Paracelsus (Part 1)

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 11 of 13

Paracelsus, Part 1
The Hermetic Genius of the Age

Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 11, 1986

Transcript:

Finally, we're going to come to the new man. A pattern that we have noticed in the hermetic tradition almost as if there's a linking together by chains. And an epoch seems to close with a major figure in the hermetic tradition, someone who brings it together, who personifies the– the understanding of the whole development. And then immediately after that figure, or contemporaneous somewhat with that figure, is the new man, the– the individual who seems to exemplify everything that the archetype had developed. And suddenly here is the new man who expresses this.

In the Hermetic tradition that we've been following, Marsilio Ficino sums up everything about the Hermetic tradition. And actually in Northern Europe, the good Abbot Trithemius also is a summing up figure, enormously learned, tremendously capacious. And then, exactly on the heels of these seminal figures, we see the new man coming out, someone– the kind of personality that we haven't seen before.

At the farther end of the development of Paracelsus, the individuals who sum up this whole epoch that we are now seeing the new man coming out in Paracelsus, those seminal individuals were Isaac Newton and Leibniz. And they sum up at the end of the 17th century this tremendous development of consciousness. And the new individual who steps out then from Newton and Leibniz will be Benjamin Franklin. Be it– Really a new man in a new world. But for Paracelsus as a new man, he steps out, not into a new world, but he steps out into a consciousness which has been completely stirred up, provoked, not just evoked, but provoked. And the world that Paracelsus steps out into is swarming with the projections and transferences of the subconscious and the unconscious which have been– had been kept in integration. And suddenly they are out, and the new man is strong enough to deal with them. But he finds himself in a social context where many persons actually seem to retrogress. This is to say, in Paracelsus’s lifetime we see a sudden rise in people being medieval all over again, but medieval in the sense that had not really been seen for many centuries.

When we go back and we look at the 13th century, we find a very sophisticated understanding, a mentality which has hard won developed itself from the great 12th century. And in the 14th century we find all of the great mystics, the seminal mystics, and we find a control. Their life and consciousness have a way of controlling the developments. And in the 15th century the development is still well in hand. The image base is sometimes extravagant, but it's well in hand. And all of a sudden, at the beginning of the 16th century, we find all of the projections, all of the transparencies, all of that image base which had been integrated and locked in – the negatives, the shadows – and the world is suddenly demonic again. There are witches again, and the 16th century is haunted not only by demons, but by angels. And all of this will come to a culmination in the early 1600s, where you will have the– the craze of pointing the finger: necromancers, black magicians, witch hunts, and this sort of thing. But at the beginning of the 16th century, we have this kind of eerie world.

In this biography of– biography of Paracelsus, here's a good description by the author Heinrich Pachter – Henry Pachter.

“Yet, here was a great difficulty. It was held to be common knowledge that demons and ghosts populate nature. Their appearance was recorded in the most authoritative books. They were held responsible for everything out of the ordinary, and for many commonplace events, too. Paracelsus himself had manifold proof of their mischievous works. In his own psychiatric practice, he encountered the spirit Afernoch which caused melancholia. Some of his patients were tortured by succubae. Miners with whom he worked were plagued by gnomes [who] guarded subterranean treasures.” – And then would release poisonous gases and and various other conscious distorting elements under the earth. “All nature, tree and spring, marsh and mountain, was the haunt of a host of monsters, ghoulish or friendly, neither men nor beasts, not quite spirit, nor quite corporeal – what was the nature of these irritating creatures?”

And Paracelsus wrote volumes to prove that nature takes care of herself heals herself, is not really demonic; the demons are not in nature. And it will transfer itself in medicine to letting wounds heal themselves, of keeping away the viper fat and all the other ingredients that would be dissolved in it from being caked onto the wound. This is an extraordinary development. Perhaps we can bring in some slides of Hieronymus Bosch, or Pieter Bruegel, and see that these projections that were coming out at this time. But for Paracelsus, the demons are in man, not in nature, and that they are in the undisciplined mind of man, and therefore man has to be returned to a wholeness. In this, magic – or magia – is the central synthesizing core for Paracelsus.

When Jung talks about Paracelsus in his volume on Alchemical Studies, volume 13, he entitles this whole section on Paracelsus now, “Paracelsus as a spiritual phenomenon,” a spiritual phenomenon – that he is larger than historical life; that he has a reverberation in the completeness of the person transcending even the psyche. For instance, this alchemical symbol which I’ve placed up here, the alchemical symbol for the Primum Mobile, the– the basic quality, which Paracelsus would call Iliaster, the very fount of all being, has for its expression here a symbolic quaternary. But the quintessence, the quintessence, added in the center of the quaternary of the four elements of nature is not something in itself like the other elements, but is a polarity. It's the psychic quality that is also there in the primordial quality of matter. There is something of psychic consciousness in matter, and in matter in its most primordial, unified state. So that the unitas, which was a world of intellectual wholeness for Ficino, becomes very specific for Paracelsus and every thing in nature can be investigated by man if he is able to return to his primordial condition within.

