Curiosities of Olden Times

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

“There are many ways,” says Del Rio, “in which the Philosopher’s Stone is made. Writers contest with each other which is the right way. Pauladamus opposes the opinion of Brachescus; Villanosanus will have none of the mode of Trevisanus. So one assails another, and all call each other foolish and ignorant.” But however they may have disputed how to make it, no one succeeded in finding the right way, for no one knew where to look for it; and yet the Philosopher’s Stone was before all their eyes to be enjoyed by all alike, but to be appropriated by none. This precious stone, which went by various names, the “Universal Elixir,” the “Elixir of Life,” the “Water of the Sun,” was thought to procure to its happy discoverer and possessor riches innumerable, perpetual health, a life exempt from all maladies and cares and pains, and even in the opinion of some – immortality. It transmuted lead into gold, glass into diamonds, it opened locks, it penetrated everywhere; it was the sovereign remedy to all disease, it was luminous in the darkest night. To fashion it – so the alchemists said – gold and lead, iron, antimony, vitriol, sulphur, mercury, arsenic, water, fire, earth, and air were needed; to these must be added the egg of a cock, and the spittle of doves. Really, said one shrewd and satiric writer, it only wanted oil, vinegar, and salt, to make of it a salad.

Now the curious thing is – as we shall see in the sequel – the alchemists were not far out in their opinion. All these ingredients, or rather most of them – the cock’s egg and the dove’s spittle only excepted – are to be found combined in the Philosopher’s Stone, and only recent science has established this fact.

As the possessor of this stone was sure to be the most glorious, powerful, rich, and happy of mortals, as he could at will convert anything into gold, and enjoy all the pleasures of life, it is not surprising that the Philosopher’s Stone was sought with eagerness. It was sought, but, as already said, never found, because the alchemists looked for it in just the place where it was not to be found, in their crucibles. Medals were struck on which were inscribed “Per Sal, Sulphur, Mercurium, Fit Lapis Philosophorum,” which was a simplification of the receipt. On the reverse stood, “Thou Alpha and Omega of Life, Hope and Resurrection after Death.” It was identified with Solomon’s seal; it was called Orphanus, the One and Only. It was thought at one time that the Emperor had it in his crown, this Orphanus, and that it blazed like the sun at night; but the German emperors enjoyed so little prosperity that philosophers came to the conclusion that the stone in the imperial crown was something quite different; it brought ill-luck rather than good-fortune.

Zosimus, who lived in the beginning of the fifth century, is one of the first in Europe to describe the powers of this stone, and its capacity for making gold and silver. The alchemists pretended to derive their science from Shem, or Chem, the son of Noah, and that thence came the name alchemy, and chemistry. All writers upon alchemy triumphantly cite the story of the golden calf in the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, to prove that Moses was an adept, and could make or unmake gold at his pleasure. It is recorded that Moses was so wroth with the Israelites for their idolatry, “that he took the calf which they had made and burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.” This, say the alchemists, he never could have done had he not been in possession of the Philosopher’s Stone; by no other means could he have made the powder of gold float upon the water.

At Constantinople, in the fourth century, the transmutation of metals was very generally believed in, and many treatises upon the subject appeared. Langlet du Fresnoy, in his History of Hermetic Philosophy, gives some account of these works. The notion of the Greek writers seems to have been that all metals were composed of two ingredients, the one metallic matter, the other a red inflammable matter which they called sulphur. The pure union of these substances formed gold; but other metals were mixed with and contaminated by various foreign ingredients. The object of the Philosopher’s Stone was to dissolve and expel these base ingredients, and so to liberate the two original constituents whose marriage produced gold.

For several centuries after this the pursuit flagged or slept in Europe, but it reappeared in the eighth century among the Arabians, and from them re-extended to Europe. We are not going to trace the history of alchemy downwards, and see one student after another wreck his genius and time on this rock, nor see what use was made of the belief in it by impostors to enrich themselves at the expense of the credulous – we will follow the superstition upwards, and track the stone to the spring of the belief in its supernatural powers. The search for the stone will take us through strange country, give us many scrambles; but, if the reader will condescend to accompany me, I believe I shall be able to bring him to the very real and original stone itself.

