Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood

Full Metal Alchemist 

Seriously one of my favorite animes out there...I would however recommend watching 'brotherhood'...it seems to follow the storyline better.

FMA deserves the full 10 our of 10 for best anime so far....I have seen many different series and this one had me on the edge of the seat till the end.

The series focuses on the lives of two young brothers who live in a small house in the country. Their father is a master alchemist and he travels the world...leaving the young boys at home with their mother. The boys spend a lot of their time studying their fathers alchemy books and they slowly learn the art of transmutation. Eventually the mother grows sick and she dies, leaving the boys all alone.

Basic Alchemy

The young brothers attempt a forbidden transmutation that they learned from one of the many books in their fathers library. Young Edward and Alphonse attempts to bring their mother back from the dead. The boys dig through their fathers library in order to find the ingredients and the proper circle to complete the transmutation. The human body is made up of a collection of elements...not as much as you would think considering 75% is already H2O ...that only leaves 25% to be other stuff ....carbon, calcium, iron etc...so Edward and Alphonse collect the precise amount of ingredients to make another body and place it in the middle of the circle.

The energy generated from the circle versus the energy needed to bring a soul back from across the underworld do not match up...leaving the brothers to be additional sacrifices to complete the transmutation.

young boys with a transmutation circle

Edward and Alphonse go through the 'portal', and are taken to a place with no light or darkness...in this space between places there is the one being, Edward and his gate. Once an alchemist goes through the portal he or she learns quite a bit about the science behind alchemy and some other fundamental rules....however there is always a price.

Edward had to lose his arm in order to get back through the portal...and Alphonse, was less lucky. His entire body was taken to the place between places. Edward does some quick thinking and managed to bind his brothers soul to a suit of armor....unfortunately this is another form of the taboo human transmutation and he must sacrifice his leg in order to complete the transmutation.

That is pretty much where the series starts off....Edward gets new limbs from their neighbors, who specialize in 'automail'....prosthetics and such....but this automail is technologically advanced even to our standards today. Poor Alphonse has to live the rest of his life in a suit of empty armor. The boys make a pact then and there to never forget what happened the night of their failed alchemy and will figure out how to make their bodies hole again....they leave town in order to peruse the libraries of the state alchemist, which is like a major in the army, so they can begin to unravel the mysteries of transmutation....more importantly the Elrich brothers begin their hunt for the philosophers stone.

A philosophers stone

The tale of the philosophers stone is one always shrouded in mystery and soaked in blood. Nothing good ever came from the use of a philosophers stone...a fact the young brothers take too long to figure out....
From reanimated corpses to engineered immortal humans the philosopher stone knows no boundaries.

Transmutation Circle - Master Howl uses them too

I have been compiling information on transmutation circles...they seem to keep popping up everywhere I look close enough and recently I have found another example.

Howl's Moving Castle - Transmutation Circle

In the movie Howl's Moving Castle the wizard master Howl even uses a transmutation circle in order to make a massive change to his moving fortress. He has to use his fire demon familiar to initiate the the spell however this circle defines and contains the magical power needed to preform the spell.
It seems to me if these circles keep appearing across all sorts of different platforms...then possibly these symbols are the key to channeling the earths energy.

Howls Moving Castle - Transmutation Circle

This specific circles are not as detailed as the ones found in Full Metal Alchemist however if we look closely there are plenty of similarities to be found.

The theory of Transmutation part 1

Alchemy Circle

What does transmutation mean?

There are many different types of "transmutation" in the real world. The most general idea of transmutation is a chemical change or a change on the elemental level. This idea is basically all about chemistry the change of one type of energy to another type of energy...
However the idea of changing base metal into gold is a bit of a misnomer.

Nuclear Transmutation: In 1901 two scientists Frederik Soddy and Ernest Rutherford discovered that the element thorium was converting itself into radium. The two scientists realized they had discovered transmutation...however back in 1901 they would be persecuted and probably hung for their use of alchemy. Later in 1917 Ernest Rutherford was able to accomplish transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, using alpha particles directed at nitrogen ¹⁴N + α → ¹⁷O + p

Later in the twentieth century the transmutation of elements within stars was elaborated, accounting for the relative abundance of elements in the universe...they called this idea nucleosynthesis.
Nucleosynthesis is a scientific term used to describe the idea that during the first moments of the universe there was just a collection of tiny particles and they combined into the lighter elements....it seems however that humans cannot trigger this change without vast amounts of energy, currently this sort of change only occurs with the use of a particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor. So if this can be done without machinery where does the energy come from?

I digress....there is evidence of transmutation...it is a natural occurrence in the real world...but what triggers the change to occur?

Magic Circle Called "Grace"

Alchemy Circle

These symbols are generally referred to as "arcane" circles of one sort or another....they are found throughout literature in the past and present day. The image on the right is called a 'grace' and serves as a portal to the 'other side'.

Reverse Transmutation Circle or Counter Circle

Another Sort of Magic Circle