Transcription
When he finally rose to the teaching podium, I suspect he didn't make much of an impression. Indeed, he was now internally exiled from the Medical Faculty at the University of Basil. He was actually forced to lecture in adjacent outbuildings. At this point, he was in his mid-30s, already bald, and he stood barely 5 feet—about a meter and a half. And out of his mouth, the lecture Thunder Ed, both in content and in language. He indicted the entirety of the medical establishment, including his professorial colleagues, as being little better than butchers and Sue chefs. And he did so in his vernacular Swiss German, peppered with strange new terms, new alchemical theories, references to the gospels, and a Latin so utterly twisted beyond scholastic recognition. He thundered, he raved, and he pioneered.
And as the spring gave way to the summer break in classes, Professor Theophrastus V. Hohenheim—more fully known as Philipus Arolo Theopus Bastas Von Hohenheim, but soon to be known to history simply as Paracelsus—burned the last bridge connected ing him to historical and institutional medical theory and practice. On the 23rd of June 1527, perhaps lugging the massive, multivolume collection of Ais's Canon of Medicine (probably about as big as he was, the standard accepted medical textbook for centuries up to that point), he kindled a fire. And into those flames, he cast not only thousands of pages of current medical theory and practice, but he also cast his lot into history.
And by the late 1520s and early 1530s, Professor Theophrastus Von Hohenheim now appeared on the world stage not only as Paracelsus, but also composing the "Par" works: the revolutionary *Paragranum*, "The Against the Grain," and also the *Paramirum*, "The Beyond Wonders, Beyond Miracles." In the early 1530s, having covered the *parag* in a previous episode (that was the work inaugurating the Paracelsian Revolution), let's introduce the mammoth work of theory and practice at the foundation of that revolution: the *Paramirum*, "The Beyond All Wonders." Here, we will find the famed theory of the Trio Prima—sulfur, salt, and mercury—his alchemical, hermetic theory of the human body, and a medicine founded on that very hermetic principle that the microcosm down here is truly bound up with the cosmic macrocosm: "As Above, So Below." A medical philosophy that foresaw, in fact, organic chemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, even psychiatry: the Paracelsian Revolution in alchemical medicine.
If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, cabala, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content and topics on esotericism, including a huge several hundred videos in the backlog and curated playlists. Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I hope you consider supporting my work over at my Patreon, with a one-time donation via PayPal, check out the Super Thanks options below the video, or you can pick up some of the cool, even some of the cool, alchemical black metal style merch over at the store tab. But now, to the *Paramirum* of Paracelsus, "The Work Beyond Wonders" of the revolutionary alchemist, Dr. Paracelsus. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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As I mentioned in the introduction, I've already covered the *Paragranum*—"The Work Against the Grain," the work inaugurating the Paracelsian Revolution in alchemy, medicine, astronomy, astrology, philosophy, and even in ethics for that matter—in a previous episode. So, you'll want to check out that if you want to really see the stage being set here of the revolutionary 1520s, a period marked by social convulsions of nearly every kind: frankly, civil, religious, scientific. But in summary, Paracelsus, as he would come to be known at this period, was motivated as much against the stolid, even dogmatically stupid, attitude of the academ establishment as he would be by the appearance of at that point new and incurable diseases, especially syphilis. I mean, he was really going up against sort of the medieval or early modern equivalent of Big Pharma when it came to the Fuggers and their guaiac pseudo-cure for syphilis. But he urged a total revolution in medicine; hence, Paracelsus is often likened to his religious contemporary, Martin Luther. And the reason and nature of that revolution (along with calling people "poop head"—that's the censored version of this) are all outlined in the *Paragranum*, something like "Against the Grain," the text I've covered again in a previous episode. You may want to check that one out before diving into this one in some ways.
