The Lucerne dragon stone: a pledge, a charter and a CT scan

In 1523 the Schultheiss, Lucerne’s chief magistrate, and the city council sealed a charter saying that a stone owned by the surgeon Martin Schryber had cured plague sores, bloody flux and other illnesses, and that the stone had come from a dragon.¹⁶ Benedict Hotz, who reported the stone’s CT scan in 2007, writes that it then served as a remedy for nearly 200 years.⁷ It now sits in the earth sciences display of the Natur-Museum Luzern. A scan in early summer 2006 showed a ball of fired clay with a painted band round the middle.⁸⁹¹⁰

The charter and the story the museum tells today do not match. The museum has a farmer, Stämpfli, haymaking near Rothenburg when a dragon flew over from the Rigi towards Pilatus in 1421.²¹¹ The oldest deed about the stone that we could read, a court judgment of 1509 printed in 1661, has no such scene. Rudj Stempflin is in court as a debtor who cannot redeem the stone he pawned, and the dragon belongs to his grandfather.¹²³

A judgment about a pledge

The oldest deed is a judgment by the bailiff of Rothenburg, given on the Monday after St Martin’s Day 1509.¹² In Cysat’s print the bailiff is Peter zu Käß; Feierabend calls him Peter Zuckäs.¹² Martin Schryber, surgeon and citizen of Lucerne, tells his court that Rudj Stempflin of Rothenburg pledged him a stone for a sum of money, and that the time for redeeming it ran out long ago.¹²

Stempflin does not argue. It is true, he says; he should have redeemed the stone long ago, and he never had the means and still has not.¹² The bailiff rules that Schryber and his heirs keep it as their own property.¹² Hotz writes that a descendant of the farmer sold the stone to Schryber in 1509.¹⁴ The deed has no sale in it. The stone was pawned, the pledge lapsed, and a court awarded it. Feierabend, who had the parchment deeds in front of him in 1862, tells the same sequence.¹²

Before the ruling Stempflin explains why the stone mattered, and this is the first place the dragon appears in the paper record.³

The grandfather was cutting hay when a dragon shot through the air close beside him, from the Rigi to Fräckmont.¹¹ Fräckmont is Pilatus; Cysat says so in his own text.¹¹ The man lost his senses, and when he got up he found blood that the dragon had spattered, set like jelly, with the stone lying in it.¹³ Feierabend and the museum both put Stämpfli himself under the dragon.¹¹ In the deed he is a man handing on what he heard from his forebears.³

The deed gives no year. Feierabend dates the sighting to “a sultry summer day in 1420”, and the geologist K. von Fritsch, writing in 1864, also says 1420.² Hotz gives summer 1421 at midday, following Renward Cysat (1545-1614), who wrote the story down towards the end of the 16th century; the museum’s blog says a hot August day in 1421.² We have not seen Renward Cysat’s manuscript. The charter of 1523 is vaguer: the stone was found long ago and kept in secret for about eighty years or more.¹⁶

Witnesses under oath, 1523

Fourteen years after the judgment Schryber, by now court clerk as well as surgeon, appeared before the Schultheiss and council and asked them to take testimony on the stone in the city’s customary way.¹ The charter, which repeats what Schryber told them, calls it a stone that came from a great dragon, found long ago in the city’s territory and kept in secret while princes, emperors, kings and the Venetians tried to buy it.¹¹⁶¹⁷

The council did not stop at Schryber’s word. It sent its sworn judge, several councillors and the sworn clerk to swear witnesses on the saints and ask what they knew of the stone.⁶ The witnesses are named. Jacob Franckhuser, of the council, says that in a plague year the sickness took him by the neck below the right ear, that he gave up on his life, and that Schryber came, stroked the sore with the stone and bound it on; the stone drew the sore out and he was well in a short time.⁶ Moritz von Mettenweil, also a councillor, had a bloody flux no doctor could stop. Schryber tied the stone into his right hand with a cloth, and after about two hours the flow ended.⁶ Heinz von Cham says the stone was bound to his baby, about a year old, for one night, and the child recovered at once.⁶

Feierabend sums the charter up as a long list of miracle cures, mostly in plague and dysentery patients.⁶ It ends on the council’s seal.

Our reading: the council certified what sworn witnesses said about cures. It did not examine a dragon. After Schryber’s death the stone was auctioned in 1527 to Dorothea Moser; later owners were the city clerk Johannes Kraft (1564), Ludwig Schürf, and the Cloos, Fleckenstein and Meier von Schauensee families.¹⁸ How long it kept its reputation is disputed. Feierabend writes that it seems to have lost its shine soon after 1527, Hotz that it counted as a remedy for nearly 200 years, and Cysat that it had been tried on many people over about 60 years by 1661.¹⁹⁷²⁰

Three printed accounts, 1661 to 1723

Johann Leopold Cysat wrote his book on the Lake of Lucerne in 1645 and it was printed in Lucerne in 1661.¹¹ In a short chapter on the stone he promises “two authentic instruments” kept with it, and prints both.¹¹

He gives no year and no name. The stone, he writes, is large, almost perfectly round, white, black and blood-coloured, “oddly divided”, and weighs nine ounces.²⁰ Against plague you stroke the sore with it and bind it on for 24 hours, or tie it into the right hand with a cloth.²⁰ He says it had been proved on many people in Lucerne over about 60 years.²⁰

Athanasius Kircher took the story into his Mundus subterraneus in 1664, naming Cysat as his source. He has the dragon go from Mount Pilatus to the opposite mountain, where Cysat has it fly from the Rigi to Pilatus.²¹¹¹

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, the Zurich naturalist, saw the stone on his journey of 1706 and wrote it up in 1723. It was then with the Cloos family.²² He ranks it above the curiosities of every museum, since it has no equal in the cabinets of kings, princes or private men, and he prints the first charter in Latin.²²²³ He also takes up the question of fraud.

