Paracelsus (1493-1541)

One of the most striking and picturesque figures in the history of medicine, alchemy, and occultism, full name Auraelus Philippus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast von Hohenheim, this illustrious physician and exponent of the hermetic philosophy was renowned under the name of Paracelsus.

He was born December 26, 1493, in Einsideln, near Zürich, Switzerland. His father, the natural son of a prince, himself a physician, desired that his only son should follow the same profession. The fulfillment of that desire was directed during the early training of Paracelsus. The training fostered his imaginative rather than his practical tendencies, which first cast his mind into the alchemical mould.

He freed himself from the constraining bonds of medicine as practiced by his contemporaries, who chiefly applied bleeding, purging, and emetics, and set about evolving a new system to replace the old. In order to study the book of nature better, he traveled extensively between 1513 and 1524 and visited almost every part of the known world. During his travels he compiled the wisdom present at the time on metallurgy, chemistry, and medicine, and the folk wisdom of the untutored.

Paracelsus met the Cham of Tartary, conversed with the magicians of Egypt and Arabia, and is said to have even reached India. At length his protracted wanderings came to a close, and in 1524 he settled in Basel, then a favorite resort of scholars and physicians, where he was appointed to fill the chair of medicine at the university.

His inflated language, eccentric behavior, and the splendor of his conceptions attracted, repelled, and gained him friends and enemies. His antipathy to the Galenic school became ever more pronounced, and the crisis came when he publicly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna in a vase into which he had cast nitrate and sulphur. By such a proceeding he incurred the hatred of his more conservative brethren and cut himself off forever from the established school of medicine. He continued his triumphant career, however, until a conflict with the magistrates brought it to an abrupt close. He was forced to flee from Basel, and thereafter wandered from place to place, earning a living as best he could.

An element of mystery surrounds the manner of his death, which took place September 24, 1541. Some say that he was poisoned at the instigation of the medical faculty, others that he was thrown down a steep incline.

But interesting as were the events of his life, it is to his work that most attention is due. Not only was he the founder of the modern science of medicine, but the magnetic theory of Franz A. Mesmer, the "astral" theory of modern Spiritualism, and the philosophy of Descartes were all foreshadowed in the fantastic, yet not always illogical, teachings of Paracelsus.

He revived the "microcosmic" theory of ancient Greece, and sought to prove the human body analogous to the solar system by establishing a connection between the seven organs of the body and the seven planets. He preached the doctrines of the efficacy of willpower and the imagination (i.e., magic):

"It is possible that my spirit, without the help of my body, and through an ardent will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. It is also possible that I can bring the spirit of my adversary into an image and then fold him up or lame him at my pleasure.

"Resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations.

"Because men do not perfectly believe and imagine, the result is, that arts are uncertain when they might be wholly certain."

He was thus a forerunner of New Thought teachings. The first principle of his doctrine was the extraction of the quintessence, or philosophic mercury, from every material body. He believed that if the quintessence were drawn from each animal, plant, and mineral, the combined result would equal the universal spirit, or astral body in human beings, and that a draught of the extract would renew youth.

He came to the conclusion that "astral bodies" exercised a mutual influence on each other, and declared that he himself had communicated with the dead and with living persons at a considerable distance. He was the first to connect this influence with that of the magnet, and to use the word "magnetism" with its modern application in the occult. It was on this idea that much of Franz A. Mesmer's work was built.

While Paracelsus busied himself with such problems, however, he did not neglect the study and practice of medicine, into which both astrology and the magnet entered largely. When he was sought by a patient, his first care was to consult the planets, where the disease had its origin, and if the patient were a woman he took it for granted that the cause of her malady lay in the moon.

His anticipation of the philosophy of Descartes consisted in his theory that by bringing the various elements of the human body into harmony with the elements of nature—fire, light, earth—old age, and death might be indefinitely postponed.

His experiment in the extraction of essential spirits from the poppy resulted in the production of laudanum (a popular form of opium through the nineteenth century), which he prescribed freely in the form of "three black pills." The recipes he gives for the philosophers' stone, the elixir of life, and various universal remedies are exceedingly obscure. He was known as the first physician to use opium and mercury, and to recognize the value of sulphur.

He applied himself also to the solution of a problem that exercised the minds of scientific men in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—whether it was possible to produce life from inorganic matter. Paracelsus asserted that it was, and left on record a quaint recipe for a homunculus, or artificial man. By a peculiar treatment of certain "spagyric substances" (which he unfortunately omitted) he declared that he could produce a perfect human child in miniature.

Medical, alchemical, and philosophical speculations were scattered so profusely throughout his teaching that one concludes that here was a master-mind, a genius, who was a charlatan, by reason of training and temperament. Paracelsus displayed a curious singleness of purpose and a real desire to penetrate the mysteries of science.

He left on record the principal points of the philosophy on which he founded his researches in his Archidoxa Medicinae. It contains the leading rules of the art of healing as he practiced and preached them. He stated that he had resolved to give ten books to the Archidoxa, but had reserved the tenth in his memory. He believed it was a treasure that men were not worthy to possess and should only be given to the world when it abjured Aristotle, Avicenna, and Galen, and promised a perfect submission to Paracelsus. The world did not recant, but Paracelsus relented and at the entreaty of his disciples published his Tenth Book of the Arch-Doctrines, also known as On the Secret Mysteries of Nature.

