Paracelsus

Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim — Wandering Physician, Spagyric Master, Father of Iatrochemistry

Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln in the Swiss Confederation and dying in 1541 at Salzburg, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim — who took for himself the bold Latin name Paracelsus, "beyond Celsus" — stands among the great hinge-figures of the Western esoteric tradition. Son of a physician-alchemist, schooled (by tradition) under the Abbot Johannes Trithemius — the same master who taught Cornelius Agrippa — and trained in the mining schools of the Fugger family at Schwaz and Hutenberg, he wandered as a physician through Germany, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Constantinople, Egypt, and the Holy Land, gathering medicine and lore from peasants, midwives, surgeons, sorcerers, and saints alike.

In 1527 he held briefly the chair of medicine at the University of Basel, where he scandalized the faculty by lecturing in German rather than Latin, by inviting barbers and surgeons into his lecture hall, and — most famously — by burning the works of Galen and Avicenna in the St. John's Day bonfire. Driven from Basel within a year, he returned to wandering, and at his death left behind a vast corpus: Opus Paramirum, Liber Paragranum, Astronomia Magna, Archidoxis, De Natura Rerum, Philosophia ad Athenienses, A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and the alchemical Aurora Thesaurusque Philosophorum attributed to his hand.

He gave the West the doctrine of the Tria Prima — Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt — as the three principles underlying every body. He gave us spagyria, the art of solve et coagula applied to plants and minerals to extract their healing virtues. He gave us iatrochemistry, the marriage of alchemy and medicine that severed Western healing from the humoral systems of antiquity and prepared the ground for modern pharmacy. He gave us the doctrine that the dose makes the poison, and the doctrine of the Archaeus — the inner alchemist who labors within every living body to separate nourishment from waste. And above all he gave us the conviction that all true knowledge descends from God, that the Magus is no sorcerer but the wise one in whom divine wisdom acts, and that man is a microcosm — a complete heaven and earth in miniature — through whom the whole of creation may be known.

His shadow falls across all that followed: upon Heinrich Khunrath and the Rosicrucian manifestos, upon Jacob Boehme and the Christian Theosophers, upon Robert Fludd and the English Hermeticists, upon Goethe's Faust, upon Carl Jung's psychology of alchemy, and upon the whole modern recovery of Western esoteric Christianity.

The Sidereal Man and the Light of the Spirit

Paracelsus held that man is composed of three bodies — the elemental body of earth, the sidereal or astral body of the stars, and the immortal spirit which receives wisdom directly from God. Through this triple constitution flows the whole influence of the cosmos, just as rain penetrates the soil.

Physical man takes his nutriment from the earth; the sidereal man receives the states of his feelings and thoughts from the stars; but the spirit has his wisdom from God. The heat of a fire passes through an iron stove, and likewise the astral influences, with all their qualities, pass through man. They penetrate him as rain penetrates the soil, and as the soil is made fruitful by the rain, likewise man's soul is made fruitful by them; but the principle of the supreme wisdom of the universe penetrates into the centre, illuminates it, and rules over all. — Paracelsus

The light of the stars knows the things of nature; the light of the spirit knows the things of God.

There is a light in the spirit of man illuminating everything, and by which he may even perceive supernatural things. Those who seek in the light of external Nature know the things of Nature; those who seek knowledge in the light of man know the things above Nature, which belong to the kingdom of God. — Paracelsus

The Microcosm

The keystone of Paracelsian philosophy is the doctrine of the microcosm: man as a perfect epitome of the universe, containing within himself the whole of creation.

The world and man are one. They are one constellation, one influence, one breath, one harmony, one time, one metal, one fruit. — Paracelsus

Nature being the Universe, is one, and its origin can only be one eternal Unity. It is an organism in which all natural things harmonise and sympathise with each other. It is the Macrocosm. Everything is the product of one universal creative effort; the Macrocosm and man (the Microcosm) are one. They are one constellation, one influence, one breath, one harmony, one time, one metal, one fruit. — Paracelsus, Philosophia ad Athenienses

Manly P. Hall, surveying the whole arc of the Western esoteric tradition, named this revelation as Paracelsus's central gift to the world.

Paracelsus revolutionized the medical world by asserting that man is a microcosm, a miniature replica of the entire universe, and that the secrets of healing are hidden within the chemical and spiritual laws of nature. — Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)

Nothing has been created that does not have a mystery that contains something great. — Paracelsus

The Tria Prima is the alchemical signature of this doctrine: every body in the cosmos and every body of man composed of the same three principles — Sulphur (the soul), Mercury (the spirit), and Salt (the body).

Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. Every body consists of three ingredients. The names of these are Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt. We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself. In every human being there is a special heaven, whole and unbroken. — Paracelsus

The Three Worlds

For Paracelsus the cosmos is built in three storeys, and man — the microcosm — corresponds to each in turn. The Elemental World is the body of earth, water, air, and fire, the realm of mineral, plant, and animal. The Sidereal World is the heaven of the stars, the realm of the astrum — of imagination, dream, longing, and thought. The Divine World is the realm of the spirit, of the Liecht der Natur and the Liecht der Gnade, of God Himself. To each world man has a body: the elemental body of flesh, the sidereal body of soul, and the immortal spirit. Health, wisdom, and salvation are the right ordering of these three; sickness, ignorance, and damnation their disorder.

This triple anatomy is the hidden architecture beneath the Tria Prima and beneath all of his medicine: every illness, every cure, every art belongs to one of the three worlds, and the Magus is the one who knows in which world to act.

The Yliaster and the Mysterium Magnum

Beneath all things Paracelsus saw a primordial chaos he named the Yliaster — the first matter, the seed-stuff out of which God called forth the differentiated creation. From the Yliaster arises the Mysterium Magnum, the "great mystery": the unmanifest fullness from which all forms separate, like fruits from a single tree. From the Mysterium Magnum proceed the Tria Prima; from the Tria Prima the four elements; from the elements every body in heaven and earth.

This vision flowed directly into Jacob Boehme's Mysterium Magnum and Aurora, and from Boehme into the whole Christian-theosophic stream — Gichtel, Pordage, William Law, Schelling, Berdyaev. To name the Yliaster and the Mysterium Magnum is to name the matrix of Western mystical metaphysics.

The Limbus

If the Yliaster is the prima materia of the cosmos, the Limbus is the prima materia of man. From the limbus magnus — a "great extract" gathered from every star, every element, every creature — God formed the body of Adam. Every human body is therefore a microcosmic recapitulation of the whole creation, kneaded together from the dust of the heavens as well as the dust of the earth.

The doctrine of the Limbus is the bridge between Paracelsian medicine and Genesis: Adam as the anthropos compounded of the whole world, and his children as bearers of that same compound. To heal a man is to act not only upon him but upon the whole creation in him.

The Will, the Wisdom, the Highest

For Paracelsus, all art and all wisdom descend from God. The will of man is not his own possession but a faculty entrusted to him; what is called natural in man is in truth a vessel through which the supernatural may act.

All arts originate in divine wisdom, and no man ever invented anything through his own power. Man cannot accomplish even the most trifling thing without the power of the Will; but the will of man is not his product and does not belong to him; it belongs to God, and has merely been lent to man; he is permitted to use it, and he abuses it on account of his ignorance. All things come from God, the good as well as the evil ones; but while the former are His direct products, and in harmony with the Law, the latter are, so to say, His grandchildren which have become degenerated; for evil is good perverted. Those who put their trust in God – that is to say, in the power of Goodness, Wisdom, Justice, and Truth – will surely succeed; but those who, while they pretend to serve God, serve merely themselves, are the children of evil, and will perish with it. Natural man has no wisdom, but the wisdom of God may act through him as an instrument. God is greater than Nature, for Nature is His product; and the beginning of wisdom in man is therefore the beginning of his supernatural power. The kind of knowledge that man ought to possess is not derived from the earth, nor does it come from the stars; but it is derived from the Highest; and therefore the man who possesses the Highest may rule over the things of the earth, and over the stars. — Paracelsus (1493–1541)

This is the theological core of Paracelsian Christian occultism: a hierarchy of light in which God is the source, the spirit of man is the receiver, and the elemental and sidereal natures are the channels through which divine wisdom descends into the body and into the work of the hands.

Christ the Cosmic Physician

At the heart of Paracelsus's Christian occultism stands a single figure: Christ the medicus animae, the Physician of the Soul, in whom the alchemical Work and the work of salvation become one. As the alchemist purifies, exalts, and resurrects the dead matter into a glorified body, so Christ purifies, exalts, and resurrects the dead soul into a glorified spirit. The Magnum Opus and the Mystery of the Cross are two readings of the same descent and ascent.

