§ =38.= =Raymond Lully=, the son of a noble Spanish family, was born at Palma (in Majorca) about 1235. He was a man of somewhat eccentric character--in his youth a man of pleasure; in his maturity, a mystic and ascetic. His career was of a roving and adventurous character. We are told that, in his younger days, although married, he became violently infatuated with a lady of the name of Ambrosia de Castello, who vainly tried to dissuade him from his profane passion. Her efforts proving futile, she requested Lully to call upon her, and in the presence of her husband, bared to his sight her breast, which was almost eaten away by a cancer. This sight--so the story goes--brought about Lully’s conversion. He became actuated by the idea of converting to Christianity the heathen in Africa, and engaged the services of an Arabian whereby he might learn the language. The man, however, discovering his master’s object, attempted to assassinate him, and Lully narrowly escaped with his life. But his enthusiasm for missionary work never abated--his central idea was the reasonableness and demonstrability of Christian doctrine--and unhappily he was, at last, stoned to death by the inhabitants of Bugiah (in Algeria) in 1315.[52] [52] See _Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers_ (1815), pp. 17 _et seq._ A very large number of alchemistic, theological and other treatises are attributed to Lully, many of which are undoubtedly spurious; and it is a difficult question to decide exactly which are genuine. He is supposed to have derived a knowledge of Alchemy from Roger Bacon and Arnold de Villanova. It appears more probable, however, either that Lully the alchemist was a personage distinct from the Lully whose life we have sketched above, or that the alchemistic writings attributed to him are forgeries of a similar nature to the works of pseudo-Geber (§ 32). Of these alchemical writings we may here mention the _Clavicula_. This he says is the key to all his other books on Alchemy, in which books the whole Art is fully declared, though so obscurely as not to be understandable without its aid. In this work an alleged method for what may be called the multiplication of the “noble” metals rather than transmutation is described in clear language; but it should be noticed that the stone employed is itself a compound either of silver or gold. According to Lully, the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone is the extraction of the mercury of silver or gold. He writes: “Metals cannot be transmuted . . . in the Minerals, unless they be reduced into their first Matter. . . . Therefore I counsel you, O my Friends, that you do not work but about _Sol_ and _Luna_, reducing them into the first Matter, our _Sulphur_ and _Argent vive_: therefore, Son, you are to use this venerable Matter; and I swear unto you and promise, that unless you take the _Argent vive_ of these two, you go to the Practick as blind men without eyes or sense. . . .”[53]