Freemasonic Templar emblem

[Paul Ferguson]

The giveaway here is in the base triangle, where we see familiar Freemasonic symbols.

There were also, of course, attempts to 'fuse' Freemasonry and alchemy in a coherent system. This is a symbol from the Secret Freemasonry of Johann Samuel Mund, an artist and alchemical student who founded his own Masonic Order. It's from Ms. germ. fol. 51 in the Library of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. 

German and English texts of the rituals and other material will be published in the New Year. From the Introduction:

    
Mund the Alchemist.

A text in the Kloss collection with shelf-mark XIII C.18 makes it abundantly clear that, when it came to alchemy, Mund was neither a dabbler nor a charlatan. The text in question is Mund’s alchemical recipe-book (or, at least, one of them), and it shows clear evidence of wide reading and shrewd discrimination. It also suggests that Mund may have had access to a laboratory where he could put theory into practice.
But what was it that made Mund turn to alchemy, and seek to integrate it into his Masonic system?

First, Alchemy had long enjoyed a positive reception from the Lutherans. Indeed, here is the great man himself, waxing lyrical about it in § 1149 of his Table-Talk:

‘The science of alchemy I like well, and, indeed, ’tis the philosophy of the ancients. I like it not only for the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting preparing, extracting, and distilling herbs, roots; I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day. For, as in a furnace the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions, and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass; even so God, at the day of judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly.’ (from Luther’s Table-Talk, in Hazlitt’s translation – the original text is in Latin).

Luther’s shrewd appreciation of both the practical and spiritual aspects of alchemy – and an understanding that these two aims were not mutually exclusive – was to be emulated by many other authors with whose works Mund was undoubtedly familiar, and which would have laid a solid foundation for his own alchemical understanding. Though Mund may not have been an original thinker, he does seem to have been an assiduous student of alchemy who was good at assimilating the ideas of others, making them his own, and developing them into a practical system. It is a shame that he does not seem to have had the charisma to make his ideas more widely known and accepted.

A second reason for Mund’s interest in alchemy is location. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for an intelligent and spiritual man like Mund not to have been deeply aware of Frankfurt’s long and liberal tradition of alchemical publishing. Although, unusually, Frankfurt did not have a university in Mund’s time (the Goethe University of Frankfurt was only founded in 1914), it did have an excellent public library with open access. There Mund could immerse himself in a wide range of texts, and compile the notebooks with which the Kloss archive is filled. The list of alchemical writers with whom Mund seems to have been familiar is too long to quote here, but the footnotes to this volume contain an abundance of references from which Mund’s reading-patterns can be constructed.
Frankfurt in Mund’s day also had the largest Jewish population in Germany. Wealthy Jews, such as the Rothschilds, were encouraged to relocate to Frankfurt. Thanks to the edict of protection issued and enforced by the Emperor following the last pogrom against the Jews in 1616, the city seemed to have been relatively free of the anti-Semitism and strict segregation of the Jewish population characteristic of certain other parts of Germany. We have already mentioned some of the Jewish alchemical influences upon Mund. He even seems to have a reasonable command of Hebrew. Did he perhaps have alchemical contacts and mentors in the teeming Judengasse, the city’s Jewish ghetto? Only further research will reveal the answer.

Third, Mund may have had some more materialistic motivations for his interest in alchemy. He was never rich, and seems to have had only modest success as an artist. Many of the recipes in XIII C.18 deal with the Wundersalzen (miracle salts) so popular in Mund’s time, and which date back to the German-Dutch alchemist Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604-1670), who lived in Frankfurt for a time, many of whose books were written in German. Did Mund perhaps consider manufacturing some potions that might have eased his financial circumstances?
A gloomier possibility is that Mund was seeking a personal alchemical solution for health problems both mental and physical. There is both grammatical and graphological evidence that Mund was simply ‘cracking up’ during the final stages of his life. In the circumstances, the medicinal aspects of alchemy would undoubtedly have appealed to him.

Finally, the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross, founded in the 1750s by the pseudonymous Hermann Fictuld (rumoured to have been either Baron Johann Friedrich von Meinstorff or Johann Heinrich Schmidt von Sonnenberg), a genuine Masonic order in which alchemy played a prominent part, had a presence in Frankfurt, and as we have already mentioned, made overtures to Mund. The ‘graduated’ nature of alchemy, with its laborious step-by-step progress towards perfection, found an obvious echo in Freemasonry, and it was perhaps inevitable that, at sundry times and places, they would become sisters.
We appreciate that this book raises far more questions than it answers, not least about Mund’s involvement with alchemy. The present text and the riches of the Kloss archive await your inspection. We do hope that alchemical scholars will seize the opportunity to further investigate this neglected and, in many ways unique, figure in the 18th century German intellectual and spiritual landscape.


The legend at the top reads 'Pillars of Cloud and Fire, that is to say Axioms of Nature in the Metallic Realm.'