it's been extremely difficult for us to wear down our intellectual inhibitions against thinking in magical terms. this has been tremendously difficult for us to get past: we were brought up in an atmosphere of extreme cynicism and skepticism about the supernatural and the magical, and even when we started having direct and regular spiritual experiences in 2016 we felt like establishing even the barest rudiments of a religious or magical practice was ridiculously difficult. our habits and usual way of thinking were dead against us, screaming in our heads: "this is useless, this is pointless, this is gibberish, etc."
that's gone double and treble for alchemy, which uses familiar chemical entities but with a completely different set of values attached to them, which makes alchemy especially opaque to someone used to the language and ruleset of chemistry. we consider ourselves fortunate to have made any breakthroughs in understanding the alchemical meanings of such things as sulfur or mercury—in grasping that these substances can be regarded as embodiments of abstract spiritual principles, as well as familiar physical and chemical properties. (curiously...I think being Catholic helped.)
hence I find myself starting to think about chemical elements and substances in a new way. some of them feel sparklier than others, in some intangible way that nevertheless feels hinted at by their utility in science and technology.
like, say, cobalt—which has been curiously on our mind.
we were quite young when we learned about one fascinating feature of certain cobaltous salts, like cobalt(2) chloride: they're "hydrochromic", which is to say they change color readily on exposure to extremes of humidity. CoCl2's usual form in humid air, the hexahydrate, is deep pink; its dehydrated form is blue. perhaps you've seen this color change in some kind of humidity or hydration indicator. magic? well, not really I suppose, but it's certainly evocative.
it gets me to thinking about just how colorful cobalt is—and how that colorful chemistry of cobalt has been of such tremendous use as a kind of indicator or signal for the presence of something else. a good qualitative test for aluminum, for example, involves calcining the sample with a little Co(NO3)2 solution added; if Al is present, it forms a blue mixed oxide with Co, "Thénard's Blue". if the sample contains zinc instead, a green mixed oxide is formed, "Rinman's Green". Al and Zn are both colorless in solution and their compounds are almost infallibly colorless or white—yet cobalt reveals a different color in each. similarly, potassium is colorless in solution and usually so soluble that it's impossible to get any sort of distinctive behavior from K in solution. but add a solution of sodium cobaltinitrite, Na3Co(NO2)6, and you get a precipitate of yellow potassium cobaltinitrite. once again, Co reveals the invisible—with a striking color.
it was differences in the colors of different octahedral cobalt complexes that helped elicit a better understanding of isomerism in such complexes. the blue color of cobalt glass also helps the analyst block out the yellow sodium doublet from flame emission tests, in order to see other elements (though neodymium glass is better for that.)
there's something so tantalizingly magical about this feature of cobalt chemistry—not merely that it's colorful, but that its colors have been of such tremendous value both to the artist and to the chemist, conferring visibility to the invisible.
maybe that's also true of kobolds? they're very helpful, I've heard.
~Chara of Pnictogen