Paracelsus - 6/13/2023

PARACELSUS

Sometimes, good ideas need a bastard. Alchemist, doctor, lay-theologian, and grandfather of toxicology, Phillipus Aruelious Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoenhiem –better known as Paracelsus– was a preeminent shit-talker in a Europe that already contained Martin Luther. He was the five-foot-nothing, always-armed-with-a-sword bastard who would draw from alchemy and magic to lay the groundwork for modern medicine.

PARACELSUS THE DOCTOR

Welcome to the year 1530. You are a doctor in the city of Nuremberg. A sick person comes to you, and asks for healing. The first thing you would do is consult your advanced, cutting edge medical textbooks. You’re a pretty wealthy and successful doctor, so you’ve got all three books: Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. You, like your other respected contemporaries, are a humorist. Meaning, you understand that all bodies have a unique balance of four substances called humors. Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile. If this person is sick, it means that their humors have become unbalanced in some way. Your job is to balance them again.

The first thing you would do is determine what type of illness they have. Is it hot or cold? Is it dry or wet? Their forehead is warm to the touch, and their nose is running. Bingo, this is a hot, wet illness. You’ve studied quite a bit, so you know which herbs are good, and which herbs are bad.  You need to prescribe them cold, dry herbs. You write them a prescription with dozens of ingredients. After all, the more different types of cold herbs in the medicine, the more effective it will be. Your patient will take that prescription to an apothecary, who will assemble the medicine for a price.

Someone comes to you with a huge infected wound on their leg. It needs to be amputated. You are insulted that they came to you. You’re not some lowly surgeon. Surgeons are glorified butchers, people who saw off limbs on battlefields. Maybe some surgeons have the good sense to learn anatomy at a university, but even then, they don’t garner anywhere near the respect that you do as a doctor.

Paracelsus thinks you’re an idiot. He hates your guts, and he tells you to your face every time he sees you. He calls himself Theophrastus, which is like calling yourself “Einstein 2.” Instead of Theophrastus, you and your other doctor friends call him Cacophrastus, literally “shit-fence.” But what really pisses you off is that, unfortunately, he is a better doctor than you and most of your friends.

[include the humor chart]

PARACELSUS THE ALCHEMIST

Paracelsus was a man who believed that wisdom can come from anywhere. He was a doctor, but he was also an Alchemist, an Astral magician, and a Hermetic Mage. By the time he had established his practice in Strasbourg in 1526 he had already traveled Europe, learning medical techniques from military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians. [1, 29]

Medical knowledge at the time held that some substances were good, and others were bad. In practice, this led to medicines prescribed in poisonous doses. The logic being that if two aspirin is good for a headache, then two thousand aspirin will make you immune to headaches for the rest of your life. Paracelsus thought this was nonsense. He railed against apothecaries, saying “the poison makes the dose” thereby inventing the field of toxicology.

But Paracelsus didn’t pull this out of thin air. Paracelsus’s medical theories are a direct result of his interest in the recently-translated alchemical works of Hermes Trismegistus. (Thank you Marsillio Ficinio) The paracelsian body is a hermetic microcosm, a small system governed by the same rules as the greater universe. Just as alchemists could use alchemy to chemically “distill” precious metals from ore, Paracelsus believed that a doctor should be able to distill the helpful essences from a substance, creating a more effective, pure medicine.

Paracelsus made significant contributions to alchemy, but chief among them was the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt theory. First mentioned in his 1530 work Opus Paramirum, Paracelsus explained his theory thus:

PARACELSUS THE MAGICIAN

When Paracelsus says “magic” what does he mean?

Paracelsus held a binary approach to magic. There was good, divine “Magie” and evil, diabolical “Zauberei.” To Paracelsus, a true magus always acted in concordance with god, he combined what is natural with what is holy. To Paracelsus, becoming a mage required learning from books, but also a higher spiritual calling. [1, 159]

When Paracelsus looked at the world, he saw a world governed by spirits. The atoms of the world were moved with intent by invisible beings in accordance with the divine plan. Perhaps there was a logic to their motion, but every minute change in creation was the result of a living, thinking, spirit.

Paracelsus was a Christian. He believed that all spirits came from God, but some spirits were closer to God than others. For most christians, there were two sub-categories of spirits. There were the good spirits, the angels who helped administer creation, and there were evil spirits, the demonic entities who consorted with necromancers and witches. However, Paracelsus believed in a third type: The Elemental.

Paracelsus was a Hermetic. For the Hermetics, the material world was just about the least godly thing in creation, the furthest thing from the pure spirit of divinity. Paracelsus believed that the spirits who administered the basest four elements of the material world were so far removed from divinity that they should be considered their own sub-type.

