Paracelsus - part 1

“We see in Paracelsus not only a pioneer in the domains of chemical medicine, but also in those of an empirical psychological healing science.”- Carl Jung

“To Paracelsus the world is indebted for much of their knowledge it now possesses of the ancient systems of medicine. Paracelsus devoted his entire life to the study and exposition of Hermetic philosophy. Every notion and theory was grist to his mill, and, while members of the medical fraternity belittle his memory now as they opposed his system then, the occult world knows that he will yet be recognized as the greatest physician of all times. While the heterodox and exotic temperament of Paracelsus has been held against him by his enemies, and his wanderlust has been called vagabondage, he was one of the few minds who intelligently sought to reconcile the art of healing with the philosophical and religious systems of paganism and Christianity.” - Manly Palmer Hall

“God did not create the planets and stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, shoud obey and serve him.” - Paracelsus (1)

The Birth and Education of Paracelsus

Wilhelm was a German physician and chemist and the illegitimate member of the very old and noble Bombast (or Banbast) family of Swabia. His father had been a Grand Master of the Knights of St. John. Elsa Ochsner was from Switzerland and a bondswoman of the Benedictine abbey. These two souls lived in a little village called Einsiedeln near Zürich, Switzerland. Their house was situated near the route of the pilgrims that journeyed year after year to the shrine of the Black Mother God in Einsiedeln. This suited Wilhelm who treated many of them after their hardships on the road.

Two years into the marriage a child was born that they named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus as he would become known. The exact date of birth is not clear. Either it was on the 17th of December 1493 or on the 26th of November 1498, nevertheless the world into which this boy came was changing.

Diaz had reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1486 and Christopher Columbus re-discovered America in 1492 after the Vikings accidental encounter with the continent, much like Columbus did, back in 986. Both ignoring the fact that the inhabitants of America already were quite aware of its existence. In 1496 Vasco de Gama opened up the sea route to India and one year later Cabot reached Labrador, and in China a man used the first ever toothbrush. No longer was the world thought of as a mass of land, but as a mass of water. Still the dogmas of Galen prevailed in medicine and Paracelsus would try, throughout his life, to oppose those obsolete ideas.

Why he would choose to call himself Paracelsus when he became older is a mystery. It is believed he derived it from a great first century Roman physichian by the name of Celsus. Paracelsus, then, could mean greater than Celsus or beyond Celsus. But his name is not important it is the man that is and what he belived and discovered.

It was in his youth that Paracelsus became interested in the writings of Isaac of Holland and as a result he became determined to reform the medical science of his day. This of course also came from the fact that both his parents were interested in medicine and chemistry. His father had taught him to see nature with his own eyes tunring him into a great observationalist. He also learned from his father a great deal about biology, surgery, basics of medicine, alchemy and chemical and metallurgical priciples.

At the end of the 15th century the art of the physician was a secretive and lucrative business. Leonardo da Vinci said on the matter:

“Strive to preserve your health, and in this you will better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines.”

So strong was the dogma that it needed a man of extraordinary stubbornness to topple it. Paracelsus would come to enjoy that quality. When he was nine years old his mother Elsa committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. After this disaster his father moved, in 1502, to Villach in Carinthia where he had accepted a position as municipal physician taking his son with him. Villach was a mining village where Paracelsus would spend the rest of his childhood. He later wrote:

“By nature I am not subtly spun, nor is it the custom of my native land to accomplish anything by spinning silk. Nor are we raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheaten bread, but on cheese, milk and oatcakes, which cannot give one a subtle disposition. Moreover, a man clings all his days to what he received in his youth; and my youth was coarse as compared to that of the subtle, pampered, and over-refined. For those who are raised in soft clothes and in women's apartments and we who are brought up among the pine-cones have trouble in understanding one another well.”

Paracelsus learned from churchmen versed in medicine and occult lore and he trained in a mining school as an analyst but at the age of fourteen he decided he wanted to become a doctor and left home to go to medical school destined for a life of constant squabblings with the dogmas of his day.

Over the next five years Paracelsus attended several prestigious universities throughout Europe. But he found no teacher he could respect.

“How have the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses? The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller, for knowledge is experience.”

