Much better to take a piece of paper and say it has value according to what you 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.

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, then you can sell these products to others, who have to use your pieces of paper to come by or ‘buy’ them.They will even exchange their gold for your pieces of paper to come buy your things, again according to the numbers you write on them. – Bingo – Alchemy.

Of course, if you appoint leaders of other people and then approach such leaders, you can let them have pieces of your paper with immense numbers on them, and they will 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 this money back to the leaders – less your expenses and anything else you care to deduct, and at interest 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.

You can now have laws passed enabling you to lend ten times the amount they give you, 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, and can then – by your law – take everything they have. This enables you to come by much much more gold, or gold cubed.

If it pleases you, you can even make disks of that base cupronickel and let folk use that, as their 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 at 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.

Alchemy was formerly practised by folk who hung about kings for some reason. Usually they were called Merlin, Barling, Karlin, Carling and so on, who later would make gold by selling other stuff to the benefit or otherwise of the populations at their disposal, who naturally had to give them all their gold while earning their way into the soil.

Alchemy is not difficult really, as you see. And there is no mystery about it so long as people don’t keep it a close secret.

Of course, when the people find out and eat you for what you are doing to them, you have no one to blame but yourself. The practice of alchemy, after all, is not entirely without its risks.