preferment; but though the Emperor put himself out to secure his
favourite the position which he coveted, and in fact appealed to the
Pope on his behalf, nothing practical came of these representations.
Probably Scot’s fame was of too dubious a kind to recommend him to the
heads of the orthodox Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom
the Pope applied in his interest, does not seem to have responded in any
friendly fashion. Finally, an offer was made to Michael Scot of the
Archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland, but in those days the Irish were
little better than a barbarous race, and they spoke the language of
Erse, which was a sealed book to their prospective bishop. In any case,
though the Chapter had actually elected him to the post, he decided to
decline. He apparently had too much principle to accept the position of
an absentee bishop, and a home among a wild and uncultured race would
hardly have been to the liking of a man who had associated with the most
intellectual minds of Europe. These hopes of ecclesiastical preferment
having fallen through, Frederick, after long delay, decided to take
steps for the publication of the translation of the works of Averroes,
and certain books of Aristotle, with the commentaries thereon of the
Arabian philosophers. He issued an imperial circular announcing the
appearance of these, and sent Michael Scot as his emissary to arrange
for their publication in the principal European centres of learning.
Finally, after visiting Bologna and Paris, Scot made his way to England,
where he appears to have visited Oxford about the year 1230. Tradition
says that he journeyed thence to his native land of Scotland. But
shortly after this we lose sight of him altogether, and though there is
no authoritative evidence with regard to his death, he seems to have
passed away by or before the year 1232. In this year the _Abbreviatio
Avicennæ_ was published at Melfi, in the Latin version which Scot had
translated. Henry of Colonia was selected by Frederick to transcribe the
work from the imperial copy, and Scot’s biographer is probably right in
regarding this work as a wreath laid by his imperial friend on his
grave. The matter would assuredly have been placed in Scot’s own hands
if he were still alive.
Scot is related to have foretold that his death would take place by the
blow of a stone falling on his head, and tradition says that being in
church one day with head uncovered at the sacring of the mass, a stone,
shaken from the tower by the motion of the bell rope, fell upon his
head, mortally wounding him. Presumably this incident occurred in
Scotland; if, that is, there is any truth at all in the story.
Another prediction is also attributed to Michael Scot by the same
chronicler—Pipini. He states that he foretold the manner also of the
Emperor’s death, which he declared would take place “ad portas ferreas”;
that is, “at the iron gates,” and in a town named after Flora.
Frederick, it is said, interpreted this as referring to Florence, which
city he accordingly made a point of avoiding. During his last campaign,
however, in the year 1250, he fell ill at Florentino, in Apulia, where
he slept in a chamber of the castle. His bed, says the story, stood
against a wall recently built to fill up the ancient gateway of the
tower, the iron staples on which the gate had been hung still forming
part of the wall. It is stated that the Emperor, learning these
particulars, and calling to mind Michael Scot’s prediction, exclaimed,
“This is the place where I shall make an end, as it was told me. The
will of God be done, for here I shall die.” A few days later the great
Emperor passed to his rest.
Of Michael Scot’s learning and erudition there can be no question, in
spite of the unfavourable criticisms of Roger Bacon with regard to his
knowledge of languages, which are the less worthy of notice in view of
the fact that Bacon’s own accomplishments in this direction were far
inferior to those of Scot. A fairer criticism of his work would be based
on its lack of originality, and the fact that the greater part of his
literary output was borrowed either from the Arabians or the Greeks. His
talents as a past master of mathematics were never in dispute, and his
researches into the problems presented by astronomy enjoyed a great
vogue in his own day.