Now, I want to start to the actual substance of Paracelsus's program as laid out in the *Opus Paramirum*, or "The Beyond Wonders." Again, lots of "Par" stuff going on here in the 1520s. In fact, the *Opus Paramirum* shouldn't be confused with another text called the *Liber Paramirum*, another text written around the same time, which I'll mention a little bit more in just a moment, and a little bit more in the follow-up to this episode. The *Opus Paramirum* is simply a mammoth text. In fact, we're told that while composing it, Paracelsus never changed his clothes (because hygiene!), he even slept in his boots and spurs, and he wrote until basically he passed out. He slept for a few more hours and went right back to his desk. We're also told that he was pretty drunk a lot of the time he was composing this, so, you know. While composed in the late 1520s and early 1530s, the text, none of it, was actually published in Paracelsus's lifetime. It only completely appeared in an edition of 1562, before a full edition in 1575, at over 300 extremely dense pages in the current academic edition. The five parts of the books are, but frankly, they're difficult to summarize. It's honestly just difficult to even follow what Paracelsus's arguments are at times in this book. And the work is marked by truly heterogeneous material: from introducing new physical theories of substance, hermetic cosmological speculation, the theory and practice of medicine (of course, including very specific essays on those highly specialized topics, even for that time—topics that just weren't even written on, and he brags about writing about them), specifically the origins of disease, issues in women's medicine (which weren't written about much), and finally, spiritual and psychological illnesses and their treatments, which included magic. So, there's that. The text manages to be somewhat less than coherent half the time, and yet encyclopedic all the same. And atop that, the non-homeopathic dose of Paracelsus's poly invective and his pinent to invent strange new terminology and then use that terminology in a wide range of seemingly contradictory ways, and we get a text that's absolutely bewildering as it is of revolutionary importance. The drinking, maybe.
So, with all that said, I'll probably do a couple of episodes on the *Paramirum*, going over some general topics in this episode and then especially focusing on the Paracelsian view of women's medicine and the role of the microcosmic Matrix, along with the spiritual and psychological illnesses, including again their magical cures, in an upcoming sequel. I mean, there's some really fascinating stuff in there about placebo and the ability of other people's imagination to affect our imagination—fascinating stuff! But those are only going to make sense insofar as they make sense within the larger context of the *Paramirum*'s larger theoretical and practical framework. So, let's lay that out in this episode.
At the heart of the Paracelsian Revolution was the hermetic philosophy, finally making its way north of the Alps through the early 16th century, through Peri people like johans roin and Paracelsus's contemporary Cornelius agria. And at the core of that philosophy was the conception that the cosmic macrocosm—the above—was reflected in the microcosm—the below—especially in the miracle of the human being and the physical human body as the nexus of the above and the below, the spiritual and the physical. This was a big shift, a double shift in thinking for the time. Generally speaking, the physical body was decidedly thought to be, well, less than miraculous at the time. I mean, we were thought to be something like a corpse carrying around the soul, to kind of crib Marcus Aurelius. Secondly, the idea of a metaphysical continuity between the sub- and super-lunar worlds was a decisive break with the Aristotelian Scholastic worldview that was popular and standard among the professors of the time. In that worldview, even the laws of physics worked differently above and below the region of the moon. Our world down here was ruled by rectilinear motion—motion goes like this—unlike the perfect circular motion that, well, ruled in the heavens up there with the spheres, for instance. This hermetic Neoplatonic worldview held that all of being was united in one vast system, with all the parts reflecting and refracting one another; that the cosmos itself was somehow contained within the physical human body. The human being was worthy of radical dignity in this worldview; *dignitas* was the catchword of this hermetic revolution, not antibody scorn, as it were. Thus, to understand what goes on within the body can only be understood by reading the Book of Nature, the *Libra Natura*, the book of the cosmos outside of the body, and vice versa. By studying the world of nature in the cosmos, one learns about the inner workings of health and disease and treatment. You study one by studying the other, and you go back and forth.
This principle was adopted very early on by Paracelsus, and even by the early 1520s, he had already so developed the so-called Doctrine of Signatures. Not only was the cosmos structured as a vast fractal, it was structured in this way precisely because God was benevolent and God had structured the world for human beings to flourish. Indeed, the Divine had signed all of nature, sealed all of nature, such that the receptive among us—those that truly worship the Divine by careful study of God's creation—could detect those signatures. And as like set to like rejoiced in like, elements of the human body would be nourished by similar elements found in nature and recognized by their Divine signatures or Divine seals. From astrological conditions down to humble roots and gyms secure deep within the Earth, nature was nourished by nature, and our body, as the nexus of the above and the below, could be nourished by that unity.
