[194] Aniadus (or Aniadum), interpreted by Bodenstein and Dorn as the “efficacity of things,” is defined by Ruland as “the regenerated spiritual man in us, the heavenly body implanted in us Christians by the Holy Ghost through the most Holy Sacraments.” This interpretation does full justice to the role which Aniadus plays in the writings of Paracelsus. Though it is clearly related to the sacraments and to the Communion in particular, it is equally clear that there was no question of arousing or implanting the inner man in the Christian sense, but of a “scientific” union of the natural with the spiritual man with the aid of arcane techniques of a medical nature. Paracelsus carefully avoids the ecclesiastical terminology and uses instead an esoteric language which is extremely difficult to decipher, for the obvious purpose of segregating the “natural” transformation mystery from the religious one and effectively concealing it from prying eyes. Otherwise the welter of esoteric terms in this treatise would have no explanation. Nor can one escape the impression that this mystery was in some sense opposed to the religious mystery: as the “nettle” and the flammula show, the ambiguities of Eros were also included in it.1 It had far more to do with pagan antiquity, as is evidenced by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, than with the Christian mystery. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Paracelsus was sniffing out nasty secrets; a more cogent motive was his experience as a physician who had to deal with man as he is and not as he should be and biologically speaking never can be. Many questions are put to a doctor which he cannot honestly answer with “should” but only from his knowledge and experience of nature. In these fragments of a nature mystery there is nothing to suggest a misplaced curiosity or perverse interest on Paracelsus’s part; they bear witness rather to the strenuous efforts of a physician to find satisfactory answers to psychological questions which the ecclesiastical casuist is inclined to twist in his own favour.
[195] This nature mystery was indeed so much at odds with the Church—despite the superficial analogies—that the Hungarian alchemist Nicolaus Melchior Szebeny,2 court astrologer to Ladislaus II (1471–1516), made the bold attempt to present the opus alchymicum in the form of a Mass.3 It is difficult to prove whether and to what extent the alchemists were aware that they were in conflict with the Church. Mostly they showed no insight into what they were doing. This is true also of Paracelsus—except for a few hints about the “Pagoyum.” It is the more understandable that no real self-criticism could come about, since they genuinely believed that they were performing a work well-pleasing to God on the principle “quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit” (what nature left imperfect, the art perfects). Paracelsus himself was wholly filled with the godliness of his profession as a doctor, and nothing disquieted or disturbed his Christian faith. He took it for granted that his work supplemented the hand of God and that he was the faithful steward of the talent that had been entrusted to him. And as a matter of fact he was right, for the human soul is not something cut off from nature. It is a natural phenomenon like any other, and its problems are just as important as the questions and riddles which are presented by the diseases of the body. Moreover there is scarcely a disease of the body in which psychic factors do not play a part, just as physical ones have to be considered in many psychogenic disturbances. Paracelsus was fully alive to this. In his own peculiar way he took the psychic phenomena into account as perhaps none of the great physicians ever did before or after him. Although his homunculi, Trarames, Durdales, nymphs, Melusines, etc., are the grossest superstitions for us so-called moderns, for a man of Paracelsus’s time they were nothing of the sort. In those days these figures were living and effective forces. They were projections, of course; but of that, too, Paracelsus seems to have had an inkling, since it is clear from numerous passages in his writings that he was aware that homunculi and suchlike beings were creatures of the imagination. His more primitive cast of mind attributed a reality to these projections, and this reality did far greater justice to their psychological effect than does our rationalistic assumption of the absolute unreality of projected contents. Whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave just like realities. We should not let ourselves be so blinded by the modern rationalistic fear of superstition that we lose sight completely of those little-known psychic phenomena which surpass our present scientific understanding. Although Paracelsus had no notion of psychology, he nevertheless affords—precisely because of his “benighted superstition”—deep insights into psychic events which the most up-to-date psychology is only now struggling to investigate again. Even though mythology may not be “true” in the sense that a mathematical law or a physical experiment is true, it is still a serious subject for research and contains quite as many truths as a natural science; only, they lie on a different plane. One can be perfectly scientific about mythology, for it is just as good a natural product as plants, animals or chemical elements.
