everyone on xnfm needs to start reading about alchemy right meow

@nyx do you have any recommendations

@corpsedoll I'm currently reading Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe

@nyx i hang out with a chemist every day does that count

@whitequark in a way yeah, it's surprising how much of alchemy involved real empirically verifiable processes despite the reputation of like haha they poisoned themselves with mercury (which as we all know is a lie by modern medicine to prevent people from growing their pineal glands). people really underestimate the degree to which a lot of people in antiquity and early modernity were still capable of like being rational and making observations of the world lol.

@nyx i've read the hermes trimagus book and some druidic texts i haven't poured over tomes in ancient latin or anything like that, Isaac Newton was technically an alchemist

@ink yes! thats why the Unicode standard has alchemy symbols actually is because of Newton. I haven't read the Hermetica yet but that's in my backlog along with Basil Valentine and a few other related things

@nyx every time i want to read something i get sidetracked by accidentally finding books i never opened and completely forgot i had and reading them instead vgh i cannot stop pvrsving moar knowledge

@nyx if we are still alive and have the capability in a few years we should start an Arabic/Egyptian languages reading group

@ink or a Latin reading group even

@nyx @whitequark they didn't know what chemicals were but They Sure Could Make Them

@nyx yes

i didn't write it out but like

chemistry is alchemy in the same way that you are a fish. the modern version of the field exists as a straight line descendant that owes its very existence and current state to its predecessor. people got some important shit wrong then but it's not like we stopped doing that since; there isn't a bright line separating the "pseudoscience of alchemy" with "science of chemistry", they're the same thing

@sierra @whitequark just like me

@nyx @ink ping me when that happens frfr

@sierra @nyx we dont know either

@nyx yesss i wanna check out Paracelsus stuffs

@nyx I'm reading about astrology and that's pretty closely tied. I've also got like twenty alchemy books on my computer tho lol. and probably more on neidan.

@nyx i found a 1300-page long mechanical engineering handbook from 1985 recently and uwawa she's beautiful

@azureazure wwaow