[145] The man whose death four hundred years ago we commemorate today exerted a powerful influence on all subsequent generations, as much by sheer force of his personality as by his prodigious literary activity. His influence made itself felt chiefly in the field of medicine and natural science. In philosophy, not only was mystical speculation stimulated in a fruitful way, but philosophical alchemy, then on the point of extinction, received a new lease of life and enjoyed a renaissance. It is no secret that Goethe, as is evident from the second part of Faust, still felt the impact of the powerful spirit of Paracelsus.
[146] It is not easy to see this spiritual phenomenon in the round and to give a really comprehensive account of it. Paracelsus was too contradictory or too chaotically many-sided, for all his obvious one-sidedness in other ways. First and foremost, he was a physician with all the strength of his spirit and soul, and his foundation was a firm religious belief. Thus he says in his Paragranum:1 “You must be of an honest, sincere, strong, true faith in God, with all your soul, heart, mind, and thought, in all love and trust. On the foundation of such faith and love, God will not withdraw his truth from you, and will make his works manifest to you, believable, visible, and comforting. But if, not having such faith, you are against God, then you will go astray in your work and will have failures, and in consequence people will have no faith in you.” The art of healing and its demands were the supreme criterion for Paracelsus. Everything in his life was devoted to this goal of helping and healing. Around this cardinal principle were grouped all his experiences, all his knowledge, all his efforts. This happens only when a man is actuated by some powerful emotional driving force, by a great passion which, undeterred by reflection and criticism, overshadows his whole life. The driving force behind Paracelsus was his compassion. “Compassion,” he exclaims, “is the physician’s schoolmaster.”2 It must be inborn in him. Compassion, which has driven many another great man and inspired his work, was also the supreme arbiter of Paracelsus’s fate.
[147] The instrument which he put at the service of his great compassion was his science and his art, which he took over from his father. But the dynamism at the back of his work, the compassion itself, must have come to him from the prime source of everything emotional, that is, from his mother, of whom he never spoke. She died young, and she probably left behind a great deal of unsatisfied longing in her son—so much that, so far as we know, no other woman was able to compete with that far-distant mother-imago, which for that reason was all the more formidable. The more remote and unreal the personal mother is, the more deeply will the son’s yearning for her clutch at his soul, awakening that primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences, and ideals. When Paracelsus says that the mother of the child is the planet and star, this is in the highest degree true of himself. To the mother in her highest form, Mater Ecclesia, he remained faithful all his life, despite the very free criticism he levelled at the ills of Christendom in that epoch. Nor did he succumb to the great temptation of that age, the Protestant schism, though he may well have had it in him to go over to the other camp. Conflict was deeply rooted in Paracelsus’s nature; indeed, it had to be so, for without a tension of opposites there is no energy, and whenever a volcano, such as he was, erupts, we shall not go wrong in supposing that water and fire have clashed together.
