Paracelsus

Source

• Born: 10 November 1493
• Birthplace: Einsiedeln, Switzerland
• Died: 24 September 1541
• Best Known As: European Renaissance physician and alchemist

Name at birth: Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim

Paracelsus is credited with developing a mineral-based chemical approach to human health problems, a radical in his day who is considered elemental in the transition from mystical traditions to modern science. He travelled all over Europe in the 16th century, serving as a surgeon and a professor of medicine, but his unorthodox views and frequent attacks on established methods kept getting him in trouble. His written works are a combination of the Renaissance ideas of the scientific method and a firmly entrenched background in alchemy and the occult.

German physician, chemist, and alchemist (1493–1541)

Paracelsus, born Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, was the son of a physician from whom he received his early training in medicine and alchemy. His assumed name stems from his claim to have surpassed the Roman physician Celsus. He traveled with his father to Villach in Austria where he worked as an apprentice in the mines and acquired much of his practical knowledge of mineralogy and metallurgy. He left the mines in 1507, attended various German universities, and may have obtained an MD from Ferrara. After practicing medicine in Sweden, Strasbourg, Basel, Nuremburg, and a host of other places, in 1540 Paracelsus settled in Salzburg where he died in the following year.

Paracelsus was the first to reject totally the authority of antiquity, suggesting its replacement by nature and experiment. To show his seriousness he burned the great medieval compilation of medical knowledge, the Canon of Avicenna, before his students. In Basel he was lucky enough to cure the infected limb of an influential publisher Frebenius, for which orthodox physicians had recommended amputation. This led to his appointment as professor of medicine and city physician at Basel.

His contempt for traditional learning and the reason the medical authorities found him so distasteful is best conveyed by his much quoted riposte to them: “Let me tell you this: every little hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and my shoe-buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.” The alternative proposed by Paracelsus contained a number of not particularly coherent strands. There was much in his work that belonged to, or at least overlapped with, the occult tradition but there was an eagerness to embrace new sources of knowledge. He would willingly learn his chemistry from the craftsmen in the mines and claimed to gain knowledge from gypsies, magicians, and elderly country folk.

His greatest influence on 16th-century science arose from his chemical philosophy in which he posed the ‘tria prima’: salt, sulfur, and mercury. These terms were meant to emphasize the principles of solidity, combustibility, and liquidity inherent in any substance. It was by following through the implications of such schemes that later chemists such as Robert Boyle were led to the corpuscular view of matter.

In medicine Paracelsus took the revolutionary step of introducing chemically prepared drugs rather than persisting exclusively with the herbal medicines or ‘simples’ of antiquity. While he was perhaps not the first to use such new remedies as mercury, sulfur, potassium, and antimony his dramatic use of them, often with supposedly verified cures, brought them sharply before the attention of the public. It is from this work that medicine begins to take on its modern aspect as being concerned with the discovery of specialized drugs providing complete and harmless cures.

The Swiss doctor and alchemist Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493-1541) is noted for opposing Galen's medical theories and for founding medical chemistry.

The real name of Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He was born in Einsiedeln. His father instructed him in Latin, botany, chemistry, and the history of religion. When Theophrastus was 9, his father was appointed town physician at Villach, and the boy attended the mining school there. For his secondary education he went to Basel. Through visits to Italy he learned of classical medical theory; after studies in the faculty of arts at the University of Vienna, he went back to Italy, receiving his doctorate in medicine from the University of Ferrara in 1515. During this Ferrara period he took the name Paracelsus.

Paracelsus resumed his study of metals briefly at Schwatz in the Tirol and then began a series of travels that lasted, almost without exception, to the end of his life. He served as an army physician in Denmark from 1518 to 1521, and the following year he joined the Venetian military forces. By 1526 Paracelsus had settled at Tübingen and gathered around him a small group of students. Later that year he was on the road again, this time to Strassburg, where he bought his citizenship and apparently intended to settle down.

