THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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for word or with Baroque embellishments in numerous alchemical Rosicrucian writings, the stone, the philosophical gold, and the golden heavens are made one and the
same. So when Andreae says: ‘The red tincture is the purple cloak around the appearing king’, then the king is both the stone and the heavenly­earthly gold itself which
it releases from the world. Chemical chiliasm certainly became one in which analytical chemistry, red tincture, gold, and paradise at the end of time seem to coincide, in
fact the work of transmutation is regarded, in complete hubris, as the ‘laboratorium Dei’. It is not astonishing that now also all other myths, whenever metamorphosis
occurred in them, seemed interpretable in terms of alchemy. Circe and the voyage of the Argonauts, the march through the Red Sea and the deeds of Hercules, King
Midas and the Garden of the Hesperides, the staff of Moses transforming bitter water into sweet, and the wedding­feast at Cana: all this and much more besides had to
serve the worship of the stone for the best. Mythical archetypes of change have been most powerfully preserved in the lavish allegory of alchemy, and if indeed the
Olympian gods breathed their last only in the eighteenth century as metallic symbols, metallic souls, then the Persian­Jewish Messianic faith lived on in such strange
metallurgy not just in secularized form. Not just allegorically either, but symbolically; for the transformation into essence lacks the ambiguity which sends from one
Alteritas to the other, it is characterized in its target by unambiguity and undeniable fanaticism of the Absolute. Gold, happiness, eternal life are imprisoned in lead, the
captive Christ, the gold­entelechy of all things and beings, must be released from the dungeon of the status quo by means of the general reformation of which alchemy is
a metaphor. Historical improvement and the transfiguration of the world were thereby cross­connected just as they introduced into one another an organic­inorganic
motif of the saviour. Thus it was no accident that Andreae adopted a motto which was probably already instructive for the Renaissance visionary of alchemy, the neo­
Platonist Ficino; an ancient motto from the Messianic ‘Odes of Solomon’, stemming from Philo or from his school. It runs: ‘Only the pure man, transformed by his own
conversion, possesses the resurrecting power to dissolve, to renew and to wake the substances sunk like lead into the chaos. By means of the holy water, the logos
spermatikos, he returns them to existence and leads them in purified form upwards, until all things below are transformed on high.’ With this statement alchemical utopia
— the boldest and most mythological that was possible at all in technology — is really characterized in toto; even beyond the ‘Christ of the unripe metals’. Finally it is
characteristic that the pure man or Cathar,