At the beginning Paracelsus hypothesized, and then attempted to substantiate, the existence of a universal spirit infused into the veins, which forms within us a species of invisible body, of which our visible body directs and governs at its will. This universal spirit is not simple—not more simple, for instance, than the number 100, which is a collection of units. The spiritual units are scattered in plants and minerals, but principally in metals. There exists in these inferior productions of the earth a host of sub-spirits that sum themselves up in us, as the universe does in God. So the science of the philosopher has to unite them to the body, disengage them from the grosser matter that clogs and confines them, and separate the pure from the impure. To separate the pure from the impure is to seize upon the soul of the heterogeneous bodies and evolve their "predestined element," "the seminal essence of beings," and "the first being, or quintessence."

To understand this latter word "quintessence," it is necessary to postulate that every body is composed of four elements. The essence compounded of these elements forms a fifth, which is the soul of the mixed bodies, or, in other words, its "mercury." "I have shown," stated Paracelsus, "in my book Elements, that the quintessence is the same thing as mercury. There is in mercury (soul) whatever wise men seek." That is, not the mercury of modern chemists, but a philosophical "mercury" of which every body has its own. "There are as many mercuries as there are things. The mercury of a vegetable, a mineral, or an animal of the same kind, although strongly resembling each other, does not precisely resemble another mercury, and it is for this reason that vegetables, minerals, and animals of the same species are not exactly alike…."

Paracelsus sought a plant in the vegetable kingdom that was worthy of holding the same rank as gold in the metallic—a plant whose "predestined element" united in itself the virtues of nearly all the vegetable essences. Although this was not easy to distinguish, he claimed to recognize at a glance the supremacy of excellence in the melissa, and first decreed to it the pharmaceutical crown. Then:

"He took some balm-mint in flower, which he had taken care to collect before the rising of the sun. He pounded it in a mortar, reduced it to an impalpable dust, poured it into a long-necked vial which he sealed hermetically, and placed it to digest (or settle) for forty hours in a heap of horse-dung. This time expired, he opened the vial, and found there a matter which he reduced into a fluid by pressing it, separating it from its impurities by exposure to the slow heat of a bain-marie (a vessel of hot water in which other vessels are heated). The grosser parts sunk to the bottom, and he drew off the liqueur which floated on the top, filtering it through some cotton. This liqueur having been poured into a bottle he added to it the fixed salt, which he had drawn from the same plant when dried. There remained nothing more but to extract from this liqueur the first life or being of the plant. For this purpose Paracelsus mixed the liqueur with so much 'water of salt' (understand by this the mercurial element or radical humidity of the salt), put it in a matrass, exposed it for six weeks to the sun, and finally, at the expiration of this term, discovered a last residuum which was decidedly, according to him, the first life or supreme essence of the plant. But at all events, it is certain that what he found in his matrass was the genie or spirit he required; and with the surplus, if there were any, we need not concern ourselves."

Those who wished to know what this genie was like were informed that it as exactly resembled, as two drops of water, the spirit of aromatic wine known today as absinthe suisse. It was a liquid green. Unfortunately, it failed as a specific in the conditions indispensable for an elixir of immortality.

By means and manipulations as subtle and ingenious as those that he employed upon the melissa, Paracelsus learned to extract the "predestined element" of plants that ranked much higher in the vegetable aristocracy—the "first life" of the gilly-flower, the cinnamon, the myrrh, the scammony, and the celandine. All these supreme essences, which, according to the fifth book of Archidoxa, united with a mass of "magisteries" as precious as they were rude, were the base of so many specifics, equally reparative and regenerative. This depended upon the relationship that existed between the temperament of a privileged plant and the temperament of the individual who asked of it his rejuvenescence.

However brilliant were the results of his discoveries, those he obtained or those he thought he might obtain, they were for Paracelsus but the beginning of magic. To the eyes of so consummate an alchemist, vegetable life was not important; it was the mineral—the metallic life—that was significant. Paracelsus believed it was in his power to seize the first life-principle of the moon, the sun, Mars, or Saturn; that is, of silver, gold, iron, or lead. It was equally facile for him to grasp the life of the precious stones, the bitumens, the sulphurs, and even that of animals. Paracelsus set forth several methods of obtaining this great arcanum. Here is the shortest and most simple explaination as recorded by Incola Francus:

"Take some mercury, or at least the element of mercury, separating the pure from the impure, and afterwards pounding it to perfect whiteness. Then you shall sublimate it with sal-ammoniac, and this so many times as may be necessary to resolve it into a fluid. Calcine it, coagulate it, and again dissolve it, and let it strain in a pelican [a vessel used for distillation] during a philosophic month, until it thickens and assumes the form of a hard substance. Thereafter this form of stone is in-combustible, and nothing can change or alter it; the metallic bodies which it penetrates become fixed and incombustible, for this material is incombustible, and changes the imperfect metals into metal perfect. Although I have given the process in few words, the thing itself demands a long toil, and many difficult circumstances, which I have expressly omitted, not to weary the reader, who ought to be very diligent and intelligent if he wishes to arrive at the accomplishment of this great work."

