Paracelsus

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The date is April the 5th, 1983. This is the sixth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Origins of Hermetic Science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Paracelsus: A Swiss Hermes Electrochemical Medicine. There are almost no books on Paracelsus that are worth the money, which seems very strange at first considering the astonishing figure that he cut in history and the enormity of his influence. There are two books which are probably worth taking a look at. There's a biography of him called Magic into Science by Henry Pachter. I think he wrote it about 1950 and you can find used copies of this all over town probably for, oh, somewhere between five and ten dollars. And this actually in terms of a book which would give you basic essential information is as good as any other. Then there's a book in the Bollingen Series which is edited by Jolande Jacobi, the great Jungian friend, and it's a Selected Writings of Paracelsus. And I believe that this is available in paperback if I'm not mistaken. So I think that you could pick those up. There is a volume by Manly Hall called Paracelsus which at $3.95 is probably the best bargain in the works. It's about 80 pages and it's a reworking of lectures which Mr. Hall has given on Paracelsus for the last 40 years, 45 years. So by this time many of the statements that he has are quite excellent. There are some misconceptions which carried over due to the early sources that he had. I think the major one being that he derived his esoteric hutzpah from the dervishes in Constantinople. We don't have to go that far afield, and those who have been coming to the series realize that when you have teachers like Trithemius and Trismosin you're already supercharged and ready to go. Paracelsus is a mysterious figure highly energetic. If anyone could be called super charged. I think Paracelsus is that figure. And he has one of those capacities to transform. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 people in history who have had that capacity to immediately polarize any situation that they fell into. And of course he was just the bomb needed to break up an intellectual logjam that had been accumulating for some time. And Paracelsus put his finger, in the form of his own life and his own career, exactly upon a knot which had kept science from maturing and the knot of course was the egotistical pride in others assuming that they knew darn well what was up. They knew the hierarchies and the diagrams. They had their arguments in place and there wasn't anything that anyone could say or do to change their mind including direct experience which would often contradict the very material that they were seeking to promulgate. Paracelsus was the kind of individual that when he saw this loggerhead, instead of being diplomatic about it, he simply blew up and started arguments and began accusations and in order to understand this we have to go back and review a little bit about his life because he has a very strange background. His grandfather fought with the Knights of Saint John and was ennobled. So that's where the family name von Hohenheim comes from the grandfather. But the father who was born out of wedlock and who was always a little shy about this fact lost the tinge of nobility, the character of dignity that would come with it. And yet he secretly knew that he came from a great tradition and was the legitimate, in a natural sense, offspring of a very great man, a fine man. So that when Paracelsus was born, and he was born in 1493, and he was born in the little Swiss town just south of Lake Zurich. If you imagine Lake Zurich running at about a 30 degree angle in Switzerland is just below it about 20 miles something on that order. At the top of Lake Zurich of course is Zurich. And then on the north shore down not too far is Küsnacht where Carl Jung lived. So that Paracelsus when he was born, was born under conditions where his father, who was a physician, what we would call an army doctor and his mother was a sort of a nurse who was under the care of the Benedictine monastery so that she was somewhat of not an incapacitated individual but someone who had to be cared for constantly in a delicate sort of a way. There are people like that. As long as they're cared for they're fine but they're not really adventurous, able to go off on their own. So that as a young boy, and they lived there in this small Swiss community until he was nine, he was probably faced with a condition of having to watch himself around the home and yet aware that in the background there were all sorts of currents of meaning going on because he would have learned from his father his heritage and why there were secrets in the family. And so the young boy who was named by his father, Theophrastus, very early on got the sense of tutoring himself and keeping the tutoring inside and on the external level of manifesting what we would recognize as a hyperactive, supercharged expressivity but that the inner self, very mature and very highly integrated and capable of taking in and sustaining an enormous complexity of information. Now Theophrastus as a name and he always signed his name Theophrastus. There are several specimens of his signature and usually Theophrastus is the first or the only name. And classically Theophrastus was the successor to Aristotle in the Lyceum in Greece and Theophrastus was the author of the famous characters, The Characters of Theophrastus which there's a Penguin classic translation of it. So the young boy, named for the successor to Aristotle and having the von Hohenheim name still circulating with him was also given several other names along with it. One of them Bombastus, which of course bombast and another which was used from time to time, Aurelius meaning gold or golden, not so much golden hair as some biographers would mislead us, but golden in the sense of really being able to have that splendor in the sense of of letting his entire personality radiate out. And he had this enormous capacity to take the personal energy, the energizing of the person, and express it, radiate it out. So he really had this characteristic and the name Aurelius designates this. I believe that it was his father who gave him also the name Paracelsus. Celsus had been a famous physician in antiquity and Origen had written a very famous book called Contracelsus, against Celsus. Celsus had risen to be a physician of Roman emperors and had written an enormously influential polemics against Christianity at the time so that the name Paracelsus meant to go above Celsus, to become a physician on a royal scale, and yet in a transcendent mode. And this is very important because it's the capacity to operate in this whole continuum from the physical through the various mental stages to the soul or spiritual stages and then into a meta or para level, the supercelestial realm, and to be able to operate there. So that the Q Paracelsus, the doctor of the capacity beyond, is very interesting. I believe that it was given by his father. The father was extremely important to him and lived quite some time I think. He didn't learn of his father's death until three years before his own death. His father died I believe in 1536 or so. Paracelsus would have been about 43 years old. So the father was always around, always an honorable man. Paracelsus who made a reputation across every country of Europe of arguing with every great man