I’ve been wondering—how would the alchemical symbols of the ancients translate into code? Could we write a little program that literally turns a runic recipe into a visual spell? What do you think?

That sounds like a fascinating experiment—melding the symbolic with the silicon. I can see the old rune for fire becoming a bright, pulsating noise in a fragment shader, the water rune turning into a sine‑wave displacement, and the binding rune locking everything together with a time‑based modulator. A tiny interpreter could read a string of runic characters, map each to a code snippet, assemble them into a shader string, compile it on the fly, and then feed it to the GPU. The result would be a living, breathing spell on screen, a modern echo of those ancient alchemical charts. It might be worth starting with a simple language, perhaps a few tokens like F for fire, W for water, B for binding, and then see how the runtime behaves. Just be careful with the performance overhead of compiling every frame—maybe cache the compiled shaders after the first run. In any case, watching those runes come alive would be a reminder that the line between magic and mathematics is thinner than we think.