had told a colleague he needed someone who could help him move the work forward, someone, interestingly enough, whose background and character were nearly identical to mine. Our first meeting together, a dinner, ran for hours. Since that first meeting, we have been connected daily, if not several times daily.
 Later, as the work deepened in complexity, breadth, and difficulty, I came to feel the same thing from the other side. One day, after calling him to discuss a highly nuanced and esoteric connection to a scientific mechanism we had recently discovered, a sudden insight came upon me that I shared with him: there was no other person in the world I could have had that conversation with.
 MB laughed, reminding me that for almost the entire twenty years before our collaboration, he, too, had had no one who could truly engage with the material at the level his work had brought him to. We came to this from different directions, with different training and different instincts. Yet as I write these words, I cannot help feeling that the paths leading to our eventual intersection had been set long before.
 Our work did not move in one direction. He would pour out decades of accumulated observations, intuitions, and partial syntheses, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in fragments, and they would immediately trigger questions that sent me into both modern and ancient literature. What I found there would then force us to clarify, defend, expand, and ultimately connect the insights that he had long held, while at many other moments my research would uncover a missing link that fit directly into one of his older lines of thought.
 As the book drew toward its close, I was struck to find that this kind of partnership is also stated in The Six Keys : “without the help of a faithful friend, one remains undoubtedly in this labyrinth.”
 Both the Letter from Sternbuchta and The Six Keys suggest that, at some point, the work may require another person—someone capable of seeing, clarifying, or correcting what the solitary practitioner cannot.
 MB then recalled an old line from Proverbs that he had long held: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The word "iron" hit hard for me, literally, not metaphorically, because it described a foundational aspect of our work. We had already spent months tracing the centrality of iron in the Rock–Water Circuit, from Earth’s core to ISAW, and in the deep-to-surface gradient that feeds life through mineralized water, so to encounter that same word at the point where the texts speak of companionship and sharpening again struck me as more than incidental.
 Then there is a coincidence that MB and I both found amusing: my name, Pierre, literally means rock , while his, Matthew, means gift of God . Forgive me for pressing the connection too hard, but I get a kick out of the fit between our names and two conditions that seem to recur throughout The Six Keys : a source rock and something received.
 When I Entered the Pattern
 I should say something here that I am not entirely comfortable saying, but I do think the path I have found myself on bears mentioning, because it now seems to me to repeat, in its own much smaller way, the same pattern I have been tracing in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB.
 By the time I reached this chapter, I had spent nearly nine months almost entirely inside this work. What began as an intrigue with Shimanishi’s extract widened into a much larger journey through mineral science, water, agriculture, geology, and hydrology, and only then narrowed into alchemy, where the work became more demanding still—an extended cycle of reading, failed interpretations, returns to the same passages, and a kind of fixation on a single problem that did not release its hold.
 What is relevant here is that this stretch of work has been unlike any other period in my life. I do not think I can assert that strongly enough. I have already lived through a highly demanding academic and medical career—two decades in one of the most intense specialties in medicine, years of teaching, writing, publishing, and working at a pace that even my ICU colleagues and superiors remarked on. That was followed by five years of uninterrupted pressure during Covid, trying to save lives while fighting institutions that weren’t, and who paid me back by ending my “system career” and revoking my three specialty certifications.
 Yet, these nine months required an unprecedented amount of labor and concentration. Outside of seeing patients and trying to preserve time with my wife, I was almost continuously at my desk, reading, researching, writing, and returning to the same material. It was narrower, more isolating, and, in many ways, far more consuming than anything I have done before.
 Another aspect of this labor is that it wasn't driven by speed, cleverness, or by expertly reading, understanding, and organizing information, as my typical work has unfolded in the past. For this, I was forced to stay with the material for a long time, asking the same questions again and again, reconstructing collapsed theories and failed interpretations. The easier readings and early theories came together quickly. Only then did deeper meanings and more sound theories begin to emerge. From Volcanoes to Vitality is undergoing its 5th revision currently, driven by the iterative developments of its core conceptual framework.
 What I am trying to say is that, at a certain point, I began to feel trapped in the same pattern of work that the work itself was describing.
 I am not claiming equivalence with Shimanishi, nor with the author of The Six Keys . But the path described in these texts—prolonged effort, isolation, and repeated failure before finally emerging—began to look like a requirement for the work itself.

 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 Bio emerged 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.
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Summary: After months of studying Shimanishi’s work through science, ancient texts, and Scripture, I now see him as someone shaped by failure, patience, reverence, and insight received.