Paracelsus himself described in Archidoxa his own recipe for the completion of it, and profited by the occasion to criticize his fellow-workers.

"I omit what I have said in different places on the theory of the stone; I will say only that this arcanum does not consist in the blast [ rouille ] or flowers of antimony. It must be sought in the mercury of antimony, which, when it is carried to perfection, is nothing else than the heaven of metals; for even as the heaven gives life to plants and minerals, so does the pure quintessence of antimony vitrify everything. This is why the Deluge was not able to deprive any substance of its virtue or properties, for the heaven being the life of all beings, there is nothing superior to it which can modify or destroy it.

"Take the antimony, purge it of its arsenical impurities in an iron vessel until the coagulated mercury of the antimony appears quite white, and is distinguishable by the star which appears in the superficies of the regulus, or semi-metal. But although this regulus, which is the element of mercury, has in itself a veritable hidden life, nevertheless these things are in virtue, and not actually.

"Therefore, if you wish to reduce the power to action, you must disengage the life which is concealed in it by a living fire like to itself, or with a metallic vinegar. To discover this fire many philosophers have proceeded differently, but agreeing to the foundations of the art, have arrived at the desired end. For some with great labour have drawn forth the quintessence of the thickened mercury of the regulus of antimony, and by this means have reduced to action the mercury of the antimony: others have considered that there was a uniform quintessence in the other minerals, as for example in the fixed sulphur of the vitriol, or the stone of the magnet, and having extracted the quintessence, have afterwards matured and exalted their heaven with it, and reduced it to action. Their process is good, and has had its result. Meanwhile this fire—this corporeal life— which they seek with toil, is found much more easily and in much greater perfection in the ordinary mercury, which appears through its perpetual fluidity—a proof that it possesses a very powerful fire and a celestial life similar to that which lies hidden in the regulus of the antimony. Therefore, he who would wish to exalt our metallic heaven, starred, to its greatest completeness, and to reduce into action its potential virtues, he must first extract from ordinary mercury its corporeal life, which is a celestial fire; that is to say the quintessence of quicksilver, or, in other words, the metallic vinegar, that has resulted from its dissolution in the water which originally produced it, and which is its own mother; that is to say, he must dissolve it in the arcanum of the salt I have described, and mingle it with the 'stomach of Anthion,' which is the spirit of vinegar, and in this menstruum melt and filter and consistent mercury of the antimony, strain it in the said liquor, and finally reduce it into crystals of a yellowish green, of which we have spoken in our manual."

As regards the philosophers' stone, he gave the following formula:

"Take the electric mineral not yet mature [antimony], put it in its sphere, in the fire with the iron, to remove its ordures and other superfluities, and purge it as much as you can, following the rules of chymistry, so that it may not suffer by the aforesaid impurities. Make, in a word, the regulus with the mark. This done, cause it to dissolve in the 'stomach of the ostrich' (vitriol), which springs from the earth and is fortified in its virtue by the 'sharpness of the eagle' (the metallic vinegar or essence of mercury). As soon as the essence is perfected, and when after its dissolution it has taken the colour of the herb called calendule, do not forget to reduce it into a spiritual luminous essence, which resembles amber. After this, add to it of the 'spread eagle' one half the weight of the election before its preparation, and frequently distil the 'stomach of the ostrich' into the matter, and thus the election will become much more spiritualized. When the 'stomach of the ostrich' is weakened by the labour of digestion, we must strengthen it and frequently distil it. Finally, when it has lost all its impurity, add as much tartarized quintessence as will rest upon your fingers, until it throws off its impurity and rises with it. Repeat this process until the preparation becomes white, and this will suffice; for you shall see yourself as gradually it rises in the form of the 'exalted eagle,' and with little trouble converts itself in its form (like sublimated mercury); and that is what we are seeking.

"I tell you in truth that there is no greater remedy in medicine than that which lies in this election, and that there is nothing like it in the whole world. But not to digress from my purpose, and not to leave this work imperfect, observe the manner in which you ought to operate.

"The election then being destroyed, as I have said, to arrive at the desired end (which is, to make of it a universal medicine for human as well as metallic bodies), take your election, rendered light and volatile by the method above described.

"Take of it as much as you would wish to reduce it to its perfection, and put it in a philosophical egg of glass, and seal it very tightly, that nothing of it may respire; put it into an athanor until of itself it resolves into a liquid, in such a manner that in the middle of this sea there may appear a small island, which daily diminishes, and finally, all shall be changed to a colour black as ink. This colour is the raven, or bird which flies at night without wings, and which, through the celestial dew, that rising continually falls back by a constant circulation, changes into what is called 'the head of the raven,' and afterwards resolves into 'the tail of the peacock,' then it assumes the hue of the 'tail of a peacock,' and afterwards the colour of the 'feathers of a swan;' finally acquiring an extreme redness, which marks its fiery nature, and in virtue of which it expels all kinds of impurities, and strengthens feeble members. This preparation, according to all philosophers, is made in a single vessel, over a single furnace, with an equal and continual fire, and this medicine, which is more than celestial, cures all kinds of infirmities, as well in human as metallic bodies; wherefore no one can understand or attain such an arcanum without the help of God: for its virtue is ineffable and divine."