For Paracelsus, nature operates through separation, especially separating the visible from the invisible and the like from the different. Indeed, this was how God created the entire cosmos: God separating light from dark, land from sea, life from clay. This separation was chiefly accomplished, according to Paracelsus, by fire: first by the hidden Divine fire, then the great solar fire, the Inner Fire Within the with inside of us (the *archaeus*), but also the fire in the alchemist's laboratory. Thus, fire, very broadly understood as a kind of creative separation through heat (primarily distillation and sublimation, at least at this register), is at the theological, cosmological, biological, and alchemical and medical center of the Paracelsian theory and practice of medicine.
So, what does this separation—creation through fire—reveal about the fundamental nature of reality? It reveals that something consumes, something is consumed, and something persists through consumption. But rather than thinking along the lines of substances ("what are things in themselves?" the way that Aristotle might have thought about "what are the causes that go into things?"), Paracelsus shifts to positing that perhaps things are what they do; that process is central over substance. And this is where things become even more perplexing and fascinating, because Paracelsus used substance names for these processes—substances long known in the history of alchemy for qualitative processes—which frankly confuses things all the more. That which conditions toward solidity he calls salt; the propensity toward combustion was called sulfur; that towards volatility or evanescence and flux, mercury. Famously, by illustrating this, he burned a piece of wood and concluded that the fire was the sulfur, the smoke was the mercury, and the residual ash was the SALT. These metaphysical properties took concrete form in a specific substance, typically analyzed using the four Aristotelian elements of earth, air, fire, and water. For Paracelsus, these elements, as much as they were subsumed or not made redundant by the Trio Prima, were seen as matrices through which a substance subsisted ontologically. What mattered for him were the material conditions in a constant changing system of processual tensions, informed by and reflecting one's place in the ever-shifting cosmos. Thus, there were as many sulfur, salts, and mercuries as there were individual people or animals, plants or rocks, etc. It was hyper-vitalized and yet hyper-individualized from an ontological point of view.
However, all of this was unified, although again a bit confusingly, by what Paracelsus referred to as the *Mysterium Magnum*, or the *Prima Materia* (sometimes interchangeable with the *Ultima Prima*), from which all beings are separated or disclosed. This *Mysterium Magnum* is "the womb of being," as he calls it, the cosmic vitality from which being becomes, the inner ontological pregnancy from which cosmic change is engendered, but also which makes possible things like cheese to emerge from milk and maggots to spontaneously emerge (as was thought of the time, at least) from that very cheese. It's like the inner facundity of being as becoming. Thus, the universe for Paracelsus was one vast living being, and that vitalism permeated his entire philosophy. Here, Paracelsus is at his most prodigious in inventing tons of new terms for this. A discrete system emerging from a given Matrix he terms an ilad. Earth, air, fire, and water are the ilad of the *Mysterium Magnum*. The human being is the ilad composed of our organs and their various processes. Climate is an ilad of, I guess, weather, the weather complexity of a given region. A house is an ilad of those within; a family is an ilad of Kim, all somehow discrete and yet again in fundamental relationship to the outside of them, reflecting within what is without. The human being, not being merely physical but also spiritual, of course, is also born from what Paracelsus calls the *limbus*—a metaphysical kind of "hymn," like the hymn of a dress, but the hymn of the Universe from which our spiritual or conscious aspect is separated off to join our physical Natures: the Eternal Limbus. The other side of that *limbus* was actually from which Christ will be born, and it might be the selfsame with the *Ultima Prima*, a more profound substance still, from which, I don't know, substantiality itself actually is said to emerge, though Paracelsus is frankly never quite clear on this topic.
And I'll admit, while there is a kind of incomprehensible beauty to the Paracelsian cosmos, he's a doctor, and he realizes more powerfully, probably, than any of us probably ever will: the world ain't exactly roses. Disease is real, it's horrible, it's often incurable, and life itself is defined over and against its own certain finitude. There's simply nothing definable as life without certain, inevitable death. For Paracelsus, in fact, life simply left to be is already dying. Thirst follows from drinking, hunger from eating, inhalation must follow exhalation, and just as quickly the chase of breathing begins. And as soon as life begins, it's ending; every cradle is a grave, and our bodies are dying just as much, if not more so, than they're living.
