THE LIFE OF
PARACELSUS

PAKACELSTJS, AGED TWENTY-FOUR.
From the painting by Scorel, 1517, now in the Louvre Gallery.

[Frontispiece

THE LIFE OF
PARACELSUS

THEOPHRASTUS VON HOHENHEIM
H93

BY ANNA M. STODDART

EDITOR OF "THE LIFE OF ISABELLA BIRD (MRS. BISHOH)

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

191 1

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO

MRS. GLASSFORD BELL

WITH AFFECTIONATE GRATITUDE FOR HER
INTEREST AND ENCOURAGEMENT

IN THE
PREPARATION OF IT

PREFACE

IN 1833, at the age of twenty-one, Robert
Browning wrote his " Paracelsus," a poem which
has to this day held its own as perhaps the
most penetrating of his sympathetic revelations.
The poet himself characterised such a poem
as the dramatic revelation of a soul, generally
that of an imaginary person. For this cause
many readers and admirers of " Paracelsus "
have classed it with others which owed their
emergence from subjective chaos to the poet's
creative power. But other readers were vaguely
aware that a man bearing this name, and held
for an extravagant and pretentious charlatan,
made some small stir in the sixteenth century,
and was dismissed from serious consideration as
a bibulous braggart, uneducated, quarrelsome,
self-assertive, and disreputable. Browning knew
more than his readers, for he possessed some
of Hohenheim's own writings and a few bio-
graphical notes of his career mainly derived from
the books of the man's inveterate foes and now
known to be mendacious calumnies. The

vii

viii PREFACE

astonishing fact is that through this paucity
of evidence and this cloud of hostile obscuration
the poet discerned his greatness.

About a quarter of a century ago, students
at Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg began
to examine the neglected traces of Hohenheim's
career and to estimate its importance to
science. With that infinite patience, accuracy,
and experienced judgment which distinguish
German from nearly all other scholars, these
men unravelled the tangled web of misrepre-
sentation and rescued its golden thread of truth
from the meshes. Dr. Sudhoff effected his
masterly inquiry into the accumulated writings
attributed to Paracelsus and published its
results in the two volumes of his " Attempt at
a Critical Estimate of the Authenticity of the
Paracelsian Writings," the first of which ap-
peared at Berlin in 1894.

Dr. Carl Aberle investigated the portraits
of all kinds, plastic and graphic, oil-paintings,
sketches, copper-plate engravings and woodcuts,
and systematised them ; and in pursuance of
this laborious quest made almost as many pil-
grimages as Paracelsus had made and discovered
from legendary and oral tradition a mass of
subsidiary but important biographical data.
He continued too the surgical examinations of
Hohenheim's skull and bones which were
begun in Salzburg by his father and published
their testimony in his valuable book " Monu-

PREFACE ix

ment, Skull, and Portraiture of Theophrastus
Paracelsus," at Salzburg, in 1891.

Dr. Julius Hartmann made a close study of
those books which Dr. Sudhoff recognised as
authentic wiritings of Hohenheim and collected
from them in chronological order all references
to his active life, his journeys and personal
experiences, compiling what resembles an auto-
biography, which is a sine qua non to all students
of his effort to reform medical science.

Professors Franz Strunz at Leipzig and Carl
Strunz at Vienna make the amazing genius
of this persecuted man the subject of lectures
to their students, and the former is editing an
edition of his works in their original German
with notes of explanation, and already both
the " Paragranum " and the "Paramirum" have
appeared.

These men are pioneers in Paracelsian re-
search and their work is attracting many
students.

To Browning's poem this " Life of Paracel-
sus " owes its inspiration; to those pioneers
and to his own works it owes its authenticity.
Attracted to the subject by the tentative but
unsatisfactory work of the Browning Society,
of whose committee I was a member for some
years, I meditated twenty years ago the possi-
bility of writing a popular Life, which while
based on accurate research should as far as
possible reconstruct the sequence of his circum-

x PREFACE

stances and activities and rescue his memory
from contemptuous oblivion. In 1840 Ambroise
Fare's gifted biographer, Dr. Maignan, admitted
and emphasised Hohenheim's brilliant services
to science ; in 1895 an English writer on the
History of Medicine pilloried him as a quack,
impostor, and braggart. It was time that a
biography which might place him in his due
relation to the European renascence, one un-
prejudiced by outworn theory, uninfluenced
by the purposes of an exotic cult, should be
written for readers in England.

Work of other kinds hindered this under-
taking until the early spring of 1910, when I
was set free to carry out a project which after
years of pondering had assumed the character
of an imperative and sacred duty. At its outset
I was encouraged by the opinion and advice of
Dr. John Comrje, M.A., whose lectures in the
University of Edinburgh upon the History of
Medicine have already created wide interest in
all that illuminates his subject, and to him I
owe my thanks.

To the Librarians of the Royal College of
Physicians, and of the Advocates' Library in
Edinburgh, and to those of other libraries at
home and abroad, in which I became acquainted
with the earliest editions of Hohenheim's works,
I am indebted for constant courtesy and help.

And to Mr. Murray, whose ready acceptance
of the early chapters gave me just that experi-

PREFACE xi

enced sympathy which more than any other
influence rallies and reinforces the power of
mind and application, I tender here my sincere
recognition.

ANNA M. STODDART.

SIENA,
June 12, 1911.

NOTE

IT is with deep regret that I have to announce the
death of Miss Anna Stoddart within a few hours of
the passing for press of the last sheets of this volume.

This is not the place in which to give a biographical
account of her, but the notices which have appeared
in the leading newspapers afford ample testimony to
the high esteem in which she and her educational work
were held by a large circle of friends and admirers.

For some years past her whole life and energies had
been devoted to this work on Paracelsus. Her previous
studies and her linguistic attainments specially fitted
her for the task, and she spent many months in Ger-
many and Italy in order to investigate on the spot the
career of a very remarkable man who is known to the
British public mainly through the works of Robert
Browning.

I trust that the public will give a favourable re-
ception to this scholarly and conscientious work for the
sake both of the author and the subject of it.

JOHN MURRAY.

September 1, 1911.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
DR. WlLHELM VON HOHENHEIM ... 1

CHAPTER II

BIKTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION 23

CHAPTER III
THE THREE PRINCIPLES 43

CHAPTER IV
YEARS OF TRAVEL . . . . . .61

CHAPTER V
TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER AT BASEL . . 81

CHAPTER VI
THE LECTURE HALL ..... 103

CHAPTER VII
PERSECUTION 127

CHAPTER VIII
No ABIDING CITY 149

xiii

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER IX

PAGB

" VOLUMEN PARAMIRUM " . . .171

CHAPTER X

" OPUS PARAMIRUM " 195

CHAPTER XI
RENEWED WANDERING 222

CHAPTER XII
TEACHER, MYSTIC, CHRISTIAN .... 249

CHAPTER XIII
LAST YEARS ....... 274

APPENDIX A
LETTER FROM PARACELSUS TO ERASMUS . . 297

APPENDIX B
LETTER FROM ERASMUS TO PARACELSUS . . 298

APPENDIX C
LAMPOON ON PARACELSUS . . . 299

INDEX 301

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PORTRAIT OF PARACELSUS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR,

PAINTED BY SCOREL, 1517, NOW IN THE LOUVRE

GALLERY ....... Frontispiece

FACING PA.GB

PORTRAIT OF DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM, FATHER OF
PARACELSUS, PAINTED 1491, NOW IN THE MUSEUM
CAROLINA-AUGUSTEUM, SALZBURG .... 20

PORTRAIT OF PARACELSUS, PAINTED IN VENICE WHEN HE

WAS THIRTY YEARS OLD . . . . .72

PARACELSUS'S HANDWRITING : FACSIMILE . . .144

PORTRAIT OF PARACELSUS, PAINTED IN NUREMBERG IN
1529 OR 1530, NOW IN THE ROYAL GALLERY AT
SCHLEISSHEIM, NEAR MUNICH . . . . .168

TOWN GATEWAY IN ST. GALLEN, BUILT 1485, PULLED

DOWN 1865 176

ENGRAVING BY HIRSCHVOGEL : PORTRAIT TAKEN AT
LAIBACH, OR VIENNA, WHEN PARACELSUS WAS FORTY-
SEVEN YEARS OLD ...... 280

LIFE OF PARACELSUS

CHAPTER I

DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM

When Einsiedeln
And its green hills were all the world to us.

THE valley of Einsiedeln stretches from the two

Mythen mountains on the south to Etzel on the

north. Up to the end of the eighth century

this high valley was uninhabited. Its streams

and brooks found their way through forests to

the Lake of Zurich. These forests knew the

wolf's howl and the vulture's scream, but the

voice of man was unheard beyond their fringe,

where a few hovels here and there might be

found. The whole district was a wilderness

and was feared by the dwellers near the lake.

The great snow-mountains which pass through

the valley of Glarus, through Schwyz, Uri, and

Unterwalden, bounded it on the south ; it

pushed its way northwards to the meadows by

the lake ; it reached Altmatt on the west, and on

the east it skirted the upper lake and the march.

This wilderness belonged to the Dukes of

Alemannia, and was ecclesiastically within the

1

2 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

diocese of the Bishops of Constance ; but al-
though the nobles of Alemannia may have
sometimes hunted on its outskirts, it was shunned
generally as the Dark Forest and a region of
sinister reputation.

Such it was before the time of Meinrad, who
was born towards the end of the eighth century.
His family belonged to a branch out of the stem
from which sprang the ancestors of the Imperial
House of Germany, and his father was a Count
of Zollern. He lived near Rottenburg, in the
valley of the Neckar, and there Meinrad, or
Meginrat, spent his childhood. The boy was
serious-minded, and his father saw in this quality
a monition that he was suited for the Church
rather than for the world. He took him to a
famous monastic school upon the Island of
Reichenau, probably influenced in his choice
by the fact that a relation of his own, called
Erlebald, was one of its instructors. Much
country round the lakes of Zurich and Constance
was already christianised, some of it by the
devoted Irish missionaries Columban and Gallus,
and the latter's memory is enshrined in the name
of St. Gallen. For Ireland was a base of mis-
sionary enterprise in those days, and with the
Cross it sent forth the light of education. Ger-
many and France looked to Ireland for schooling,
because its learning, its music, its arts of design
and manufacture were in advance of the crude
Anglian and Alemannic civilisations.

822] MEINRAD 3

Still, part of Helvetia and Alemannia was
heathen to all intents and purposes, and only
the nobles sought learning for their sons in
* the monastic schools. \

Count Zollern's wise insight was endorsed
by the event. From the beginning Meinrad
lent a willing ear to his instructors. He took
to study with zeal, mastered Latin and theo-
logy, was diligent in the scriptorium, became
expert in Church formula and ritual, and sought
the grave exercises of the cloister rather than
boyish sports and distractions. So gentle and
willing a pupil endeared himself to the monks,
and they encouraged his bias towards the
priestly life. He spent his youth and early
manhood at Reichenau and took deacon's and
priest's orders when he was twenty-five years
old. In 822, Erlebald was made abbot of the
monastery, and shortly afterwards Meinrad
entered the order of St. Benedict and submitted
himself wholly to its rigorous Rule. His learning
fitted him for scholarly rather than for physical
labour, and he copied the whole of the Scriptures
as well as several books of devotion. He
taught in the school, and after some time was
sent to Bollingen on the upper Lake of Zurich,
where Reichenau had a dependent house and
school, established to meet the Emperor Char-
lemagne's desire for a wider distribution of
educational facilities in that neighbourhood.

Meinrad performed his duties obediently and

4 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

diligently, but his heart was in the devotional,
not in the secular vocation of monasticism.
Across the narrow lake he could see the wooded
wilderness when after a night of prayer he
watched the sun rise on its mountains. Their
dark recesses drew him with irresistible mag-
netism. Yonder was solitude, and he yearned
for solitude with God. Had not St. Benedict
in his Rule enjoined " the battle of the soul in
the desert, where only God is present, and other
help there is none to maintain the soul's warfare
against temptation " ?

He could not walk by the lake's shore without
experiencing an agony of longing as he gazed.
At last he decided to cross the lake and explore
the ground. Some of his pupils accompanied
him, and they climbed till they reached the
slopes of the High Etzel. Here the boys stopped
to fish in the Sihl, but Meinrad pushed upwards
into the forest, and found a spot on the lower
slope fit for a hermitage. As teacher and
pupils fared back to the southern shore, they
came upon a little village, now called Altendorf,
where a kindly woman promised to provide
for his maintenance those things that were
necessary to existence, and to carry them to a
point on the forest's edge from which at stated
times he could fetch them.

Meinrad returned to Bollingen with his boys
and then sought Abbot Erlebald to lay before
him his heart's desire. Erlebald talked the

829] THE HIGH ETZEL 5

whole matter out with him and became aware
that solitude was God's will for him and must
be obeyed. Meinrad received his permission
and made his preparation for the change, giving
to the monastery of Reichenau nearly all the
copies which he transcribed there. He re-
tained the Rule of St. Benedict, his Mass-book,
and a few sacred writings. He left for the
Etzel some time in 829, and there, just where
now the chapel stands, he built a little hut
and began the hermit life.

Unfortunately, the solitude he had sought
was disturbed. There was a great mental rest-
lessness in those difficult days of transition, and
the spectacle of a man who knew his own mind
and set himself to win a closer communion with
God than even the monastery could afford
appealed to many wistful men and women.
They climbed the rough hill that led to his
hermitage to seek counsel, comfort, and inter-
cession. Others followed out of curiosity, and
the object of his renunciation seemed to be
thwarted. He bore the intrusion bravely for
seven years. Doubtless in winter, when the
High Etzel is mantled with snow, he could re-
cover, but during the greater part of the year
pilgrims flocked to seek his blessing. His
hermitage was too near the world, and he de-
cided to push further into the heart of the
dark forest to escape its contact. About
four miles he travelled towards the pyramidal

6 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

Mythens, which stand sentinel on the south,
and there he found a plain thickly wooded but
level and walled on the east by the prolonged
semi-circular heights of the Freiherrenberg.
He halted just below them, and with the help
of some woodcutters he rebuilt his hermitage.
In the neighbourhood the Alp rustled through
the fir-trees, a streamlet whose pure water
ministered to his daily needs.