The Wandering Physician

At seventeen he earned a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna and six years later he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Ferrara. During the next decade he wandered gaining experience all over Europe visiting most of its countries including Russia. He served as a surgeon in Denmark and Sweden for the Venitian army. (3) Worked in the Fugger mines in the Tyrol. Journeyed to the island of Rhodes and then onto Arabia and Egypt to further his alchemical studies. Paracelsus wrote:

“Therefore I consider that it is for me a matter of praise, not of blame, that I have hitherto and worthily pursued my wanderings. For this will I bear witness respecting nature: he who will investigate her ways must travel her books with his feet. That which is written is investigated not through letters, but nature from land to land - as often a land so often a leaf. Thus is the codex of Nature, thus must its leaves be turned.”

“The journeys which I have thus far made have profited me much, for the reason that no man’s master is in his home and none has his teacher in the chimney-corner. Thus the arts are not all confined within one’s fatherland, but they are distributed over the whole world. Not that they are in one man alone, or in one place: on the contrary, they must be gathered together, sought out and captured, where they are.”

Gypsies taught him about simples and Arabs the making of talismans and the influence of heavenly bodies. When in Constantinople he is said to have met an initiate who instructed him in the secret doctrines of the East and the Hermetic arts, which led to his journey to India where the Brahmins instructed him in Nature spirits and the inhabitants of the invisible world. Later he journeyed to the Mahatmas in Tibet. He stated:

“All Wisdom comes from the East.”

The pre-Buddhist ascetics living in their inaccessible retreat amongst the Himalayas are known as The Brothers of the Snowy Range or The Great Teachers of the Snowy Mountain. Emperor Yu (2207 B.C.) said he aquired his wisdom from these brothers and theosophists call them Mahatmas, Masters of Wisdom and Compassion, who have renounced bliss to remain on Earth for the benefit of the humans and their sufferings. Some exist in physical bodies others in an invisible, astral, form. These later ones are called the Nirmanakayas. (4) The aborigines of modern Tibet are a degraded race and descendants of these wise and mighty forefathers. Paracelsus have been thought of as a member of The Brothers of the Snowy Range but it is a fact that can not be proven.

Wherever he went he practiced medicine learning from any source that was available, studying local diseases and healing the sick, which for Paracelsus was much more important than a medical career serving orthodox medicine.

During his wanderings it has been suggested that Paracelsus met Solomon Trismosin who became his teacher. Solomon was a legendary alchemist that is said to have lived 150 years because of his alchemical knowledge. He claimed to have secured the secret formula of transmutation thus made vasts amount of gold. In a manuscript entitled Alchemical Wanderings dated 1582, now in the British Museum, the following statement can be found:

“Study what thou art, whereof thou art a part, what thou knowest of this art, this is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within, thus wrote Trismosin.”

As his knowledge increased the urge to share it with the world grew, but none wanted to listen, and he became bitter. The more he was ignored the louder he screamed, and the more he was disregarded the more aggressive he became.


A 16th Century Punk

Colomubs was now long dead (1506) and Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis on the church door at Wittenberg in 1517. This was followed by the deaths of such famous people as Leonardo da Vinci (1519), Magellan (1521) and Vasco da Gama (1524). The world had lost many of its discoverers. Around Europe witches were still hunted, accused and burned.

In the town of Basel, in Switzerland, the famous book printer Johann Froben (5) suffered horrible pains in his right foot from an accident and the doctors advised him to amputate. Froben knew of the wandering physician and decided to get his opinion, so in 1526 Paracelsus arrived at Basel and managed to treat, and cure, the patient without the use of a knife.

At this time the office of town physician fell vacant so the municipal council offered Paracelsus the position, which also entitled him to give lectures at the university. (6) But the quiet little town wasn’t quite ready to understand and accept such a freethinking spirit of such a violent temper.

The professors did not like Paracelsus from the start because he refused to take the Hippocratic oath that among other things made the physician swear that he would guard his professional knowledge. (7) Having already declared himself Paracelsus and publicly burned books by Galen and Avicenna, which he threw into a student bonfire on St. John’s Day on the 24th of June 1527, he would not last long.

Paracelsus also, as the first man to do so, wrote scientific books in the language of the common people, which did not agree with the establishment. Everyone was shockingly invited to his lectures, which he gave in German and not in Latin, using the opportunity to make fun at the medical dogma calling physicians couch-sitters not considering the patients needs only his wallet. His cap, he said, had more learning in it than all the heads in the university. He labelled contemporary medicine a whore and declared that the practic of bleeding was barbaric insisting that wounds dressed in moss and dung caused infection and prevented draining.

“If you prevent infection nature will heal the wound all by herself.”