That's because our bodies are in a process of living, and that process necessarily means that we are open to a world that isn't our body. Not only is it not our body, not only is the world open, but it's necessarily reliant on that world that, again, isn't our body—in fact, a world that can be completely hostile to our body for its own sustenance and existence. Yet we necessarily bring that external world into our own body as food and drink and air and sight, even thought and imagination, even spiritual relation. And if we're lucky, those exterior elements brought into our bodies are processed by our inner hermetic biology, the alchemy of our body, through the inner fire of our *archaeus*—the sort of fiery refinery deep within us. And they're processed such that nutrients that sustain us are kept, and poisons are properly excreted.
And Paracelsus rightly marvels that we can eat greens or fruit, we can drink beer and wine and hopefully clean water, we can chomp the flesh of other animals, we can consume grains, and all of those substances—all of those substances—are transformed within us to human flesh, human bone, human fat, human skin, and human life. But try as we might, no diet can be perfect, and that which sustains a fish or a plant can only partially sustain us, but also, in some small, cumulative manner, they're also poisoning us. No diet is safe from this slow accumulation of poison, which is the necessary correlative of our place within the microcosm in the macrocosm. And disease is how these poisons precipitate within the ilad of our bodies; they are the fruits of our Matrix, to use the Paracelsian language. Exterior toxins shaped into particularity by the forces of salt, mercur, and sulfur: salt making for skin lesions and cancers; mercury for gout and swelling and melancholy and the novel syphilis for that matter; and sulfur forming the burning fevers and the plague, of course.
All of this is compounded by the astral UIA raining down on us like so much astr ical weather. The same rain necessary for crops and water to drink, well, it can also flood fields and towns and sweep us away. Thus, even the ever-changing astral conditions, just like the weather, mean that we must take the wheel with the woe: solar goodness for Saturn gloom.
For Paracelsus, the same hermetic cosmology that links us with the Divine in the great chain of being, reaching back to Pure Being itself, also ensures inevitable disease and death. But God is merciful. We are living in a world that, despite our sins distancing us from the Divine, God has engineered this cosmos for our flourishing. And the doctor is like the microcosmic Christ, healing the flesh as Christ did for the spirit. But how? The first task of the doctor for Paracelsus is to realize the body cannot be healed through any outside mechanism or any form of mechanistic transformation. The outside will always contain poisons as well as cures for the inside, but the internal harmony of the body has all the power it needs to heal itself, as instilled by Divine Mercy. Thus, the task of the doctor is not to heal the body (you can't do that), but to facilitate the body healing itself, just like the gardener can't force the seedling to grow. Rather, they must become custodians of that seedling, creating the IL adus of the garden where that seed can flourish. The doctor must become the gardener of the flesh, and this is accomplished by learning to read the Book of Nature, to use our cognition and even the occult to detect the Doctrine of Signatures, to meet the body where it's at, to aid it in the process of healing itself.
Thus, unlike the medicine of that day (or this day, for that matter), which could be hyper-invasive, no doubt leading to nightmarish infections, Paracelsian doctrine was by definition minimally invasive. Not that he was afraid of surgery if it was necessary; sometimes, well, things got to go. In this way, you can probably imagine that people went to the Paracelsian doctor first, and this probably helped to facilitate the popularity of the school. When bleeding and emetics and, well, "cut it off" were the first line of medicine, you went to Paracelsus first. Further, whereas the apothecaries of the time often focused on extremely complex and expensive compounds, often featuring dozens of substitutions because they were all composed now far removed from their original composition in the Mediterranean or the Middle East, Paracelsus now sought hyperlocal remedies. Again, "like cures like" in that you were born in a specific region, you are literally that region, you're made up of that terar. In that some sense, you are thus adding you back to you, thus giving your body the constitutional support it needs to heal itself.
However, Paracelsus did accept lots of other ideas, some of those in use at the time, like the medical use of *mumia*. These are fragments of mummified human flesh. It was argued at the time that if a person died early in their life, especially through execution, while their body was otherwise physically healthy, their body retained some of the innate life force, which could be powdered and then used as medicine. It's like the medieval equivalent of stem cells or something. In fact, Paracelsus would actually go on to employ the term *mumia* for the general life force that is sealed up in the mummified body of those long dead, but also it's what animates us living as it is now.