Round the shores of Lake Zurich many
religious houses had been established. Over
one of these, a convent, the Abbess Hildegard,
a king's daughter and a holy woman, presided.
Moved to admiration and compassion for a
renunciation which lacked even the objective
aids to devotion, she sent Meinrad a Madonna
and Child carved in wood, and it is supposed
aided him to build a little sanctuary in which
to place this treasure. Another abbess, Heil-
wiga of Schannis, gave him an altar, candle-
sticks, incense, and wax, perhaps too the priestly
equipment for his daily services. " Our Lady
of Einsiedeln " was installed, no more to leave
the spot in which her honour dwells. For the
Madonna and Child of the Holy Chapel in the
monastery -church of Einsiedeln, at whose shrine
more than a hundred thousand pilgrims yearly
pray, kneeling while they listen to the Salve
Regina sung every afternoon the most touching
intercessory laud surely ever heard, with its
wail as of the wind amongst the fir-branches, its

836] THE EINSIEDELEI 7

cry for deliverance as of lonely souls in conflict
is the wooden statue sent thither by the Abbess
Hildegard nearly eleven hundred years ago.

Here Meinrad had peace from the world,
although now and again distressed souls sought
his help, and from time to time one of the
brothers from Reichenau would come to visit
him. From the evil within and the powers of
darkness he suffered fierce assault, but overcame
in the might of the Cross, and we are told that
God sent him visible messengers of consolation
once in the form of Jesus, the little Jesus. His
hour of recreation was passed in the forest,
walking to and fro, and a pair of young ravens
whom he fed from his hand with crumbs of
his scanty meals attached themselves to him,
as long centuries before two ravens had attached
themselves to St. Benedict.

For hard work he had his axe, and he cleared
a space round the chapel and cell. When this
was done he began to clear the plain in front
of them and so to reclaim the wilderness. For
twenty-five years St. Meinrad dwelt in his
hermitage or Einsiedelei. In his later years
pilgrims, many of them nobles, sought him out
in their times of affliction and contrition, and
the way to the Einsiedelei became a well-trodden
path. He would receive their confessions,
restore and console them, celebrate Mass for
them and send them away renewed and re-
solved.

8 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

But the fame of these visits reached the ears
of evil men, and they reasoned that in his soli-
tude he must have much wealth accumulated,
gifts of gold and silver vessels for his sanctuary,
which could be converted into wealth. A Ger-
man and a Rhaetian resolved to kill him.
Father Odilo Ringholz tells the story of their
crime. Meinrad, while celebrating his early
Mass, was made aware of approaching death
and of special divine preparation. He spent
the whole day in prayer. At evening his mur-
derers came. He received them with friendly
greeting and shared his bread and water with
them. When it grew dark, they fell upon him
with clubs and beat him to death. But as he
died they saw lighted tapers round his body
and a perfume as of incense came from it. In
terror they fled, not daring to enter the sanctu-
ary. The ravens, who had watched their crime,
rose from their perch screaming with rage and
pursued them all the way to Zurich, so that they
were unable to find refuge and were thrown
into prison. Their brutal sacrilege was dis-
covered and the Archduke Adalbert condemned
them to be burnt to death.

When the news reached Reichenau, Abbot
Walter and some of the monks went up to the
hermitage and carried Meinrad's heart to his
hut-chapel on the Etzel and his body to Reich-
enau, there to be buried with every sacred rite.
This was in January 861.

927] BENNO 9

So far we have lingered over the story of
Einsiedeln, whose importance rose out of the
memory of its saint and out of the pilgrimages
which kept it alive. Now, we can only glance
at the events of the six centuries which separate
v. the death of St. Meinrad from the birth of
A Paracelsus, and at these as they affected the
growth of Einsiedeln. }(

For nearly half a century there is nothing to
record. The chapel and hermitage fell almost
into ruins, for the occasional pilgrimages did
not avail to keep them in repair. But early
in the tenth century, a dignitary of Strassburg
Cathedral came with some followers, drawn
by the two-fold cord of St. Meinrad's memory
and the longing for solitude. Benedict, better
known as Benno, set to work to repair the build-
ing and to add cells to the hermitage, one for
each, for they practised the hermit life, not that
of an established order. When the building
was done, they followed Meinrad's example
and felled trees in front of and around their
settlement. The wide meadow now called the
Bruel is due to their toil, as is a large stretch
of arable land west of the Alp and still called
Bennau. But in 927, Benno, against his will,
was made Bishop of Metz and had to leave
his little flock in the Dark Forest. He found
the city of Metz given over to wickedness and
admonished its citizens from the pulpit. His
reward was their hatred, and when King^Henry,

10 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

who had appointed him, was absent, they hired
two knaves to lie in wait for him and put out
his eyes. The ruffians added blows to this
crime, and Benno sought release from the Synod
and went back to Einsiedeln. He was very
gladly welcomed and cared for and lived eleven
peaceful, devout years till his death in 940.
Six years before he died there came to join him
another Canon of Strassburg, like himself a
man of noble birth and possessing a large for-
tune. He brought with him a number of
followers, and Benno made him abbot.

This Eberhard proposed to devote his money
to the building of a church and monastery
on the site of St. Meinrad's hermitage, to re-
organise the hermit into the monastic life and
to adopt the Rule of St. Benedict. To all this
Benno gladly consented, but it was not till
after his death that the buildings were begun.
Amongst Eberhard's relatives were the wealthy
Duke Hermann of Suabia and his wife the
Duchess Reginlinde. The Duke bestowed large
sums on these buildings, and his name is
coupled with that of Eberhard as founder of the
Church at Einsiedeln. He gave the ground on
which it was built as well as the neighbouring
land as far as the Etzel to the monastery, and
secured from Emperor Otto I. a decree granting
to the monks liberty to elect their abbot
without interference. This decree admitted the
abbot to the rank of Prince- Abbot,

947] ANGELIC CONSECRATION 11

It was towards the end of 947 that the build-
ings were finished. The church stood round
and over St. Meinrad's little chapel which was
preserved in its original form with its altar
and Madonna. Church and chapel were ready
for consecration. They were within the diocese
of Constance to which Einsiedeln belonged till
the beginning of the eighteenth century and
the Bishop of Constance was asked to perform
the solemn rite. The Bishop of Augsburg was
invited to be present and brought with him
some relics of St. Maurice as a gift.

Bishop Conrad of Constance was a man of
deeply devotional nature and habit and rose
about midnight on the eve of the consecration
to pray in the new church. As he entered, the
most wonderful singing met his ear. Some of
the Benedictine monks were in the church and
with him they went to the door of the little
chapel, from which the sound proceeded. Look-
ing in with reverent astonishment, they found
the chapel lighted up and a great choir of angels
conducting its consecration with chant and
prayer and ceremony according to the ritual
of the Church. They listened till the celestial
function was ended and then returned to the
monastery with hearts uplifted and amazed.
The Bishop felt that in the human ceremony
of the following day the chapel had no share,
for God had consecrated it.

When Eberhard and the assembled monks

12 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

were told, they were astonished and troubled,
and feared that Conrad and their brothers had
seen a mocking vision, or were carried away
by a fantasy. They entreated the Bishop to
begin and complete the ceremony as it had been
arranged. He yielded very reluctantly and
the consecration began at the chapel. Scarcely
had the first words been spoken when a voice
from above said three times in reverberating
tones : " Stop, brother, the chapel is already
consecrated by God."

Afterwards, when Bishop Conrad was in Rome,
he related all that he had seen and heard to
Pope Leo VIII. and received from him a Bull
forbidding any attempt in future to reconse-
crate the chapel.

This incident roused the whole neighbourhood,
and pilgrimages began to a spot so honoured
by Heaven. These have continued in increasing
numbers during the nine centuries and a half
which have elapsed. To-day there is no dimi-
nution in their number, no relapse in their
devotions. In the thirteenth century, the
monastery was permitted to use a seal and chose
the Madonna and Child for its impression,
while the abbot's shield includes the two faith-
ful ravens of St. Meinhard flying at full speed as
after his assassins.

The oldest picture of Einsiedeln belongs to
about 1513, and shows the church and monastery
against the wooded slope behind, closely beset

1513] MARIA EINSIEDELN 18

by small houses, and in the Briiel groups of
boys playing near a little church apparently
at snowballing, with a few grave and reverend
seniors watching the sport. There was a school
three centuries before this date, superintended
by the Benedictines, and the schoolmaster at
the beginning of the fourteenth century com-
posed some lines in honour of the church, which
freely translated run as follows :

Some minsters from relics of saints have renown,

Some from dignities kings have bestowed in their love,
But ours can glory in both, and for crown,

In her great consecration by choirs from above.
Holy Virgin ! God set apart here to thy praise

His temple that we might be saved at thy shrine :
Here pilgrims implore thee in love and amaze

Weak and strong receive from thee all favours divine.

Through good and evil days Maria Einsiedeln
endured. Working people and tradespeople
gathered to the little town, to provide for the
needs of the multitudes who visited the Holy
Chapel, and a secular life began which was in
sympathetic subjection to the Benedictine
authority. But before the end of the fifteenth
century much trouble had befallen this ener-
getic community. The Benedictines were mis-
sionaries, church-builders, founders of religious
houses, promoters of education and of learning.
Part of their revenues, whether from gifts or
from their increasing territorial property, was
expended on these important undertakings.

The first misfortune occurred in 1029, when

14 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

church and cloister were burnt down through
either malice or mishap, but certainly by an
enemy called Eberhard, whose interference with
their elections of an abbot had been thwarted.
The neighbouring nobles detested the liberty
enjoyed by the monks to elect their abbot and
tried to arouse hostility against it. But added
to this it is probable that their influence and
energy in reform of the neglected inhabitants
within a wide radius of Einsiedeln were at the
root of this enmity. The struggle lasted fifty
years, and by strength of arms the nobles once
managed to force an abbot of their choosing
upon the monastery. When this danger was
past, there followed a lengthy intermittent
strife with the townspeople of Schwyz, who in
1314 broke violently into the church, plundered
all its valuables and flung the monks into prison.
Austria interfered in 1315 on behalf of Ein-
siedeln, but her army was defeated in the battle
of Morgarten.

These disasters were so prolonged and so
mischievous that the Benedictines lost by them
a full half of their land in the Dark Forest, but
managed to retain their independence and their
rights. Peace was concluded with Schwyz, by
the arbitration of the Abbot of Disentis, at
one time a monk of Einsiedeln. These successive
quarrels embittered more than two centuries,
and during the troubles with Schwyz, in 1226,
the cloister was burnt down a second time.

1327] ABBOT JOHN 15

Before the fourteenth century began even, the
prosperity of the tenth seemed to have dwindled
away. But even at its lowest secular estate, the
abbots of Einsiedeln were constantly called to
episcopal office in other places.

Abbot John I. had much to do with its restor-
ation. A man of affairs, of piety and of learning,
he raised the standard of worship as well in
detail as in spirit ; he improved the methods
of study, and worked without pause to provide
the means for restoring the much- injured build-
ings. Pilgrimages had become rarer during the
troubles, but revived under his encouragement.
He died in 1327, and was fortunately succeeded
by men whom he had himself inspired, and by
the beginning of the fifteenth century Einsiedeln
had partially recovered her prosperity. Her
dignity she never lost.

During this century several dependent reli-
gious houses were established in the neigh-
bourhood of the monastery, some of them for
women, and these in the following century were
combined into a community of Benedictine
nuns.

Peace and progress had come to the valley.
The monastery was aristocratic in its social
character. No monk was made abbot unless
he could pass an examination into his family
claims. He must show testimony to fourteen
noble ancestors. Dean Albrecht von Bonstettin
says in his Chronicle of 1494 :

16 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

" This house of God and church shall be a
hospital of refuge for the Princes, Counts, land-
owners and their children, as it is written in
the chronicles and has been in custom for a long
time."

Four abbots of high rank succeeded each
other during the fifteenth century, the last of
these being Conrad of Hohenrechberg, who was
elected in 1480. Already, in his time, the strict
observance of this qualification was considerably
discussed. It was said that the devotional
character of the monastery suffered from its
social influence and that its discipline was greatly
relaxed. In common with most religious houses
of that date, Einsiedeln laid itself open to criti-
cism and censure.

The first breath of the reformation had
roused serious thinking in Bohemia and England,
and when the wind of the Spirit is set in motion
it passes from land to land. We may surmise that
the failure of the Christian Church to maintain
its high purpose in the fourteenth and -fifteenth
centuries was the main cause of that revolution
which men call the Reformation. Like science,
the Church in those times had become a dis-
cordant echo of its past. Its spiritual life was
failing, and the forces which gathered their
impetus slowly and silently, in men touched
by the Spirit, from the spectacle of a Church
at odds with God, at odds with man, found a

1481] SUMMONS TO EINSIEDELN 17

volcanic vent in their action and a challenge
on their tongues of fire.

Under the gentle Conrad of Hohenrechberg
there was no attempt at Einsiedeln to meet or
refute the charges. He was abbot from 1480
to 1526, when the premonitory tremblings had
become upheaval.

There was need, shortly after his election,
of a physician to take charge of the sick in the
town and of the pilgrim-hospital. The choice
devolved upon the abbot. He summoned
Dr. Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, of whom
Archbishop Netzhammer in his admirable " Life
of Paracelsus " says :

" Wilhelm von Hohenheim was no bath and
barber doctor, but a celebrated physician,
trained in the best schools, who had acquired
at Tubingen his degree of Licentiate of Medicine,
as a chronicle of Villach tells us."