The following story I give as it was told to me by some Yorkshire mill lasses, in their own delightful vernacular. I forewarn the reader that the golden ball in the story is the same as the Philosopher’s Stone, as we shall hear presently:

“There were two lasses, daughters of one mother, and as they came home from t’ fair, they saw a right bonny young man stand i’ t’ house-door before them. He had gold on t’ cap, gold on t’ finger, gold on t’ neck, a red gold watch-chain – eh! but he had brass. He had a golden ball in each hand.24 He gave a ball to each lass, and she was to keep it, and if she lost it, she was to be hanged. One o’ t’ lasses, ’twas t’ youngest, lost her ball. She was by a park-paling, and she tossed the ball, and it went up, up, and up, till it went over t’ paling, and when she climbed to look, t’ ball ran along green grass, and it went raite forward to t’ door of t’ house, and t’ ball went in, and she saw ’t no more.

“So she was taken away to be hanged by t’ neck till she were dead, acause she’d lost her ball.

[“But she had a sweetheart, and he said he would get the ball. So he went to t’ park-gate, but ’twas shut; so he climbed hedge, and when he got to t’ top of hedge, an old woman rose up out o’ t’ dyke afore him, and said, if he would get ball, he must sleep three nights i’ t’ house. He said he would.

“Then he went into t’ house, and looked for t’ ball, but couldna find it. Night came on, and he heard spirits move i’ t’ courtyard; so he looked out o’ t’ window, and t’ yard was full of them, like maggots i’ rotten meat.

“Presently he heard steps coming upstairs. He hid behind t’ door, and was still as a mouse. Then in came a big giant five times as tall as he, and t’ giant looked round, but did not see t’ lad, so he went to t’ window and bowed to look out; and as he bowed on his elbows to see spirits i’ t’ yard, t’ lad stepped behind him, and wi’ one blow of his sword he cut him in twain, so that the top part of him fell in t’ yard, and t’ bottom part stood looking out o’ t’ window.

“There was a great cry from t’ spirits when they saw half t’ giant tumbling down to them, and they called out, ‘There comes half our master, give us t’ other half.’

“So the lad said, ‘It’s no use of thee, thou pair o’ legs, standing aloan at window, so go join thy brother’; and he cast the bottom part of t’ giant after top part. Now when t’ spirits had gotten all t’ giant they was quiet.

“Next night t’ lad was at the house again, and saw a second giant come in at door, and as he came in, t’ lad cut him in twain; but the legs walked on to t’ chimney and went up it. ‘Go, get thee after thy legs,’ said t’ lad to t’ head, and he cast t’ head up chimney too.

“The third night t’ lad got into bed, and he heard spirits stirring under t’ bed; and they had t’ ball there, and they was casting it to and fro.

“Now one of them had his leg thrussen out from under bed, so t’ lad brings his sword down and cuts it off. Then another thrusts his arm out at t’ other side of t’ bed, and t’ lad cuts that off. So at last he had maimed them all, and they all went crying and wailing off, and forgot t’ ball, and let it lig there, under t’ bed; and the lad took it and went to seek his true love.25]

“Now t’ lass was taken to York to be hanged; she was brought out on t’ scaffold, and t’ hangman said, ‘Now, lass, tha’ must hang by thy neck till tha’ be’st dead.’ But she cried out:

“Then the hangman said, ‘Now, lass, say thy prayers, for tha’ must dee.’ But she said:

“Then the hangman said, ‘Hast thee done thy prayers? Now, lass, put thy head into t’ noose.’