honored his father enormously. At the age of nine his mother died and they were able to leave this little Swiss community to leave the confining world of this Benedictine-controlled monastic environment, this little Swiss village. And they moved all the way across the map of Switzerland into southern Austria, a small town actually the second largest town in the area there called Villach. V-I-L-L-A-C-H. Now Villach is in Austria, what we call today Austria, but it's very close to where Yugoslavia and Italy come against Austria. And there's a pass there through the Alps. And that main road goes to Vienna so that Villach was on the main crossroads from all of the activity happening in northern Italy and the activity which was radiating out into central Europe from Vienna. So that the University of Vienna, which was a very high-powered excellent facility at that time, and all the universities in northern Italy - Padua, Ferrara, in Florence and so forth - all would have had concourse through this road and Paracelsus from the age of 9 to 14 spent some very formative years with his father freed on that crossroad. At the age of 14. He was sent off to become a scholar. And we think today of a scholar as somebody who's going to sit in a study carrel and read and study and we can't imagine that four or five hundred years ago that the word scholar would have had about the same kind of indication as our word today of thug or hippie because Europe, which had cracked the mold of the medieval world for some 50 or 60 years and in some places several hundred years by this time, was covered with traveling roving bands of students who were so offensive that laws were passed in some cities to the extent that one should not fling mud at lectures, one should not make love in public squares. These kinds of laws had to be passed. And how did these students, these roving bands of students make their living? They wrote songs, usually profane songs and sang them. They sold drugs and they stole. So it's a situation where Europe was covered by thousands of young men, usually adolescents, and Paracelsus joined this motley flow of students looking for some place to learn. So it was kind of like a game of roulette. You had to count on some kind of luck to find the right place to find the right teacher or you would have had to have heard from someone that they learned such and such from so and so and he was in such and such a city or at least he was last year, and now maybe he's over here this year. So the term seething characterizes the schooling of the day. Europe was seething with students and professors and changing political situations so that there was a constant motion of populations moving around. And for two years Paracelsus went everywhere. He went to Heidelberg and he records later on in his life, he said that he was completely put off by the way in which at Heidelberg the students thought that having so many days of debauchery in a row was a sign of maturity. He just couldn't believe it. He went to the University of Freiburg and he said he couldn't stand the way in which the instructors arranged all of these wonderful Aristotelian hoops for you to jump through. And he went to Cologne and various other cities and found absolutely nothing that he could trust. And for two years between the ages of 14 and 16, Paracelsus simply wandered, looking. And probably the only talisman that he had to guide him at this time was his father's advice. And his father, who had been not just a physician, but who had been a specialist in minerals understood minerals and therefore was acquainted with alchemical processes, had probably schooled the young Paracelsus to be acquainted enough with the world of mining and processing of minerals and probably some basic alchemical processes that during these years Paracelsus kept thinking to himself there must be somewhere that I can mature this information that my father has given to me. In fact, Paracelsus all of his life was of an eminently practical nature very much in the mode of Trismosin that we had last week that he knew how to make things work. He could go through a physical distilling process, handle the equipment and so forth, just so he could probably get a job at any mine because he knew his material in terms of minerals and mining, smelting and distilling. He would have impressed some foremen well enough that he could have gotten on. In fact when he traveled to England one of the first places that he really ended up was in Cornwall in some mines doing some research down there and only later on went to Oxford and Cambridge which turned him off completely and went into London much later on in his visit. But coming back to him in 1509 at the age of 16 he gave up this traveling temporarily and this traveling would characterize his entire life. He settled in at the University of Vienna for two years. And the reason that he went there is that a teacher who had been in this small town of Villach had become the president of the University of Vienna. Now this man was only nine years older than Paracelsus. So he wasn't that old. He was probably 25 years old. But Paracelsus began to try to dedicate himself at the University of Vienna to learn the basic program and at that time the four major higher arts that one would learn would be astrology, arithmetic, geometry, and music. So those four arts, higher arts, the quadrivium, emphasized the sense of understanding structure that behind manifestations are rules of structure which reoccur and therefore have a periodicity. And not only that, but interpenetrate. And those of you who were here for the original lecture in the series remember Ficino's theory of astrological music and the way in which that was a key to understanding universal structure. So Paracelsus really tried. He tried to settle down and make himself at home but it was an age in which no one could settle down. And in 1511 one of these outbursts of bubonic plague hit Vienna and the total enrollment of the University of Vienna fell to zero. No one was there because it had become a place of contamination. And this gives us yet another clue to the tremendous anxiety of that age. Another element of the roulette of life was that bubonic plague would from time to time spring up in various sections. And of course with the mind built on analogies and especially religious analogies it was very difficult for any person to escape the fact that maybe all this was meant by God and that he had chosen such and such a place. And this kind of superstitious outlook carried on and increased in later years. In fact in the next century it became almost a code. There was an outburst of bubonic plague about 50 years after Paracelsus died and the little Swiss town where there was a statue, a little monument to Paracelsus, had absolutely no deaths from plague while a town some 10 or 15 kilometers away, three quarters of it were killed by plague. So that this age was filled with the mind that saw in happenings a plan of some sort. So Paracelsus had to leave the University of Vienna and he still hadn't had a real education. He had all kinds of promise but a pattern had been made in his life where he was simply broken out of any mold in which he could stay. And for the rest of his life Paracelsus who wasn't very large. I think I read a description where he was about five foot three, sort of bandy legged, wore huge caps, fur caps, kind of askew with sort of a pudgy kind of a character. And from the illustrations