World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 26 April 1906, Berlin

Paracelsus

It is certainly appealing to delve into the past and take a look at the great minds that have gone before us. However, when it comes to the personality we want to talk about today, there is something else to consider besides the appeal of historical reflection. What is much more important about Paracelsus is that he still has a great deal to offer people today. And a movement of spiritual research into things, such as spiritual science, is particularly well suited to unearthing the treasure, the spirit of knowledge, of nature research and enlightenment, that lies hidden in Paracelsus. It is true that today's research is also turning more or less to minds such as Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, and others of this period at the end of the Middle Ages. However, the approach of our present-day science is so different from the spirit, the standpoint of a man like Paracelsus, that it cannot, in the truest sense of the word, do him justice.

Paracelsus must be understood in a different way than is usually the case when one immerses oneself in a spirit of the past today. One must have a living feeling for the subject and the direction of thought to which he devoted himself. In a certain sense, this is such an immersion in spiritual life, namely in the spiritual forces and entities that underlie nature, and this can only be achieved through an approach such as that of Spiritual Science. Paracelsus belonged to an interesting time. He lived from 1493 to 1541, a period that had either just passed or was still in the midst of what we call the rise of the bourgeoisie. This had a significant influence on the whole of spiritual life.

Before the rise of bourgeois life, only two classes were considered to be influential in intellectual life: the nobility and the clergy. After the rise of the bourgeoisie, intellectual culture was based much more on individual personality and ability than before, when, on the one hand, within the nobility, blood ties and tribal affiliation determined a person's value and the position they should occupy in social relations, and when it was not only what the individual clergyman created from himself that stood behind him, but where the whole power and intellectual culture of the church stood behind the individual. It stood as a whole behind the individual personality. It was only in the age of the bourgeoisie that the achievements of the individual were based on the personal abilities of the individual. That is why everything we encounter in this period of the late Middle Ages and the emerging bourgeoisie takes on a personal character, requiring the individual to invest much more of themselves. We could cite many such personalities who had to use their very own powers at that time.

One of the most remarkable and interesting personalities is Paracelsus. Other things also came into play during the time in which he lived. This was immediately at a time when the stage on which peoples acted was expanding enormously, when great discoveries of distant lands were being made, at a time when the newly invented art of printing had given intellectual life entirely different directions and currents than had previously been the case. All of this, which forms the basic tableau for us, so to speak, is the tableau from which the personality of Theophrastus Paracelsus emerges. Added to all this is the fact that we are dealing with a rarely striking personality, a personality of revolutionary character in the spiritual sense. He was a personality who was aware of what had been achieved in the fields of intellectual life in the past and how much his own work stood out from it.

In order to understand what Paracelsus was, one must consider the whole basic character of his work as a physician and philosopher, and understand him as a theosophist, as he united these two soul characters. This personality was completely unified. With a brilliant mind, he sought to comprehend the structure of the universe. His astonishing gaze looked up to the mysteries of the starry world, delved into the structure of the earth, and especially into the structure of human beings themselves. This brilliant mind also penetrated the mysteries of spiritual life. He was equally a theosophist in his attempt to comprehend the essence of astronomical knowledge and, at the same time, the essence of anthropology, the study of human beings in connection with the study of all living beings. Nothing in this man was mere theory; everything was directly aimed at practice, directly aimed at the salvation and spiritual and physical health of human beings, to which he wanted to apply everything he knew. And he knew about God and the stars, humans, animals, plants, and minerals. This gives his work, thinking, and research a great, powerful unity. It shows him to us as if carved sharply from a single piece of wood. Thus he stands before us as an original, elemental personality.

There were two directions for him in the field that was of primary importance to him, the field of medicine. One was linked to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, the other to Galen. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, stood before him as a great ideal. Today's scholars can do justice neither to what that Greek was, nor to what Paracelsus saw in him. It certainly seems rather problematic today when we hear that, in the sense of this medicine, what constitutes human beings was distinguished into black bile, white bile, blood, and phlegm, four humors, which in turn were supposed to have a certain connection to earth, water, air, and fire. These were supposed to be the components of human nature. Today's natural scientist naturally thinks that this is a childish view, which had to be overcome in the course of time by a penetrating insight. He does not suspect that something else is at stake here. That is why Paracelsus is so extraordinarily difficult to understand for today's scholarly view. These four elements of human nature did not refer to juices and components, substances in the usual physical, material sense, but to something quite different. The natural scientists of those ancient times saw in the human body, as it is built up from physical, sensually perceptible substances, only the outer expression of something spiritual, the actual builder of this outer body.

