'alkemē to us means: making something better. Taking something and infusing your love and energy into it for the greater good.
Have you read 'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coehlo? (if not... open another browser immediately and buy it - the best book you will ever read to enhance, or start your spiritual growth journey).
Alchemy is an ancient practice shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
Alchemy's #1 law:
Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange.
It's practitioners mainly sought to turn lead into gold, a quest that has captured the imaginations of people for thousands of years. However, the goals of alchemy went far beyond simply creating some golden nuggets.
Alchemy was rooted in a complex spiritual worldview in which everything around us contains a sort of universal spirit, and metals were believed not only to be alive but also to grow inside the Earth. When a base, or common, metal such as lead was found, it was thought to simply be a spiritually and physically immature form of higher metals such as gold.
Alchemy has never been considered a science, not even by alchemists. They saw it more as a philosophy, a way of understanding the universe that went beyond chemical reactions and into the spiritual. To an alchemist, every single body, including minerals, had a spirit that permeated it, and this spirit could be isolated from the material and condensed into the philosopher’s stone.
We live in a time where knowledge is divided into a series of branches, subdivided themselves into specialties and subspecialties. From the point of view of alchemy, this is inconceivable: it would have been considered an obstacle to try and penetrate the mysteries of nature, which the alchemists considered as a whole. We are astronomers or physicists, chemists or biologists, medics, philosophers or literates: an alchemist had to be all of these, and probably more.