Reddit reviews The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

The difficulty here is that it isn't always clear whether or not the religious explanation ever stood in the place of more pragmatic explanations. To understand what I mean, it's best to look to some competent history of religion and compare it to competent history of science for the same periods. In [The Forge and the Crucible][1], for example, Mircea Eliade looks at the roots of alchemical belief in the origins of metallurgy. He argues -- and I don't see anyway around the logic of his argument -- that a practical understanding of the processes of metallurgy had to have pre-dated their religious interpretation. That is to say, we had to have a practical understanding of the way in which metallurgy worked before it could be significant enough to society to make it an attractive motif for religious interpretation.

The same goes for something like agriculture, and with it astronomy and weather. If you compare what the know of hunter-gatherer cultures with agricultural societies, the religion of the former has markedly fewer references to weather and practically no use for astronomy. The reason is that meteorology and astronomy aren't particularly useful disciplines when you're living mostly off of game. They become much more important once you're practically invested in agriculture, which is why we see the development of astronomy (and later on, astrology) in agricultural societies like those of the Babylonians and Egyptians. The thing about both societies is that they leaned to treat the heavens as regular and consistent processes before they overlaid that knowledge with a layer of religious symbolism. As [Jane Sellers][2] has shown, the Egyptians had long known how to chart the future course of the stars, predict eclipses of the sun, and so forth.

It's unlikely that these cultures developed the religious associations first, stumbling into correct practical knowledge of material phenomenon by sheer luck. Which leads to the general principle that at least some etiological myth develops, literally, after the fact.

That notion is anathema to the argument that a lot of critics of religion would like to bring to bear. They see religion as an attempt to explain the material world, but the historical view deflates that a bit. If nothing else, it's hard to see what etiological myth would add to an already sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon it apparently seeks to explain, particularly if the explanation is raises more questions than it answers. And that's problematic for the science-v.-etiology line of argument, since the underlying premise of that line of attack is that, if religion is an attempt to explain the natural world, providing a better means of explanation will make religion obsolete. But if, as the work of historians like Sellers and Eliade suggests, religion isn't an attempt to explain the natural world, then the the difference between science and religion isn't just one of improved methodology. And, in fact, etiological myths give us much more information about the gods they purport to describe than they do about the phenomenon that presumably explain.

With regard to your request, what I'm getting at is that science may not ultimately have broken down the attribution of certain phenomenon to religion. Ancient farmers likely viewed the heavens in roughly mechanistic terms before they built that knowledge into astrological practice. Ancient metallurgists were using sophisticated techniques to make charcoal and smelt iron before they developed the symbols by which alchemists hoped to turn lead into gold. The advance of scientific knowledge is a stunning and wonderful thing, but if history is any indication, modern day advances are as likely to furnish the symbols of tomorrow's religions as they are to discredit the myths of yesterday.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Forge-Crucible-Origins-Structure-Alchemy/dp/0226203905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253042808&sr=8-1
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Gods-Ancient-Egypt/dp/1430317906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253043496&sr=1-1-spell

Amazon is a good start. This book is Mircea Eliade could be a title and if you like visuals, buy Alchemy & Mysticism, 576 pages with color images and some explanation. From there on, try to see what it is that interests you.