In lectures on spiritual science, we have often spoken of this builder of the human body. We have spoken of the fact that a so-called etheric body, a fine body, underlies this physical body in all its manifold substances, materials, and fluids, and that this etheric or life body contains the forces that build up the physical body. It is therefore the case that every organ is built up from this etheric body. Studying this etheric body does not only involve sensory research, but also something else, namely what is called intuition, spiritual research. And when one uses sensory expressions such as black, white, yellow, green, and so on to describe what is relevant to this spiritual research, one means only parables for something that lies behind them. It is completely wrong to identify them with our material things.

The way in which the ancient physicians approached sick people in clinics was different. It was an intuitive view that did not focus on the physical, but on the finer, etheric aspect underlying the physical. The idea was that if something is sick, it is less important what changes are externally perceptible than what has caused them. Disorder in the outer physical body corresponds to something disorderly in the etheric body. One recognizes how the etheric body has been changed by the diseased organism and sets out to cure what lies behind the physical body through the art of medicine: the formative force behind the physical body. If I may express myself somewhat crudely, one could say: if someone has a stomach ailment, they are not sick in the stomach, but in the finer body, of which the stomach ailment is only the expression.

Paracelsus had absorbed the spirit of such intuitive medicine. However, the Roman physician Galen was now exerting his authority everywhere. Outwardly, he based his medicine on these old principles, and when you read Galen superficially, you get the mental image: Yes, what does Paracelsus want, fighting so hard against Galen and defending the older medicine? Isn't it the same thing? — It might almost seem that way, but it is not so. For what became medicine in Galen is the material externality, the materialization of the originally spiritual view. Thus, Galen's students understood what had previously been meant intuitively as something external and material. And instead of seeing through with the intuitive gaze, they merely researched matter, speculated, and invented theories. The moral perspective had been lost.

Paracelsus opposed this method and the loss of the intuitive perspective. He wanted to return to the knowledge of the great nature and find the means to heal people. That is why he rejected everything that was officially considered medicine at the time. He did not want to base his work on what was written in books, but rather on the fundamental book, the great book of nature itself. Everything that had gradually emerged as medicine was spun out of a completely derivative speculation, out of research that no longer knew anything about the original spiritual perspective. It was no longer possible to see the connection between the medicine and a disease, because people no longer saw what was behind the body, because they only looked at everything in material terms. This led Paracelsus to say: The light of nature itself must shine again. This brought him into sharp conflict with the medicine of his time. His profound insight, his insightful nature, which was unique to him and which grasped the great connection with the cosmos, gave him an intense self-confidence that was delightful in the way he stood up to those who practiced science in the conventional manner of the time. The medicine of that time bears a great resemblance to that of our own time, with the difference that our own time has no Paracelsus in the field of medicine. But the confusion and uncertainty was almost the same as it is today. This is very reminiscent of the old days of Paracelsus. When we follow medicine today and see how a remedy is invented and then, after five years, is considered harmful and discarded, how so many people are examined, but the big picture of the connection between humans and nature has been completely lost, it is very reminiscent of the time of Paracelsus. It is true that most people have no idea how they are caught up in such a time again and how belief in authority has tremendous power in this area in particular. On the one hand, people fight against belief in authority and feel great when they take up arms against the old superstitions that send people to Lourdes. They may be right to do so, but they do not realize that only the form of superstition has changed and that the superstition is hardly any less when people are sent to Wiesbaden and other places. One can see in this something similar to what existed in the time of Paracelsus, when people were inclined to oppose tradition. Paracelsus said: "But as I take the four for myself, so must you also take them and follow me, not I you, but you me. Follow me, Avicenna, Galene, Rasis, Montagnana, Mesue, etc., follow me and I will not follow you, you from Paris, from Cologne, you from Vienna and what lies on the Danube and Rhine rivers, you islands in the sea, you Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, you Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites, follow me and I will not follow you ... I will become a monarch, and mine will be the monarchy, and I will lead the monarchy and gird your loins.

