That of the minerals is called Stannar or Trughat; of the vegetable kingdom, Leffas; while the astral bodies of animals are their Evestra. The Evestrum may travel about apart from its body; it may live long after the death of the body. Ghosts are, in fact, the Evestra of the departed. If you commit suicide the Evestrum does not recognise the act; it goes on as if the body were going on also until its appointed time.
Man is a microcosm; the universe is the macrocosm. Not that they are comparable to each other; they are one in reality, divided only by form. If you are not spiritually enlightened you may not be able to perceive this. Each plant on earth has its star. There is a stella absinthii, a stella rorismarini. If we could compile a complete “herbarium spirituale sidereum” we should be fully equipped to treat disease. Star influences also form our soul-essences. This accounts for our varying temperaments and talents.
The material part of man, the living body, is the Mumia. This is managed by the Archæus, which rules over everybody; it is the vital principle. It provides the internal balsam which heals wounds or diseases, and controls the action of the various organs.
His theories of mercury, sulphur, and salt, as the constituents of all things, seem at first likely to lead to something conceivable if not credible. But before we grasp the idea we are switched off into the spiritual world again. It is the sidereal mercury, sulphur, and salt, spirit, soul, and body, to which he is alluding.
His Chemical and Pharmaceutical Innovations.
These fantastic notions permeate all the medical treatises of Paracelsus. But every now and then there are indications of keen insight which go some way towards explaining his success as a physician; for it cannot be doubted that he did effect many remarkable cures. His European fame was not won by mere boasting. His treatise, De Morbis ex Tartare oriundus, is admittedly full of sound sense.
Some of his chemical observations are startling for their anticipations of later discoveries. If there were no air, he says, all living beings would die. There must be air for wood to burn. Tin, calcined, increases in weight; some air is fixed on the metal. When water and sulphuric acid attack a metal there is effervescence; that is due to the escape of some air from the water. He calls metals that have rusted, dead.
Saffron of Mars (the peroxide) is dead iron. Verdigris is dead copper. Red oxide of mercury is dead mercury. But, he adds, these dead metals can be revivified, “reduced to the metallic state,” are his exact words (and it is to be noted that he was the first chemist to employ the term “reduce” in this sense), by means of coal. Elsewhere he describes digestion as a solution of food; putrefaction as a transmutation. He knew how to separate gold from silver by nitric acid. It is quite certain that the writer of Paracelsus’s works was a singularly observant and intelligent chemist. He had “a wolfish hunger after knowledge,” says Browning.
“Have you heard,” wrote Gui Patin to a friend a hundred years after the death of the famous revolutionary, “that 'Paracelsus’ is being printed at Geneva in four volumes in folio? What a shame that so wicked a book should find presses and printers which cannot be found for better things. I would rather see the Koran printed. It would not deceive so many people. Chemistry is the false money of our profession.”