of him his facial structure shows that as a child he might have suffered from rickets or some illness like that. So that there was some bone deformation and damage. He wasn't handsome at all, dynamic. He left the University of Vienna and it's interesting to note that he left in a very very special way. And I think I'd like to give you a paragraph describing it from Pachter because this is quite interesting. "Dissatisfied with 'philosophy' and determined to find another approach to learning, Theophrastus continued his wanderings in the company of the so-called roll brethren." And this is the first indication in European history of a traveling brethren. That is to say there had been at the turn of the millennium the year 1000 - and I'll be lecturing on this Thursday at the PRS - there had been a various millennial groups like the brethren of the Free Spirit and so forth but that this roll brethren that Paracelsus joined was the first generation that were manifesting from the activities of Ficino and Colet, Trithemius and Trismosin. In other words, in the background those individuals that we have already covered have already done their work, have already made the new world but they've made it in a sense of positing the invisible movements and structures which then would slowly grow and manifest themselves. This was an age when transportation and the growth of ideas was extremely sluggish and it took 100 years for ideas which would have matured in one generation in our time to actually come to maturity. But this joining of a traveling brethren group on the part of Paracelsus at the very formative age of 18 years old, Pachter goes on and he says, "they were an offspring of the brothers of the common lot." This was their name, "brothers of the common lot," and they cultivated a new form of piety very congenial to Theophrastus. And they too believed in the spontaneity of will and taught that man can justify his existence through love not through faith as Luther thought and many looked up to. Nicholas de Cusa as their spiritual father. And he says here to Erasmus as their leader. But actually this is a misnomer on Pachter's part because Erasmus at this time was still tutoring himself on John Colet's background. The man in the background of this brethren of the common lot was our dear Abbot Trithemius in connection with Colet in London and Trismosin traveling all over Europe. Paracelsus when he joined this group disappears from our view. If we're looking with academic glasses none of the books that you read or consult have any real idea of where he was. Pachter later in some footnote, about 50 or 60 pages later, confesses that everything that he's said about Paracelsus travels from such a point to such a point is all conjecture and that the fact that certain documents surfaced, and seem to name Paracelsus, he says indicates that maybe somewhere along the line Paracelsus had met Trithemius before he had gone back to Italy which happened in about 3 or 4 years. The fact is that Paracelsus finally discovered a group of serious minded questers, persons very much like ourselves, who were not to be put off by the anxieties of the age, enormous as they might be, and not to be deferred by the pseudo-pleasures of the age who were determined that they were going to find the truth of life and the truth of the unfoldment of the individual. And Paracelsus finally got himself into a situation where he was ready to meet his masters. It is said that he traveled to Erfurt. Erfurt which is a town in Germany somewhere in between the triangle of Leipzig and Frankfurt and Munich somewhere in the middle of that. But actually Erfurt is connected with Trithemius. It's not that far from Würzburg and Trithemius had a tremendous net of organization that he'd been building now since the 1480s, and we're talking about 1511. So this is quite far along, this traveling brethren of the common lot were the first indications of what in a century would become the Rosicrucians. They were the first groups. And of course when they found someone like Paracelsus they brought him into their confidence and had him travel with themselves. And he was taken back and slowly brought into the kin of the good abbot. Now Trithemius who was probably from 1511 to his death in 1516 associated with Paracelsus as a teacher, but not as a teacher as someone would have standing at a podium and giving you information to take notes, but a teacher of a very very high spiritual order someone who lived with the students, who moved with them in hermetic ways, who was able to let the developments come out in a natural pacing given the emendation but the natural pacing was energized by a projection from the teacher. And we'll see that one of the most outstanding peculiarities in Paracelsus's philosophy was his belief in the magnetic organization of life energy and the understanding of this was a sensitivity which Trithemius and Trismosin were extremely capable of imparting. And when they found a student like Paracelsus who could not only take it in but who could integrate it and perform with it they gave him all that they could. And there are just a few indications in his work. Paracelsus who usually thought physicians especially to be the most ignorant people of all they should know better and they didn't, said that there was one great physician that he admired above all others and that was Marsilio Ficino. And it's interesting that Paracelsus would call Ficino a physician but he meant it because his view of medicine and of health took in all of these universal patterns of which man is a microcosm was the expressive integrating center. And the physician not only heals the body and not only the body and the mind but primarily reconstitutes the harmony of the soul by attuning it to the harmony of the world. And that health then is brought back. Trithemius died in 1516 and it's just about the time that Paracelsus begins traveling again and we find him covering the entirety of Europe. He travels from 1516 to about 1524, 1525 and he goes everywhere. He goes to England. He goes north. He shows up as a surgeon in the Netherlands. He shows up in far northern Europe. He travels so that later on his books are translated into Turkish and Persian and Arabic. Just where he goes we're uncertain but the fact is, is that he has learned that the Book of Nature is the text by which a hermetic scientist tutors himself and that his postgraduate course is moving in the world in that special way to build his observations, his experience, into a fullness. He goes to Salzburg about 1525 and it's about this time that Paracelsus begins to appeal to the royalty of Europe. They would like to make him a physician or they would like to give him a position. And every time Paracelsus gets a chance he blows up the situation because it's so phony he can't stand it. He held a chair as a professor at one time in Paris and just could not stand the smug ignorance of the faculty. And so the very people who gave him a job and gave him the position became the target of his lambasting. And of course you don't make many friends this way. So he kept traveling and realized that he was probably going to live out his life this way. Now there's an interesting observation, I think Mr. Hall makes it briefly in one place, there was a rumor that Paracelsus had at some time in his early life suffered a castration which was why he was never married and seemed not really to be too related to women. He seemed always to