During all these travels, Paracelsus was spreading the anti-Aristotelian position that the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) were composed of primary principles: a fireproducing principle (sulfur), a principle of liquidity (mercury), and a principle of solidity (salt). From a medical viewpoint, salt was thought to be a cleanser, sulfur a consuming agent, and mercury a transporter of the product of consumption. Shaping the normal healthy organism is a principle called an archeus. When an imbalance occurs among the three principles in man, there is disease, and the office of the doctor is to help the archeus by supplying the right medicines. Advocating the treatment of like by like, Paracelsus therapy is thus homeopathic in theory. During his travels he acquired a reputation as a healer; all his practical success would support his theory of the three principles.

In 1526 Paracelsus was summoned to Basel to treat a patient, and he remained on as town physician, a post that included a lectureship at the university and supervision of the apothecaries. His lectures drew large audiences, but his teaching and style were unpopular with the authorities. He openly challenged the traditional books on medicine and the teaching of medicine by textual analysis; he preferred to lecture in German rather than Latin; he refused to prescribe the medicines of the local apothecaries; and, though sympathetic with some of the ideas of the Reformation, he was a Roman Catholic. In 1528 Paracelsus had to flee to escape arrest and imprisonment.

Shortly before the flight from Basel, Paracelsus completed the most important of his earlier works, Nine Books of Archidoxus, a reference manual on secret remedies. Between 1530 and 1534 he wrote his bestknown works, the Paragranum and the Paramirum, both dealing with cosmology. He returned to medical writing with the Books of the Greater Surgery in editions of 1536 and 1537; this was his only work that was a publishing success. The Astronomia magna, done between 1537 and 1539, shows his most mature thinking about nature and man.

Paracelsus claimed that the pillars of his outlook on the world were philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue. It might be convenient to sample this outlook by emphasizing only alchemy here. For Paracelsus, alchemy was not only an earthly science but a spiritual one, requiring moral virtue on the part of the knower. At his highest, such a knower was not a theoretician but an activist; Paracelsus emphasized wisdom as practical rather than contemplative.

Paracelsus believed that to every evil there was a counteracting good and to every disease, a cure. He valued alchemy not because it might turn baser metals into gold, but because it might discover the means of restoring youth and prolonging life. He was looking for something like an elixir. Yet alchemy was not restricted to the chemist; it was at work in the whole of nature. Relating his natural philosophy to his religious beliefs, he pointed out that Christ came not as a scholar or a philosopher but as a healer. Many of Christ's miracles were healings of the sick. Most importantly, he healed the wounds of sin. Alchemy thus provided Paracelsus with a natural philosophy and a view of Christianity.

Paracelsus underscored the relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm as an argument for going to nature to understand man. According to his macrocosm-microcosm theory, "Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary objects and the stars…can also be applied to the firmament of the body." The physician is the god of the microcosm. Such was the cosmology which Paracelsus espoused.

During the post-Basel period and especially after 1531, Paracelsus appears to have undergone a spiritual conversion which prompted him to renounce material possessions. In 1534 he came as a beggar and tramp, to use his own words, to Innsbruck, Vipiteno, and Merano. The plague was raging in these cities, and he ministered to the victims. In this new spirit that animated him, Paracelsus was especially attentive to the poor and the needy. He tended to a more mystical view of man and especially of the physician. He had long stressed a so-called light of nature, which was human reason. He thought that such a light was a radiation of the Holy Spirit.

In 1540 Paracelsus arrived in Salzburg a sick man, and he died there on Sept. 24, 1541.

Further Reading

Many of Paracelsus' own writings are gathered in Jolande Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, translated by Norbert N. Guterman (2d ed. 1958). Biographies of his life and work include Anna M. Stoddart, The Life of Paracelsus (1911); John Maxson Stillman, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus (1920); John Hargrave, The Life and Soul of Paracelsus (1951); Henry M. Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic into Science (1951), and Sidney Rosen, Doctor Paracelsus (1959).

For more information on Paracelsus, visit Britannica.com.

Paracelsus, Theophrastus (Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1493-1541, Salzburg), physician, original thinker, and legendary figure, whose true name is variously given as Theophrast von Hohenheim (in Württemberg) and Th. Bombast von Hohenheim. In the latinized form the names Philippus and/or Aureolus sometimes precede the Theophrastus.

