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Abstract

The language of alchemy may be divided into five layers. - Within the first layer the alchemists explicitly and undisguisedly conveyed chemical informations. But they described chemical substances and chemical operations in a way which reminds us of sociological or psychological descriptions and the treatment of complex personalities. - Within the second layer the alchemists also gave chemical informations albeit encoded in much the same way as craftmen's guilds encoded their knowledge to fend off competition from outsiders. - Within the third layer the alchemists refer to verbal associations and to myths from their cultural environment so that their texts can only be properly understood within a certain cultural context. As the language of this layer was often handed down to later generations of alchemists who were not acquainted with the specific cultural context it tended to cause confusions and misunderstandings. - Within the fourth layer the alchemists deliberately used an arcane language for within this layer they tried to convey the paradoxa of alchemy. - Within the fifth ayer alchemy is treated as a literary tradition in which all classical texts contain the truth but no text does it in a fully comprehensible way. - These last two layers show that au fond alchemy is not a process of riddle solving but a quest for cosmic secrets. This gives us a demarcation criterion to distinguish alchemy from genuine natural sciences.