Such a man, Scheuchzer argues, had no means of painting a jasper globe and passing it off, and no way of getting a stone with no equal in Europe.²⁴ He gives the cures less credit: marble and jasper are not to be trusted for virtues like these, he writes, “except perhaps against haemorrhage”.²⁴ Hotz lists Scheuchzer with the Lucerne physician Moritz Anton Kappeler as the first to doubt that the ball formed in a dragon’s body, and to take it for a worked flint.²⁵ On the pages of Scheuchzer we read, he defends the finder’s honesty and doubts only the cures.

Kappeler, who printed his name as Cappeller, answered the poor-farmer argument in his Latin history of Mount Pilatus in 1767. He retells the 1509 deed from Renward Cysat’s papers and the 1661 print, grandfather included, and then declines to accuse anyone, at some length.²⁶

The sentence ends by noting that Lucerne would have had far more generous buyers if there had been no suspicion of fraud at all.²⁷ Kappeler also thought he saw a painter’s brush strokes in the pattern.²⁸

Feierabend weighs it, Fritsch measures it

In 1862 M. A. Feierabend gave the Lucerne natural history society’s talk for the visiting Swiss society. He calls the stone “a fallen greatness” of the city, one the red Swiss guidebooks of his day no longer mention.²⁹ He handled it. A knife does not scratch it; it weighs 18 Loth; under a lens the surface is netlike, rough and shiny; a chemical analysis was refused.³⁰ His verdict, 144 years before the CT scan, was that texture and density both argue against an ordinary meteorite.³⁰⁹

He guessed further that Schryber was the one who gave the stone its final form.

Nothing we read supports the guess. The 1509 deed says Schryber’s pledge had lapsed “years and days” before, so he had the stone in his hands for some time by then, and that is all it says.¹² Feierabend’s own dragon was weather: a glowing electric cloud over Stämpfli’s head, like the one reported over Hauptmannsdorf in 1847, and the blood trade-wind dust like the red dust seen in Calabria in 1813.³¹ The Calabrian dust was collected and kept. “Das hat leider unser Stämpfli mit dem vermeintlichen Drachenblute nicht gethan”, he writes: unfortunately our Stämpfli did not do that with the supposed dragon’s blood.³¹ He adds that for centuries the local saying had been “es ist ein feuriger Drack oder eine feurige Kugel gefahren”, a fiery dragon or fiery ball has gone by.³²

Two years later K. von Fritsch, who examined the stone at the house of Hauptmann Meyer von Schauensee, measured a specific gravity of 2.23, which he thought too low; found no iron and no effect on a magnetic needle; and judged it not meteoric but stoneware-like fired clay, quartzite or jasper-like felsite.³³ He doubted that a meteorite fell at all in 1420, since lightning could have frightened the farmer, and passed on Kappeler’s hint that fraud may have crept into the telling and into Schryber’s acquisition of the stone.³⁴ Hotz says the verdict ended further research for almost 100 years.³³ Ernst Chladni, whom Hotz calls the founder of the meteorite theory still held today, had taken the stone for a small stone meteorite (1819, in Hotz’s account); Feierabend has him call it a meteorite rounded and painted by art.³⁵

Weighed, then scanned

In November 1954 the stone went on loan to the Pharmacy History Museum in Basel, which had it examined at the University of Basel.³⁶ Its specific gravity came to 2.26 g/cm3, too light for sandstone or quartzite. O. Grütter took it for a hand-formed clay ball but could not rule out a hollow or clay core, since the stone could not be damaged.³⁶ In 1986 a seminar paper at the University of Zurich found no link with known meteorites and no magnetic field, and read it as a silica concretion.³⁷

Two more ideas came before the scan. Schumacher (1998) suspected a meteorite later given a baked clay coat, and Beda Hofmann and Edwin Gnos of Bern, who study meteorites, took the description of 1421 at face value as a possible fall.³⁸ In early summer 2006 the stone went through the industrial CT scanner at EMPA in Dübendorf, together with meteorites from Oman.⁹

The sections show a homogeneous, fine-grained mass with voids from under a millimetre to a few millimetres, about 2.5% of the volume by Hotz’s estimate, and nothing foreign in the core.³⁹¹⁰ Hotz compares its density and pore volume with fired clay sherds of the 14th century measured by Schifer in 2003 and finds them close; he reads the voids as air trapped when the ball was shaped.³⁹ His summary says the scan clearly refuted the meteorite hypothesis. His conclusion leaves one door open.

The museum asks the same question.⁴⁰ Hotz, like the museum, has Stempfflin himself under the dragon; the 1509 deed puts the sighting a generation earlier.³

Where the story leaves the papers

Radioactivity in the light band

The radioactivity in the last row is weak. Barmettler measured 5 to 11 microroentgen per hour on the stone, which Hotz says is at most about the natural external radiation of the Lucerne region. All the weak zones lie in the light middle band, framed by the wavy brown lines painted on it.⁵ Hotz explains the radioactivity by potassium, uranium and thorium in the clay. What he cannot explain is the painting.⁵

The museum says the same: it is unexplained why the zones of raised radioactivity lie in the light middle band.⁵ The Luzerner Zeitung adds two more gaps, that nobody knows when the clay ball was made, or what the brown arcs are painted with.⁴ Hotz counts six of those arcs and Feierabend seven crescents.⁴¹