For Paracelsus, every physician is a servant of the One Physician; every medicine, rightly given, is a participation in the healing work of Christ; and every alchemical sublimation is a figure of the Resurrection. This is the deepest seam of his thought, and the seam through which the Royal Art opens to the Way of Christ.

Anabaptist Sympathies and the Reform of Faith

Paracelsus lived through the storm of the Reformation, and his sympathies lay neither with Rome nor with Wittenberg but with the radical wing — the Anabaptists, the Schwärmer, the inward and ecstatic Christians who sought a Church of the Spirit beyond the Church of the institution. He preached in German to peasants and miners, attacked the corruption of the clergy, defended the poor against princes and bishops, and wrote tracts (most circulated only in manuscript) on the Kirche der Geist, the Church of the Spirit.

He was no theologian by trade, but his theology runs through every page of his medicine: the priesthood of the spirit, the inwardness of grace, the immediacy of God to the soul of the simple believer. When the Inquisition came for the Anabaptists, his manuscripts were quietly destroyed by his own friends to keep him out of the fire.

The Foundations of the Philosophy

In Das Buch Paragranum, Paracelsus laid down the rule that any genuine philosophy must take the microcosm as its foundation: the philosopher must be able to read in the body of man whatever is written in the heavens, and in the heavens whatever is written in the body of man.

If a man will be a philosopher without going astray, he must lay the foundations of his philosophy by making heaven and earth a microcosm, and not be wrong by a hair's breadth. Therefore he who will lay the foundations of medicine must also guard against the slightest error, and must make from the microcosm the revolution of heaven and earth, so that the philosopher does not find anything in heaven and earth which he does not also find in man, and the physician does not find anything in man which heaven and earth do not have. And these two differ only in outward form, and yet the form on both sides is understood as pertaining to one thing. — Paracelsus, Das Buch Paragranum

The Reputation of the Master

His name traveled into the next centuries with the weight of legend. Casanova, recording his audience with the Marquise d'Urfé in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, found her enraptured by the Paracelsian art and treating his name as the very emblem of the Magnum Opus.

Madame d'Urfé, beautiful though old, received me very nobly, with all the ease of the old court from the time of the Regency. [...] Mme d'Urfé affected only curiosity, but I saw clearly that she was eager to display her knowledge. [...] After dinner, La Tour d'Auvergne left us [...], and then Madame began to speak to me about chemistry, alchemy, magic, and everything that made up the substance of her madness. When we came to the subject of the Magnum Opus, and I had the simplicity to ask her whether she knew the prima materia, she did not burst out laughing, for that would have been impolite, but with a gracious smile she told me that she already possessed what is called the Philosopher's Stone, and that she was well-versed in all the great operations. [...] Her favorite author was Paracelsus who, according to her, had been neither man nor woman, and who had had the misfortune of poisoning himself with too strong a dose of the universal medicine. She showed me a small manuscript in which the great process was explained in French in very clear terms. — Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, II, p. 86–87

The Archaeus

Within every living body Paracelsus saw an Archaeus — an inner alchemist, a presiding spirit of the body's own digestion and growth. The Archaeus presides over the stomach as a "philosopher" who separates the nourishment from the poison in every mouthful; it presides over each organ as the operator of an inner laboratory; and when it errs or fails, disease takes root.

The Archaeus is the bridge between the Tria Prima and the living anatomy: it is the operator within who applies solve et coagula to the food, drink, and air that enter the body. To heal is to assist the Archaeus; to overburden it is to fall ill. This doctrine, more than any other, founded the Western tradition of vitalism that ran through Van Helmont, Stahl, the Romantic physicians, and into homeopathy and naturopathy in our own time.

The Five Entia

Paracelsus rejected the humoral theory of disease that had ruled Western medicine since Galen. In its place he set the doctrine of the Five Entia — five distinct sources from which any illness may arise:

• Ens Astrale — disease descending from the stars and the air; pestilence, plague, and the great seasonal scourges.
• Ens Veneni — disease arising from poison, from food, drink, and the corruptions of the gut.
• Ens Naturale — disease arising from the constitution itself, from inherited weakness or imbalance of the Tria Prima in the body.
• Ens Spirituale — disease arising from the spirit: from passion, despair, hatred, the disordered will. Centuries before psychosomatic medicine had a name.
• Ens Dei — disease sent by God for the soul's purification, the trial that no physician can heal but only honor.