“But she answered, ‘Stop, stop, I think I see my brother coming,’ etc. After which she excused herself because she thought she saw her sister coming, and her uncle, then her aunt, then her cousin, each of which was related in full; after which the hangman said, ‘I wee-nt stop no longer, tha’s making gam o’ me.’ But now she saw her sweetheart coming through the crowd, and he held overhead i’ t’ air her own golden ball; so she said —

In this very curious story, the portion within brackets reminds one of the German story of “Fearless John,” in Grimm (K. M. 4), of which I remember obtaining an English variant in a chap-book in Exeter when I was a child – alas! now lost. It is also found in Iceland,26 and is indeed a widely-spread tale. The verses are like others found in Essex in connection with the child’s game of “Mary Brown,” and those of the Swedish “Fair Gundela.” But these points we must pass over. Our interest attaches specially to the golden ball. The story is almost certainly the remains of an old religious myth. The golden ball which one sister has is the sun, the silver ball of the other sister is the moon. The sun is lost; it sets, and the trolls, the spirits of darkness, play with it under the bed, that is, in the house of night, beneath the earth.

But the sun is not only a golden ball, but it is also a shining stone; and here at the outset we tell our secret: the sun is the true Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all to gold, that gives health, that fills with joy.

In primeval times, our rude forefathers were puzzled how to explain the nature of sun and moon and stars, and they thought they had hit on the interpretation of the phenomenon when they said that the stars were diamonds stuck in the heavenly vault, and that the sun was a luminous stone, a carbuncle; and the moon a pearl or silver disk. Even the classic writers had not shaken off this notion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus, all speak of the sun as a glowing stone,27 and Orpheus28 calls the opal the sunstone, because of its analogy to that shining ball. So Pliny also.29 The old Norse spoke of the stars as the “gemstones of heaven,” so did the Anglo-Saxons.30

But perhaps the clearest idea we can have of the old cosmogony is from the pictures preserved to us of the world of the dwarfs. When a superior conception of the universe was general, then the old heathen idea sank, and what had been told of the world of men was referred to the underground world, peopled by the dwarfs, who were the representatives of the early race conquered by the Britons, and by Norse and Teuton, a race probably of Turanian origin. Our British and Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian forefathers knew of the cosmogony of the conquered race, and came to suppose that they inhabited another world to them, a world of which the vault that overarched it was set with precious stones; and as the aboriginal inhabitants were driven to live in caves, or in huts heaped over with turf so as to be like mounds, they regarded them as a subterranean people, and their world to be underground. In a multitude of stories the trolls or dwarfs are said to live in tumuli or cairns. This is nothing more than that their hovels were made of sticks stuck in the ground, gathered together in the middle and turfed over. The Lapp hut, even the Icelandic farmhouse, look like grass mounds. In many tales we hear of human children carried off by the dwarfs, and when these children are recovered they tell of a world in which they have been where the light is given by diamonds and a great carbuncle set in a stony black vault.

William of Newburgh31 says that at Woolpit (Wolf-pits), near Stowmarket in Suffolk, were some very ancient trenches. Out of these trenches there once came, in harvest-time, two children, a boy and a girl, whose bodies were of a green colour, and who wore dresses of some unknown stuff. They were caught and taken to the village, where for many months they would eat nothing but beans. They gradually lost their green colour. The boy soon died. The girl survived, and was married to a man of Lynn. At first they could speak no English; but when they were able to do so they said that they belonged to the land of St. Martin, an unknown country, where, as they were once watching their father’s sheep, they heard a loud noise, like the ringing of the bells of St. Edmund’s Monastery. And then, all at once, they found themselves among the reapers at Woolpit. Their country was a Christian land and had churches. There was no sun there, only a faint twilight; but beyond a broad river there lay a land of light. Giraldus Cambrensis in his Itinerary of Wales tells another queer story of the underground world, and notices that some of the words used in it are closely related to the British tongue.32 But in neither story are the sun and stars spoken of as stones incrusting the vault.

The underground Rose-garden of Laurin the Dwarf, by Botzen, is, however, illumined by one great carbuncle.33 The same sun-stone – a white, marvellous stone – reappears in the “Grail Story,” which is from beginning to end a Christianised Keltic myth. In it the Grail is originally not invariably a basin or goblet, but a stone. It is so in Wolfran von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In that there is no thought of it as a chalice: it is a stone which feeds and delights all who surround, cherish, and venerate it.