Sources:

Hartmann, Franz. The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and of the Substance of his Teachings. London: George Redway, 1887; Retd. with: The Prophecies of Paracelsus; Occult Symbols and Magic Figures. Blauvelt, N.Y.: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1973.

The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus the Great. 2 vols. Edited by Arthur E. Waite. London: James Elliott, 1894. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1967.

Stillman, John M. Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim called Paracelsus; his Personality and Influence as Physician, Chemist and Reformer. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1920.

Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

PARACELSUS (1493/94–1541)

PARACELSUS (1493/94–1541), German physician and alchemist. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who later gave himself the name Paracelsus, spent his early years in Einsiedeln (Switzerland) and Villach (Austria) before leaving home and wandering through much of Europe while visiting several universities. He gave his attention primarily to medicine but rejected ancient authorities in favor of a conception of medicine based in alchemical experience and a Hermetic view of nature. The principles of all things, Paracelsus believed, were the tria prima of salt, sulfur, and mercury, which separated initially from a prime matter, the mysterium arcanum, and gave rise thereafter to the four elements, described as the material wombs of all the earthly, watery, airy, and fiery parts of nature.

Around 1520 Paracelsus composed the Archidoxis (the title could be translated as Ancient Teaching, or Deepest Knowledge), which focused on the extraction of the "mysteries of nature" (qualities, virtues, powers) from natural things. After brief residences in Salzburg and Strasbourg his reputation as a physician brought him, in 1527, to Basel as city physician and university lecturer. His teaching in German, as opposed to traditional Latin, and his condemnation of traditional medical authorities, led to sharp confrontations with the Basel community of physicians and prompted his flight from the city in 1528. Soon thereafter he composed two works dealing with syphilis in which he spoke out against the use of guaiacum (the wood from a West Indian shrub, a monopoly on the importation of which was held by the Fugger trading dynasty) and recommended instead a medicament made from mercury.

Paracelsus described the discipline of medicine as resting upon four pillars, namely philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and the virtue of the physician. True philosophy, he argued, began with a knowledge of the ars spagyria, the alchemical art of separation. In a work called Opus Paramirum (or Work Beyond Wonder), this concept played a central role in helping him formulate a new conception of disease. In contrast to traditional humoral pathology, Paracelsus argued that each organ of the body contained an archeus (a kind of guiding spirit or principle) which acted as an "inner alchemist" and provided for the proper functioning of the organ by separating that which was good or pure from that which was impure or unnecessary. In many cases of illness, he thought, the separating function of the archeus was disturbed. Moreover, just as everything in nature was born out of the three corporeal principles of salt, sulfur, and mercury, diseases of the body were also born into these three cosmogonic categories and represented themselves as saline (for example, outbreaks of the skin), sulfurous (inflammations or fevers), or mercurial (diseases associated with excess phlegm or fluid). Diseases were thus not consequences of general humoral imbalance, as depicted in Hippocratic and Galenic writing, but specific entities with individual etiologies and characteristics located within particular parts of the body. According to Paracelsus, specific remedies needed to match specific diseases, and physicians cured not by opposing qualities (hot to cold, or wet to dry) as in traditional therapies, but as a result of fashioning a medicine similar to the nature of the illness itself. Medicines could be prepared from anything, since the tria prima was to be found in every part of nature. The most effective medicaments, however, were prepared from minerals and metals, since these related best to the disease categories manifested as saline, sulfurous, or mercurial. In this way, like cured like. All of nature existed as a giant pharmacopoeia, and the alchemist-physician, guided by observation and experience, knew which of its parts related most closely to the various parts of the body. After selecting the appropriate material, the doctor needed to separate its purities from its impure and possibly poisonous parts. The spiritual powers thus extracted were then further ennobled and communicated as a medicine to a specific, diseased part of the body.

MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

The new therapy rested on what was actually a very old idea, namely that "the firmament is within man"; that is, there exist everywhere in nature analogies and correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Within this medical cosmology, Paracelsus believed that astral emanations impressed all earthly things and gave to them their divinely designated "signatures," the material indications showing which parts of the body (microcosm) they could serve best as medicaments. Comprising the being of every person, he thought, was the mortal life of the physical body, the immortal life that corresponded to the soul, and a life derived from the heavens and which corresponded to an "astral body" or "sidereal spirit"—the essential middle link between mind and matter. While not everything in nature possessed a divine soul, all things—plants, animals, minerals, and metals—did possess an astral body, which originated in the stars and which specified for all things their form and function. It was this spirit, or, as Paracelsus refers to it, this astra, that penetrated matter, giving life to all growing things, including minerals and metals. He regarded it as "the secret forger" from which proceeded every form and figure, and the source of the motions and directed actions that accounted for the vitality of the body. Because of the fall of Adam, impurities were mixed in with the astra, and these could sometimes also produce certain kinds of illness.

Since the human being was a condensation of the forces, elements, and creative principles of the entire universe, Paracelsus thought that an understanding of how the healthy universe of the body worked had to begin with an understanding of how the greater world functioned. The keys to doing this were to be found in philosophy and astronomy. Philosophy, however, was not the study of Aristotle, but the comprehension through experience of how the forces, virtues, and powers hidden in natural things operated to produce specific effects. Knowledge of astronomy was similarly based in experience of the world, being an understanding of how the powers and celestial virtues linked to the stars and planets affected the functioning of the human body.