This is characteristic of the power with which this personality expressed himself. He believed he owed this power to his original kinship with the mysteries of nature. For Paracelsus, this manifested itself in such a way that he not only saw what his eyes saw, but saw with his being, which was connected to nature. He traveled extensively. He did not want to learn anything scientific from the lectern, but rather from the dark premonitions of the simple people outside, who had not yet severed their bonds of feeling and sensation with nature. I would like to clarify the state of Paracelsus' soul by means of a comparison. It is actually quite beautiful to see how animals, with their instincts, know exactly what to graze on and what to leave alone in the fields, what is good for them and what would be harmful. This is based on what is called the relationship of the creature to its environment. It is this relationship that is present in the powers of the soul and is able to choose what is good and what is not good.

Through the intellect and through speculation, the creature breaks away from nature. It is not superstition to say that the simple person who lives in the countryside still has something of the original powers that lead the animal to food in a longing and instinctive way, that this relationship also gives something of the knowledge of how the individual herb, how the individual stone, affects the human being. This is a feeling that exists, that is there, that is something completely different from what is usually understood as knowledge, but which is therefore no longer so important for humans. That is why people who have not yet been through education have an original certainty about what is good for humans within nature. Paracelsus feels connected to this primal feeling for nature. He repeatedly emphasizes that those people who only roam the world in carriages, separated from the rural population, are not the right ones. Paracelsus traveled differently. He listened to what the simple man had to say. The instinct of the simple man became the intuition of the genius in him. He did not sever the bond between nature and the original intuitive power in man. He expresses this as follows: "By nature I am not subtly spun, nor is it my nature to achieve what is achieved with silk spinning. We are not raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheat bread, but on cheese, milk, and barley bread: it cannot make subtle companions. To which one clings all day long, which one has received in youth; the same is only vast and coarse to the subtle, the pure, the superfine. Then those who are raised in soft clothes and women's rooms and those who grow up in dance halls do not understand each other well." — He knew that on his long journeys through Poland, Hungary, and into Turkey, he had always walked in the sun, not only in the sun of the physical world, but also in the sun of the spiritual world. What distinguishes Paracelsus is his unified view of the spiritual. For him, therefore, man is not the person into whom one slips sensually during examination, but rather he stands in connection with the whole of nature. He says: Look at the apple and then at the apple seed. You cannot understand how the apple seed grows unless you look at the whole apple. The core draws its strength from its surroundings, the apple, and so it is with human beings and the whole world as with the apple and the apple core. — According to Paracelsus, those who only examine the core and not the apple do not understand the apple core. Therefore, for him, there is no medicine and no natural science that is not at the same time astronomy and knowledge of God. In this context, one must understand the human being. Therefore, for him, the human being is divided into three parts of human existence.

We must take a closer look at these three parts. First, we have the physical human being, consisting of the same physical components, substances, and forces that are found elsewhere in nature. So, those who traverse nature, who study the minerals, plants, and animals of nature, are actually studying, in the sense of Paracelsus, that which composes the physical human being. It is as if one had taken the whole of physical nature around us and extracted a kind of essence, a kind of extract, from all the individual metals, plants, and animals, and formed the physical human being from this. This is how he sees the physical human being, and he calls this physical human being the elemental human being. For him, this is the lowest link, comparable to the apple seed, which cannot be understood unless one understands the whole apple. Similarly, one cannot understand the elementary human being unless one recognizes the earth with all its substances and forces, for he derives all his power from the earth. Then a force builds a finer materiality into this physical elementary human being. Paracelsus calls this the Archäus. He thus distinguishes between the elemental body and the finer body, the builder of the physical body, just as it is also the builder of the earth. In this way, he sees from the externally perceptible to the underlying, from the body to the life body, from the externally physical to that which underlies it as a force. This is the first link in the human being in Paracelsus' sense.

He regards the second link in a certain other direction, like an apple seed. For this second link, the apple is the entire world of stars. And just as the elemental body draws its powers and juices from the earth and what belongs to it, so the second human being draws his powers from what lives in the stars, from the laws of the stars. Just as the blood, muscles, bones, and digestive juices are composed and the digestive juices are exchanged and transformed, and just as these are dependent on the earthly, so too are the instincts and drives, the desires and passions, indeed the mental images, pleasures, and sufferings, all that which Paracelsus summarizes under the two fundamental forces of the spiritual nature of man, sympathy and antipathy, an expression of the entire starry world, just as the apple seed is an expression of the entire apple. That is why he calls the second body the astral body or the body belonging to the starry world.