The Lost Medicine in the Stone

We now arrive at the third and final alchemical text in this series of posts. For those unsettled by this brief foray into the Hermetic canon, take heart: this is the last stop before we turn toward Scripture, which, I suspect, will prove to be the deeper well.
 Before we continue, a brief clarification. Many of the Western alchemists who preserved and worked with these texts, some of whom went on to become founders of modern science, were themselves deeply Christian and saw no contradiction between their faith and the study of nature in this way. They saw Hermes as a symbolic or historical voice rather than a figure of worship (just as I do). They thought of him as one who might preserve observations about creation. Their work, as I see it, was not an attempt to replace God, but to better understand what He had made.
 With that said, let's move forward.
 If The Emerald Tablet gave the symbolic picture of the cycle on Earth, and the Letter from Sternbuchta gave the portrait of the essence brought forth within it, The Six Keys turns to the work itself: the sequence of openings, dissolutions, and separations through which that essence is brought forth from stone.
 These posts have been trying to bring a single structure into view: the recursive, generative process by which mineral chemistry and water produce, sustain, and renew life on Earth. It is the same process that powers biology in all its forms, the same process at work in Nature and, when understood, in Art. Each text approaches that process from a different angle. In this post, we enter the labyrinth as deeply as we can, because The Six Keys is where the sequence itself is most carefully hidden: the Work in Art, described in guarded symbolic language.
 The First Key: The Trap of Literal Reading
 Although presented last in this series, The Six Keys of Eudoxus proved to be exactly what its title suggests: not just a key, but the key through which the rest of the Hermetic canon began to resolve for me.
 A brief note on the history of The Six Keys of Eudoxus . The text appears to date to the late seventeenth century, and scholars have long noted its resemblance to writings attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, the alchemical pseudonym widely associated with George Starkey.
 Starkey was an American born in Bermuda, educated at Harvard, and later active in London in the 1650s. Notably, he was there during the same period as Robert Boyle, of Boyle’s law, one of the founders of modern chemistry, and a central figure in arguing that scientific inquiry and theology were not in conflict but deeply aligned. I bolded that point, given some of the concerns readers have raised about my exploration of alchemical texts.
 While no definitive attribution can be made, the text most likely emerged from the same Western European alchemical world, carrying the same preoccupation with guarding the method using symbolic compression and deliberate misdirection that defines that period of the Hermetic tradition.
 What cost me a long time to figure out was that, despite its title, The Six Keys are not six steps in a procedure. They are instead six symbolic vantage points onto one underlying process, repeating it in shifting language so the reader cannot lock onto it too cleanly.
 For that reason, I will not walk through all six Keys in equal detail. I will begin by moving slowly through the First Key, with our role-grammar already in place and with a quick review of Shimanishi’s method.
 Shimanishi’s process began with vermiculite, a weathered form of biotite, or “black mica” — an iron-rich mineral known to contain an unusually broad range of elements. In Nature, sulfate-bearing rainwater slowly transforms biotite into vermiculite, making it more porous, hydrated, and reactive than its parent stone, whose minerals remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets. Shimanishi then dried the vermiculite to remove residual moisture before exposing it to sulfuric acid under carefully controlled conditions, a method that took him nearly fifteen years to perfect. The result was a golden-colored, mineral-dense aqueous solution he called Themarox or “Rock Extract.”
 For brevity, I include only the First Key below; for the complete document, readers can consult the text here .
 THE FIRST KEY
 The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this is it which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body—of sulphur with mercury.

 Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of this First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the Stone, which is venerable, bright in colour, a mind sublime, and an open sea.

 This Stone has a bright glittering: it contains a Spirit of a sublime original; it is the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish.

 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, to the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost in this labyrinth, from whence it is very hard to get out. In effect, when one imagines that they speak of one work, they often treat of another.

 Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.

 Hence, Hermes says, What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.