Paracelsus's handbook of surgery, the Grosse Wundartzney, appeared at Augsburg in 1536. His Astronomia Magna, a summary of philosophical, anthropological, and cosmological opinions, was never finished, and other tracts representing his views in theology in addition to medicine and natural philosophy remained unpublished at the time of his death.

See also Alchemy ; Astrology ; Astronomy ; Hermeticism ; Medicine .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Paracelsus. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Karl Sudhoff and Wilhelm Matthiessen, 1922–1933; rept. Hildesheim, 1996.

——. Sämtliche Werke: Zweite Abteilung: Theologische und Religionsphilosophische Scriften. Edited by Kurt Goldammer. Wiesbaden, 1955.

Secondary Sources

Goldammer, Kurt. Paracelsus: Natur und Offenbarung. Hannover-Kirchrode, 1953.

Grell, Ole Peter, ed. Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas, and Their Transformation. Leiden, 1998.

Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus. Basel, 1958.

Bruce T. Moran

PARACELSUS
(1493–1541)

Paracelsus was the pseudonym of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus (Baumastus) von Hohenheim, the reformer of medicine and pharmacology, chemist, philosopher, iconoclast, and writer. If he himself assumed this name, it could signify "higher than high," or "higher than Hohenheim," a jibe at his illegitimate paternal grandfather. Born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, where his father practiced medicine, Paracelsus later lived at Villach in Carinthia (Austria), a center of mining, smelting, and alchemy—metal lores that were to occupy him for the rest of his life. From the age of fifteen his life was migratory. After medical studies at various German and Austrian universities, he seems to have completed his doctorate in 1515 at Ferrara under a faculty that was Scotist, Platonist, and humanist.

For the next eleven years, Paracelsus traveled throughout Europe, jeopardizing his authority as a physician by practicing surgery (then a craft, not a learned profession) in the army of Charles V and by experimental prescriptions. He visited spas, analyzed the waters, treated by hypnosis, and sometimes alleviated pain with laudanum. At Salzburg he narrowly escaped execution for participating in a peasants' revolt. When, in 1526, he settled at Strasbourg to establish himself in medical practice, he was famous as an object of superstitious distrust. But his spectacular cure of the printer Johann Froben quickly led to friendships with such men as Desiderius Erasmus and Oecolampadius and an appointment—against the will of the faculty—as medical lecturer at the University of Basel.

His eminence was short-lived. Lectures in German (rather than Latin), rejection of the canonical theory of Avicenna and Galen, denunciation of the apothecaries, and a public burning of the works of Avicenna were topped by the death of Froben. Those whose vested interests had been threatened tricked Paracelsus into behavior that could justify dismissal and arrest.

From 1528 until his death, his life was once again nomadic. Unkept promises and unstable patronage led him to Colmar, Nuremberg, Saint Gall, Villach, Vienna, and finally to Salzburg, where he died, probably of cancer, perhaps of metal poisoning.

Among his medical innovations were chemical urinalysis; a biochemical theory of digestion; chemical therapy; antisepsis of wounds; the use of laudanum, ether (without awareness of its anesthetic properties), and mercury for syphilis; and the combining of the apothecary's and surgeon's arts in the profession of medicine.

Paracelsus's numerous books are mostly variants on the theme of man (the microcosm) in relation to nature (the macrocosm). The most important are Archidoxis (c. 1524); the treatises on syphilis (c. 1529); Opus Paragranum (c. 1529); Opus Paramirum (c. 1530); Philosophia Sagax (c. 1536); and Labyrinthus Medicorum (1538).

Paracelsian philosophy was both traditional and new. Its medieval elements are traceable to alchemy and Kabbalism, which are branches of a trunk rooted in Hellenistic Neoplatonism, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Gnosticism. These occult lores shared the concept of creation through corruption; the axiom "That which is above is one with that which is below"; belief in a bisexual, homogeneous, hylozoic universe; a cyclic theory of time; and an animism approximating pantheism.

A mystery religion of life rather than merely of gold, medieval alchemy employed Semitic and Greco-Roman mythology as a screen against the unenlightened and as a vehicle of private communication for adepts. Although Paracelsus counted himself an adept, he abandoned the tradition of reserve and discarded most of the mythological symbolism. Unlike his predecessors, he wrote to clarify. He explained that alchemy's real desideratum was the secret of life.

Like Kabbalists and alchemists, Paracelsus believed in the theory that decay is the beginning of all birth. Nature emerges through separations: First, prime matter separates out of ultimate matter (also called Yliaster or Mysterium Magnum ), which is eternal and paradoxically immaterial. "The first was with God … that is ultima materia ; this ultima materia He made into prime matter … that is a seed and the seed is the element of water [fluid]." God spins ultimate matter out of himself. This yields, by separation, the prime matter of individual objects, a watery matrix, perpetually spawning nature, perpetually resolvable back into ultimate matter. Human creativeness in art, alchemy, or pharmacology repeats the primal act. The human demiurge, like God, separates rather than combines.

