Paracelsus (Part 3)

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 13 of 13

Paracelsus, Part 3
Conclusion
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 25, 1986

Transcript:

Paracelsus Prophecies, 1536, and the Prophecies of Nostradamus are 1555, just about nineteen years later. And in The Prophecies of Paracelsus, they are not only written out but they are accompanied by figures. And if we were to be able to go through that series of figures you would see that there is a direct link here between the classic hermetic picture books, like The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, or the tarot deck of Mantegna. And so that the prophetic mode here which Paracelsus is indulging towards the end links up this whole series of pictorial developments like in Splendor Solis, the twenty-two stages of the Red Lion process in alchemy by Trismosin.

So that Paracelsus is an extraordinary figure in that he attempts in the explosion of himself, and he literally is a figure who explodes. He attempts to try and deliver out, in total, everything that had been put into him. He felt totally responsible. And one of the mantic qualities of Paracelsus’s personality was that he was composing all the time – writing that is to say, in his mind all the time.

The– the list of his books for instance somebody went through and even throwing out all of the spurious volumes, totaled up a hundred and six books by Paracelsus. And he died when he was 48. The list of books includes fifty books on medicine, seven on alchemy, nine on natural history and philosophy, twenty-six on magic, and fourteen on various other subjects. In his composing though, in his writing, he was diametrically opposite in the sense of psychically polarized to an academic who sits down and uses his books as his resource, and then writes his book to fit on the shelves with these other books. Paracelsus is 180 degrees from that. He bases himself upon what he calls life experiences. And the reason for this is in his magical alchemical understanding of specifics in distillation, separations, essences, and quintessences. That is to say his whole philosophy revolves around the understanding that a human being is not just a– a sack of flesh and bone and blood which a spirit then is placed inside that, to animate it. So the model is not that we're a puppet, but that the very substance of the flesh is alive in an intelligent way; so that the very reality of a person – the Mercurius Vivianus – is the the movement of life intelligence in a person and that this quality is the quintessence – the quintessential. But in Paracelsus in his personality he could not sit down and write out a book from his mind. He had to literally write a book from his guts – if we can use that kind of a colloquial term. So he composed all the while that he was working or drinking.

We have a testimony from a man who was his secretary for a couple of years. Paracelsus in the late 1520s, in Basel, was appointed to a professorship. There was a lot of urban joggling going on between the Catholic and the Protestant sects at the time. They couldn't find a professor for the university, for the chair of medicine, that would satisfy both parties. They brought in Paracelsus from the outside. And Paracelsus, for a little while, was going to be an academic professor. But he never went to a faculty meeting. He never presented himself for confirmation to the authorities of the university. They, realizing it was a snub, refused to give him a classroom so he chartered a hall off-campus. And when he came into the hall he came in with a professor's robe on. The first thing he did was blatantly rip it off and cast it down. He said we have nothing more to do with this tradition. And then he lectured all that summer and all that winter quarter on the new man, that the new man is based upon experience, that he has the wisdom of life and it's not a street wisdom – which we would think colloquially – but it's the universal wisdom that's in the flesh of man; that's in the the metals within man. You know the old British colloquialism, a man of metal. It's that kind of an understanding. And in fact during the great celebration the next year on June 24th, Saint John's Day, when students in Europe – in those days – used to have huge bonfires. Paracelsus had the huge university tome of Avicenna which was so heavy a person couldn't carry it, had that wheeled in by several singing drunk students, and they threw it upon the fire with Paracelsus’s blessing and burnt this volume up.

He could not sit down and write as an academic not because of his temperament, that would be shallow, but because of the understanding and the conviction that he had. But it was even more dynamic than this, because his understanding was that this life essence in the universe has a– is time-dated. That the Earth had been created at a certain time and that the close of the last millennium before the final thousand years was approaching in Europe, was approaching in the world. And that all of reality was time-dated and was due to expire. But its expiration would not be on a T. S. Eliot whimper note. But upon a grand culmination of man coming into comprehension of his true purpose in the universe to fill in the last completing notes in the symphony of creation. That it was up to man to realize how to continue and complete the transformations in nature that had been left undone by God; had been left undone in a kind of a planned way. Not in a predestination way. Not in a determinate way. But in a designed way. So that at a certain time man would come into possession of knowledge of how to complete nature; how to complete the processes. And in fact Paracelsus believed, along with many millenarians at this time – the Anabaptist movement particularly very strong at this time. They believed that it was up to the Renaissance magus to teach men how to learn to complete processes. We're not just to go on indefinitely but that the Paradisical golden age will come very soon, as soon as Renaissance man in the magus-form teaches the correct way by which processes are brought to their fruition and completion. Then human beings can be perfected.