 The Key to The Six Keys
 Recall that in Chapters III and IV , I introduced the core scientific insights into iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) chemistry—the chemistry that powers the Rock–Water Circuit. That framework describes a planetary energy system that is self-renewing: a process that generates, sustains, and continually recreates the conditions for life. It was a detailed understanding of that chemistry and how it cycles through the Earth that allowed us to construct an interpretive key for decoding these texts.
 To interpret The Six Keys , one crucial aspect of the relationship between the two mineral forms at the center of the Rock–Water Circuit must be understood: only Nature can transform biotite into vermiculite over geologic time; no human can. It is only after that transformation—after black mica has been weathered into vermiculite—that the broad range of minerals it contains can be released. If an alchemist—referred to in the text as a philosopher—began the Work with black mica itself, he would never succeed.
 That point matters because, across centuries of Hermetic alchemy, no universally recognized instance of the substance described in The Six Keys or Letter from Sternbuchta has ever been established. It is my belief that this failure was not accidental, but the result of deliberate misdirection in The Six Keys .
 This text cost me months because it appears simple, but it defeats anyone who reads it as such. To wit, the First Key begins with a brazen deception in the first line:
 “The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up.”
 Here, the text suggests that the alchemist should aim to open black mica, “the dark prisons,” in order to access the reactive, redox-capable mineral chemistry locked inside, “the Sulphur.” But that first opening is humanly impossible. It belongs to Nature alone.
 “This Stone has a bright glittering.”
 At first glance, this line seems to point toward a lustrous mineral—something like black mica with its characteristic shimmer. But that reading does not hold cleanly as the passage develops. Vermiculite, especially when exfoliated or reduced to finer particles, also presents as a glittering, gold-white material. The ambiguity is not accidental. The text shifts its referent, allowing the same word— “ Stone ”—to point to different forms at different stages of the work. What appears to be a simple description begins to function as a moving target, one that resists a fixed, literal reading.
 “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.”
 Although this line announces that there are three steps in the process, “ the operations of the three works ,” the steps will be difficult to interpret because the descriptions overlap. In my reading, this is an explicit admission that the same process will be described in shifting language, and that the ambiguity is intentional.
 The warning then sharpens:
 “To the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost in this labyrinth, from whence it is very hard to get out. In effect, when one imagines that they speak of one work, they often treat of another.”
 “ Lynx’s eyes ” in alchemy refers to those with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. Without that capacity, the reader cannot tell which step is being described, what material is being acted upon, or when the text has shifted from one operation to another. That is how an alchemist reader can quickly become “ lost in this labyrinth. ”
 The text then returns to again deceptively suggesting the alchemist begin his work with black mica, all the while warning him not to be deceived, yet stating it is a truth:
 “Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.”
 Read this way, the passage appears, for the first time, to encode—however cryptically—the three distinct and sequential steps in the process:
 (1) The weathering of biotite (black mica) into vermiculite—“ cut off the head of the Black Dragon. ”
(2) The separation of the stone from its mineral essence using sulfuric acid—“ whiten the black . ”
(3) The emergence of that essence in active aqueous form—“ vivify the white. ”
 “It is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.”
 Just as it warned it would, the text repeats the misleading instruction that the Artist must begin by opening the closed mineral body himself, while naming it in overlapping forms, “ cuts off the head of the Black Dragan and of the Raven ,” which can make the reader think two different starting materials are required.
 Again, any alchemist who began the work with black mica, trying by Art to perform what only Nature can do, would fail every time. Shimanishi did not. He began with vermiculite, starting only after Nature had completed the first step in the process.
 Although the First Key contains a good deal of deliberate misdirection, the later Keys start to offer clearer and more faithful guidance. From the Third Key:
 “Hence, Hermes says, What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art.”
 This is a clear instruction that the Artist must begin not with black mica itself, but with what is “ born of the Crow ”: vermiculite weathered from black mica.
 In one instance, the connection to Shimanishi’s method is unusually precise. When the text speaks of a “ Secret Fire ” that dissolves the Stone “ without violence, ” it mirrors his discovery that vermiculite must first be air-dried; if sulfuric acid is applied while moisture remains, the material shatters violently.
 Later in the Third Key, the clearest illustration of the first step appears:
 “But, further, that you may not be deceived with the terms of the Compound, I will tell you that the philosophers have two sorts of compounds. The first is the compound of Nature, whereof I have spoken in the First Key; for it is Nature which makes it in a manner, incomprehensible to the Artist, who does nothing but lend a hand to Nature by the adhibition of external things, by the means of which she brings forth and produces this admirable compound. The second is the compound of Art; it is the Wise man who makes it by the secret union of the fixed with the volatile, perfectly conjoined with all prudence, which cannot be acquired but by the lights of a profound philosophy.”
 Here, the text more clearly points to the rock the Artist must start with. “ The first is the compound of Nature, ” suggesting that the Artist leave that to Nature, and instead start with vermiculite, the rock weathered from black mica, “ in a manner incomprehensible to the Artist. ” “ The second is the compound of Art, ” describing the mineral essence produced when the alchemist takes the vermiculite and then applies “ the volatile, ” i.e., sulfuric acid.
 Each time I return to the final line of that passage, it resonates more deeply. I cannot help but see in it a description of Shimanishi—the “ Wise Artist ”—whose determination and persistence kept him working alone for fifteen years until he could “ perfectly conjoin ” sulfuric acid with vermiculite, arriving at a method that, in the text’s words, “ cannot be acquired but by the lights of a profound philosophy .” We will return to what is meant by the “ lights of a profound philosophy ” in the next post.
 Now to the First Key, to one of its most beautifully symbolic passages:
 “Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.”
 The “ blackest black ” corresponds to what is driven off or separated during the process, while the “ white and resplendent Stone ” is the extracted essence itself—clarified, active, and no longer confined within the mineral lattice. For the first time, a hint of the mineral composition it will contain appears: “ It contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. ”
 In ordinary life, blood is inseparable from iron, which gives it its redness and underlies its power to carry oxygen. In alchemical imagery, the pelican is a figure of nourishment through blood. Thus, the phrase naturally points to an iron-rich, life-bearing essence: a mineral extract whose redox-active core helps explain why the alchemists spoke of it in terms of blood, nourishment, and vitality.
 That suggestion becomes even more striking when set beside Shimanishi’s extract. After sulfur, iron is the second-highest concentrated active mineral in Themarox. Shimanishi appears to have understood that iron was central to many of the properties the extract displayed, as he reportedly spent twenty years searching across multiple continents for the most iron-rich mica he could find. In the end, the richest source he identified lay not halfway across the world, but in Japan, within two hours of his home, in Fukushima Prefecture.
 A Second Reading
 As in the last chapter, I will leave the reader with a cluster of repetitive descriptions appearing throughout The Six Keys , all circling one of the “three works” or steps. By this point, they should begin to sound less like separate instructions than like recurring views of the same operation.
 For instance, there are numerous descriptions of a liquid solution of dissolved minerals being extracted from vermiculite via the actions of sulfuric acid; here, I include only three of the many I found:
 • “Extract the seed from the body”
• “Ought the Wise Artist dissolve the Body with the Spirit”
• “Dissolution of the Body into its water”
 Then:
 “This is the Secret Fire which forms the Stone of the Philosophers by the conjunction of the Spirit with the Body, of Sulfur with Mercury.”
 For MB and me, the phrase “ of Sulfur with Mercury ” was the most difficult line we encountered in alchemy. We initially read “ Sulfur ” and “ Mercury ” as materials: first as sulfated rainwater acting on black mica, then as sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite. Both readings worked locally but failed as we carried them forward.
 The difficulty resolved only when we stopped treating these terms as substances and began reading them as functions.
 In that framework, “ Sulfur ” does not name sulfuric acid itself, but its activating function—its capacity to penetrate, react, and transform. “ Mercury ” does not name a separate material, but its mediating function—its capacity to dissolve, mobilize, and carry.
 Read this way, the phrase no longer describes two substances joined together, but two roles performed by the same agent. It is sulfuric acid acting simultaneously as activator and mediator, “ the Spirit ” working upon the “ Body ” to release the mineral essence.
 Our understanding of that line is what ultimately led us out of the labyrinth.
 When the Three Came Into Focus
 At the outset of this sequence of chapters, I proposed that these three texts were not saying the same thing in the same way, but rather describing the same underlying chemistry and process from different angles. Having now walked through them one by one, that conclusion can be stated more definitively.
 The Emerald Tablet gives the larger natural order: the recurring cycle by which mineral chemistry, water, energy, and life remain linked across ascent, descent, nourishment, and return. Letter from Sternbuchta gives the portrait of the essence once brought forth: its value, its multiplication, its restorative power, and the kind of language required to describe it without exposing it too openly. The Six Keys of Eudoxus gives the guarded work itself: the sequence, misdirections, and operations by which that essence is brought forth from stone.
 Taken together, the three texts do not merely echo one another. They form a coherent structure. The Tablet gives the cycle in Nature. Sternbuchta gives the essence in view. Eudoxus gives the steps in Art. That was the interpretive framework I proposed at the outset. What these chapters have attempted to show is how and why that reading holds.
 But now that the chemistry in these texts has been decoded, it is time to turn to another kind of knowledge they preserve: not about minerals, water, and extraction, but about the human beings drawn into such work, shaped by it, and, in rare cases, those who brought it to its end. Seeing that side of the texts hit me harder than I was prepared for, just as their insights into chemistry had. It mapped first onto Shimanishi, the modern figure I had already come to regard as a man of historic importance whose achievement history had largely missed.
 And then, more disturbingly, it began to map onto MB and, however reluctantly I say it, onto me as well.