[148] But although the Church remained a mother for Paracelsus all his life, he nevertheless had two mothers: the other was Mater Natura. And if the former was an absolute authority, so too was the latter. Even though he endeavoured to conceal the conflict between the two maternal spheres of influence, he was honest enough to admit its existence; indeed, he seems to have had a very good idea of what such a dilemma meant. Thus he says: “I also confess that I write like a pagan and yet am a Christian.”3 Accordingly he named the first five sections of his Paramirum de quinque entibus morborum “Pagoya.” “Pagoyum” is one of his favourite neologisms, compounded of “paganum” and the Hebrew word “goyim.” He held that knowledge of the nature of diseases was pagan, since this knowledge came from the “light of nature” and not from revelation.4 “Magic,” he says, is “the preceptor and teacher of the physician,”5 who derives his knowledge from the lumen naturae. There can be no doubt the “light of nature” was a second, independent source of knowledge for Paracelsus. His closest pupil, Adam von Bodenstein, puts it like this: “The Spagyric has the things of nature not by authority, but by his own experience.”6 The concept of the lumen naturae may derive from the Occulta philosophia of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1533), who speaks of a luminositas sensus naturae that extends even to the four-footed beasts and enables them to foretell the future.7 Paracelsus says accordingly:
It is, therefore, also to be known that the auguries of the birds are caused by these innate spirits, as when cocks foretell future weather and peacocks the death of their master and other such things with their crowing. All this comes from the innate spirit and is the Light of Nature. Just as it is present in animals and is natural, so also it dwells within man and he brought it into the world with himself. He who is chaste is a good prophet, natural as the birds, and the prophecies of birds are not contrary to nature but are of nature. Each, then, according to his own state. These things which the birds announce can also be foretold in sleep, for it is the astral spirit which is the invisible body of nature.8 And it should be known that when a man prophesies, he does not speak from the Devil, not from Satan, and not from the Holy Spirit, but he speaks from the innate spirit of the invisible body which teaches Magiam and in which the Magus has his origin.9
The light of nature comes from the Astrum: “Nothing can be in man unless it has been given to him by the Light of Nature, and what is in the Light of Nature has been brought by the stars.”10 The pagans still possessed the light of nature, “for to act in the Light of Nature and to rejoice in it is divine despite being mortal.” Before Christ came into the world, the world was still endowed with the light of nature, but in comparison with Christ this was a “lesser light.” “Therefore we should know that we have to interpret nature according to the spirit of nature, the Word of God according to the spirit of God, and the Devil according to his spirit also.” “He who knows nothing of these things is a gorged pig and will not leave room for instruction and experience.” The light of nature is the quinta essentia, extracted by God himself from the four elements, and dwelling “in our hearts.”11 It is enkindled by the Holy Spirit.12 The light of nature is an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination.13 It has two sources: a mortal and an immortal, which Paracelsus calls “angels.”14 “Man,” he says, “is also an angel and has all the latter’s qualities.” He has a natural light, but also a light outside the light of nature by which he can search out supernatural things.15 The relationship of this supernatural light to the light of revelation remains, however, obscure. Paracelsus seems to have held a peculiar trichotomous view in this respect.
[149] The authenticity of one’s own experience of nature against the authority of tradition is a basic theme of Paracelsan thinking. On this principle he based his attack on the medical schools, and his pupils16 carried the revolution even further by attacking Aristotelian philosophy. It was an attitude that opened the way for the scientific investigation of nature and helped to emancipate natural science from the authority of tradition. Though this liberating act had the most fruitful consequences, it also led to that conflict between knowledge and faith which poisoned the spiritual atmosphere of the nineteenth century in particular. Paracelsus naturally had no inkling of the possibility of these late repercussions. As a medieval Christian, he still lived in a unitary world and did not feel the two sources of knowledge, the divine and the natural, as the conflict it later turned out to be. As he says in his “Philosophia sagax”: “There are, therefore, two kinds of knowledge in this world: an eternal and a temporal. The eternal springs directly from the light of the Holy Spirit, but the other directly from the Light of Nature.” In his view the latter kind is ambivalent: both good and bad. This knowledge, he says, “is not from flesh and blood, but from the stars in the flesh and blood. That is the treasure, the natural Summum Bonum.” Man is twofold, “one part temporal, the other part eternal, and each part takes its light from God, both the temporal and the eternal, and there is nothing that does not have its origin in God. Why, then, should the Father’s light be considered pagan, and I be recognized and condemned as a pagan?” God the Father created man “from below upwards,” but God the Son “from above downwards.” Therefore Paracelsus asks: “If Father and Son are one, how then can I honour two lights? I would be condemned as an idolater: but the number one preserves me. And if I love two and accord to each its light, as God has ordained for everyone, how then can I be a pagan?”
[150] It is clear enough from this what his attitude was to the problem of the two sources of knowledge: both lights derive from the unity of God. And yet—why did he give the name “Pagoyum” to what he wrote in the light of nature? Was he playing with words, or was it an involuntary avowal, a dim presentiment of a duality in the world and the soul? Was Paracelsus really unaffected by the schismatic spirit of the age, and was his attack on authority really confined only to Galen, Avicenna, Rhazes, and Arnaldus de Villanova?
