THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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by Adam, after the Fall, Enoch and Solomon.’ Alchemy and chiliasm together thus entered the hermetic sects, with the transformation of metals as a prelude to the
‘true’ homunculus or to the birth of the new man. A late after­image of this is still to be found in Goethe's fragment ‘The Mysteries’, concerning the dream of a chemical
kingdom. The wanderer, ‘exhausted by the day's long journeying/He undertook upon impulse sublime’, here sees a mysterious image on the monastery gate, sees the
cross entwined with roses, ‘and light celestial clouds of silver float,/To soar into the sky with cross and roses’. Thirteen chairs are standing in the monastery hall, at their
heads hang thirteen shields with unmistakably alchemical allegories: ‘And here he sees a fiery dragon pause/To quench his raging thirst in wild flames;/And here an arm
caught in a bear's fierce jaws,/From which the blood is pouring in hot streams.’ The images on the shields signify in this order thirteen stages of turning to gold, and thus
they are the ancestral hall which the old man in the monastery tells the wanderer about. But then the wise man, who has such diverse ancestors behind him, is called
Humanus in Goethe's strange poem; and this very name has also been claimed in the Rosicrucianism of Andreae to be the final name and content which rises from the
transformation of metals and the world. Cross and rose, the first the symbol of pain and of dissolution, the second the symbol of love and life, thus united allegorically in
the ‘work of perfection’. ‘And a French philosopher’, as Gottfried Arnold's history of heretics of 1741 relates, in the chapter on the Rosicrucians, ‘has sought the
secret of making gold in the name itself and suggested that rose comes from ros or dew, and crux means lux for them, which things the alchemists used most.’ Thus
again and again Rosicrucianism opened out into a kind of second storey of alchemy; the philosopher's stone in the Chemical Wedding was at the same time Christ the
cornerstone. For lead and man and for the whole world: ‘Vita Christi, mors Adami, Mors Christi, vita Adami’,* ran the epitaph of the Rosicrucian and friend of Jakob
Böhme, Abraham von Franckenberg. Or as the same Franckenberg, in connection with the Chemical Wedding, had taught: alchemy was ‘renewal of the celestial lights,
ages, men, animals, trees, plants, metals and all things in the world’. Moreover this kind of thing was levelled at any constraint or spellbinding by the existing celestial
lights, and therefore, despite some cross­connections, at the mythology of fate at that time: astrology. Some cross­connections did exist of course, all metals bore
planetary symbols and vice versa, the position of the planets was always taken
* ‘Life of Christ, death of Adam, Death of Christ, life of Adam.’