Another alchemist, Johann Kunkel, wasn’t so sure. Perhaps frustrated by his own unsuccessful attempts, Kunkel declared that “such a dissolvent does not exist, and I call it by its true name, Alles Lugen ist, ’all that is a lie.’ “ Voicing the obvious and insurmountable problem, Kunkel said, “If the alkahest dissolves all bodies, it will dissolve the vessel which contains it; if it dissolves flint, it will render liquid the glass retort, for glass is made with flint.” Although Kunkel’s declarations didn’t put an absolute stop to the search—one adept asserted that he’d found the universal solvent and that he was able to store it in a vial of wax—much of the enthusiasm was inevitably lost.
PARACELSUS
He was bald and fat, with a violent temper and a caustic tongue. His manners were notoriously coarse, and his clothes shabby and disheveled. His face was known to turn purple with rage. But Paracelsus was also a pioneer of medical science and an occultist of the first stripe. Everywhere he went—and in his life he went virtually everywhere, from Sicily to Sweden to France to Egypt—he stirred up trouble, made headlines, and challenged the authorities, whether they were secular or scientific, religious or royal. When he died under mysterious circumstances at the age of forty-eight (some say he was poisoned, others that he was thrown from a cliff by his enemies), he left behind him a legacy of obscure texts, fantastic stories, and, perhaps most important, scientific methods that are in essence used to this day.
He also gave us the word “bombast.” Born Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim in 1493, his own name came to signify a loud and aggressive personality. It was only later in life that he chose to call himself Paracelsus, to signify his superiority to the ancient Roman physician known as Celsus. Modesty was never one of his virtues. His father was a Swiss physician, and his mother had supervised a hospital before getting married, but Paracelsus was bored and restless with the usual course of study. Even at sixteen, when he discontinued his studies at the University of Basel, he was already fed up with the rote learning that passed for education in his day. He took off for the abbey at Sponheim, where he absorbed all that he could from the abbot there, Trithemius, whose own chemical experiments—in search of the philosophers’ stone and the universal cure-all, which he called the Grand Catholicon—were considered the most advanced and successful to date.
His next stop, when even that began to pall, was the Tirol, where he studied firsthand the lives of the miners who toiled for the wealthy and powerful Fugger family.
Paracelsus learned a lot there. First, he learned a great deal about minerals, ores, and precious metals, about stones and soil. All of this knowledge would later figure greatly in his chemical and astrological studies.
But he also studied the injuries the miners routinely suffered in the pits and the bronchial diseases they endured. And he rapidly became disenchanted with the standard medical wisdom and practices. Up until that time, doctors relied almost entirely upon the wisdom of the ancients, on the theories and advice handed down by Galen and Avicenna and Aristotle. Paracelsus would have none of it; if he couldn’t see something with his own eyes, he refused to believe it. If he couldn’t determine the efficacy of some treatment by testing it on his own patients, he made up his own treatment instead. He was bold, he was uncompromising, and he was, above all, open to knowledge wherever it might come from.
“Everywhere,” he writes, “I inquired diligently and gathered experience of the true medical art, not alone from doctors but also from barbers, women, sorcerers, alchemists, in convents, from the low ranks and from those of the nobility, from the intelligent and the simple-minded.”
When he returned to Basel in 1526, he was made town physician and given a teaching appointment at the university there. But in no time he had riled his fellow faculty members, first by lecturing in German (when Latin had always been the accustomed tongue) and second by challenging the standard texts. Indeed, he went so far as to take the books of Galen and Avicenna, toss them into a brazen vase, and burn them.
Not that this endeared him to any of the other practicing physicians of his day. (Or the apothecaries, who made their living selling the concoctions that the ancients had formulated and prescribed.) Paracelsus was attacked for his theories and for his lack of professional degrees. But he argued back that he had learned what he knew from the best source of all—life itself, which he had observed and analyzed. “Whence have I all my secrets,” he asked, “out of what writers and authors? Ask rather how the beasts have learned their arts. If nature can instruct irrational animals, can it not much more men?” The fact that Paracelsus presented lectures based on his own discoveries and observations was revolutionary.
But it was all, ultimately, too much for Basel to handle. Things came to a head when one of Paracelsus’s patients, whom he had successfully cured, refused to pay his bill. Paracelsus brought suit against him, and, though he was indisputably in the right, he lost the case; that’s when he decided there was no point in remaining there. He packed up his belongings and left—but not before dropping a few choice words for the “wormy lousy sophists” who had, he felt, influenced the verdict and made his university tenure so troublesome: “You are nothing but teachers and masters combing lice and scratching,” he declared. “You are not worthy that a dog should lift his hind leg against you. Your prince Galen is in hell, from whence he has sent letters to me, and if you knew what he told me, you would make the sign of the cross on yourselves with a fox’s tail.” Pronouncements like these made Paracelsus fresh enemies wherever he showed up.
