[Clarste]

Alchemy is pre-chemistry, pure and simple. They systematically mixed stuff together with the intent of seeing what would happen. Yes, they had goals that nowadays seem pseudoscientific, but at the time that this was happening there was no such distinction.

Fly eggs are too small to see without a microscope, so it was commonly believed that maggots were "spontaneously generated" by rotting meat. They didn't have genetics and dissecting humans was taboo and they therefore lacked knowledge of the female egg, so they assumed that sperm contained everything necessary to make a human, provided that they could make an artificial womb. And obviously without knowledge of the atom and its subatomic forces they had no way to know that turning lead into gold was any more impossible than making bronze out of tin and copper; it was just assumed that they hadn't discovered how yet.

Of course, to us, these seem superstitious and weird, but back then it was just trying to understand the world and use that to their advantage, just like what we do every day with modern technology. Unfortunately, the idea of openly sharing scientific ideas wasn't around back then, so most alchemists wrote their notes and formulas using bizarre and nonsensical terms that they made up and only revealed to trusted peers, leading to an occult perception of their work, and possibly occult behavior in their successors.