Now this is a tremendous development in advance over the Hellenistic idea of purity and perfection – the perfecting. In Hellenistic Judaism the– the elect, the community of the elect, is elect by design but elect from eternity and needs to be sifted out at the time of final crisis. But for Paracelsus the notion is turned into its fullness almost democratized that everyone will be completed. But what has to be dispelled is the veil of ignorance covering people. And so Paracelsus is this bombastic herald of the New Age in his own eyes. To break down these barriers; that the barriers are a false barrier. And in fact when we look to understand alchemy and quintessence.

I have a quotation here which you will not run across, which is germane to this whole discussion. This is from a volume published in England entitled Science and the Renaissance: An Introduction to the Study of the Emergence of Sciences in the Sixteenth Century. It's a two volume set. This is the first volume. And on page 171, the writer, Wightman, quite excellently sums up for us information that we have to have in compact form. He writes here, “the empirical tradition, so notable in the work of Al-Razi, was continued in the medieval Latin works, and this whole idea of transmutation of metals.” The only concern in medieval alchemical operations from the 13th century on appeared an idea of a fifth essence. That is to say there were four elements or four essences the classical elements and then there was a fifth. But Wightman points out that this is not to be confused with a fifth element of Aristotle, in classical Aristotle, which was the aether, A-E-T-H-E-R. In Aristotle the aether exists above the four elements, like a context, but rather it was nearer to the Greek idea of pneumatic or pneuma, living breath, that the quintessence was a living breath. That it inhabited the structure made by the elements and vivified them. That the quintessence was alive. So that the possibility of different grades of pneuma became of central importance. For instance, in stoic philosophy – he doesn't go into it here but the stoic philosopher who codified this was Posidonius, who was a teacher of Cicero, among others about 100 BC. And so this various grades of pneuma as a living fifth essence which is physical. There was an Epicurean tone in stoic thought and it was physical. It was thought to be a refined atomic structure.

This comes into alchemical thought and stays in it all this time. So that after a while Sophic mercury, or Sophic sulfur, are the soul's relative to ordinary mercury or ordinary sulfur. So the quintessence in mercury is its soul. The quintessence in sulfur is its soul. That that soul in fact is very specific. It is what Paracelsus would call a signature. And later Jacob Boehme would deal with the signatures of all things. Paracelsus also besides calling them signatures calls them specifics, in that the accuracy of the alchemical process, the– the way by which magic became science was the insistence that the specifics were quite exact. Not to be confused at all ever.

So in the doctrine of the quintessence it was held that every substance owes its suchness not only to the characteristic proportion of the four elements in a material sense composing it but its specific essence, its signature. We would today I think ideally call this the the working ratio so that the process of separation is to separate out the specific quintessence from the ratio structure of the elements that go to make up whatever material thing is there. And its separation from the grosser matter of the substance became a task to which some alchemists were dedicated especially then Paracelsus. And this task of separating out the essence, as you can see, becomes a religious tinged task, but not religious in any doctrinaire sense. It has nothing to do with doctrine. It has everything to do with the penetrating view, the viewpoint, the logical structure of matter. Matter is spiritual, not the spirit must be freed from the matter. It must be separated from it.

In fact, in Paracelsus, when– this is from The Collected Works of Paracelsus by Waite, Selected Hermetic and Alchemical Writings. He has in here– the second volume, on page 165: “Concerning the Book of Alchemy, without which one can not become a Physician.” The headline is “Labyrinthus Medicorum” – the Labyrinth of Medicine. And he writes, Paracelsus writes, in translation:

“Anyone who would become a physician must learn the book of Alchemy thoroughly by heart. Its name, no doubt, will prevent its being acceptable to many; but why should wise people hate without cause that which some others wantonly misuse? Who hates blue because some clumsy painter [misuses it]?”

So alchemy is not a doctrine to Paracelsus. It's not even what we tend to stress here as a viewpoint. To him it was an apparent reality in the structure of nature – the structure of nature. And it was man's particular signature, his particular, specific, quintessence, to be able to crack the structure of the elements and release the quintessence. Not just from lead into gold, but all things in their– into their apocryphal right place in the universe. So that man is a universal herald then in the steps of his maturation of how close the end of the universe was. Not just the end of the world, but the culmination of the universe. Which is why the emphasis on prophecy. Why the emphasis on destroying the old because it's worthless and releasing the new – not making it up – but releasing it. But that the process of releasing it was one of man learning how to continue the separation which started the universe and carried it to this point.