[196] Even if the psyche were a product of the will, it would still not be outside nature. No doubt it would have been a greater achievement if Paracelsus had developed his natural philosophy in an age when the psyche had been discredited as an object of scientific study. As it was, he merely included in the scope of his investigations something that was already present, without being obliged to prove its existence anew. Even so his achievement is sufficiently great, despite the fact that we moderns still find it difficult to estimate correctly the full psychological implications of his views. For what, in the end, do we know about the causes and motives that prompted man, for more than a thousand years, to believe in that “absurdity” the transmutation of metals and the simultaneous psychic transformation of the artifex? We have never seriously considered the fact that for the medieval investigator the redemption of the world by God’s son and the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements were not the last word, or rather, not the last answer to the manifold enigmas of man and his soul. If the opus alchymicum claimed equality with the opus divinum of the Mass, the reason for this was not grotesque presumption but the fact that a vast, unknown Nature, disregarded by the eternal verities of the Church, was imperiously demanding recognition and acceptance. Paracelsus knew, in advance of modern times, that this Nature was not only chemical and physical but also psychic. Even though his Trarames and whatnot cannot be demonstrated in a test tube, they nevertheless had their place in his world. And even if, like all the rest of them, he never produced any gold, he was yet on the track of a process of psychic transformation that is incomparably more important for the happiness of the individual than the possession of the red tincture.
[197] So when we try to elucidate the riddles of the Vita longa we are following the traces of a psychological process that is the vital secret of all seekers after truth. Not all are vouchsafed the grace of a faith that anticipates all solutions, nor is it given to all to rest content with the sun of revealed truth. The light that is lighted in the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit, that same light of nature, however feeble it may be, is more important to them than the great light which shines in the darkness and which the darkness comprehended not. They discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness.4 Paracelsus was one of these. He was a well-intentioned, humble Christian. His ethics and his professed faith were Christian, but his most secret, deepest passion, his whole creative yearning, belonged to the lumen naturae, the divine spark buried in the darkness, whose sleep of death could not be vanquished even by the revelation of God’s son. The light from above made the darkness still darker; but the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends. Therefore it turns blackness into brightness, burns away “all superfluities,” and leaves behind nothing but “faecem et scoriam et terram damnatam” (dross and scoriae and the rejected earth).
[198] Paracelsus, like all the philosophical alchemists, was seeking for something that would give him a hold on the dark, body-bound nature of man, on the soul which, intangibly interwoven with the world and with matter, appeared before itself in the terrifying form of strange, demoniacal figures and seemed to be the secret source of life-shortening diseases. The Church might exorcise demons and banish them, but that only alienated man from his own nature, which, unconscious of itself, had clothed itself in these spectral forms. Not separation of the natures but union of the natures was the goal of alchemy. From the time of Democritus its leitmotiv had been: “Nature rejoices in nature, nature conquers nature, nature rules over nature.”5 This principle is pagan in feeling and an expression of nature worship. Nature not only contains a process of transformation—it is itself transformation. It strives not for isolation but for union, for the wedding feast followed by death and rebirth. Paracelsus’s “exaltation in May” is this marriage, the “gamonymus” or hierosgamos of light and darkness in the shape of Sol and Luna. Here the opposites unite what the light from above had sternly divided. This is not so much a reversion to antiquity as a continuation of that religious feeling for nature, so alien to Christianity, which is expressed most beautifully in the “Secret Inscription” in the Great Magic Papyrus of Paris:6
Greetings, entire edifice of the Spirit of the air, greetings, Spirit that penetratest from heaven to earth, and from earth, which abideth in the midst of the universe, to the uttermost bounds of the abyss, greetings, Spirit that penetratest into me, and shakest me, and departest from me in goodness according to God’s will; greetings, beginning and end of irremovable Nature, greetings, thou who revolvest the elements which untiringly render service, greetings, brightly shining sun, whose radiance ministereth to the world, greetings, moon shining by night with disc of fickle brilliance, greetings, all ye spirits of the demons of the air, greetings, ye for whom the greeting is offered in praise, brothers and sisters, devout men and women! O great, greatest. incomprehensible fabric of the world, formed in a circle! Heavenly One, dwelling in the heavens, aetherial spirit, dwelling in the aether, having the form of water, of earth, of fire, of wind, of light, of darkness, star-glittering, damp-fiery-cold Spirit! I praise thee, God of gods, who hast fashioned the world, who hast established the depths upon the invisible support of their firm foundation, who hast separated heaven and earth, and hast encompassed the heavens with golden, eternal wings, and founded the earth upon eternal bases, who hast hung the aether high above the earth, who hast scattered the air with the self-moving wind, who hast laid the waters round about, who callest forth the tempests, the thunder, the lightning, the rain: Destroyer, Begetter of living things, God of the Aeons, great art thou, Lord, God, Ruler of All!