 Note to readers: What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, what these texts described centuries ago. Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) is a diluted form of that extract, and part of my effort to bring this mineral chemistry into practical use. For those interested in encountering the work beyond the page, Aurmina is its modern expression.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, 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: Why am I reading alchemical texts? Because some of them appear to preserve practical knowledge about minerals, water, and vitality. The Six Keys may be one of the clearest examples.


The Letter from Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Golden Elixir

Yesterday, I introduced The Emerald Tablet as a record of Nature’s cycle. What follows is the next step in that sequence.
 Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom by Theosophia Sternbuchta gives a portrait of the essence brought forth from within that cycle. 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 an acquaintance passed it along to him. Interestingly, after discovering the letter, he attempted to contact an antiquities professor to discuss it. Soon afterward, the webpage that hosted the 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 will not reproduce the full text here. Instead, I will only quote 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 Was—and Wasn’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, a ‘feminine voice’ often signals a perspective focused on receiving, holding, and correctly recognizing a process, rather than actively driving or asserting it. “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, after weeks and months of working across all three texts—tracing repeated words, roles, images, and patterns against the mineral chemistry, Shimanishi’s operations, and the qualities of the mineral essence brought forth from the process—did those same lines begin to resolve into specific, testable meanings.
 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 it has been 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 revealing it to those with some knowledge of 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 multiplicative property is the clearest connection between Sternbuchta’s Golden Elixir and Shimanishi’s Themarox. 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 by which the essence is brought forth, we have to turn to a different kind of text: The Six Keys of Eudoxus . If this post has made you more intrigued than exhausted, the next stage of the labyrinth begins here .

 A note for readers : In the next post, we will turn to a 17th-century text that describes the procedure by which the mineral solution was said to be prepared.
 For those interested in how that knowledge has re-entered the world in material form, I invite you to explore Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) — a name we chose before we fully understood what it pointed to, and one that will become clearer as this series unfolds.
 Yes, this is a product, and part of a company I am building around this work, because at some point the work had to leave the page and enter the world.

 *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's letter describes the hidden essence drawn from stone—activated, multiplied, and capable of restoring what has fallen into disorder.


The Emerald Tablet, Decoded: Not Symbolism, But a Coherent Natural Cycle

We now move deeper into the Hermetic alchemical texts.
 The Emerald Tablet is the first of the three texts we will decode, and the most foundational: It is the most widely known, the most studied, and the most frequently misunderstood.
 I begin with it not because it proves our interpretive framework, but because it names the larger order: ascent and descent, reception and activation, opening and release, circulation and return. Its language is compressed, ancient, and less operationally precise than the texts we will decode in the next posts, so some of the mappings may initially feel provisional, even forced.
 Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and preserved in early medieval Arabic sources, the Tablet is typically read as mystical or symbolic literature—a set of poetic aphorisms about the unity of nature. It is rarely read as a compressed description of a planetary cycle.
 We read it differently.
 In what follows, we present a materially specific interpretation of the text—one tested against the Rock–Water Circuit Theory and against the operational chemistry of Asao Shimanishi . In our reading, the Tablet preserves, in symbolic language, the same recurring cycle described in Chapters III through V : Earth’s cycle of opening, circulation, transformation, and return linking rock, water, and life.
 I ask for patience here. The roles we assign in the Tablet—to sulfur-bearing rainwater, biotite, vermiculite, and the mineral essence brought forth from stone—will be tested repeatedly in the texts that follow. Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom will give a portrait of the essence once produced. The Six Keys of Eudoxus will give the guarded procedure by which it is extracted.
 By the end, our claim is not that one striking line happens to fit. It is that all three texts lock together around the same materials and processes we have identified. If our interpretation was incorrect, it would have broken somewhere across these texts. We believe that it does not.
 I do not offer that lightly. To our knowledge, these texts have not been mapped onto a physical process with this degree of chemical and operational precision. If that claim is too strong, it will fail under scrutiny. If it holds, then one of the most famous documents in the Hermetic tradition may be read in a way that has not been available before.
 For those more inclined to listening, I’m including a deeply evocative reading of The Emerald Tablet by professional voice actress Laura Anderson, also known as Conscious Voice. Laura is a colleague from the World Council for Health , though I had no idea she was a professional voice actress until she sent me this recording after yesterday’s post.
 She reads carefully and slowly, and I found that, reading the words in time with her voice, made the Tablet feel newly alive to me, even after months of living inside it.