Paracelsus writes in here, this is in “The Philosophy Addressed to the Athenians.” He says, “Of all created things the condition whereof is transitory and frail, there is only one single principle. Herein included latent were all created things which the aether embraces in its scope. This is as much to say that all created things proceeded from one matter, not each one separately from its own peculiar matter.” That there was a– a primal matter. In fact there was a– a primal condition of all primal matter. That is to say, he's talking here, he's writing here around 1530 the way that physicists talk in 1986. The Big Bang begins with one incredibly compacted spark, and the spark comes out of nothing – comes out of nothing. Paracelsus will maintain the very same. He writes,

“This common matter of all things is the Great Mystery. Its comprehension could not be prefigured or shaped by any certain essence or idea, neither could it incline to any properties, seeing that it was free at once from color and from elementary nature.” It was not composite. “Wherever the aether is diffused, there [is] also the orb of the Great Mystery [lying] extended. This Great Mystery is the mother of all the elements, and at the same time the spleen of all the stars, [of all the] trees, [of all] carnal [creations]. As children come forth from the mother, so from the Great Mystery are generated all things.”

How are they generated? They are generated by a process of separation, progressive separations. He writes– I'm skipping over now just to encapsulate this for you. “The separation, then, having now been made, and everything being reduced to its peculiar shape and property, so that each shall subsist by itself, then, at length, the substantial matter can be distinguished. What was fit for compaction has been compacted, [and] the rest (so far as its substance is concerned) remaining empty and thin. [But] when the compaction took place, the whole could not be equally compacted, but the greater part remained void. This is clearly shewn in the case of water. If this be coagulated, the mass or quantity of that which is compacted is small.” And the same thing, he says, takes place in the universe.

So that in Paracelsus’s view, the universe is largely void with a little bit of compacted matter, which again in 1986 we would claim. But in this separation operation, the movement of life, the movement of the reality, is in the material as it becomes more and more distinguished– distinguished from the matrix out of which it was separated and that new combinations then form a matrix by themselves, of themselves, for the next stage of separation, and so on and so on. That down this line towards the end is man, but man is not so much distant from the Godhead, but man is highly energized by the Godhead because he has been separated out from matrix after matrix after matrix all of the dross going by. All of the basic structures which would shield us from the divine have been lost progressively. And so that man now at the stage of the Renaissance Magus is able to look back, Pico Mirandola, and look up the whole core of creation back to the divine and understand that he may continue this.

So he writes here, “So when the Great Mystery was filled with such essence and deity, [and] with the addition of eternal power, before all creatures were made the work of separation began. [And] When this had commenced, afterwards every creature emerged and shone forth with its free will; in which state all will afterwards flourish up to the end of all things, that is, until that great harvest in which everything shall be pregnant with its [final] fruits, and those fruits shall be reaped and carried into the barn.” And it is man who will cause the universe to fruit, and it’s man who will reap this harvest and carry it back to where. He writes here, towards the end, “the four elements [as had been said] were in the beginning severally separated from one single matter, in which, however, their complexion and essence were not present – those complexions and natures emerged by that process of separation.”

The qualities are not inherent so much in the thing, but are inherent in the transformative process of separation by which the thing is precipitated out of its matrix. So that the thing that comes out in a particular stage in creation does not display its reality, but only presents an appearance, a physical appearance. Its reality can be understood only in terms of its transmutable process from the matrix by which it came. And only then by learning that vocabulary, that art, that scientia, can man then trace step-by-step, matrix-by-matrix, back to the primordial, back to the prima materia. But as he gets closer and closer to the prima materia, he loses the orientation of the mind, the orientation of the false learning, which is why you have to throw it out anyway. It's not going to do you any good. In fact it clouds your vision. And in fact, he says, there is a stage that we get back to where the elemental structure of reality disappears. It no longer is there because that itself came out of the matrix of the one matter. And then he says, the problem for man as a magus is to realize and recognize that that prima materia, that primal matter, came out of a matrix. And what is that matrix? And he writes in here, this is about 1530,

