Entropy and Rarefaction in Alchemy

We will see later how alchemical works are ultimately an accelerated entropy (compared to the times programmed by nature). Apparently, the alchemist “destroys” the body’s crust to extract alchemical “time”. But destroying the crust is a jargon of spagyrists, an alchemist would say that it is a matter of “spiritualizing” the body.

At the end of the alchemical works of a body, Mercurius remains, preferably inside a “handy” casing, called Mercurius Philosophorum, or “fixed” Mercurius. The famous sentence from Turba Philosophorum was a jargon suitable for the alchemists of the Middle Ages. Today we would say that it is a matter of arriving at the alchemical time, that is, the “world of arcane or primordial memory”. We saw above that for particles with a wave function this procedure would seem rather simple, but it still requires that the particle can be attracted by something in an imaginary world, that is, something that is not part of the ordinary world.

First of all, “destroying the crust” is a jargon of spagyrists, alchemists would say that they are intent on “spiritualizing” the raw matter. In fact, we know that Mercurius comes to light only after illogically continuous repetitions of the same volatilization operations. Nevertheless, the alchemical Mercurius came out only after a “unhinging” of at least seven/nine continuous volatilizations. These reiterations resemble a brute force attack aimed at generating “chaos“ in an organized molecular structure. Almost as if it were designed to disarticulate and demolish an original order. This could be observed in old analog computers from the 70’s: Programming computers to do iterations, or continuously repeating the same equations, led to chaos, resulting in so-called strange attractors. With the resulting dynamic growth behaviors that mathematicians know well.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in an isolated system can only increase. This means that, normally, the decay products cannot rearrange themselves to create the original particle – we will see below that there could be loopholes – but here it is interesting to note that entropy particularly affects an “isolated system”.

If we consider death as the inevitable entropic decay of an isolated system, we have seen how a “transmutation“ could transform into an open system. As we see, for an alchemist who only deals with metals, the situation is much less traumatic. Since we cannot “break” the biological isolated system to transmute it into an open one, we must imagine that even in this complicated realm there exists a “spark” that does not decay. Or, at least, a quasiparticle from which to start again. The “metallic” alchemists call it a seed.