 I begin with the text itself. The translation used here is the Steele and Singer rendering, whose English most closely aligns with the phrases analyzed below. I reproduce it in full 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 the passages that, in our reading, most clearly describe the Rock–Water Circuit. We arrived at these readings by testing one interpretation after another against the geochemistry, Shimanishi’s procedural steps, and the text’s internal consistency.
 “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.”
 In our reading, “above” and “below” refer to more than sky and Earth. They describe the continuity between deep geologic formation and surface biological life. What forms below, under heat, pressure, and mineral transformation, later rises toward the surface through uplift, tectonic exposure, and crustal cycling. Once exposed above, it meets water, atmosphere, and life. The same materials then reenter circulation through weathering, release, biological use, death, sedimentation, burial, and eventual reformation. Above and below are not separate domains. They are two phases of one recurring operation.
 “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 a recursive planetary process. Minerals form deep within the Earth, are gathered into rock, lifted toward the surface, opened by weathering, and released into water. Their chemistry enters soils, organisms, and living systems, then returns again through decay, sediment, burial, metamorphism, and rock formation. The “single act of adaptation” is the mediating operation by which fixed mineral order becomes mobile biological chemistry. Water fulfills that role most consistently. It receives charge from rock, carries mineral chemistry into life, returns those materials to Earth, and later reopens the rock so the cycle can begin again. The power is “perfect” because the source is not consumed. It is transformed, circulated, buried, re-formed, lifted, and released again.
 “The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon.”
 Here, the Sun and Moon name roles within a generative transformation rather than fixed substances. The Father, identified with the Sun, is the activating and penetrating principle. In Nature, that activity appears across two linked domains: deep geologic heat and pressure below, which form the original mineral body, and sulfur-bearing rainwater above, which later reopens and remobilizes that body after uplift and exposure. In Art, the same activating role is performed directly by sulfuric acid.
 The Mother, identified with the Moon, is the receptive mineral body. In Nature, that body is biotite, formed at depth and later exposed to weathering. In Art, it is vermiculite, the already opened mineral matrix from which the spirit or fire can mobilize the seed. The Father acts. The Mother receives, opens, and yields. The child is the liberated mineral essence drawn forth from stone.
 “The wind carried it in its womb; the earth is the nurse thereof.”
 The Tablet now describes transport and return. The “wind” names the atmospheric phase of the cycle, especially the movement of sulfur-bearing compounds through air and water. What is carried is not the whole mineral system, but one of its mobile activating agents: sulfur chemistry returned through rain, capable of reopening rock and setting stored mineral chemistry into motion.
 But the line also belongs to the larger planetary cycle. Material rises from below through geodynamic processes, enters surface and atmospheric circulation, and later returns through erosion, sedimentation, burial, and reformation. The wind carries. The Earth receives. The process moves between atmosphere, surface, life, and depth.
 “The earth is the nurse thereof.”
 A nurse feeds and sustains what has already been brought forth. Here, the Earth nurses because it is the enduring mineral body from which water and life are fed. Weathered rock, especially vermiculite, performs part of that nursing function at the surface: its opened lattice releases mineral charge in a slow, buffered, and governed way. Iron, magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, and ultratrace elements enter water and soil in forms prepared for biological use.
 At the deeper scale, Earth nurses by preserving and reforming the source itself. It gathers returned matter, buries it, transforms it, and eventually brings it back toward exposure. Nursing is therefore not only surface feeding. It is the whole planetary act of storing, preparing, releasing, and renewing mineral chemistry for life.
 “It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the whole world.”
 In our reading, this points to the source of usable energy: the separation and attraction of unlike charges, especially proton and electron, through which potential energy is stored and made available to life. Minerals provide the structures through which this energy is held, organized, directed, and released. Their charged lattices store electrochemical potential and help govern its transfer across environments.
 This occurs at both scales. At depth, heat, pressure, redox chemistry, and mineral formation store the original charge-bearing architecture. At the surface, weathering and water release that architecture into soils, waters, and organisms. In planetary terms, the same principle appears in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where alkaline, electron-rich fluids rising from depth meet more acidic, proton-rich waters above.
 “If it be cast on to earth, it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.”
 This is one of the Tablet’s clearest descriptions of extraction. When the active principle is cast onto Earth, fixed matter is separated from mobile essence. In Nature, sulfur-bearing rainwater contacts exposed mineral bodies and begins opening them. The dense mineral structure is altered, and the more mobile ionic and redox-active fractions are separated from the gross body of stone.
 At the deeper scale, the same principle operates in reverse and return. What has been separated, circulated, and used by life eventually returns to Earth, where it is gathered again into sediment, rock, and mineral architecture. Separation and recombination are therefore two halves of the same cycle.
 “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.”
 This line is the center of the Tablet’s planetary logic. It describes circulation across multiple scales at once. At the hydrologic level, water ascends through evaporation and transpiration, then descends as rain. At the geodynamic level, mineral bodies formed deep within Earth slowly ascend toward the surface through uplift, tectonic exposure, and crustal cycling. Once exposed, they are reopened by weathering and returned into circulation through water, soils, and life.
 The line also describes union. What descends from above—rain, atmospheric chemistry, sulfur-bearing water—meets what has risen from below: mineral bodies formed in the Earth. Their contact unites superior and inferior, atmosphere and geology, water and rock, activation and reception. That union produces the mobile mineral chemistry on which life depends.
 “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 carrying redox-active mineral chemistry in mobile form. Iron and sulfur provide the energetic core, but water gives that chemistry reach. It moves through subtle spaces, enters mineral interfaces, and eventually penetrates what first appears solid and closed.
 Biotite is the key example. Formed at depth, lifted toward exposure, and then acted upon by sulfur-bearing rainwater, it slowly opens toward vermiculite. What was dense, layered, and relatively inaccessible becomes hydrated, expanded, exchangeable, and capable of releasing its mineral chemistry into water. The line, therefore, describes both penetration and transformation: water entering stone, stone opening into a receptive matrix, and mineral essence becoming mobile.
 “Thus was this world created.”
 This line only makes full sense at the planetary scale. The Tablet is not describing surface weathering alone, nor atmospheric circulation alone. It is describing a recursive world-making order: deep formation, ascent, exposure, activation, opening, release, circulation, biological participation, burial, reformation, and return. This is the Rock–Water Circuit in its largest form.
 “Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee.”
 In our reading, “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 confusion that prevails when geology, water, minerals, life, and ancient texts are treated as separate domains. But because the Tablet describes a process active in nature, the brightness also extends into vitality itself. Wherever the cycle remains intact, mineral order, water, charge, and life remain connected.
 When the Whole Came Into View
 The lines “That which is above is like to that which is below” and “it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth” are not separate claims. They are two expressions of the same order. The first states the unity of above and below. The second describes its circulation.
 Scientifically, that order operates across atmospheric, hydrologic, biologic, and geodynamic scales. Sulfur-bearing rainwater descends from the atmosphere and meets iron-rich mineral bodies exposed at the surface. Those bodies were formed below, lifted upward, opened by water, and made chemically mobile. Their mineral chemistry enters soils, waters, organisms, and metabolic systems before returning again through death, erosion, sediment, burial, and reformation.
 At the broader planetary level, the same order appears in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where alkaline, electron-rich fluids rising from depth meet more acidic, proton-rich waters above. 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 formation, 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 Earth cycle itself, 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, 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