The physician's first duty, said Paracelsus, is to discern which ens is at work — for the cure of one is the worsening of another, and the same illness may have entirely different causes in two different patients.

The Doctrine of Signatures

Every plant, mineral, and creature, Paracelsus taught, bears upon its outer form the signatura of its inner virtue — a visible mark by which God has written for the physician what the thing is good for. The walnut, shaped like a brain, strengthens the brain; the eyebright flower, marked like an eye, heals the eye; the heart-shaped leaves of motherwort comfort the heart; the yellow of celandine speaks of jaundice; the iron-red of hematite of blood.

The world, in this vision, is a book — the Buch der Natur — written in the hand of God for the eyes of the wise. The physician is its reader. The Doctrine of Signatures would pass through Boehme's Signatura Rerum, through Nicholas Culpeper's herbal, through the entire stream of European folk medicine, and into the symbolic-correspondence thinking that underlies every esoteric system since.

The Mumia and Sympathetic Healing

In the warmth of every living body Paracelsus discerned a vital balm which he called the Mumia — the spirit-substance of life that lingers in flesh, blood, and bone even after death. This Mumia is the medium of sympathetic action: a medicine applied to a lock of hair, a fingernail, or a drop of blood may act upon the body from which they came; and the famous unguentum armarium, the weapon salve, applied not to the wound but to the blade that made it, was held by Paracelsus and his school to draw the wound shut by sympathy alone.

Such doctrines were derided in their day by the schoolmen and embraced in ours by the depth psychologies that recognize action at a distance through symbolic linkage. The Mumia is one of Paracelsus's most haunting bequests: the assertion that life, once kindled, leaves a sympathetic trace in everything it has touched.

The Aurum Potabile and the Panacea

The crowning aim of Paracelsian iatrochemistry was the search for the Aurum Potabile — drinkable gold — and beyond it for the Panacea, the single universal medicine that heals every illness because it heals the Tria Prima itself. The alchemist who could prepare gold not for the purse but for the cup, dissolved into a tincture the body could receive without injury, would have in his hand a medicine equal to the body's own quintessence.

Whether or not he ever attained it, Paracelsus left to the West both the conviction that such a medicine was possible and the methods of its pursuit. The whole subsequent literature of the elixir, the grand arcanum, and the philosopher's stone-as-medicine descends from his work.

The Birth of Occupational Medicine

Among the Fugger mines at Schwaz and Hutenberg, Paracelsus had watched the miners die — coughing, wasting, blackened by what he called the Bergsucht, "the mountain-sickness". In Von der Bergsucht und anderen Bergkrankheiten (c. 1533–34) he set down the first systematic treatment of work-related disease in Western literature: silicosis, mercury poisoning, the corrosive lung-fevers of smelters. He named the diseases, traced their causes to the dusts and vapors of the mine, prescribed treatments, and called for their prevention.

It was the first book of occupational medicine — the recognition that men suffer not only from the stars and from their constitutions but from the work that is given them to do. From this small book grew the modern care of workers' health.

The Generation of Natural Things, and the Homunculus

Few of Paracelsus's writings have provoked as much wonder as De Natura Rerum, in which he describes the homunculus — a living being generated by alchemical art alone, drawn forth from the Tria Prima under the proper conditions, an arcanum so great that it deserves to be kept hidden until the last days. For Paracelsus, plants, animals, men, and metals are all generated from specific seeds or principles — the Tria Prima of Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt — under the appropriate conditions; and the homunculus stands as the supreme demonstration that art, rightly applied to the principles of nature, can bring forth life itself.

The life of things is none other than a spiritual essence, an invisible and impalpable thing, a spirit and a spiritual thing. — Paracelsus, Concerning the Life of Natural Things

This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and begins to display intelligence. Now, this is one of the greatest secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and marvel of God, an arcanum above all arcana, and deserves to be kept secret until the last times, when there shall be nothing hidden, but all things shall be made manifest. And although up to this time it has not been known to men, it was, nevertheless, known to the wood-sprites and nymphs and giants long ago, because they themselves were sprung from this source;... As by Art they acquire their life, by Art acquire their body, flesh, bones and blood, and are born by Art, therefore Art is incorporated in them and born with them, and there is no need for them to learn, but others are compelled to learn from them, since they are sprung from Art and live by it, as a rose or a flower in a garden, and are called the children of the wood-sprites and the nymphs, because in their virtue they are not like men, but like spirits. Here, too, it would be necessary to speak about the generation of metals… Know, then, that all the seven metals are born from a threefold matter, namely, Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt… — Paracelsus, De Natura Rerum, Book I, Concerning the Generation of Natural Things

The Four Elemental Hosts

In A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits, Paracelsus laid out the taxonomy of elemental beings that has informed Western esotericism ever since: real creatures, intermediate between men and pure spirits, woven into a fully Christian cosmology rather than dismissed as devils.

