I want to understand it but everything I read about it oscillates impossibly between vulgar metals -> gold and some kind of spiritual transformation metaphysical stuff
What is it and what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Does it have utility outside of use as a metaphor or allegory or whatever?
Alchemy is basically just the alpha version of chemistry. It wasn’t feature complete and still had a lot of bugs, but there was some good mechanical ideas that have persisted throughout development. Such as mixing two or more things together to make something new.