[199] Just as this prayer has come down to us embedded in a mass of magical recipes, so does the lumen naturae rise up from a world of kobolds and other creatures of darkness, veiled in magical spells and almost extinguished in a morass of mystification. Nature is certainly equivocal, and one can blame neither Paracelsus nor the alchemists if, anxiously aware of their responsibilities, they cautiously expressed themselves in parables. This procedure is indeed the more appropriate one in the circumstances. What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right, without our becoming any the wiser: indeed, we can only open up the opposition again. Here only the symbol helps, for, in accordance with its paradoxical nature, it represents the “tertium” that in logic does not exist, but which in reality is the living truth. So we should not begrudge Paracelsus and the alchemists their secret language: deeper insight into the problems of psychic development soon teaches us how much better it is to reserve judgment instead of prematurely announcing to all and sundry what’s what. Of course we all have an understandable desire for crystal clarity, but we are apt to forget that in psychic matters we are dealing with processes of experience, that is, with transformations which should never be given hard and fast names if their living movement is not to petrify into something static. The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but—and this is perhaps just as important—it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels. Thus the symbolic hints of marriage and exaltation in the “true May,” when the heavenly flowers bloom and the secret of the inner man is made manifest, by the very choice and sound of the words convey a vision and experience of a climax whose significance could be amplified only by the finest flights of the poets. But the clear and unambiguous concept would find not the smallest place where it would fit. And yet something deeply significant has been said, for as Paracelsus rightly remarks: “When the heavenly marriage is accomplished, who will deny its superexcellent virtue?”
[200] Paracelsus is concerned here with something of great importance, and in recognition of this I have put in an apologia for the symbol, which unites what is divided. But he too felt the need of some explanation. Thus he says in the second chapter of Book V that man has two life forces: one of them natural, the other “aerial, wherein is nothing of the body.” (We would say that life has a physiological and a psychic aspect.) He therefore ends De vita longa with a discussion of incorporeal things. “Miserable in this respect are mortals to whom Nature has denied her first and best treasure, which the monarchy of Nature contains, namely, the lumen naturae!”7 he exclaims, leaving us in no doubt what the lumen naturae meant to him. He says that he will now go beyond Nature and consider Aniadus. Let no one take exception to what he will now set forth concerning the power of the Guarini, Saldini, Salamandrini, and Melusina. If any should be astonished at his words, he should not let that detain him, but should rather read to the end, when he will understand all.
