ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 24
The Death of Paracelsus
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Salzburg, September 1541. In a rented
room at the inn called Zum Weißen Roß, on the Kaigasse, a forty-seven-year-old
physician dictates his last will. He leaves money to relatives back in
Einsiedeln, money to his friends in the city, and everything remaining to the
poor of Salzburg. Three days later he's dead. Within a generation half of
Europe is arguing about how it happened, and the arguing hasn't stopped since.
Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim—Paracelsus—died
on September 24, 1541. And almost nothing about that death has been left alone
since.
His admirers said murder; Rival
physicians, the story went, had hired assassins; one version has him pushed
from a height, a fall that would conveniently account for the fracture later
found in his skull. His enemies preferred a different ending, in which he drank
himself to death after a banquet, which suited the portrait they'd been
painting of him for twenty years. Neither camp had much evidence, yet both had
their own motives…
In 1886 Dr. Carl Aberle examined the
remains and found structural abnormalities in the skull, including the fracture
that murder theorists have leaned on ever since. The trouble is that the same
damage is consistent with childhood rickets, and Paracelsus was raised in
modest circumstances in a mining district. Later chemical analysis of his bones
turned up mercury at roughly ten times the level found in the general
population—which sounds damning right up until you remember what the man did
for a living. He worked with mercury constantly, prescribed it, distilled it,
and had treated an inflammation with it not long before the end. Chronic
self-poisoning fits the evidence at least as well as homicide does. So do
cirrhosis and nephritis, both of which contemporary accounts put forward.
The honest answer is … we don't know.
Every man close enough to the story to testify had a version he wanted sold.
You'll read that Paracelsus
died destitute in a squalid tavern and was tipped into a pauper's grave yet his
own will says otherwise. He was buried in the cemetery of the Bruderhaus St. Sebastian
(a home for the aged and infirm) because that's what he asked for, and his
estate went where he directed it. In 1542, ten Gulden from that estate were
disbursed to the Bruderhaus, and the accounting entry recording it still sits
in the Salzburg Municipal Archive. This wasn't a
man discarded by the world. It was a man making a last statement about where he
thought a physician's money belonged.
The squalid-tavern detail collapses
about as quickly: the innkeeper, Riß, had studied at Ingolstadt, co-owned a
mine, sat on the city council, and was serving as mayor of Salzburg in the year
Paracelsus died. The circle around him in those final months was educated and
prosperous. The image of the ranting vagabond expiring among indifferent
strangers is a literary invention—a durable one, but an invention.
Which brings us to the most repeated
falsehood attached to his name. You'll be told, confidently and often, that
English gets the word bombastic from his middle name, because the man was so
insufferably grandiose that his own surname curdled into an insult. It's a
wonderful story. The Oxford English Dictionary rejects it outright. “Bombast”
entered English in the 1570s, meaning cotton padding, by way of Old French bombace
and Late Latin bombax, and it drifted toward inflated speech in the
1580s for the obvious reason: stuffing is stuffing, whether it's packed into a
doublet or a sentence. Meanwhile Bombast had been a hereditary byname in
his family since at least the fourteenth century—a "Hans Bombast von Hohenheim" is on record between 1342 and 1404.
(While we're here: Paracelsus almost
certainly doesn't mean beyond Celsus either. The claim that he coined it to
announce his superiority over the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus is
popular because it fits the caricature so neatly. The likelier explanation is
duller and rather better—it's a Latinization of Hohenheim, since celsus
means “high” or “lofty.”
Paracelsus took alchemy's long
obsession with transmuting metals and turned it on the human body. Where the
tradition had worked with sulphur and mercury, he added salt and made three:
sulphur, the soul and the combustible; mercury, the spirit and the volatile; and salt, the body and the solid. Disease, in his system, wasn't humoral imbalance but
the separation of these principles, and the physician's work was therefore
chemical. That's the hinge on which alchemy swings around into pharmacology.
Everything we call spagyric descends from it. He also gave us the principle that poison is a
question of quantity—the dose makes the poison, in its later Latin compression.
Which lands with a certain weight given what's in his bones. The man who taught
Europe that the difference between a medicine and a poison is arithmetic may
well have died because he lost track of his own sums.
For all these proved achievements, Paracelsus
is the patron saint of every practitioner who's certain the received tradition
is wrong and believes they can prove it. He was right far more often than his
opponents were. He was also reckless with his own body in ways that plausibly
shortened his life, and he built a persona so loud that it eventually swallowed
the work. Five centuries on, more people know he was supposedly bombastic than
know what the three principles are.
A stranger erected a monument to him
at St. Sebastian's in 1752, two centuries after the burial. The legends kept
growing regardless. He fed the Faust literature, he fed the homunculus recipe,
he fed every story ever told about the doctor who knew too much. And that's the
final irony of the man. He spent his life insisting on observation over
inherited authority—and then became inherited authority himself, repeated
unexamined, for four hundred years, by people who never once went and checked.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... Today, in honor of the master of publicity theater at the
center of this story, we're recommending his own defense of the philosophy
underlying everything he did, hoaxes included.
Practical
Alchemy: A Guide to the Great Work
Brian
Cotnoir, foreword by Robert Allen Bartlett, introduction by James Wasserman
/ Weiser Books
There's a direct line from today's
subject to this book: Brian Cotnoir contributed to Parachemy, the
journal of Frater Albertus's Paracelsus Research Society, and Robert Allen
Bartlett opens his foreword by invoking Paracelsus on alchemy as the art of “separating
the pure from the impure.” If you finished the piece above wanting to know what
the three principles actually do on a bench rather than a page, this is the
place to start.
Practical Alchemy is exactly what the title promises,
which is rarer in this field than it ought to be. Cotnoir moves from the
earliest melding of Egyptian craft technique through the medieval golden age
and into contemporary practice, then does the thing most alchemy books flinch
from: he puts you in front of actual laboratory procedure, with real equipment
and real materials, structured so a careful beginner can follow it without
hurting themselves. Cotnoir
declines the now-standard psychological reading in which alchemy is
retroactively downgraded to a medieval form of psychotherapy with pretty
illustrations. He takes the operative tradition seriously as operative, works
through the relationship between alchemy and chemistry rather than waving at
it, and treats the laboratory as the place where the philosophy is tested.
Post-Jung, that's a minority view, and he argues it without contempt for the
other side.
Anyone wanting a scholarly history of
Paracelsian iatrochemistry, or a full textual treatment of the spagyric
corpus, will need to go elsewhere afterward; the bibliography is there
precisely to send you. And a word on the practical chapters: take the safety
material seriously. Paracelsus's own bones are the strongest argument we have
for reading those pages twice.
One note: This was previously
published in 2006 as The Weiser Concise Guide to Alchemy; the 2021
edition adds Bartlett's foreword alongside James Wasserman's introduction.
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