But it was his genius, combined with the undeniable force of his personality, that also made him such an influential figure. And though his scientific methods and much of his philosophy were wise and insightful—it was Paracelsus who was one of the first to understand the powerful influence of the mind on the body, to realize that the dread of disease was sometimes worse than even the disease itself—he was also the ardent proponent of mystical ideas and systems that defied not only logic but any empirical attempts to verify them. He was, quite clearly, a man of vast contradictions.
“Resolute imagination,” he once said, “is the beginning of all magical operations.” And through the practiced use of imagination, Paracelsus believed many things were possible: “It is possible that my spirit, without the help of my body, and through an ardent will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. It is also possible that I can bring the spirit of my adversary into an image and then fold him up or lame him at my pleasure.” He believed that imagination could allow a man to predict the future and to see what his friends were doing, even if they were in another country.
He also contended that it was possible to create life in the laboratory and claimed that he’d done it himself—that he’d formulated an artificial human being, a creature known as a homunculus. He even offered the recipe in one of his books. First, it was necessary to deposit a sizable specimen of human semen into a flask, then seal the flask tightly and bury it in a pile of horse manure. It was also important to “magnetize” the sample properly, though it’s not entirely clear what that meant. Forty days later, Paracelsus claimed, a tiny, transparent proto-human would appear inside the flask.
The next step was to take the flask back into the lab and start adding to it daily doses of human blood; for forty weeks, the flask was to be kept at the steady temperature of a mare’s womb. If everything had been done according to the instructions, at the end of that time you’d have a fully formed, though small, human child, altogether normal in every other way. “It may be raised and educated,” Paracelsus wrote, “until it grows older and is able to look after itself.”
Paracelsus had devised an elaborate and mysterious system in which all things in the universe were interconnected, and influenced each other for good or ill. And man was simply a microcosm of the whole; to understand how all things operated on each other in the outer world was to understand how they would operate inside the individual human being. For instance, he believed in a strong astral
influence upon the body: “A physician who wishes to be rational must know the constitution of the universe as well as the constitution of man. . . . All the influences that come from the sun, the planets and stars act invisibly upon man, and if these influences are evil they will produce evil effects.”
Each of the major organs in the body, according to Paracelsus, was developed under the influence of a particular planet or star and worked in some mysterious conjunction with it. The heart, he asserted, was in sympathy with the sun, while the brain related to the moon; the gallbladder was under the sway of Mars, the kidneys Venus, and the spleen Saturn. Thus, he argued, “If a man gets angry, it is not because he has too much bile, but because the Mars combative element in his body is in a state of exaltation. If a man is amorous it is because the Venus element in his body is in a state of exaltation.” If those two in particular come together, the result is a fit of jealousy.
Plants and metals, too, had their celestial correspondences. But if the physician was sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable, he could take all of this into account when tending to his patients. His reasoning may not have always been right, but Paracelsus’s prescriptions often were; in an era when bleeding and purging and emetics were the usual methods, he used new plant-and mineral-based pharmaceuticals of his own invention, employing opium, mercury, sulfur. He recommended natural baths, and opening sick rooms to fresh air and sunlight, and taking antiseptic measures when performing surgery. He asserted that epileptics, contrary to popular wisdom, were not lunatics possessed by demons but simply people afflicted with a strange disease.
Paracelsus. Paracelsus, Astronomica et astrologica opuscula (Cologne, 1567). Author’s collection.**
In the end, it was Paracelsus’s contention that, even though “our astral bodies are in sympathy with the stars,” it was “absurd to believe that the stars can make a man. Whatever the stars can do we can do ourselves, because the wisdom which we obtain from God overpowers the heavens and rules over the stars.”
ROBERT FLUDD
Among the most prolific and successful of Paracelsus’s followers and disciples was the English physician and alchemist Robert Fludd.
The son of Sir Thomas Fludd, the treasurer of war to Queen Elizabeth in France and the Low Countries, Fludd was born in Milgate, Kent, in 1574 and later educated at Oxford. He studied medicine, ultimately becoming a Fellow of the College of Physicians, but it was while traveling in Europe for six years that he first became acquainted with the work and the theories of Paracelsus. In London, he set up his medical practice in a house on Fenchurch Street, where he practiced medicine with great success—in part because of his indisputable skills and in part because he was well known for his amiable and curious disposition. But he was never satisfied with the conventional wisdom or accepted methods. He was always pushing at the boundaries, trying to find new forms of treatment, and even more important, new ways to understand how the innermost workings of the cosmos might be reflected in the constitution of the individual human beings whom he saw in his daily practice. Fludd was convinced that the connection was there.
In an attempt to discover how it worked, he took up alchemy and studied the Cabbala; he read the ancient philosophers and became an active member of the Rosicrucians. (Indeed, when the Rosicrucians came under attack from several German authors, he wrote, in 1616, a vigorous defense.) Fludd was astonishingly eclectic in his tastes and interests, taking at once both progressive stands, such as a firm belief in actual experimentation, and more “mystical” positions, such as his abiding faith in the as-yet-undiscovered philosophers’ stone and elixir of life.