In 1566, several years after his death, Ex Libro de Nymphis, Sylvanis, Pygmaeis, Salamandris, et Gigantibus etc. ) was published. He argues that each of the four elements has its own type of governing spirit. Gnomes for earth, Slyphs for air, Nymphs for water, and Salamanders for fire. He depicts these spirits as much like us, they have societies, wear clothes, and are even capable of bearing children. However, they would occasionally give birth to monsters like dwarves, sirens, giants, and will-o-the-wisps.

Like any sensible being in the renaissance, elementary spirits desired salvation through Christ. Unfortunately, elementals were not born with immortal souls, and the only way to get a soul is to marry a human. Mind you, elementals do not steal souls, but Paraceclsus warns against the dangers of consorting with them. Marry a salamander, and her nature will draw her back to the flame, causing her to vanish into the fireplace with her new soul in tow.

Paracelsus even recounts the tale of Peter Dimringer von Staufenberg, a nobleman who married a Nymph, only to denounce her as a devil and marry a new woman. A dire mistake, as the nobleman turned up dead shortly after the wedding. In Paracelsus’s eyes, this murder was entirely justified. By falsely repudiating his wife as a demon, God had granted the nymph the right to punish her husband for adultery. [1, 143]

Additionally, he argues that

Gimme like 5 pages max. Im at p 90

[who is paracelsus]

• Anti-Galen, bit of a brag. Said that he was the best doctor ever
• Deeply spiritual person
• United alchemy and medicine by treating the body as a microcosm
• Invented laudanaum
• SHIT. TALKER.
• Introduced sulphur-mercury-salt

[medicine before P]

• Humor Theory
• Surgeons and Diagnosticians were different people.
• P needed to re-define disease
• Proposed that clouds of poison were created though astral misalignments. Everything contains that which both nurtures and poisons. The key is balance.
• Hated Apothecaries. Most medicines at the time contained like 40-60 ingredients. The idea being that if you had a hot-wet illness, you needed as many cold-dry ingreidents as possible.
• Paracelsus said that literally anything in nature was poison if you prepared it improperly.

“Theophrastus von Hohenheim, later called Paracelsus,was probably less than 1.5 metres tall (5 feet), and by comparison, the sword he carried must have seemed enormous. Rumour had it that he kept a medicine in the sword’s pommel capable of curing almost anything. Why not? The Renaissance world was one of wonders and marvels, a world in which the old and trusted mixed with the new and unexpected.”[1]

Certainly he took patients and treated them on the

basis of techniques linked both to traditional medicine and to

those he had encountered during his journeys, to the learning

and procedures of military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village

women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians.[1, 29]

Make your way to Basel, he announced, if you want to learn

true medicine (illus. 5).[1, 30]

[1, 34] Paracelsus burning books

“Oddly, Paracelsus and Galen agreed on this point. Art

perfected nature and refined those who acquired knowledge

of her secrets.” [1, 37]

How did a physician gain improvement? In perfecting the art of medicine through reading the book of Nature, how was ‘reading’ to be done? The first and most important book to read was the book of wisdom. Since everything in nature comes from God, including medicine, one needed to seek medical knowledge first through prayer. ‘This’, Paracelsus instructed, ‘is the [proper] path to school.’11 [1, 38]

He conceived of the body as a microcosm of the greater design.

Alchemy is that which completes that which has not come to its end . . . As there are alchemists of metals . . . who separate the impure from the pure by means of the fire . . . there are also alchemists of medicine who separate what belongs to a medicine from what does not. So you see what kind of art alchemy is. It is the art of removing the useless from the useful and bringing a thing to its final being and material end [1, 40]

Paracelsus also rejected the notion that all things in the immediate physical world were composed of earth, air, fire and water. In his view, there was something that preceded even them: the cosmolog- ical wombs, as he called them, of Sulphur, Salt and Mercury. These were known as the ‘first three’ (tria prima); they pro- duced each body, sensitive as well as insensitive, metals and minerals, as well as herbs, plants, animals and people. [42]

He had been called the ‘Luther of physicians’ and knew that the same crowd hated him as they hated the religious reformer, wishing for them both the punishment of eternal fire. [1, 51]

Studying the heavens meant studying their influences, and the celestial powers that connected the human body to the heavenly bodies Paracelsus called astra. [1,52]

Disease, in other words, was not something outside nature, not some other order of thing, nor was it nature gone wrong. Disease was part of nature, part of the intelligence of nature; it was

that part of nature that knows how things should be when things fall apart, as everything must. Disease is the intelligence by which the body knows to be sick, to fall apart a little or a lot, in one way rather than another. [1, 53]

Paracelsus says there’s three types of disease: Disease from unbalanced humors, Disease from words and emotions, and Disease directly from god. All have different levels of treatabilioty.

