The 'lapis philosophorum'

The 'lapis philosophorum'

John Bjarne Grover

The 'lapis philosophorum' is, if I have understood it right, considered the peak of spiritual achievement for a classic alchemist: It happens after many years of work and struggle with the inside and the outside, the soul, the spirit, the world he lives in, the inner world he strives towards, that the alchemist one day finds the white stone, also called the philosopher's stone, which contains the secrets of creation and the whole world. It has taken shape out of nothing, ex nihilo, suddenly formed as out of the air, and has thereby crossed the border from non-being to being.

The great christian mystic Jacob Böhme said that the lapis philosophorum is the same as Jesus Christ - that is, that it comes from heaven and has taken place in material being.

The great political issue in the western world throughout the centuries of the 2nd millenium is the similarity and difference between Rigveda and Moses - giving rise to suspicion that one of them could be false - probably prompting the Vatican to establish the Inquisition and later Opus Dei to quench the scepticism that Moses and hence christianity was a mere copy of the hinduist Rigveda. Protestantism of Martin Luther is likewise possibly developed from this scepticism.

British tradition seems (rightly or not) to conceptualize the Rigveda as prescribing the lithurgical formation of a divine white stone which is crushed in a mortar and mixed up in fruit juice given to the congregation to drink. Moses does not prescribe this procedure - and some would say that this is the reason why Christ later had to come and be the 'lapis' missing from the text of Moses, to be 'crushed' and given to the congregation to consume in the holy communion. If not, the two texts would not have been 'the same'.

But wouldnt the tablets which Moses got from God be the 'lapis' of Moses? He did take them down from the mountain but crushed them against the ground when he saw the people dancing around the golden calf, and therefore he had to go up to get new ones, tell the scriptures of Moses. Political intrigue, in particular the formation of nazism in the 20th century, seems to have related to this by conceiving the first tablets as the shared consciousness of the jews while the second set of tablets being what is known also to christianity. Hitler could have been constructed on basis of the idea of the original tablets, pre-crushed, and he seems to have dug up as many holy jewish secrets as he could find for turning them into terror - so that nobody wanted them after the war - while keeping the vedic swastika as his logo.

The 'lapis' contains the whole world in itself - that is, it 'is' the human semiotic endowment which makes human reality different from other realities, which means that there exist bigger realities across the border of existence to which the 'lapis' can cross when it takes shape but which humans cannot really understand.

Ouyang Xiu is considered the most prominent poet of the chinese Song dynasty - he has written these 10 poems which I have translated - they seem to be essentially about the 'lapis philosophorum' and surrounding mysteries. I have translated them on basis of the strict empirical facts I have established during the work with my book 'Der Dornenstrauch' on the yellow metre. The lapis took form at the end of the work with the third part. One year later I wrote also the white metre - and then another lapis took shape - this was less interesting than the first in terms of substance - it has a bony structure and could have been a part of a human skeleton - and had the form and size of a male penis head and seemed to have shapes on it which corresponded with poem #5 in the series of 64 poems of the white metre. I call this the 'philosophers bone' in contrast to the first which I call the 'philosophers stone'. The first stone I found in the kitchen sink, stuck into the side of the drain-hole - hence the smooth part on the lower side of it. I first believed that some salt had fallen into the water of the sink and been coagulating there, I first looked briefly at it but put it back and took it up for a closer study some hours later. It lay on the place where the typical 'potato peel filter' would have been if I had had one - this is what I found in the bathtub when I lived in Ehamgasse on Simmering in 2006 or thereabout. In fact even this 'Stonehenge'-formed plastic item seems to be part of Ouyang's series of poems. Ouyang conceptualizes the metaphysical reality in the form of a lake or sea - there is the shared 'refrain' in his 10 poems telling 'xi hu hao' = 'Western Lake is good' - it means the metaphysical reality as a water basin in which the objects of ontological being in the human reality are developed like 'boats' on or in the sea - or like my lapis in the water basin of the sink. This lake or sea is like the tract of a tuba in my conceptualization, often compared with the flower tract of a lotus flower: The metaphysical reality is beyond this tract, the catalogue of mysteries, and go through two coils (inside the kitchenbench, that would be) - one transcendent and one immanent - before the objects are articulated at the mouthpiece of the tuba. This means that the lapis found in the drainhole is quite 'metaphysical'.