While there is no evidence but that of highly-coloured tradition to
suggest that Michael Scot was the adept he is represented as being in
magical spells and incantations, there is nothing in our historical
knowledge of his career which renders the practice of such arts by him
at all incredible, or indeed unlikely. Legend has magnified this portion
of his many-sided activities to the exclusion of that branch of his
labours which might well, one would have thought, have earned for him
more enduring fame. The lovers of the marvellous have thus surrounded
with a mysterious and semi-sinister halo the name of a man whose chief
work in life lay in the paths of philosophy, astronomy, and medical
research. It seems not improbable that the last of these pursuits led
this daring thinker into the investigation and practice of what to-day
we term hypnotism, and its employment to the bewilderment of his
acquaintances in the creation of illusions, the source of which we now
recognise in the power of a master mind to mould by sheer force of will
the plastic imagination and subjective consciousness of his audience.
IV
PARACELSUS
The embattled forces of conservative orthodoxy are so strong that one is
sometimes tempted to wonder how it is that the world ever goes round at
all; how it is that the forward movement of progress succeeds, as it
apparently does, in getting the better of so many retrograde tendencies,
so much prejudice, so strong a clinging to the stereotyped conditions of
the day. After all, the more one thinks about it, the more one becomes
convinced that the whole progress of the world is the work of the very,
very few; that the positive and progressive intellect is the rare
exception, and that if democratic conditions really prevailed (as of
course they never do) all civilisation would go backwards and gradually
revert once more to chaos. What a mockery, after all, Democracy is! And
how hopelessly the modern world is deluded in thinking that anywhere or
at any time Democracy has in reality held sway! As a matter of fact, the
many have never ruled, have never wished to rule; they have merely asked
for some strong man to lead them. Where was ever the flock of sheep that
did not follow the bell-wether? Here and there we meet with a master
mind that—for good or evil—leads the multitude—or, if he does not lead,
at least points the way where others will eventually follow. Side by
side with him we see the multitude either drifting or being led. “Work!”
said Voltaire, that most popular of writers, “work for the little
public!” Voltaire knew, as all great leaders have known, before and
after, that it is the “little public” that ever dominates the situation.
It is the “little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.” “It is a sight
beloved of the gods,” says the old saying, “to see a good man struggling
against adversity.” But is it not a finer sight still, to see a strong
man battling with the forces of orthodoxy, and refusing to yield his
ground? A man of such a mould was Philip Bombast of Hohenheim, better
known by his assumed name of Paracelsus. Never was there any one to whom
Shelley’s celebrated line
The sun comes out and many reptiles spawn,
was more absolutely appropriate. The hostility and venomous antagonism
of his own profession, with a few notable exceptions, followed and
persecuted him throughout his entire medical career. The boldness and
independence of his medical attitude galled the leaders as well as the
rank and file of the profession. But what was still more galling to them
than his lack of orthodoxy, was the fact that his novel methods, as they
must have appeared to the doctors of that day, were so immeasurably more
successful than their own. Paracelsus, indeed, never gave nor asked for
quarter. John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees who came to him as “a
generation of vipers” was no bad parallel to Paracelsus’s stinging
invective on the ignorance and tradition-loving proclivities of his own
profession.
[Illustration: Paracelsus (aged 24).]
Many to whom the name of Paracelsus is familiar are accustomed to look
upon him as little more than a singularly successful quack who revived
the traditions of an earlier school of Occultism in defiance of the more
scientific methods of his own time. As a matter of fact, the doctors of
his day were, in the vast majority of cases, merely theorists with
little real practical experience, but with a fair store of book-learning
of a very indifferent kind. It was Paracelsus whose medical knowledge
was derived from experiment and experience, and who had acquired the
greater part of his medical and surgical skill from wide and varied
travelling and visiting more countries and more different nationalities
than any other medical expert of his day, and who had learnt by actual
association with all sorts and conditions of men in different climes,
far more than any book-learning had ever taught him.