• Nymphs / Undines — beings of water
• Sylphs — beings of air
• Pygmies / Gnomes — beings of earth
• Salamanders — beings of fire

He insisted upon their reality, upon their kinship with man, and upon their place within God's creation — a cosmology that would later flow through the Rosicrucians, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, and the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.

The Firmament Within

The astrum — the inner firmament of man — is for Paracelsus no mere reflection of the outer heavens. It is an independent and powerful whole, a sphere of mind whose government belongs to the spirit alone.

As the sky with its stars and constellations is nothing separate from the All but includes the All, so is the 'firmament' of Man not separate from Man; and as the Universal Mind is not ruled by any external being, likewise the firmament in Man (his individual sphere of mind) is not subject to the rule of any creature, but is an independent and powerful whole. — Paracelsus

The Imagination

Paracelsus taught that the imagination is the creative faculty of the soul, the very organ by which the magus participates in divine making. To imagine fully is to become.

Man is a thinker. He is that what he thinks. When he thinks fire he is fire. When he thinks war, he will create war. Everything depends if his entire imagination will be an entire sun, that is, that he will imagine himself completely that what he wants. — Paracelsus (source unknown)

The imagination is sun-like in its power... it can bring forth fruits from the earth, or it can wither them. — Paracelsus, Von den Ursachen der Bergkrankheit (c. 1535)

Magic, the Quintessence, and the Magus

Paracelsus rescued the word magic from the slander of the schoolmen and restored it to its older meaning: not sorcery, but the supreme wisdom by which the wise man, living from the Spirit of Wisdom, becomes master over heaven and earth.

The wisdom which man ought to have does not come from the earth, nor from the astral spirit, but from the fifth essence — the Spirit of Wisdom. Therefore man is superior to the stars and the constellation, provided he lives in the power of that superior wisdom. Such a person, being the master over heaven and earth, by means of his freewill, is called a Magus, and therefore Magic is not sorcery, but supreme wisdom. — Paracelsus

The Magi knew that all creatures might be brought to a single substance, and that this substance — purified, exalted, and raised through every kingdom — becomes the divine Quintessence containing the essence of all heaven and earth.

The Magi in their wisdom asserted that all creatures might be brought to one unified substance, which substance they affirm may, by purifications and purgations, attain to so high a degree of subtlety, such divine nature and occult property, as to work wonderful results. For they considered that by returning to the earth, and by a supreme magical separation, a certain perfect substance would come forth, which is at length, by many industrious and prolonged preparations, exalted and raised up above the range of vegetable substances into mineral, above mineral into metallic, and above perfect metallic substances into a perpetual and divine Quintessence, including in itself the essence of all celestial and terrestrial creatures. — Paracelsus

One Thing (compared to the forces of our body) is an indestructible essence, drying up all the superfluities of our bodies, and has been philosophically called by the above-mentioned name. It is neither hot and dry like fire, nor cold and moist like water, nor warm and moist like air, nor dry and cold like earth. But it is a skilful, perfect equation of all the Elements, a right commingling of natural forces, a most particular union of spiritual virtues, an indissoluble uniting of body and soul. It is the purest and noblest substance of an indestructible body, which cannot be destroyed nor harmed by the Elements, and is produced by Art. — Paracelsus

The Astronomia Magna

The Astronomia Magna oder die ganze Philosophia sagax der grossen und kleinen Welt (1537–38) is Paracelsus's encyclopedic synthesis of the magical arts — the single best map of his whole worldview. In its pages he sets out the liechter or "lights" by which man may know:

• the light of nature (lumen naturae) — the wisdom of the elements
• the light of the stars — astrology and the influences of heaven
• the light of the spirit — theology and the immediate knowledge of God
• the gabalia — his Christian Cabala, the wisdom of the Word
• magia naturalis — natural magic, the supreme wisdom
• necromantia — the science of the departed and the spirits
• the artes incertae — geomancy, hydromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, physiognomy

Each light has its proper sphere; each is a legitimate path of knowing when followed in the fear of God; each is dangerous when divorced from Him. The Astronomia Magna is the Paracelsian summa — the work to which Boehme, Khunrath, Fludd, and the Rosicrucians all returned.

