THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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tally to some extent, just as if each later one stood on the shoulders of the ones before. Ramon Lull compares the stone with a carbuncle; Paracelsus, in his ‘Signatura
rerum naturalium’, states that the stone is heavy, in mass bright red as a ruby, transparent as a crystal, but also malleable as resin and yet fragile as glass; Helmont, the
chemist and Paracelsian, relates that the stone, when he had it in his hands, was a heavy saffron­coloured powder, shimmering like not very finely ground glass (cf.
Kopp, Die Alchymie, 1886, I, p. 82). Both silver and quicksilver as well as the ‘unripe’ metals, namely lead, tin, copper and iron, as well as brittle ones like antimony,
bismuth, zinc and so on, permeated by the tincture and the stone, are supposed to turn to gold. This refining is caused by ‘projection’, i.e. by throwing the tincture on to
the metal when it is in a state of flux, such that the tincture, according to the purity attained, can transform base metal up to thirty thousand times its own weight (cf.
Schmieder, Geschichte der Alchymie, 1832, p. 2). But the alchemists always speak of this utopian, all too utopian jewel with a reverence which goes far beyond such
lucrative metal miracles and also more particularly does not omit Gospel allusions to another cornerstone and saviour. Just as the ‘materia prima’ and more specifically
Mercury are compared with the Virgin Mary, so is the stone to her son. Then there is a ‘conception of the blessed stone’, and Robert Fludd calls it ‘the foundation
stone of the inner temple, so that the whole work of the sun is done’. Then Jakob Böshme praises it as the ‘root of a kingdom in which there is no longer any other
element than the Son of Man’. Just as Böhme on the whole elaborated the outlines of his theosophy and theogony in accordance with alchemical operations; as if in the
alchemical process man was only doing what God does in a similar or the same way in the created life of inorganic nature (cf. Harleß, Jakob Böhme und die
Alchymisten, 1870, p. off.). Angelus Silesius, in the wealth of his allegories, spurns the alchemical­Messianic ones least of all: ‘I am myself the metal, the spirit is hearth
and fire,/The tincture which transfigures body and soul is the Messiah’ (‘Cherubinical Wanderer’ I, rhyme 103). But the cue for all this idolization of the stone and of
what it brings was given by Marsilio Ficino, the neo­Platonist of the Renaissance; all the later allusions and transparencies are first found in his work. Whether still
hesitantly veiled in a half gnostic ‘Theologia Platonica’, or openly in the treatise ‘De arte chimica’, as follows: ‘The Virgin is Mercury, from here the Son is born to us,
that is the stone, through whose blood the tainted lower bodies are led back into the golden eavens intact.’ At the same time through this text, as it recurs word