be sort of the hermit, almost like a eunuch in terms of that capacity of life. It may have been that. I rather suspect that the overriding religious visionary capacity of the man simply made it impossible for him to be anything other than a secular saint which is really what he was. His quality and intensity of addressing himself to the problems of the universe was of such a high order that he could not stand any kind of compromise in anyone else, including himself. And so this tremendous volatility in his personality was not the trigger of an unbalanced character but rather an indication of the transparency of this nuclear energy within himself, this dynamo, this reactor of cosmic power plant quality within himself just under the surface. He was given a chance in 1525, 1526 to be the city physician for the town of Basel, Switzerland and there he consulted with a great many famous individuals. I have a letter from Erasmus to Paracelsus and I'll give you just a few statements out of this. This was written by Erasmus in 1527 to Paracelsus. And remember now Erasmus was the one of the arch students of John Colet and he was very much acquainted with Sir Thomas More who wrote the Utopia, among other things, and that we have mentioned how John Colet was the mentor also in a transforming way to Agrippa, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, who we'll get to next week. And so we have Erasmus writing in 1527 to Paracelsus. And he says that he, "it is not incongruous to wish continued spiritual health to the medical man through whom God gives us physical health." This is a very peculiar type of salutation from a very quiet collected scholar like Erasmus. This is the man through whom God gives us physical health. In other words by the time he was 34 in the eyes of a man like Erasmus, Paracelsus was already the arch physician of a spiritual medicine. And how does he know this? Because he had met Paracelsus. He says just once before. Where would he have met him? Possibly in the Netherlands when he was an army surgeon there. But because of the tie-ins with Trithemius and Trismosin, I think that he probably was circulated in the group as being the star student, the great man of promise, in whom all of these tremendous traditions which had been brought back into play energized by these geniuses and then fed and integrated into that individual Paracelsus. So Erasmus goes on and he says to him, "I'm surprised that you know my ailments so well and that you are able to diagnose me so absolutely correctly." And he says, "I have heard that you have even resurrected Froben." And this was a great friend of Erasmus who's very high up in the University of Basel and he says "this this is my other half and if you restore me also you will have restored both of us by treating each of us singly. May we have the good fortune to keep you in Basel." And then he signs it, "Erasmus of Rotterdam" by his own hand. So at this time Paracelsus, about 34 years of age, trying again to stay put but just could not stand to keep his mouth shut. There was so much to rail against. There were so many phonies and it was a situation where his visionary capacity fortressed by his experiential training and then energized by the spiritual imprimaturs that had been given to him by people of the quality of Trithemius and Trismosin. And remember one of the basic cores that they were giving was that we have a tradition of great antiquity which was lost and we have salvaged and brought back to life and the light shall never again go out. And therefore when we pass this lamp of tradition to you we pass it to you to keep it working and to pass it on so that Paracelsus had this tremendous responsibility. The next years of his life though, once he had ingratiated himself with the power structures of a major university, like the University of Basel and the city fathers of Basel, reads like an itinerary of a thief fleeing from one city to another across the face of Europe and one can go down month by month and year by year and he's always leaving. He's living out of a suitcase. But while he's living out of this suitcase he is increasingly at home everywhere. His entire comprehension of the cosmos as a unity just seems in these years to mature and grow. And Paracelsus who in his education had never been given the finished Latin education so that when he wrote there were not these refined paragraphs and wonderful treatises but rather in a sort of a low German the cribbed and scribbled notes of a fantastic genius trying to catch up with his insights and yet having enough of a sense of comprehension that his works seem to be more than just wonderful arguments put out to be matrixes of visionary seeds collected and heaped together under categories. And in fact this produced a great problem later on because legitimate works of Paracelsus for the first 50 years after his death were very difficult to determine and it was only on the orders of Prince Ernst of Cologne in 1589 and 1590 that the legitimate works of Paracelsus were identified and brought together and published in a huge series of tomes so that the spurious documents dreamed up by those who would like to take the authority of Paracelsus and then dupe other people. There are always con men working. And whenever there's something powerful and transformative like the tradition which had been handed to Paracelsus, the temptation for most mortals is just too much. And so this great edition of 1590 of Paracelsus works, which was then reprinted in 1616 when all of the works like The Famine and the Confessio and the Chemical Marriage were coming out, they reprinted in four great tomes The Works of Paracelsus so that everyone could realize that this is the legitimate tradition. This is the path. In fact the only name in the Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucians is Paracelsus and they speak very highly of him that although he had seen the book em he was not of our particular brethren and the reason that he wasn't because they were writing that in 1614 a century after Paracelsus had already taken part in the brethren of the common lot who were the originators the original movement. He spent some time in cities like Nuremberg. He spent some time in Innsbruck. He spent some time in Augsburg and Linz and through the 1530s he increasingly had a sense of his impending mortality. When he died he was only 48 years old. It is said that he died at the hands of enemies. I'm not quite so sure if that's the case. Stephan related that there's a stairwell in Salzburg that is pointed to as the place where he was cast down. The late portraits of him by Hirschvogel show a kind of sunken quality to his eyes in dark circles coming out and it seems to me that he shows the effects of someone who in his life had experimented with alchemical medicines. And you find this kind of quality especially in Chinese Daoist manuscripts of that sunken kind of a capacity where the system is leached out by the introduction of very high potent mineral preparations. I rather believe the tradition that on the equinox of 1541, the autumnal equinox, Paracelsus in some inn, drew up his last will and testament and in his last will and testament made a declaration of his worldly goods to various people and then three days later died on September 24th. And the reason why I go for that is that we have, in the PRS vault, the original document known as Paracelsus' Prophecy and I have xeroxed, and it was copied and notarized