He then presents his consciousness to the material world in its primordial state, so that matter, however it has been formed in its quaternary signature, impresses man's wholeness in such a way that man understands, registers, what this is, what it is for, the arrangement for it. So that the analysis, the scientific analysis for Paracelsus, is not yet projected out into the lab, not into the lab equipment yet. It will take a long time for that. But the quality is within man's consciousness. He is able to become more and more specific in his understanding. So that Paracelsus, while he is learned and attracted to Ficino, to Pico. When he studies in Ferrara, he studies under individuals who were personal friends of Pico, who had studied under Ficino. But he's not interested quite in that. He's not interested in the– what we would call now, the intellectual understanding. He's not interested in the ideational matrix, but he has this practical bent.

Part of the difficulty with Paracelsus is his background. Physically, Paracelsus suffered from rickets. Immanuel Kant also suffered from it. So that physically, he had the bowed disjointedness of a boy who was ill, who was diseased. There was something always not right with him physically, but in his structure it wasn't quite right. And as a boy, he had to find a way to be whole, within himself, above and beyond the physical articulateness of himself. And also there was the matter of his mother. The mother was a semi-indentured servant to an inn that was run in connection with the Benedictine monastery. She committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in the Little Swiss Alpine town when he was only nine. The father, who was a doctor, but did not have a degree and so had to practice sort of on the side, was immediately repulsed by the Swiss environment, the townspeople talking, and he took the nine year old Paracelsus all the way across the mountain ranges, diagonally across – imagine in your mind – from south of Lake Zurich, all the way across to the border of Austria and northern Italy, near the Yugoslavian border. The city there is named Villach. Villach was a mining town. It was owned by the Fugger family, the great bankers, and the mines in the mountains around Villach yielded many precious metals and minerals. And so it was a mining, and distilling, and metallurgically-oriented town situated about halfway between Vienna – which is like an intellectual capital – and Venice – which is an industrial capital.

It's at this time, in Villach, that Paracelsus comes into contact with Trismosin, because Trismosin by this time – this would be around 1502, 1503 when Paracelsus shows up in Vienna. And Trismosin is now getting on in age. He's probably in his late 50s, and he is masterful at metallurgical processes, and he's just the sort of individual, the tough old wise man who would have been hired by a powerful banking family who couldn't have a better personal representative in a mining– important mining center than someone like this.

Paracelsus, in his teen years, from nine to fourteen, lives here in Villach, and he learns a peculiar quality of the processes of nature. Some of the biographers say that his father teaches him. His father doesn't have that kind of background, but someone like Trismosin would have. And at the age of fourteen, Paracelsus is together enough as an individual to take off on his own. And he goes traipsing across Europe at fourteen, and he goes from city to city, from university to university, never quite settling anywhere. And he goes with a critical mind to hear how they talk. How do they describe nature? How do they describe man? Because he already has some instruction. He says, colloquially, that he grew up among the pines. The pines do not teach you that. When he goes to a place like Paris, at age fifteen, he's already got a critical intelligence, and he's able to hear through the patter, the university academic patter, and he realizes they don't know what they're talking about. He realizes that the referent world for that kind of learning is in books, not basic books, but what we would today call pastiche textbooks – compendia of quotations, put together by individuals who can teach out of this textbook for forty years and not have to change it.

And so Paracelsus, when he sees this, realizes that they don't have any understanding of nature. For instance, in his hermetic and alchemical writings, he writes here about the property of crystals, natural crystals:

“To conjure is nothing else than to observe anything rightly, to know and understand what it is. The crystal is a figure of the air. Whatever appears in the air, movable or immovable, the same also appears in the crystal as a wave. For the air, the water, and the crystal, so far as vision is concerned, are one, like [mirrors in which inverted copies of objects unseen can be seen.]”

So he has this quality. And after two years of traveling, at age sixteen, he's taken out of this stewing about, out of this traveling. And he's put into a school in Vienna. And there in Vienna, he's taken under the wing of a man who's only about ten years older than himself, but who is established there at the university as the rector. And watches out over Paracelsus. In fact, it's this time in– in Vienna. The man's name– his humanist name was Vadianus, Vadianus – Joachim von Waadt (W-A-A-D-T), who lived on till 1551. Rector there at the University of Vienna, takes Paracelsus in, and for two years Paracelsus begins to get the basic kind of education that he is going to need. He learns about Latin. He learns about the– the books that generally people are– are acquainted with. He learns about book medicine for the first time in a formal way, so that he's given Galen; he's given Avicenna; he's given Hippocrates. But he's already mature in the sense that his critical intelligence has already been fashioned and already been– already been working for a couple of years. This is why later on, when Paracelsus wishes to demonstrate to the intellectually hidebound book learning population, the uselessness of their base of knowledge, he will publicly burn a copy of Galen. He learns this here, and in Vienna he realizes that this is a place he can always come back to. And in fact, twenty years later, in tough times, Paracelsus is welcomed by his old friend and put up for a while. But the difficulty of the times hits. Plague appears in Vienna and the university is completely closed down.

Where to go for his education? And he is told by his rector friend, the president at the University of Vienna, why not go to the original place? Go to Northern Italy. And so Paracelsus crosses over the Alps, and goes into Ferrara. Run at this time by the sparkling odd intelligence of Lucrezia Borgia. It's her– It's her taste that sets the tone of Ferrara at this time. And she's interested enough, she's intelligent enough. Her father, remember, was Pope Alexander the Sixth. Her brother is Cesare Borgia. She's odd enough to have interesting characters around in the court there in Ferrara, so that Paracelsus begins to pick up a new level of internationalism.

