Paracelsus 1
Paracelsus and the Light of Nature
The archaic, “…really valuable religious feeling for nature…”[1] was personified by Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), an outspoken doctor-astrologist-healer and the father of modern pharmacology and chemical therapy. He also was a precursor of modern depth psychology as I hope will become apparent in the following exposition.[2]
Paracelsus had considerable influence on the hermetic philosophers and scientists of the 16th and 17th[3] centuries. Jung characterizes Paracelsus as a complex figure, blissfully uniting world and soul, unaware of the terrible split his own words implied. One example of this is when Paracelsus on the one hand criticized older authorities for not being adequately empirical and on the other hand saw no conflict in affirming that dragons and nymphs existed.
About Paracelsus Jung says:
He felt at one with God and with himself. Wholly and unremittingly engaged in the practical art of healing, his busy mind wasted no time on abstract problems, and his irrational, intuitive nature never pursued logical reflections so far that they resulted in destructive insights.[4]
And:
As a medieval Christian he lived in a unitary world and did not feel the two sources of knowledge, the divine and the natural, as the conflict it later turned out to be.[5]
I live in another age; I grew up in the post-World War II darkness where the shock of the Nazi holocaust and fears of impending nuclear destruction gave name to the already existent unconscious fears of life in my parents and impregnated the atmosphere of my home. Before I could formulate feelings I intuitively sensed that Nature and mankind’s nature were no longer in harmony. Yet I (as T.B.) lived out the remnants of a dream of harmony as a surfer and hippy in southern California. Now, however, I can no longer jump over this split in the world around me and in my own soul. Unlike Paracelsus, I am not at one with God nor with nature nor with myself. And yet, like Paracelsus, I am fascinated by nature’s light.
Technological progress has not only contributed to the destruction of the environment, scientists turned engineers are now playing with the very processes of life through genetic manipulation. Using recombinant DNA techniques, biochemical experimenters in Basle (where Paracelsus once worked and taught) are continuing the Hohenheimer’s research into chemical therapy.[6] Although our technological expertise has advanced at incredible rates, our psychological development is still at Stone Age levels.
Harriet: “Am I to understand that this lumen naturae has steered us into this hubris with its dire consequences, and you are now going to expound on this deadly inflation to me?”
The answer is, of course, yes. I must delve into this matter in order to understand the deeper currents of my age and the shadowy sinews of my own being.
The three lights
In his treatise on the microcosm and macrocosm written in 1537-8, Astronomia Magna: oder die ganze Philosophia Sagax der grossen und kleinen Welt, Paracelsus wrote:[7]
| My English translation | Original German by Paracelsus | |
| A man must take thought within himself and realize that he must learn in the elements and know the Elementa. He should and must also learn through the sidereal what the Sidereal Mysteries are. He must also learn of the eternal and what the eternal is and can do. To this end is man created: not to be a creature, or to know that he is and should be an animal, but rather to contemplate that he is a man, to be taught in the three schools: leave the elemental body to the elements, the sidereal to the sidereal school, the eternal to the eternal school. | Es muss ein Mensch in ihm selbs bedencken, dass er an ihme hatt zu lernen in die Elementen, und wissen die Elementa: Er soll und muss auch lernen in den Syderischen, was die Syderischen Mysteria seind: Er muss auch lernen das Ewig, und was das Ewig sei und vermag. Darzu ist der Mensch beschaffen, nicht ein Viech zu sein, darumb dass er ein Animal ist und sei, sonder bedencken, dass er ein Mensch sei, lernent solt in den dreyen Schulen: Den Elementischen Leib in die Elementische lassen gehen, den Syderischen in die Syderische Schul, den Ewigen in die Ewige Schul. | |
. . .
| Thus three lights burn in man, thus there are three Doctrines in man, and thus in the three is man perfect. And even though the two are eclipsed by the third, they are still lights of the world, in which man partly [through his own efforts] should transform [himself through] the natural light. | Also brennen drey Liechter im Mensch, also seind drey Doctrinae im Menschen, also in den dreyen ist der Mensch Perfect. Und wiewol das ist, dass die Zwo Ein Finsternis seind gegen dem Dritten, so sind sie doch Liechter der Welt, in denn der Mensch natürlichs Liechts halben wandlen soll. [8] |
. . .
The title of this treatise tells us that the author is taking it on himself to explain nothing less than the deep nature of the relationship of inner reality (the microcosm) and outer reality (the macrocosm). In this quote he states the thread which runs through his work: the three “lights” and what relationship humanity should have to them. What are these three lights?
The Elemental Light
By the “Elementa” Paracelsus means the four basic “Aristotelian” elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.[9] In the ancient world these four elements were revered as the basis of earthly existence. Their appearance as a quaternity[10] and their status as primitive gods points to a psychological projection of wholeness and an archetypal nature.[11] Even rational consciousness (their “light”) is an unknown phenomenon, its source probably lying in a transcendental[12] realm. Hence, the god-like qualities attributed to the four elements by earlier (and humbler) scientists.
Psychologically, the elemental light points to the basic value of conscious activity. Jung has said that the structure of consciousness is fourfold, resting on the four functions: thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation.[13] I intuitively associate feeling with Fire, intuition with Water, thinking with Air, and sensation with Earth. We use these functions to perceive and interpret nature, both our inner nature and outer material world. In so far as they guide our consciousness, the Elements are indeed lightbringers. The following example from a modern scientist illustrates this interpretation.
Example 1: Fermi’s discovery
According to S. Chandrasekhar, the physicist Enrico Fermi once said:
I will tell you how I came to make the discovery which I suppose is the most important one I have made. We were working very hard on the neutron-induced radioactivity and the results we were obtaining made no sense. One day, as I came to the laboratory, it occurred to me that I should examine the effect of placing a piece of lead before the incident neutrons. Instead of my usual custom, I took great pains to have the piece of lead precisely machined. I was clearly dissatisfied with something; I tried every excuse to postpone putting the piece of lead in its place. I said to myself: “No, I do not want this piece of lead here; what I want is a piece of paraffin”. It was just like that with no advance warning, no conscious prior reasoning. I immediately took some odd piece of paraffin and placed it where the piece of lead was to have been.[14]
The italics are mine and indicate an important aspect of this example to which I will return shortly. Here I would like to point to Paracelsus’ differentiation between the elemental and the eternal lights. His “elemental light” is exemplified by Fermi’s idea to use lead to slow the neutrons down. This is a normal, scientifically well-reasoned thought based on acquired knowledge about the properties of the chemical elements.
[1] C. G. Jung, Lecture notes on Alchemy, p. 40.
[2] Jung writes: “Thus Paracelsus appears as a pioneer not only of chemical medicine but of empirical psychology and psychotherapy.” Paracelsus, p. 189.
[3] Including, among others, Robert Fludd (verbal sparring partner of Johannes Kepler, see Appendix III) and Isaac Newton (see for instance, From Paracelsus to Newton, Charles Webster, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, passim).
[4] C. G. Jung, Paracelsus , p. 117.
[5] Ibid., p. 115-6.
[6] But not exactly, as I hope to show later. I think Paracelsus would not have condoned the lack of differentiation and absence of a humble relationship to a guiding light greater than the ego.
[7] One evening I caught myself drowsing while editing this paragraph. I was having the fantasy of a black African woman who had come to Europe. She had met a white, very sympathetic man who tried to help her. He saw her as a beautiful bird that was dying and he did not know how to save her. She was far from her home, but it had been her own fate that had landed her in Europe, and now he could do nothing to help her. It appeared that she could neither go back to Africa, nor survive where she was. Her only choice was to carry her fate with dignity, even if it meant to die without a resolution. The only compensation was knowing that something greater than herself had driven her into the European world, far from her homeland, cold, mechanical, indifferent and unsympathetic. Something irrational that she could never grasp in human terms forced her footsteps northward. There could be no rational answer to her silent questions about her fate (why did God do this to her?), she could only accept, bowing to it with dignity and a sense of being truly human.
[8] Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna…Philosophiæ Sagacis, Liber Primus: Probatio in scientiam Philosophia Adeptae, (Huser X, Olms 5), p. 175.
[9] These are not the chemical elements as we know them today: Paracelsus lived in the world of iachimistry and alchemy. However, in other texts, he did refer to chemical substances in a way very close to how we now know them as elements. He lived in both worlds and in his wonderful undifferentiated way enabled a unity where I experience division.
[10] In his Philosophiae de Generationibus & Fructibus quatuor Elementorum (comprising four books, one each on Air, Fire, Earth, and Water), Paracelsus goes into detail on the four elements. One can see the conflict between the Christian “three” and the archaic “four” throughout his work. For instance he prefaces his exposition on the four elements by saying that each element is based on a threesome (“Ein jedlichs Element stehet in dreyen Ersten, das ist, in dreyen dingen…das ist der Sulphur, Mercurius, und Sal”), Huser VIII (Olms IV) p. 54. Even in modern physics there is now billions of dollars being spent to find out whether there are three or four types of basic matter. Jung discusses at length the problem of the three and the four in A psychological approach to the dogma of the Trinity, Coll. Works vol. 11, p 164ff.
[11] See C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Coll. Works vol. 5) and A psychological approach to the dogma of the Trinity, (Coll. Works vol. 11).
[12] In Number and Time, M.-L. von Franz states that she uses the term “transcendental” to mean “transcending consciousness”. I intuitively mean “coming from the unknown realm where matter and psyche are somehow bound together”. However, von Franz’s definition is more precise. I hope I am not inaccurate in assuming that we mean the same thing.
[13] See Jung, Ibid. (A psychological approach), p. 167f and his Typologie, passim.
[14] Quoted in Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970, p. 80.