A Quick Guide To Alchemy
If you’re reading this with the intent of making your own transmutation circles, keep in mind that there are many ways to interpret things and you should look for other sources as well to find what feels right for you. A good place to start is https://www.deviantart.com/alchemy-junkies although you’ll have to sift through the more recent occult-ish posts to find something resembling alchemy as described here. What I’ve written here is based on my own understanding of alchemy as I have adapted from people like Notshurly and Azerik92, and over the years I’ve diverged a little and made my own form.
In alchemy, transmutation circles or arrays are like instructions that guide your life energy/magic to make some tangible change in the world. Alchemy follows the basis of manipulating what is given rather than creating things, which is how it differs from most kinds of magic. All alchemy can be summed up as understanding your work materials, breaking them down, and manipulating them into your desired form.  A simple example of transmutation is turning water to ice, or hydrogen and oxygen gas. Making something like a rock from just water would be more difficult, and requires nuclear alchemy or expending magic to create the materials needed. Using your life energy in this way would shorten your lifespan, so it’s far easier and better to simply make a different array with different source materials.
The base of any array is the circle. Energy flows along the circle and connects it to other parts of the array. Energy and materials travel along the lines to be processed, and for this reason arrays with more structure are more versatile. Conversely, a complicated array requires more focus and direction from the user, so they aren’t always the best option for ‘real life’ applications and are the reason we don’t have some mega array that does everything. For instance, below on the left is a general processing array, capable of many simple tasks like breaking things down and making simple molecules/structures. On the right is an outdated array for mixing things in water. Were it updated, it would perform its specific function more efficiently than the other.
Different shapes and symbols have various meanings in alchemy. Some are more arbitrary and some have a clearer meaning. Regular polygons are the bread and butter of any transmutation. They provide balanced structure and can do many basic operations. All polygons with five or more points have stars, such as pentagrams and hexagrams. Stars provide the same function as their polygon counterpart but have different uses due to their structure. Stars inner geometry makes points to place things on while polygons are good for surrounding a circle. There are other interpretations of the polygons, but for me it is as follows. Triangles break down materials, squares reconstruct them, pentagons work with physical energies such as heat, hexagons are like triangles that are more focused on the elements and have properties of the square, heptagon’s complexity makes them ideal for working with living things on a cellular level, octagons similarly work with living energy or magic, and nonagons deal the world on a fundamental level, and are always paired with nonagrams.
Beyond the base polygons, symbols and glyphs have specific meanings that guide a reaction or define a part of it such as ‘separate’, ‘fire’, or ‘oxygen’. Many parts of an array can be combined or rearranged in dynamic ways to change the meaning. For very specific and complicated arrays, you may also add scripts to literally tell your array important details such as defining the amount of atoms in a molecule.