 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, an ancient symbolic record of ascent, descent, activation, and return, appears to anticipate the modern Rock–Water Circuit Theory by nearly 2,000 years.


The Blueprint of Life: Entering the Hermetic Canon

Well, That Took Longer Than Expected
 Before we enter alchemy, I want to briefly re-ground those of you who were following The Blueprint of Life as I was serially publishing it here, and who may have wondered why I suddenly disappeared for six weeks.
 The reason is simple: I thought the book was nearly finished. Then, while posting it, I discovered things that demanded more attention, more research, more decoding, and more writing. What was supposed to be a final pass became one of the deepest rabbit holes I have ever gone down, and I did not come back up until I felt the work was finally complete. The full book is now available here on Substack while it is being typeset and prepared for print.
 For those of you who stuck with me, I appreciate you. For those who drifted off, welcome back.
 Six weeks ago, I published three chapters over one long weekend: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory , Three Minerals and Water: The Engine of Life , and Earth’s First Energy System . They were, apparently, too heavy on the science. I say that because, for the first time in four years of writing on Substack, I lost subscribers while actively posting.
 Oddly, I was unperturbed. Although I knew those chapters were too much, too soon, I also had a quiet confidence that the people who drifted away would likely come back once the destination became clearer.
 Further, I had wandered far from my usual territory, even though I warned everyone we were going someplace new. Those chapters were in a domain foreign to, and probably uninteresting to, much of my long-standing readership.
 What readers could not yet know was that those chapters were laying the foundation for where the book was really going next:
 Into alchemy.
 So stay with me. Please. It is going to get good. Like really good.
 At my most delusional, I firmly believe these posts will make history — on Substack of all places. At my most sober, I hope to gain a handful of new subscribers.
 Let history be the judge.
 Anyway, enough of that. Let’s pick up where we left off.
 In the earlier “heavy science” posts, MB and I put forth what we believe is a coherent extension of modern scientific understanding of the origins and continuance of life on Earth: a framework we named the Rock–Water Circuit .
 When the Old Texts Began to Speak
 The Rock–Water Circuit Theory draws on geology, hydrology, origin-of-life research, biochemistry, and atmospheric science. In brief, we propose that iron-rich biotite, once weathered into vermiculite, provides a core iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) chemistry, along with a broader mineral matrix, that bridges geology and biology.
 In this cycle, an energy-supporting mineral chemistry forms in rock, is opened by weathering, mobilized by water, carried into living systems, and eventually returned to Earth, where, over geologic time, it is reformed into rock, weathered again, and returned to circulation.
 That last recursive movement—from life back to rock, and from rock back into water, using the same core chemistry—is where MB and I believe our work points toward a new understanding of Earth as a self-renewing life-support system.
 What I did not expect was that this same cycle seemed to reappear—symbolically but consistently—in texts written long before modern scientific language existed. MB, the co-author of the theory and a man deeply studied in Scripture and texts from antiquity, had been pointing me toward that literature for months. At first, I did not know what to do with it.
 Water was what finally caught my attention. It stood at the center of everything: modern chemistry, biology, and the older symbolic languages I had only begun to take seriously. As From Volcanoes to Vitality neared what I thought would be its completion, those scattered connections began organizing themselves into something larger, something that no longer belonged inside that book.
 That is where The Blueprint of Life began. It also explains why FVTV remains unfinished. I had expected to complete it first, but this material intervened and demanded to be written. I am already hard at work since completing and submitting the final, final, final manuscript of Blueprint last week.
 By then, I had 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 alchemy and Scripture began mapping with striking fidelity onto both his method and the Rock–Water Circuit.
 What modern science now describes in the language of chemistry, physics, and biology, older traditions described symbolically. Water was treated as the active medium that carries, dissolves, mediates, renews, and enables transformation.
 As the connections mounted, I began to suspect that the language was not just poetic. It might also have been recording, in symbolic language, something that modern science would later describe more precisely.
 That is the question this post begins to test. But first, we have to set 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 caricature obscures what alchemy actually was: the first experimental 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 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. Its legendary source was Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the Thrice-Greatest,” a Hellenistic figure formed from the union of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, deities associated with communication, wisdom, and sacred knowledge.
 The writings attributed to him treated material and spiritual reality as parts of one intelligible order, governed by hidden correspondences between visible and invisible processes. That is why Hermetic texts mattered so deeply to alchemists: they offered a framework in which matter, spirit, nature, medicine, and divine order were not separate subjects, but different faces of one Work. 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 a purified, ordered, and incorruptible state. 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. 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.”
 Entering the Labyrinth
 MB had been pointing me toward these older texts for months—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 whether the modern scientific cycle we were seeing could stand on its own.
 Only after that scientific map had taken shape did I begin to see—at first only in glimpses—that the language might be describing something real. By then, I had a more detailed understanding of the physical processes MB believed the texts described, but almost no fluency in the symbolic language of alchemy.
 That is where the real difficulty began. It took far longer than either of us expected. The posts that follow trace how we found our way through that difficulty, one text at a time.
 Now you know why I disappeared for so long.
 Throughout what follows, when I use the term Art , I mean the chemistry of Shimanishi’s laboratory process. When I use Nature , I mean the larger Rock–Water Circuit as it operates in the world.
 That distinction matters 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.
 The Failure of Literal Reading
 Alchemy is difficult in a different way than chemistry. Chemistry is difficult because it is technical. Alchemy is difficult because its central words do not behave like modern nouns.