In the Elder Edda, in the Fiölvinnsmal, Svipdagr is represented as climbing to the golden halls of heaven, and when he comes there he asks who reigns in that place. The answer given him is: —

Now Menglöd means she who rejoices in the Men, the Precious Stone,34 that is, the sun. She is the holder of the sun, as in the Yorkshire story the lass holds the golden ball.

Matthew Paris says that King Richard Cœur de Lion was wont to tell the following story: – “A rich and miserly Venetian, whose name was Vitalis, was wandering in a forest in quest of game for his table, as he was about to give his daughter in marriage. He fell into a pit that had been prepared for wild beasts, and on reaching the bottom found there a lion and a serpent. They did not injure him. By chance a charcoal-burner came that way and heard the lamentations of those in the pit. Moved with pity, he fetched a rope and ladder and released all three. The lion, full of gratitude, brought the collier meat. The serpent brought him a precious stone. The Venetian thanked him and promised him a reward if he would come to his house. The poor man did so, when Vitalis refused to acknowledge any debt, and threw the collier into prison. However, he escaped, and went with the lion and serpent before the magistrates and told them the tale, and showed them the jewel given him by the serpent. The magistrates thereupon ordered Vitalis to pay to the collier a reasonable reward. The poor man also sold the jewel for a very large sum.”35

Richard must have heard this story in the East; there are no lions in Venetian territory. Moreover the story is incomplete. We have the same story in a fuller form in the Gesta Romanorum.

A seneschal rode through a wood and fell into a pit, in which were an ape, a lion, and a serpent. A woodcutter saved them all. Next day the woodcutter went to the castle for the promised reward, but received instead a cudgelling. The following day the lion drove to him ten laden asses, and he had them and the treasure they bore. Next day, as he was collecting wood and had no axe, the ape brought him boughs with which to lade his ass. On the third day the serpent brought him a stone of three colours, by the virtue of which he won all hearts, and came to such honour that he was appointed general-in-command of the emperor’s armies. But when the emperor heard of the stone he bought it of the woodcutter. However, the stone always returned to the original owner, however often he parted with it.

The same story occurs in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The story spread throughout Europe, and is found in most collections of household tales. It occurs in Grimm’s Kinder Märchen (No. 24), and in Basili’s book of Neapolitan tales, the Pentamerone (No. 37).

All these were derived from the East, and were brought to Europe by the Crusaders. The story occurs in various Oriental collections. The Pâli tale is as follows: —

In a time of drought, a dog, a serpent, and a man fell into a pit together. An inhabitant of Benares draws them up in a basket, and they all promise him tokens of gratitude. The man of Benares falls into great poverty; the dog thereupon steals the king’s crown whilst he is bathing, and brings it to his preserver. The man who had been helped by the other betrays him, and the preserver is imprisoned. The poor man is about to be impaled when the serpent bites the queen; and the king learns that she can only be cured by the man who is on his way to execution. So the poor fellow is brought before the prince and the whole story comes out.36 In this version the stone does not appear; nor does it in the Sanskrit Pantschatantra.37 But in the Mongol Siddhi-kür (No. 13) we have the stone again. A Brahmin delivers a mouse from children who teased it, then an ape, and lastly a bear. He falls into trouble and is put in a wooden box and thrown into the sea. The mouse comes and nibbles a hole in the box, through which he can breathe, the ape raises the lid, and the bear tears it off. Then the ape gives him a wondrous stone, which gives to him who has it power to do and have all he wishes. With this he wishes himself on land, then builds a palace, and surrounds himself with servants. A caravan passes and the leader is amazed to see the new palace, buys the stone of the man, and at once with it goes all the luck and splendour, and the Brahmin is where he was at first. Again the thankful beasts come to his aid. The mouse creeps into the palace of the new owner of the stone and discovers where he hides it, and with the aid of the bear and ape it is again recovered. Here we have the serpent omitted, which is the principal animal to be considered, for really the serpent is the owner of the stone that grows in its head. This idea is very general – that the carbuncle is to be found in a serpent’s head. Pliny has this notion; indeed it is found everywhere.38 The origin of this myth is that the great serpent is the heaven-god – and on the gnostic seals we have the Demiurge so represented as a crowned or nimbed serpent. In the head of this great heaven-god is the sun, the glorious stone that gives life and light and gladness and plenty. In the West the story was told that the Emperor Theodosius hung in his palace a bell, and all who needed his help were to ring the bell. One day a snake came and pulled the bell. The emperor, who was blind, came out to inquire who needed him; then he learned that a toad had invaded the nest of the serpent. So he ordered the toad to be removed. Next day the grateful serpent brought the emperor a costly stone, and bade him lay it on his eyes. When he did this he recovered his sight.

