He continued his career outside the university until a conflict with magistrates brought his career abruptly to a close. He had numerous quarrels with society: Landlords had to sue him for rent, and he continually evaded contracts. He answered with countersuits and childish, self-righteous letters to authorities. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he was forced to flee for his life. He wandered toward Colmar, in upper Alsace, for eight years until his mysterious death on September 24, 1541, at the White Horse Inn in Salzburg. Best accounts state he was poisoned at the instigation of the medical establishment.
As an alchemist, Paracelsus had found the making of gold beneath his talents: His interest was less in the material than in the human. He thoroughly investigated the philosophy of health and disease, but he did not limit himself to abstract thinking. He published a clinical description of syphilis in 1530 that maintained the disease could be successfully treated, foreshadowing the Salvarsan treatment of 1909. In 1536 he published The Great Surgery Book, a treatise that emphasized cleanliness in surgery. He declared that miner’s disease (silicosis) resulted from inhaling metal vapors and not, as it was then believed, from mountain spirits’ punishment for sin. Paracelsus was also the first to state that, given in small doses, “what makes a man ill also cures him,” an anticipation of the modern practice of vaccination. He was the first to connect goiter with minerals, especially lead, in drinking water. He taught according to the belief that “nature heals, the doctor nurses.”
His great work, Sagacious Philosophy of the Great and Small World, considers man, salvation, the healing power of stones, meteorology, ghosts, and the possibility of the human voice being carried long distances “by the aid of pipes and crystals.” His curiosity and quest for knowledge resonated throughout his life and after his death contributed to the legend of Dr. Faustus.
ALCHEMY IN LITERATURE, PSYCHOLOGY AND MYTH
An errant knight of science, Paracelsus exerted a powerful influence not only on his own time but also on succeeding centuries as his persona became absorbed in the Western literary tradition. Goethe, Marlowe, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare (notably Prospero in The Tempest), Yeats, H. D., and Joyce were concerned with alchemy and alchemists. Robertson Davies, Gabriel García Márquez, and many other contemporary writers incorporate alchemists or the idea of alchemy in their writing. Through literature, alchemy and its images have been internalized. Some current literary theories even suggest alchemic reading of texts. The metaphors of hermeticism, hidden meaning, transmutation or development, and the search for immortality lie at the crux of the analysis of literature.
Paracelsus and his alchemy were no less an influence on modern psychology. Struck by the analogy between the symbolism found in the dreams of his patients and the symbolism of alchemy, the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung seriously delved into alchemical literature. “Paracelsus, an almost legendary figure in our time, was a preoccupation of mine when I was trying to understand alchemy, especially its connection with natural philosophy. . . . We see in Paracelsus not only a pioneer in the domains of chemical medicine, but also [a pioneer] in those of an empirical psychological healing science,” he wrote. The conclusions Jung formed from the study of alchemy are an integral part of his work and modern psychological understanding, and they have given us a new perspective on the genius of Paracelsus in particular. Fascinated by the alchemists’ attention to the redemption of matter, Jung found that in the depths of the unconscious mind, processes occur that bear remarkable likeness to the stages of spiritual operation: mysticism, alchemy, hermeticism. The unconscious tends to be the trans-conscious: the quest to release and then possess the Self—what Jung called individuation. The alchemist’s philosopher’s stone—capable of making gold from lead, of changing the world, in other words—was an instrument for immortality and ultimate freedom. And Jung isolated a psychological philosopher’s stone in us all—our imaginations, hallucinations, and dreams.
Writers like Joseph Campbell would later enlarge upon Jung’s work to show how all myth operates in this same transforming, ultimately healing manner—leading us back to the great vision of Paracelsus, his drive to separate wheat from chaff, wisdom from stupidity.
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Paracelsus wrote in the juicy pre-Lutheran Swiss German dialect, which he interspersed with medical and philosophical lingo from school Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and with imaginative coinages of his own. Moreover, the style is spiced with German slang, obscenities and epithets of a highly personal character. No translation can possibly render the individual flavor of this gasping, searching, and emphatic attempt to create a scientific medium in the vernacular.
HENRY M. PACHTER, Paracelsus: Magic into Science
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