Heinemann £20 pp448
Anyone who has tried reading Paracelsus will have a special reason for admiring Philip Ball’s new book, because they will be able to imagine the oceans of tedium he had to wade through in order to write it. Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Paracelsus was a Renaissance magician. But whereas Prospero is brief and relatively modest about his achievements — eclipsing the sun, raising the dead from their graves — Paracelsus was a stranger to modesty as well as to clarity and consistency. Ball thinks his blind rages and apocalyptic visions may indicate mental illness. At all events, his writings confirm that, however jolly magic may seem at the Harry Potter level, when spun out into complex systems and arcane vocabularies it is achingly dull and sometimes sickening.
His ideas were a mixture of pseudo-science and theology, largely derived from the starry-eyed neo-Platonists of 2nd-century Alexandria. He believed that all matter is permeated by spirit, and subject to astral influences. The universe is full of secret signs and symbols that connect everything with everything else. Humans have invisible bodies, which interact with stars, herbs and occult forces. God made the world in man’s image, so man is a microcosm, or little world, containing everything in created nature. One of Paracelsus’s later critics tartly rejoined that, if this is so, man should be able to fly, live in the sea, lay eggs and bear apples. But Paracelsians easily evaded such common-sense objections by disappearing into a fog of metaphor and “higher” truth.
He inherited from Arabic alchemy the idea that everything is composed of sulphur and mercury, and he added a third ingredient, salt, which was not ordinary salt but a mystical entity, accounting for the hardness or softness of things. Being composed of the same basic elements, things could, given the correct mumbo-jumbo, be turned into other things — hence the alchemical belief that base metals can become gold. More original was Paracelsus’s discovery of four previously unsuspected species of hominids, whom he dubbed nymphs, sylphs, gnomes and salamanders. Like science-fiction aliens, these lived on the earth among humans and were indistinguishable from them, except that they lacked souls, which made them eager to marry human spouses whose souls they could share.
He announced, in one of his medical works, that he had discovered the secret of life, enabling him not only to raise the dead but also to create a miniature human being from scratch. To do this, he explained, you had to take some human semen and allow it to putrefy, packing it in horse manure for 40 days. After this you fed it with human blood and a “true and living” infant would emerge. Masturbation was wrong, he taught, because it allowed semen to get into the hands of the evil spirits who were always wandering around at night, and they used it to produce “curious monsters of horrible shapes”.
On the other hand, for the male not to expel his seed was dangerous, because it would decay internally and cause “lumps”. So the best course for the unmarried man with no proper use for his seed was to be castrated. His own chaste life and eunuchoid sexual characteristics led many to suppose that he had followed this advice himself.
His adventures in the real world were just as strange as his ideas, and far more interesting. Born in 1493, the son of a poor Swiss schoolmaster, he grew up in a mining district in southern Austria where he acquired his knowledge of metallurgy. His baptismal name was Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, and his adoption of the snappier pseudonym Paracelsus (signifying his superiority to the Roman medical authority, Celsus) was an early sign of his talent for self-promotion. At the age of 14, he became a wandering student, visiting the German universities, including Wittenberg, where Luther was professor of theology, then the universities of Italy. In Spain he became a military surgeon and crossed with the Spanish army into North Africa. During the next few years he journeyed through Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Transylvania, did a tour of the British Isles, went to Denmark, where Christian II made him a royal physician, and, at the invitation of the tsar, travelled by sleigh to Moscow where he was captured by Tartars who took him to the Crimea and taught him about their religion of shamanism. Back in Austria, he headed south, landed at Alexandria, sailed up the Nile to Cairo, then journeyed overland to Greece via the holy land, arriving in Rhodes in time to offer his medical services to the Knights Hospitallers, who were being besieged by Suleiman.
In an age when most people did not travel more than 15 miles from their birthplace this was an almost superhuman itinerary, and it made him a legend. His enemies declared he was in league with the devil. Wherever he went he was remembered for his miraculous cures — lepers were cleansed, the paralytic walked — as well as for his frenzied denunciations of conventional medicine, and his heroic drunkenness. His place in the history of culture, Ball concludes, was won by sheer force of personality, not by anything valid or original in his ideas. It was a triumph of public relations. At the same time, his journeys had the practical aim of collecting popular remedies. A good doctor, he insisted, should consult barbers, bath-keepers, old women, gypsies, wayfarers and peasants. His informants were not always reliable. He learnt, for example, and passed it on as a fact, that a man can live indefinitely without food, provided his feet are planted in the earth. But folk medicine, rather than his own erudite theories, probably accounted for his fame as a healer. Even in the 19th century, pilgrims from all over Austria still visited his tomb, hoping his fabled powers would restore them to health.
Quite apart from a thorough investigation of Paracelsus, Ball’s book charts the social and cultural ferment in which he lived, supplying brief histories of astrology, merchant banking, humanism, the Protestant reformation, syphilis, and a dozen other topics, and introducing an enormous cast of savants, quacks, sorcerers, prophets and illuminati. A brilliant final chapter traces the furious debates over Paracelsus’s posthumous reputation, with rational materialism gradually winning out over magic. Ball himself seems torn over his subject’s scientific standing, proclaiming both that he was “wildly wrong” and simply “did not do science”, and that he had “a profound impact on the development of the science of chemistry”. However, some degree of self-contradiction is entirely fitting in a book on Paracelsus, and this prodigiously learned volume can only reinforce Ball’s reputation as one of our most versatile and gripping science writers.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Sick note
Paracelsus’s disdain for doctors, such as the ones above, treating a patient for syphilis, was total. Mocking the “gorgeous satins, silks and velvets” of their clothing, he complained that “all they can do is to gaze at piss”.
Read on... websites:
http://historymedren.about.com/library/who/blwwparacelsus.htm
Biography and good links