The name indicates his rank, but for fuller
information we have to thank the latest autho-
rities on the parentage of Paracelsus, Dr. Sud-
hoff, Dr. Carl Aberle, Dr. Strunz, and Dr. Hart-
mann, who have made careful investigation
into his status by birth. Were it not for the
malignity of his son's enemies, contemporary
and posthumous, it would be unnecessary to
dwell at length on Wilhelm von Hohenheim 's
ancestry, but mendacious biographies of Para-
celsus have been so long credited that it be-
2

18 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP. I

comes a duty briefly to give the fruits of the
latest research.

A soldier called Conrad Bombast von Hohen-
heim lived in 1270 and was known then as a
feudal tenant of the Count of Wirtemberg.
He died in 1299, leaving as his executor a Fried-
rich von Hohenheim. A close relation between
the Counts of Wirtemberg and this family is
evidenced by the lands and revenue which the
Bombasts von Hohenheim could claim. This
Conrad lived at Castle Hohenheim near Stutt-
gart and collected tithes from Plieningen and
one-half of the revenue of Ober-Esslingen, and
these rights lasted through the fourteenth and
well into the fifteenth century. A family called
Spat bought the feudal tenancy and rights
from them in 1432 with Count Ulrich of Wirtem-
berg's permission. Wilhelm von Hohenheim
married a lady of this family. He was a knight
who in 1461 rode with Count Ulrich against the
Count Palatine Friedrich and in 1492 shared
the expedition to Landshut under Count Eber-
hard of Wirtemberg, accompanied by his brother
George Bombast von Hohenheim. This hap-
pened just a year before the birth of Paracelsus,
whose father had been already eleven years in
Einsiedeln.

This George von Hohenheim had accompanied
Count Eberhard on a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land in 1468, and in his later life had entered
the Order of the Knights of St. John, in which

1481-91] ARRIVAL AND WORK 19

he held high rank. He had a nephew Wilhelm
Bombast von Hohenheim, whom we claim as
the young doctor summoned from Suabia by
Conrad von Hohenrechberg in 1481. The name
Bombast, Bambast, Baumbast, or in its oldest
form Banbast, was special to this branch of
the von Hohenheims. Its fortunes were de-
clining and his father, who lived at Riet, was
neither a soldier nor wealthy. The son was
educated for a profession in which he could
make his own way.

After his arrival in Einsiedeln, he must have
lived quietly and laboriously, studying too,
both chemistry and botany, and making herbal
medicine a special interest. He had many
valuable manuscripts, copies perhaps made in
Tubingen, and they comprised the chief thinking
his time in medicine, chemistry, astrology,
and their cognate arts. When he was thirty-
four years old, he married a lady of a family
well known in Einsiedeln, Ochsner by name,
whose father was probably the Rudi Ochsner
who lived at the Sihl bridge. She held the posi-
tion of matron of the pilgrim-hospital, under
the abbot's administration, and the doctor
must have come into frequent contact with her
while attending invalid pilgrims professionally.

In honour of his marriage, which took place
in 1491, Dr. Wilhelm von Hohenheim had his
portrait taken. It is now in Salzburg in the
Museum Carolina Augusteum, and illuminates

20 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

for us many matters which might otherwise
have remained doubtful. His age is stated
on a scroll to his left, just under the von
Hohenheim shield, which bears three blue balls
on a white band. On his right, in the left
corner of the picture, is the head of an ox, not
heraldically displayed, but probably connected
with the family name of his bride. In his
right hand he holds a carnation, the customary
sign of a bridegroom. A small arched window
on his right looks upon a road bordered by
rocks and fir-trees, down whose slope a man on
horseback and a pedestrian are wending, and
this may be intended for the pilgrim-way to
the High Etzel. The portraiture is most in-
teresting and is well painted in oil upon a wooden
panel. It shows a man of thirty-four years
old, dressed in professional black and wearing
a beret which covers the upper part of the head,
all but a ring of thick and curling hair high on
his brow and rather low on his neck. The face
is finely featured, full of thought, gentle, kindly,
deeply lined round the mouth, with delicately
arched eyebrows and eyes in which wisdom,
humour, and some sadness dwell. He wears
two rings, one on the third finger of either hand.
We gather that in 1491 Wilhelm von Hohen-
heim was a student, a man of kindliest temper,
a gentleman who had the right to bear the arms
of his family and to transmit them to his son,
who always used them.

DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM, FATHER OF PARACELSUS.
Painted in 1491, now in the Museum Carolina- Augusteum, Salzburg.
P. 20]

1491] MARRIAGE AND HOME 21

Dr. Carl Aberle suggests some of the picture's
probable vicissitudes before it was placed in
the museum at Salzburg. It is said to have
been seen in 1760 in the house of a merchant
of that city, and its owner spoke of it as having
hung in Paracelsus 's sitting-room, when
lived there ; a century later, it was in the pos-
session of Herr Josef Mossl, who died in 1885,
and who inherited it from his father, by whom
it had been bought from a man called Scham-
huber in the service of the Archbishop of Salz-
burg late in the eighteenth century.

The Ochsner family lived in a house on the
further side of the bridge over the Sihl and close
to the ascent to the Etzel. The original house
was burnt down about 1838, and the building
which took its place is not altogether a repro-
duction. In a map of old Einsiedeln and its
neighbourhood, bridge and house are given as
they were when Dr. von Hohenheim brought
his wife to her father's home. There were two
good stories in the long building, and the upper
of these was assigned to the young couple.
We hear little more of the doctor's wife. She
was doubtless a quiet, devout, capable woman,
who kept to her home duties after marriage.

The home was beautifully placed. It was
approached from Einsiedeln by a hilly road
which reached the Sihl bridge down a steep
descent. The river rushed through a gorge, its
banks clad with fir-trees and rich in plants and

22 DR. WILHELM VON HOHENHEIM [CHAP, i

wild flowers. The house stood a little back
from the end of the covered bridge, its windows
looking towards the pilgrim- way up the Etzel.
Behind it stretched meadows where cattle grazed.
The bridge, known as the Teufels-briicke, was
rebuilt a century and a half ago, but as nearly
as possible in its original form, so that one
can realise to-day most of the features familiar
to the inmates of the Ochsner house.

CHAPTER II

BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION

The Ages

Coming and going all the while till dawned
His true time's advent.

X HERE, on November 10, 1493, their boy was
born. He was christened Theophrastus in
honour of a Greek thinker and follower of
Aristotle, JTheophrastus Tyrtamos of Eresusj
physician, botanist, and mineralogist, whom his
father specially admired. " Philip " may have
been prefixed to this name, but it was not used
by Paracelsus himself at all, and for " Aureole,"
it seems to have been conferred on him by his
admirers in later life, and in 1538 he used it
in the title of a document. Aureolus was a
name of honour given to Theophrastus Tyrtamos
and may have been playfully used by the doctor
to h}s son. There was perhaps some faint
luminous effluence from his face, as there has
been from other men of genius, which won him
this pet name. In looking at the portrait,
wrongly ascribed to Tintoretto, drawn when
Paracelsus was twenty- eight years old, there is
an apparent attempt to indicate such a light

23

24 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

about his head. But it was not till after his
death that the name was freely used by his
biographers and publishers. His full name, set
down without hypothetic additions, was Theo-
phrastus Bombast von Hohenheim.

He was a difficult child to rear. Small,
fragile, with a tendency to rickets, he required
constant attention. This he received from his
father, who watched him with anxious tender-
ness. Dr. von Hohenheim had discovered for
himself the healing and strengthening value of
open air, and when he was old enough Theo-
phrastus was his constant companion and learned
from him the names and uses of herbs for healing
for lotions, for potions, for poisons, for an-
tidotes. This was his first reading of a page
of God's book of nature. No fuller or more
attractive page could be read than in the country
round his own home. Father Martin Gander
has catalogued the flora of Einsiedeln, of moun-
tains, forest, meadow, lake, swamp, and road-
side, and in his little book, published by Messrs.
Benziger, we can discover what the little boy
discovered in his earliest perusal of it.

Pharmacy had not reached a registered and
acknowledged status in Europe, as it had done
in China, Egypt, Judea, and Greece more than
a thousand years before the Christian era. In-
deed, the first European pharmacopoeia belonged
1542, the year after Paracelsus

died. But most of the herbal medicines known

1500] FLORA OF EINSIEDELN 25

to us now were known in the middle ages, and
the religious houses cultivated them in their
gardens and so kept up their use. But they
were often administered inaccurately, and
patients were forced to swallow mixtures which
added to their suffering and sometimes hastened
their end. The decoctions from herbs, however,
were less repulsive than the mineral and animal
brews given with prayers and holy water and a
devout abstinence from fresh air.

On the meadows, banks, and in the woods,
by the Sihl streams and in the Sihl valley,
where swamps abound, spring, summer, autumn,
and winter bring countless plants to bloom and
fruition. In the meadows, primulas, gentians,
daisies, salvia, ranunculus, orchises, camomile,
colchicum, borage, angelica, fennel, kummel,
poppies, and martagon lilies succeed each
other. In the woods, pirolas of five varieties,
woodroof, belladonna, datura, violets, and wild
berries are plentiful. On the banks and road-
sides are campanulas, foxgloves, chicory, cen-
taurea, many different veronicas, geums, mint,
thyme, vervain, smilax, lychnis, St. John's
wort, potentillas, ribes, and witch-herb. On
the swamps are the mealy primrose in great
patches of lavender and purple, sundews, myo-
sotis, pinguiculas, mallows, equisetums, selagin-
ella, a rare orchis relic of an older world ;
and on the moors and mountain slopes erica,
azalia, alpenrose, saxifrage, grass of Parnassus,

26 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

dianthus, wild plum and wild berries abound.
These are but a few of the plants in Father
Gander's list, which includes a large number
of other medicinal herbs and some to which
magical powers were ascribed.

Theophrastus must have learnt them all by
his father's side, when the doctor made his
professional rounds on foot. They were long
rounds, sometimes leading him over the Etzel
to the villages on the shores of Lake Zurich,
sometimes taking him southward to Einsiedeln
and its outlying farms, on other days needing
briefer trudging to the hamlets and farms
within a mile or two of the Sihl bridge. When
early summer brought the pilgrims, his attend-
ance would be divided between the Etzel and
Einsiedeln.

It has been suggested that his home served
as a refreshment house for the pilgrims as they
came down from the chapel and that a wheel
was hung up on pilgrimage days to indicate
that wine could be bought there. This rests
on an assumption due to the presence of a
wheel lying by the roadside in the landscape
of his portrait, but it is nowhere confirmed.
What is quite possible is that over-tired and
delicate pilgrims found rest and care there
and perhaps restoring draughts of wine.

These days would lead to many questions from
the child and many answers from his father.
A sad surmise haunts one, as one seeks to re-

1500] EARLY TEACHING 27

construct his childhood, that the mother was no
longer there, but had passed away while he was
still young. He was so entirely in his father's
care, and he suffered much from lack of suitable
nourishment. But that he was brought up
in a religious home is proved by his strong
conviction of the profound importance of re-
ligion in after-years. For Paracelsus there
were only two subjects of paramount interest
in life : God in Heaven to be worshipped and
trusted, God in nature. and. in man to be passion-
ately sought a,ftpr. As a child he would accept
all that he was taught, in youth and manhood
he thought for himself, but never once lost
sight of the great eternal truths. To him, as
we shall see, Jesus Christ was the divine teacher
and example, wh_ose...._jfeto required positive
obedience, not casuistic interpretation to vanish-
ing point. We may accept from his own later
reminiscences that his father was his first in-
structor in Latin, botany, alchemy, herbal
medicine, surgery, and religious history . But
there were influences at work for which Dr. von
Hohenheim was not responsible. These were
due to the spirit of his time and were not only
born within him, but were rapidly both mentally
and ethically developed.

Young as he was, he must have known the
great events in Switzerland, which had national-
ised so many of its cantons in the fourteenth
century, and in the fifteenth had defended

28 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

the confederacy against Charles of Burgundy
and Austria. In the very year which brought
his father to Einsiedeln, the Convention of
Stanz had taken place, which not only included
new cantons but endorsed the older constitu-
tional decrees and was the basis of the Swiss
Con federation for thrfifi hundred years. The
sentiment of individual canton self-government
combined with a united executive found ex-
pression in those centuries, and of that rapid
development in liberty and law Theophrastus
must have heard, for Schwyz had always taken
a prominent part in the wars, foreign and internal,
of Switzerland.

And outside Switzerland events were taking
place which were soon to draw this Confederacy
into the whirlpool of their results, on whose
verge most of Europe found itself.

Dr._JFranz Strunz in the able and eloquent
introduction to his " Life and Personality of
Paracelsus " calls our attention to them. A
new era was in birth, its predecessor in travail
but bringing forth a great generation of men
and of achievements ; printing discovered : the
arts turning to nature : science reconsidering
its formulas and its assertions : theology called
to account for its systems and its limitations :
a new freedom opening its vistas to men's
minds : the giant Antaeus awaking from slumber
on his mother earth to renew his struggle with
ignorance, superstition, and prejudice.

1500] THE RENASCENCE 29

In the infancy of the new age Paracelsus was
an infant.

" The History of the Renascence," says Dr.
Strunz, " philosophic as well as artistic, with
its thousand inspirations,, its thousand voices,
must have reached Paracelsus, and we must
endeavour to trace how this wonderful manifesta-
tion of his time affected the lonely investigator
of nature and medicine lonely amidst the erring
crowds who followed the philosophic methods
of the middle ages how to him it may have
seemed that old things were doomed to pass
away and all things to become new. . . . The
Renascence concealed a deeply rooted spiritual
condition, an immense inner cleavage between
the dying age and its bondsmen's creed and the
world given over to the devil ; between the
absence of law and lawlessness. It was from
the spirit of the Renascence that Paracelsus
received his impulse towards the light of nature,
towards scientific Induction and comparison.
Its alliance with the spiritual forces of the
Reformation in both the narrower and wider
sense of the word along with its influence upon
men's souls an influence not directly due to
Luther explains to us the other side of his
character."