“Since it has been said, then, that all things were created from the Great Primal Mystery, and that they pass away in like manner, it follows as an evident consequence that some such Great Mystery must exist. This is nothing more than saying that a house has been built by a word. This is an attribute of the eternal, just as it is possible for man to elicit fire where there is no fire, and from that which is not fire. The flint has no fire, though it emits fire from itself. So in the Great Mystery all Primal Mysteries were existent in a latent form and after a threefold manner, in respect of vegetative, elementary, and sensible things. The vegetative things were many hundreds, nay, many thousands. Every kind in the Great Mystery had its own specialty. With regard to the elements, there were only four. [And] These four had their principles. But men were innumerable. One kind were of [certain] loripedes, another the cyclopses, another the giants, another the mechili. [And] In like manner, there are those who dwell in the earth, in the air, in the water, in the fire. So, also, every kind of growing thing had its own proper mystery in the Great Mystery, and from thence emerged all the multifarious created things. The eternal alone dominates in man, and in the whole of his mystery, not [in more] in one more than in another. [And in this] Great Mystery [there] was no kind which was not infinitely formed and colored, one differently from another. Now, all these things are to perish. What then happens we forbear to say, but – A new Mysterium Magnum is not possible. That would be a greater miracle than we are even able to speculate about.”

What happens is that everything returns back to nothing. Paracelsus writes, “The separation having thus been made, and every single thing brought back to its nature or first principle, that is, to [say] nothing, then within the aether there will be nothing that is not eternal, [and] all will be without end. That from which the non-eternal came into existence will flourish far more widely than before the beginning of creatures. It has no frailty in it, no mortality. And as glass cannot be consumed by a creature, so neither can that eternal essence ever be reduced to nothingness.” All of the material world will return to nothingness, but the eternal element will return to itself undivided because it has never been divided.

So Paracelsus has very strong philosophy here – philosophy, an apocalyptic universal vision. He's living though at a time when the religious schism between Protestants and Catholics is tearing apart Christianity. Each side wanting to maintain hegemony over the other in this contest of ideas. Each side, for a while, vying with individuals like Paracelsus to be on their side. But Paracelsus almost alone of all the figures of the age sees both these parties as squabbling children, totally uneducated as to the real nature of the universe, that they have no idea of whatsoever, because they're learning their religion comes from doctrines hammered out through church councils, through academic sessions of talking it over, of voting upon various conclusions. And for Paracelsus all of this has to go. And so when he is put into a position, once in his life, of authority of being appointed professor of medicine at Basel, he does his best to offend everybody and he wins. They drive him out of town. Finally everybody unites together for a change. And Paracelsus has to flee. And after the break we'll come back and we'll. We'll see how he handles this. And I'll try and give you some idea of– of why it was impossible for people to really understand him. Let's take a little break though and we'll come back.

Here's a quotation of interest from Paracelsus, “Doctors, I advise you to use alchemy in preparing mysteria, arcana, magnalia, to separate the pure from the impurities so that you may obtain a perfect medicine. God did not choose to give us the medicines prepared. He wants us to cook them ourselves.”

Why is that? Because every single medicine that we could label or make would just be a generic. It wouldn't really be effective for us because one has to separate further stages from that generic to reach the effective level for art ourselves. This is why Paracelsus is always saying, don't look at the textbook, look at the patient, because every single patient is specific. This is the beginnings of the empirical attitude. Not only is every patient specific empirically different from every other patient, but at different times this specific person is different. He's different at midnight from what he is at noon. So that if you're going to treat him, really treat him, you have to be able to prepare for yourself a series of matrixes so that you can understand who that person is. What cycles is he in? What daily cycles is he in? What weekly cycles? What about his family? What about the family history? Well they've all had club feet, isn't that interesting? He has a club foot. One has to understand all the matrixes. And when one can get that specific then the medicines begin not only to work to adjust one back to health, but to cure, as we would say, cells. To deliver one back to one's quinta essentia. And for Paracelsus the fact that medicine has advanced, that the Hermetic tradition has advanced, to this level indicates to him that the time of man playing in the universe is coming to an end, and the time for him to shoulder his peculiar responsibility to help that universe fruit, to help the fruition of all things, mainly by helping man to achieve his exact specific individuality.

