Alchemy- science, magic, art- or all three?

Alchemy seems to have many dimensions to it, so I think it could be understood as a science, as magic, art and more. Alchemy explores the nature of substance and its various transformations, but it also was a study of the cosmos and mankind's relationship to the universe. In this sense it took the more scientific aspect of alchemy and applied the ideas to a spiritual context, uncovering an alchemy of one's inner world. Both aspects can be seen as scientific in their experimentation of natural phenomena, but have a creative or artistic element in their act of transformation. I discovered that alchemists would treat the matter they worked with as though it has a consciousness, and would ask it what it was, what kind of life it was, what it was doing, how it felt when melted following the belief that because these materials are within you, you can contact them directly. In this way they had found a method of directly tapping into what we now call the collective unconscious which sounds like a magical process to me.