If we go more closely into the various trends of Paracelsism, in which the rational trend and a more empirical trend seem to dominate, in the last resort it emerges that all find their roots in an understanding of nature that bestows its own spirituality and religious character on the pure force of nature.
This similarly becomes clear from the "three bodies theory," which is attributed to Paracelsus. It states that the division of the microcosm occurs only in death.
For in the death of a human being the two bodies separate, the heavenly and the earthly, i.e. the sacramental and the elemental. One flies up like an eagle and the other falls to earth like lead. The elemental body corrupts and becomes a foul corpse, is buried in the earth and no longer seen; the sacramental, that is, the heavenly and sidereal body, does not corrupt, is not buried, possesses no place; the same body appears to man, is seen after death. ( XI, 361)
A fine, strong picture, but it should be noted that it comes from the book De natura rerurn, the manuscript of which is not dated and the text of which cannot be certified. Moreover, for all the
echoes of Paracelsian thought, the language is not that of Theophrastus of Hohenheim. For that reason Sudhoff already warned the reader not to take everything as valid currency! 13Here we
have, rather, that "kabbalistic art" which is said to derive from the old magic, according to whose doctrine at death the three bodies separate and return to their origins: "the earthly body again to the prima materia elementorum, the soul to the prima materia sacramentorum the spirit in turn to the prima materia of the chaos of air" ( XI, 361).
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An impressive example of this kind of speculative Paracelsism is the term astrum, which served as a popular model for Paracelsus's worldview and could also be extremely useful to us in distinguishing between the "authentic" and the "Inauthentic" elements of Hohenheim's thought. Over against the Neoplatonic tradition, according to which the spiritual quintessence of
humankind derives from the stars, in Paracelsus we find the clear and often repeated observation that astrology cannot say anything about human beings unless it incorporates the "Inner heaven" into all prognostic considerations ( VII, 466). From the stars as such only a "little spark" enters the sublunary sphere; it is quickly extinguished and cannot exercise any influence on human beings ( IX, 241). These remarks stand in clear opposition to the astronomia magna which is constantly adduced; it is certainly wrongly attributed to Paracelsus, although as a "system of universal knowledge" it has become a thing of inestimable significance. 14
The astronomia magna is divided into "four orders," which already stand in clear contradiction to Paracelsus's theory of disease. As naturalis astronomia it shows the influence of the
firmament on the sidereal body; as supera it serves the new birth to a spiritual life ( XII, 76); as astronomia olympi novi it shows the true faith; and as astronomia inferiorum it reveals the infernal powers ( XII, 76). But the astrologus should and can recognize the summum motorem naturae; for the stars and human beings are "of equal capacity" ( XII, 90). By means of the signum signatum, human beings will first learn the virtutes and thus arrive at real inventiones ( XII, 99). In this way the magician becomes the ruler of nature: "Thus it is given to its natural saints, as magicians are called, to do violence to nature, its power and capacity" ( XII, 130). Now the physician also gains this power over nature: "Where the astronomer ends, there the true physician begins, there the true philosopher begins" ( XII, 77). But this also gives the physician control of all the mantic disciplines subordinated to astronomia; the physician is to investigate and control all that "lies secretly in nature" ( XII, 185).
The parallel between macrocosm and microcosm nowhere seems so impressively "carried through in detail and exploited" 15 I as in Paracelsus Astronomia, which according to Pagel is
one of the supporting pillars in the system of medicine. By contrast, in the Labyrinthus Paracelsus speaks only of the Concordanz anatomiae as a parallel to both fabrications, the machina mundi and the physicum corporis ( XI, 183). It is hardly evident from this that Paracelsus alone is "close to the mystics," as Pagel thinks. 16Astronomia is "the mother of all arts" only because it shows that life in all worldly things which then can be recognized in the light of nature. Even Pagel, who makes such efforts -- though predominantly on the basis of inauthentic texts -to present Paracelsus as a nature mystic, has to concede that the specifically
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gnostic ideas derive predominantly from those "deutero-Paracelsian" writings that should be attributed to one of the later generations of speculative Paracelsism. Obviously the ideas about natural philosophy in Paracelsus's work as a whole must also be seen in their relationship to the
theosophical and cosmological ideas of the Renaissance. However, in that case specific texts must always form the starting point and must be used critically. The intensive connections between Paracelsus's worldview on the one hand and the Neoplatonic traditions and a contemporary gnosticism on the other should not be overlooked. Walter Pagel in particular already drew attention to these interrelationships in 1962. 17
Beyond question, links with traditional Hermeticism can be established wherever in Paracelsus there is talk of the parallel between the macrocosm and the microcosm, where the spiritual is played off against the earthly or the body against the soul, and where the invisible is said to be manifested in the visible. Such attempts are less convincing when the topic of discussion is a specific concept like the Neoplatonic concept of matter, the logoi spermatikoi of the gnostic tradition, the doctrine of the three principles or the mutual interpenetration of the light of nature and the light of grace.
By contrast, in more recent research into Paracelsus, historical attention has focused above all on the alchemical legacy of Neoplatonism in the thinking of Paracelsus. Here surprising insights have been gained into the therapeutic character of late medieval alchemy, a "medical alchemy" to which Paracelsus's theory of the arcane also made significant contributions. This could lead to Johann Heinrich Alsted's being able to include "alchemy" as a "part of medicine" in an
encyclopedia as early as 1630.
It is more difficult to trace the alleged analogies to gnosticism where they are associated with historical figures; here careful comparisons ought to be made by means of specific texts. This is the case with Agrippa of Nettesheim and with Marsillo Ficino, but also with Hildegard of Bingen ( 10991180) or Arnald of Villanova ( 1235-1311) and not least with Nicholas of Cusa ( 1401- 1464).
Here a methodological precept which Walter Pagel and Marianne Winder have used with Paracelsus is of special interest, a pattern of thought that is bound up with the question whether doctrines characteristic of the Renaissance naturalists (like Pico, Zorzi, and Agrippa) concerning the differences between "higher" and "lower" elements cannot also be applied to Paracelsus. 18
However, this reference loses significance if writings that are in all probability inauthentic (like De vita longa) are set alongside the "authentic" writings (like Labyrinthus).
With the sixteenth century, the magia naturalis increasingly abandoned its epistemological foundation and became a rapidly vulgarized magia
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artificialis which could as yet hardly adapt itself to the methods and progress of the natural sciences. Then the "mechanization of the world-picture" in the course of the seventeenth century fully demonstrated those regularities of nature that could no longer be harmonized with magical thought. Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the magia naturalis was regarded more as a quarry for esoteric societies.