Archive

The nature of alchemy.

Henning Brand set about distilling 1,500 L of urine in an attempt to turn it into gold. It is not too big a leap to create a metaphor of what we're trying to do with artificial intelligence. What it will give us may well be valuable, even

A Change of Plan

I wrote recently that I was going to move the Athanor from Ghost to Substack. I no longer am. Here’s why: Substack is becoming a platform, funded by venture capital investment, that, in turn, creates an implicit obligation to pursue growth. If the business model is robust, that growth,

AI, Alchemy and Strategy.

For a long time, the technologists who built AI have deserved the attention. So too, perhaps more accurately, have the investors who funded them, often drawn from industries that were themselves built on extracting value from earlier digital platforms. That helps explain why so many people still expect AI to

The Assay

Avoiding Fool's Gold The Athanor is now in transition to a practice as much as a publication. We work with founder-led organisations, individual leaders and small groups on the thinking that has to be done as we reach the edges of the maps we have been using,

The Journey So Far. Part 3.

The Cut A review. Part three of three. I left winter with a question hanging: what do we bring to the container that the Athanor is? The spring answered it in the way this space answers anything, through experiment, in public, with the results posted whether they flattered us or

The Journey So Far, part two.

Slow Heat Part one of this review ended on a question: what forms, when you decline to force the form? This part is the answer that formed over the winter, between November 2025 and February 2026, when the Athanor had no programme to run; only a name and the fire

The Journey so Far - Part One

Like any exploration into new territory, the Athanor project started with an idea and an aspiration, not a map. Or, as Antonio Machado, had it: "Traveller, there is no path, the path is made by walking." So it’s a good time to look back and see where

The Craft of Distillation

Prima Materia

What We Bring to the Vessel Slow conversations, without agenda have been a central part of my practice for so long now I had almost forgotten they were deliberate choice made during a difficult time when we did not know what was happening. Not slow in the sense of being

Working In The Dark

The Athanor Project — April 2026 We have been using the Athanor metaphor gently. It appears in the foundational documents of this project as a description of patience: the slow, steady heat that holds conditions for transformation without engineering the outcome. The blast furnace forces; the Athanor waits. The adviser provides

The Alchemy of Unlike Minds

Harbingers

John Boyd talked about "fingerspitzengefuehle". The fingertip feeling, the ability to sense changes as they are starting, but before they manifest. Now feels like such a time, and it requires us to pay attention. For my own part, I think it requires longer posts, slightly less often, as

AI, Alchemy and Apple...

Alchemy, AI, and Soft Power.

Experiment #1 - Continued

Registers, Circles, and the Limits of Borrowed Knowledge In my last workshop post, I shared an experiment working with Claude to map the spectrum of communication, from the purely informational at one end to the expressive and artistic at the other. The key finding was simple: AI is not merely

Craft in a World of AI

Artisans Don't Use Recipes Artisans are deeply invested in their craft, and have an understanding of and with their raw materials that makes recipes superfluous. The realisation occurred to me when reading C. Thi Nguyen's excellent “The Score”, his latest book on the philosophy of games

Beneath The Surface

Experiment #1

Communication spans six registers from informational to artistic, on a spectrum from information to presence. At one end, AI excels. At the other, where value lies in the human behind the words, it fails. Wisdom is knowing where you stand.

Alchemy is Local

Alchemy

A Reflection on "Thin Space" The idea of Alchemy is fractal; it happens at every level of being, from our individual psyches to the groups we form and on to the environments we occupy. Alchemy can be individual, at other times collective, and on occasion something larger altogether,