[151] Paracelsus’s scepticism and rebelliousness stop short at the Church, but he also reined them in before alchemy, astrology, and magic, which he believed in as fervently as he did in divine revelation, since in his view they proceeded from the authority of the lumen naturae. And when he speaks of the divine office of the physician, he exclaims: “I under the Lord, the Lord under me, I under him outside my office, and he under me outside his office.”17 What kind of spirit addresses us in these words? Do they not recall those of the later Angelus Silesius?
I am as great as God,
And he is small like me;
He cannot be above,
Nor I below him be.
[152] There is no denying that the human ego’s affinity with God here raises a distinct claim to be heard and also to be recognized as such. That is the spirit of the Renaissance—to give man in his mightiness, intellectual power, and beauty a visible place beside God. Deus et Homo in a new and unprecedented sense! Agrippa von Nettesheim, Paracelsus’s older contemporary and an authority on the Cabala, declares in his sceptical and contumacious book De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum:18
Agrippa spares no man.
He contemns, knows, knows not, weeps, laughs, waxes wroth,
reviles, carps at all things;
being himself philosopher, demon, hero, God,
and all things.
Paracelsus to be sure did not rise to such unfortunate heights of modernity. He felt at one with God and with himself. Wholly and unremittingly engaged in the practical art of healing, his busy mind wasted no time on abstract problems, and his irrational, intuitive nature never pursued logical reflections so far that they resulted in destructive insights.
[153] Paracelsus had one father, whom he held in love and respect, but, as we have said, like every true hero he had two mothers, a heavenly one and an earthly one—Mother Church and Mother Nature. Can one serve two mothers? And even if, like Paracelsus, one feels oneself a physician created by God, is there not something suspicious about pressing God into one’s service inside the physician’s office, so to speak? One can easily object that Paracelsus said this, like so much else, only in passing and that it is not to be taken all that seriously. He himself would probably have been astonished and indignant if he had been taken at his word. The words that flowed into his pen came less from deep reflection than from the spirit of the age in which he lived. No one can claim to be immune to the spirit of his own epoch or to possess anything like a complete knowledge of it. Regardless of our conscious convictions, we are all without exception, in so far as we are particles in the mass, gnawed at and undermined by the spirit that runs through the masses. Our freedom extends only as far as our consciousness reaches. Beyond that, we succumb to the unconscious influences of our environment. Though we may not be clear in a logical sense about the deepest meanings of our words and actions, these meanings nevertheless exist and they have a psychological effect. Whether we know it or not, there remains in each of us the tremendous tension between the man who serves God and the man who commands God to do his bidding.
[154] But the greater the tension, the greater the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites. It was to the constellation of the most powerful opposites within him that Paracelsus owed his almost daemonic energy, which was not an unalloyed gift of God but went hand in hand with his impetuous and quarrelsome temperament, his hastiness, impatience, discontentedness, and his arrogance. Not for nothing was Paracelsus the prototype of Faust, whom Jacob Burckhardt once called “a great primordial image” in the soul of every German. From Faust the line leads direct to Nietzsche, who was a Faustian man if ever there was one. What still maintained the balance in the case of Paracelsus and Angelus Silesius—“I under God and God under me”—was lost in the twentieth century, and the scale sinks lower and lower under the weight of an ego that fancies itself more and more godlike. Paracelsus shared with Angelus Silesius his inner piety and the touching but dangerous simplicity of his relationship to God. But alongside this spirituality a countervailing chthonic spirit made itself felt to an almost frightening degree: there was no form of manticism and magic that Paracelsus did not practise himself or recommend to others. Dabbling in these arts—no matter how enlightened one thinks one is—is not without its psychological dangers. Magic always was and still is a source of fascination. At the time of Paracelsus, certainly, the world teemed with marvels: everyone was conscious of the immediate presence of the dark forces of nature. Astronomy and astrology were not yet separated. Kepler still cast horoscopes. Instead of chemistry there was only alchemy. Amulets, talismans, spells for healing wounds and diseases were taken as a matter of course. A man so avid for knowledge as Paracelsus could not avoid a thorough investigation of all these things, only to discover that strange and remarkable effects resulted from their use. But so far as I know he never uttered a clear warning about the psychic dangers of magic for the adept.19 He even scoffed at the doctors because they understood nothing of magic. But he does not mention that