Everything was under his attack. In a sense he could be thought of as a 16th century punk angrily kicking at the heavy tenets of 16th century medicine. He wrote:

“All they [physicians] can do is prudently observe the patient and make their guesses about his condition; and the patient may rest satisfied if the medicines administered to him do no serious harm, and do not prevent his recovery. The best of our popular physicians are the ones that do least harm. But, unfortunately, some poison their patients with mercury, others purge or bleed them to death. There are some who have learned so much that their learning has driven out all their common sense, and there are others who care a great deal more for their own profit than for the health of their patients. A disease does not change its state to accommodate itself to the knowledge of the physician, but the physician should understand the causes of the disease. A physician should be a servant of Nature, and not her enemy; he should be able to guide and direct her in her struggle for life and not throw, by his unreasonable interference, fresh obstacles in the way of recovery.”

It has been said that the word Bombastic, a synonym of self-righteous and pompous language, is derived from Paracelsus surname Bombastus. True or false his enemies took advatage of his behaviour. Many rumours were spread about him.

Paracelsus was accused of being an alcoholic despite the fact that he possessed a stunning mental clarity and produced vast amounts of written material. Whether an exagerrated fact, or a complete lie, Paracelus was the victim of envy. He did bring about remarkable cures that could not be argued. The most common diseases of his day were treated by him and is said to have cured leprosy, cholera and cancer. All but raising the dead.

Yet it wasn’t only his brain that caused ridicule his appearace did too. Paracelsus head was disproportionately large, his torso pear-shaped, his hips were wide and feminine and his lips protruding . Rumours began that he was actually a woman or a eunuch.

He was with all likely-hood riduculed for his looks and his rude and self-praising behaviour was a natural result. Women treated him the same and there is no recorded or known love affair. His hatred of the opposite sex could be explained by how he was treated by them, and it is impossible to know, but the suicide of his mother must have caused him some mental anguish.

It is very difficult for a man, or a woman, that wishes not to belong to the dogma and tradition of their day. Even more so when there is no theoretical or practical body of knowledge that can counter the heavy weight of tradition looming above.

Paracelsus was such a man, ahead of his time, filled with the knowing that he was right but empty of proof that he was. In the same manner that Martin Luther (8) opposed the Pope Paracelsus opposed the Pope of Medicine Galen, or more precise, Galenism.

Claudius Galenus of Pergamum, or Galen, (9) was a Greek physician and his views would come to dominate European medicine for over a thousand years. Most of his knowledge he gained from dissecting animals, some while they were still alive, or from what he saw inside the wounds of gladiators. Even though he changed the view by Aristotle that the mind was in the brain and not in the heart and that arteries carry blood not air his knowledge is mostly flawed. For example he spread the idea that bloodletting was a good treatment, but Galen himself was very much like Paracelsus a man obsessed with finding out the truth.

“…from my very youth I despised the opinion of the multitude and longed for truth and knowledge, believing that there was for man no possession more noble or divine.”

But so revered became his discovery and his knowledge that it turned into a dogma that, for fifteen hundred years, was the main source for European physicians studying the body completely ignoring Galen’s own suggestion:

“If anyone wishes to observe the works of Nature, he should put his trust not in books on anatomy but in his own eyes…”

Paracelsus - part 2

Footnotes:
(1) All quotes of Paracelsus are derived from his numerous manuscripts and I have decided to omit the exact source for the benefit of flow and space (to the frustrating vanity of the translators). If you are interested then not one particular book or manuscript can be recommended. I suggest you try and get hold of anything you can. A lot of it is in German, but there is plenty to be found in English and in other languages as well. The best thing is to read his own words and not books discussing his writings or person apart from this one. Good luck in your hunt.
(3) Many mercenary armies ravaged Europe in endless wars of this period.
(4) Literally meaning a transformed body, yet it is a state not having any objective existence. As a Nirmankaya, the person leaves behind only the physical body, and retains every other principle and it can never be resurrected from this state.
(5) Born 1460 and died in 1527. He founded one of the most influential early presses and published the first printed New Testament in Greek.
(6) Recommended by Froben and Erasmus (1466-1536) whom Paracelsus also treated.
(7) “Give not that which his holy unto dogs, neither cast ye pearls before the swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” from St. Matthew (7:6).
(8) During Paracelsus lifetime he was called, by some, the Luther of Medicine.
(9) Approximately born in 130 and died in 200.

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