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1 SEEKING THE STONE An informal conversation about Vincent Bridges ideas on alchemy in celebration of the upcoming release of An Alchemical Enigma: A Short History of the Rise and Fall of Sir Edward Kelley An outline of those ideas can be found here:

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7 Questions: 1)What was alchemy before the First Crusade and why, in the west, did it become something different afterwards? 2)How does this connect to sacred alphabets such as Hebrew? 3)Why did he consider Enochian related to alchemy?

8 Digressions: To wherever you all want to go!

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11 From Soon after the first part of my article on the odd connections between Fulcanelli and the curious affair of Rennes-le-Chateau was published in New Dawn magazine, I received another . An astute reader wanted to know why the thread concerning a stone, possibly a piece of the Black Stone of Abraham from the Ka abba in Mecca, that could have been the literal prima material discovered and used by the Templar, dropped out of the book after the High Middle Ages. He correctly pointed out that the examples of literal alchemical transmutations in the 14th through 18th centuries suggest a dwindling and possibly unique supply of the stone of transmutation. Could the secret of its use have survived, but not how to make the Stone itself? Or could the source, the prima material, be truly unique?

12 Well, what could I say? The guy actually had me by a very sore point. Back in 1998, before Jay and I put together the first version of A Monument of the End of Time, I wrote a book length manuscript called The Gnostic Science of Alchemy. A version of Part One: From Alexandria to the Black Death can be found at my website and at other locations around the Internet, including Alchemy Journal, and it formed the basis for the first half of both Monument and Mysteries. However, I had stopped work on Part Two: From Flamel to Fulcanelli when it became apparent that the facts did indeed point, almost inescapably, to the conclusion my astute reader from down-under had spotted. The secret of how to use the Stone for the literal and physical transmutation had survived, but the secret of the nature of the Stone, its origin and its creation, seemed to have been lost.

13 If the stone was in Jerusalem the whole time, why did it take a Crusade for the Order of Zion to gain possession of it? One reason lies in the madness of al-hakim. As part of his Mahdihood, he persecuted the Christians and the Jews, burning their churches and synagogues. Even though he repented of the destruction before his death or disappearance, access to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount itself was restricted to Muslims from that time onward. Once the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, all access to the Holy Sites was restricted. And at that point, Peter, the Hermit of Mount Zion, departed for the West to start the political process that, eleven years later, would bring the order back into control of the Temple and the Dome of the Rock. Sometime between 1099 and 1104, it is possible that the Order of Zion made at least two discoveries, either together or separately, in Jerusalem. The first was perhaps a text explaining the mechanics of the physics of creation and its application to the process of transmutation. The second might well have been have been the mad caliph s piece of the Black Stone. Word of this discovery was sent back to France, where, upon receiving the information, Hugh of Champagne and his entourage, possibly including a few Hebrew scholars, departed immediately for Jerusalem.

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