The noble genius of Paracelsus

Book excerpt: Paracelsus was the most wondrous intellect of his age and original thinker. Bold creator of chemical medicines, founder of courageous parties, ever victorious in controversy. He belonged to those great minds who have created a new mode of thinking on the natural existence of things. More than one pathologist, chemist, homœopathist, and magnetist has quenched his thirst for knowledge in his books. Alkahest, a Paracelsian term for which there is no end to the assumed explanations, is Chaos, i.e., primordial undifferentiated substance, containing within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man, including the “breath of life” itself in a latent state, ready to be awakened. Chaos is another name for Æther, the celestial virgin and spiritual mother of every form and being in the manifested world. Alkahest was used by Paracelsus to denote the menstruum or universal solvent that is capable of reducing all things. But the real alkahest is the all-pervading Divine Spirit of the higher Initiate, not the all-geist of the inferior Alchemist. Paracelsus was the greatest chemist of his age and peer of modern scientists. But he exhausted his ingenuity in endless transpositions of letters and abbreviations of words and sentences. For example, when he wrote sutratur he meant tartar; and by mutrin, nitrum! By mercurius vitæ, he meant the living spirit or aura of silver, not the quicksilver. Paracelsus declared that the affinity between stars and man is due to their identical composition. Embodied existence is the outcome of reciprocal sympathies and antipathies between the starry sky and man. Our body comes from terrestrial elements; the thinking principle, from the stars. It is not the spirits of heaven and hell that are the masters of nature but the Spirit of Man which is concealed in him, as the fire is concealed in the flint. Every living being possesses his own celestial power and is closely allied with heaven. The fact that everyone affects another and all, mutually and reciprocally, is evidence of the universal sympathy and antipathy that exists between everyone and everything. Éliphas Lévi quotes approvingly the doctrine of Paracelsus that every man, animal, and plant bears external and internal evidence of the influences dominant at the moment of germinal development. Pure magic stems from the imperial will of man. Will is neither spirit nor substance but everlasting ideation. Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. Paracelsus is the father of modern magic and proponent of the occult physics of the Kabbalah and Magnetism. True Magic is occult wisdom; reason, the folly of man. No armour can protect against Black Magic, for it injures the inward spirit of life. But there is a divine power in every man, which is to rule his life, and which no one can influence for evil, not even the greatest magician. Let men bring their lives under its guidance, and they have nothing to fear from man or devil. The great Adept removed disease by applying a healthy organism to the afflicted part. Watch out! A would-be healer, who is physically or morally ill, not only fails to heal but often imparts his illness to his patient, thus robbing him of what strength he may have. The divine spirit is a great thing, so great that no one can fully express its greatness. It requires no conjuration or ceremonies. Circle-making and incense burning are all tomfoolery and temptation by which only evil spirits are attracted, says Paracelsus. If we only knew the power of the heart, nothing would be impossible for us. The whole world is one living organism and outcome of a single creative effort. There is no death and nothing “dead” throughout nature. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone has ever been “created,” and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced becoming, by expanding from within without, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance in the abyss of matter. According to the Hermetico-Kabbalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster that evolved out of its “chaotic” self a new Kosmos. Yliaster is the universal matrix of Kosmos, the Father-Mother within. It is beyond space, time, and intellectual comprehension. Yliaster is Anima Mundi, the noumenon of Astral Light, and a cosmic veil between earth and the waters of Space that sprang out of Chaos. The Swiss-German Adept rediscovered some of the lost secrets of the Phrygian priests and the Asclepieia. He was a learned Theosophist and a far-famed physician-Occultist. He taught that Fire, i.e., the Spirit of the Flame, is the highest God. The Hermetic Fire is a ray of the One eternal and infinite Flame that starts from, and is immediately reabsorbed into, the parent essence. The Spirit of the Flame is invisible to all except to the eyes of another immortal Spirit. The occult properties of medicinal plants and minerals, and of the curative powers of certain things in nature, are far more important and useful than metaphysical and psychological Occultism or Theophany.