The Paracelsian theory of time resembles that of Plotinus. Time is qualitative change: growth, transition—even fate. Given the basic concept of cyclic generation and decay, Paracelsian time would be for the material cosmos a cycle of becoming. But there are two orders of time: force time (within) and growing time (without). Like the Paracelsian concept of "prime matter" in relation to "ultimate matter," this theory of time is essentially dualist.

"Above" and "below" are substantially the same: "Heaven is man and man is heaven, and all men together are the one heaven," but microcosm and macrocosm are contained by membranes or partitions.

Paracelsus rejected the concept of humors as governed by planets and substituted a chemical theory of humors as properties: salt, sweet, bitter, and sour. He retained the medieval alchemistic variant of the four elements and a quintessence, the fifth element, that is life. He tended to treat fire as less elementary than the combustible principle, sulfur. Medieval alchemy had stressed the sexual polarity of two elements, fire (identified with the male principle) and water (identified with the female principle), and contrasted flame with flow and sulfur with mercury. Paracelsus reinterpreted these as principles rather than as elements and added a third principle, salt. These are properties or states—combustible, fluid or vaporous, and solid; each confers on matter its structure, corporality, and function. As constituents of ultimate matter, these are absolutes; as components of nature, they are infinitely variable in all sensuously discernible properties. Every natural object has its own sulfur, salt, and mercury, as well as its own quintessence.

Absolute life comes from Ens Seminis, the cosmic protoplasm. Ens Astrale is to the microcosm (man) as the firmament is to the macrocosm (nature). It can sustain or poison from within, as a toxic atmosphere can poison sea water and fish. Ens Veneni is the poison from without. Nature lives by dying; life eats life. Man may eat the flesh of an animal whose food would poison him, but within every living body there is an alchemist that selects what is food for that body. Ens Naturale is the bodily harmony of the chemical humors. Ens Spirituale has its equivalent in what psychiatry calls the psyche. Against the common belief of his day, Paracelsus argued that madness was not demonic possession and that evil dreams were not intercourse with incubi or succubi. Mind produces diseases both in itself and its own body or in another mind or body through hypnosis, fetishism, or demonstrable ill will. Most diseases are positive evils, but there is Ens Dei, God's will, which no doctor can circumvent.

Although accused by Erasmus of dualist heresy because of the importance he gave primal matter and because he described illness as intrinsically evil, Paracelsus died in the Church of Rome, and his burial place became a shrine.

See also Avicenna; Erasmus, Desiderius; Galen; Gnosticism; Kabbalah; Macrocosm and Microcosm; Neoplatonism; Pantheism; Plotinus; Time.

Bibliography

works by paracelsus

Opera Omnia. 12 vols, edited by John Huser. Basel, 1589–1591. The original German text.

Opera Omnia. 3 vols, edited by F. Bitiskius. Geneva, 1658. In Latin.

Sämtliche Werke. 15 vols, edited by Karl Sudhoff and E. Matthiessen. Munich, 1922–1933. In German; the standard critical edition.

Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, edited by Henry Sigerist, C. Lilian Temkin, George Rosen, and Gregory Zilboorg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941.

Selected Writings, edited by Jolande Jacobi; translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Pantheon, 1951 and 1958. Contains an introduction by the editor. Excellent.

works on paracelsus

Browning, Robert. Paracelsus. London, 1835.

Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Debus, Allen G. The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Science History Publications, 1977.

Debus, Allen G. "The Paracelsian Compromise in Elizabethan England." Ambix 8 (June 1960): 71–97.

Donne, John. Ignatius His Conclave. London, 1613.

Koyre, Alexandre. "Paracelsus (1493–1541)." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 24 (1) (2003): 169–208.

Pachter, Henry M. Magic into Science. New York: Schuman, 1951. Represents Paracelsus as a proto-Faust; readable.

Pagel, Walter. "Paracelsus and the Neoplatonic and Gnostic Tradition." Ambix 8 (October 1960): 125–166.

Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus. An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. New York: Karger, 1958. Excellent.

Pagel, Walter. "The Prime Matter of Paracelsus." Ambix 9 (October 1961):, 117–135.

Stillman, John Maxson. Paracelsus. London: Open Court, 1920. Emphasis on science.

Stoddart, Anna M. The Life of Paracelsus. London: Murray, 1911. Browning's interpretation.

Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Linda Van Norden (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)

PARACELSUS

PARACELSUS (1493?–1541) was a German alchemist, mystic, and physician. Philippus Aureolos Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was one of the most bizarre characters in the history of science. Commonly known as Paracelsus because in his own estimation he was greater than the great Greek physician Celsus, he was a paranoid, uncouth, abusive, and usually drunken genius, whose reputation varied widely. While his supporters dubbed him the "Luther of science," his detractors denounced him as a heretic and condemned him as the disreputable black magician who provided the model for Faust. His considerable writings offer a strange blend of medicine, religion, philosophy, cosmology, alchemy, magic, and astrology, a synthesis of natural and mystical philosophy typical of other writers before the scientific revolution separated science from religious and philosophical speculation.

Neither modest in presenting his opinions nor restrained in his language, Paracelsus launched an acrimonious attack on the medical and scientific establishment of his day. He rejected the prevailing Galenic theory that attributed disease to an imbalance of the four humors and replaced it with his own dynamic theory of diseases as specific entities attacking specific organs.