Now, when Paracelsus is drinking in the taverns and he's talking to the Protestant reformers, at first the Protestant reformers think that he's speaking like they are. We don't need a church structure between us and our God. And Paracelsus is saying, well that's all right for starters but you're not carrying it far enough. And as the Protestant Reformation ministers listen closer to Paracelsus they say, you're crazy, you're insane, because you're dropping completely out of the world which we love. And Paracelsus saying, that's right. Everything that you know and everything that you love everything that is familiar to you, you're going to have to have to give up because you're going to drop down to universal levels to get to your specific quintessence that you didn't even know existed before. You couldn't have known existed, because it's only going through the process of the separations, matrix after matrix, that one discovers what one is. Medicines he writes, were created by God, but he did not prepare them completely. They are hidden in the slag. It is a matter of removing the slag from the medicine. For all things have been created in prima materia, and then follows Volcanus who made them into ultima materia through the art of alchemy. And this art is the art of separating the useful from the useless. But one does this distillation again and again and again until finally when one is working on oneself at a deep enough level there is no one else to consult. No one could understand the complexities which have now become so simple because only you are party to that.

So Paracelsus is extraordinary revolutionary. Once we begin to understand what he is talking about we read descriptions of Paracelsus by Oporinus, his secretary who spent a couple of years with him, and he says, “I don't know how Paracelsus could write anything. The man was always drinking. I never saw him read a book. He was always working on patients. He always wore the the– the clothes of what he calls teamsters, mule drivers, horse drivers, dirty aprons, dirty clothes. So that every year Paracelsus had to buy a whole new wardrobe because his clothes would be completely worn out. And he says I can't believe that he could have written anything. He would come home after tending patients all day and drinking all night and he would come in with his big sword with Azoth written on the pommel. He would lay it down on the bed not long enough to even fall asleep and suddenly get up with the sword flashing and begin speaking wild eyed to himself until he had to clear out of the room.

When did the man write? When did he have time to write? But the point is exactly 180 degrees, after realizing that Paracelsus was always writing he was always composing because he was a herald of the new age. You can't write 106 books sitting down to intend to write them. You can't do that. It's only when that comes out constantly. Unending strain. Unending. That sort of continuity. Why is it unending? Because he's going through this distillation to get to his quintessence constantly.

Why is he roving all over Europe? He goes from Morocco to the Netherlands. He goes up to Sweden. He goes over to Russia. He goes down to Constantinople. He goes to Egypt. He comes back through Greece through Yugoslavia, comes back to Nuremberg. He starts off again. He's never in one place more than a week or he's in a couple of places for a few months in his life. In his life. Why is he moving around changing the scene all the time? Because he's understood himself in that matrix. He's after something else. He's distilling himself all the time. He's like Socrates. He's a living example of the process. You're not supposed to stay in one place. He would be stupid to stay in one place. It's not there anymore. It was there last week when you first got there. That's understood now. It's not there anymore. The circumstance is different. It's changed.

All the while, Paracelsus says, “Don't make gold. Make medicines.” Why medicines? Because medicines become the quintessence of the Hermetic tradition by Paracelsus’s time. Because medicines are understood to apply only to that specific signature of that exact condition at that exact moment for that person individually. Medicine becomes a discipline of honing everything down, of bringing all the lines of force together to one single point. The discipline of the mind. You talk about empiricism. There's almost nobody today that's that empirical. A yoga master maybe. You want to get down to understand that exact quality matrix which allows for that uniqueness to come out and be there and all of the other structures are obfuscations of that.

Which is why if you busy yourself in trying to understand their relationships you'll never live long enough to even go over a syllabus an outline of what they are and you will have spent absolutely no time on yourself. Now for Paracelsus. He understands That he's the only man alive in Europe at this time who understands us who talks this way. Nobody else does. And he realizes that he's like a Johnny Appleseed and he's got to spread this– this contagion. Of this new discovery in the Hermetic tradition. What's interesting is that after Paracelsus for a hundred and fifty years, individual human beings of genius come upon Paracelsus’s understanding of this, and are astounded by this. The last great figures to understand this from Paracelsus are men like Newton and Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin. They're the generations that finally understand what Paracelsus was delivering in his – we can say, colloquially, clumsy way. It was clumsy just because there was no context for it. There was nobody he could talk to.

