The Rudolf Steiner Archive

21. Paracelsus

[ 1 ] It is certainly appealing to delve into the past and take a brief look at the great minds who have gone before us. However, when it comes to the figure we wish to discuss today, there is something quite different from the appeal of historical reflection that comes into play. What matters far more with Paracelsus is that he still has a great, great deal to offer people today. And it is precisely a movement of spiritual inquiry into things—such as spiritual science—that is particularly well-suited to unearthing the treasure, the spirit of knowledge, natural inquiry, and enlightenment, that lies hidden within Paracelsus. It is true that contemporary research today is, to a greater or lesser extent, also turning its attention to thinkers such as Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, and others from this period at the end of the Middle Ages. Yet the approach of our present-day science is so different from the spirit and perspective of a man like Paracelsus that it cannot, in the truest sense of the word, do him justice.

[ 2 ] Paracelsus must, in fact, be understood in a different way than is usually the case when one immerses oneself in the spirit of the past today. One must develop a living sense of the subject matter and the direction of thought to which he devoted himself. In a certain sense, this is a deep immersion into spiritual life—namely, into the spiritual forces and entities that underlie nature—and this can only be achieved through an approach such as that of spiritual science. Paracelsus already belongs to an interesting era. He lived from 1493 to 1541, a period that had either just passed or was still in the midst of what we call the rise of the bourgeoisie. This, in essence, exerted a significant influence on the entire spiritual life.

[ 3 ] Only two estates were considered capable of shaping intellectual life before the rise of the bourgeoisie: the nobility and the clergy. After the rise of the bourgeoisie, intellectual culture was based far more on the individual personality and his or her competence than before, when, on the one hand, within the nobility, blood ties and clan affiliation determined a person’s worth and the social position he or she was to occupy—and when it was not merely what the individual clergyman created on his own stood behind him, but where the entire strength and intellectual culture of the Church stood behind the individual. The Church, as a whole, stood behind the individual personality. It was not until the era of the bourgeoisie that an individual’s achievements were based on his or her personal competence. This is why everything we encounter in this period of the late Middle Ages, with the emerging bourgeoisie, takes on a personal character, requiring the individual to engage much more fully. We could cite many such individuals who had to draw upon their very own inner strengths at that time.

[ 4 ] One of the most remarkable and interesting figures is none other than Paracelsus. Other factors also came into play during the time in which he lived. This was right at the time when the world was expanding enormously, when great discoveries of distant lands were being made, and when the recently invented art of printing had set intellectual life on entirely different paths and currents than had previously been the case. All of this, which, so to speak, provides the backdrop for us, is the setting from which the figure of Theophrastus Paracelsus emerges. Added to all this is the fact that we are dealing in him with a personality of rare distinction, a personality of a revolutionary character in the intellectual sense. He was a figure who was fully aware of what had previously been achieved in the realms of intellectual life and of how greatly his own work stood apart from it.

[ 5 ] To understand who Paracelsus was, one must consider the fundamental nature of his work as a physician and as a philosopher, and, in light of how he united these two aspects of his character, recognize him as a theosophist. His personality was entirely unified. With a genius’s insight, he sought to grasp the structure of the universe. His astonishing gaze looked up to the mysteries of the starry world, delved into the structure of the Earth, and, in particular, into the structure of the human being itself. This genius’s insight also penetrated the mysteries of spiritual life. He was just as much a theosophist in that he sought to encompass the essence of astronomical knowledge and, at the same time, the essence of anthropology—the study of humankind—in connection with the study of all living beings. Nothing in this man was mere theory; everything was so directly oriented toward practice that the well-being—the spiritual and physical health—of humankind was the very purpose for which he wished to apply all that he knew. And he knew about God and the stars, about humans, animals, plants, and minerals. This gives his work, thought, and research a great, powerful unity. This presents him to us as if he were carved from a single piece of wood. Thus he stands before us as a primal, elemental personality.

[ 6 ] There were two schools of thought for him in the field that mattered most to him—the field of medicine. One drew on the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, the other on those of Galen. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, stood before him as a great ideal. Today’s scholars can do justice neither to who that Greek truly was nor to what Paracelsus saw in him. It certainly seems rather problematic today when we hear that, according to this medical system, the elements composing the human being were distinguished as black bile, white bile, blood, and phlegm—four humors—which in turn were said to have a certain connection to earth, water, air, and fire. These were supposed to be the constituents of human nature. Today’s natural scientist naturally assumes that this is a childish way of looking at things, one that had to be overcome over time through deeper insight. He does not realize that something entirely different is at stake here. This is why Paracelsus is so extraordinarily difficult to understand from the perspective of modern scholarship. For these four elements of human nature were by no means intended to refer to humors and constituents—substances in the ordinary physical or material sense—but to something entirely different. The natural scientist of that ancient time saw in the human body—as it is composed of physical, sensually perceptible substances—merely the outward expression of something spiritual, the actual builder of this outer body.

[ 7 ] In our lectures on the humanities, we have often spoken of this builder of the human body. We have spoken of how a so-called etheric body—a subtle body—underlies this physical body in all its manifold materials, substances, and fluids, and how this etheric or life body contains the forces that build up the physical body. It is thus the case that every organ is built up from this etheric body. Studying this etheric body involves not only sensory research, but also something else—namely, what is called intuition, spiritual research. And when one uses sensory terms—such as black, white, yellow, green, and so on—to describe what is relevant to this spiritual research, one is merely using metaphors for something that lies behind them. It is entirely wrong to identify them with our material things.

