What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

THE BEAUTIFUL REDDISH LIGHT OF THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE 179
sulfur, mercury, and sal ammoniac—could produce such
wonderful substances, then surely real gold, and even the Stone,
could not be impossible. And it’s no surprise that painters are not
far away: Mosaic gold was also used as a substitute for actual
gold in illuminated manuscripts. 6
The famous Stone is only stone in the most undefined sense.
Really it is neither a stone, nor a kind of stone, nor stone as
opposed to rock or mineral or metal, but stone as the principle
underlying the universe of substances—the entire world, and
everything in it. It would have no place in Ğābir’s classification of
earthly materials. When the sum total of kinds of substances is
exhausted, there remains one that cannot be on the list: the
philosopher’s stone itself. The stone is not gold, and even the
gold allowed into the alchemists’ laboratories was not “common
gold” or “vulgar gold” (aurum vulgaris) but “sophic gold,” or the
purified “seeds of gold.” Substances come in several varieties,
passing gradually from everyday life to unheard-of rarity and
beauty. In the case of mercury, first there are the lumps of earth,
the plants and animals in which mercury is locked away, hidden
in impurities and combinations. Then there is ore, and especially
the rocks that yield the mineral cinnabar. Cinnabar itself
“sweats” the liquid mercury when it is heated, leaving a smelly
sulfurous residue. The perspiration is pure metallic mercury.
When that is distilled and cohobated it yields the “seed” or
“sophic seed” of mercury, meaning the generative principle
proper to mercury and fit for alchemical experiment. Then comes
“living mercury” and the nearly supernatural tinctures of
mercury, which are shining liquids or “crystalline bodies,” and
finally the fixed mercury of the philosophers.
The Stone itself is one step further toward the supernatural. It
sparkles with a beautiful reddish light, and has a fragrant smell.
One alchemist claims it is “saffron-colored powder, very heavy,”
glittering like “splinters of glass.” 7 Another says it is red and
shines like a ruby. 8 Yet the Stone is not entirely supernatural,
since according to alchemical legends some people possessed it,
and carried it around for years in secret pouches. They gave
some away to worthy strangers, who took it and used it to make
ordinary gold without any previous knowledge.
The basic reason why the Stone is not fully supernatural is that
Christ himself is the goal and subject of the alchemical work, and
he was incarnated and walked on the earth. Most of what gets