Paracelsus was the son of a Württemberg doctor who moved to Villach, Carinthia, in 1502. He studied medicine, possibly at Tübingen, and certainly at Ferrara. In 1527 he became professor of medicine at Basel, where he was in contact with Erasmus and the printer Froben. Paracelsus was the first to deliver a course of lectures at a German-speaking university in German instead of the traditional Latin, an innovation which aroused opposition among his colleagues. He was soon at odds with the medical faculty and left Basel hastily to escape prosecution. He then led a restless, wandering life, being recorded at Colmar, St Gall, Amberg, Innsbruck, Merano, Ulm, and Augsburg, as well as turning up in Moravia and Hungary. In 1541 he was offered a permanent post in Salzburg, but died there after a few months.

Paracelsus revolted against traditional medicine, based on Galen and Avicenna, and his unconventionality led to his being regarded by his numerous enemies as a quack and charlatan. His unpopularity was augmented by his flamboyant and egregious personality. He was, however, clearly a physician with a gift for healing and, in addition, with a perception that the human body possesses wonderful recuperative powers, which the physician must help. He had an instinctive awareness of biological chemistry. He perceived the human body as a ‘microcosm’ corresponding to the ‘macrocosm’ of Nature and held that remedies for all diseases could for this reason be found in Nature if the relations between ‘microcosm’ and ‘macrocosm’ were fully understood. Die große Wundarznei (1537), written, contrary to the medical practice of the age, in German, was the only one of his works published in his lifetime. His tense, complex, and obscure style corresponds to his striving to express truth.

The philosophical views of Paracelsus reveal him as a man linked both with the Middle Ages and the New Humanism. His opinions, though unorthodox, are firmly theistic; at the same time modern neo-Platonist views, derived from Pico della Mirandola and others, contributed to form his thought. A complex system of relationships enables God to be recognized in Nature, and Nature to be known in God.

The strange personality of Paracelsus, with its blend of arrogance and compassion, over-confidence and devotion, as well as his unusual and ambiguous philosophy, have attracted subsequent writers. Goethe studied him in his early years; Schnitzler devoted a verse play (Paracelsus, 1899) to him; and E. G. Kolbenheyer made him the central figure of his sizeable trilogy of novels (Paracelsus-Trilogie, 1917-26).

The first edition of his works was published as Werke, ed. J. Huser (1589-91) and reissued (11 vols.) 1968 ff. Sämtliche Werke (14 vols.), ed. K. Sudhoff, appeared in 1922-33.

(1493/4-1541) Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was born in Switzerland. He practised as an alchemist and doctor, and left pantheistic and hylozoic treatises influenced by the kabbala, and other gnostic and occult sources.

Paracelsus, Philippus Aureolus (fĭlĭp'əs ôrēō'ləs părəsĕl'səs) , 1493?–1541, Swiss physician and alchemist. His original name was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He traveled widely, acquiring knowledge of alchemy, chemistry, and metallurgy, and although his egotism and his contempt for traditional theories earned him the enmity of his learned contemporaries, he gained wide popularity among the people (he lectured and wrote in German rather than Latin) and had great influence in his own and succeeding centuries. In Salzburg, where he died, a statue was erected to him in 1752. His thought was colored by the fantastic philosophies of his time, but he firmly opposed the humoral theory of disease championed by Galen; advocated the use of specific remedies for specific diseases, introducing many chemicals (e.g., laudanum, mercury, sulfur, iron, and arsenic) into use as medicines; and noted relationships such as the hereditary pattern in syphilis and the association of cretinism with endemic goiter and of paralysis with head injuries. He wrote numerous medical and occult works containing a curious mixture of sound observation and mystical jargon. His work On Diseases of Miners was the first study devoted to an occupational disease.

Bibliography

See Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim (ed. by H. E. Sigerist, 1941); W. Pagel, Paracelsus (2d ed. 1982).

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.

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

(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.

IN BRIEF: n. - Swiss physician who introduced treatments of particular illnesses based on his observation and experience.

Quotes:

"Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster."

"The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; could we rightly comprehend the mind of man nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth."

"Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided."

"Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven."

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