These influences were in active diffusion be-
fore Luther on the one side and Paracelsus
on the other had given them voice. Two
hundred and fifty years earlier another lonely
soul had received vision, which pierced through

30 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

the accumulated darkness of fifteen centuries
and discovered the key that could unlock God's
treasure-house of nature, but men cried shame
upon the sacrilege, and Roger Bacon's plea for
experimental research was stifled and his writ-
ings were shunned and forgotten. His " Opus
Majus " was not rescued from its tattered manu-
script until a year after the death of Paracelsus,
so unready was the Western world to accept
a solution of the great enigmas till it was shaken
loose from mental bondage by the Renascence
and the Reformation.

The time was now eager to bring to new birth, j
In 1483 Luther, in 1493 Paracelsus was born :
Pico della Mirandola died a year afterwards :
in 1510 Girolamo Cardano, in 1517 Ambroise
I Pare was born : Copernicus was their contem-
LjLQrary. It was all one birth, new religious |
expression, new thought, new science, new art.
And these were only amongst the many voices
of that great human restlessness which desired
what it could not formulate until they came.

It is impossible now to estimate how far the
child came into contact with Benedictine in-
fluence. Apparently there is only one mocking
allusion to him in the monastic archives of
Einsiedeln, written after his death when he
could make no reprisal. He was only nine
years old when he left, but sufficiently old to
be well acquainted with the church and its
services.

1502] BOYHOOD AT VILLAGE 31

It was burnt down in 1465, in 1509, and again
in 1577. We do not know its form between
1493 and 1502 ; but there is an old picture of
Einsiedeln in 1577, which preserves for us its
appearance then before its last destruction by
fire. The rebuilding was long delayed for lack of
funds, so that the present church was erected
late in the seventeenth century, as its baroque
architecture indicates.

In 1502 Dr. Wilhelm von Hohenheim was
appointed to be town physician at Villach in
Karinthia. We have a trustworthy record of
the thirty-two years which he spent there in
a document dated May 12, 1538, four years
after his death. Its purpose was to bear witness
to his son's right to the property left by him,
which it does in the following terms :

6 We, the magistrates, council, and whole
community of Villach, bear open testimony in
this letter that the learned and famous Wilhelm
Bombast von Hohenheim, Licentiate of Medicine,
lived amongst us in Villach for thirty-two years
and all the time of his residence led an honour-
able life and behaviour. With good will we
witness to his rectitude and to his just and
blameless conduct, as it is incumbent on us to
do. In 1534, exactly on the birthday of our
Beloved Lady, he departed this life here in
Villach. May God the Almighty be merciful to
his soul. Of the said Wilhelm Bombast von
Hohenheim, the most honourable and learned
Herr Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim,

32 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

Doctor in both Arts of Medicine, is son by
marriage and next heir, and was held by the
aforesaid Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim for
his son by marriage and his next heir. . . .
And that this letter may serve as absolutely
trustworthy, we give it with the seal of the town
of Villach appended."

Theophrastus was now old enough to go to
school, and in Villach there was a school founded
by the famous Fuggers of Augsburg, who were
engaged in working the lead mines at Bleiberg,
a short distance from Villach. Their Berg-
schule was intended to train overseers and
analysts to superintend and instruct the miners
and to analyse the metals and ores discovered.
In his " Chronicle of Karinthia " Paracelsus
wrote many years later concerning its minerals :

" At Bleiberg is a wonderful lead-ore which
provides Germany, Pannonia, Turkey, and Italy
with lead ; at Hiitenberg, iron-ore full of speci-
ally fine steel and much alum ore, also vitriol
ore of strong degree ; gold ore at St. Paternion ;
also zinc ore, a very rare metal not found else-
where in Europe, rarer than the others ; ex-
cellent cinnabar ore which is not without
quicksilver, and others of the same character
which cannot all be mentioned. And so the
mountains of Karinthia are like a strong box
which when opened with a key reveals great
treasure."

Such a key was the mining begun by the

1502-9] THE BERGSCHULE 33

Fuggers, and the doctor and his son must often
have walked through the ancient larch forests
to Bleiberg on the slope of the Doberatsch to
watch the processes which converted the ore
through breaking up, smelting, and moulding
into shapely blocks of lead.

In the Bergschule the doctor was teacher
of chemistry, or of alchemy in progress towards
chemistry.

Father and son lived in the Haupt Platz,
or Market Place, of Villach at No. 18, and the
school was in the Lederer Gasse. Theophras-
tus went to it daily and sat on its benches when
father taught. That the Fuggers had chosen
Dr. Wilhelm von Hohenheim for this post in-
dicates his proficiency in chemistry, and we
may infer that his boy had already learnt some
of its principles and knew the fascination of
its experiments. His father had his own little
laboratory in the house on the Market Place,
in which he made his own tests. Dr. Karl
Aberle saw this room in 1879 and a knob on
the railing of some steps rising from the court-
yard, which he was told Paracelsus had gilded.

The boy was sent to the famous Benedictine
school at St. Andrew's monastery in the Lavan-
tall for higher scholastic instruction, and it
is probable that there he came in contact with
Bishop Erhart, or Eberhart Baumgartner, who
helped the Fiiggers, in th ft fr alchemical labora-
tory. There is no doubt that good teaching and
3

34 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

his native power of exact observation equipped
him for further study at this period. The
climate of Karinthia would favour his physical
development into fairly healthy boyhood. The
country as well as Karniola had recently come
through a terrific struggle with the Turks,
who were driven from the very gates of Villach
in 1492.

Theophrastus was now preparing for the
high school, or college, probably at Basel.
He was even engaged in studying the occult
with his father and by help of his father's col-
lection of books. Without a knowledge of the
arts belonging to occultism it was impossible
at that time to become a physician. ^ There
was no such thing as"j positive scienceA All
collegiate and monastic training was founded
upon authority and consisted in a degenerate
and much falsified inheritance of dogma from
the Greek and Roman physicians copied studi-^
ously for centuries and stultified with errors
in its transference from Greek to Latin, from
Latin to Arabic, and from Arabic back to mediae-
val Latin. \

Hippocrates, the great " Father of Medicine,"
was succeeded in the fifth century before Christ
by Aristotle the Stagyrite, who had the instinct of
surpassing genius and almost sighted experimental
science. He wrote on all subjects physics,
meteorology, mechanics, anatomy, physiology,
biology, the vital principle, animals, parts

131-200] CLAUDIUS GALEN 35

of animals, generation, memory, sleep, dreams,
etc. His work was great and he attained to
the gate if not to the strait and narrow way of
science. School succeeded school of medicine
for six hundred years in Greece, Alexandria,
and Rome. But transference from language
to language impaired and confused the,. bases
founded by Hippocrates and Aristotle, jwhile
the Platonic transcendentalism and metaphy-
sical obscuration disturbed logical thinking and
fired men's imagination at the expense of patient
investigation.

The second century of the Christian era pro-
duced Galen, a physician of Pergamos, who knew
all that there was to be acquired in his time
and a little more of his own, founded upon in-
adequate experiment. He wrote on every
branch of what was comprehensively called
philosophy, five hundred clever treatises, and
of these one hundred have survived. His merit
was that he urged the importance of anatomical
knowledge. Otherwise, he dictated a system
of medicine fusing theory and practice re-
trograde in itself, not developed from the sound
principles of Hippocrates and Aristotle so im-
posing in its reduction of all departments of
knowledge to authoritative assertion that it
prevailed over all Europe for twelve centuries
and dissent was accounted sacrilegious. While
Hippocrates urged the importance of obser-
vation, Galen confounded it with theory. When

36 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

the Arabs invaded the sphere of European
enlightenment, they were struck with admira-
tion for this mass of erudition and accepted
it without question.

The result was that copies were made in
Arabic of Galen's treatises and of Latin ver-
sions of the Greek physicians. Avicenna and
Averroes were hard-and-fast disciples of the
Galenic system, fascinated by its pose of omni-
science, and their support not only stamped out
such illuminated protest as Roger Bacon's, but
made of the decrees of Claudius Galen fetters
to bind men's minds for three centuries beyond
Bacon's time. As Latin was the general lan-
guage of teaching, copies of the Arabic were
transferred into mediaeval Latin and errors
increased and multiplied. To such an extent
were the works of even Aristotle debased in
Roger Bacon's time, that their conceptions
were stultified, and in his great work the " Opus
Majus," written for Pope Clement IV., the Fran-
ciscan scientist declared that "if he could he
would burn all the works of the Stagyrite, since
their study was not only loss of time, but the
cause of error and multiplication of ignorance."

It is not wonderful that occultism supple-
mented dogmatic ignorance. St. Ambrose
of Milan said : " The testimony of nature
is more valid than the argument of doctrine."
But such consultation of nature was punished
as wizardry. None the less it was hazarded.

1510] AT COLLEGE 37

William Howitt, Friend and mystic, has written:
" True mysticism consists in the direct relation
of the human mind to God : false mysticism
accomplishes no true community and pro-
pitiation between God and man." How should
it, when it leaves the naked soul at the mercy
of evil ? The mind absorbed in God is shielded
from assault. It was the true mysticism that
Theophrastus sought to acquire, the union of
his mind with the Divine Mind, that he might
be enabled to understand its workings in nature.

When he went to Basel, he was already practi-
cally acquainted with surgical treatment and had
helped his father in dealing with wounds. He
tells us in his "Surgical Books and Writings" that
he had the best of teachers and had read much
written by famous men, both past and present.
Amongst them he instances Bishop Erhart of
Lavantall and his predecessor. Lavantall was
in the valley where the Fuggers had their smelt-
ing furnaces and laboratories, and there the
bishop probably attained experimental ac-
quaintance with the alchemy of metals.

We know next to nothing of Theophrastus at
Basel in 1510. The High School or University
was in the hands of the scholiasts and pedants
of the time. He soon became conscious that
he had nothing to gain from their dull reitera-
tions of aeon- old formulas which his intellect
disowned. The dust and ashes to which these
barren minds deferred " had laboured and grown

38 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

famous and the fruits were best seen in a dark
and groaning earth given over to a blind and
endless strife with evil what of all their lore
abates ? "

One incident belongs to this time. It was a
fashion for scholars to adopt a latinised version
of their family name and in some cases to hellen-
ise its form. Erasmus, Frobenius, Melancthon
are examples of such changes. The habit pre-
dominated in Basel, and Theophrastus trans-
ferred Hohenheim into Paracelsus. There is
a tradition that his father had conferred this
name on him while he was still a boy, meaning
by it that he was already more learned than
Celsus, a physician who lived in the time of the
Emperor Augustus, and who wrote a work upon
medical treatment somewhat more advanced in
hygiene than was usual then. But Dr. Sudhoff
and Dr. Karl Aberle agree in considering " Para-
celsus " to be a paraphrase of Hohenheim carry-
ing the " High Home " into the spiritual
region, and we are safe in accepting their opinion.

From 1510 he was known by this name, and
although he rarely included it in his signature,
he affixed it to his greater works, those on
philosophy and religion, and was universally
cited by it whether in discipleship, in contro-
versy, or in contumely.

His impatience with the outworn and almost
worthless academic teaching can be imagined.
He needed truth, not jargon ; order, not con-

1511] THE ABBOT TRITHEMIUS 39

fusion ; guidance, not misleading. And all the
time Roger Bacon's " Opus Majus " lay frayed
and tattered at Rome and Oxford.

Paracelsus had read some manuscript by the
Abbot Trithemius, perhaps a copy in his father's
collection, and it decided him to go to Wiirz-
burg and seek enrolment amongst his pupils.
Trithemius was called after his birthplace,
Treitenheim, near Trier. His own name was
Johannes Heidenberg. Even as a young Bene-
dictine monk he was celebrated for his learning,
and was made Abbot of Sponheim when he was
only twenty -one years old. From Sponheim
he was transferred in 1506 to the monastery of
St. Jacob close to Wiirzburg, where he died
in December 1516. He had a great renown,
and more especially for occult research, believ-
ing that the hidden things of nature were in
the keeping of spiritual forces. Students came
to him, and if they proved themselves worthy
were admitted to his study where his grim
experiments were made. He was learned in
all the knowledge of his day, influenced too
by the Renascence, a lover of art and poetry
as well as a historian and a physician, an al-
chemist with a nostrum of his own for all diseases,
the receipt for which is quoted by Dr. Franz
Hartmann.

So Paracelsus travelled the long road to
Wiirzburg, probably in just such conditions
as Erasmus describes in his letter about the

40 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

journey from Basel to Louvain. He had grown
stronger, but always remained small and slight,
carrying his great gifts in a frail vessel. He
took a lodging at Wurzburg,

Which the Mayne
Forsakes her course to fold as with an arm.

Trithemius was accounted dangerous by the
ignorant many. He had penetrated to some
of nature's hidden things, amongst them to
magnetism and telepathy. In mystical ex-
periments he had found himself able to read
the thoughts of others at a distance. He used
a cryptic language and a secret chronology
by which he interpreted the prophetic and
mystical portions of the Bible and of cabalistic
writings. Above all study he insisted on that
of the Holy Scriptures, for which he had a
deep devotion and which he required his pupils
to examine with exact and reverent care. In
this he influenced Paracelsus for life, for Bible
study was one of the preoccupations of his later
years, and in his writings we have constant
witness not only to his mastery of its language,
but of its* deepest spiritual significance.