When he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and he traveled around, he traveled rather in student groups. They were called, colloquially, in retrospect, they're called ‘brethren of the common lot’, or scholaris in Latin. And they were traveling groups of students. Some historians hardly discriminate them from bands of marauders – roving bands of European youths, to use a phrase. Cities suddenly have laws against students coming in, or they have laws posting signs that one cannot enjoy extramarital connubial bliss in the classroom, in public. The original condemnations of mud slinging actually come from this time period when professors would actually throw mud at each other during lectures. It was a free for all. Universities were a blight on the community. Perhaps they still are. But a real blight– the students brought with them turmoil – like the 60s I suppose.

The next time that Paracelsus moves, Paracelsus moves as an individual. After Ferrara, Paracelsus realizes that he is in a peculiar position. And for the rest of his life, Paracelsus considers himself very much like a hermetic knight errant. His whole self-conception matures in Ferrara, and he begins to personify in himself that individual which Pico wrote about. The individual who is free in the universe and able to go on all levels, any level he wishes, able to contact the Primum Mobile. But what Paracelsus needs most of all is a teacher who can mature him in this primordial sense, and he finds in Ferrara – this is around 1511, 1512 – He finds in Ferrara that there is nobody in northern Italy that he can really go to: Ficino’s been dead for a while; Pico is gone; their disciples are interesting, but they don't have the original contact. The glow is fading. It's then that he learns that Trithemius is still alive. Trithemius is still in– He thinks in Sponheim, but very soon Trithemius will leave within that year, leave Sponheim. His monks will burn part of the library that he has amassed and throw the books out because they become scared.

Consciousness, when it's emerging into a new phase, is scary. It's like in our own time. We have a very peculiar giddiness that comes upon us. It's like a– it's like a vertigo of civilization. We realize that we're literally stepping off the planet. The same there at that time. When he goes to Trithemius, Trithemius will present to Paracelsus a whole new quality. Here's a quotation from Trithemius to illustrate the kind of mind that he has in his vast maturity.

“Studies generate knowledge. Knowledge bears love. Love emanates likeness and likeness creates communion. Communion engenders virtue. Virtue confers dignity. This dignity becomes a power and with that power, man makes miracles in nature. He transforms Nature. But most poignantly, he transforms himself. He is a new man. He is no longer what he was. And that new man can transform others.”

Well, this is revolutionary. This is very powerful. This is contemporaneous with Luther. This is a stirring of gigantic possibilities, but so far limited to a few personalities who are able to take this seriously. Remember, now, this is a demon-haunted matrix. This is a world where everything is scary. Everything is witchy. But Paracelsus, when he shows up, and– and comes into contact with Trithemius, he has the same quality of response that he had with Trismosin. He realizes that Trithemius is not reading books as his image base, but that the books are like strings around the fingers, they’re reminders to him of what he has experienced himself, of what he knows, so that the knowledge of Trithemius is what we would call a ‘horizon of reality’, rather than a ‘horizon of hermeneutic’. Rather than an interpretive scale of intelligence, Trithemius has an amplitude, or later on is what it is called an amphitheater of sapientiae, of wisdom. So that the normal book learning intelligence, that individual who has the– He has an interchange, generally with his books, and the books with each other, and eventually this comes back to him. And this is his circle of learning, and his circle of learning depends upon his inner horizon; his ability to coordinate that with his own personality.

But with someone like the new man, with Paracelsus, this circle of learning is amplified so that it becomes a three-dimensional sphere. It becomes a whole amphitheater of capacity. And the horizon, the inner horizon of intelligence, is no longer like a plane of reference, but becomes multidimensional so that what becomes real for Paracelsus, seeing things for what they are, is not identifying them as static entities, but understanding them as focuses of processes, and that if one is able to handle those processes, one can transform anything, and that the transformation takes place in a patterning so that man has to become– the new man has to become strategic about the reality in which he lives. He has to be ultimately circumspect because whatever he comes into contact with, whatever he is living with, whatever sphere of experience comes to him, he is able to change any quality in it, any element in it, and even himself, so that the whole orientation is able to transform. So that Paracelsus becomes very, very circumspect. And it's to this kind of quality that we owe the– the quality of his personality that from the outside critics called ‘frenetic’; that he couldn't get along with people; he couldn't stay in one place very long.

Well that's true, because Paracelsus was developing for himself a theater of action, which included all of history and all of the Hermetic tradition and all of Europe. He begins, for instance, and we turn to the Hermetic and alchemical writings of Paracelsus, volume one on Hermetic Chemistry. And we take a look in here and we see the first book, On the Heavenly Philosophy – The Coelum Philosophorum.

“What Alchemy is. Alchemy is nothing else but the set purpose, intention, and subtle endeavor to transmute the kinds of the metals from one to another. According to this, each person, by his own mental grasp, can choose out for himself a better way and Art, [that by] therein finding truth, for the man who follows a thing up more intently does [eventually] find the truth.”