And Trismosin died when he was still in his 20s and there was nobody else; Ficino had long gone; he met Erasmus and Erasmus couldn't understand him. Erasmus’s publisher Froben broke his leg and they were going to have to amputate his leg because it got infected. And so they sent a letter to Paracelsus. He was somewhere in Switzerland. He came to the Netherlands and he healed Froben's leg. And the key to it was applying the specific dosages in a specific time sequence to get rid of the infection. When the other doctors who took notes, what did he use tried those that killed their patients. They died of mercury poisoning. So they would rail against Paracelsus that he was a madman. And Paracelsus would say you're not doctors. You don't understand. He didn't talk to them about dosage. He didn't talk to them about about the prognosis the etiology of a disease. They– they couldn't understand that nobody at that time understood that. Erasmus, in thanking Paracelsus, wrote him a beautiful letter saying to him I have it here someplace, I can't find it right off the bat saying to him it's wonderful to have met you but I don't really understand why the medication that you gave me works. Could you tell me, I'm pretty educated myself. And then he ends the letter by saying if you can read this I'd like a reply. Because the impression that he gave was that he was coarse; he was a ruffian. He's somebody who drinks with the butchers, whose classes have barbers in them instead of doctors. Somebody who's just colloquial. How can this person be sophisticated? How can they even be spiritual? But the understanding was is this is the only way to distill. He had to distill himself in the terms that he actually was. He was born in little tiny Swiss village. He was raised in a mining camp. He was that way. He– he went to school. He went to northern Italy. He could have been an academic but that wouldn't have been him. That wouldn't have been the reality that was Paracelsus Theophrastus von Hohenheim. He took the name Paracelsus, not just meaning beyond celsus, but the part in there was very dear to him. Para in Greek is beyond. It's a transcendental mode; para-psychology. Paracelsus. It's a transcendental mode of medicine. And that's who he was. Because the reality is not in the thing but in the process by which it is distilled out of its matrix. That's the reality that it is. So a name is not the label of the thing but it's an indication. It's a description of understanding the process of how that process came out. That's what a name is.

So that hermetic language by Paracelsus’s time comes fully behind the realization that a language of reality does not speak about material things but speaks only in terms of ratios of processes and phases of matrix disclosures, and that it works both ways. It comes into being and it goes back to its origin. So that in a hundred and fifty years you not only have a differential calculus but an integral calculus. The universal language has to work both ways. And the astounding thing is that if you speak that language nature actually shapes itself according to your prescription.

One can say, “Well, this is just a formula. It's just an equation.” Yes, but there is a whole miles long blackboard equation of matrix out of which this is precipitated and by putting that matrix into operation one can actually make a ton of power; you can crack the atom. You can do it. Paracelsus is the first individual to understand that– that this is the process not that this is just something that man can do but that the coming of age to be able to do this is a signal to man that the universe is maturing that the whole universe is coming of age. That is to say that the end of time is imminent. There's no more time to play around. So– So that spiritual magic for Paracelsus is intimately tied up to the cosmology which he has in this cosmological matrix becomes the basic matrix which Hermetic thought then has after that.

In this little lecture series, delivered at Cambridge University about four years ago – three or four years ago – published by Cambridge University Press in England. He writes, “Paracelsus and the Newtonians just managed to steer clear of extreme Anabaptists [or] Huguenot millenarians respectively.” That is, in Paracelsus’s time there were the Anabaptists, and in Newton’s time there were thne Huguenots. “But they contributed to the idea that the elect would enjoy a prolonged period of earthly bliss either before or after the Judgment.” What is the Judgment? The Judgment is, did man learn? Did he transform himself or not? That there is a time when that specific event occurs.

“A construction of this kind permitted maximum opportunity for the exploitation of the idea of secular progress based on the growth of science. [and] Consequently, throughout the Scientific Revolution, Christian eschatology provided an [undiminished] incentive towards science, if not a primary motivating factor. In the course of the Scientific Revolution the idea of recovery from the adverse effects of the fall and [the] restitution of man's dominion over nature contained in Christian eschatology was reinforced by an analogous set of ideas inherited from [the] ancient theology. The more magical Neoplatonic writings and the Corpus Hermeticum made current by the Florentine Neoplatonists, contained more than a veiled expectation [then] initiates of hermeticism would ascend to a level of mystical illumination offering a variety of benefits, including the possibility of being transformed into powerful Magi. As Pagel, Rossi, Walker, Yeats [and others] have pointed out, the aspirations of experimental science were intimately entangled with the fortunes of the Renaissance Magus. Both experimental science and natural magic were involved in the understanding and conquest of the forces associated with spiritual magic. The latter is construed as the non-demonic form of magic utilizing the powers of the spiritus mundi, and reaching no higher in its meditations than the human spirit. Natural magic or science could be viewed not only as a manifestation of skill or knowledge, but as a sign of election as a reward for the elect” to continue to completion – to completion. Natural magic.