His theory of disease was especially novel. He believed that a wind, under the control of an evil spirit, could agitate other evil spirits (which were at all times hovering in the air unseen) and cause them to enter a person’s body, either through his open pores or into his lungs while he was breathing. If there was a vulnerable point in the body, these evil spirits, Fludd felt, would be sure to find it; they would then attack the places where the four bodily humors were out of balance, which would, in turn, cause the disease to erupt. If the imbalance wasn’t attended to, it could lead to the total collapse and death of the patient.
To fight the malady, Fludd recommended the application of sympathetic compounds, which would stimulate the angelic forces (something like heavenly antibodies) and counteract the illness. Among these compounds were herbs collected under the correct astrological influences, chemical solutions, and in some cases “magnetic” preparations. In his 1631 book, Integrum Morborum Mysterium (The Whole Mystery of Diseases), he laid out his theory in great detail.
Magnetism, too, was one of Fludd’s most fondly held beliefs. Each and every person, he contended, shared, with the earth itself, a positive or negative, active or passive, magnetic polarity. Natural attractions and aversions between people could be traced back to something as simple as their respective emanations.
Fludd also explored, with considerable zeal, the notion commonly known as the music of the spheres. The world and the heavens above were like one huge instrument, he argued, the keys of which were attuned to the intervals between such things as the angelic hosts and the fixed stars, the planets and the elements (or material world). In this, he was following the lead of Agrippa von Nettesheim, who had written that “musical harmony is a most powerful conceiver. It allures the celestial influences and changes affections, intentions, gestures, notions, actions and dispositions. . . . It lures beasts, serpents, birds, to hear pleasant tunes. . . . Fish in the lake of Alexandria are delighted with harmonious sounds; music has caused friendship between dolphins and men.”
For all his strange theories and convictions, Fludd was a pivotal figure in the history of science, medicine, and philosophy, one of the last to try to bridge the gap between the medieval/Renaissance perspective and the coming scientific revolution.
When he died in London on September 8, 1637, he had left careful instructions as to his burial. His undisturbed body was wrapped in fresh linen, as ordered, and transported to the inn at Bearsted in Kent. After night had fallen, the corpse was carried in a torchlight parade to the parish church and interred under the floor there. Afterward, the mourners (for many of whom Fludd had left money to pay for their funeral clothes) went back to the inn to enjoy a healthy repast (also at the good doctor’s expense).
ALEXANDER SETON
For a seventeenth-century Scotsman named Alexander Seton, it was a shipwreck that gave his alchemical career just the boost it needed.
In 1601, while residing in relative obscurity in a coastal town not far from Edinburgh, he happened to spot a Dutch merchant ship foundering offshore. Bravely, Seton went about rescuing several of the crew members from the raging sea, then put them up in his own house until they were well enough to return to their homes; as they had lost everything at sea, he even helped to cover their travel expenses. In return, the pilot, James Haussen, invited Seton to visit him in Holland.
Shortly thereafter, Seton took him up on it.
While Seton was in Holland, he mentioned to his host that the line of work he was in was alchemy; to prove it, he conducted a couple of transmutations that absolutely astonished Haussen. Haussen then told a prominent Dutch physician about it, the physican told his grandson, who mentioned it to a friend who was a famous author, who then wrote to an alchemical journal a letter about this remarkable foreigner and his discoveries. Seton’s name was suddenly being bandied about everywhere, and everyone wanted to know if his claims were true.
Seton embarked on a lecture and demonstration tour, traveling to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, then Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. In Basel, he gathered together some of the most important people in town and conducted one of his experiments in front of them. Wolfgang Dienheim, an avowed skeptic of alchemy who was also present, has left a description of Seton “as short but stout, and high-coloured, with a pointed beard, but despite his corpulence, his expression was spiritual and exalted.” Apparently, Dienheim was
convinced by the demonstration and thereafter became one of Seton’s supporters.
In Munich, Seton took a little time off from work and used it to woo and win a local maiden. In fact, he was so happy with his newly married state that when he received an invitation from the youthful elector of Saxony, Christian II, to come and demonstrate his skills, he refused to part from her and sent an apprentice, William Hamilton, instead. Using the secret transmuting agent, Hamilton was able to create gold that passed every test with flying colors. Far from satisfying the elector, however, this just made him that much more anxious to see Seton himself. He sent another request—which, coming from him, was tantamount to an order—and this time Seton reluctantly kissed his young bride good-bye and left for the elector’s court in Dresden.
He would soon be sorry that he did.
As soon as he got there, it became plain to him that it wasn’t just a demonstration that the elector was after, nor was it a small measure of the magical powder. What Christian II wanted from Seton was nothing less than his secret, the method by which he made the gold, and he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d pried it loose. When Seton refused to give it to him, citing the higher purposes of the great art, Christian had him thrown into a tower prison, where he was guarded round the clock by forty soldiers. Seton was put to the rack, he was roasted over a slow fire, he was whipped and scourged, but he still refused to talk. The elector left him in his cell, presumably to rot.
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