[201] Those live longest, says Paracelsus, who have lived “the aerial life” (vitam aeream). Their life lasts anything from six hundred to a thousand or eleven hundred years, and this is because they have lived in accordance with the “rule of the Magnalia, which are easily understood.” One should therefore imitate Aniadus, “and that by means of the air alone”—that is, by psychic means—“whose power is so great that the end of life has nothing in common with it. Further, if the said air be wanting, that which lies hidden in the capsule will burst forth.” By the “capsule” Paracelsus probably means the heart. The soul or anima iliastri dwells in the fire of the heart. It is impassibilis (non-sentient, incapable of suffering), whereas the cagastric soul, which is passibilis, “floats” on the water of the capsule.8 The heart is also the seat of the imagination, and is the “sun in the Microcosm.”9 Hence the anima iliastri can burst forth from the heart when it lacks “air”; that is to say, if psychic remedies are not applied, death occurs prematurely.10 Paracelsus continues: “But if this [i.e., the anima iliastri] should be wholly filled with that [air] which renews itself again, and is then moved into the centre, that is, outside that under which it lay hidden before and still lies hid [i.e., in the heart capsule], then as a tranquil thing it is not heard at all by anything corporeal, and resounds only as Aniadus, Adech, and Edochinum. Whence comes the birth of that great Aquaster, which is born beyond Nature” (i.e., supernaturally).11
[202] The meaning of this laborious explanation seems to be that by psychic means the soul is not only prevented from escaping but is also brought back into the centre, the heart region. But this time it is not enclosed in the capsula cordis, where it lay hidden and as it were imprisoned till then; it is now outside its previous habitation. This indicates a certain degree of freedom from bondage to the body, hence the “tranquillity” of the soul, which, when it dwelt inside the heart, was too much exposed to the power of imagination, to Ares and the formative principle. The heart, for all its virtues, is a restless and emotional thing, all too easily swayed by the turbulence of the body. In it dwells that lower, earthbound, “cagastric” soul which has to be separated from the higher, more spiritual Iliaster. In this liberated and more tranquil sphere the soul, unheard by the body, can re-echo those higher entities, Aniadus, Adech, and Edochinum, who form the upper triad.
[203] We have seen already that Adech stands for the inner homo maximus. He is the astral man, the manifestation of the macrocosm in the microcosm. Since he is named along with Aniadus and Edochinum, they are probably parallel designations. Aniadus certainly has this meaning, as mentioned earlier. Edochinum seems to be a variant of Enochdianus: Enoch belonged to the race of protoplasts related to the Original Man, who “tasted not death,” or at any rate lived for several hundred years. The three different names are probably only amplifications of the same conception—that of the deathless Original Man, to whom the mortal man can be approximated by means of the alchemical opus. As a result of this approximation the powers and attributes of the homo maximus flow like a helpful and healing stream into the earthly nature of the microcosmic mortal man. Paracelsus’s conception of the homo maximus does much to elucidate the psychological motives of the alchemical opus in general, since it shows how the main product of the work, the aurum non vulgi or lapis philosophorum, came to have such a variety of names and definitions: elixir, panacea, tincture, quintessence, light, east, morning, Aries, living fount, fruit-tree, animal, Adam, man, homo altus, form of man, brother, son, father, pater mirabilis, king, hermaphrodite, deus terrenus, salvator, servator, filius macrocosmi, and so on.12 In comparison with the “mille nomina” of the alchemists, Paracelsus used only about ten names for this entity, which exercised the speculative fantasy of the alchemists for more than sixteen hundred years.
[204] Dorn’s commentary lays particular emphasis on the significance of this passage. According to him, these three—Aniadus, Adech, and Edochinum—form the one “pure and well-tempered element” (elementum purum temperatum) as contrasted with the four, impure, gross, and worldly elements, which are far removed from longevity. From these three comes the “mental vision” of that great Aquaster, which is born supernaturally. That is to say, from the Aniadic mother, with the aid of Adech and through the power of the imagination, comes the great vision, which impregnates the supernatural matrix so that it gives birth to the invisible foetus of longevity, that is created or begotten by the invisible or extrinsic Iliaster. Dorn’s insistence on three as opposed to four is based on his polemical attitude to the axiom of Maria and to the relation of the quaternity to the Trinity, which I have discussed elsewhere.13 Characteristically, Dorn overlooks the fact that the fourth is in this case the microcosmic mortal man, who complements the upper triad.14
[205] Union with the homo maximus produces a new life, which Paracelsus calls “vita cosmographica.” In this life “time appears as well as the body Jesahach” (cum locus tum corpus Jesahach).15 Locus can mean “time” as well as “space,” and since, as we shall see, Paracelsus is here concerned with a sort of Golden Age, I have translated it as “time.” The corpus Jesahach may thus be the corpus glorificationis, the resurrected body of the alchemists, and would coincide with the corpus astrale.
