I don't know exactly when or how we arrived at the conclusion, but a couple of years ago we had the sudden realization that alchemy wasn't nonsense—at least, we gained some sort of intuitive understanding of a few of its core concepts, and we felt as though they actually made sense. a barrier had fallen—we were now able to study alchemy if we wanted.
that was important I think. it meant that we could now actually think about studying magic in general.
I'll tell you the thing that did it, the heureka! moment: it was realizing that the tria prima of Paracelsus, the trio of fundamental materials—mercury, salt, and sulfur—did in fact represent a physical trinity that we could understand: mercury was an exemplar of metallic bonding, salt was an exemplar of ionic bonding, and sulfur was an exemplar of covalent bonding. clearly, Paracelsus was onto something, even if he didn't fully understand it.
and that's led us to ruminating on how the tria prima can be conceived as representing a sort of set of fundamental actions—principles that apply to generally, to general-purpose entities, rather than just electrons. in metallic bonding the valence electrons are shared throughout the whole mass of the material; in ionic bonding, they're not shared at all, but confined to discrete charge-carriers; in covalent bonding, they're shared but only within a single molecule.
it's covalent bonding that—on Earth anyway—results in life ("as we know it"). metals and ionic substances aren't devoid of chemical complexity and idiosyncrasy, but covalent chemistry is what produces rich individuality in complex chemical systems. consider that no two flowers from the same species produce exactly the same complicated mixture of aromatic compounds; synthesize dye chemicals and you'll find that no two batches are exactly the same.
~Chara