That he studied occultism with the abbot
and was aware of its mysterious powers is also
sure, for later he sought to systematise them
anew. But he shrank from its more dangerous
experiments because he believed them to be
opposed to the divine will, and above all he

1511] NECROMANCY 41

abhorred the necromancy practised by less
scrupulous men, being convinced that it opened
an outlet for the forces of evil. He abjured
all personal profit from the exercise of beneficent
magic, and believed that only the good of others
could authorise it, and particularly the healing
of others under the direction of God.

Robert Browning has well defined his atti-
tude towards all cabalistic efforts to control
spirit influence for selfish purposes :

I can abjure so well the idle arts

These pedants strive to learn and teach ; Black Arts,

Great Works, the Secret and Sublime, forsooth

Let others prize : too intimate a tie

Connects me with our God ! A sullen friend

To do my bidding, fallen and hateful sprites

To help me what are these, at best, beside

God helping, God directing everywhere,

So that the earth shall yield her secrets up,

And every object there be charged to strike,

Teach, gratify her master God appoints ?

It was with this clear purpose that he
returned to active personal and experimental
research. He could discern between the mental
food convenient for him and that which un-
fitted his aspiring soul for union with God.
To heal men as Christ had healed them would
be best of all, and in time this union might
invest him with such healing power, but in
the meantime the divine behest and the divine
commission had come to him to search out all
means of healing with which the Creator had
stored nature. In the years of his study with

42 BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION [CHAP, n

Trithemius he must have felt the spiritual im-
pulse which pushed him into the van of God's
battalion, for this time was the crisis of his
life arid he had to choose whether to go forward
into the wilderness or to surrender the high
emprise. He forsook all things which could
lead to worldly preferment and went out to
seek wisdom with as little provision for his
bodily comfort as the poverello of Assisi.

X CHAPTER III

THE THREE PRINCIPLES

Then first discovering my own aim's extent
Which sought to comprehend the works of God
And God Himself, and all God's intercourse
With the human mind.

to make neither gold nor silver :
its use is to make the supreme essences and to
direct them against diseases." This was the
outcome of Hohenheim's researches in Schwatz.
But when he went thither, it was with some
curiosity as to the possible discovery of a com-
bination which would transmute the baser
metals into gold. He had read so much and
heard so much of this fabled achievement,
that it was difficult for him to escape from the
glamour of its possible consummation.

He was probably about twenty-two years
old when he joined Fiiger's little army of workers
in the silver-mines and laboratories of Schwatz,
and his residence there was the most influential
period of his preparation for a new departure
in science. The Fiigers were in no way related
to the Fuggers of Augsburg who mined Bleiberg.
They were Counts of Fiigen in the Tyrol, and

43

44 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

their mines were in the Tyrol about thirty
kilometres from Innspriick. Sigmund Fiiger
more particularly befriended Paracelsus, who
stayed with him at Schwatz.

Paracelsus found two groups of workers
the miners with their directors and the chemists
with their crucibles, retorts, and phials. The
chemists were still alchemists. Their analyses
and combinations belonged to occult experiment.
They were seeking Nature's mysteries mysteri-
ously with rites and offerings and old conven-
tions ; with observance of days and hours and
astral influences, with conjurations and in-
vocations and cryptic measurements and weights.
They tried by all hazards to grasp knowledge,
taking cabalistic precautions, anticipating the
sudden revelation, preparing for it by fasting
and meditation. Belonging to Christendom,
they inherited their occult creeds and methods
from a world more ancient than we can imagine,
a world of which they knew nothing but in
.^ fragments and whispers and strange survivals*
Sumerian, Accadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyp-1
tian, Indian, Persian, Phoenician, Arab, Hebrew, \
Greek, Roman, Goth, Celt, Teuton, Tartar,
""Mongolian practised and bequeathed what they'
were practising. But polytheism favoured oc-
cultism more than Christianity, for polytheism
was occultism, and from its terminology and
rites the alchemists inherited theirs.

Paracelsus worked with both groups. He

1514] AT SCHWATZ 45

learnt the risks and hardships of mining, and
studied the veins of precious ore, molten by
means at which he could only guess, which,
flowing into fissures and cracks within the
mountains, had hardened there in glittering
streaks. Three forces had produced them, fire,
fluidity, and solidification.

His first biographers, or rather those of them
whom spite had not perverted, maintain his
power of penetrating into the very soul of
natural things.

" Paracelsus," wrote Peter Ramus, " entered
into the innermost recesses of nature and ex-
plored and saw through the forms and faculties
of metals and their origins with such incredible
acumen as to cure diseases."

__ __

Melchior Adam testified that " in universal
philosophy, so arduous, so arcane and so hidden,
no one was his equal."

Besides his research into the nature of metals
in the mines themselves, he frequented at first
the laboratory where the alchemists pursued
their phantom quest, and after a time left them,
convinced of the futility of " gold-cooking."
But their combinations and solutions, if applied
to making medicines, might be developedf^and
he believed that all minerals subjected to ana-
lysis might yield curative and life-giving secrets
and lead to new and sympathetic combinations

46 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

of value in cases of either mental or physical
disease^He held as the very basis of divine
creation that every substance, whether endowed
with organic life or apparently lifeless,ycontained
some variety of healing potentiality^ Alchemi-
cal experiments for the sake of gold-making
he realised to be no divine quest at all, and he
called the men who muttered and sweated
over the crucible fires in Schwatz " fools who
thresh empty straw." But the crucible fires
had great uses and they who claimed God's
direction might turn them into purifying flames
for the healing of the nations.

Paracelsus was wd^^qukinted with the pro-
cesses of experimental ^l&remy : at Villach
and at Sponheim he had assisted at many a
test, and he now began to submit the minerals
at his disposal to the trial of solution, disin-
tegration, and combination, so as to discover
what treasure each held and could impart.

In his earliest work, " Archidoxa," he gave some
of the results of these investigations at Schwatz.
It was published nearly thirty years after his
death in 1570 for the first time, although for
forty years known to his pupils and disciples
in manuscript form. Peter Perna in Basel
was its first publisher. Theodosium Rihel pub-
lished it in Strassburg later in the same year,
and towards the end of the century many
editions appeared. Perna's " Archidoxorum "
shows, says Dr. Sudhoff, indications of hasty

1515 and later] THE ARCHIDOXORUM 47

editing. The order of its contents is as
follows :

Concerning the mysteries of the Microcosm

I. The first book of Renovation and

Restoration.

II. Concerning the Separation of the Ele-
ments.

III. Concerning the Fifth Essence.

IV. Concerning the Arcane.

V. Concerning the Magisteriis (medicinal

virtues).

VI. Concerning the Specific.
VII. Concerning Elixirs.
VIII. Concerning the Externals.
IX. Concerning Long Life.

Although ten books are mentioned in the
title, there are only nine in this edition, unless
we include the lecture on the Microcosm,
which is printed without a numeral. Probably
Perna heard of the forthcoming edition at
Strassburg and hastily collected the manuscript
copies from old followers of Paracelsus, printing
them without due revision to forestall Rihel.
The errors are numerous and are not much
improved by a list of corrections at the end of
a reprint.

Rihel's version is better. It is entitled

' Archidoxa ' of Philip Theophrastus Paracelsus

Bombast : of the highly experienced and most

famous Doctor of Philosophy and of both Medi-

48 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

cines, concerning the Mysteries of Nature."
Its table of contents gives us :

I. De Mysteriis Microcosmi.

II. De Mysteriis Elementarum.

III. De Mysteriis Quintae Essentige.

IV. De Mysteriis Arcani.

V. De Mysteriis Extractionum.

VI. De Mysteriis Specificorum.

VII. De Mysteriis Elixir.

VIII. De Mysteriis Externis.

IX. De Renovatione and Restauratione.

X. De Vita Longa.

And at the end of this list are two supplemen-
tary treatises, " De Tinctura Physica " and " De
Occultse Philosophise," which do not belong to
the "Archidoxa."

These books contain the therapeutics of Para-
celsus. To understand them we require the
aid of a glossary. It was the habit of alchem-
ists in those days to veil their secrets from the
uninitiated by expressing them in cabalistic
terms. Paracelsus was familiar with those used
by the Abbot Trithemius and not only adapted
most of them to his own terminology, but
added many other terms and phrases, some of
which were imported from India and Persia.
There is a glossary of these, the " Lexicon
Alchemicum," compiled by Martin Ruland and
published at Prague in 1612. Fifty years later
it was translated into English and printed in

1612] ALCHEMICAL TERMINOLOGY 49

London, by William Johnson, who took the
credit of its compilation. It is now in the
collection at Geneva, called Biblioteca Chymica
Curiosa, by J. F. Mangels. It is interesting
to find that occultists of to-day, the Theosophists,
use a cipher still. I find in one of their publi-
cations, " Light on the Path," 1908, the following
words :

" In fact it is deciphering a profound cipher.
All alchemical works are written in the cipher
of which I speak ; it has been used by the
great philosophers and poets of all time. It
is used systematically by the Adepts in life
and knowledge, who, seemingly giving out their
greatest wisdom, hide in the very words which
frame it, its actual mystery."

In this glossary we find that Paracelsus calls
the principle of wisdom Adrop, Azane, or Azar,
perhaps a spiritual rendering of the so-called
philosopher's stone. Azoth is the creative prin-
ciple in nature, or the spiritual vitalising force.
The Cherio is the quinta-essentia of a body,
whether mineral, vegetable, or animal, its fifth
principle or potency. The Derses is an occult
breath from the earth promoting growth. The
Ilech Primum is the primordial force or causa-
tion. Magic is wisdom, the conscious employ-
ment of spiritual powers to produce visible
effects, as of the will, of love, of imagination
the highest power of the human spirit to control

50 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, in

all lower influences for the purpose of good,
not sorcery.

Many pages might be given of this vocabulary,
but these examples, taken from Dr. Franz
Hartmann's list, sufficiently indicate its char-
acter. With its help the new system of natural
philosophy which Paracelsus began to organise
about 1515, after his researches in Schwatz,
has been recovered in his own words. His
pupils and disciples were of course provided
with a key to his terminolog)jnbut its obscurity
guarded his books and lectures from hostile
misrepresentation.^

We gather that he divided the elements dis-
coverable in all bodies, animal, vegetable, and
mineral, into water, fire, air, and earth, as did
the ancient philosophy, more or less present
in every body, whether organised or not, and
which can be separated each from the other.
To the processes of such separation, laboratories
were essential with good arrangements and
vessels. The ordinary fireplace did not suffice,
neither did the hotter hearth of the forge.
What were needed were the reflecting furnace
and revolving fire, which could make the cru-
cible glow through and through, and the Atha-
nare or stove whose heat could be constantly
maintained and increased for operations re-
quiring protracted care. There must always
be a constant supply of water, steam, sand,
iron-filings, to keep the heat even and to cool

1515] THE QUINTA-ESSENTIA 51

the furnace by degrees. The examination of
substances in so high a temperature required
a reflector and insulator. For the laboratory
shelves and tables there must be good balancing
scales, mortars, phials and alembics, well-glazed
crucibles, cans and other vessels of glass, as
well as an alembic with mouthpieces in which
most of the distillations could be carried out.
In such a laboratory the alchemist capable of
rigorous application to his work and who is
trained to minute observation can test the
different substances submitted for analysis,
and can extract from each its quintessence, its
arcana, by which Paracelsus meant its intrinsic
properties of healing value whether for external
or internal use. Such properties resided in
the quinta-essentia, or virtue, of each substance.
It was often infinitesimal in quantity, even
in large bodies, but none the less had power
to affect the mass through and through, as a
single drop of gall embitters or a few grains
of saffron colour a quantity of water. Metals
and half-metals, stones and their varieties are
furnished with the quinta-essentia just as are
organised bodies, for although held as lifeless
bodies as distinguished from animals and plants
they contain essences drawn from bodies that
have lived.

This is a remarkable statement and when
strengthened by his theory of the transmutation
of metals into varying substances, a theory

52 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

held by the occultist experimentalists, but in
Hohenheim's view indicating medicines, not
precious metals, it shows a very advanced view
of the mineral kingdom. We are urged in
candour to acknowledge that Paracelsus was
a true scientist, and by research of an infinitely
careful character had attained glimpses of
mysteries in what we call inanimate nature
which are only now in process of revelation by
the extraordinary discoveries of observers like
Madame Curie and her collaborators.

While considering the new system of Natural
Philosophy evolved by Paracelsus we must

forget that nearly four centuries of researcff~\
have expired since his time, a research which \
he practically originated and with which he
x inspired the greater minds of his own and the
succeeding generations. The historic spirit is
of the utmost importance to its right apprecia-
tion. His great forerunner, Roger Bacon, met
with obloquy and imprisonment from the mort-
main of scholasticism, and up to this point
Paracelsus was unaware of his stifled cry for
experimental research in the thirteenth century.
We must honestly face the conditions of the
sixteenth century in order to appreciate what
Paracelsus achieved, to realise his high ethical
standards that roused unrelenting hatred in
baser and mentally more clouded men, and his
steadfast courage in despite of rancorous op-
position.

1515] ANALYTICAL RESEARCH 53

, < .-..
His analyses were made with different agents

with fire, with vitriol, with vinegar, with corro-
sives, and with slow distillation. Metals were
his main study atfSchwatz, \ and he had for
his fellow-analyst the famous Bishop Erhart
of Lavantall, whom he includes in the number
of his instructors. Bismuth was one of the
substances which he specially analysed and
which he catalogued as a half-metal. From
this substance Madame Curie has eliminated
polonium, and it may have been from bismuth
that he divined the existence of active virtues
in minerals which suggested processes of trans-
mutation./ He discovered zinc |and classed it
as a half-metaTl It was one of the many ad-
ditions which turmade to pharmacy A Amongst
them were preparations oi iron^ 5T antimony,
of mercury, and of lead A Sulphur and sul-
phuric acid were subjects "of especial interest
and experiment, and represented to him a
fundamental substance corporealising inflamma-
bility. He investigated amalgams with mercury,
particularly the amalgam of copper ; alum
and its uses, and the gases arising from solution
and calcination. What was left as ashes by
calcination he considered the indestructible
and arcane part of a substance, its salt and
incorruptible.