[206] In this last chapter Paracelsus makes almost untranslatable allusions to the four Scaiolae, and it is not at all clear what could be meant. Ruland, who had a wide knowledge of the contemporary Paracelsist literature, defines them as “spiritual powers of the mind” (spirituales mentis vires), qualities and faculties which are fourfold, to correspond with the four elements. They are the four wheels of the fiery chariot that swept Elijah up to heaven. The Scaiolae, he says, originate in the mind of man, “from whom they depart and to whom they are turned back” (a quo recedunt, et ad quem reflectuntur).
[207] Like the four seasons and the four quarters of heaven, the four elements are a quaternary system of orientation which always expresses a totality. In this case it is obviously the totality of the mind (animus), which here would be better translated as “consciousness” (including its contents). The orienting system of consciousness has four aspects, which correspond to four empirical functions: thinking, feeling, sensation (sense-perception), intuition. This quaternity is an archetypal arrangement.16 As an archetype, it can be interpreted in any number of ways, as Ruland shows: he interprets the four first of all psychologically, as phantasia17 imaginatioa,18 speculatio,19 and agnata fides (inborn faith). This interpretation is of value only so far as it alludes unmistakably to certain psychic functions. Since every archetype is psychologically a fascinosum, i.e., exerts an influence that excites and grips the imagination, it is liable to clothe itself in religious ideas (which are themselves of an archetypal nature). Accordingly Ruland says that the four Scaiolae also stand for the four main articles20 of the Christian faith: baptism, belief in Jesus Christ, the sacrament of the Last Supper, and love of one’s neighbour.21 In Paracelsus, Scaioli are lovers of wisdom. He says: “Ye pious filii Scaiolae et Anachmi.”22 The Anachmus (= Aniadus) is therefore closely connected with the four Scaiolae. So it would not be overbold to conclude that the four Scaiolae correspond to the traditional quadripartite man and express his all-encompassing wholeness. The quadripartite nature of the homo maximus is the basis and cause of all division into four: four elements, seasons, directions, etc.23 In this last chapter, says Paracelsus, the Scaiolae caused him the greatest difficulties,24 “for in them is nothing of mortality.” But, he assures us, whoever lives “by reason of the Scaiolae” is immortal, and he proves this by the example of the Enochdiani and their descendants. Dorn explains the difficulty of the Scaiolae by saying that the mind must exercise itself with extraordinary labours (mentem exercere miris laboribus), and, as there is in the Scaiolae nothing of mortality, this work exceeds our mortal endeavours.25
[208] Although Dorn, like Ruland, emphasizes the psychic nature of the Scaiolae (“mental powers and virtues, properties of the arts of the mind”), so that actually they are attributes of the natural man and must therefore be mortal, and although Paracelsus himself says in other writings that even the lumen naturae is mortal, it is nevertheless asserted here that the natural powers of the mind are immortal and belong to the Archa—the principle that existed before the world. We hear nothing more about the “mortality” of the lumen naturae, but rather of eternal principles, of the invisibilis homo maximus (Dorn) and his four Scaiolae, which appear to be interpreted as mental powers and psychological functions. This contradiction is resolved when we bear in mind that these concepts of Paracelsus were the result not of rational reflection but of intuitive introspection, which was able to grasp the quaternary structure of consciousness and its archetypal nature. The one is mortal, the other immortal.
[209] Dorn’s explanation as to why the Scaiolae are “difficult” might also be extended to Adech (= Adam, Anthropos),26 who is the ruler of the Scaiolae and/or their quintessence. Paracelsus actually calls him “that difficult Adech.” Also, it is “that great Adech” who hinders our intentions.27 The difficulties of the art play no small role in alchemy. Generally they are explained as technical difficulties, but often enough, in the Greek texts as well as in the later Latin ones, there are remarks about the psychic nature of the dangers and obstacles that complicate the work. Partly they are demonic influences, partly psychic disturbances such as melancholia. These difficulties find expression also in the names and definitions of the prima materia, which, as the raw material of the opus, provides ample occasion for wearisome trials of patience. The prima materia is, as one can so aptly say in English, “tantalizing”: it is cheap as dirt and can be had everywhere, only nobody knows it; it is as vague and evasive as the lapis that is to be produced from it; it has a “thousand names.” And the worst thing is that without it the work cannot even be begun. The task of the alchemist is obviously like shooting an arrow through a thread hung up in a cloud, as Spitteler says. The prima materia is “saturnine,” and the malefic Saturn is the abode of the devil, or again it is the most despised and rejected thing, “thrown out into the street,” “cast on the dunghill,” “found in filth.” These epithets reflect not only the perplexity of the investigator but also his psychic background, which animates the darkness lying before him, so that he discovers in the projection the qualities of the unconscious. This easily demonstrable fact helps to elucidate the darkness that shrouds his spiritual endeavours and the labor Sophiae: it is a process of coming to terms with the unconscious, which always sets in when a man is confronted with its darkness. This confrontation forced itself on the alchemist as soon as he made a serious effort to find the prima materia.