So that the rise of the whole idea of the individual in Western civilization is concomitant of the scientific revolution and both of them are a hermetic amplitude of this whole realization that time and space are illusory if you're looking at the materia. This is not important at all. It has nothing to do with anything. But the graded processes by which reality discloses its transformative capacity again and again and again, from the beginning, to you, and from you back to the beginning – this is it. This is the sequence.

For Paracelsus, he realized that he came too early in the process to see it happen. That is to say, it was happening for him individually in his lifetime, but that generations after him – and he predicted, he said, twenty years after I am dead all of my works will be in print and they will begin to seed them for future generations. And that's exactly what happened. About twenty years after his death, the first great editions of the collected writings of Paracelsus – and they were a mess because no one had understood Paracelsus – none of his disciples, none of his students, nobody had understood him. And so not wanting to jimmy the writings of the master, they just printed material as they had it. And of course Paracelsus never sat at a table to write. He is always writing in himself, not in his mind, but in himself. So when he had a chance he would scribble something down so that when they printed these scribbles a lot of things were out of, out of context, out of order. And it wasn't until almost a century later that the writings of Paracelsus were put into an order where they finally made sense. And it was just in time, because the 17th century was just dawning and as the 17th century dawned and the writings of Paracelsus came into order, they realized that they were living at the time when this whole revolution was supposed to now move out into the population. And that's when the Rosicrucian Manifestos were written, in 1614, 1615. It's extraordinary, but he realized that the first step was to break up the existing order, and that's what he was up to. That if you had to use a sledgehammer you might as well use a sledgehammer to start it. Not very nice, not very clean. But when you're presented with brick walls everywhere and there's work to be done. There are channels to be opened up. He took that route, and he took responsibility for it.

This notion becomes extremely powerful. The notion sums itself up in the– in the phrase of an evangelical economy to the universe. That the universe has a message of redemption and that the peculiar quality of the message of redemption is that only man transformed can read it. And the way that he reads it is not with his mind but with his life actually transforming himself back to his quintessence. That's how he reads it. He demonstrates that he has read it by having lived that life.

Well these are extremely powerful ideas and we'll see when we get back in three months to the Hermetic tradition that the first couple of generations after Paracelsus are the most confused time in history of the whole Hermetic tradition. Paracelsus used the term ‘chaos’. And by chaos he meant gas. It wasn't until the 1670s that the French Hermeticist van Helmont transferred chaos from the Greek into the term which became gas. Chaos in French then became gas and we use gas then. It is the unformed element. But for Paracelsus he realized very much that the following generations were going to experience chaos because he had left everything that he could in complete chaos. All of the Hermetic traditions had met in him. He was the recipient of– of all of the degrees. I showed you Trismosin’s degree to him. I showed you Trithemius’s degree to him. And he was simply confirmed by– by everyone. They put all their eggs in one basket, and Paracelsus delivered. He sacrificed himself in the only way that someone like that could have. He made his very life the tone of the teachings as he should have.

The books that we have, and The Collected Writings of Paracelsus really are much larger than these two selected volumes – enormous tomes. Zeitlin's has for $3,000 a three-volume Latin set that's just huge. But if you tried to read them in Latin now, they're confusing to us. The reason why they're so confusing to us is that our mentality is skewed. We come crippled and injured with a kind of a junkyard orientation and we're on the other side of a whole matrix of clarity which is now we've shot past and have to regain it somewhat. And so Paracelsus is incomprehensible to us until someone like myself takes the time to try and go into this bit by bit to reveal that this is– this is not just entertaining occultism, it's not just cute historical developments. It was very profound and is in fact– is the understanding matrix out of which the scientific age and the individual were born.

The Western individual in the scientific technological culture which he exists was born out of that matrix. We left the comprehension of that matrix about two hundred years ago and we've never gone back to it. And it's never developed from then. And it's been left. The last individuals who were able to live those lives without having to consult the text to find out what they're supposed to do were people like Thoreau and Whitman.

Well we'll get back to this in three months. The next series we’ll concern another little aspect of the tradition which has not been talked about sufficiently. And when it was brought to my attention that nobody had ever talked of Jesus's years in Alexandria, I thought I'd better step out on a limb and at least present some basic facts. So we'll start that next week and we'll come back to this in three months.