Paracelsianism

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

One important reason for the emergence of Paracelsian alchemical illustration may have been its function as a psychological compensation for the rejection of Catholic imagery by the Protestants and the resulting spiritual and emotional insecurity experienced by many of the faithful. It is not merely coincidental that Paracelsian iconography should appear in Protestant areas where traditional Catholic icons had been destroyed. (The development of a specihcally Catholic interest in alchemy, however, was a phenomenon of the mid-seventeenth century developed in the work of Athanasius Kircher and other Jesuits.) ... 

AUen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy. Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London Heinemann, 1977) and also, Allen G. Debus, Robert Fludd and the Philosophicall Key (New York Science History Publications, 1979). 

Carlos GiUy, Theophrastia Sancta Paracelsianism as a religion in conflict with the established Churches in Ole Peter GreU (ed.), Paracelsus The Man and his Reputation, his ideas and their Transformation (Leiden Brill 1998), 151-185. 

In a manner comparable to Christian eschatology, alchemical literature insisted on its own purificatory rituals that involved the preliminary torture, death and dismemberment of the prima materia. The canonical Catholic depiction of Christ s sacrificed body was a primary source for sixteenth and seventeenth century illustrations of the tortured body in anatomical and alchemical publications. In eflfect, the practice of Paracelsian alchemical medicine and surgery had a sacramental connotation, since the physician acted on the human body in the same manner as God worked on the great universal Macrocosmic Body. In like manner, the Paracelsian physician introduced the universal panacea, a liquid form of the philosopher s stone, into the alchemical alembic that was the Microcosmic human body. This alchemical medicine was permeated with the starry virtues of the heavens and the grace of Christ s Spirit, redeeming the body and soul of the patient by granting him not only an extended life on earth, but even eternal salvation. 

Moving forward in this history, one encounters an unexpected twist in the relation of dissidents to the Churches, since the Spirituals of the 1590s who had been influenced by Paracelsian theosophy reinstated the Eucharist into their religious soteriology. Some even... 

Another example of Paracelsian alchemical eschatology is found in Johann Daniel Mylius, Philosophia Reformata (Frankfurt Lucas Jennis, 1622), which contains a precise sequence of images describing the... 

Michelspacher s four mirrors in the Cabala (1615—16) may have originated in Dee s optical magic in the Propaedeumaia Aphoristica (1558). He employs these ideas in a polemical manner to defend Paracelsians against Roman Catholics and Lutherans. The essence of Michelspacher s political position is displayed in the fourth engraving of the Cabala,... 

See the discussion of Khunrath s theosophy in Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light (2000), 79-137. Christ, the Ruah-Elohim, became the Paracelsian azoth. See Heinrich Khunrath, Vom Hylealischen das ist pri-matmalischen oder algerminen naturlichen Chaos (Magdeburg J. Schmeidt for Johann Francken, 1616), 75, 86-88. Christ is also identified with the Paracelsian Salt, the prime matter of creation. 

Debus, Chemical Phihsophy (1977), 1, 51-61. An important study of Paracelsianism is Walter Pagel and Marianne Winder, The Higher Elements and Prime Matter in Renaissance Naturalism and in Paracelsus, Ambix, 21 (1974) 93 ff. 

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