in 1542 just a few months, about four months after Paracelsus died. And in this document which was written out and notarized and made official in 1542, Paracelsus also gives the other half of his responsibility because you see he had become what is known in the Hermetic tradition as a doctor of civilization. That is to say when the prideful ignorance of man gums up the world to a certain point of chaos then God takes a hand and sends in individuals or an individual who will bring an order back out, dissolve the false views of the age, and re-precipitate out a true structure so that man may have a chance again to know himself and to participate in the larger world. Well this other document which is the other side of his will is the prophecies of Paracelsus. And it's only a few pages but I'd like to give you a couple of excerpts because it carries the tremendous sense of responsibility of Paracelsus. This is the translation done in 1952 at the behest of Mr. Hall. The prophecy of Doctor Philippe Theophrastus Paracelsus concerning the lion of the North. The lion - do you remember in the Trithemius and Trismosin document the rosy cross with the sphere of Jesus implied at the end was a man lying down with a lion. Do you remember Trismosin's alchemical process leading to spiritual enlightenment, the Red lion process. And the promise that at the end of this course we will see that Newton Sir Isaac Newton goes into the complement to it the green Lion process. Well here's the prophecy of Paracelsus concerning the lion of the North. He wrote and this is translated but it's very close to his words, "They would not allow me to remain in my tomb. But after dragging me forth they faced me towards the east." This is a death vision. The Great Spirit who has lived properly near their death has a death vision. And in this death vision an appropriate Mythos of the cosmos is presented and I in my life have known several individuals who have given me their death vision. And so I understand and recognize the tone and the quality and the sheer magnificence that Paracelsus gives here. "They would not allow me to remain in my tomb. But after dragging me forth they faced me towards the east. And so I predict to you three great treasures lie hidden." That is there buried. Three great buried treasures. "The first is at Judea near the Julian Alps. The second lies between Swabia and Bavaria. I will not purposely designate the location in order to avoid much evil in the spilling of blood. And the third is hidden between Spain and France in the Pyrenees. The finders of these treasures will be carried aloft in triumph and will be greatly admired by all. Furthermore between Swabia and Bavaria there will be found some books containing working methods for little known crafts together with some precious stones and a carbuncle. These books of little known crafts are buried alchemical processes," recipes not simply for the chemical aspect but these were the keys to the spiritual science. And Paracelsus says, "these are now buried." And he says, "but I will now give you the ages of those who will find these treasures. The first person will be 32 years old, the second will be 50, the third will be 28. The latter will appear a little while after the catastrophe of the Austrian Empire and at the same time that this will happen the Red Lion will come from the north. He will be the aggressor and at length will overcome the eagle. The former will submit his rule onto all of Europe and part of Asia and Africa and he will profess goodwill on a Christian religion which will come from which will come several sects." And he goes on with this and I want to give you one more. "Finally, I Theophrastus firmly demanded of you that none of you impart that which I have placed in evidence before you since I am not able to oppose the will of God who alone in the nature of things is able to place such things into operation. Here are the mysteries of the secrets which I have yielded up for your discovery. This treasure surpasses many of the other treasures and in the locations already indicated, as in between Swabia and Bavaria lie hidden, my processes which are the true transformation of metals by means of an easy abridged method." So that Paracelsus had wended his way through this labyrinth of alchemical processes and had not only found, as Trismosin and Trithemius would have given him, the true method but he had had time to find a shortcut method, a process by which man may transform himself into a divine capacity almost a capacitor. And the clue to that is a paragraph, and I have to digress here for just a second. The clue to that is a paragraph which Prachter gives us in translation from a book by Trithemius which is very hard to come by. I don't have access to a copy. The book in translation is called The Great Surgery Book. And what is the greatest surgery? The greatest surgery is for a physician representing the divine to come into a civilization and restore it to health. That's the great surgery. From The Great Surgery book Trithemius gives this secret process and he gives it like a master would with just the peaks, just the high points because if you don't know how to link it together, if you don't know the matrix and the context by which it forms together, then it just sounds to you like homilies, something very nice to say. But when you understand how it goes together and that it is a sequence of effectiveness then it changes. Then it becomes a plan by which to reform the world. "Studies generate knowledge. Knowledge bears love. Love. Likeness. Likeness. Communion. Communion. Virtue. Virtue. Dignity." Not dignity as aren't we great? But dignitatis. An interior architecture of quality which is universal. Dignitatis. "Dignity. Power." Not physical power but power to do. Power to make. And power performs the miracle. This is the unique path to magic perfection. Perfection. "Divine and natural from which all superstitious and diabolical wizardry is totally separated and by which it is confounded." And of course all of this describes stages along an esoteric alchemical process. And there are seven stages leading to the miracle which are like the seven planetary spheres, the seven transformative stages of the Red lion alchemical process. But if one takes the miracle, the eighth, then one has the eight. And one has the true manifestation of infinity. And he says that he has buried the secret for the true transformation of metals by means of an easy abridged method, the universal matter which is more perfect and more celebrated than potable gold. And lastly the stone of the philosophers for the discovery of which with the aid of God life becomes open. Life becomes open. And again these are not homilies. These are powerful formulae on the same level and with the same import as Einstein's E=MC squared. That given an intelligence which knows how to understand the workings of the context and the matrix the experience of the way in which these formulae come into an exacting operation man may in fact change not only himself but the world. There is a peculiarity about this which I think should be gone into for just a few minutes. The four basic elements - earth, air, water, and fire - as everyone knows was complemented by a quintessence, a fifth essence which was an ether, or an energy, or as it was called azoth. And in that portrait of Paracelsus, that great sword that he got in 1524, had a stone on the handle. And the engraving it said azoth on that stone and the handle of the sword, that sword is a mystical symbol of effective vision, mystical vision, the sword of Manjushri in Vajrayana Buddhism. The sword is always there and in fact in a document which is almost unknown called The Prognostications of Paracelsus which I have xeroxed a copy, and you can take a look at it later. 