they kept away from it out of a quite justifiable fear. And yet we know from the testimony of Conrad Gessner, of Zurich, that the very doctors whom Paracelsus attacked shunned magic on religious grounds and accused him and his pupils of sorcery. Writing to Crato von Crafftheim20 about Paracelsus’s pupil Adam von Bodenstein, Gessner says: “I know that most people of this kind are Arians and deny the divinity of Christ . . . Oporin in Basel, once a pupil of Theophrastus and his private assistant [familiaris], reported strange tales concerning the latter’s intercourse with demons. They are given to senseless astrology, geomancy, necromancy, and other forbidden arts. I myself suspect that they are the last of the Druids, those of the ancient Celts who were instructed for several years in underground places by demons. It is also certain that such things are done to this very day at Salamanca in Spain. From this school also arose the wandering scholars, as they are commonly called. The most famous of these was Faust, who died not so long ago.” Elsewhere in the same letter Gessner writes: “Theophrastus has assuredly been an impious man and a sorcerer [magus], and has had intercourse with demons.”21
[155] Although this judgment is based in part on the unreliable testimony of Oporin and is essentially unfair or actually false, it nevertheless shows how unseemly, in the opinion of contemporary doctors of repute, was Paracelsus’s preoccupation with magic. He himself, as we have said, had no such scruples. He drew magic, like everything else worth knowing, into his orbit and tried to exploit it medically for the benefit of the sick, unperturbed by what it might do to him personally or what the implications might be from the religious point of view. For him magic and the wisdom of nature had their place within the divinely ordained order as a mysterium et magnale Dei, and so it was not difficult for him to bridge the gulf into which half the world had plunged.22 Instead of experiencing any conflict in himself, he found his arch-enemy outside in the great medical authorities of the past, as well as in the host of academic physicians against whom he let fly like the proper Swiss mercenary he was. He was infuriated beyond measure by the resistance of his opponents and he made enemies everywhere. His writings are as turbulent as his life and his wanderings. His style is violently rhetorical. He always seems to be speaking importunately into someone’s ear—someone who listens unwillingly, or against whose thick skin even the best arguments rebound. His exposition of a subject is seldom systematic or even coherent; it is constantly interrupted by admonitions, addressed in a subtle or coarse vein to an invisible auditor afflicted with moral deafness. Paracelsus was a little too sure that he had his enemy in front of him, and did not notice that it was lodged in his own bosom. He consisted of two persons who never really confronted one another. He nowhere betrays the least suspicion that he might not be at one with himself. He felt himself to be undividedly one, and all the things that constantly thwarted him had of course to be his external enemies. He had to conquer them and prove to them that he was the “Monarcha,” the sovereign ruler, which secretly and unknown to himself was the very thing he was not. He was so unconscious of the conflict within him that he never noticed there was a second ruler in his own house who worked against him and opposed everything he wanted. But every unconscious conflict works out like that: one obstructs and undermines oneself. Paracelsus did not see that the truth of the Church and the Christian standpoint could never get along with the thought implicit in all alchemy, “God under me.” And when one unconsciously works against oneself, the result is impatience, irritability, and an impotent longing to get one’s opponent down whatever the means. Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one’s opponent, so one employs a special, “bombastic” style full of neologisms which might be described as “power-words.”23 This symptom is observable not only in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern philosophers, and, above all, whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance: the language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. It is the old word magic, and sometimes it can degenerate into a regular disease. Paracelsus was afflicted with this malady to such a degree that even his closest pupils were obliged to compile “onomastica” (word-lists) and to publish commentaries. The unwary reader continually stumbles over these neologisms and is completely baffled at first, for Paracelsus never bothered to give any explanations even when, as often happens, the word was a hapax legomenon (one that occurs only once). Often it is only by comparing a number of passages that one can approximately make out the sense. There are, however, mitigating circumstances: doctors have always loved using magically incomprehensible jargon for even the most ordinary things. It is part of the medical persona. But it is odd indeed that Paracelsus, who prided himself on teaching and writing in German, should have been the very one to concoct the most intricate neologisms out of Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, and possibly even Arabic.
