Skip to content

Details

Paracelsus (1493-1541) was a celebrated German-Swiss physician and philosopher, whose theory (that drugs should attack a disease rather than rebalancing humors) is sometimes credited as the birth of modern pharmacology. But his thought was also deeply wedded with astrology, alchemy, magic, and the occult.

Characteristic of the hermetic tradition, the Corpus Hermeticism states that "unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outleap all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand god.... Go higher than every height and lower than every depth.... then you can understand god."

This attitude reverberates (more or less explicitly) in a host of Promethean heroes of the Romantic period, including Frankenstein (1818) and Moby-Dick. (In a cryptic note apparently relating to his plan for Ahab, Melville writes: "It & right reason extremes of one,–not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic–seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel.")

Robert Browning is one of the most significant poets of the Victorian era, and "Paracelsus" (1835) was his first important work: a five-part epic poem about the historical figure. In Book 1, a youthful Paracelsus sets out on an obsessive quest to test the limits of all knowledge. As critic Stopford Brooke says, it "opens at Würzburg in a garden, and in the year 1512. But it is not a poem which has to do with any place or any time. It belongs only to the country of the human soul."

Paracelsus:

Supplemental:

Extracts:

  • "What: dilute the brine with the double distilled soul of the precious grape? Haft himself would have haunted me! Then again, it might come into play medicinally; and Paracelsus himself stands sponsor for every cup drunk for the good of the abdomen." (Mardi, 1.33)
  • "Now, music is a holy thing, and its instruments, however humble, are to be loved and revered.... Not in a spirit of foolish speculation altogether, in no merely transcendental mood, did the glorious Greek of old fancy the human soul to be essentially a harmony. And if we grant that theory of Paracelsus and Campanella, that every man has four souls within him; then can we account for those banded sounds with silver links, those quartettes of melody, that sometimes sit and sing within us, as if our souls were baronial halls, and our music were made by the hoarest old harpers of Wales." (Redburn, 49)
  • "And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk." (Moby-Dick, 92)
  • "In those lonely narrow ways—long-drawn prospectives of desertion—lined with huge piles of silent, vaulted, old iron-grated buildings of dark gray stone, one almost expects to encounter Paracelsus or Friar Bacon turning the next corner, with some awful vial of Black-Art elixir in his hand." (Israel Potter, 8)

This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.

Related topics

Literature
Intellectual Discussions
Philosophy
Poetry
Hermetic Alchemy

You may also like