@sun @HarryNuggets @Nudhul

Yeah. Alchemy is a whole other kettle of fish that get's stuck in the blender with herbalism largely thanks to Paracelsus (father of modern toxicology), due to his invention of Spagyric medicine. Back in those days there was a lot of rivalry between different practitioners so they invented a bunch of convoluted symbolic ciphers and cockamamie theories to explain how it all worked. Partly to keep things proprietary so they could get paid/famous, and partly to prevent one's self getting burned at the stake by insanely superstitious Christians who wilfully misunderstand things like that. Gods forbid you were a woman trying to ply folk medicine, because that was illegal/Satanic. The earlier stuff pre-Paracelsus that didn't have as much Alchemy woo infused into it was much more down to earth though, provided it was ever recorded and that we can decipher the nomenclature. Linnaeus was a big help thankfully. But also the Greeks and Egyptians recorded a lot of their medical practices in plain language which has largely come down in tact, even if it's hard to identify sometimes precisely what plants they were indicating.