[156] Magic is insidious, and therein lies its danger. At one point, where Paracelsus is discussing witchcraft, he actually falls into using a magical witch-language without giving the least explanation. For instance, instead of “Zwirnfaden” (twine) he says “Swindafnerz,” instead of “Nadel” (needle) “Dallen,” instead of “Leiche” (corpse) “Chely,” instead of “Faden” (thread) “Daphne,” and so on.24 In magical rites the inversion of letters serves the diabolical purpose of turning the divine order into an infernal disorder. It is remarkable how casually and unthinkingly Paracelsus takes over these magically distorted words and simply leaves the reader to make what he can of them. This shows that Paracelsus must have been thoroughly steeped in the lowest folk beliefs and popular superstitions, and one looks in vain for any trace of disgust at such squalid things, though in his case its absence was certainly not due to lack of feeling but rather to a kind of natural innocence and naïveté. Thus he himself recommends the magical use of wax manikins in cases of sickness,25 and seems to have designed and used amulets and seals.28 He was convinced that physicians should have an understanding of the magic arts and should not eschew sorcery if this might help their patients. But this kind of folk magic is not Christian, it is demonstrably pagan—in a word, a “Pagoyum.”
[157] Besides his manifold contacts with folk superstition there was another, more respectable source of “pagan” lore that had a great influence on Paracelsus. This was his knowledge of and intense preoccupation with alchemy, which he used not only in his pharmacology and pharmaceutics but also for “philosophical” purposes. Since earliest times alchemy contained, or actually was, a secret doctrine. With the triumph of Christianity under Constantine the old pagan ideas did not vanish but lived on in the strange arcane terminology of philosophical alchemy. Its chief figure was Hermes or Mercurius, in his dual significance as quicksilver and the world soul, with his companion figures Sol (= gold) and Luna (= silver). The alchemical operation consisted essentially in separating the prima materia, the so-called chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, the body, which were then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or “chymical marriage.” In other words, the coniunctio was allegorized as the hierosgamos, the ritual cohabitation of Sol and Luna. From this union sprang the filius sapientiae or filius philosophorum, the transformed Mercurius, who was thought of as hermaphroditic in token of his rounded perfection. [Cf. fig. B2.]
[158] The opus alchymicum, in spite of its chemical aspects, was always understood as a kind of rite after the manner of an opus divinum. For this reason Melchior Cibinensis, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, could still represent it in the form of a Mass,27 since long before this the filius or lapis philosophorum had been regarded as an allegory of Christ.28 Many things in Paracelsus that would otherwise remain incomprehensible must be understood in terms of this tradition. In it are to be found the origins of practically the whole of his philosophy in so far as it is not Cabalistic. It is evident from his writings that he had a considerable knowledge of Hermetic literature.29 Like all medieval alchemists he seems not to have been aware of the true nature of alchemy, although the refusal of the Basel printer Conrad Waldkirch, at the end of the sixteenth century, to print the first part of Aurora consurgens (a treatise falsely ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas) on account of its “blasphemous character”30 shows that the dubious nature of alchemy was apparent even to a layman. To me it seems certain that Paracelsus was completely naïve in these matters and, intent only on the welfare of the sick, used alchemy primarily for its practical value regardless of its murky background. Consciously, alchemy for him meant a knowledge of the materia medica and a chemical procedure for preparing medicaments, above all the well-loved arcana, the secret remedies. He also believed that one could make gold and engender homunculi.31 This aspect of it was so predominant that one is inclined to forget that alchemy meant very much more to him than that. We know this from a brief remark in the Paragranum, where he says that the physician himself is “ripened” by the art.32 This sounds as though the alchemical maturation should go hand in hand with the maturation of the physician. If we are not mistaken in this assumption, we must further conclude that Paracelsus not only was acquainted with the arcane teachings of alchemy but was convinced of their rightness. It is of course impossible to prove this without detailed investigation, for the esteem which he expressed for alchemy throughout his writings might in the end refer only to its chemical aspect. This special predilection of his made him a forerunner and inaugurator of modern chemical medicine. Even his belief in the transmutation of metals and in the lapis philosophorum, which he shared with many others, is no evidence of a deeper affinity with the mystic background of the ars aurifera. And yet such an affinity is very probable since his closest followers were found among the alchemical physicians.33
[159] In the course of our inquiry we shall have to scrutinize more closely the arcane teaching of alchemy, which is so important for an understanding of the spiritual side of Paracelsus. I must ask the reader to forgive me in advance for putting his attention and patience to such a severe test. The subject is abstruse and wrapped in obscurity, but it constitutes an essential part of the Paracelsan spirit and exerted a profound influence on Goethe, so much so that the impressions he gained in his Leipzig days continued to engross him even in old age: indeed, they formed the matrix for Faust.