[210] I do not know how many or how few people today can imagine what “coming to terms with the unconscious” means. I fear they are only too few. But perhaps it will be conceded that the second part of Goethe’s Faust presents only incidentally and in doubtful degree an aesthetic problem, but primarily and in far greater degree a human one. It was a preoccupation that accompanied the poet right into old age, an alchemical encounter with the unconscious, comparable to the labor Sophiae of Paracelsus. It is on the one hand an endeavour to understand the archetypal world of the psyche, on the other hand a struggle against the sanity-threatening danger of fascination by the measureless heights and depths and paradoxes of psychic truth. The denser, concretistic, daytime mind here reaches its limits; for the “Cedurini” (Paracelsus), the “men of crasser temperament” (Dorn), there is no way into “the untrodden, the untreadable regions”—“and in this place,” says Paracelsus, “the Aquaster does not break in” (the damp soul that is akin to matter). Here the human mind is confronted with its origins, the archetypes; the finite consciousness with its archaic foundations; the mortal ego with the immortal self, Anthropos, purusha, atman, or whatever else be the names that human speculation has given to that collective preconscious state from which the individual ego arose. Kinsman and stranger at once, it recognizes and yet does not recognize that unknown brother who steps towards it, intangible yet real. The more it is bound by time and space, the more it will feel the other as “that difficult Adech” who crosses its purpose at every misguided step, who gives fate an unexpected twist, and sets it as a task the very thing it feared. Here we must feel our way with Paracelsus into a question that was never openly asked before in our culture, and was never clearly put, partly from sheer unconsciousness, partly from holy dread. Moreover, the secret doctrine of the Anthropos was dangerous because it had nothing to do with the teachings of the Church, since from that point of view Christ was a reflection—and only a reflection—of the inner Anthropos. Hence there were a hundred good reasons for disguising this figure in indecipherable secret names.
[211] That being so, we may perhaps be able to understand another dark passage from the concluding chapter, which runs: “If, therefore, I should count myself among the Scaiolae [or: Scaioli, ‘lovers of wisdom’] in the manner of the Necrolii [= adepts], that would be something which in my view should be undertaken, but it is hindered by that great Adech, who deflects our purpose but not the procedure. I leave this to you theoreticians to discuss.”28
[212] One gets the impression that Adech is almost hostile to the adept, or at least intent on frustrating him in some way. From our above reflections, which are based on practical experience, we have seen how problematical is the relation of the ego to the self. We have only to make the further assumption that this is what Paracelsus meant. And this does indeed seem to be the case: he “counts himself” among the Scaioli, the philosophers, or “implants himself” in the Scaiolae, the quaternity of the Original Man—which seems to me a quite possible conception since another synonym for the quaternity is Paradise with its four rivers, or the eternal city, the Metropolis, with its four gates29 (the alchemical equivalent is the domus sapientiae and the squared circle). He would thus find himself in the immediate vicinity of Adech and would be a citizen of the eternal city—another echo of Christian ideas. The fact that Adech does not deflect the work (modus here presumably means method, procedure, as contrasted with propositum, purpose, intention) is understandable since Paracelsus is no doubt speaking of the alchemical opus, which always remains the same as a general procedure though its goal may vary: sometimes it is the production of gold (chrysopoea), sometimes the elixir, sometimes the aurum potabile or, finally, the mysterious filius unicus. Also, the artifex can have a selfish or an idealistic attitude towards the work.