THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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a kind of ordeal of fire and water, then afterwards, adorned with the Golden Fleece, attends the seven­day wedding celebration as chief guest, has a vision of death and
afterwards the resurrection of the royal couple. The guests are dubbed Knights of the Golden Stone, but Christian Rosenkreutz, having forced his way into a chamber
where he found Lady Venus asleep, is induced, as the wedding is in full swing, to remain in the castle as a doorkeeper or as Peter. ‘Alchymia’ gives away the bride at
the wedding, she is the ‘parergon to the ergon of the seven days’. On the whole the alchemical meaning in Andreae's allegory is clear, but not as one which refers
exclusively to metallurgy. If it is confined to the latter, then the ‘Chemical Wedding’ bears no or only very little relation to gold­cooking. If, however, alchemy is
conceived as giving away the bride of a transformation of the world or ‘general reformation’, then it is understandable that contemporary believers saw in the novel,
even if it is typically a fragment, the most sublime allegory of the ‘work of perfection’, of the extraction of philosophical gold. A Rosicrucian by the name of Brotoffer
published an interpretation in 1617: ‘Elucidarius major or Synopsis of the Chemical Wedding F.R.C., in which praeparatio lapidis aurei is very neatly described.’ This
interpretation openly explains the seven days of the wedding as the seven stages of the lchemical process, spiritually brought to light: as destillatio, solutio, purefactio,
nigredo, albedo, fermentatio, and projectio medicinae (tincture of gold). It is even correct that the ‘Chemical Wedding’ was not only intended as allegory but as
symbolism in the comprehensively final sense, i.e. as metaphorical reference to an ultimate Unitas, to the fermenting golden Pan. So, in alchemy of this kind, this was
supposed to be the solemn significance announced above: that of an Easter Day to be fantastically created against ice and barriers. The bourgeois impulse towards the
‘Freedom of the Christian Man’* that did not arrive now adopted such strange paths and naturally­adorned disguises in the so­called hermetic societies of the German
Baroque and their stated symbolism. A reveille was intended which was to resound through the whole earthly layer, an ‘Awake, frozen Christian’, through lead,
creation, society and the remaining Alteritas. The preparation of gold and the promotion of humanity are jumbled together in Rosicrucianism from then on, constitute the
peculiar quality of its mixed fantasy. In 1622 the since famous Society of Rosicrucians was founded in The Hague, though the name of the order itself is older than the
Fama and Confessio which Andreae produced about it. Paracelsus
* Luther's ‘Freiheit des Christenmenschen’.