[160] When one reads Paracelsus, it is chiefly the technical neologisms that seem to give out mysterious hints. But when one tries to establish their etymology and their meaning, as often as not one ends up in a blind alley. For instance, one can guess that “Iliaster” or “Yliastrum” is composed etymologically of ὗλη (matter) and ἀστóρ (star), and that it means about the same as the spiritus vitae of classical alchemy, or that “Cagastrum” is connected with κακὸς (bad) and ἀστήρ, or that “Anthos” and “Anthera” are embellishments of the alchemical flores. Even his philosophical concepts, such as the doctrine of the astrum, only lead us back to the known alchemical and astrological tradition, from which we can see that his doctrine of the corpus astrale was not a new discovery. We find this idea already in an old classic, the “Tractatus Aristotelis,” where it is said that the “planets in man” have a more powerful influence than the heavenly bodies;34 and when Paracelsus says that the medicine is found in the astrum, we read in the same treatise that “in man, who is made in the image of God, can be found the cause and the medicine.”
[161] But that other pivot of Paracelsus’s teaching, his belief in the light of nature, allows us to surmise connections which illuminate the obscurities of his religio medica. The light hidden in nature and particularly in human nature likewise belongs to the stock of ancient alchemical ideas. Thus the “Tractatus Aristotelis” says: “See therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.” The light of nature is indeed of great importance in alchemy. Just as, according to Paracelsus, it enlightens man as to the workings of nature and gives him an understanding of natural things “by cagastric magic” (per magiam cagastricam),35 so it is the aim of alchemy to beget this light in the shape of the filius philosophorum. An equally ancient treatise of Arabic provenance attributed to Hermes,36 the “Tractatus aureus,” says (Mercurius is speaking): “My light excels all other lights, and my goods are higher than all other goods. I beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature. Nothing better or more worthy of veneration can come to pass in the world than the union of myself with my son.”37 In the “Dicta Belini” (Belinus is a pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana) Mercurius says: “I enlighten all that is mine, and I make the light manifest on the journey from my father Saturn.”38 “I make the days of the world eternal, and I illumine all lights with my light.”39 Another author says of the “chymical marriage” from which arises the filius philosophorum: “They embrace and the new light is begotten of them, which is like no other light in the whole world.”40
[162] This idea of the light, with Paracelsus as with other alchemists, coincides with the concept of Sapientia and Scientia. We can safely call the light the central mystery of philosophical alchemy. Almost always it is personified as the filius, or is at least mentioned as one of his outstanding attributes. It is a δαιμόνιον pure and simple. Often the texts refer to the need for a familiar spirit who should help the adept at his work. The Magic Papyri do not hesitate to enlist the services even of the major gods.41 The filius remains in the adept’s power. Thus the treatise of Haly, king of Arabia, says: “And that son . . . shall serve thee in thy house in this world and in the next.”42 Long before Paracelsus, as I have said, this filius was equated with Christ. The parallel comes out very clearly in the sixteenth-century German alchemists who were influenced by Paracelsus. For instance, Heinrich Khunrath says: “This [the filius philosophorum], the Son of the Macrocosm, is God and creature . . . that [Christ], is the son of God, the θεάνθρωπος, that is, God and man; the one conceived in the womb of the Macrocosm, the other in the womb of the Microcosm, and both of a virginal womb. . . . Without blasphemy I say: In the Book or Mirror of Nature, the Stone of the Philosophers, the Preserver of the Macrocosm, is the symbol of Christ Jesus Crucified, Saviour of the whole race of men, that is, of the Microcosm. From the stone you shall know in natural wise Christ, and from Christ the stone.”43