Nothing in nature was without poison, Paracelsus ex-

plained, but by means of alchemy, human artistry separated

away what was harmful and impure and delivered to the body

what was pure and healthful. [1, 77] He points out taht dogs and cats can eat the same thing, and itmight kill one of them

Alchemical techniques involve purification of heat. Paracelsus was accusing apothecaries of essentially giving people raw ingredients, with all the dirt and poison still included.

Nature herself was, in her divine origin, a giant

pharmacopoeia in which each part (plants, animals or min-

erals) was created for the alchemist to treat specific illnesses

in the body. The alchemist–physician knew which part of

nature to use to treat specific parts of the body because each

plant, animal or mineral was ‘signed’ – we might better say de-

signed – by God for its intended purpose. [1, 80]

These doctrines of signs and signatures and microcosms were not new. They’re hermetic. And we have our good buddy Marsillio Ficino to thank for that!

Paracelsus was certainly aware of the so-called ‘Hermetic

tradition’ and, as we will see a little later, viewed magic as a

feature of the spirit-packed world in which he lived. [1, 82]

Finding correspondences in nature was part of that tradition, but

Paracelsus added a special twist – not entirely original, but a

trademark nevertheless. This was the idea that in defining

the relationships between medicines and disease, God had

designed local substances which, when properly prepared,

would effectively treat local illnesses.

Paracelsus had been

writing treatises critical of religious ceremony and practices

and had got himself caught up in a rebellion against the city’s

prince-archbishop, Matthäus Lang (1468–1540).10 At court

Paracelsus may well have been marked as a dangerous out-

sider, social renegade and heretic, and Lang knew how to deal

with people like that. [1, 126]

Education was

key to completing the perfection of the human and physical

world, and in emphasizing the notion of completing creation

through education, Paracelsus reflected an idea that might

be considered profound. Far from being an original idea, this

notion was, in fact, very old. Closer to the time of Paracelsus,

it was revised by an Italian scholar who died very young named

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). It is the idea

that the human being stands at the centre of creation with one

foot in the material world and one in the world of spirit or

intellect. He or she is both a part of nature and is able to

observe nature. The human being provides the means by which

nature comes to reflect upon its own existence, is able to think

about itself, to know itself. Through the human being, nature

becomes self-conscious. This gives the human being enor-

mous dignity, and the responsibility of education becomes a

responsibility of cosmic and divine proportions. [1, 132]

Paracelsus’s books of lay-theology: One

was called Liber de sancta trinitate (A Book Concerning the

Holy Trinity) and the other De septem punctis idolatriae christianae

(Concerning Seven Points of Christian Idolatry [1,133]

Chreyben von den Kranckheyten so die Vernunfft Berauben (Diseases that Rob a Person of Reason).

He first accounted for

the causes of epilepsy and mania and then turned his atten-

tion to the origins of the sufferings of those he called insane.

The insane, he said, were of four types: lunatici, insani, vesani

and melancholici.[1, 143]

PARACELSUS ESSENTIAL READINGS NOTES:

Nature and man, not ancient texts, were his sources: he believed that a pious Christian faith, the evidence of his own senses, and a system of correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm surpassed the knowledge gleaned from the writings ot Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna. [2, 14]

His astrological, alchemical, and occult insights were rooted in the contemporary philosophy of Renaissance neo-Platonism, natural magic, and cabbalism. [2, 14]

he other names were attributed only later and it was not until 1529 that he used the name Paracelsus, probably to signify ‘surpassing Celsus’ (the Roman writer on medicine), by which he is best known. [2, 14]

Paracelsus sought a universal knowledge, a knowledge that was not to be found in the books or the faculties. The young doctor now embarked on a series of extensive travels around Europe. Between 1517 and 1524 these wanderings led him from Italy across France to Spain and Portugal, through France again, then to England, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Croatia, across to Italy and thence to Rhodes, Constantinople and, possibly, Egypt. [2, 15]

SOURCES:

[1]Paracelcus, an Alchemical Life, Bruce T. Moran

[2] Paracelsus, Essential Readings, Goodrick-Clarke

[2]Paracelsian Moments, Ed. Metzner

[3]Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings, Brill.

[4] Hanegraaf dictionary, Paracelsus starts at 922