Paracelsus was an idealist and a visionary who considered chemistry the key to the universe. In his view, God was the divine alchemist who created the world by calcinating, congealing, distilling, and sublimating the elements of chaos. The alchemist had only to read the reactions in his laboratory on a grand scale to fathom the mysteries of creation. By turning alchemy away from gold-making, Paracelsus and his followers transformed it into a universal science of matter concerned with every aspect of material change.

Paracelsus's thought was shaped by both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Although he rejected the aesthetics and classicism of Renaissance humanists, he shared their anthropocentric and individualistic outlook. As Walter Pagel (1958, p. 36) has pointed out, there was a decentralizing tendency throughout Paracelsus's work. An enormous variety of noncorporeal forces (vital spirits, demons, subhumans, superhumans) work below the surface of the Paracelsian universe. Paracelsus drew his vitalist and pantheist ideas from the occult philosophies and sciences revived by Renaissance scholars—Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Qabbalah, magic, alchemy, and astrology. The analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm characteristic of these philosophies shaped Paracelsus's theory of knowledge. He rejected scholastic rationalism in favor of a kind of psychological empiricism. Because humans are the microcosm they contain within themselves all the elements of the greater world, or macrocosm. Knowledge therefore consists in an intuitive act of recognition, in which the knower and the known become one.

Because Paracelsus's theory of knowledge approximates Luther's doctrine of the "inner light," the two men have been compared. Each attacked established ideologies and institutions, wrote in the vernacular, and was a master of scurrilous invective. Both enjoyed theatrics: Luther burned the papal bull excommunicating him; Paracelsus burned the works of Galen and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The comparison between the two men is, however, superficial. Luther preached the bondage of the human will, while Paracelsus was an ardent advocate of free will; Luther made grace the prerequisite of salvation, while Paracelsus emphasized charitable acts; Luther sided with sovereigns, while Paracelsus's sympathies remained with the people. Although Paracelsus was in contact with many reformers, sharing their criticism of church abuses, he eventually became disillusioned and charged that the reformers were as autocratic as their Catholic counterparts. Paracelsus's religious ideas were more compatible with nondogmatic reformers such as Hans Denck (1495?–1527) and Sebastian Franck (1499?–1542?).

Religion and philosophy provided the sources for both the progressive and the obscurantist aspect of Paracelsus's thought. His repudiation of reason led him to embrace empiricism; it also made much of his writing incomprehensible. On the basis of his vitalist philosophy, he rejected mechanical explanations of biological processes in favor of an organic, holistic approach that allowed for psychological factors. The same vitalism taken to extremes, however, resulted in proliferation of the number of active, independent forces to the point that classification became impossible and causality meaningless.

With his penchant for oracular and aphoristic statements, Paracelsus was more a prophet than a scientist. His most vociferous critic, Thomas Lüber (Thomas Erastus), denounced him as a gnostic heretic. Paracelsus did believe he was divinely inspired. In this sense, he was the "spiritual man" or "knowing one" who had achieved gnōsis.

See Also

Occultism; Rosicrucians.

Bibliography

The critical standard edition of Paracelsus's Sämtliche Werke, 15 vols., edited by Karl Sudoff and Wilhelm Mattiessen (Munich, 1922–1933), includes copious annotations and bibliographic references. Walter Pagel's Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York, 1958) has an excellent bibliography and provides a thorough discussion of Paracelsus's sources. In his The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York, 1977), Allen G. Debus discusses Paracelsus's legacy and influence on later scientists. English translations of selected treatises can be found in Arthur Edward Waite's The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, called Paracelsus the Great, 2 vols. (1894; reprint, New Hyde Park, N. Y., 1967); Henry Sigerist's Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim (Baltimore, 1941); and Jolande Jacobi's Paracelsus: Selected Writings (New York, 1951).

Allison Coudert (1987)

Paracelsus

1493-1541

Alchemist and physician

Sources

Early Years. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, later known by the simpler cognomen Paracelsus, was born in the Swiss village of Einsiedeln, where his father practiced medicine. Paracelsus’s mother died while he was still a child, and the family moved to Villach, a mining town in Austria, where he grew up observing his father treat the particular diseases that afflicted miners. Paracelsus also absorbed the chemistry and lore surrounding mining and metallurgy. He was schooled by local clerics, from whom he received a wide-ranging exposure to both orthodox and mystical religion and philosophy, which were feeding the discussions and social unrest in the early sixteenth century that gave rise to the Reformation. It is no wonder, then, that Paracelsus’s extensive writing, popular preaching, and teaching as an adult revealed a syncretistic combination of chemical theory, medicine, and heterodox religious ideas, which he gave vague philosophical expression in terms of medieval mysticism and Renaissance Platonism.