The period of Paracelsus’s career coincided with the Reformation of
Luther, and with the wider and more general Renaissance movement. This
latter development had brought back in its train the study of classical
learning and classical ideals which had fallen into discredit about the
period of the first triumph of Christianity and its establishment as a
world-religion. The attitude of the earlier Christians, who looked upon
the Pagan deities as devils, and Greek and Roman classical writers as
apologists for devil-worship, had passed away; and the highest
dignitaries of the Church were now often noted for their classical
erudition and ripe scholarship. With the return of classical ideals came
back also into favour in a number of unexpected quarters the doctrines
of Neoplatonism. When Hypatia perished at Alexandria, orthodox
Christianity set its foot on Plotinus and all his works. The struggle at
the end had been one rather between Christianity and the later Greek
philosophers with their Neoplatonic conceptions than between
Christianity and Pagan Rome. The gods of Rome were dead already. Pan was
dead past resurrecting. The danger that threatened Christianity was the
triumph of such Emperors as Julian the Apostate—Julian, whose master was
Plotinus, and whose religion was Neoplatonism merely dressed in an old
Roman garb. To the thinkers and philosophers of that time the triumph of
Christianity seemed like the victory of exoteric religion over the inner
esoteric truths. Back, now, with all that was best of the scholarship
and art of Greece and Rome, came the mystic doctrines of the Alexandrian
philosophers—back, not in triumph, but daring once more to reassert
themselves in the face of a hostile world that had long even forgotten
their existence. A thousand years separated Hypatia from Cornelius
Agrippa—a thousand years which, in the realm of thought, might well be
characterised as the Dark Ages. Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was
born at Cologne in 1486. Seven years later, on 10th November 1493, at
Einsiedeln, near Zurich, a son was born to Dr Wilhelm Bombast von
Hohenheim, and was christened Theophrastus, in honour of Theophrastus
Tyrtamos, a Greek physician, philosopher, and follower of Aristotle.
This child was subsequently to be known to fame and held up to obloquy
under the title of Paracelsus.
It was a period in which the world was in labour with great events. Only
a year before Columbus had landed on American soil. In the same year, or
the previous one, passed away a man whose life was destined to create as
great a revolution in the history of the human race as that of Columbus
himself—William Caxton. Returning from a long sojourn in the Netherlands
in or about 1474, Caxton established his printing press in the precincts
of Westminster Abbey, and before his death at least sixty-four books are
known to have been issued from this first English Printing House. Ten
years exactly before Paracelsus’s birth, a third of these great makers
of revolutions had seen the light. On 10th November 1483, Martin Luther
was born at Eisleben in Lower Saxony, and when the subject of these
notes was twenty-four years old, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses
against the Doctrine of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg.
Paracelsus, when occasion offered, did not attempt to disguise his
sympathy with this bold reformer, though he took no actual part in the
movement, and he was accused by his enemies of being a medical Luther, a
charge which he took pains to show that he did not in any way resent.
Another noteworthy character in the realm of History and Literature,
Lorenzo de Medici, had passed away a year before our hero’s birth. In
England the Wars of the Roses were over, and Henry VII. was busy
establishing monarchy on a firm basis, the people, worn out by incessant
struggles, being glad to accept the Tudor rule, sympathetic as it always
was to the middle and commercial classes. In Europe there was no
Austrian Emperor, and Italy was still fated, for centuries to come, to
remain a geographical expression. The Holy Roman Empire extended from
the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea on the North to the Adriatic on the
South. Poland and Lithuania extended far along its Eastern border, and
the outmost limit of the realm of the Muscovite was still 500 miles east
of the site where a century later Peter the Great was to found and give
his name to the capital of the Russian Empire. The conquering Turk was
thundering at the gates of Christendom. Ferdinand and Isabella, patrons
of Columbus, reigned at Madrid. Everywhere throughout the civilised
world vast changes were impending, everywhere the horizon was widening,
and men’s minds were being directed into new channels and to fresh
fields of enterprise and of opinion.