I have based my translation on the empirical facts from the work with the yellow and white metres, in particular the years 2014-2016, and all of it I have documented on the web. The significant empirical data are centred around the scroll with the thread around it which I found in the bathtub in Zinckgasse, the black spot from which I rubbed off some material and put on a microscope glass, and the appr 10 pictures I could find there in the rubbed-out 'mud' there on the glass. These plus the two lapises and the potato peel filter are easily recognized in the chinese original of Ouyang's ten poems. If you buy a goodenough chinese dictionary you can attest the phenomenon yourself by looking up the signs alphabetized by the pinyin transcription in latin spelling - and soon you can feel like an accomplished sinologist making 'expert' opinions on the literary history. There are generally several possible meanings attached to each chinese sign - and if it had not been for my preparatory empirical work with the 'Dornenstrauch', I would not have had a chance to arrive at these 10 translations on basis of my meagre competence in chinese. It is because I recognize my empirical facts in the chinese text that I can make this translation - and indeed it looks sensible compared with other translations, which I have been able to ascertain after having made my own.

The Fatima revelations of 1917 seem to be susceptible to an interpretation in terms of the same 'lapis philosophorum' - and the metaphysics of Ouyang. The three children of Fatima were tending the sheep and lambs in Cova da Iria - which means a basin-formed 'pit' ('Grube') comparable to the Western Lake of Ouyang - the lamb or sheep is seen on the lapis as a sleeping lamb head - or is it an eagle or other winged being from heaven ? The three secrets told by the Madonna are 1) a vision of hell with souls bathed in fire, 2) a purgatorial semi-level wherein she calls for the understanding of Russia as a 'consecrated' place, and 3) the ascension to the top of a mountain on which there stands a cross made of cork-oak. These are seen on the lapis in the form of 1) the smooth lower side under the diagonal, 2) the sweet dreams of the sleeping lamb or 'Dreamer', dreaming about the naked Eve (could be people do not go to hell for some masturbation only) with whom he shares the head, hence a dreamer's 'inner ejaculation' could be compared with the formation of a 'white stone', and 3) the mountain on the side of it - with the 'cork-oak' of the potato peel filter establishing a 'higher level' of being.

All these aspects are present in Ouyang's poems empirically recognizable in the form of the lapis and surrounding mysticism - for Ouyang the lapis is a boat in or on the water.

I make particular notice of the translation of poem 4 and 5: It was when I discovered that the graphic form of the chinese signs in #4 seemed to draw on paper the circumstances of the formation of the 'philosophers bone' in Szolnok (such as the 'map' telling the location of the finding of the 'bone' in the sign 'yàn' = 'swallow' - the bird) that I understood that #5 could be translated similarly in accordance with the sound of the original chinese - my translation is as close in english to the sound of the original chinese as I can get it while retaining as much as possible of the original meaning. That is also in accordance with the puzzling phenomenon of the 'bone' that it seemed to imitate my own poem #5.

Indira Gandhi was shot in 1984 with a Sten gun and a revolver - hence her life was ended with tools which could lead to associations with the white stone ('sten') or bone resembling a lapis or penis head 'bone' of masturbation. Acts 10, act Sten. A 'lapis philosophorum' is composed, tells tradition, of one part salt, one part mercury and one part incombustible sulphur - and the classic alchemists were struggling with finding the optimal mix of these (and metals - and, first of all, their own moral and mystic constitution) in the search for the 'lapis'. In the district of Johnstrasse in Vienna there is a small square ('quadrant') by the three streets Selzergasse = the salt, Gstaltmeyrgasse for the mercury (Gstaltmeyr was Seelsorger, Dechant and Pfarrer, tells the sign, and jocular interpretations of buttons of trouble, treble and bass on the 'revelational radio' - Gebührenpflichtig? - probably exist), and Wurmsergasse for the sulphur - while the fourth street in the quadrant is Hütteldorferstrasse - with easy associations to Hitler-Adolf-strasse.

