Paracelsus, the Rebel Physician: Alchemy, Stars and Elemental Spirits

Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in 1493 or 1494, and died in Salzburg in September 1541. The name by which he is known to history, Paracelsus, appears in his writings from about 1529; its meaning is debated, and it is not certain that it meant “greater than Celsus”, the Roman physician. He was a restless figure, always travelling, who changed for ever the way medicine and alchemy were conceived.

The Basel Scandal

In 1527 Paracelsus obtained the post of city physician in Basel along with the right to teach at the university. He caused a scandal at once: he lectured in German instead of Latin and openly attacked the authority of Galen and Avicenna. According to an episode recorded by his biographers, during the Saint John's Eve bonfires he threw a work of traditional medicine into the flames, perhaps Avicenna's Canon, as a gesture of rupture.

His stay was short. By early 1528, after a lawsuit with a canon and clashes with the city's physicians, he had to leave Basel. From then on he lived as an itinerant doctor across Alsace, southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Most of his works remained in manuscript and were printed after his death, above all in the edition prepared by Johann Huser between 1589 and 1591.

The Three Principles and the Light of Nature

Alongside the classical theory of the four elements Paracelsus set the tria prima, the three principles of sulphur, mercury and salt. Sulphur stood for what burns, mercury for what evaporates, salt for what remains as a fixed residue. These were not chemical substances in the modern sense, but principles present in every body. With them Paracelsus sought to explain the composition of things and the processes of life and disease.

To know nature, he argued, books are not enough: one needs the lux naturae, the light of nature, that is, direct experience illuminated by inner knowledge. Man is a microcosm containing heaven and earth, and the physician must read the correspondences between the two. In the Astronomia magna, written around 1537 and published in 1571, this vision becomes a full philosophy of the cosmos.

Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies and Salamanders

One of Paracelsus's most successful writings is the Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris, printed in 1566. In it he describes beings that inhabit the four elements: nymphs or undines in water, sylphs in air, pygmies or gnomes in earth, salamanders in fire. According to his account they are neither demons nor angels, but intermediate creatures, similar to humans yet without an immortal soul.

The book had an enormous influence on the European imagination. From it derive the elemental spirits of later occultism, the undines of Romantic literature and the spread of the word gnome. It is an example of how Paracelsus combined observation, folklore and theological speculation in a way that does not fit modern categories. The author himself declared that he wrote to know God's works better, not to satisfy curiosity.

Paracelsus and Agrippa were near contemporaries and shared the idea of a living nature, full of hidden forces to be known with respect. The Paracelsians of the later sixteenth century turned his insights into a school, and the debates that followed contributed to the rise of medical chemistry. His therapies today belong only to history.