[163] To me it seems certain that Paracelsus was just as unconscious of the full implications of these teachings as Khunrath was, who also believed he was speaking “without blasphemy.” But in spite of this unconsciousness they were of the essence of philosophical alchemy,44 and anyone who practised it thought, lived, and acted in the atmosphere of these teachings, which perhaps had an all the more insidious effect the more naïvely and uncritically one succumbed to them. The “natural light of man” or the “star in man” sounds harmless enough, so that none of the authors had any notion of the possibilities of conflict that lurked within it. And yet that light or filius philosophorum was openly named the greatest and most victorious of all lights, and set alongside Christ as the Saviour and Preserver of the world! Whereas in Christ God himself became man, the filius philosophorum was extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer. In the former case the miracle of man’s salvation is accomplished by God; in the latter, the salvation or transfiguration of the universe is brought about by the mind of man—“Deo concedente,” as the authors never fail to add. In the one case man confesses “I under God,” in the other he asserts “God under me.” Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.”45 Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter.
[164] Paracelsus’s preoccupation with alchemy exposed him to an influence that left its mark on his spiritual development. The inner driving-force behind the aspirations of alchemy was a presumption whose daemonic grandeur on the one hand and psychic danger46 on the other should not be underestimated. Much of the overbearing pride and arrogant self-esteem, which contrasts so strangely with the truly Christian humility of Paracelsus, comes from this source. What erupted like a volcano in Agrippa von Nettesheim’s “himself demon, hero, God” remained, with Paracelsus, hidden under the threshold of a Christian consciousness and expressed itself only indirectly in exaggerated claims and in his irritable self-assertiveness, which made him enemies wherever he went. We know from experience that such a symptom is due to unadmitted feelings of inferiority, i.e., to a real failing of which one is usually unconscious. In each of us there is a pitiless judge who makes us feel guilty even if we are not conscious of having done anything wrong. Although we do not know what it is, it is as though it were known somewhere. Paracelsus’s desire to help the sick at all costs was doubtless quite pure and genuine. But the magical means he used, and in particular the secret content of alchemy, were diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christianity. And that remained so whether Paracelsus was aware of it or not. Subjectively, he was without blame; but that pitiless judge condemned him to feelings of inferiority that clouded his life.
[165] This crucial point, namely the arcane doctrine of the marvellous son of the philosophers, is the subject of unfriendly but perspicacious criticism by Conrad Gessner. Apropos the works of a pupil of Paracelsus, Alexander à Suchten,47 he writes to Crato: “But look who it is whom he reveals to us as the son of God, namely none other than the spirit of the world and of nature, and the same who dwells in our bodies (it is a wonder that he does not add the spirit of the ox and the ass!). This spirit can be separated from matter or from the body of the elements by the technical procedures of the Theophrastus school. If anyone were to take him at his word, he would say that he had merely voiced a principle of the philosophers, but not his own opinion. He repeats it, however, in order to express his agreement. And I know that other Theophrastians besmirch such things with their writings, from which it is easy to conclude that they deny the divinity of Christ. I myself am entirely convinced that Theophrastus has been an Arian. They endeavour to persuade us that Christ was a quite ordinary man, and that in him was no other spirit than in us.”48
[166] Gessner’s charge against the Theophrastus school and against the Master himself applies to alchemy in general. The extraction of the world soul from matter was not a peculiarity of Paracelsan alchemy. But the charge of Arianism is unjustified. It was obviously prompted by the well-known parallel between the filius philosophorum and Christ, though so far as I know this nowhere occurs in Paracelsus’s own writings. On the other hand, in a treatise called “Apokalypsis Hermetis,” ascribed by Huser to Paracelsus, there is a complete alchemical confession of faith which lends Gessner’s charge a certain weight. There Paracelsus says of the “spirit of the fifth essence”: “This is the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot comprehend without the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, or without the instruction of those who know him.”49 “He is the soul of the world,” moving all and preserving all. In his initial earthly form (that is, in his original Saturnine darkness) he is unclean, but he purifies himself progressively during the ascent through his watery, aerial, and fiery forms. Finally, in the fifth essence, he appears as the “clarified body.”50 “This spirit is the secret that has been hidden since the beginning of things.”
