CHAPTER V.
The reason that Men do not doubt of many things, is, that they never examine common Impressions; they do not dig to the Root, where the Faults and Defects lye; they only debate upon the Branches: They do not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it has been so and so understood. It is not inquir’d into, whether Galen has said anything to purpose, but whether he has said so or so.—Montaigne.
Willoughby’s Essay—Third Evening.
§ 3. Theophrastus Paracelsus.
Due place must be given to the influence of that medical Ishmael, Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, he studied medicine at Basle, and travelled Europe for fourteen years from Sweden to Naples, and from France to Poland. The jealous hatred awakened by a most reasonable project of reform drove him from Basle soon after his return. Vituperated and vituperating, he became a wanderer throughout Germany, everywhere forming, or followed by, successive groups of disciples. He died at the age of forty-eight, in a little inn—but not, as report has long said, drunk on the taproom floor;—a victim, more probably, to the violence of assailants despatched against him by some hostile physicians.[[215]]
Paracelsus found the medical profession of those days more disastrously incompetent, if possible, than we see it in the pages of Le Sage and Molière. It was so easy of entrance, he complains, as to become the tempting resource of knavery and ignorance everywhere. With a smattering of Greek a doctor might be finished and famous. A dead language was to exorcise deadly maladies. Diseases were encountered by definitions, and fact and experiment unheeded amidst disputes about the sense of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. When a new life began to struggle to the light from beneath the ruins of scholasticism, the fearless vehemence of such a nature became its appropriate organ. Paracelsus was the first to lecture in the vernacular. Instead of reading and commenting on the text of Galen, or extracting fanciful specifics from Raymond Lully, or John de Rupecissa, he resolved to observe and judge for himself wherever the ravages of disease or war might furnish him with facts. Preposterous as many of his own remedies may have been, he merits the title of a reformer in effect as well as purpose. He applied, with great success, mineral preparations before unknown, or little used; performed celebrated cures by the use of opium, and exposed the fraudulent pretensions of the alchemist and the astrologer. To the persecution and gross abuse of the profession he replied in torrents of undiluted and inexhaustible Billingsgate. While his velvet-cloaked brethren, with faces blandly inane or portentously inscrutable, mounted, with step of cat-like softness, to the chamber of the obese burgomaster or the fashionable lady, Paracelsus gloried in grandiloquent shabbiness and boisterous vulgarity. He boasted that he had picked up many a hint while chatting as an equal with pedlars, waggoners, and old women. He loved to drain his can on the ale-bench before wayside hostelries with boors such as Ostade has painted. Ragged and dusty, footing it with his knapsack on his back under a broiling sun, he would swear that there lay more wisdom in his beard than in all the be-doctored wiseacres of all the universities of Europe.
On the basis of principles substantially the same with those represented by Agrippa, Paracelsus developed, in his own way, the doctrine of signatures, and the relationships of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
The special illumination of the Holy Ghost was not more essential to the monastic perfection of preceding mystics, than to the success of the theosophist in that devout pursuit of science inculcated by Paracelsus. The true Physician—he who would be wise indeed in the mysteries of nature, must seek with ceaseless importunity the light that cometh from above. In the Scriptures, and in the Cabbala, lies the key to all knowledge. Medicine has four pillars: (1) Philosophy, generally equivalent, as he uses it, to physiology,—the study of the true nature of material substances in their relation to the microcosm, man; (2) Astronomy, embracing especially the influences of the heavenly bodies on the human frame; (3) Alchemy, not gold-making, but the preparation of specifics—chemistry applied to medicine; (4) Religion, whereby the genuine professor of the healing art is taught of God, and works in reliance on, and union with, Him.[[216]] In the spirit of the ancient mystics he describes the exaltation of one whose soul is inwardly absorbed, so that the ordinary operation of the external senses is suspended. A man thus divinely intoxicated, lost in thoughts so profound, may seem, says Paracelsus, a mere fool to the men of this world, but in the eyes of God he is the wisest of mankind, a partaker of the secrecy of the Most High.[[217]] Like Agrippa (and with as good reason) Paracelsus lays great stress on Imagination, using the term, apparently, to express the highest realization of faith. Bacon observes that Imagination is with Paracelsus almost equivalent to Fascination. He speaks of the Trinity as imaged in man, in the Heart, (Gemüth), in Faith, and in Imagination,—the three forms of that spiritual nature in us which he declares a fiery particle from the Divine Substance. By the disposition of the Heart we come to God; by Faith to Christ; and by Imagination we receive the Holy Spirit. Thus blessed (did we but truly know our own hearts) nothing would be impossible to us. This is the true magic, the gift of Faith, which, were its strength sufficient, might even now cast out devils, heal the sick, raise the dead, and remove mountains.[[218]]
In the sixteenth century we still trace the influence of that doctrine, so fertile in mysticism, which Anselm bequeathed to the schoolmen of the middle age. We are to know by ascending to the fount of being, and in the primal Idea, whence all ideas flow, to discern the inner potency of all actual existence. But in Paracelsus we see especial prominence given to two new ideas which greatly modify, and apparently facilitate the researches of theosophy. One of these is the theory of divine manifestation by Contraries,—teaching (instead of the old division of Being and Non-being) the development of the primal ground of existence by antithesis, and akin, in fact, to the principle of modern speculative philosophy, according to which the Divine Being is the absorption (Aufhebung) of those contraries which his self-evolution, or lusus amoris, has posited. This doctrine is the key-note in the system of Jacob Behmen. The other is the assumption that man—the micro-cosm, is, as it were, a miniature of the macro-cosm—the great outer world,—a little parliament to which every part of the universe sends its deputy,—his body a compound from the four circles of material existence,—his animal nature correspondent to, and dependent on, the upper firmament,—and his spirit, a divine efflux wherein, though fallen, there dwells a magnetic tendency towards its source, which renders redemption possible through Christ. There is nothing, accordingly, in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, which may not be found in the minor world of man. On this principle, further, depends the whole system of signatures in its application to the cure of human malady.[[219]]