Medical Approach. Paracelsus claimed to be a doctor of both medicine and surgery, and historians have speculated that he may have attended the University of Vienna and perhaps received the M.D. from the University of Ferrara, where Copernicus completed his graduate study a decade earlier. His writings show a familiarity with concepts found in academic natural philosophy and medicine, but his poor knowledge of Latin, cloudy explanations of theory, and open hostility to the chief tenets of Galenic medicine and Aristotelian philosophy suggest that his knowledge was gleaned from a variety of oral and vernacular written sources and not through the contemporary university medical curriculum. His rejection of any medical use for human anatomy, for example, is not without precedent, inasmuch as medieval Islamic physicians regarded knowledge of anatomy gained from dead bodies to be of little use in healing the living, beyond what might help a surgeon to mend a bone or remove an arrow. Even in Galen’s day, there were physicians identified as Empiricists, who denied the therapeutic value of anatomical knowledge and elaborate theories. Members of this medical sect taught that healing was a matter of careful observation of the patient, who should be treated according to the physician’s experience with like cases. However, Paracelsus probably was neither an Empiricist nor an Arabist, given his deprecation of Islamic and pagan Greek medicine (except that of Hippocrates) and his readiness to apply magical lore and alchemical theory to describe the hidden workings of the body and its diseases. More likely, he rejected traditional medical theory as part of a Reformation-era antirationalism, combined with a commitment to alchemical theory, Neoplatonist ideas about the relationship between the learned magus and the divinity present in nature, and the German mystics’ view of the divinity of the inner man.

Unpopular Stance. Paracelsus was violently opposed to the prevailing medical doctrine that health and disease were governed by the state or temperament of the four cardinal qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), which were determined by the patient’s particular mixture of the four basic fluids (blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile). This concept was central to the diagnostic and therapeutic parts of Galen’s medicine, and by rejecting it Paracelsus was denying the validity of university medical education. Paracelsus’s utter disdain for traditional medicine is symbolized in the story that while employed as a town physician in Basel, Switzerland, in 1527, he threw a copy of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, an expensive book that had been one of the mainstays of medieval medical education, onto the St. John’s Eve bonfire. Not surprisingly, he was not popular with professional physicians and apothecaries (druggists), whose livelihood depended on their knowledge of Galenic medicine, not to mention the professors themselves, who viewed Paracelsus as a crackpot and a serious threat to health care and medical education.

Inner Alchemical Agents. Instead of the four basic fluids and qualities, Paracelsus regarded all physiological processes as chemical in nature, whether occurring in the body of the greater world (the macrocosm) or in the human body (the microcosm). He described human digestion, excretion, and metabolism as a series of chemical “digestions” or separations that were governed by a kind of innate intelligence. He likened these processes of separating pure nutrients from impurities to the operations of a metallurgist or alchemist, who separated the pure metal or chemical from the dross or dregs. He imagined these processes to be distributed around the body, governed by inner alchemical agents that he called archei (singular archeus). When operating properly, the archei that were present at various places, most obviously the stomach, perfectly separated pure nutrients from the dregs and excreted the latter. However, when affected by an external influence, caused by a stronger chemical archeus or perhaps a malign ray from a planet or star, the inner alchemist could malfunction and permit a buildup of toxic salts in the body. Inflammations, for example, were regarded as caused by inflamed sulfurous or nitrosulfurous salts.

Divine Calling. In keeping with his alchemical view of physiology, Paracelsus recommended drugs on the basis of their chemical properties, which could combat bad inner chemistry, expel toxic excrements, and help the body’s natural tendency to restore health. Like Hippocrates, whom he admired, Paracelsus viewed the physician as nature’s assistant or minister and demanded that the physician be morally upright. Unlike the Greeks, though, he saw the physician as having a particularly divine calling, since Christ himself was the prototype healer, able to cure the incurable and even raise the dead to life.

Life of Wandering. Paracelsus’s career was troubled. Owing to his medical iconoclasm, which offended the medical establishment, and his irregular religious preachings, which offended both Catholic and Lutheran religious authorities, he was seldom resident in any one town for long before being chased out, sometimes fleeing in great haste and leaving unfinished treatises behind him, to be puzzled over and reconstructed a generation later by his followers. His reputation for successfully treating diseases that academically trained physicians deemed incurable led to his being repeatedly summoned to heal aristocrats and other prominent people, such as the humanist printer and friend of Erasmus, Frobenius. However, the forces of medical and theological order gave him little respite to work or publish before making him resume his life of wandering. Few of his treatises were printed during his lifetime, which came to an end in Salzburg in 1541, where he died without fanfare.

Lasting Impact. Paracelsus’s reputation both as a healer and as an author of an alternative medical system grew rapidly after the publication of his main medical ideas during the 1560s. In the last quarter of the century, a new generation of medical students began to embrace these ideas, giving them a more rigorous theoretical explanation and incorporating them into an eclectic medical practice. Petrus Severinus, for example, composed an influential biological philosophy that explained human physiology, generation, and pathology according to Paracelsian principles, which he showed to be compatible with ancient ideas of Hippocrates, Pliny, and other authors. After publishing this book, Idea medicina philosophica (An Ideal for Philosophical Medicine, 1571), Severinus was appointed royal physician to the king of Denmark and took part in the intellectual circle around the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe—who was also a Paracelsian alchemist. Severinus’s career typifies the reception of Paracelsian ideas in the late sixteenth century: many students were fascinated by Paracelsus’s ideas, but the universities generally opposed them. As a result, Paracelsus’s followers often relied on the patronage of kings, queens, and other nobility, who were open to alternative philosophies and treatments.

Sources

Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 volumes (New York: Science History Publications, 1977).

Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel, Switzerland & New York: S. Karger, 1958).

Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).