For Paracelsus, alchemy was the Divine Science of revealing the true nature of, well, nature, through the process of disclosing what was once hidden through separation, primarily through distillation and sublimation. And if one looks through the Hermetic preparations of Paracelsus and his followers (which I've actually done; I've recreated recently an attempt to try to see if I can make some Paracelsian medicine—maybe it worked and maybe it didn't, here it is!), they were greatly concerned with what was called the primary quintessence of aquavi, along with many herbs, minerals, and metals, in distillation to extract and combine those quintessences into a single curative Matrix, at least to allow the body again to heal itself. Thus, so much of Paracelsian pharmacology is given over to the careful distillation, and the impact this had on medical cures cannot be overstated.
But "as without, so within," and as has often been pointed out, *pharmakon* means both poison and cure, the effective difference being dosage. If distillation could at some level cure us, or at least cure us in the Paracelsian sense of "cure," then distillation must also be the means by which illness itself takes hold. And indeed, Paracelsus rests here on traditional grounds, at least in this sense: in the older Galenic medical theory, excessive blood produced urine, which could be inspected for signs of disease, specifically particles of an illness inducing substance known at that time as Qatar. This theory held that urine rose through the body heat to the head, where it flowed back down into the body as poisonous mucus and infecting the body. Paracelsus held this process to be a kind of distillation of poisons from which food and drink flowed down into our body as Mercurial, thus giving rise to things like gout and even madness.
But he went even further here: of all the substances that were most profoundly life-giving, according to Paracelsus, were of course bread and wine, literally also fundamental in the spiritual sense with the Eucharist. Thus, what produces so much life-giving power must also contain a similar dose of poison. And as organic acids of wine react with metals such as potassium within the barrels or even on the corks, whitish crystals of taric acid were formed. Paracelsus held that such buildup could also affect the teeth, but also deep within the body, eventually passing through horrifying agony as kidney and gallstones. That horrible burning was denoted by Paracelsus as "tartaric," from Tartarus, tartar, the region of hell, as a kind of refuge not totally able to be cleansed out of the body through urination. This tartaric theory of disease would eventually come to profoundly influence the ear early Paracelsus, and in the *Paramirum*, it becomes almost the theory of disease at the time, with a host of plants, Meats, drinks, and cereals all producing different versions of this tartaric acid.
So, what was the solution? The use of potassium tartarate, or cream of tartar (remember, "like cures like"), but also drink really acidic beers served with warm butter mixed in, added to facilitate expelling the tartar from the *archaeus*. So, yeah, butterbeer! Thanks, Paracelsus!
This brings us to the last two of five books that make up the titanic *Paramirum*. And trust me, this video is no substitute for you reading the thing. Those two—"On the Matrix," which covers the physics and metaphysics of women's health, and "On the Invisible Diseases," which covers psychological and spiritual diseases and their kind of quasy magical cures—are frankly of such specific interest and detail, but I'm going to be covering them in a final episode to this sort of short series introducing the fundamental works of Paracelsus. So, come back for "On the Matrix" and the idea of the spiritual, magical diseases.
As I mentioned in the last episode, the good news is that both the *Paragranum* and the *Paramirum* are available for a mere $392, because Brill. So, you'll need to conjure those from the ether, or you'll have to get them IL or be rich. If you really want an wonderful, well-written account of Paracelsus's life and thought, Bruce Moran, who does a bunch of other really wonderful work in alchemy, has written a brief and rather beautifully printed work on the topic, and it's well worth getting. Philip Ball also has his book, *The Devil's Doctor*, which sounds like it's going to be terrible, but it's actually a really wonderful popular treatment, and it's great to read, and I'd recommend it highly. We're going to be coming back to Paracelsus and eventually getting to his followers, the Paracelsians, as well, so keep an eye out for more episodes about Paracelsus and Paracelsianism. He's just, I don't know, a seemingly infinite well of brilliant, sometimes crazy sounding content. But look, sometimes breakdowns or breakthroughs. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge. Thank you, thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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