So that the– the freedom that Paracelsus is becoming conscious of is an unbounded freedom. It's not yet the sense of infinity. In the 17th century, that's the sense that will come up, that will begin to terrify individuals in the Hermetic tradition until they get used to it. For Paracelsus, there is still the– the joy that the world is here. He's free in the world. He still doesn't quite experience, and nobody does at this time, that one can look over the crest of the world and look out, and all those starry spaces are for man. And Pascal, especially, will have that great quotation that those infinite vastnesses of our home terrify. But that doesn't come up yet. For Paracelsus we can find the truth that each man, each human being, can find a better way individually.

So the emphasis here is on man alone as a courageous explorer. And Paracelsus is emphasizing we have received a fantastic tradition from antiquity, and it is excellent. But it's been perverted from time to time. It was capped and stopped from time to time, and now we have inherited it, and it has revealed to us that we may explore. We may invent for ourselves new things, new material, new qualities. And so, he writes,

“It is highly necessary to have a correct estimation of stars and stones… Sol and Luna [and] all the” celestials; all of this is just one stone in itself, the Philosopher's Stone, which the new man is able to use then, as a kind of a template, but it's not a template for a design of any particular thing, but it's the template of the all which is able then to transform. So the transformation becomes the key process for Paracelsus.

His particular emphasis with Trithemius and with the experience in Ferrara, with the University in Vienna, with his father in the background, culminated finally in Paracelsus’s understanding that the key new science was medicine. Medicine in the sense of helping man to achieve his fullness. Medicine of restoring man to health, because only in his healthy condition can man then explore this new world, this new realm. And so medicine becomes the discipline. And for him, it's not so much making gold that alchemy is about that the hermetic sciences are going to yield. But it's the creation of the– the true magician, the philosopher. He writes in here:

“The Book Concerning the Tincture of the Philosophers, written against those Sophists born since the Deluge, in [this new age] of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And he writes as, “Philosopher of the Monarchia, Prince of the Spagyrists,” – the spagyric art is the alchemy – “Chief Astronomer, Surpassing Physician, and Trismegistus of [the] Mechanical Arcana.” Those are the titles that he takes for himself. Then he addresses the audience. “Since you, O Sophist, everywhere abuse me with such fatuous and mendacious words, on the ground that being sprung from rude Helvetia [Switzerland] I can understand and know nothing: and also because being a duly qualified physician, I wander from one district to another; therefore, I have proposed by means of this treatise to disclose to the ignorant and the inexperienced: what good arts existed in the first age; what my art avails against you and yours against me; [and] what should be thought of each, and how my posterity in this age of grace will imitate me. Look at Hermes, Archelaus, and others in the first age: see what Spagyrists and what Philosophers then existed.”

And then he goes on to tell us that he has the insight to the authentic fathers that art and experience from the ancient emerald tablet on, brings the ancient Egyptian wisdom through the whole tradition to him whole, and that he then represents the focusing of the entire tradition, freed now in now in a new man, that he marks an epic, that that previous epic of the Hermetic tradition had come to a close in his time, a close in the sense of a fruition and now he was a new man stepping out. He was the son of the fruition, and he begins to write in this religious, almost scriptural kind of conviction that what he is writing here is a Third Testament – a Third Testament now, of a man who is freed of all the kinds of encumbrances that once splayed him out in the fantasies of his own mind; that he has placed the psychic polarity of his nature squarely in the center of matter and now, using the transformation of matter as his school ground, man will learn how to become cosmically real unto himself.

This is the revolution in consciousness and Paracelsus is the first individual to be able to actually write extensively and live this as if it were so. If Paracelsus saw a cyclotron today, he would be overjoyed – he would be trembling. The sword that he carried everywhere with him, he'd finally put back in its sheath and say, those are my boys.

Let's take a break.

I put the address on the board. Some of you have been inquiring of some of the other work that I do. I've been at this an awful long time. I know it doesn't probably seem like it, but I started doing this in the mid 1960s in San Francisco and after teaching in universities for ten years, got disgusted with the fact that all of the really excellent students I had, I had to counsel to leave the school and go out and live their own lives; that they were getting stifled where they were. And so finally, I got into a moral crisis of not being able to stay any longer in the universities– there was– I had worked my way to the top. I'd become a tenured professor, chairman of the department, and I saw there are no bad guys. There are no people that are in the way. It's that the context, the situation itself is flawed, is faulty, because all it does is gives us new layers of mentation, and whole new dimensions of expectation then are are thrown out on other people. Why aren't you reasonable? Why don't you do what I think you should do? Why do you keep fighting me when it's for your own good? Et cetera. Et cetera. This is obviously not very healthy parfait to engender. So I didn't– I quit teaching and became, as many of you know, sort of a regular in Hollywood, Hollywood Boulevard, and got talked into giving up that joyful life of a bookstore owner on Hollywood Boulevard by Mr. Hall, who– who said, “Sometimes it takes forty or fifty years to get something done. Don't be so impatient.” And, what can you say? You're– you're just a– really a kid, after all. And– and you didn't really give it a fair trial. I mean, you've not even taught for one generation.

So, I've been teaching here for seven years and just recently have begun to offer courses other than here on Thursday nights, and I have a course on Tuesdays, which right now is on Chinese Thought. And it's very important to us because we're being asked to make the same kind of synthesis that the Chinese made in the Song Dynasty. We're being asked to put the best of all kinds of things together, and that that's going to be a super synthesis. And it is a super synthesis, but there are some qualities in that that we have to be circumspect about.

