When the great Rosicrucian, Robert Fludd, confirmed by quotation from the Holy Writ his alchemical speculation concerning the Catholic, or Universal, Stone, he brought down upon his head the anathemas of an irate clerg. Declaring that Fludd was attempting to distort the Scriptures into a book of chemical formulae, the pious pedagogues of the seventeenth century solemnly washed their hands of any concurrence in the learned doctor’s premises. When FLudd declared the universe to be a vast chemical laboratory and the various manifestations of life existing therein to be the result of certain alchemical processes analogous to evolution, one, Gassendi by name, could restrain himself no longer, and in 1630 -published a book in which he unwittingly attempted to prove the Bible to contain nothing reasonable, logical or philosophical, but to be the direct inspiration of God! Moved to pity by the puerility of an intellect attempting to prove that God could fabricate a universe out of nothing merely through the exercise of Divine prerogative, Fludd prepared a most scholarly tract in which he expounded the deeper principles of Rosicrucian alchemy.

Christ is the true cornerstone of the alchemical temple, he asserted, and also the mysterious powder of projection which transmutes every base substance which it contacts. The unfoldment of the Christ within each human soul is the magnum opus which, when accomplished, elevates the philosopher to the exalted position of a Frater R. C. or a Knight of the Golden Stone. In the above plate, the aged philosopher signifies the ripeness of wisdom, the open book before him represents Nature, and the figures in the retort the consummation of alchemical art. Reclining with his head upon the lapis philosophorum, the patriarch Jacob beheld the ladder of alchemical steps which ascends through three world and terminates in the throne of Jehovah. Realizing Nature to be an epitome of God and man an epitome of Nature, the philosopher creates in his retort miniature universes, from the study of which he discovers the laws governing life and death. With this knowledge he not only emancipates his own soul but makes his contribution towards the regeneration of the world.