It is a pity with all that nazi infiltration into the mystic quest for the innermost secrets of being - secrets and mystic thinking which can be recognized in judaism, christianity, hinduism and buddhism (Ouyang). It is the need for finding an ecumenic solution in the new global society and the need for solving that old riddle of the similarity of Rigveda with Moses which is compromised by such 'nazi infiltration'. Why is Rigveda and Moses similar? That is solved when understanding why a 'lapis philosophorum' always (at least I would believe so) looks nearly the same across various people and cultures and alchemists - who all are humans and share the same 'limitations of reality' characteristic for humans. The lapises look the same because the human semiotic endowment is the same across cultures and religions, the Rigveda and Moses are similar for the same reasons of being fundamental religious texts about the metaphysical basis for the creation of the world (as conceived by humans). Hence the riddle is solved with the 'lapis philosophorum'.

But to say that this means that Adolf Hitler is right is to take it out wrong way again. That is called 'nazi infiltration' into the mysteries of being. The problem of Hitler is that he used terror - probably on basis of the classic misunderstanding of angels as 'terrible' and 'scaring' mixed with the idea that the level of the 'lapis' is close to the metaphysical level of angels. But that is hubris - and exactly the fundamental misunderstanding of what a human is.

Hitler seems to have taken all the deepest mysteries and turned them into terror - could be on basis of such misundertandings. "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich" says Rilke in his 2nd Duino elegy - but to explode bombs for being 'angelic' like on a level of 'lapis' is a misunderstanding.

I add an observation from the story of the Fatima revelation that the visionary Lucia dos Santos wrote that she had been recommended by a Father Jose Bernardo Goncalves to articulate her experience in words and send it to the pope. I notice that the concept of Moses carrying the first 'hard' tablets but smashing them against the ground under his 'calves' seems to be contained in this name. Whether that is the reason for the Concorde disaster and the name-similarity of Obama with me, I dont know - but think it could be an interesting observation. Generally there seems to be much 'political infiltration' into the mystic fields of understanding. But maybe it is right to say that the 'lapis philosophorum' is a proper way of understanding the world for a modern politician - in particular with its general and ecumenic values. The quest of the mystic is of course for own Nirvana or Heaven but by this faith and quest the mystic undergoes a mystic transformation which is true change of history towards a higher spiritual level for the rest of the society - and that is a political work which every society needs. Therefore, to the extent that the mystic can believe in a transcendent reality, it means that politics also can be something more than a mere struggle for power and control - the 'art of politics' as some may like to call it.

The lapis is really only the nature of the human species relative to its metaphysical origins - and hence the fundamental political problem deriving from the similarity of Moses and Rigveda seems to be solved thereby.

If my official custody father in the early years were Josef Mengele under new norwegian identity, and if he carried out child abuse on me for the purpose of making me 'skewed' or 'biased' with a lateralization with difference of right and left halves, that could have been a cheap trick for pretending that I should be a 'lapis philosophorum' a la Christ and subjected to surveillance attention via media - for a quasi justification of a politics which also can be taken far astray into nazism. Then it is important to understand that this is a cheap trick obtained by (very unmystic!) child abuse only - and that the universal lateralization which is typical of the human nature and which is found by the diagonal setting the first and the second Fatima secret apart has nothing to do with a lateralization of my body due to child abuse. Cheap tricks that is called - and there can be no justification for surveillance abuse of me for such reasons. Josef 'diagonal' Mengele could also have been in Auschwitz for reasons of such bad Fatima interpretations. If there are such claims on me - that "we have proofs that there is a strange sort of evil emitted from this person which nobody can understand" - that would be only a nazi intrigue for throwing a spell of claims of evil on jewish genetics - old and traditional nazism and nothing else that would be.

It is important that if a new Hitler should be coming up again, then he must not come to power by way of the achievements of my work (see the story of Gandhi, Amritsar, Albertinaplatz) while I be pushed down on the other side of the 'diagonal' of the lapis philosophorum. That is another reason why it is extremely important that my books be published. Power is the field and temptation of politics - but not all offers are considered proper from the point of view of 'the art of politics'.

The transcendent empirical facts which emerged during my work with the 'Dornenstrauch' is what I could recognize in the poems of Ouyang, and this is also the reason why the apparent unsolvable paradox which led to the formation of protestantism in Germany can be solved. Then it is important that the book not be used for making a new Hitler.