Talismans, Sigils, and the Magic of the Word

Paracelsus taught and practiced the making of talismans and sigils — small images of metal, stamped with planetary characters under the proper hour, charged with the signatura of a star or a name, and worn upon the body for healing or for protection. He gave careful instructions in the Archidoxis Magica: the iron of Mars under the hour of Mars for courage, the silver of the Moon for fertility, the gold of the Sun for the strengthening of the heart.

Beneath such practices lies his deeper doctrine of the Word — the Verbum by which God created and by which the Magus, joined to that creating Word, may act. To pronounce a name with full faith and full attention is to participate in the divine speech that brought the world into being. This is the inner key to every Paracelsian operation, talismanic or alchemical: the Word, spoken in purity, moves the matter.

Azoth — the Universal Solvent

Azoth — the alchemists' name for the universal solvent, the secret mercury, the alpha-and-omega of the Work — runs through Paracelsus's writings as one of his most beloved terms. The very name encodes the alpha and omega of three sacred alphabets: the A of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at one end; the Z (zēta), the Th (theta), and the Th (tau / taw) at the other. Azoth is the mercurial spirit that begins and ends every operation, the dissolvent that prepares every coagulation, the living water that washes the dead body and raises it.

It is Azoth, cleansing the black stone. — from the Libavian commentary on the Paracelsian art

For Paracelsus, Azoth is the operative name of the Spiritus Mundi itself — the breath of God moving over the waters at the beginning, present in every alchemical vessel, present in every breath of the practitioner.

On Witches and Madness

In an age that burned witches and chained the mad, Paracelsus stood almost alone in proposing natural and compassionate explanations. In the Liber de Lunaticis and in his treatises on epilepsy and St. Vitus' dance, he distinguished the insani from the vesani and the melancholici, naming the inner causes of madness in the disordered astrum, in the wounded spirit, in the imbalances of the Tria Prima of the body. He treated the mad as patients, not as devils.

So too with witches: where the schoolmen saw pacts with Satan, Paracelsus saw — most often — the disordered imagination acting upon a body weakened by ignorance, hunger, or grief. Where genuine maleficium was at work, he counselled spiritual healing, never the fire. This compassion, born of his Anabaptist humanism and his medical naturalism together, set him centuries ahead of his age.

Within the Royal Art Opus

Paracelsus stands as one of the great patrons of the Royal Art. His Tria Prima — Sulphur, Mercury, Salt — is the threefold scaffold upon which any practical alchemy of body, soul, and spirit may be built. His doctrine of the microcosm anchors the Work within the operator's own being: there is nothing in the heavens or the earth that the philosopher may not also find in himself, and nothing in himself that he may not also find in the great world. His Magus — the wise one through whom the Spirit of Wisdom acts — is the model of the practitioner of the Opus, neither sorcerer nor scholar but vessel of the Highest. His doctrine of the Imagination as sun-like is the inner key to every theurgic and alchemical operation: that through ordered imagining, the soul participates in the creative act. And his vision of the Quintessence — that single substance hidden within all things, drawn forth by purification and exaltation — is the very Stone the Opus seeks.

To the Way of Christ within the Royal Art, Paracelsus brings the indispensable insistence that all wisdom is the gift of God, that the will is lent and not owned, that prayer and humility precede every operation, and that the true arcanum is not gold but the medicine of soul and body alike.