32 emblem pictures. Again very much like the tarot cards which we have very much like masons red lion process and very much incidentally like a friend of theirs Hans Holbein's Dance of Death. We find again and again a recurring symbolism where the hand that holds the sword comes out of a cloud. And later on in the next century when the symbolism has really matured and come full circle the hand that comes out of the cloud no longer holds just a sword but holds a whole university building on wheels with all kinds of other elements coming into it. But in Paracelsus's day, because this was the psychic image of this tremendous breakthrough that man had finally understood what was going on in the universe for the first time really had a comprehension and not just on the level of the most excellent Marsilio Ficino but on the level of Paracelsus where a man could go in and take physical matter and change its nature and prove it, that he knew what he was doing. That he was able to transform. And the essential core of this transformation was that quintessence, that fifth element, that azoth. And the notion that obtained here was that all life exists not in the object but in its magnetic qualities of integrating cosmic energy. So that food for instance was not effective as physical food, it wasn't the apple. It was its capacity to organize certain proportions of energy into a magnetic focus which then we ingest and the benefit to us is from that energy. It's like food that has its nutrition in the vitamins. If you overcook that food and the vitamins are gone it's lost its nutrition. The same sort of thing except that in Paracelsus' understanding it was a spiritual quality of the fifth essence, the energy of the universe that had been codified and brought in in a specific pattern. And that man had learned to unlock those keys so that the first illustrations in the prognostications of Theophrastus, when you see them, the very first thing that they show is they show a hand with a sword and they show the locks with the little keyholes the symmetrical keyholes of that infinity pattern showing that this is in fact… Do you notice the serpent around the sword? Yeah. The rod, the magic rod. The magician's rod has become a sword. Man may fight ignorance. Man may change the world. Convert it not by arguments to some phony position but to actually demonstrate his capacity to be a magus, a comprehender of magia - magic. And just as our childlike images of some kind of sword in the stone Merlin is very close to the exact truth where the transformation happens. But it has to work on the cosmic level so that physicality has to be removed from its emphasis, its temporary emphasis, as a static object and converted mathematically, hermetically to its etherial magnetic form. And then if a man is able to work on that level of the unconditioned he may transpose that magnetic form to another and effect a total transformation. And if this is so that a physician then may address a person who is sick not as a static entity but as someone whose magnetic form, whose auric balance, is out of kilter and transfer that imbalance that disease form from the person to something else. And Paracelsus spent a lot of time experimenting with taking the disease of people and putting it into plants, not into animals because with animals it doesn't work and it harms the animals but with plants it doesn't affect them. And as long as the person doesn't recreate those conditions the disease will not return. But the only physicians who can make this work are those spiritual physicians those masters of the hermetic science. And there are only a few of them and they teach just a few because the qualities of ignorance are so ingrown in the world obtaining for so long that you can even show someone the truth and train them in it and they will not realize the character of an internal integrity that is commensurate with its operation. So as Trithemius says, there are many people who guess a lot who just don't know and there are a few who know exactly and can do it. So that Paracelsus was extremely interested and of course one of his great statements in his writing is that minerals are alive and mineral world has its magnetic properties even stronger because it's more in contact with the primordiality of the physical world and that minerals are alive in this quintessential horizon of manifestation and they grow. He says, I know because I'm a miner. He says, I've been around these people all my life and we know that minerals grow in the earth. And we know that the strongest minerals are the metals. And we know that there are seven primordial metals in a sequence. And we know that the finest metal in that sequence, the crown of the mineral realm, is gold. So that that most perfect juxtaposition, that most perfect magnetic shape, is that expressed by gold. He says, we don't want to have gold to spend. We don't want to make gold to prove that we can do this. But we understand that this knot of truth comes to a point exactly at that place in nature to show man that his understood capacity is not only legitimate and true but efficacious anywhere in the universe. And he says, for instance, we know that certain plants collect certain kinds of minerals. I have affinities with them. And in this of course he's following Ficino very closely and understanding Trismosin very very closely. And he says take for instance the grape. We know that grape leaves in particular when they are dried and had been collected from certain areas next to certain mines, the ashes of those grape leaves will contain minute quantities of gold and that grapes more than any other fruit seem to have the roots of the plant leach into the mineral and draw the gold up. And he says maybe this is why ambrosia, the grape, the food of the gods. Because it was a clue for man to realize all the time that this was a natural occurrence of the way in which levels of nature juxtapose and interpenetrate and if this is so he says, man has a very peculiar relationship to the mineral world. He is the expressive, moving comprehension and the mineral world is the primordial basis of manifestation. And in between that the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom have their harmonies but that man in order to get back to the quintessence, has to go back down to in his comprehension to be able to work with the mineral world. That is he has to understand how gold manifests because it's the process by which his comprehension finally is tutored and he realizes that if this is so and he sees it for himself and he can do it again and again then everything else in that whole spectrum of understanding is also true. And he may, with confidence, move on. So that alchemy is really a theology and that there is no war of science and religion. That's a phony conundrum that's presented by ignorant minds that came out later and we'll see how that came out. And in fact he says, there must be then for physicians who are able to work freely in the hermetic process a universal medicine that can cure effectively any disease because it operates on that most primordial transformative level in that