[167] Paracelsus is speaking here as a true alchemist. Like his pupils, he draws the Cabala, which had been made accessible to the world at large through Pico della Mirandola and Agrippa, into the scope of his alchemical speculations. “All you who are led by your religion to prophesy future events and to interpret the past and the present to people, you who see abroad and read hidden letters and sealed books, who seek in the earth and in walls for what is buried, you who learn great wisdom and art—bear in mind if you wish to apply all these things, that you take to yourselves the religion of the Gabal and walk in its light, for the Gabal is well-founded. Ask and it will be granted to you, knock, you will be heard and it will be opened unto you. From this granting and opening there will flow what you desire: you will see into the lowest depths of the earth, into the depths of hell, into the third heaven. You will gain more wisdom than Solomon, you will have greater communion with God than Moses and Aaron.”51
[168] Just as the wisdom of the Cabala coincided with the Sapientia of alchemy, so the figure of Adam Kadmon was identified with the filius philosophorum. Originally this figure may have been the ἄνθρωπος ϕωτεινός, the “man of light” who was imprisoned in Adam, and whom we encounter in Zosimos of Panopolis (third century).62 But the man of light is an echo of the pre-Christian doctrine of the Primordial Man. Under the influence of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, these and other Neoplatonic ideas had already become popularized in the fifteenth century and were known to nearly every educated person. In alchemy they fell in with the remnants of classical tradition. Besides this there were the views of the Cabala, which had been philosophically assessed by Pico.53 He and Agrippa54 were probably the sources for Paracelsus’s somewhat scanty knowledge of the Cabala. For Paracelsus the Primordial Man was identical with the “astral” man: “The true man is the star in us.”55 “The star desires to drive man towards great wisdom.”56 In his Paragranum he says: “For heaven is man and man is heaven, and all men are one heaven, and heaven is only one man.”57 Man stands in the relationship of a son to the inner heaven,58 which is the Father, whom Paracelsus calls the homo maximus59 or Adech,60 an arcane name derived from Adam. Elsewhere he is called Archeus: “He is therefore similar to man and consists of the four elements and is an Archeus and is composed of four parts; say then, he is the great Cosmos.”61 Undoubtedly this is the Primordial Man, for Paracelsus says: “In the whole Ides there is but One Man, the same is extracted by the Iliastrum62 and is the Protoplast.” Ides or Ideus is “the gate through which all created things have proceeded,” the “globule or materia” from which man was created.63 Other secret names for the Primordial Man are Idechtrum64 and Protothoma.63 The number of names alone shows how preoccupied Paracelsus was with this idea. The ancient teachings about the Anthropos or Primordial Man assert that God, or the world-creating principle, was made manifest in the form of a “first-created” (protoplastus) man, usually of cosmic size. In India he is Prajāpati or Purusha, who is also “the size of a thumb” and dwells in the heart of every man, like the Iliaster of Paracelsus. In Persia he is Gayomart (gayō-maretan, ‘mortal life’), a youth of dazzling whiteness, as is also said of the alchemical Mercurius. In the Zohar he is Metatron, who was created together with light. He is the celestial man whom we meet in the visions of Daniel, Ezra, Enoch, and also in Philo Judaeus. He is one of the principal figures in Gnosticism, where, as always, he is connected with the question of creation and redemption.66 This is the case with Paracelsus.