The Saturday class is a class in Self-Development, which begins with nNature and goes into a phase of Rituals and goes into a phase of Mythology, and culminates in the first year of a phase of Symbolism. And we're just starting to move from the mythic level, the level of mythology, the language capacity of consciousness, to be able to tell ourselves whole cycles of stories, to be able to see the whole expressive venue of– of interest for us, and how that creates an internal necessity for a focus. And that the human person, the individual, the persona is– is not– not– not the person. But there's a symbolic presence that comes into being and into focus. And it's that symbolic vision internally that then looks out upon the world and creates the consciousness that we experience. And that's the magic– that's the magia. And that has to be woven back into nature. And so the whole career of our species is coming back home after finding out that that's what we need to do. After the war of opposites – and we realized that we have survived and we can go home – we have to find out where that is. And it's very mysterious. So the Saturday course is about that.

Now, this next series that's coming up on Tuesday evenings, I'm not going to directly finish the Hermetic series up to the culmination I wanted to take it to. I'm going to intersperse this series on Jesus. I've been working for a long time on trying to find a way to express not so much a personal vision of Jesus, but the kind of understanding that has really come out in the last ten years: the Nag Hammadi material, the making available in English of all the Greek magical papyri, the speculations that have come out from world figures like Eliade and Quispel and so forth, the ability to read between the lines of Jung and other authors. And we're in a position now that we have to– we have to strike out a little bit, somewhat like Paracelsus. And we have to talk as realistically as we can about a new understanding, a new consciousness. And for us, one of the– one of the symbols that we have to come to understand is– is Jesus just essential? And you don't have to be a Christian, really, but it's– but it's essential to understand that rest of the year be concerned with that.

And then in January, I'll take up from Paracelsus. We'll start out with John Dee and Copernicus and Kepler, and we'll move through to the culmination in Newton and Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin. What happens in this dramatic story is that after the Renaissance, the Hermetic tradition slowly creates the new man and the new man, when he– when he's mature– when he's mature in the plays of Shakespeare, when he's mature in the portraits of Rembrandt, when he's mature in the epic of Cervantes, finds that he has completely outstripped the context of life, that he stepped not only onto the stage of the– of the universe, but out of the whole capacity for life to support him. That he has to go back and he has to, quote ‘improve the quality of life’ to catch up with the consciousness which he has found that he has. And so the movement in the 18th century changes, and it becomes concerned with developing the new world as an improving life, improving the world. And the first individual in our country who really takes this seriously is Jefferson. And the difference in conception of the United States between somebody like Hamilton, or Washington, and Jefferson is that Hamilton and Washington are looking back through history, and Jefferson is looking forward into the night to see what kind of new possibilities there are.

And this country has a very odd reality. One of the conclusions that Franklin and Jefferson came to is that you cannot leave a trail for people to follow. If you do, they will eventually become corralled by the process of following that trail. So what you have to do is you have to open up the dimensions so that they will find trails for themselves. And we do. Americans have a very peculiar mentality. One of the acid tests of the American personality was that we were able to send, I forget how many now, twelve or fifteen men to the moon. It's been seventeen years. There have been no Russians on the moon. It's not beyond them, technically; it hasn't been for a generation. They can't go. Something really arcane in that. We're free to go. With us it's an economic issue, whether we want to go again. Why? Why do we want to go? Give us some reasons. The Russians would love to go. They cannot go.

So Paracelsus becomes for us, as Jung says, ‘a spiritual phenomenon’. Paracelsus becomes for us the– the really interesting phenomenon. In Paracelsus as a spiritual phenomenon, Collected Works 13, page 134, Jung is going to write in here a little bit about the Iliaster. This is a comment– commentary that Jung is making on Paracelsus’s book on De Vita Longa, an exposition of the secret doctrine. Paracelsus believed, thoroughly, that man could live to be a thousand years old. That what keeps life in man is a matrix of saline solution which keeps revivifying the organs and so forth. And that given the right matrix and replenishing that, that man can replenish himself, that eventually he will have the end of his physical life. But there is no reason why alchemical man can't live a thousand years. This is– He believed this. So this is on De Vita Longa. Jung, writing on the Iliaster, he writes:

“The treatise [De vita longa,] is mainly concerned with the conditions under which longevity, which in Paracelsus’s opinion extends up to a thousand years or more… In what follows I shall give chiefly the passages that relate to the secret doctrine and are of help in explaining it. Paracelsus starts by giving a definition of life, as follows:” – the quotation from Paracelsus – “ ‘Life, by Hercules, is nothing other than a certain embalsamed Mumia, which preserves the mortal body from the mortal worms and from corruption by means of a mixed saline solution.’ ”

The word for corruption here in Paracelsus, he's writing in Latin, he does not use corruptia. He uses an Arabic term, word, which is A-E-S-T-P-H-A-R-A, aestphara. It's rendered here in translation, usually as a corruptio– corruption. But Jung points out that another derivation of the Arabic from the Greek in this word is, “to render invisible” in the sense of killing or cleaving or dismembering what is, and letting what sustains what is in a transformative way to come forth and operate.

