The Occult

The Philosopher's Stone: Myth and Meaning

Hermeticism & Alchemy · 6 min read

The philosopher’s stone — the lapis philosophorum — is the most famous single symbol in the Western alchemical tradition. The alchemists attributed to it two main properties: the transmutation of base metals into gold, and the prolongation of life. Taken literally, neither claim has been substantiated, and no modern laboratory has produced a substance capable of doing either. The stone is important, however, not because of what it was supposed to do in the furnace, but because of what it represented in the broader symbolic and spiritual tradition of which alchemy is a part. The history of the stone, properly told, is the history of an idea that has been read in many different ways without ever settling on a single one (Principe 2013; Newman 2004).## What the Alchemists Wrote

The earliest references to a perfected substance capable of transmuting metals appear in the Greek alchemical texts of the third and fourth centuries CE, particularly in the writings of Zosimos of Panopolis. By the time of the Arabic alchemists of the eighth and ninth centuries, the product is more clearly described. Jabir ibn Hayyan treats the al-iksīr (the elixir) as a substance that, projected onto a base metal in the furnace, transmutes it into gold, and that, taken internally, heals the body and prolongs life. The Arabic al-iksīr is the source of the European word “elixir.”

The Latin alchemists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries translated the Arabic material and added to it. The Latin treatise Summa perfectionis, attributed to “Geber” (the Latin Geber, distinct from the Arabic Jabir) and probably composed in the late thirteenth century by Paul of Taranto, gives the most influential Latin description of the stone: a single substance, prepared from a single raw material, possessing the two properties the tradition attributed to it. The alchemists gave the stone many names — philosopher’s stone, great magistery, elixir, tincture, powder, red stone, white stone, divine water, heavenly fire, seed of gold, quinta essentia, fifth element, the stone that is not a stone, the king, the child of the work, the phoenix — partly as concealment, partly because the stone was not a single thing and no one name could capture it.

The etymology of “alchemy” is itself contested. The principal theories derive the word from the Greek χυμεία (chymeia, “casting” or “fusion”), from the Egyptian kēme (“black earth,” related to the name of Egypt itself, Kemet), or from the Chinese chin-i (“gold-making juice”). The Arabic al-kīmiyā’ is the form in which the word reached medieval Europe, but the Arabic is generally considered a borrowing from the Greek or Egyptian, not the ultimate source (Principe 2013; Newman 2004).

The Two Claims

The first main claim is the transmutation of base metals into gold. The alchemists observed that metals share certain properties — heavy, opaque, polished, malleable, conductive — and inferred that these betoken a shared underlying composition.

The second main claim is the prolongation of life. Paracelsus’s statement, in his Paragranum and elsewhere, that the aim of alchemy is the making of medicines rather than the making of gold, is a restatement of the older view — though the Paracelsian position is more nuanced than the popular paraphrase allows. The alchemists were careful to say that neither claim is to be taken in the most obvious way.

Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the Latin Geber, George Ripley, and Johann Joachim Becher took the laboratory work seriously as laboratory work. The Aurora Consurgens (c. 1350), the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550, and Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens of 1617/18 work on both registers at once. Most historical alchemists held to both simultaneously (Principe 2013; von Franz 1980).

The Symbolic Reading

The symbolic reading treats the stone as a description of inner transformation. The transmutation of base metal into gold is the transmutation of the unworked self into the perfected self. The four stages of the alchemical work — nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo — are the four stages of an inner process of purification and integration. The symbolic reading is not a modern invention; the alchemists themselves developed it.

The modern psychological reading, most influentially developed by Carl Gustav Jung in Psychology and Alchemy (German 1944, English 1953) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (German 1955–56, English 1963), treats the alchemical images as symbolic descriptions of the process of individuation. Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s principal collaborator, did much of the most detailed alchemical-symbol work at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, and her Aureum Speculum (1980) remains an important reference. The Jungian reading has been criticised from several directions. William R. Newman and Lawrence Principe have argued that Jung and his followers selected alchemical texts that fit the psychological model and ignored those that did not. The criticisms are serious. Jung’s reading remains, however, a powerful and influential interpretation.

The White Stone and the Red Stone

The tradition often distinguishes between a white stone and a red stone, associated with the moon and the sun, with silver and gold, with the albedo and the rubedo. The white stone is the product of the partial work; the red stone is the product of the completed work. The two stones also have a corresponding medical symbolism: the white stone is the medicine of the soul, the red stone is the medicine of the body. The distinction is set out explicitly in the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550 and in the Tractatus aureus attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.

Nicolas Flamel and the Stone in Legend

The most famous name in alchemical legend is Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330–1418), a Parisian scrivener (a scribe and copyist of documents) who also worked in the book trade and owned several properties. The legend that he had produced the stone began to circulate in the seventeenth century and became the prototype of the romance of the alchemist who succeeds where all others fail. The historical Flamel did in fact endow several Parisian churches and hospitals with the proceeds of his business. The Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques attributed to him is now generally treated by scholarship as a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century forgery (Principe 2013).

The alchemists themselves, in their technical writings, treat the production of the stone as a matter of theory and practice. The legend tradition treats it as a magical object that can be obtained by a particularly favored practitioner. The distinction is a real one.

Why the Stone Became Central

The philosopher’s stone became central to the alchemical tradition because it gave a concrete object to the abstract work. The stone has a powerful resonance beyond the alchemical tradition itself: the alchemists often used the imagery of common religious devotion to describe it — the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, the resurrection body, the elixir of life. The stone is, in this sense, the alchemical version of the central religious symbol: the perfected being, the union of the human and the divine. It is for this reason that the stone became a central emblem of the entire Western esoteric tradition.

A small modern development is the “contemplative alchemy” movement, associated with the work of the French-born teacher Jean-Patrick Costa (writing as “Lapidus”) and the American writer Richard Smoley. The movement is more a contemporary spiritual practice than a continuation of the older laboratory tradition, and it uses the language of the stone as the language of contemplative integration.