These researches eventuated in his theory of
the three basic substances necessary to all
bodies. He called them! sulphur, mercury, and

THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

in his cipher terminology. Sulphur stands
for fire, mercury for water, and salt for earth7\
otherwise for inflammability, fluidity, and solicP"
ity. Air he omitted, considering it a product
of fire and water. All bodies, be they organised
or mineral, man or metal, iron, diamond, lily,
herb, were for him varied combinations of these
basic elements. His teaching on the bases
and qualities of matter is this theory of the
Three Principles. They are the premises of
all activity, the limits of all analysis, and the
final constituents of all bodies. They are the
soul, body, and spirit of all matter, which is
one. But the shaping power of nature, which
he called the Archeus, made out of matter a
myriad forms, each informed with its own alcol,
or animal soul, and each with its ares, or specific
character. In man there is besides the aluech,
or pure spiritual body^ This shaping power
of nature is an invisible and lofty spirit, nature's
artist and craftsman altering the types and
reproducing themT^ Paracelsus adopted the
conceptions of Mticrocosmos and Microcosmos
to express the great world of the universe
and the little world of the individual man, the
one mirroring the other. I Besides the results
of his experimental research already noteji^
he discoy^redlchloride and sulphate of mercury, \
calomel,/ flower of sulphur, and many distilla-
tions. TSven late in the last century straw-
berry jam was unpleasantly associated with a

1515] THE USE OF MEDICINES

grey powder and administered in a teaspoon
unwilling children, a medicine due to the thera-
peutic ingenuity of Paracelsus, and zinc ointment,
rhich prevails to this day, dates from SchwatzT
He guarded the use of all medicines in later
treatises by earnest counsel to physicians to
know well the diseases for which they were ad-
minister

" For," he said, " every experiment with
medicine is like employing a weapon which
must be used according to its kind : as a spear
to thrust, a club to fell, so also each experiment.
And as a club will not thrust and a spear will
not fell, neither can a medicine be used other-
wise than for its own remedy. Therefore it
is of the highest importance to know each
thoroughly and its powers. To use experi-
mental medicines requires an experienced man
who discerns between the thrust and the blow,
that is to say who has tried and mastered the
nature of each kind. . . . The physician must
be exactly acquainted with the illness before
he can know with what medicine to conquer it.
A wood-carver must use many kinds of tools in
order to work out his art. So, as the physician's
work is also an art, he must be well practised
in the means which he employs."

Paracelsus wrote not only with a clear sense
of what he wished to convey, but also with a
luminousness which his illustrations accentuate.
There is no involution in his style, nothing of

56 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, m

the tide of overwrought and tortured language
which followed the Renascence. He speaks as
a man having authority. In some of his writings
we recognise the brief and pregnant utterance
of a seer, and his thoughts are clothed in lan-
guage which gives them the rank of aphorisms
availing for all time :

" Faith," he says, " is a luminous star that
leads the honest seeker into the mysteries of
nature. You must seek your point of gravity
m God and put your trust into an honest, divine,
sincere, pure, and strong faith and cling to it
with your whole heart and sense and thought,
full of love and confidence. \ If you possess such
a faith, God will not witnhold His truth from
you, but He will reveal His works credibly,
visibly and consolingly." " Faith in the things
of the earth should be based upon the Holy
Scriptures and upon the teachings of Christ,
and it will then stand upon a firm basis."

In none of his writings is this directness of
style more observable than in his " Book of the
Three Principles, their Forms and Operation,"
an abstract of which will give a clearer concep-
tion of his system than pages of description.

It was published at Basel in 1563 by Adam
von Bodenstein, who tells us in an editorial
preface that Paracelsus had been shamefully
calumniated and that many doctors had given
out as their own what they had learnt and
abstracted from him.

1515 and later] SALT, SULPHUR, MERCURY 57

In this little book, Paracelsus applies his
doctrine of the " Three Principles " to diseases
and their cures. His style bears internal evi-
dence that the chapters contain the subject-
matter of one or more lectures to his students.

He begins by laying down the premiss al-
ready noted, that every substance or growth is
lormed of salt, sulphur, and mercury7\and is a
conjunction of these three : that a~"*threefold
operation is therefore always proceeding in
each body, that of cleansing through salt, of
breaking up and consuming through sulphur,
and of carrying away what is consumed through
mercury. \ Salt is an alkali, sulphur an oil,
mercury a liquor. Each has its own power
apart from the others. In diseases which are
complicated, mixed cures are necessary. Great
care must be taken to understand each disease,
whether it be simple, or of two kinds, or of three
kinds ; whether it proceeds from corporeal
salt, sulphur, or mercury, and to what extent
from each or all, and how it stands in relation
to the adjacent parts of the body, so as
to note whether liquor, alkali, or oil is to be
extracted ; in short, a doctor must observe
the rule that two diseases should not be
jQonfused.

/ In the second chapter he describes the three
/ ways in which salt cleanses and purges the
/ body daily by virtue of the Archeus or presiding
^life-power in each organ, which ordains the

58 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, in

manner of cleansing in and for each. In the
elemental world there are many kinds of
alkali, as cassia, which is sweet and in minerals
is called antimony ; as sal gemmae, which is
sour ; as acetate of tin, which is sharp ; as
colocynth, which is bitter. Some alkalis are
natural, some are extracted, some are coagu-
lated, and they must be used accordingly,
whether for expulsion by perspiration or in
the other modes.

In the third chapter the operation of sulphur
corporeal as well as elemental is explained.
Every sickness, he says, brought about by the
superfluous in the body, has its antidote in
elemental nature^ so that from the genera of
plants and minerals the genera of diseases
can be discovered ; one points out the other.
Mercury takes upon itself what salt and sulphur
reject such as disease of the arteries, ligaments,
articulations, joints and so on, and in such
the fluid mercury must be taken in its special
form which answers to the form of the disease.
The thing in disease needs the thing in nature
pointed out as remedy.

Paracelsus goes on to specialise the diseases
arising severally out of salt, sulphur, and mer-
cury, to be cured severally by salts, sulphuric
medicines, and mercurial medicines. Diseases
in their genera are divisible into branches,
twigs, and leaves so are their cures. Mercurial
diseases are therefore controlled by mercurial

1515 and later] HOMOEOPATHIC TREATMENT 59

medicines, either common mercury, metallic
mercury, or mercurial antimony, and the cures
must be understood. Some contain both con-
solidated and incarnative strength. Mercury
is manifold. Metallic mercury appears as a
mineral; in juniper, hebeno, as a wood; in
prassatella and persicaria as a plant, and yet
it is the same mercury in many forms. Some
ulcers are cured by persicaria, some by arsenical
mercury, some by mercury of boxwood. Three
things in wood are necessary for diseases :
salt, sulphur, and mercury, each of two kinds,
one elemental and one healing. No doctor
need break into two trees to extract one cure.
At the base there are only three diseases and
three medicines, therefore peace to the endless
chatter and cavilling about those old fiddlers,
Avicenna, Mesue, and the rest !

In Chapter VI. Paracelsus insists that all < (

diseases should be called by the name of their \
. It is better to call leprosy gold-disease7~
for so it is medicinally named, and the name
points out the remedy It is better to call
epilepsy / vitriol-disease, \ for it is cured by
vitriol.

" My honoured predecessors have not made
clear to me what evils theory has ended. The
doctor's art lies in the mysteries of nature,
which the old theorists locked up. But I prove
my theory from nature and from its life in all
generations."

60 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [CHAP, in

The seventh chapter deals with incarnatives
and their source :

" These come from mercury alone : wounds,
ulcers, cancers, erysipelas can be healed only
by the differ^nl^jnercurial powers in minerals
and in plants.^ Every doctor must search and
discover these for himself, so that he may know
the things in which mercury lies, and know
how to prepare each, one kind in topaz, one
in a special spirit, each in the exaltation in
which it is at its best, so as to extract it from
the mass holding it. You will be called doctors
if you can deal with each substance knowing
how to extract from it. Experiment must be
made, for nothing can be learnt by wishing."

The eighth chapter deals with distillation
and balsams, with gums and substances which
attract, and with sulphuric percussives. The
whole treatise is wound up with a chapter on
the Archeus, the " heart of the elements,"
the shaping, protecting, vitalising spirit present,
in the macrocosm as in the microcosm.

" It brings a tree out of a seed. It is by the
power of the elements that the tree grows and
lasts and stretches itself up high. It is by this
power that the animals live and move and stop.
In man's body it is in every organ, which would
otherwise perish ; each organ has its own kind
to strengthen and renovate it and so the power
of the Archeus is in his members, the power of
the macrocosm in the microcosm."

CHAPTER IV

YEARS OF TRAVEL

I go to prove my soul !

I see my way as birds their trackless way. . . .
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive ;
He guides me, and the bird.

PARACELSUS stayed about ten months at
Schwatz and then decided that his experience
of a university having been as barren of results
as if he were "in a garden where the trees
were all stumps," he would "transplant himself
into another garden," where the trees grow
tall and bear all manner of fruits.

He was twenty-three years old when he
left Villach to graduate in the university of the
world. He was not prepared to settle down
as a doctor and to relapse into tedium and
mental stagnation. -JHe followed what to

was a divine call, " God's great commission,''
sensible that the mind of the Most High hail
touched his own and had inspired him with
apprehension of a vaster universe and potenti-
alities physical and spiritual unknown to
scholasticism, and that it called him to venture
forth, a pilgrim, a pioneer, a conqueror, or a
martyr.

61

62 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

How know I else such glorious fate my own,

But in the restless, irresistible force

That works within me ? Is it for human will

To institute such impulses ? ... Be sure that God

Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart.

In his " Surgical Books and Writings," Para-
celsus indicates his reasons for the long time
spent in travel, about nine years altogether.
" A doctor," he says, " cannot become effi-
cient at the universities : how is it possible
in three or four years to understand nature,
astronomy, alchemy, or physic f\ Physic
meant medicine at that time.\ "It is not pos-
sible, for so much belongs to the art of a doctor
that an immature boy of four-and-twenty can-
not know it all and is not fit to be a doctor."
46 It is not only the knowledge of minerals and
their medicines that makes a doctor : that
makes a philosopher."

It was customary at that time for the learned
to become affiliated to a secret society of al-
chemists, to devote themselves to alchemy
and to astrology, and doubtless to learn many
things, but under oath of silence. Paracelsus
refused to join any such body and to be bound
by any vow of secrecy. He wished to gain
knowledge openly and to give its benefit to
all whom it could help.

Dr. R. Julius Hartmann has lightened our
task in following the course of his travels. In
his " Theophrast von Hohenheim," published
in 1904, he has collected the itinerary statistics

1517] PORTRAIT IN LOUVRE GALLERY 63

from his works and has given them to us in a
masterly sequence. We can accept this safely,
enriching its incidents from the discoveries
of Dr. Carl Aberle and other eminent investi-
gators.

V " A doctor must be a traveller," said Para-
celsus, " because he must inquire of the world.
Experiment is not sufficient. Experience must
verify what can be accepted or not accepted.
Knowledge is experience."

In spite of his disappointment with one
university, he did not avoid the others, but
tried them in every country which he visited,
hoping to find some kindred spirit, some one
in whom was the questioning " spark from
heaven."

He went first to Vienna and then to Cologne,
where the universities were amongst the oldest
in Europe. From Cologne he went to Paris,
ut we know nothing of his residence there,
except that he studied local diseases.

There is in the Louvre Gallery a portrait of
him at about the age of twenty-four, a very
beautiful picture in oil upon wood, which at one
time was in the museum of Nancy. It bears the
inscription " Famoso Doctor Paracelsus " and
is ascribed to a French or Belgian artist called
Scorel, who lived from 1493 to 1562.

Dr. Aberle gives us what details have been
discovered about it. There are many assertions

/*

K

64 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

but few that can be verified. A replica some-
what altered used to belong to the gallery at
Blenheim. The portrait now in the Louvre
was till quite recently ascribed to Albrecht
Diirer, just as the Blenheim portrait was as-
cribed to Rubens. Perhaps Scorel was a pupil
of Diirer's, for style and treatment are certainly
reminiscent of the great German artist. The
face is beautiful, in repose, the eyes large, clear,
and meditative : they look " as if where'er
they gazed there stood a star." But if the
eyes are those of a seer, the broad brow, the
strong nose, the small, resolute mouth and the
firmly moulded chin and jaw are those of a
man of action. He wears a red velvet cap
trimmed with fur, and his right hand holds
a half -open book. Both hands rest lightly
on a diagonal scroll, on which is the inscription
already quoted. His hair falls in waves on
either side. The background is occupied by
a landscape, in the manner of the Flemish,
Dutch, and Italian painters, and this represents
a castle and rocks, a stone bridge and a little
town, and critics have sought to identify Dinant
and its Bayard rocks in this landscape.

The Blenheim replica is smaller in size but
resembles the other closely. It was removed
from the gallery in 1886. There are in exis-
tence many woodcuts and engravings of this
portrait, the most famous being Hollar's wood-
cut, but it is regrettable that these vary from

1517] AMBROISE PARfi 65

the original. We can only surmise that the
portrait was painted by a gifted contemporary
as young as himself, either at Nancy, Paris,
or Montpellier, while Paracelsus was in France.

It was in 1517, just at the time of this resi-
dence, that Ambroise Pare was born, afterwards
to be called the " Father of Modern Surgery."
Those who so honoured him were ignorant or
oblivious of the fact that in the first edition of
his works published in his lifetime, Pare acknow-
ledged his indebtedness to Paracelsus in all
that concerned the surgery of wounds. This
acknowledgment was omitted from all later
editions of Pare's works except from that of
M. J. F. Malgaigne in 1840.

