THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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into account when cooking gold. Nevertheless, the superstition of alchemy has always reserved to itself something distinctive from, even contrary to that of astrology,
simply the act of intervention, combination, the changing process; all this was to be levelled precisely at the ‘frozen heavens’. At the horoscope of the beginning, which
also claims right at the beginning to be an epitaph as well, an unchangeable, inescapable one. The planetary symbols themselves, in metals and in the heavens, were to
be ‘chemically surmounted’, namely by the sun or by gold. That is why Franckenberg's ‘Oculus siderius’ of 1643 boils down to this: ‘Since we have been stuck long
enough in the circumscribed cage or whitewashed imaginary vault of the frozen heavens and have fooled one another with all kinds of fantastic visions and
constellations, we now need to rub the sleep of seven ages out of our eyes at once.’ The hidden alchemy at work in Thomas More and his liberal utopia has already
been referred to, as the ‘mythology of liberation (cf. Vol. II, p. 528). This was in contrast to astrology, the characteristic guiding system in Campanella's authoritarian
utopia; astrology is solely magic that descends from above, it does not, like alchemy, ascend from below into something better. Turning to gold as a whole was and
remained for Andreae and his successors the transformation of the world, and metallurgy a mere vicarious test of this ‘technology’. In the end, out of the really divined
Pan, the world was to be rebuilt, by means of pansophy’ and humanity.
The paths to this were clearly confused, and in a more familiar region they became conspicuously short. In 1619, three years after the anonymous ‘Chemical Wedding’,
Andreae also published a social utopia: ‘Rei publicae Christianopolis descriptio’. Outside the background we have just seen, it is not particularly important and is not
independent in any case; that is also why we can talk about it only now, in connection with the Rosicrucians. The golden order has here become a kind of thoroughly
Christianized city of artisans and schools, an island­city with a circular temple in the middle, with a market­, gymnastics­ and pleasure­zone around it, with fields and
workshops on the outskirts of the city. Admittedly there is no mention of alchemy even in the curriculum of the utopian school, even the undoubted dispersion of the city
is surrounded by a kind of planetary circle, almost in the manner of the somewhat later ‘Civitas solis’ of Campanella. Nevertheless, an alchemical consciousness,
opposed to the astrological one, is at work on this social utopia, as was already the case in that of More; for Christianopolis rises in an emphatically antithetical manner,
as if processed out, from ‘the dross of the topsy­turvy, completely