So looked up quite a few things tryiing to get away from using lye in soap. There are a lot of websites and you tube videos that claim they do this, but in fact they're just shredding an already existing bar of soap.

It turns out that the chemical process of mixing lye with lard is call "soapification", The lye is what hardens it. If you do it right, the lye will chemically mix with the oil to form a soap that is non caustic. But the lye on it's own is dangerous.

There were some sites about making soap without lye, but it was gelatenous and gooey, and would disintegrate quickly with water.

There's a very informative video on how to make lye here:

[link to www.youtube.com]

Basically, it's a filtering water through ash. Any kind of ash will do apparently.

Also found this quite interesting:

[link to www.associatedcontent.com]

According to this, the way soap was originally discovered was from people having animal sacrifices. After they burned the animals and if it rained, the rain would filter through the ash and the fat of the animal would drip down into it. When the women were washing clothing downstream they discovered soap from it.

Pretty crazy.

Having said that, and now that we know how to make lye naturally and don't have to use that chemical compound, I thought this youtube video gave a great example of making homemade soap:

[link to www.youtube.com]