The Philosopher's Stone, Immortality, and the Mysterious Ripley Scrolls
Our mystery starts here.
I must say, when I first read the following excerpt, my interest was piqued:
Philosophers call it a stone
The which hath a great nature
To bring a stone that is so pure
So he have kindly nourishment
Perfect heat and decoction
But in the matrix when they be put
Let never the glasse be unshutFrom one of the Ripley Scrolls (modernized English)
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The Philosopher’s Stone...
Alchemy, immortality.
The excerpt above comes from the Ripley Scrolls.
The Ripley Scrolls are 16th-century scrolls covered in bizarre and beautiful imagery. The kind of illustrations that make your mind race trying to decode it.
Every part of it is a puzzle. Filled with dragons, birds, blood, and other symbolic and mysterious imagery, it’s said to contain the cryptic instructions for creating the Philosopher’s Stone.
The Philosopher’s Stone, of course, is the legendary stone, referenced across global cultures for thousands of years, from which you can derive a substance that can turn metal into silver and gold, and its transmutation powers can even take years off your life, or grant a person immortality, so they told.
The legends say that some people were eventually able to create the Stone, and some alchemists would “encode” the instructions, making it difficult to decipher, since they didn’t want the powers to get in the wrong hands or the recipe being stolen.
Here’s where it gets... really weird.
Nicholas Flamel was a bookseller in the 14th century and one of the people who was claimed to have created this Stone, by reading an ancient text, and decoding the instructions within. I believe I read that this old and exotic book was sold to him by a customer.
There is a 17th century book, attributed to him (how?), wherein he and his wife, who learned the secrets alongside him, had come upon creating the Stone (and/or substance derived from it) that have been sought for so many years.
Now get ready. Here is an excerpt I found from it:
“Still following word for word the directions of my book, about five o’clock in the evening of the twenty-fifth day of the following April I made projection of the Red stone on the same amount of Mercury, still at my own house, Peronelle and no other with me, and it was duly transmuted into the same quantity of pure gold, much better than that of the ordinary metal, softer and more pliable. I speak in all truth. I have made it three times.”
Flamel did come upon great wealth, and he and his wife became philanthropists, donating great sums to build hospitals and churches.
But the book I just mentioned was published many years after his death.
To some people, this only adds to the claims of Flamel and Peronelle gaining some kind of... immortality or extended life from the powers of the stone.
People even claimed they had spotted him and his wife while attending an opera hundreds of years after his reported death.
The Ripley Scrolls and Nicholas Flamel were both subjects studied by Isaac Newton, though modern scientists downplay his studies into alchemy and the occult.
In a quote attributed to Fritz Liber on Newton’s pursuits:
“Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”
Modern historians are still making discoveries about these pursuits which Newton kept hidden.
Keep reading, because I have two more mysterious quotes, links to where you can see the scrolls for yourself, some book recommendations for you, and a preview of next week’s email.
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Two wild quotes I found in my research
Flamel supposedly describing his studies:
Having with me, therefore, this fair book, I did nothing else day nor night but study upon it, understanding very well all the operations that it showed, but not knowing with what Matter I should begin
Flammel's Hieroglyphics
Newton predicts the end of the world in the year 2060:
And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060.
Newton’s letter
View a page of the Scrolls
Research on the Scrolls
https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/ishm/vesalius/VESx1996x02x01x039x049.pdf
https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/akitch/pdf/ripley-scrolls.pdf
Nonfiction book recommendations
The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy
Fiction book recommendations
Next week:
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn