Lapis Philosophorum

The philosopher’s stone is the declared goal of the alchemical opus. In the Hermetic tradition it is the lapis aethereus, the “hermaphroditic rebis,” the “stone of invisibility” (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944). It is born from the coniunctio of King and Queen through the sequence of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, and in the rosarium-philosophorum it appears as the Rebis, a crowned hermaphrodite standing on the round chaos.

Jung identifies the lapis with the psychological Self: “the stone for the alchemists was nothing less than a primordial religious experience which, as good Christians, they had to reconcile with their beliefs. This accounts for that ambiguous identity or parallelism between Christ as the filius microcosmi and the lapis philosophorum as the filius macrocosmi” (Alchemical Studies, Jung 1967). The lapis is thus the Anthropos imaged in stone — the transpersonal ground of the personality, “spherical and bisexual,” standing “for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious” (von Franz 1975, citing Jung).

The medieval alchemist Petrus Bonus wrote of the stone: “This secret stone is a gift of God. There could be no alchemy without this stone. It is the heart and tincture of the gold” (quoted in von Franz 1975).

Hillman resists the purely telic reading. For him the stone “brings facticity, objectivity. It stands there emblematic of the final freedom from subjectivity… hard, simple, one, compact, defined, unambiguous.” Its psychological virtue is not that it completes the opus but that it resists interpretation: “the stone does not allow itself to be held in meaning. It does not yield to understanding. Its capacity to resist mental penetration is the primary wound to human hybris” (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 2010). The two readings — Jung’s as arrival at the Self, Hillman’s as the psyche’s refusal to be reduced to intelligibility — mark the internal tension of the post-Jungian tradition.

Relationships

• coniunctio
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• self
• individuation

Primary sources

• jung-psychology-and-alchemy (Jung 1944)
• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)
• von-franz-cg-jung-his (von Franz 1975)
• hillman-alchemical-psychology (Hillman 2010)