What acts externally as gravity, as gravitational force, as attractive and repulsive force, is present in humans, as if in an extract, as pleasure and displeasure, as sympathy and antipathy, so that nothing in humans in terms of instincts and passions can be understood other than through what Paracelsus calls astrological astronomy. This is a science of which little is known today. Astronomy has taken a different path. As a physician, Paracelsus wants to know nothing about it. He wants to know how the astral forces in outer space are connected to the astral body of human beings. His relationship to an astronomer is like that of a priest to a requiem priest. A requiem priest is one who reads the mass and gets paid for it, while a real priest is one who penetrates the spirit. Paracelsus uses clear expressions here, which others often call rudeness. Now we have understood the second part of human wisdom.

The third part is what he calls spirit. This spirit, in turn, relates to the much more powerful, larger apple, to the entire spiritual world, as the spark of God in man relates to the entire sum of divine powers in the world. Paracelsus thus distinguishes three things in the world: the divine-spiritual, the celestial, and the elemental-earthly. In humans, there is an extract of these three things: from the spiritual-divine, the human spirit; from the celestial, the astral body; from the elemental-earthly, the physical body. And just as one must study the material world, plants and animals and so on, if one wants to understand the human body, so too must the physician study and understand what is happening in the world of the stars if he wants to understand human beings. And since Paracelsus believes that a disease can only be understood by tracing it back to its origin, he seeks the cause of illness in the drives and passions. He sees illness as a consequence of spiritual error and, ultimately, in the highest sense, he traces it back to moral characteristics, even if he does not trace these characteristics back to the stars, for he knows well that the effect does not have to occur so quickly.

He sees everything physical as an expression of the spiritual. Thus, he says that anyone who wants to investigate the cause of an illness must study the entire basis of the sympathies and antipathies of the soul, and he can only study this by studying the stars of the human being. So form your mental image of how he approaches a sick person. With an intuitive gaze, this soul wanders from the outwardly diseased limb to what lives inwardly in the soul of the person. And from there he goes to the astral influences of the stars and to the elemental influences of the earth. He has this before him in every single case. This is true spiritual medicine. He expresses how he mentally imagines this and how he tries to make it clear with his own image in a beautiful way in this unraveling of the whole world: This is something great that you should consider. There is nothing in heaven and on earth that is not also in man, and God, who is in heaven and on earth, is also in man. I have often quoted another beautiful saying in which he compares what he wanted to say here. He says: Look out into nature. What is there? He sees a mineral, an animal, a plant; he sees them as individual letters, and man is the word composed of these individual letters. If one wants to read human beings, one must gather the individual letters in the great book of nature. — This is not a matter of gathering, but of looking together, according to Paracelsus. This is what always enables him to have the whole world present in the individual special case he has to treat as a physician. What is at work behind all this is the genius and moral force from which everything springs in him. Ultimately, it is something like moral indignation that rebels in him against the traditional way of curing and finding mixtures for all kinds of things. He says: I am not here to enrich the pharmacists, I am here to heal people.

In order to be able to read Paracelsus' writings even to some extent, one must be aware that at that time, terms were used quite differently than was later the case. When one reads about salt, mercury, and sulfur in Paracelsus today, one does not immediately have a correct mental image; one thinks of what people today refer to as such. And then everything you read in Paracelsus seems imperfect and childish. Anyone familiar with science today has a certain right to regard Paracelsus as childish, but one must also delve a little deeper. I want to give a mental image of how one can come to understand what he means when he uses the terms salt, mercury, and sulfur.

Paracelsus looks far back into the becoming of the earth, into the becoming of the beings that live around him, and of human beings themselves. When he looks back in this way, a time comes to mind in which human beings had completely different forms of existence than they do now. No one was as clear about what had become as Paracelsus. Millions of years ago, the earth was completely different. We have often spoken of the transformation of the earth. He looked back on a human form that was still completely animalistic, where the hands were still organs of locomotion, where humans still lived in air and water. The earth, the environment, was still completely different. Even today's physics looks back on an age in which what is now in solid form was still in a liquid state. Paracelsus, who started from the spiritual, naturally saw a spiritual human being in the context of such an Earth, which was still very different from today. On an Earth that was so much warmer than today, today's human beings could not live.

At that time, people also lived under different conditions; metals were still fluid and could hardly be contained in the air as vapor. At that time, living beings could not exist in a solid form either, but they evolved. Just as today's elementary human being is related to the physical world as the apple seed is to the apple, so too did prehistoric man stand in a different relationship to the prehistoric Earth and in a different relationship to the entire surrounding astral world, so that what today constitutes man, that is, the physical man, his soul as the astral body, and his spirit as the divine man, has only come into being. In the past, this was present in a completely different way. Man was much closer to the deity. The astral human being is born out of the astral world, and the physical human being is born out of the entire physical world.

Paracelsus spoke in a much greater and nobler sense of the physical human being being born out of the physical environment than today's theory of descent. Paracelsus understood this perfectly well, and he emphasizes it again and again, but for him, human beings are a confluence of everything that lives outside in nature. Human beings have passions; they have them within themselves, only in a milder form, as the lion, for example, also has them, and as they exist in the environment. When humans look at lions in the sense of Paracelsus, they see the same power that dwells within them today as their passion, born out of the entire astral world. In lions, it is one-sided; in humans, it is mixed with other powers. Thus, for Paracelsus, the entire animal world is humanity spread out like a fan. He sees everything that is distributed in the forms of animals within himself, invisible in his inner being. In a certain sense, this is also true when humans look at the earth. Even the metals that have become physical today are born out of the same essence from which physical humans are born. Please understand me correctly, because this is far removed from today's way of thinking. Paracelsus looks far back to the time when the physical human body first built the heart. There are lower animals that have no heart, that have retained the form that humans had at that time. For Paracelsus, this was the same time when gold also emerged from a much more general essence of the earth, so that there is a connection between the emergence of gold and the heart in humans. He also intuitively sees a connection between an abnormality such as cholera and arsenic. He says to himself that the possibility of cholera arising depends on arsenic having developed from the outer world. He thus regards each individual organ as belonging to the human unity, and it is so that it belongs to him like any animal, plant, or substance in the outer world.

I would like to read another quote that will show you how he expresses himself in a very specific way. This is a statement taken from a number of statements by Paracelsus, but one that could be multiplied a thousandfold. For him, the individual human being, in relation to his individual organs and the recognition of their diseases, has a very specific relationship to the physical world and the astral world. This relationship is differentiated in a very specific way. Today, people admire the general sayings about what pantheism is, about what the view of nature is, but that is pure dilettantism if one does not know that the great Paracelsus is not satisfied with an all-encompassing life that lives itself out in the individual human being. Paracelsus speaks of something concrete: "From this it follows that you should not say, this is cholera, this is melancholia, but this is arsenicus, this is aluminosum; so also this is Saturni, this is Martis, not this is melancholiae, this is cholerae. For one part is of heaven, one part is of earth, and they are mixed together like fire and wood, so that each may lose its name; for there are two things in one."

Just as he explains the connection between the heart and gold, he also explains the connection between certain phenomena and Saturn, and others with Mars and that which is related to Mars. Thus, for the uniquely structured mind of Paracelsus, man places himself in nature, in the world. And even if there is something to be corrected in Paracelsus, what matters is the great, comprehensive thing that lives in this soul.

He traces this back to specific types. Thus, for him, everything that arises as a precipitate in the mineral realm is elemental. At the same time, it arose during the period of development when the human physical body was formed and took on the shape it has today on Earth. Therefore, for him, everything that precipitates in minerals, everything salty, is connected with the human physical body and the animal physical body. And everything that remains liquid after certain deposits have formed, he calls mercurial, changeable. Mercury is a typical example of this for him. Thus, we have a tendency to solidify the liquid metal. For him, the soul is also born out of the same forces of the world from which the mercurial, mercury, is born. The deeper connection is such that it cannot be discussed publicly.

Sulfur has a parallel cause in the world with the origin and present form of the spirit. However, this is not connected in such a way that it can be used as a parable. No — these three things out in the world correspond exactly to the body, soul, and spirit in human beings.

By its nature, sulfur is connected with the spirit, mercury with the soul, and salt with the body of the human being. Everything else that human beings consume is related to these in a certain way, because they are born out of them. Therefore, such an example shows us that we need to go deeper. It is not enough to simply understand Paracelsus' expressions; we must approach Paracelsus' books with thorough preparation, then we will understand him. We must be clear that he always has the whole picture in mind, so that he says to himself: If a person has an illness, this is an interruption, a disturbance of a certain balance, which he calls magnetic balance, and — just as there is never only one pole on a magnetic needle, but north and south magnetism always belong together — so too does every digestion in the human body have a digestion outside in the world, which he then seeks out. And in the etheric human being he seeks the cause for the individual, in the material he seeks the expression of the spirit. In this respect, he calls the material the mummy. This is a significant expression that must first be understood. It is a certain essence that underlies the physical body; the mummy is different in the healthy and different in the sick, because the whole and the individual are changed. Therefore, one only needs to recognize the mummy, the changes in the etheric body, in order to recognize what a person is lacking.

In short, we see into the depths of a spiritual life from which we can learn a great deal. We must be clear that only in-depth spiritual research can understand what lies in Paracelsus, and that then, when Paracelsus is understood in such depth, he will no longer appear as a spirit who is regarded merely as an interesting historical object, but as a spirit who must be regarded from a higher standpoint, and from whom we can still learn a great deal, at least in terms of method, even in the present day. This is the way we should approach Paracelsus. Those who do so will find in Paracelsus' charmingly crude manner a difference between today's type of research and his own, a difference that he already made for his contemporaries. For he distinguishes between two types of reason, between the reason that looks into the whole realm of spiritual life and the one that only deals with the individual. He calls the one the first reason. He calls it this because it leads to the hidden spirit of things, and he calls the other reason: a public folly in contrast to hidden wisdom. He expresses himself even more charmingly or crudely by saying: One must distinguish between a human-divine reason and a beastly reason. He does not express himself by speaking of the animal and spiritual nature of man, but of the animalistic nature. He sees the relationship in such a way that man is to be regarded as the son of the animal species. Spread out into individual facets is the animalistic; summarized is the animalistic in man. He once said: Man is therefore the son of the entire rest of the animal world. But they would not understand that he wants to be like the other animal beings; then the animal beings would look at him as if he were a wayward son and be astonished at what he has become.

Elsewhere, too, you will find the opportunity with Paracelsus to receive elementary instruction on certain truly theosophical basic concepts. What Paracelsus says about dreams and sleep is, in the most eminent sense, what Spiritual Science also has to say about it, only he expresses it in his grandiose language. When man sleeps, the elemental body is in space, and what is active is the astral man. Then the astral human being can commune with the stars, so that he need only remember the communion with the stars in order to bring help to the sick person, to cure him. He attributes all this to the prophets. They are worth more to him than anything that came later. He does not call Moses, Daniel, and Enoch magicians, but says: If one understands them correctly, they are the precursors of this great astronomical-astrological medicine that has worked for humanity. Such a man was allowed to have a certain self-confidence, and the power of action flows from this self-confidence. But he was also clear that what he had founded must live on and will live on in those who can recognize it. Despite everything, a great deal of gossip, including historical gossip, has been spread about him. His skull was even examined in order to slander him, because this skull had a hole in it, and since people attach great importance to such external things, it was found to be true that he had fallen while drunk and cracked his skull. This is how people wanted to judge his entire life. The parable of Christ Jesus with the dead dog can be cited, where Christ Jesus pointed to the animal's beautiful teeth. With such a personality, we are not concerned with anything other than what we can learn from him, what made him a benefactor of humanity, the many things he overcame and which made him immortal.

Let me conclude with his own words, which he hurls in the faces of his opponents, where he says to them: "I will enlighten and defend you in such a way that my writings will remain true until the last day of the world, and yours will be recognized as full of gall, poison, and serpent breeding, and hated by the people like toads. It is not my will that you should fall or be overthrown in a year, but after a long time you must reveal your shame yourselves and fall through the repentant. I will judge you after my death rather than before. And even if you eat my body, you will only have eaten dirt: Theophrastus will fight with you for the body."