Solve et Coagula

Alchemy is often misunderstood by those who approach it as a pursuit of power, an effort to manipulate matter or bend nature to human will. Some early scientists even believed and stated they were refining or perfecting nature. Yet humans did not invent science, and they did not invent alchemy. They received it. Knowledge arose through observation: by watching Earth’s feedback systems move through cycles of dissolution and reformation, and by sensing those same transformations echo through emotion, body, and breath. We now call these great planetary cycles, being the movement of water, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus to biogeochemical cycles. They are processes that continually dissolve, reorganize, and return matter in service of life.

One of alchemy’s most fundamental principles is Solve et Coagula. You can find these words etched into the walls of buildings in Prague, or in old texts attempting to describe the foundations of laboratory alchemy. Its translation is to dissolve and recombine, roughly. This idea is frequently treated symbolically, or just to be used in the laboratory. But there seems to be no inquiry as to where this understanding came from. Being inquisitive and taking a look at our surroundings, we see that it is deeply operative in the natural world.

Nothing exists in isolation, it is all very cyclical and furthermore in direct relationship. For a long time our science that was birthed from a reductionist and mechanistic perspective adopted the outlook that life only existed in a thin smear in the biosphere and there was no interaction with one another. They spontaneously adapted to their static environment and evolved as seen fit. Now we understand, that could not be further from the truth. Nothing grows in isolation. 

Competition exists in the natural world, yes. But when we view life and our world at scale, collaboration dominates. Algae influence cloud formation. Wolves shape river systems. Whales influence the ecosystems of the oceans. Humans are composed of nearly equal parts microbial and human cells. We exist as hosts, symbionts, and participants in a vast ecological network that precede and outlast us. We shouldn’t be so quick to center ourselves as the main character.

In the 1970’s James Lovelock began to ask questions as to how the atmosphere of earth was sustained even over long periods of time. Our sun is getting hotter, but the temperature regulation of our earth remains quite controlled. Why was this? This question led to the Gaia Theory. It proposed that Earth functions as a self-regulating system, shaped by feedback systems between life, atmosphere, water, and geology. It seems that life does not merely adapt to a static environment, it is actively creating and maintaining it. The atmosphere is an extension of the biosphere, much as the mind is an extension of DNA as Dorion Sagan once said. 

Looking at how life is ‘working’ microorganisms certainly play a central role in this regulation. Long before plants and animals evolved, microbes were transforming nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon in abundance. Perhaps the plants learned how to partake in these operations from witnessing the world around them as they came to be. These metabolic processes underpin atmospheric composition today.

Mars and Venus for example, which are largely devoid of life, contain atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide, around 95%. Earth by contrast maintains extraordinarily low CO₂ levels, around 0.04%. This is largely due to photosynthesis. Plants, algae, and bacteria continually remove carbon dioxide from the air, converting it into solid structures such as limestone reefs and shells. Or plants utilizing the carbon as food and releasing oxygen as a by-product.

This stability is not luck. It is participation, relationship, and regulation happening.

In alchemy, Solve et Coagula describes this same pattern: matter is dissolved, transformed, and reassembled. We see it in the water cycle, where water evaporates, condenses, and returns as rain, unchanged in essence yet always transformed. The atoms in our bodies have existed for billions of years. We borrow them briefly and return them again to the land, sea and atmosphere– just altered.

The nitrogen cycle mirrors this process precisely. Nitrogen gas, inert and inaccessible to most, is made usable through bacterial action breaking apart the tight triple-bonds. It is transformed, assimilated, transferred through food webs, and eventually returned to the atmosphere and soil. The same principles apply to carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus. The act of dissolving and recombinging. 

These cycles are not linear, they are feedback systems. 

In the laboratory, alchemists attempted to mirror these natural processes, creating feedback loops that reveal transformation in hopes to create transformation on a small scale to better understand life and consciousness. Nature was always the inspiration, and still remains the greatest teacher.

Alchemy at its core is not about domination. It is about participation. The invitation of the Great Work is not to control nature, but to remember our place within it. Not separate, not superior, but embedded within the living consciousness of Earth itself.