Medium: Alchemy as Cognitive Integration and Deprogramming

[Paul Ferguson]

"Alchemy originated in ancient Egypt and evolved through Greek, Islamic, and medieval European traditions as a hybrid system of material experimentation, symbolic language, and spiritual transformation. Far from mere proto-chemistry, it was a coded guide to psychological restructuring — using metals, elements, and cosmic symbols to map and manipulate the self. During the Enlightenment, alchemy was dismissed as superstition and fractured into modern chemistry and esoteric mysticism. Later, Romantic thinkers and occultists like Jung reinterpreted it as metaphor, obscuring its original function: a practical system for dissolving inherited values, restructuring cognition, and achieving internal sovereignty through symbolic operations encoded in secrecy."

https://medium.com/@ex21011987/the-magnu...72c889bab7