THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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all works, however confused, are agreed on this), no initiate may be accepted, and even less may a piece of the art be ‘betrayed’ to him. Often fasts, sexual abstinence
and other solemn remittances were required; at least the pupil thereby attained an out of the ordinary, devoutly patient state of mind. And, in a business which could
never come to an end anyway, there always remained the possibility of putting failure down to one's own impurity, to inadequate inner preparation. In addition, the fear
of evil spirits played a part, in an age when the impenetrable night inhabited by demons already began three steps from the tallow candle and the hearth; when a hellish
something croaked, groaned, threatened, hovered or groped in all dark corners. Thus it seemed advisable for the initiate just starting out to be clean himself, and
unassailable so to speak; a pious heart was regarded as an amulet. But superstitious as all this was: some of these inward pieces of advice nevertheless seem strangely
close to nature, subterraneanly close to nature as it were. The alchemist also changed his pupil's state of awareness so that he should attain an unconscious connection
with his materials. The initiate just starting out therefore not only had to become just and pure of desires but also had to do justice to his material, connected in such a
way with fire, lead, antimony, ductility and lustre as if they were ‘fundamentally’ a part of him. Then an ‘imagination’ of gold was presupposed, in reality probably one
which was mostly very clear­cut, one of the very comprehensible exchange value, but according to the ideal regulation one which referred to gold, frankincense and
myrrh, and thus almost to the birth of the Lord. This kind of thing is less blasphemous or even ideological than it sounds in view of the usual alchemical gold­making and
hence money­making; for it belonged, according to the faith of the art, to the technological method itself. Here totally disregarding for the moment deeper allusions and
intentions which became apparent in the case of the Rosicrucians. Gold was at any rate to be aroused and summoned with the volitional image of itself, with the
preparation of an internal philosopher's stone, before the ‘great metallic sound’ could be evoked. Some regulations concerning this ‘imagination’ seem as if the whole
passionate volitional subject itself had to enter into nature, ‘sympathetically’ linked with its own core or source, as if by a subterranean passage. Psychological, religious
and natural categories frequently became intertwined in alchemy just as in the contemporary cosmologies of Paracelsus and Böhme. This state of affairs can hardly be
re­experienced scientifically any more, when the very independence from the experiencing and interpreting subject is regarded as the criterion of knowledge. Above all,
even