 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 problem from the start.
 Of all people, I should have recognized that sooner, 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. Then, two pages later, the whole structure collapses. That was my experience of the Hermetic canon.
 The resolution came when I stopped demanding that the words behave like labels and started treating them as roles. Sun, Moon, Sulfur, Mercury, Body, Spirit, and Stone can name substances in one passage and functions in another. The mistake is deciding too early what a word “means,” then carrying that meaning forward as if the text were using a fixed vocabulary.
 That is how the labyrinth works: it punishes certainty before the process has been understood.
 Shimanishi’s work gave us a concrete operational system against which the 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 the extract itself, the more his process allowed us to move forward.
 We eventually realized that alchemical texts often use the same words to describe the same physical operation, even when the material being acted upon changes. The texts also repeat constantly, describing the same process while using different metaphors, terms, and emphases. To a literal reader, this feels like new steps appearing everywhere. In reality, the text is often describing the same operation from different symbolic angles.
 One example may help. In The Emerald Tablet , the line “ The Father thereof is the Sun, the Mother the Moon ” initially led me to treat Sun and Moon as stable substances. I tried mapping biotite onto the Sun and vermiculite onto the Moon. That reading worked briefly, then collapsed.
 The language was not assigning fixed identities. It was describing an interaction. The Sun names the activating principle—the force that penetrates, transforms, and brings about change. In the chemistry we had identified, that role is most consistently fulfilled by sulfur, whether as sulfated rainwater in Nature or sulfuric acid in Shimanishi’s laboratory. The Moon names the receptive body: the matrix that receives that action, opens, and yields its contents.
 The words had not been inconsistent. I had been trying to hold them still
 Three terms sent me deepest into the labyrinth: Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. Because these words are so difficult and unstable in the texts, it helps to state their core meanings simply 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, water. In Art, Mercury is the mercurial solvent doing the extracting and carrying—that is, sulfuric acid.
 Later, when we reach The Six Keys of Eudoxus , the text even uses both 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 MB and I arrived at after months of failed readings, internal contradictions, cross-checking, and repeated returns to the primary texts. To our knowledge, no prior interpretation has mapped these terms with this degree of operational and material precision. The framework stands or falls by whether it holds together across texts, chemistry, and scale.
 The Key We Had in Hand
 As described earlier in the book, we began with what we thought was a reasonably accurate understanding of Shimanishi’s method of extracting minerals from rock in a liquid solution. 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 that error, many interpretive mistakes resolved.
 Over long geologic periods, acidic, sulfated rainwater gradually weathers biotite, leaching potassium and transforming it into a more porous, hydrated vermiculite. Shimanishi did not begin with the closed parent mineral. He began with 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. Nature had already done that. The acid acted only after the mineral had been prepared.
 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 inside, the mineral would shatter violently. Once air-dried, however, 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 left the aluminosilicate framework largely intact while releasing 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 by sulfur and water, the removal of moisture, the entry of a mediating fluid, and the extraction of a concentrated mineral essence—was the operational key we began with, but only in outline. We understood the general shape of Shimanishi’s method before we understood its precision. And that lack of precision kept defeating us when we tried to map the process onto the texts.
 What followed became recursive. When the texts stopped making sense, they forced us back into Shimanishi’s method. When his method became clearer, we could return to the texts and advance a little farther. That back-and-forth—between chemistry and language, process and symbol, failure and correction—is how the alchemical texts began to resolve. Over time, the three principal texts began to appear as differently angled descriptions of the same underlying process.
 A Novel Interpretive Framework
 Taken together, the three alchemical texts presented in the following posts span the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and, in our reading, preserve a process whose expression extends back through nearly two thousand years of Hermetic and alchemical tradition.
 What follows is not the conventional understanding of these works. It is a novel interpretation MB and I arrived at over months of testing the texts against Shimanishi’s process, the Rock–Water Circuit, and the chemistry itself.
 To our knowledge, these texts have not been interpreted in this operational and materially specific way before. I say that carefully. I do not mean that no one has ever seen part of what we describe. Many readers have recognized isolated themes, symbols, or structural features. What appears not to have been done is to map these 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 presents the portrait of that essence once produced: the medicine, tincture, or elixir, and its properties.
 The next three posts 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 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.
 The three posts that walk through each decoding, followed by “The Closing of the Hermetic Canon,” follow below. They form the core of The Blueprint of Life and are available to paid subscribers.
 The Emerald Tablet: A Map of the Rock–Water Circuit
 Letter From Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Stone
 The Six Keys of Eudoxus: The Labyrinth
 The Hermetic Canon: Closed

 For readers curious about the mineral extracts that this journey led me towards, you can learn more at Aurmina and Primorabio .
 *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: Two thousand years. Three ancient texts. One underlying process. A reading that stands or falls on chemistry.


The Blueprint of Life - Start Here

This page collects the complete Substack edition of The Blueprint of Life while the print edition is being typeset and prepared.
 The Blueprint of Life proposes that beneath biology lies a planetary architecture in which minerals, water, and energy flow form a continuous Stone–Water Circuit that powers metabolism, resilience, and the rise and fall of living systems. By integrating modern geochemistry and biophysics with patterns preserved in ancient texts, the book argues that life’s energy systems did not emerge in isolation, but arose within—and remain dependent on—a mineral-water architecture of Earth that appears less accidental the more closely it is examined.
 Start at the beginning, or use the table of contents below to move through the book by chapters.

