Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
There are many famous fairy tales of the time that carry a similar
message, although in a clumsier manner. If we assume that the Grimm
brothers in the period 1812-15 only wrote down older tales, their
Wasser
des Lebens
(Water of Life) is probably the oldest one. The elixir of life,
according to their moral, is to be found only if the seeker is morally per-
fect. The German writer and philosopher Christoph Martin Wieland
(1733-1813) narrated a fairy tale called
Der Stein der Weisen
(The Phi-
losophers' Stone, 1786-89)
12
in which he employed the full-fledged me-
dieval figure of the cheating alchemist. His victim is a king of Cornwall
who is as credulous and stupid as he is greedy and heartless. After his
deception, he goes through a series of fanciful transformations, con-
trolled by fairy-like figures, through which the king's former credulity
and greed give way to the reason and morality of a simple and happy
man. At the happy end, we learn that the true philosophers' stone,
i.e
. a
remedy for happiness, is to be searched for in reason and morality. There
is another fairy tale called
The Philosophers' Stone
written by the Danish
writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) around 1835. Here, it is a wise
old Indian who is reaching for the 'stone', a remedy against death, that is
said to be composed of the true, the good, and the beautiful,
i.e
. the me-
dieval
verum, bonum et pulchrum
. After a series of unsuccessful attempts
by his four sons, who are each characterized by extraordinary capacities
of one of the senses, his blind daughter is finally able to collect the in-
gredients. This reveals to her father, as the tale finishes, that the secret
stone is Faith, leading via Hope and Love (
i.e.
the three Christian virtues)
to immortality.
All these literary examples revive the discourse about the true al-
chemy. Writers involved in that discourse argued in favor of a spiritual
alchemy based on morality or religion, or they even reformulated al-
chemy in pure terms of the Christian doctrine, as Anderson did. In this
context, as in the internal medieval debates, the cheating alchemist only
12
This is part of a collection of fairy tales first published anonymously as
Dschinnistan
oder Auserlesene Feen- und Geistermärchen
(Winterthur: Steiner, 1786-89; repr.
Zürich-Stuttgart: Manesse, 1992). Wieland's tales bear some similarities to the
Tales
of the Thousand and One Nights
. His 'Stein der Weisen' is probably inspired by the
'Story of Hasan of El-Basrah' (see below). For a structuralist interpretation of Wie-
land's 'moralistic tale', see Nobis 1976, chap. IV.