Prayer from The Book Concerning the Tincture of the Philosophers by Paracelsus

O unfathomable abyss of God's Wisdom, which thus hath united and comprised in the virtue and power of this One Spirit the qualities of all existing bodies! O unspeakable honour and boundless joy granted to mortal man! For the destructible things of Nature are restored by virtue of the said Spirit. O mystery of mysteries, most secret of all secret things, and healing and medicine of all things! Thou last discovery in earthly natures, last best gift to Patriarchs and Sages, greatly desired by the whole world! Oh, what a wondrous and laudable spirit is purity, in which stand all joy, riches, fruitfulness of life, and art of all arts, a power which to its initiates grants all material joys! O desirable knowledge, lovely above all things beneath the circle of the Moon, by which Nature is strengthened, and heart and limbs are renewed, blooming youth is preserved, old age driven away, weakness destroyed, beauty in its perfection preserved, and abundance ensured in all things pleasing to men! O thou spiritual substance, lovely above all things! O thou wondrous power, strengthening all the world! O thou invincible virtue, highest of all that is, although despised by the ignorant, yet held by the wise in great praise, honour, and glory, that – proceeding from humours – wakest the dead, expellest diseases, restorest the voice of the dying! O thou treasure of treasures, mystery of mysteries, called by Avicenna "an unspeakable substance", the purest and most perfect soul of the world, than which there is nothing more costly under Heaven, unfathomable in nature and power, wonderful in virtue and works, having no equal among creatures, possessing the virtues of all bodies under Heaven! For from it flow the water of life, the oil and honey of eternal healing, and thus hath it nourished them with honey and water from the rock. Therefore, saith Morienus: "He who hath it, the same also hath all things". Blessed art Thou, Lord God of our Fathers, in that Thou hast given the prophets this knowledge and understanding, that they have hidden these things (lest they should be discovered by the blind, and those drowned in worldly godlessness) by which the wise and the pious have praised Thee!

The Death and Legend

Paracelsus died in Salzburg on the 24th of September, 1541, at the age of forty-seven, in the Drei Mohren inn, where he had been lodged by the prince-archbishop. The cause was never settled. His friends spoke of a fall down a staircase; his enemies of a stroke; rumor — which Casanova still repeated two centuries later — of a fatal dose of his own universal medicine; and a darker tradition, of poisoning at the hands of rival physicians who would not abide his triumph.

He was buried in the cemetery of the church of St. Sebastian in Salzburg, where his remains were later exhumed and his skull found to bear a great fissure (whether from the alleged staircase or the alleged rivals, no one could say). His tomb still stands; his epitaph reads, in part:

Conditur hic Philippus Theophrastus, insignis Medicinae Doctor, qui dira illa vulnera, lepram, podagram, hydropisim aliaque insanabilia corporis contagia mirifica arte sustulit. (Here is laid Philippus Theophrastus, distinguished Doctor of Medicine, who by wonderful art healed those grievous wounds — leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other incurable contagions of the body.)

Within a generation his books were being printed across Europe, his methods adopted in court pharmacies, his name spoken with the awe due to a master of the Magnum Opus. The legend has not faded since.

The School of Paracelsus

The four centuries since his death have produced what is fairly called a Schola Paracelsica — a continuous lineage of physicians, alchemists, and mystics who have drawn upon his work:

• Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605) — author of the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, who wedded Paracelsian alchemy to Christian Cabala and wrote one of the most beautiful esoteric Christian art-books of the late Renaissance.
• Oswald Croll (c. 1563–1609) — physician to Rudolf II at Prague, whose Basilica Chymica codified the Paracelsian pharmacopoeia.
• Michael Maier (1568–1622) — court physician and Rosicrucian apologist, whose Atalanta Fugiens is among the most exquisite of Paracelsian-Hermetic emblem books.
• Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) — the Görlitz shoemaker-mystic whose Mysterium Magnum, Aurora, and Signatura Rerum are unimaginable without Paracelsus, and through whom the Paracelsian metaphysic becomes Christian theosophy.
• Robert Fludd (1574–1637) — the English Hermeticist whose Utriusque Cosmi Historia built a great two-volume cosmological synthesis upon Paracelsian foundations.
• The Rosicrucian Manifestos (1614–1617) — Fama, Confessio, Chymical Wedding — saturated in Paracelsian themes; the legendary Brother R.C. is half a fictional Paracelsus.
• Johann Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644) — heir to the Archaeus doctrine, founder of pneumatic chemistry.
• The Christian Theosophers — Gichtel, Pordage, Jane Leade, William Law — who carried the Paracelsian-Boehmian stream into the eighteenth century.
• Goethe (1749–1832) — whose Faust is at every level a Paracelsian drama, and whose own scientific work continued the search for the Urpflanze and the Urphänomen.
• Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) — founder of Anthroposophy, who rebuilt a complete Paracelsian medicine and pharmacy (the Weleda preparations) for the twentieth century.
• Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) — whose Paracelsica and Psychology and Alchemy recovered the Paracelsian symbolic-spiritual reading of the Magnum Opus as the inner work of individuation.

In this lineage Paracelsus is no relic of the sixteenth century but a living source — and the Royal Art Opus stands within it.

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"The spirit is the life and the balsam within all corporeal things." — Paracelsus (Vita Rerum, iv.)

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