There has been much discussion as to what exactly is connoted by the
name “Paracelsus,” and how it came to be first adopted. What seems clear
is that von Hohenheim adopted the name himself, and was not, as some
have held, given it by his admirers. It was a usual practice in those
days to write books under some Latin _nom de plume_, frequently some
adaptation into Latin of the name of the writer. In all probability the
last two syllables of the name, “celsus,” were suggested by “Hohen” (or
“high”), “Hohenheim” being literally translated as “high home.” With
regard to the first two syllables it is noticeable that these were
occasionally employed by Paracelsus in giving name to his medical
treatises. There is thus one treatise called “Paramirum,” and another
“Paragranum.” This word “para” seems to have been used in the sense of
giving the word to which it was prefixed a superlative value. Thus
“Paramirum” would mean “extremely wonderful.” The whole word is
doubtless a polyglot hotchpotch, the first part being Greek and the
second Latin; but mediæval writers had little scruple in adapting the
classical tongues to their own requirements.
To follow the writings of Paracelsus it is necessary to understand his
phraseology, his jargon, as we should call it in the slang of to-day.
Without this he is as incomprehensible as is the dog Latin of a
scientific textbook to one who is not a scientific specialist—or, to
give another example, as the language of Astrology is to one who is not
an Astrologer. Paracelsus held that there were three basic substances
necessary to the existence of all bodies. These he called Sulphur,
Mercury, and Salt. Sulphur corresponds to fire, or rather to the
principle of inflammability; Mercury to water, or fluidity; and Salt to
earth, or solidity. For a full glossary of the terms which he employed,
readers are referred to the volume on _The Life and Philosophy of
Paracelsus_, by the late Dr Franz Hartmann. In this terminology _Azoth_
stands for the creative principle in Nature, or the spiritual vitalising
force; the _Ilech Primum_ is the causative force; _Cherio_, the essence
of the thing, the “fifth principle,” which constitutes what we call its
essential qualities; the _Evestrum_ is man’s astral body, his ethereal
counterpart, that may act to him as guardian angel and warn him of
dangers; the _Elementaries_ are the astral corpses of the dead, and must
not be confused with the _Elementals_, or Nature Spirits—Sylphs,
Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes; _Magic_ is the conscious employment of
spiritual powers to act on external Nature. Many of these expressions
have been adopted by the Theosophists of the present day and by students
of Occultism.
It is clear, though Paracelsus long antedated Hahnemann, the founder of
Homœopathy, that much of his medical teaching is what we should now call
Homœopathic. Hahnemann, in fact, borrowed extensively from Paracelsus.
Take, for instance, Paracelsus’s teaching with regard to the
quintessence or virtue of each substance. This, he taught, though
infinitesimal in quantity, even in large bodies, had none the less the
power to affect the mass through and through, as a single drop of gall
embitters, or a few grains of saffron colour a large quantity of water.
The application of homœopathic cures by those ignorant of homœopathic
principles has frequently led to mistakes in this connection; as, for
instance, the administration of doses many times in excess of what the
complaint requires, the result being the entire failure of the medicine
to produce the intended effect.
“There are wide differences,” says Paracelsus, striking again a very
homœopathic note, “between what the ancient doctors taught and what
we here teach, and therefore our healing art differs widely from
theirs. For we teach that what heals a man also wounds him, and what
wounded will also heal him. For the nettle can be so changed that it
cannot burn, the flame so that it does not scorch, and the chelidony
so that it does not cicatrize. Thus similars are good in healing,
such and such a salt to such and such a sore. And the things which
heal a wound in Nature heal the same sort of wound in man.”
“Many kinds of rust,” says Paracelsus again, “occur in the minerals; for
each mineral has its own peculiar nature.” This rust is in the form of a
disease, and iron has one disease, while copper has another. In a
similar way a man has a sore and it is healed by treatment. The metal,
too, has a sore, and can be healed by treatment. “Metallic bodies,” says
Paracelsus, long antedating the discoveries of the present day, “are as
liable to death as the others, for their salt is arsenic.” The whole
earth is linked together, and the life that passes through the bodies of
men passes also through the bodies of minerals. Paracelsus had no
patience with those who taught of a panacea that would heal all
diseases. He described them as people who “rode all horses with one
saddle,” through whom more harm than good was effected. He maintained
that a doctor must know the sick and all matters appertaining to their
state “just as a carpenter knows his wood.” He mentions six essential
qualifications for the practical physician.
