The Connection Between Starfish and Alchemy

At first glance, the starfish and the practice of alchemy might seem worlds apart. But both are bound by a shared language: the symbolic vocabulary of regeneration, transformation, and the search for balance in times of fracture.

In an era marked by environmental collapse, political unrest, collective trauma, and rapid unraveling of long-standing systems, symbols that embody survival, healing, and reimagining hold a certain weight. The starfish and alchemy offer us not just aesthetic metaphors but blueprints – about how we break down and rebuild.

Starfish are best known for their extraordinary ability to regenerate: cut off a limb, and they grow it back. In some cases, a single severed arm can grow into an entirely new being. This kind of resilience is not just biological – it’s metaphorical. It speaks to the quiet, persistent kind of recovery that doesn’t erase loss, but works with it. A starfish doesn’t grow despite being severed – it grows because of it.

In symbolic terms, starfish have long been associated with divine love, intuition, and the feminine. Their radial symmetry (often five points) echoes the pentagram – a sacred symbol in alchemy representing the five elements: earth, water, air, fire, and spirit. The starfish’s body itself becomes a mandala, a living symbol of balance and elemental harmony.

In a world increasingly shaped by fragmentation – social, ecological, psychological – the starfish becomes an emblem of survival not through power or domination, but through restoration. It’s a call toward healing that doesn’t deny harm, but moves through it.

Alchemy, commonly misunderstood as a failed precursor to modern chemistry, was never just about turning lead into gold. It was about transmutation – of materials, yes, but also of the self and the soul. Alchemists saw physical processes as metaphors for inner change: calcination (burning away ego), dissolution (melting identity), separation, conjunction, and eventually, the creation of the philosopher’s stone – the symbol of enlightenment, wholeness, or God.

These stages weren’t linear. Like trauma, healing or social movement, they looped and spiraled. You returned to chaos and decomposition before ever reaching radiance.

Today, alchemy gives us a language for slow transformation. Not the kind sold in self-help slogans, but the kind that takes time. The kind that burns and remakes. It speaks to a process where decay is necessary – not something to avoid, but something to honor. A breaking down of what is no longer sustainable to form something entirely new.

So where do the starfish and alchemy intersect? In their shared resistance to permanence, in their faith in reformation, and in their deep allegiance to cyclical growth.

Both suggest that healing isn’t about returning to what was – it’s about becoming something entirely different. And that transformation isn’t clean or linear. It requires loss, decay, and fragmentation. In this way, the starfish-alchemy connection becomes a metaphor for revolution.

We are living in a moment of collapse: climate catastrophe, surveillance capitalism, authoritarianism, genocide. But alongside that collapse is something else – people fighting back, and communities slowly regenerating new bodies of care and possibility. In this way, they are living acts of transmutation.

Both alchemy and starfish reject the fantasy of purity or permanence. They teach us to honor cycles. To work with the mess. To trust what can grow from the broken places. Alchemy reminds us that change is slow, deep, often invisible. Starfish remind us that it’s possible – even after amputation – to become again.

In a time that demands radical change, both symbols offer not a solution, but a stance: keep growing, even when it hurts. Keep transforming, even when it looks like ruin.