Paracelsus believed, as many of the Hermetic masters believed, that Wisdom Man becomes invisible to ignorant man. Not only is he not seen and understood as he is, but that the way that he moves, very often, is just not noticed because he moves with such comprehension. It is not until later that others, sometimes generations or hundreds of years later, see what happened, and they ask, how did this get here? It's like the children do not see the adults. The adults are invisible to the children in just that way. They're not seeing. They're caught up in a different horizon. So that wisdom man very often is invisible and moves in a very peculiar way. So that, for instance, when Saint John styles wisdom man in the gospel, he styles him in the sense that he is pure light – pure light in the sense that he doesn't have any shape or form which you can identify, but has that inner light which one can experience only. But there's no identification of it. And that the experience is of wholeness. That's all that's there is just the wholeness.

This is why sometimes in the lake on Tuesday, we were talking about the way in which Taoism and Buddhism came together in Chan. Why in moments of enlightenment, the Chan masters laugh at themselves because it was absurd to think that this is what you were or who you were. It's really comical that that should even have been an issue, that you should have been worried about it. It becomes comical.

Paracelsus is writing about the Iliaster, about the basic fluidity of being. It's ambidextrous quality of being able to manifest and then take back and remanifest. This Mumia that is within the physical organs, partakes of it, partakes of it in a very peculiar way. We have to backtrack here for just a second.

When there is an organization which is very tied up and is energized so that there's an energy flowing, that ensemble acts as a single unit, so that the reverberation of that unit is by the whole of that unit. This is Plotinian emanation. So that what is carried is– is the whole of the pattern as a single unity, as a quality. So that the– the archetypal being confers its unity all a piece upon man, and man receives that, but he scrambles it up. He is not able to manifest that. And as a consequence of his inability to organize himself, to be together, he can't take advantage of it. Jung writes, then that:

“This was something like a natural elixir,” – this Mumia – “by means of which the body was kept alive or, if dead, incorruptible.” So that the Egyptians embalmed the dead and preserved them in death. But that since Jesus the understanding was that the teachings were not for the dead, but for the living, so that the Hermetic tradition transferred the Egyptian concern with the dead to the Hellenistic concern with the living – saving the living – and that the living were saved by being embalmed in a life process so that they were whole. And that's what health was. And Paracelsus was given this tradition whole from Trithemius. And from Trismosin, he learned the techne of how to actually experiment with applying it, that the metals are like the veins of the earth. It's like the most condensed structure of the earth. It's like the skeleton of the Earth are the metals. And so you experiment with that structure of the Earth, but you're also understanding that this is for you. And it's just like in medicine, instead of just treating the illness, one treats the whole person. And for Paracelsus, the treatment is not to be specific so much about the particular disease, but to find the way in which that disease is in a whole pattern and then one treats the whole pattern, and the specificity lies in understanding how that disease fits into that whole pattern. So that, it's not so much correspondences that are happening here, but it's matrices. It's just that there was no mathematical intelligence to be able to understand this at the time and so it was couched in language that reads as if it were medieval correspondences. And some biographers say, well, Paracelsus is really a medieval man who had modern ideas – but that's not so at all. It's just that the– the language was not yet able to carry what they knew. And part of Paracelsus’s difficulty – and he says it himself in several places – that he stammers. And some people have said, well, Paracelsus must have had a speech defect, but he doesn't mean that, he means that he can't say what he would like to say, but he can do it. And so he's interested in doing this.

So Jung then, writing on this, “This was something like a natural elixir, by means of which the body was kept alive or, if dead, incorruptible. By the same logic, a scorpion or venomous snake necessarily had in it an alexipharmic, [that is] an antidote, otherwise it would die of its own poison.” The disease carries its own cure within it. Why? Because it's a polarity within a pattern. The pattern is within an archetypal pattern of the all. And if man is tuned to that, he can not only transform things, but can transform patterns and processes. And so he becomes, as Trithemius says, through that power, capable of seeming miracle. Nothing is forbidden to him.

So that, “Paracelsus,” then, Jung writes, “goes on to discuss a great many arcane remedies, since diseases shorten life and have above all to be cured. The chief among these remedies are gold and pearls [and the] latter can be transformed into the quinta essentia.” Pearls. “A [particular] potency is attributed to Cheyri, which fortifies the microcosmic body so much that it ‘must necessarily continue in its conservation through the universal anatomy of the four elements.’ ”

It's a kind of an herbal. Cheyri was derived from Pansy. “Therefore the physician should see to it that the ‘anatomy’ ([the] structure) of the four elements ‘be contracted into the one anatomy of the microcosm…’” – that is– that is, instead of having it articulate as a thing where the elements are definitely arranged in a particular way, that in the solution that they are contracted into the the universal fluidness and man adds his spiritual dimension to this, and this is what makes it able to be transformed.

The spirit– the balsam then is a– is a life principle, quinta essentia, it's a life principle. Life is actually not so much an energy, but an emanation. An emanation of life, which is captured in a living being as if it were a waveform – just like crystals capturing reverberation in the air and registering it as a wave. The balsam, this life principle then, is affine to the spiritus mercurius in man, to his hermetic capacity, and it is more or less than in this way, coinciding “with the Paracelsian concept of the Iliaster.” Part of it is that there is this universal exchange between man and his, his Spiritus mercurius quality and life in its quinta essentia. They're able to– to be together. When they are together this is the Iliaster.