(1) A doctor (he says) must know how many kinds of tissue there are
in the body, and how each kind stands in relation to the man.
(2) He must know all the bones, such as the ribs and their
coverings, the difference between one and another, their relations
to each other and their articulations.
(3) He must know all the blood-vessels, the nerves, the cartilages
and how they are held together.
(4) He must know the length, number, form, condition, and purpose of
each member of the body, its particular flesh, marrow, and all other
details.
(5) He must know where all emunctoria lie and how they are to be
averted; also what is in every cavity of the body, and everything
about the intestines.
(6) He must with all his might and being seek to understand about
life and death, what the chief organs in man mean, and what each
member can and may suffer.
If we look to Paracelsus as the real founder of Homœopathy, so also must
we regard him as the pioneer of magnetism and magnetic healing. Man, he
maintained, is nourished through the magnetic power which resides in all
Nature and by which each individual being draws its specific nourishment
to itself. He called this magnetic force _Mumia_ in his special
phraseology, and he laid great stress on the healing power which resided
in this _Mumia_. “Just as the power of the lily breaks forth in perfume
which is invisible, so,” he writes, “the invisible body sends forth its
healing influence. Just as in the visible body are wonderful activities
which the senses can perceive, so, too, lie powers in the invisible body
which can work great wonders.” To him the whole universe was one, and
knit together by indissoluble bonds.
“The astral currents created by the imagination of the Macrocosmos,”
he writes, “act upon the Microcosmos, and produce certain states in
the latter, and likewise the astral currents produced by the
imagination and will of man produce certain states in external
Nature; and these currents may reach far, because the power of the
imagination reaches as far as thought can go. The physiological
processes taking place in the body of living beings are caused by
their astral currents, and the physiological and meteorological
processes taking place in the great organism of Nature are caused by
the astral currents of Nature as a whole. The astral currents of
either act upon the other, either consciously or unconsciously; and
if this fact is properly understood it will cease to appear
incredible that the mind of man may produce changes in the universal
mind, which may cause changes in the atmosphere—winds and rains,
storm, hail and lightning—or that evil may be changed into good by
the power of Faith. Heaven is a field into which the imagination of
man throws the seeds.”
Here, in a single paragraph, is the philosophy of Astrology, and the
justification for the efficacy of prayer.
I have said that Paracelsus was the father of Homœopathy, and the father
also of that later school of animal magnetism which was founded in
France in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the inception
of which is always associated with the name of Mesmer. Unfortunately,
Mesmer had neither the knowledge nor the experience, nor yet the
intuitive faculties of his master, Paracelsus. But, resurrected as it
was under somewhat unfavourable conditions, there is reason to believe
that magnetic healing is destined to play a far greater part in the
future of medical art than it has ever done in the past. Not only was
Paracelsus a pioneer in Homœopathy and animal magnetism, he was also one
of the first, as well as one of the greatest, of all Faith-healers.
“Faith,” he says, “has a great deal more power than the physical body.”
“All magical processes are based upon Faith.” “The power of Faith
overcomes all spirits of Nature, because it is a spiritual power, and
Spirit is higher than Nature.” “Whatever is grown in the realm of Nature
may be changed by the power of Faith.” “Anything we may accomplish which
surpasses Nature is accomplished by Faith, and by Faith diseases may be
cured.” “Imagination,” he says again, “is the cause of many diseases.
Faith is the cure for all.” “If we cannot cure a disease by Faith, it is
because our Faith is too weak. But our Faith is weak on account of our
want of knowledge. If we were conscious of the power of God within
ourselves, we should never fail.” “The power of amulets does not rest so
much in the material of which they are made as in the Faith with which
they are worn.” Paracelsus’s chosen motto was:
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest—