Paracelsus - part 2

On the Origin of Truly Insane People

Paracelsus was a humanist considering his patient as a human being realizing that individualization is necessary, especially with mental disorders, because it is a higly individual phenomenon.

“As long as one wishes to ride all horses with one saddle and recognise not disease in its essence, rather, what comes into each man’s head, is his art, there is yet no experience nor truth established.”

To follow Galen was to be professional and since Paracelsus didn’t he wasn’t considered serious enough. In the matter of mental diseases Paracelsus was centuries ahead. Mental disorder was, for a long time, considered to be a matter for theology and not of medicine. In fact the traditions of treating mental disorders was not abandoned until 200 years after Paracelsus death.

There is a mystery on how Paracelsus received his great knowledge on the illness of the mind. Nothing of what he wrote was practiced in the times he lived. He anticipated the descriptive methods of psychiatry and the clinical manifestations of epilepsy, mania and hysteria. He truly possessed a complete intellectual freedom not afraid to admit whenever he came across something new. In a chapter entitled On the Origin of Truly Insane People Paracelsus lists four kinds if insane people.

Lunatici
The moon does not posses the brain but attracts, like a magnet, reason out of it. The power of attraction is at its height during the full moon and somewhat the same during the new moon.

Insani
Insanity brought from the womb through family heritage.

Vesani
The loss of reason and sense through the use of food and drink.

Melancholici
Those people who lose reason by their own nature by “…driving the spiritus vitae up towards the brain so that it is too much of it there.” (1)

Paracelsus and Religion

The Catholic Church banned Paracelsus ideas and even though a born Catholic he denounced public prayers, church-going, bowing, saint worship and observance of church rules. On an essay on nymphs he clearly expressed his views:

“…there are more superstitio in the Roman Church than in all these women and witches. And so it may be a warning that if superstitio turns a man into a serpent, it also turns him into a devil. That is, if it happens to nymhps, it also happens to you in the Roman Church. That is, you too will be transformed into such serpents, you who now are pretty and handsome, adorned with large diadems and jewels. In the end you will be a serpent and a dragon...”

Paracelsus approved of Martin Luther’s Reformation yet took no part in it. His individualism clashed with the dogmas of the church instead believing in self-reliance. He wished people would realize their inherent Godhood. The divine Wisdom is a greater power than that which saints and gods can give. Only through the abandonment of personal self can man see, feel, the presence of God within rising above illusions into truth.

“Try to understand yourselves in the light of Nature and then all wisdom will come to you.”

Paracelsus and the Hermetic Arts

The Renaissance saw a rise in intrest of science and medicine. Great lenghts were taken to create new translations of such respected authors as Aristotle, Galen, Hiprocates and Ptolemy because the Latin translations of the Middle Ages were no longer acceptable. Some of these translators studied Greek so they could directly do justice to these ancient treasures. But the hunt for original manuscripts led to the discovery of new ones.

The recovery of the Corpus Hermetica was a major event for all intellectuals, especially Paracelsus who found great knowledge in the Emerald Tablet. (2) Scorning his fellow doctors he stated that:

“…the ancient Emerald Tablet shows more art and experience in philosophy, alchemy, magic, and the like, than could ever be taught by you and your crowd of followers.”

Paracelsus tried to apply the principles of the Emerald Tablet everywhere he could and he wrote a great deal on the subject openly preaching the correspondences between the Above and Below careful not to say too much.

“To write more about this mystery is forbidden and further revelation is the prerogative of the divine power. For this art is truly a gift of God; wherefore, not everyone can understand it.”

Paracelsus considered magic to be Supreme Wisdom and not sorcery. A person that is Master of Heaven and Earth by his own free will is called a Magus.

“There is nothing dead in Nature, Everything is organic and living, therefore the world appears to be a living organism.”

According to Paracelsus life exists in every form, moving slower in the mineral kingdom and rapidly in the plants and animal kingdoms. Nature (the universe) is an organism where all things harmonize and sympathize with each other. Man is the microcosm and nature is the macrocosm, and together they are one. The unity of man and nature is the heart through which the physical, astral and spiritual forces manifest themselves.

Paracelsus popularized the notion of these three heavenly forces and was the first to call them Salt, Sulphur and Mercury. (3) When the three substances were in harmony health was the result, if in disharmony disease and if in disruption death.

SALT = the physical body
SULPHUR = the indwelling energizing nature, the astral man
MERCURY = the intelligence, the indwelling God, the Spirit and above Salt and Sulphur.

There is one vital substance in Nature upon which all things subsist. It is called the archæus, or vital life force, and is synonymous with the astral light or spiritual air of the ancients. The vehicle for the archæus Paracelsus called the mumia. A good example of a physical mumia is vaccine, which is a vehicle of a semi-astral virus.

In other words anything that serves as a medium for the transmission of the archæus, organic or inorganic, truly physical or partly spiritualized, was termed mumia. The most universal form of mumia was ether, which modern science has accepted as a hypothetical substance serving as a medium between the realm of vital energy and that of organic and inorganic substance.

To control universal energy is virtually impossible save through one of its vehicles (the mumia). Man does not secure nourishment from dead animal or plant organisms, but when he incorporates their structure into his own body he first gains control over the mumia, or etheric double, of the animal or plant. Having obtained this control the human organism then diverts the flow of the archæus to his own uses.

For example if we eat the flesh of a ferocious animal we would become ferocious ourselves. The mumia of any creature, according to Paracelsus, is closely connected to the bloodstream. Hence any substance taken into the bloodstream makes a direct magnetic connection between the mumia of the person receiving the substance and the mumia of the animal or person whom it was taken.

“That which constitutes life is contained in the Mumia, and by imparting the Mumia we impart life.”

Paracelsus divulges the secrets of the remedial properties of talismans and amulets. For the mumia of substances of which they are composed serves as a channel to connect the person wearing them with certain manifestations of the universal life force.

Paracelsus declared that the mumia of a person may be strengthened by the power of imagination, which is a tremendous force, able to create actual images in the astral light, and to give a kind of consciousness to those forms.

“Imagination is a great power, and if the world knew what strange things can be produced by the power of imagination, the public authorities would cause idle people to go to work.”

Paracelsus saw the mind as the most powerful healing power and he stressed the importance of the patient’s thoughts and emotion introducing the concept of holistic healing. He was certain everything in the universe was good for something.

At his estate in Hohenheim he gathered dew during ceratain configurations of the planets on glass plates, at midnight, discovering the water possessed medicinal virtues absorbing the properties of the heavenly bodies. But as popular as astrology was in his day he did not fully endorse it.

“The stars determine nothing, incline nothing, suggest nothing; we are as free from them as they are from us. The stars and all the firmament cannot affect our body, nor our color, beauty and gestures, not our virtues and vices… the course of Saturnus can neither prolong or shorten a man’s life.”

The magnet appealed to Paracelus and he referred to it as a Monarch of Secrets placing it above all other remedies. He explored magnetism and its relation to the human organism. Later his work would inspire the great, and neglected, Anton Mesmer whose tale shall be told in due course. On the subject he wrote:

“The magnet, like the stars and other bodies of the universe is endowed with a subtle emanation, fluidum, that has a favorable influence on the health and life of man. It assures cure for discharging sinuses of the limbs, for fistulae of the various parts of the body, for fluxes of the eye, ear, and nose, and for jaundice and dropsy. It stops hemorrhagic disturbances in women.”

Poor and Homeless

A high ecclesiastic had promised Paracelsus a large sum if he was cured from an abdominal disorder. When Paracelsus did so with a few laudanum pellets the churchman refused to pay. Paracelsus took him to court and lost.

Not understood by his students at the University of Basel, antagonized by his collegues, squabbling with everybody, infurating many doctors and finally when his only ally Froben died suddenly in October of 1527 he one night fled for his life leaving all his manuscripts behind. (4)

“Why do you throw it in my face if I cannot cure impossible things, when you cannot cure the possible? But rather ruin it, so that I must build it up again. How can I cure a cut-off heart, put a cut-off hand back on?”

Paracelus, poor and homeless, lodged with friends, revising his ideas and hoping for a chance to publish them. His treaty on the disease of miners would become the starting point of a new line of medical litterature and was the first ever monograph written on an occupational disease. He declared, from his extensive experience, that the diseases of miners were caused by dust particles and not by the mountain spirits upset by their mining. As the first physician to realize that the agent that makes a man sick can also cure him if administered in small doses he foreshadowed the modern concepts of vaccination and homeopathy.

Paracelsus saw poisons as chemical compounds and introduced the notion of proper dosage. He brought chemistry into medicine and experimented with hydrogen and medicines containing sulphur, copper and iron even curing syphilis with mercury compounds.

“The preparations of Antimony vary with the diseases for which it is administered. That which is used for wounds differs from that which is applied in the case of leprosy. And so of the rest. To take the same preparation of Antimony both in wounds and in leprosy would be a serious error.”

He discovered Laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of opium, and named it after the Latin laudare, which means to praise, because he found it having great medical value unaware of its addictive properties.


The Death and Legacy of Paracelsus

Bishop Palantine of Salzburg offered Paracelsus asylum in 1541. The town had once expelled him but he accepted the invitaiton without any real choice. Whilst staying in a small room in the White Horse Inn, on the 24th of September, he died poor and alone. (5)

“A man’s death is nothing but the end of his daily work, an expiration of air, the consummation of his own balsamic curative power, the extinction of the rational light of nature, and a great desperation of the three - body, soul, and spirit - a return to the womb.”

After a quick burial at the St. Sebastian Church in Salzburg officials turned up a will that distributed his assets to charity, but made no mention of what was to be done with the many manuscripts spread out across the cities of Europe.

One year later Copernicus published On the Revolution of Heavely Spheres proposing that the sun is at the centre and that the planets, including Earth, orbit around it. (6) Andreas Vesalius, one year later after that, published his work On the Structure of the Human Body. It established a standard for anatomical works for many centuries and was the real beginning of the end for Galen. Thus the understanding of the universe continued.

Like many alchemists before, and after, Paracelsus was reported to be seen in several places after his own death having achived immortality by producing the Philosopher’s Stone.

Three hundred years later his grave was exhumed and the body found was identified as his own, still revealing no true cause of death. Immortal or not his legacy lives on, as he himself wrote:

“Eternal Wisdom is without time, without a beginning and without an end.”

During a cholera epidemic in Austria in the 1830’s hundreds of people visited his grave (7) hoping to be cured, and even today some kneel by his tomb, which is a broken pyramid of white marble, praying for cures. He was ignored by the rich but canonized by the poor.

Independent, self-confident, bold and struggling to break free from the chains of tradition Paracelsus tried to understand and explore the truths of the universe before knowledge or language had come of age to formulate what he sought. Nothing can be harder and therefore the greater the respect should be given to a man who tried to fill the dark with light.

It is extremely easy for us now to see when Paracelsus was right and when others were wrong, but it is even easier to forget, and ignore, those very same kind of people that are shouting loudly in our society at the moment for an audience. All they want is for someone to listen. Give them your ear.

Footnotes:
(1) The list is abbreviated and rewritten, but the whole essay is higly recommended if you can get hold of a copy. Look for Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim called Paracelsus, edited with preface by Henry E. Sigerist, 1941, United States of America.
(2) The Corpus Hermetica became known through a translation into Latin that appeared in 1471, which was before Paracelsus own birth implying the possibility that he could have come in contact with it at an early age.
(3) Rejecting the Aristotelian elements of fire, air, earth, and water.
(4) Having spent only about ten months in Basel.
(5) His friends said that he was murdered by an assassin and his enemies that he died in a drunken brawl, but both of these are probably false since he suffered from rickets and propably died prematurely from the wear and tear of an arduous nomadic life.
(6) No church in the world could punish him since he died not soon after in 1543.
(7)The epitaph reads: ”Here lies buried Philipp Theophrastus the famous doctor of medicine who cured wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy and other incurable diseases of the body with wonderful knowledge and who gave his goods to be divided and distributed among the poor. In the year 1541 on the 24th day of September he exchanged life for death. To the living peace, to the entombed eternal rest.”

© deviadah