Jung writes, “It is therefore roughly the same as the balsam, or one could say that the balsam is the pharmacological or chemical aspect of the Iliaster. The Iliaster has three forms: sanctitus, paratetus, and magnus. [And] they are [all] subordinate to man, and [they] can be brought ‘into one [form].’ ” Or, Jung uses the gamonymus form and says, “Since Paracelsus attributes a special [quality] to the Iliaster, this enigmatic [marriage of– of names], must be interpreted as a kind of a chymical wedding, in other words, an indissoluble hermaphroditic union” within the individual. “There are [then] as many Iliastri” – the plural – “as there are men…” Every human being is an individual cosmos in that sense. Individual and universal at the same time.

Jung writes (page 136): “...that is to say in every [human being] there is an Iliaster that holds together each individual's peculiar combination of qualities.” So that the– the principle of individuation is a universal formative principle for the real. That man becomes, in fact, real only when this does occur. I won't go into it further from here, but once man has this quality, if he begins to meditate his imagination, any imago that occurs in his mind then, has potency, can come into being, can come into the real, and he can make it happen.

And so Paracelsus then is extraordinary – new dimension of man, but Paracelsus writes in The Tincture of the Philosopher's, the technique of doing this in the Hermetic tradition, as it was developed over the millennia as it comes to us, became so complicated that it was almost impossible for anyone to follow, so that Paracelsus, now by the authority that he has, shortens the form. And he says in here, page 25 of the Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, volume one:

“Concerning the Process for the Tincture of the Philosopher's, as it is shortened by Paracelsus.” The tincture. The tincture carries the whole, like a reverberation. That's the projection. “The ancient Spagyrists would not have required such lengthened labor and such wearisome repetition, if they had learnt and practiced their work in my school, they would have obtained their wish just as well, with far less expense and labor. But at this time, when Theophrastus Paracelsus has arrived as the Monarch of Arcana, the opportunity is at hand for finding out those things which were occult to all Spagyrists before me. Wherefore I say, …” and then he goes on to talk about the process of the Red Lion, which, of course you recognize. Those who were here for the Trismosin lecture, that's Trismosin’s process. But then Paracelsus introduces as a compliment the principle of the process of the Green Lion. And later on, a hundred and forty years in the future, Isaac Newton, in his alchemy, will trace to conclusion the process of the Green Lion. And in doing so will develop the consciousness which enabled him then to think in terms of the kind of physics which becomes intelligible to us in our time. Whole new echelon of consciousness.

“The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists,” he writes, “So far as relates to the knowledge of it and experiment with it, all the philosophers before me, though they have aimed at it with their missiles, have gone very wide of the mark. They believed that Mercury and Sulfur were the mother of all metals, never even dreaming of making mention meanwhile of a third; and yet when the water is separated from it by Spagyric Art the truth is plainly revealed, though it was unknown to Galen or even to Avicenna. But if, for the sake of our excellent physicians, we had to describe only the name, the composition, the dissolution, and coagulation, as in the beginning of the world Nature proceeds with all growing things, a whole year would scarcely suffice me, and, in order to explain these things, not even the skins of numerous cows would be adequate. Now, I assert that in this mineral are found three principles, which are Mercury, Sulfur, and the Mineral Water which has served to naturally coagulate it. Spagyric science is able to extract this last from its proper juice when it is not altogether matured, in the middle of the autumn, just like a pear from a tree. The tree potentially contains the pear.” He's talking anagogically here. “If the Celestial Stars and Nature agree, the tree first of all puts forth shoots in the month of March; …” And then he carries it through and goes through the seasons and the fruiting. “...Let the Alchemists who are seeking the Treasure of Treasures carefully note this. I will shew them the way, its beginning, its middle, and its end. [And] In the following treatise I will describe the proper Water, the proper Sulfur, and the proper Balm thereof. By means of these three the resolution and composition are coagulated into one.”

He goes on with this, and it's here again that he comes back to the two processes, the Red Lion and the Green Lion. We don't have time because of the– the complexities of going into this tonight. But we'll come back to this and we'll see.

Paracelsus in his hermetic writings, is concerned not only with the techne of how to actually do this and teach this, but with getting the tradition straight. And he learned from Trithemius that the reason one has to get the tradition straight is not to refine the pedigree of one's teacher, but that the form in which this pattern was developed throughout history is actually the ore vein in man as a whole, mankind as an entity, and that the growth of the Hermetic tradition then has to be investigated in this way. And he writes here:

What the Magi– “What Magi the Chaldeans, Persians, and Egyptians were. Many persons have endeavored to investigate and make use of the secret magic of these [ancient] wise men; but it has not yet been accomplished. Many of our own age exalt Trithemius, others [Roger] Bacon [or even] Agrippa, for magic and the cabala – two things apparently quite distinct – not knowing why they do so. Magic, indeed, is an art and faculty whereby the elementary bodies, their fruits, properties, virtues and hidden operations are comprehended.”

What I refer to as processes Paracelsus would most likely use operation. He's seeing it as an engineer, sees it as something that actually happens, actually can be done. “But,” he writes, “the cabala, by a subtle understanding of the Scriptures, seems to trace out the way to God for men, [and] to shew them how they may act with Him, and prophesy from Him; for the cabala is full of divine mysteries, even as Magic is full of natural secrets.”

