Lucerne dragon stone
The Lucerne Dragon Stone is a former healing stone of unknown origin in the Lucerne Nature Museum .
history
According to tradition, in the summer of 1420 near Rothenburg ( Canton Lucerne ) a farmer named Stämpfli saw a fiery kite that flew to the Pilatus massif and dropped something. This turned out to be a ball surrounded by clotted blood. This ball was soon used as a healing stone against numerous diseases. The surgeon Martin Schriber acquired the property from a descendant of Stämpfli and in 1523 had the mayor and council of the city of Lucerne confirmed the miraculous power in a document. After the end of the day, after Schriber's death in 1527, it came into the possession of aDorothea Moser and in 1564 the town clerk Johannes Kraft , then the mayor Ludwig Schurf , then in the possession of the Cloos family and from there it went to the Fleckenstein family and finally to the Meier von Schauenstein family. In 1921, the canton of Lucerne acquired the stone from them. Since then it has been in state ownership and is shown in the Lucerne Nature Museum.
Finding of the stone in a representation from 1661
Attempts at explanation and description
Due to the history of its origin, it has long been assumed that the stone is either a meteorite itself or contains one. In 1862 MA Feierabend mentions a meteorite that fell in Calabria in 1813 , which was also apparently surrounded by coagulated blood, but which turned out to be trade wind dust . This is conceivable as an explanation for the blood of the dragon stone, but no longer verifiable, since nothing of this "dragon's blood" has been preserved. He also assumed that the object had only received its final shape and color through the surgeon Schriber. Previously, the stone was probably pale yellow. This has the shape and size of a medium apple and is completely like a barber's soap ball . The painting was done artlessly with a thick, elastic brush. There are two black-brown poles , a pale yellow ring-shaped central zone and seven crescent-shaped brown, transverse figures representing a comma symbol, which form a chain all around […].
After the change of ownership from Martin Schriber to Dorothea Moser, the belief in miraculous power quickly disappeared, but the object was still considered a valuable curiosity. He was not allowed to chemically examine the stone, he said, but the structure of the surface and the specific gravity did not indicate a meteorite, but a structure of burnt clay . This assumption was confirmed in 2006 by a computer tomography at the EMPA in Dübendorf . According to this, the dragon stone is a massive painted ball made of a single material (presumably clay) and does not contain any foreign bodies. The origin of the stone and the cause of the dragon legend remain unclear.
reception
The musical Der Drachenstein was premiered in 2002 in the Culture and Congress Center Lucerne . In 2007 a new recording followed at Le Théâtre Kriens-Luzern . In it, a young woman undertakes a fantastic journey to the origins of the dragon stone on Pilatus.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Lucerne Nature Museum: The Lucerne Dragon Stone , accessed on November 18, 2017
- ↑ a b ETH - e-periodica.ch: The Lucerne Dragon Stone. Natural history treatise by MA Feierabend , accessed on November 18, 2017
- ↑ presseportal.ch: Musical "Der Drachenstein": The return of a successful piece , press release from February 23, 2007, accessed on November 18, 2017