 Table of Contents
 Author’s Note and Dedication
 Prologue
 Chapter I: The Place Science Delivered Me
 Chapter II: The Cursor Blinks
 Chapter III: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory
 Chapter IV: Three Minerals and Water: The Engine of Life
 Chapter V: Earth’s First Energy System
 Chapter VI: The Volcano Alchemist and the Rock Extract
 Chapter VII: The Questions Science Won’t Ask
 Chapter VIII: Alchemy: The First Mineral Science
 Chapter IX: The Emerald Tablet: A Map of the Rock–Water Circuit
 Chapter X: Letter From Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Stone
 Chapter XI: The Six Keys of Eudoxus: The Labyrinth
 Chapter XII: Alchemy in Modern Life
 Chapter XIII: The Hermetic Canon: Closed
 Chapter XIV: The Same Engine, Everywhere
 Chapter XV: The Cornerstone That the Builders Refused
 Chapter XVI: Water From the Rock Is More Than Metaphor
 Chapter XVII: The Great Flood: The First Planetary Geohydrological Shift
 Chapter XXIII: Order and Alignment
 Chapter XIX: Order and Alignment in Life and Culture
 Chapter XX: The Source Beneath Our Feet
 Chapter XXI: From Architecture to Architect
 Chapter XXII: Judgment As Exposure
 Chapter XXIII: Living in Alignment
 Epilogue — Movement I: Observation Before Explanation
 Epilogue — Movement II - The Life That Prepared Me
 Epilogue — Movement III- A Life Reconsidered
 Epilogue — Movement IV- The Line That Broke Me

 If it holds, this isn’t just theory.
 It’s a blueprint.

Summary: The core idea, the full table of contents, and the system that powers life.


Author’s Note and Dedication

Dear Lisa,
 Every author writes that they could not have done it without their spouse. In our case, that sentence is not a nicety; it is the central truth. These past months asked more of you than any other project I have ever undertaken. You lived beside a man who disappeared into his office for endless hours, woke in the middle of the night to chase ideas, and let a book grow larger and more demanding with each passing week. You listened patiently as I talked through unfamiliar territories, alchemy, scripture, coherence, and God, subjects that must have sounded, at times, more like obsessions than chapters.
 You gave me the freedom to spend long days and, most sacrificially, evenings on the phone with Matt, wandering down intellectual paths that, for a long time, kept multiplying rather than resolving. Despite the irony of being Swedish and famously intolerant of cold weather, you agreed to be snowed in with me in a cabin in Montana for seven weeks, far from friends and your routines, while I wrote eighteen hours a day and lost all sense of time. You were working tirelessly to build Aurmina yet still carried the quiet burden of my absence even when we were in the same room. I know the days were long, and that I often failed to give you the walks, the conversations, and the shared life you deserved, but never forget The Herb & Omni in Whitefish, the restaurant you discovered, which served us the best meals we have ever shared. Those evenings became our small islands of normalcy, the brightest markers in an otherwise relentless stretch of work.
 Through it all, you offered patience when I was distracted, understanding when I was consumed, and love when I was least able to return it in equal measure. This book bears my name on the cover, but it carries your endurance on every page. Without your steady support, your willingness to endure the solitude that my writing imposed, and your quiet belief that the work mattered even when it overwhelmed our lives, these words would never have come into being.
 With all my love, awe, and gratitude,
 Your husband, Pierre
 Author’s Note
 Some discoveries begin with a question.
 Others begin with something seen so clearly that you cannot look away..
 In this case, it was a tree growing out of rock.
 In a volcanic region of Japan, a Japanese engineer named Asao Shimanishi found himself staring at exactly that sight: a mature tree rising from a narrow crack in a granite boulder, its trunk steady, its canopy full, the whole organism thriving in what appeared to be bare rock.
 Something about the moment held his attention. Trees require nutrients, water, and energy. In ordinary circumstances, those come through the soil. Here, the soil was absent. The roots disappeared directly into the rock’s fissure.
 The question that formed in his mind was simple: what, exactly, was feeding the tree?
 Rocks in volcanic regions contain an extraordinary spectrum of minerals, and Shimanishi began to wonder whether those minerals, interacting with water moving through microscopic fractures, might provide the energy that sustained the plant. Curiosity turned into investigation. Investigation turned into experiment.
 What followed was nearly two decades of work exploring how to extract volcanic minerals from rock. Shimanishi eventually succeeded in transforming the mineral architecture of rock into a water-soluble form, producing a liquid extract containing an unusually broad spectrum of elements released from the original mica lattice.
 Yet the most interesting part of the discovery was not the minerals themselves.
 It was what happened when those minerals entered water.
 The water began to behave differently. Suspended particles clumped together and settled. Biological systems responded in ways that suggested a change in the underlying electrochemical environment. Agriculture, aquaculture, and water purification all showed unexpected improvements.
 Years later, reflecting on the process that had led him there, Shimanishi summarized the realization in a single sentence:
 “In the beginning there was a rock.”
 The line captured a geological truth that had gradually revealed itself through experiment. Mineral surfaces shape water’s behavior, and water carries the gradients that sustain biological activity.
 As I studied what Shimanishi had uncovered, the implications widened. The system he had exposed looked like a fundamental pattern, a mineral-water circuit linking geology, chemistry, and life.
 Recognizing that structure marked the beginning of the work that eventually became this book. It also changed the order in which I had to tell the story.

 *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 dedication to the person who endured the work beside me, and the origin story that began it all: one tree, one rock, and the question that opened the hidden architecture of life.