Philosophical Rose

He who tries to penetrate into the Philosophical Rose Garden without a key resembles a man who wishes to walk without feet. 

That even as a natural rose is a pleasure to the senses and life of man, on account of its sweetness and salubrity, so is the Philosophical Rose exhilarating to the heart and a giver of strength to the brain. 

Perrin, R.M.S., Rose, J. Davies, H. 1979. The distribution, variation and origins of pre-Devensian tills in eastern England. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B287, 535-570. 

The mystical as distinguished from the pseudo-practical descriptions of the Stone and its preparation are by far the more interesting of the two. Paracelsus, in his work on The Tincture of the Philosophers, tells us that all that is necessary for us to do is to mix and coagulate the "rose-coloured blood from the Lion" and "the gluten from the Eagle," by which he probably meant that we must combine "philosophical sulphur" with "philosophical mercury."... 

A nineteenth-century biographical dictionary of alchemists includes Jean de Meun, author of The Romance of the Rose. Francis Barrett notes that some have read the work as a tale of love, while others have seen beneath the text the process for the stone of the philosophers (29). In particular, verses 16914—16997 are said to contain much veiled information regarding the Great Work. 

Figure 6.1 An early form of the Rosicrucian emblem depicts a cross centered on a heart, which is centered on a rose. Compare this emblem to the image of the Philosopher s Stone in Figure 5.3, which features a cross, a heart, and a rosebud. (Robert M. Place)...

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a philosopher and glossolaliac who consumed peyote with the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. He believed that peyote triggers the brain to remember supreme truths difficult to obtain by other means. While using peyote, he saw shapes rise from his belly that looked like the letters of a very ancient and mysterious alphabet. The letters J and E in particular rose and glowed fiercely. 

The most popular of his treatises in the fifteenth century and later was probably his Thesaurus Thesaurorum et Rosarium Philosophorum (Treasure of Treasures and Rose Garden of the Philosophers). It consists of two parts, the first in ten brief chapters gives the conventional Greek-Arabian doctrine of the origin and constitution of metals, of sulphur, mercury, and the philosopher s stone, and transmutation. The second part of thirty-two chapters contains seemingly specific directions for operations for the preparation and purification of substances supposed to be necessary for the preparation of the elixirs and the philosopher s stone. As Professor Thomas Thomson pertinently remarks,18... 

Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1958), presents Boyle as a corpuscular philosopher. Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1985), discuss Boyles work with the air pump in its social and rhetorical contexts. More recendy, Rose-Mary Sargent, The Dijfi-... 

Rose-Mary Sargent, The Diffident Naturalist Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27—41, 50—53, 206—207, etpassim. See also Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-Mary Sargent (Indianapolis Hackett, 1999), xxi—xxii, 208-209. 

The importance of Light and Dew emerges from many diverse sources such as garden roses, the orders of Rosicrucians and the historical milieu of the Knights Templars. We find that the Ancient of Days could be much more than a vision of Ezekiel. The romances of the Holy Grail integrate all of our knowledge of the Philosophers Stone into a consummate whole. 

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