etheric energy level in that highest integration of the magnetic qualities. And remember that Trithemius originally took himself to Würzburg because it had been founded by Saint Kilian on that conflux of laylines so that this whole tradition goes back into dim antiquity. In fact it goes so far back that we lose track of it. This capacity in fact of transcending the physical limitations was expressed most poignantly in those Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, that I think I mentioned last week. And it's interesting I think I xeroxed off for some of you to take a look at. I have some place here. I think in here. Just what Paracelsus is talking about here. That man transcends and becomes just a pair of eyes above the landscape. Or just an eye above the landscape. Or here's his face and the eyes up above in the clouds. These are the summations of the secret processes of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. From about the fourth century AD just before the Alexandrian synthesis was butchered by the armies of the ignorant. And it's interesting too, that here in the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo at the very beginning a very interesting statement is always made and no one's been able to identify it before this. It says that these hieroglyphics were translated by Philip. Translated by Philip. And it's commensurate with this that in that secret manuscript that I showed you some slides of last week that contain the degrees from Trismosin to Paracelsus and from Trithemius to Paracelsus. That Trismosin when he writes a letter to him does not address him as Theophrastus and he doesn't address him as Paracelsus. He addresses him as Philip, because one of his names was Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. He says, from Salomon Trismosin from Lucien to you young Hohenheim that you may become great in the secret art I hear and have learned upon inquiry that you Philip, work with many arts and experiment with imperfect metals. You find therein nothing you know what to do with and therefore send for counsel from me so that you may read again the nature of the unknown things I have seen through you and your constellation tells me that you are predestined to the secret art. How does he see through him? He doesn't see through him like a psychiatrist would see through somebody because of an understanding of personality types. He doesn't see through him as some experienced man of the world because he's seen a lot of characters. He sees through him to his true self, is in our nature, his magnetic body which Trismosin has a really powerful adept. You can take a look at this picture of him again. Would see. It's rumored I haven't been able to find it that Albrecht Dürer who was one of this crowd did an engraving of all the masters together - Trithemius and Trismosin and so forth. He says I have seen through you and your constellation that's not just the constellation of a horoscope but it's the constellation of that universal quintessential energy that's in this particular manifestation and is visible not just in a manifestation like an aura but in its universal thereness, thusness. You must become great in your fortune, he says. I have taught and instructed you in my school with the sweet sentences of the learned philosophers that you might know the red lion. That which you have not understood with your intellect because the mind cannot understand the unconditioned realm. It has no capacity to operate in the unconditioned. But man's spirit does. Man's spirit is free. It's like that bird that comes off the spinal column, that energy that flies away from the rod of the chakras and becomes that cloud. The understanding of which holds that sort of truth, that blessing tool of azoth. Because there's always that cloud from which the hand and the sword come. There's always that God in the whirlwind who does come to the Job who refuses to be misled by the arguments of the wise so-called. So Trismosin goes on to Paracelsus. He says you let slip the pearls and you grasp that which is uncertain. Let go of all these things that look so beautiful and they look so powerful and they seem so wealthy and go for the uncertain, the uncertain. You must seek the right road like our ancient forefathers. I am pleased with you as a young mountaineer who extracts the sun from the rain because you enjoy it. She will become submissive to you and she will become mixed with lion blood in your work. Your mane is reversed from that of your parents to the advancement of your fortune. Your chastity will enable you to acquire much secret art. Your desires will be fulfilled in your middle age. You have been to me the most beloved disciple of my school. Therefore will I reveal to you what otherwise I keep secret and did keep secret at your beginning. Be secretive and silent like a fool that cannot speak. The fool card is always a zero right? It's always unconditioned. It doesn't have any number. No number. I want you to have in your youth a solid basis for your work in the world. Seek now your experiment with gentle fire so that the tincture will succeed for you. Be careful that the blooming with its colors will not disintegrate in its operation. Don't be misled by the spectrum. Don't follow after those seeming manifestations. It's the whole and the whole is only in the unconditioned. There isn't any single particular quality that's the key but the unconditioned which has no quality. Seek the uncertainty he says. You must be wise for the control of the fire. Your understanding will teach you and you will become skilled. I cannot teach you neither can any man in this world how to place your hands so that the lion will show himself in his good rays. You must experience it. Seek a devout man whom you can trust who has assayed the secret work to its end. Humble yourself before him. He will point out with his fingers the great treasure with its colors. I am old and weary. I have consummated the work for another time. I will now rest. Amen. Given from the village of Lucerne, April 18th, 1515 to Philip von Hohenheim. Now and for future use by my beloved former pupil. And so he restores to him the von Hohenheim the grandfather's royalty. Because the teacher of this quality can do that, a teacher may give that. So that Paracelsus was working with alchemy as a theology. He was working with a plan that led to a universal medicine. He had the method. He understood its efficaciousness and all he needed was a world of experimenting to be able to transmit and transform what he had understood into the realm of particulars. And with this of course he sought a universal medicine. I'll give you a little quotation here from a lecture done by Mr. Hall about ten years ago about this quality and this property of Paracelsus. It's very tricky to explain. I use his words with your permission. "This universal medicine perpetuated the body and the soul and perfected the mind. It brought the mind to its perfection because the mind was not the object of its own operation but merely the vehicle by which the unconditioned could declare its manifestation. It equipped man for the direct experience of the presence of God as a mystery within himself." And of course this was absolute dynamite to any church hierarchy. It wasn't just a reformation like Luther of tacking theses and problems that needed to be corrected on the door. This was not only pulling the rug but pulling the house and the ground and the planet and the