Paracelsus defines true magic as the knowledge of the hidden virtues and operations of natural objects. The Cabbala imparts instruction concerning heavenly mysteries, and teaches the loftiest approximation to the Supreme. By the combination of these sources of knowledge we come to understand, and can partially produce, that marriage between heavenly influences and terrestrial objects, called, in the language of theosophy, Gamahea.[[220]] True magic is founded solely ‘on the Ternary and Trinity of God,’ and works in harmony with that universal life which, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, animates all nature,—even the granite, the ocean, and the flower. The magic of Paracelsus disclaims the use of all ceremonies, conjurations, bannings, and blessings, and will rest solely on the power of that faith to which the promise was given, that spirits should be subject to it, and mountains plucked up at its fiat.[[221]] We are here far enough from the theurgic ritual of Iamblichus. But large room still remained for superstitious practice, and Paracelsus could not refuse his faith to the potency of certain magical words, of waxen images, and of pentacula inscribed with magic characters. The universal life of nature was mythologically personified in the sylphs and gnomes, the salamanders and undines, somewhat as the thought of supernatural presence found its representation in the nymphs, the nereids, and the hamadryads, of ancient Grecian fable.[[222]]
In the chemistry of Paracelsus all matter is composed, in varying proportions, of salt—the firm coherent principle, of quicksilver—the fluid, and of sulphur—the fiery, or combustible.[[223]]
The theory of signatures proceeded on the supposition that every creature bears, in some part of its structure or outward conformation, the indication of the character or virtue inherent in it—the representation, in fact, of its idea or soul. Southey relates, in his Doctor, a legend, according to which he who should drink the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled to hear the voice and understand the speech of plants. Such a man might stand on a mountain at sunrise, and hearken to their language, from the delicate voices of wild flowers and grass blades in the dew, to the large utterance of the stately trees making their obeisance in the fresh morning airs;—might hear each enumerating its gifts and virtues, and blessing the Creator for his bestowments. The knowledge thus imparted by a charm, the student of sympathies sought as the result of careful observation. He essayed to read the character of plants by signs in their organization, as the professor of palmistry announced that of men by the lines of the hand. Such indications were sometimes traced from the resemblance of certain parts of a plant to portions of the human frame, sometimes they were sought in the more recondite relations of certain plants to certain stars. Thus citrons, according to Paracelsus, are good for heart affections because they are heart-shaped; and because, moreover, they have the colour of the sun, and the heart is, in a sort, the sun of the body. Similarly, the saphena riparum is to be applied to fresh wounds, because its leaves are spotted as with flecks of blood. A species of dentaria, whose roots resemble teeth, is a cure for toothache and scurvy.[[224]]
The theosophists, working on principles very similar to those of the alchemists, though with worthier and larger purpose, inherited the extraordinary language of their predecessors. That wisdom of Gamahea, which was to explain and facilitate the union of the celestial and terrestrial in the phenomena and processes of nature, naturally produced a phraseology which was a confused mixture of theological, astrological, and chemical terms. To add to the obscurity, every agent or process was veiled under symbolic names and fantastic metaphors, frequently changing with the caprice of the adept. Thus the white wine of Lully is called by Paracelsus the glue of the eagle; and Lully’s red wine is, with Paracelsus, the blood of the Red Lion. Often the metaphor runs into a kind of parable, as with Bernard of Treviso. He describes what is understood to be the solution of gold in quicksilver, under the regimen of Saturn, leaving a residuum of black paste, in the following oriental style:—
‘The king, when he comes to the fountain, leaving all strangers behind him, enters the bath alone, clothed in golden robes, which he puts off, and gives to Saturn, his first chamberlain, from whom he receiveth a black velvet suit.’[[225]]
In like manner, in the Secretum Magicum attributed (to Paracelsus), we find mention of the chemical Virgin Mary, of chemical deaths and resurrections, falls and redemptions, adopted from theological phraseology. We read of the union of the philosophic Sol,—Quintessentia Solis, or Fifth Wisdom of Gold, with his Father in the Golden Heaven, whereby imperfect substances are brought to the perfection of the Kingdom of Gold.[[226]]
The conclusion of Weidenfeld’s treatise on the Green Lion of Paracelsus may suffice as a specimen of this fanciful mode of expression, which can never speak directly, and which, adopted by Jacob Behmen, enwraps his obscure system in sevenfold darkness:—
‘Let us therefore desist from further pursuit of the said Green Lion which we have pursued through the meads and forest of Diana, through the way of philosophical Saturn, even to the vineyards of Philosophy. This most pleasant place is allowed the disciples of this art to recreate themselves here, after so much pains and sweat, dangers of fortune and life, exercising the work of women and the sports of children, being content with the most red blood of the Lion, and eating the white or red grapes of Diana, the wine of which being purified, is the most secret secret of all the more secret Chymy; as being the white or red wine of Lully, the nectar of the ancients, and their only desire, the peculiar refreshment of the adopted sons, but the heart-breaking and stumblingblock of the scornful and ignorant.’[[227]]