Secrets of alchemy revealed! – Its advantages and disadvantages.
To make gold, take as much base metal ore as you like – say copper and nickel – and heat it in a crucible. Then realise you can make gold much more easily than this, and turn off the heat.
Much better to take a piece of paper and say it has value according to what you then write on it: ideally numbers – which logically numb dumb brains. Enough will believe you to make it worthwhile. The cautious may write small numbers, but those confident of the innocence of the innocent may add a few noughts for luck and to further amaze the brains of their recipients. Modern printing presses, you will find, help considerably in the arduous work of printing.
You can use these pieces of paper with numbers and noughts on them to buy gold from idiots if you want, which is simple alchemy of a sort. However, if that is not arty-crafty or comprehensive enough for you, we can go further -
People will work for these pieces of paper, and you can benefit from their work, particularly if they are working for you. People work quite as willingly as horses if you suggest it and then lean on them somewhat. If they are producing attractive things for you, such as food, you can sell these products to them and to others, who will have to use your pieces of paper to come by or ‘buy’ them. Well, such food doesn’t grow in the ground or on trees, now does it, eh? - Eh?
They will also exchange their gold for your pieces of paper to come buy your products plus your profit, again according to the numbers you write on them. – Bingo! – Alchemy plus.
Of course, if you appoint leaders of other people and then approach these leaders, you can let them have pieces of your paper with immense numbers on them, and at your suggestion they will establish 'laws' to have whole populations pay out their pieces of paper to compensate you – wholesale – for those numbers you have given their leaders.
You can then lend back this money wholesale to the leaders – less your expenses and anything else you care to deduct, and at interest on the total of course – for them to administer their countries in the interest of your interest.
In this way you have many more pieces of paper, with lots and lots of numbers on them, with which you can come by much more gold, or gold squared.
Due to the bribes . . . er, presents . . . er, 'tributes' you have given the leaders, and the leverage this gives you over them, you can now call yourself the ‘National Bank’ of each nation and have more ‘laws’ passed enabling you to lend ten times the amount that folks pay you in taxes, by which you can ‘earn’ a hundred percent on all the paper you care to print. You can also lower and raise your interest rates to attract and then trap folk – that’s such fun, and can then – by your ‘laws‘ – take everything they have, which is hilarious. This enables you to come by much much more gold, or gold cubed.
And if exactitude is what you rejoice in, you can even make disks of that base cupronickel – remember? – and let folk use that, as the ‘chink-chink’ attracts and entertains the simpler of them who are happy to use piddling little numbers rather than big numbers with lots of noughts after them. It also puts all the little people to your use rather than only the big ones, and this helps fulfil the prophecy, ‘you look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves’. – How true. And base metal to gold – authentic alchemy!
And you will have more and more believers as successive generations of little suckers are born to accept your paper and coins as natural. Until finally as adults they will also accept the crooks you impose on them as their kings and presidents, even though they kill and maim them in wars for their fun and your profit, as we see, and wholesale as inessential to your economy – Super.
Alchemy was formerly practised by folk who hung around kings for some reason. Usually they were called Merlin, evolving to Barling, Carling and so on, who later would go on to make gold by selling other stuff to the benefit or, possibly, otherwise of the populations at their disposal, who naturally had to give them all their gold while earning their way into the soil. But now any old Tom Dick or Harry gets up to it, and the rest of us folk have been most carefully educated to let them.
Alchemy is not difficult really, as you see. And there is no mystery about it so long as people don’t keep it too close a secret.
Of course, when the people find out and eat you for what you are doing to them, you shouldn’t be too surprised and have no one to blame but yourself. The practice of alchemy, after all, is not entirely without its risks.
By the way, have you never tried roast Baron of Rothschild? – Wonderful taste, their favored friends will tell you. Succulent! And kosher!
Now, is that absolutely clear? Good, then why not just pass it on.