The same story is told of Charlemagne. He was summoned to judge between a toad and a serpent, and decided for the latter. In gratitude the snake brought the Emperor a precious stone. Charles gave it, set in a ring, to his wife Fastrada. It had the power to attract love. Thenceforth he was inseparable from Fastrada, and when she died he would not leave her body, but carried it about with him for eighteen years. Then a courtier removed the jewel and flung it into a hot spring at Aix-la-Chapelle. Thenceforth the emperor loved Aix above every spot in the world, and would never leave it.

In the story of Eraclius, the hero finds a stone that has the power of preserving the bearer from injury by water. Eraclius, armed with this stone, lies at the bottom of the Tiber, as one asleep, and is not drowned. In Barlaam and Josaphat the hermit undertakes to give his pupil a stone which will afford light to the blind, wisdom to fools, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb.

There is a strange story in the Talmud39 of a serpent that has a stone which gives life. A man goes in quest of it. The serpent tries to swallow the ship in which he sails. Then comes a raven and bites off the serpent’s head and the sea is made red with its blood. A dragon catches the falling stone and touches the dead serpent with it; it revives and again attacks the ship. Then another bird kills the creature, and this time the man catches the stone. The power of the stone was so great that it revived salted birds that lay on the table ready to be eaten, and they flew away.

In Buddhist stories, the original signification of the marvellous stone is completely lost, as completely as in the European mediæval stories. The Indian Buddhists remembered that there was a wondrous stone of which strange stories had been told, and which possessed the most surprising powers, and they made use of the idea to illustrate their doctrine – the stone was no other than the secret of Buddha. He who attained to that was rich, happy, serene. It is called the “Tschinta-mani,” that is, the Wishing-stone, because he who has it has everything that can be desired.

In the Buddhist collection of stories entitled The Wise Man and the Fool is the tale of the king’s son, Gedon, who, grieved at the misery there is in the world, goes in quest of the “Tschinta-mani.” He takes with him his brother Digdon. They reach a castle, where he is warned to strike at the door with a diamond bat. Then five hundred goddesses will come forth, each bearing a precious stone, but only one of these is the Wishing-stone. He must select the stone without speaking. He does so, and chooses the right one. On his way home, on board ship, a storm arises, and he is wrecked; but, as he bears the precious stone, he is not drowned, and he saves his brother. Digdon, envious, steals the stone, and puts out his brother’s eyes, and goes home. Gedon follows, forgives his brother, recovers the stone and his sight.

Elsewhere the Wishing-stone is described as giving light by night as well as by day, as far as one hundred and twenty voices could be heard calling, the one catching and repeating to another; and by this light could be seen the seven kinds of treasures falling from heaven like a rain, which are offered to all.

The idea of the marvellous, luminous, enriching, health-giving stone remains, its original significance absolutely lost, and is given a new spell of life, in that it is used as a symbol of the teaching of Buddha.

In Europe, also, the idea of the marvellous stone remains; it is not used allegorically, except in the Grail myth, but it haunts men’s minds; they believe in it, they suppose it must be found, and they try to manufacture it out of all kinds of ingredients.40