From Paris Paracelsus journeyed south to
Montpellier, halting by the way wherever there
was opportunity for observation. At Mont-
pellier the Moorish system of medical training
was in full force, and Paracelsus was again face
to face with the Galenic theories in one of their
strongholds. He was thoroughly conversant
with those theories and could quote them at
length by heart.

" The books of the ancients never satisfied
.me," he wrote afterwards, "for they are not
'thorough but uncertain and serve rather to
mislead than to direct to the straight way."

L^

He must have remained some length of time
at Montpellier, for he often refers to his visit.
5

66 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

When he left France it was to make his way
to Italy, where he visited Bologna, Padua, and
Ferrara, centres of learning where some of the
philosophers had felt the transforming touch
of the Renascence.

At this tim^Girolamo CardancK was a boy at
Milan, carrying his father's heavy books and
papers when the lawyer went abroad on business,
and not very kindly treated at home.

Probably Paracelsus visited Salerno as well
as the northern cities, but having failed to find
in Germany, France, and Italy the fundamental
truths of medicine, he took ship for Spain and
journeyed to Granada. " As I did not wish to
submit myself to the teaching and writings of
these universities," he tells us in his " Book of
the Greater Surgery," " I travelled further to
Granada and then to Lisbon through Spain."

He sailed from Lisbon to England, of his visit
to which we have only one mention without
details. But having regard to his purpose,
we are justified in believing that he visited
Oxford, and that some of his time was given
to the lead mines in Cumberland and the tin
mines in Cornwall. Perhaps he heard of Roger
Bacon when he visited Oxford. The fame of
this great man, obscured for three centuries,
had begun to pierce through the clouds. Some
effort was being made to recover his works,
more serious in France than in England, for
it is not to England's credit that France has

1518] AS ARMY SURGEON 67

been more jealous to assert and prove his great-
ness than his native country, where his discover-
ies were appropriated to add to another man's
glory.

While Paracelsus was in England, news
. reached him that there was fighting in the
^Netherlands. He left for the seat of war and
applied for the post of barber-surgeon to the
Dutch army. This he tells us in his " Hospital
Book."

He had claimed the book of nature for autho-
rity in scientific research, and now he claimed
the wounded for his book in surgery. " The
sick should be the doctor's books," he coun-
selled his students just as Hippocrates had
done two thousand years earlier. War was
the opportunity for enlarging his knowledge
of wound-surgery, which he had already prac-
tised with his father, and he eagerly sought
employment in a series of campaigns which
occurred during his wander-years. Dr. Julius
Hartmann thinks that he may have picked up
or bought the long sword, conspicuous in all
his later portraits, in the Netherlands.

In 1518, Christian II., King of Denmark,
appeared with a powerful fleet before Stock-
holm, where in 1520 he was acknowledged
King of Sweden. Paracelsus journeyed from
the Netherlands to Denmark and took service
as army surgeon. He was sent to Stockholm,
which he naturally calls a " city of Denmark "

68 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

in the circumstances. Amongst both Danish
and Swedish soldiers he pursued his healing
art, observing the cures which the men them-
selves practised and the wonder-working bever-
ages and febrifuges administered by the country
people to their wounded. In his " Greater
Surgery " he tells of a Swedish lady who com-
pounded a miraculous drink which healed even
severed veins after three doses, and he probably
overcame his usual avoidance of women to
secure its recipe.

He visited the mines of Sweden not only
for the sake of their produce, but to make
himself better acquainted with the accidents
and Diseases to which miners were subject.
He wrote a book on the r Diseases of Miners \'
many years afterwards, wnen he had further
studied them in Saxony, Bohemia, Hungary,
Transylvania, Poland, and Prussia.

The minerals which he identified in Sweden
and Denmark were iron, copper, zinc, lead,
alum, sulphur, silver and gold. When he had
finished his work and exploration, he mounted
his steed and resumed his travels through
Brandenburg to Prussia ; then to Bohemia,
Moravia, Lithuania, and Poland ; then to Wal-
lachia, Transylvania, Carniola, Croatia, Dal-
matia and southwards by the coast to Fiume.
He mentions these countries in several books.
He seems to have had an illness in Transylvania
or to have run some risk of losing his life. It

1518-20] ON THE ROAD 69

was a series of wonderful regions for his eager
interest, each of them a new chair in the world-
university, or as he himself has said, a new
chapter in the book of nature.

We can picture him little burdened by per-
sonal baggage his doctor's gown and beret
perhaps in a sack dressed in a serviceable
doublet of strong twill, riding a hired horse
from inn to inn ; or taking advantage of a train
of merchants on their way to some annual fair
with laden pack-horses ; or finding room enough
in a jolting cart going to market ; or in the
following of a rough corps and its reckless
leader ; or with a string of pilgrims bound for
healing well or shrine ; or falling in with a band
of merry lads seeking apprenticeship away
from their homes ; or making a comrade of
pedlar, friar, gipsy, travelling journeyman, per-
haps not averse to a beggar, and camping by
night where he could. But it is certain that
wherever he was and with whatever itinerant
humanity, he was serving, helping, healing,
comforting, and learning.^

In towns where he sojourned a while, he was
called to the houses and castles of the wealthy
and was paid for the cures which he effected,
so that he had money for his hostelry and food
and could renew his doublet and beret as he
needed. These cures won him renown indeed
but hostility as well from the local practitioners,
and hostility was apt to take a dangerous form.

70 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

He was a man who gave thanks in every-
thing, and we find him praising God for the
poverty of his childhood, for its coarse oaten
bread and rough garments, which had made
privation of no account, and had prepared him
to seek the things invisible which endure, rather
than the outward and visible luxury which
perishes. There were patients of all kinds and
conditions for him, by the roadside, in the
lazar-houses, at the inns, in the villages, and
for healing these his fee was some old wise
woman's lotion, some soothsayer's mystic hint,
some barber's trick, perhaps some executioner's
grim experience. It sufficed him, for what in-
creased his store of knowledge needed no pack-
horse to carry.

He probably knew Carniola well already,
for it lies but a few leagues from Villach, where
he doubtless rested a few weeks on his way to
the south. No more beautiful region exists
than the valley of the Save, with its lakes and
healing waters, its sun-warmed air perfumed
amongst the pines, its marvellous flora and its
river like flowing aquamarine, golden orioles
flashing from bush to bush upon its banks. He
would reach it by a narrow pass below the
robber castle of Katzenstein, where Pegam
the magic horse was stalled in olden days, and
he would see the tabors erected at every church
porch for refuge and defence against the Turks
and the cascade of fiery molten metal at Jauer-

1520-22] IN THE VENETIAN WARS 71

burg, where, as the old Slovenic poem tells,
" swords were fashioned to lop off the Turkish

noses."

He turned at Zeugg, south of Fiume, took
ship across the Adriatic to Venice and spent
some time as army surgeon to the Venetians,
at that time occupied against the Emperor
Charles V. One of their wars was for the
defence of the Island of Rhodes against Sulei-
man II. the Magnificent, and he seems to have
been present in the campaign. Venice helped
the Knights of St. John, but their efforts were
unavailing, and in 1522 Rhodes was abandoned
to the Soldan. This surmise is founded on
his including " Rodiss "in a list of places
visited and on his observations of arrow-wounds
made personally. The bow and arrow were no
longer used in western wars. He mentions, too,
a disease which he found amongst " Saracens,
Turks, Tartars, Germans, and Wallachians."

It has been said that the young Tintoretto
met him in Venice and was so impressed with
his appearance that he painted his portrait
from life, but this has been disproved by Dr.
Aberle. Tintoretto was a child of two years
on his first visit to Venice and not more than
four on the second. Probably some other
Venetian artist was the painter. Paracelsus is
represented as sitting in an old armchair,
clad in a doctor's gown, his hair growing
scanty over his brow, but plentiful on the side

72 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

visible. He holds the arm of his chair with
the right hand. It is the portrait of a man
between thirty and forty years of age, and when
he was in Venice he was either not yet thirty
or only just thirty. His great fatigues and
privations had probably aged him even then,
but the picture cannot have been painted by
Tintoretto, fine although it be. It is certainly
a portrait of Paracelsus and has been frequently
engraved and photographed. Had he been in
Venice eight years later, the ascription to Tin-
toretto would have been just barely credible.

He now visited the Tartars, probably the
Cossacks of the Balkan Peninsula and the
nomadic tribes of Southern Russia, for the
term " Tartar " was indiscriminately applied to
the migratory hordes which wandered over the
steppes and to Turks and Cossacks in the
Balkan Peninsula. He went north as far as
Moscow, sharing the tent life and privations
of his hosts, from whom he could learn more
respecting the treatment of horses, cattle, and
goats than from any western people. From
them he would win the respect which a character
so courageous and beneficent and a power so
generously employed for others evokes from
natural peoples, undegraded by self-interest,
unblinded by clap-trap education.

It is said that he journeyed from Moscow to
Constantinople with a Tartar prince, and spent
some months there in the house of a famous

1522] OCCULT LORE 73

sorcerer. He went no farther east, nor south.
He says himself : " I visited neither Asia nor
Africa, although it has been so reported."

From Turks and Tartars he added to his stores
of positive knowledge as well as to his acquaint-
ance with that force which the culture of will
and imagination renders powerful for either
good or evil, to subdue disease or to create it,
to calm and fortify or to surrender to malignant
and destructive influences. We know that Para-
celsus had already studied the occult and had
rejected much which seemed to him " mere
superstition and phantasy." He had accepted
its finer doctrine of the ever-present working of
the spirit of life with its miracles in elemental
nature, its insight and its links with the uni-
versal, bringing the macrocosm into touch
with the microcosm, so that man lives not
by bread alone but by every thought of the
divine.

He had probed even further in the labora-
tory at St. Jacob's, but recoiled from the malig-
nant experiments of necromancy. Already he
had made experiments in magnetism, in tele-
pathy, and in psychic divination. But it was
not till he had wandered with eastern nomads
for a summer, till he had learned from Saracens
and Turks the lore of their saints, and had
wiled from Jewish physicians and astrologers
the secrets of their dread Kabbala, that he
became convinced of the reality of that occult

74 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

power which amongst all nations of antiquity
was accounted the highest endowment of the
priesthood. It was the wisdom taught to
Moses at Heliopolis, the wisdom that qualified
him to be the deliverer and lawgiver of his
people. It was the wisdom of Solomon, who
knew all created things and was accredited
with control over mighty spirits. It was the
wisdom of Samuel and of the prophets and
was taught in the schools of the prophets, and
at its highest it was and is a seeking after God.
We owe to it all that the Scriptures of the Old
Testament have taught us of God. It foretold
the coming of Christ in the far east as in Judea ;
the wise men were its adepts and the kings of
the east its illuminated.

Its value for Paracelsus lay in the healing
power and insight with which it endows the
seeker after truth. He returned from the near
east with a greater reverence for the gifts in-
visible, for the manifold powers of a hallowed
and energised will.

In the fourth Book of Defences he says :

*te*

" The universities do not teach all things^
so a doctor must seek out old wives, gipsies,
sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and
uch outlaws and take lessons from them."
We must seek for ourselves, travel througfrx
the countries, and experience much, and when
we have experienced all sorts of things, we must 1
hold fast that which is good." ^ j

1522] VALUE OF TRAVEL 75

Again, in the Fourth Defence he reiterates :

" My travels have developed me : no man
becomes a master at home, nor finds his teacher
behind the stove. For knowledge is not all
locked up, but is distributed throughout the
whole world. It must be sought for and cap-
tured wherever it is."

" Sicknesses wander here and there the whole
length of the world, and do not remain in one
place. If a man wishes to understand them
he must wander too. Does not travel give
more understanding than sitting behind the
stove ? A doctor must be an alchemist. He
must therefore see the mother-earth where
the minerals grow, and as the mountains won't
come to him he must go to the mountains.
How can an alchemist get to the working of
nature unless he seeks it where the minerals
lie ? Is it a reproach that I have sought the
minerals and found their mind and heart and
kept the knowledge of them fast, so as to know
how to separate the clean from the ore, to do
which I have come through many hardships."

" Why did the Queen of Sheba come from the
ends of the sea to hear the wisdom of Solomon ?
Because wisdom is a gift of God, which He gives in
such a manner that men must seek it. It is true
that those who do not seek it have more wealth
than those who do. The doctors who sit by
the stove wear chains and silk, those who travel
can barely afford a smock. Those who sit
by the stove eat partridges and those who
follow after knowledge eat milk-soup. Al-
though they have nothing, they know that as

76 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

Juvenal says, ' He only travels happily who
has nothing.' I think it is to my praise and
not to my shame that I_have accomplished my
travelling at little cost.] And I testify that
this is true concerning Nature : whoever wis
Jbo know her must tread her books on their
feet. Writing is understood by its letters, |
Nature by land after land, for every land is a l
book. Such is the Codex Naturce and so must
a man turn over her pages."