What is the Kabbalah? The Kabbalah is the language, the Neo-pythagorean, transcendental Jewish language, that enables one to speak directly without any metaphorical in between, without appealing to the mind in its reference of speaking directly as in calling out creation. It would be in our day– It would be like the– the DNA formula for a particular being. That exact sequence of the four elements of DNA given in its totality is exactly what that is. But just knowing the language, the secret language, is not enough. You have to be able to engender it in life. And so Paracelsus says that magia is that. The cabala understands the language of reality, but it's only magic that is able to make life happen in terms of the cabalistic language of reality.

So, “These and the like subjects are the bonds wherewith things celestial” – the language, the names, the holy names – “are bound up with things of the earth.” The magia deals with transformation of– of the earth, of us here, heaven and earth. “Such a conjunction of celestial influences, whereby the heavenly virtues acted upon inferior bodies, was formerly called by the Magi a Gamahea, or the marriage of the celestial powers and properties with elementary bodies. Hence ensued the excellent commixtures of all bodies, celestial and terrestrial, namely, of the sun and planets, likewise [with] vegetables, minerals, and animals. The devil attempted with his whole force and endeavor to darken this light; nor was he wholly frustrated in his hopes, for he deprived all Greece of it, and, in place thereof, introduced among that people human speculations and simple blasphemies against God and His Son. Magic, it is true, had its origin in the Divine Ternary and arose from the Trinity of God. For God marked all His creatures with this Ternary and engraved its hieroglyph on them with His own finger. Nothing in the nature of things can be assigned or produced that lacks this magistery of the Divine Ternary, or that does not even ocularly prove it. The creature teaches us to understand and see the Creator Himself… This covenant of the Divine Ternary, diffused throughout the whole substance of things, is indissoluble.”

The– the effectiveness of the potency of the relation between the divine language of the real, and the– the fertile capacity to come into existence and being and have being, that is unchanging. But the form in which it currently is, all that is transformable, but transformable only in terms of that language. Man has to learn that. What is difficult, Paracelsus is trying to say, is that when someone is not spiritual, when they're not really mature, they fall into a kind of a mental trap where they only see correspondences, and that's all they see. And so they keep trying to match up maps against maps. And of course, you can't go anywhere that way. You have to– you have to match up the language as it is able to call out the real with the life giving properties.

So he goes on and he talks about the essence, the “Supreme Essence of Things.” And then he writes about, “Concerning the Different Errors as to its Discovery and Knowledge”; “Concerning the Errors of those who seek the Stone in Vegetables”; “Concerning [the errors of] those who [seek] the Stone in Animals”; Concerning those who have sought the Stone, then in various other places. And why finally the hermetic process actually works, but works only with a view towards transmutation of the real. And Paracelsus goes on writing in this way on page 108 – and I'm going to end here – He takes a little time out in his writings to say that he is not talking about anything, which is metaphorical. He writes here:

“Since the time when the [discovery] of electrum given by the ancients passed into oblivion, there has forthwith followed the ruin of those who change that name into fictitious gold and silver. That has been the destruction of [all] modern chemists. To define Electrum: it is a metal made from some other by Art, and no longer resembling that from which it was made.” It's an alloy of gold and silver with a little bit of tin. “For example: arsenical metal [arsenic alloyed metal], prepared according to the form of metallic preparation, cemented with Venus in the accustomed manner, converts the whole copper into white electrum more worthless than its own copper. What need is there to deprave metals at great expense? Would it not be better to leave the copper in its own natural essence, to keep one's money, and devote time and labor to a more useful work? The ancients called Electrum by its proper name; the moderns falsely call it silver. The ancients were not losers, because they knew the Electrum itself; the moderns, because they have no knowledge of Electrum, throw away their faculties, labor, and time. Now, since in Alchemy all mistakes are constantly propped up with some new hope, it was tried to fix Arsenic by means of reverberations for weeks, and by other devices. Thence it ensued that the Arsenic became red and brittle like coral, but of no use in Alchemy except for Electrum, as was just now said. Then by descent and precipitation they affected nothing more than by their [own] calcinations.” And this happens in Alchemy. That obstinate men are always deceived because they do not learn thoroughly from the foundation all the terms of the Art. “It is true that Arsenic does, in its own natural condition, contain gold; and that this gold, [is by industry, sometimes] separated in a cement, or a projection, or otherwise [cast on to] silver or copper or lead by attraction; but it does not follow therefore that this is produced by his operations and his tinctures. It means only that the gold which was there before has been derived by a process of separation, generally, from its ore” – and– and projected.

What he's saying here is that there is constantly the temptation for man to fudge a little bit, and to believe that he has done it because it looks right, because the color is right, because now there's a little gold coating on this or that metal. That one has done something. He says, I'm not talking about this. We're not talking about this kind of transformation. He says this is an error. This is a deception. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about the real and not just changing the coat of some particular quality of a thing, but by redoing its universal structure and bringing it into being in another way. And he says, this is the difference between Paracelsus as a man and the phonies who are around him. They can never be themselves, though they take upon different roles every five years or every two years or something like that, where he says, Paracelsus is really who he is.

Well, we'll see some more of him next week.