whole works away so that the mystery of God was there inside himself. It was therefore the medicine of complete regeneration, complete regeneration. Mr. Hall says, "later the Rosicrucians, the Hermeticists and various groups of humanists all took hold of this theory of regeneration for its possible political implications. There was a way in which society itself could be brought to a state of social equity by means of a universal reformation." So that Paracelsus had the keys to this and realized. But further he had been given sufficient warning. Remember Trithemius's warning to Agrippa. Just feed hay to the oxen because very often as it falls out they trample you. So you have to be careful how you give it and where you give it. To whom it is given. And further the information has to come out in a very peculiar way. It cannot come out in lines of argument that are beautifully comprehensible all along the line. There have to be lacunae in the presentation. There have to be twists and turns of a very special particular nature because only by the generating of the personal energy of the individual do they come up to that transcendent level and leave off of looking at the arguments and leave off of working with the mind and blossom into that comprehension. Ah! as Plato says. That discovery that it's true. So that this quality had to be preserved. So that every time the Hermetic tradition from here on would present itself it was increasingly concerned not only with keeping the tradition intact for the individuals - I don't like the word adept - but there was an eye cocked to the horizon because this was absolute dynamite to every social structure that obtained. There wasn't a political order. There wasn't a religious order. There wasn't a social order anywhere in the world that was not completely up for grabs by the power of this information. This was the life blood of the Renaissance. This was the core mystically behind the Reformation. And it had to by its nature and on purpose because of its implications be kept absolutely secret. So that if you consult the literature you never find statements such as I've given to you the sequencing. And the sequencing is only possible to be reconstructed at this time because I'm not seeking to give it step by step or stage by stage but keep coming back and hitting it again and again, week after week, and filling in various points and layering it out so that as you listen over some extended period of time, or listen to the tapes of this over some extended period of time, there will come a point of comprehension where all the particulars begin to sound like sense and it starts to make sense because you're generating the context for understanding it in your own self. And surely that's admissible. One more aspect of Paracelsus medicine needs to be talked about because it's so peculiar at first, and so shattering at last, to our conception of disease and health. He believed that because physical manifestation comes into the phenomenal realm, in a natural juxtaposition of astral or magnetic qualities, that man through his ignorance has fouled up these natural processes and has produced what we would call demons, diseases, which are in fact temporarily in the phenomenal realm real entities and they inhabit persons, and they inhabit objects, and they have an efficacy until they are dissolved and the structure restored. So that in Paracelsus' eyes what is wrong with a person who is diseased is that he has deformed his structure to a point to where the complement deformation has entered into him. And the way to deal with that is to temporarily take that out of him - that disease, that demonic presence - and then change his conditions so that he restores himself to health so that this kind of a statement could be written. Apropos Paracelsus' view of disease, if the individual has some form of disease locked within his etheric energy field so that it looks like some kind of a tumor or a cancerous growth exists which has not come into objectivity but which nevertheless steals the vitality. Paracelsus offers several consolations that the disease can be cured because it is not preceded to an irreversible physical condition. That is, these diseases, because they are not in the natural order, because they do not plug into the actual true sequence of manifestation in the cosmos, are all temporary. They are all written on water as it is. They never are real in the sense of having a universal quality to them. They're always phenomenal and always changeable. And here's one of the strangenesses. And it has to be brought up because Paracelsus believed this to be true. He says that, this life force as long as it is intact stays with the individual, stays with the object. So that he says that he knows that there are some Egyptian mummies that still have the life force intact. And in fact in one of his documents uses the peculiar term mummy - M-U-M-M-I-E - designating that life force. He says this mummy if it is still intact is in fact - and we have these books at the PRS vault - is detectable. So that this word arising from the Egyptian word mumia the embalmed body of the dead. More interesting however is the fact that Paracelsus discovered that the etheric fields of Egyptian mummies were still functioning by magical spells and invocations and the placement of secret charms. These energy fields were still operative to some degree. He gave. Perhaps he gave this phenomenon as the explanation for the so-called Egyptian curse which seems to plague those who disturbed Egyptian remains and so on. But the fact is that Paracelsus being a universal genius really took this very very far and developed the whole notion of cosmic correlations and analogies on the level of man's soul to a point to which Ficino could only have dreamed of it. And you have to realize that Paracelsus was six years old when Ficino died. So all of this happened very very suddenly. In fact so suddenly that we find the intrusion of this tremendous upheaval of psychic contents entering into the culture of the time. An artist who is an exact contemporary with Salomon Trismosin was Hieronymus Bosch. And if you take a look at Bosch's work you get some idea of the incredible psychic upheaval going on in this time. Well a very close student with Paracelsus from the same teachers was Henry Cornelius Agrippa. And we need to take a look at him. Paracelsus admired his work, probably had not seen him too often. But the connection is very close. And in fact Agrippa became the physician to Maximilian. And it was Maximilian who brought Dürer into his court who made an offer to Trithemius to bring him into his court who patronized from time to time Paracelsus. And if I can manage to find the great huge construct, the Arch of Maximilian by Albrecht Dürer, I will try to borrow it from PRS and bring it next week because it will be a wonderful background for us to see Henry Cornelius Agrippa who is of that generation of Paracelsus of that generation of Erasmus and Thomas More. They were the first students from this cosmic university that had been re-established and they are really somebody. If I can't get the whole thing I have the centerpiece of that arch because it's the frontispiece in the Bollingen Series translation of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. We're moving in a hermetic circle even though it's very wide and very large. Increasingly you'll see that it all comes home to our home right here in old Los Angeles.