>ii r*

Paracelsus left Constantinople for Venice
some time in 1522, to act as army surgeon in
the war between the Emperor Charles V. and
the King of France, Francis I., for the possession
of Naples. The Venetians took part against
the Emperor. This war lasted some years,
and Paracelsus continued at his post till 1525
and was present wherever the campaign was
conducted, part of the time in the Romagna.
He was an experienced surgeon as well as a
distinguished physician by that year and had
taken his doctor's degree in both arts, probably
at Salerno. He was renowned as a healer
wherever he went, and had often been sent for
by men of high rank whom he successfully
treated for diseases given up as hopeless by
the rank and file of doctors. He cured nearly
a score of princes, and wherever he halted for
a short time students gathered round him to
watch his analyses or listen to his teaching.
In Bohemia when he was examining the

1525-6] END OF EARLY TRAVELS 77

minerals of the Riesengebirge, in Poland and
in Slavonia, he had instructed numbers and had
won many disciples. But already the practi-
tioners of the day, doctors, barbers, friars,
sorcerers, laughed his new science to scorn, spied
upon his treatment and proclaimed it as their
own. The simplicity of his twill doublet, for
he wore his black robe only on special occasions,
exposed him to their coarse derision, and his
marvellous skill provoked their active malignity,
so that he was sometimes obliged to escape
from its hazards. In this way he fled from
Prussia^ Lithuania, and Poland. He says him-
self : Ij^I pleased no one except the sick whom
I healedA

We lose sight of him for some months of
1525. He was probably in Villach with his
father. Early in 1526 he had come as far west
as Wirtemberg, had settled in Tubingen to
practise as a physician and surgeon, and had
there gathered about him a circle of student
disciples. But his stay was brief. There
were too many doctors of the old school in the
university town to tolerate his interference with
their trade and teaching. He went to Frei-
burg-im-Breisgau. He preferred university
towns because students were assembled in them,
and it was from the younger generation that he
was able to win a hearing, although the jealousy
of professors and doctors alike was invariably
roused by his remarkable teaching and equally

78 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

remarkable cures. The students who came to
him were indisposed to submit tamely to the
dull routine of Galenic instruction when they
had once seized his doctrine of a living, pro-
gressive science, whose possibilities were in-
finite and which he obstinately defended against
aspersion.

It is a wonderful page in the history of scienti-
fic progress that tells of this brave man, alone,
delicate, poor, maintaining against all Europe
the great cause of personal research into nature,
undismayed by ill-treatment, scorn, and failure,
unshaken by the combined hostility of doc-
torculi and pedagogues, steadfast to the truth
to which he had dedicated his life. What
chance had he against such odds ? Socrates
was treated with the cup of hemlock ; Roger
Bacon with imprisonment ; Galileo with the
dungeon and the rack ; Giordano Bruno with
the stake.

Again and again his life was threatened and
he had to fly.

While he was in Wirtemberg, he visited a
number of mineral springs at Goppingen, Wild-
bad, Zellerbad or Liebenzell, and Nieder Baden,
now called Baden Baden. He analysed their
waters and declared that the last three springs
had one common source, and this opinion was
endorsed only last century by Walchner the
geologist. He visited Liebenzell more than
once and is said to have been there again in

1526] AT STRASSBURG 79

the year of his death. Johann Reuchlin had
been there in 1522 for convalescence after yellow
fever, and there are many other records of
the popularity of mineral springs during the
whole of the fifteenth century.

Paracelsus cured the Abbess of Rottenminster
on his way to Freiburg, where he was as little
welcomed as at Tubingen, so he decided to try
Strassburg. Here there was as yet no univer-
sity, but much talk of establishing one, although
the city contented itself with building an Aca-
demy some years later. Towards the end of
December 1526, Paracelsus bought the citizen-
ship of Strassburg and prepared to settle down.
He was obliged by the local law to become a
member of one of the civic guilds or corpora-
tions, and he chose that of the cornchandlers
and millers, to which at that time surgeons
were admitted. It almost seemed as if the
wanderer had found a home and rest.

At Strassburg there was not so much strife
between surgery and medicine as elsewhere,
and a man might practise both without being
held for an impostor. But no sooner was he
settled than he was in demand by patients
given over by the doctorculi, and his cures
awoke the professional rancour which followed
him everywhere.

He was challenged to encounter a famous
upholder of the Galenic School called Vende-
linus in a " Disputation," and was so disgusted

80 YEARS OF TRAVEL [CHAP, iv

with the fluent futilities of his opponent that
he would not condescend to answer them. The
doctor culi buzzed with triumph. But the
disconcerting cures went on and it became a
professional duty to crush him. He was sum-
moned to attend Philip, Markgrave of Baden,
who was ill with dysentery and whose life had
been despaired of. Paracelsus soon stopped
the dysentery, so soon, indeed, that the house-
hold doctors insisted that they had done the
healing, and that he was not worthy of his fee.
It was refused by their advice and he never
forgot an insult so deliberate and so unmerited.

CHAPTER V

TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER AT BASEL

Here I stand
And here I stay, be sure, till forced to flit.

WHEN Paracelsus returned to western Europe
a great change had taken place. Luther's
challenge had given courage to the protest in
more countries than those of Hanover, Prussia,
and England. The Swiss Reformation lagged
behind that of the north, because its leader,
Zwingli, was not fully prepared for his great
undertaking till 1518.

He was pfarrer at Einsiedeln for two years,
from 1516 to 1518, and had begun to attack
the peddling of indulgences from his pulpit
there. The Renascence affected him quite as
much as the Reformation, and it is interesting
to find that his reading of the Fathers Origen,
Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine in the
monastery library of Einsiedeln led him to
a more searching study of the New Testament,
and particularly of the Pauline Epistles and
Hebrews, all of which he copied into a little
book from the first edition of Erasmus, which
appeared in March 1516.

He made a friend of the treasurer of the
monastery, and together they talked over the

6 81

82 TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER [CHAP, v

coming crisis and agreed that the worship of
the Virgin Mary had led Christianity away from
Christ, and that the coarse expedient of selling
indulgences through the medium of an itinerant
friar was an insult to the pardoning mercy of
God, who freely forgave the penitent. Zwingli
preached against both in the cloister church
of Maria Einsiedeln, and induced Abbot Conrad
to take down the document which had been
affixed to the gate and which offered full re-
mission of sins for money.

He was called to Zurich at the end of 1518,
to one of the minor churches, and his great
services during 1519, when the plague raged
in the town, led to his appointment as Canon
of the Grossmiinster in 1521. From that
year he was the mouthpiece of the Reformation
in Switzerland. He preached against fasting
in Lent, maintained Scripture authority against
that of the Church, and published sixty-seven
" Conclusions," which contained the first public
statement of the reformed faith in Switzerland,
rejecting the primacy of the Pope, the Mass,
the invocation of saints, fasts, pilgrimages,
celibacy, and purgatory. He claimed Jesus
Christ as the only Saviour and Mediator.

In 1523, at a public disputation, the magis-
tracy declared judgment in favour of Zwingli 's
" Conclusions." Two further disputations
were held, and at these the Bishops and the
Diet refused to appear or to be represented.

1525] THE SWISS REFORMATION 83

The Canton of Zurich acted without them and
established the reformation within its boun-
daries. Reformed Communion was celebrated
by its whole people on Thursday, Good Friday,
and Easter Sunday, in April 1525. Zwingli
and Leo Judse became responsible for the trans-
lation of the whole Swiss Bible, which was
published at Zurich in 1530, four years before
Luther's Bible. The Reformation spread to
Basel, and with its establishment there the next
important events in the life of Paracelsus were
intimately concerned.

Its acceptance in Basel was mainly due to
OEcolampadius, who was settled there as pastor
of the Church of St. Martin and Professor of
Theology in the University. He sought Zwingli's
friendship, and began his work on the plan of
that at Zurich. Amongst his helpers was the
famous Johann Froben, whose guest, Erasmus of
Rotterdam, favoured reform, although on broader
and more intellectual lines than those possible
at the time. Erasmus lived eight years with
Froben. The latter had disabled his right foot
in a fall and was suffering as much from the
rough and ignorant treatment of local physicians
as from the original injury. In the summer
of 1526 this suffering came to a head and
amputation was suggested. Happily, the fame
of Paracelsus had reached Basel, and Froben
sent a messenger to Strassburg to fetch him.
He stayed in the house, commenced his treat-

84 TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER [CHAP, v

ment at once, that of an experienced surgeon,
and the cure began with the treatment. After
a few weeks Froben was able not only to walk
but to resume the long journeys necessary to
his business of printer and bookseller. During
these weeks Paracelsus made the acquaintance
of Erasmus and won his fervent admiration.
Erasmus consulted him by letter as to his own
health, which Paracelsus found to be under-
mined by gout, hepatic and kidney troubles,
the last apparently gravel. In his reply * he gave
Erasmus a diagnosis of these, protested against
the medicines which he was using, and offered
to prescribe for his ailments and to cure them.
To this Erasmus answered f :

" It is not unreasonable, O Physician, through
whom God gives us health of body, to wish
eternal health for thy soul. ... In the liver
I suffer pains, the origin of which I cannot
divine. I have been aware of the kidney trouble
for many years. The third ailment I do not
sufficiently understand, still it seems to be
probable that there is some harm. If there is
any citric solution which can ameliorate the
pain, I beg that thou wilt communicate it to
me. ... I cannot offer a fee equal to thy art
and thy learning, but certainly a grateful spirit.
Thou hast recalled Frobenius from the shades,
who is my other half, and if thou restorest me
thou restorest two in one. . . . Farewell,

"ERASMUS ROTERODAMUS."

* Appendix A. f Appendix B.

1526] BASEL 85

The insight of the diagnosis astonished Eras-
mus, who wished that Paracelsus could stay
some length of time in Basel, and doubtless his
admiration for the great physician influenced
the magistrates in their decision a few weeks
later.

Basel was divided on the Church question.
The Catholics were led by Ludwig Bar, preacher
in the cathedral and professor in the faculty
of theology in the University. (Ecolampadius
was the head of the protesting party. He had
accepted the appointment to St. Martin's Church
on the condition that he need not use Catholic
rites, and already he was celebrating Holy
Communion in the simple fashion of the re-
formers, with a liturgy composed by himself.
He was detested by the Catholic party. The
magistrates of Basel were not all of one mind,
but at Lent, 1526, the majority were in favour
of the Catholics, and issued a prohibition against
the slaughter and sale of animal food during
the weeks of fasting.

Ludwig Bar sent a special deputation to
thank them for this decree and offered as a
token of gratitude to extend the inclusion of
citizens to the canons' seats in the cathedral,
and to give these new citizens equal protection
for life and property, equal taxes and the right
to belong to any guild which they preferred.

But, as the months went on, the party division
became more marked and the magistracy showed

86 TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER [CHAP, v

a majority for reform. Soon many of the
churches were using congregational psalmody
in German, and in September the magistrates
issued a decision that the Gospel was to be
preached freely and openly as it was contained
in the four Evangels, in the Epistles of Paul,
and in the Old Testament, and that all canon
teaching not authorised by these was to cease.
On October 29 another decree was issued,
which appropriated monastic property for the
use of the poor and the general welfare.

These rapid changes were due to (Ecolam-
padius, whose personal influence had become
supreme. But in the University the Catholics
remained authoritative and hostile to the re-
formers, who sought to modify their power.
The post of town physician was vacant. It
was one of considerable importance, as in ad-
dition to medical care of Basel, it included a
lectureship on Medicine in the University, and
the superintendence of the town apothecaries,
a large body living on exorbitant prices de-
manded for the stale drugs and disgusting
decoctions of the Galenic school.

This appointment was in the gift of the
magistrates, not of the University. But the
faculty of medicine had the right to interfere
with both the medical practice and the lecturing
if the doctor appointed did not satisfy their
standards and had probably advised and even
decided the choice on former occasions. It

1526] INFLUENCE OF REFORMERS 8T

seems it had already chosen a candidate to be
elected by the magistrates, who were at the
discretion of CEcolampadius. He was an in-
timate friend of Froben and Erasmus, who
were anxious to bring Paracelsus to Basel, and
he probably knew the latter already.

It is not easy exactly to characterise the
sympathy shown at this time by Paracelsus
towards the reformers, but it must have been
of a quality to win their confidence. He knew
well to what a depth the Church had sunk,
how it canonised ignorance and withstood pro-
gress. We shall learn from his own wor
what he thought of the " pfaffenzahl." In his
" Five Qualifications of a Doctor " he main-
tained that neither priest nor monk was fit to
be a physician, so ignorant, greedy, and immoral
was the whole crew. The most malignant of
his foes had been the friar-doctors, who had
chased him out of the Markgrave Philip of
Baden's sick-room and cheated him of his fee.

Here drivelled the physician,

Whose most infallible nostrum was at fault ;

There quaked the astrologer, whose horoscope

Had promised him interminable years ;

Here a monk fumbled at the sick man's mouth

With some undoubted relic a sudary

Of the Virgin ; while another piebald knave

Of the same brotherhood (he loved them ever)

Was actively preparing 'neath his nose

Such a suffumigation as, once fired,

Had stunk the patient dead e'er he could groan.

I cursed the doctor and upset the brother,
Brushed past the conjuror, vowed that the first gust

88 TOWN PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER [CHAP, v

Of stench from the ingredients just alight
Would wake a cross-grained devil in my sword
Not easily laid : and ere an hour the prince
Slept as he never slept since prince he was.

Browning gives the scene to the life, as Para-
celsus himself recorded it.
Of Luther he wrote :

" The enemies of Luther are composed to a
great extent of fanatics, knaves, bigots, and
rogues. Why do you call me a medical Luther ?
You do not intend to honour me by giving me
that name, because you despise Luther. But
I know of no other enemies of Luther than
those whose kitchen prospects are interfered
with by his reforms. Those whom he causes to
suffer in their pockets are his enemies. I leave
it to Luther to defend what he says, and I
shall be responsible for what I say. Whoever
is Luther's enemy deserves my contempt. That
which you wish to Luther you wish also to me ;
you wish us both to the fire."

(Ecolampadius hoped that Paracelsus would
reinforce the evangelical party in the University
and urged his appointment. But it is probable
that however strongly he sided with the op-
ponents of the " pfaffenzahl," he was preoccu-
pied with the reform of medicine and had too
many contests on his own hands to desire those
of other men. His convictions were certainly
more nearly allied to those of the reformers
than to those of the recreant ecclesiasticism.

1526] CALLED TO BASEL 89

Perhaps he was held back by some uncertainty
as to how far the inrush of free thought would
lead the protestants ; as to what extreme the
principle of secession once admitted might
carry men ; as to the substitution of the Bible
as sole authority, without check over the in-
evitable and countless misconceptions of its
teaching, which, as a matter of fact, have been
the disr