[ 8 ] The way the doctors of old approached sick people in the hospitals was different. It was an intuitive perspective that did not focus on the physical, but rather on the finer, etheric aspect underlying the physical. The starting point was this idea: if something is ill, what matters is not so much the changes that are outwardly perceptible, but rather what caused them. The disorder in the outer physical body corresponds to a disorder in the etheric body. One recognizes how the etheric body is altered by observing the diseased organism, and seeks, through the practices of pharmacology, to heal that which lies behind the physical body: the formative force, the power that underlies the physical body. If I may put it somewhat bluntly, one could say: When someone is ill with a stomach ailment, they are not actually ill in the stomach, but in the finer body, of which the stomach ailment is merely an expression.

[ 9 ] Paracelsus had absorbed the spirit of this kind of intuitive medicine. At that time, however, the Roman physician Galen was exerting his influence everywhere as an authority. Outwardly, he based his medicine on these ancient principles, and if one reads Galen in such a superficial way, one gets the impression: “Well, what does Paracelsus want, fighting so hard against Galen and defending the older medicine? Isn’t it all the same?” — It might almost seem that way, but it is not so. For what has become medicine in Galen is the material externality, the materialization of the originally spiritual insight. Understood in this way, Galen’s students already perceived something outwardly material in what had previously been meant intuitively. And instead of seeing through things with an intuitive gaze, they merely delved into matter, speculated, and devised theories. The moral gaze had been lost.

[ 10 ] Paracelsus turned against this method, against this loss of the intuitive gaze. He wanted to return to the past; drawing on his understanding of the great natural world, he sought once again to discover the means by which to heal people. That is why he was repelled by everything that was officially regarded as medicine at the time. He did not want to base his approach on what was written in books, but rather to open the fundamental book—the great book of Nature itself. Everything that had gradually emerged as medicine had been spun out of purely derivative speculation, out of research that had lost all connection to the original spiritual insight. It was no longer possible to see the connection between a remedy and a disease, precisely because people no longer saw what lay behind the body, because they viewed everything solely in material terms. This led Paracelsus to say: “The light of nature itself must shine again.” — This brought him into sharp conflict with the medicine of his time. Such profound insight as he possessed, the perceptive nature that was his own—which grasped the great connection with the cosmos—gave him an intense self-confidence that had something enchanting about it in the way he stood up against those who practiced the science of that time in the conventional manner. The medical science of that time bears a great resemblance to that of our own era, with the difference, however, that our present age has no Paracelsus in the medical field. But that confusion and uncertainty were almost exactly as they are today. This is very reminiscent of Paracelsus’s time. When we follow medicine today and see how a remedy is invented only to be deemed harmful and discarded after just five years, how so many people are examined, yet the broader perspective on humanity’s connection to nature has been completely lost—this is quite reminiscent of Paracelsus’s time. It is true that most people have no idea that they are once again caught up in such a time, and that blind faith in authority wields immense power, particularly in this field. On the one hand, people fight against blind faith in authority, and they feel great when they take up arms against the old superstitions that send people to Lourdes. They may be right to do so, but they do not realize that only the form of superstition has changed, and that the superstition is hardly any less when people are sent to Wiesbaden and other places. One can see in this something similar to what existed in the time of Paracelsus, when people were inclined to oppose established tradition. Paracelsus said: “But just as I take the four for myself, so must you also take them and follow me—not I following you, but you following me. Follow me—Avicenna, Galen, Rasis, Montagnana, Mesue, etc.—follow me, and not I you; you from Paris, from Cologne, you from Vienna, and all that lies along the Danube and the Rhine, you islands in the sea, you Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, you Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites—follow me, and not I you . . . I shall become monarch, and the monarchy shall be mine; and I shall lead the monarchy and gird your loins.”

[ 11 ] This characterizes the power with which this personality expressed himself. He believed he owed this power to his innate affinity with the mysteries of nature. For Paracelsus, this manifested itself in such a way that he did not merely perceive what his eye saw, but saw with his very being, which was united with nature. He undertook extensive travels. He did not want to be taught anything scientific from the lectern, but rather wanted to learn from the dark intuition of the simple people out in the world, who had not yet severed the bonds of feeling and sensation with nature. I would like to clarify the state of Paracelsus’s soul through a comparison. It is actually quite beautiful to see how animals, guided by their instincts out in the fields, know exactly what to graze on and what to leave alone—what serves their well-being and what would be harmful to them. This is based on what is called the kinship of a being with its environment. It is this kinship that is present in the powers of the soul and is capable of choosing what is good and what is not.

[ 12 ] Through reason and speculation, the human being breaks away from nature. It is no superstition to say that the simple person who lives in the countryside still possesses something of the primal forces that, in a longing and instinctive way, guide the animal toward its food, and that this kinship also conveys something of the knowledge of how a particular herb or a particular stone affects a person. This is a feeling that exists, that is there, that is something quite different from what is usually understood as knowledge, but which is no longer considered so important to human beings for that very reason. Therefore, in people who have not yet undergone the process of education, one finds a primal certainty regarding what within nature is beneficial to human beings. Paracelsus feels a kinship with this primal sense of nature. He emphasizes time and again that those who merely roam the world—traveling in carriages and separated from the common people of the countryside—are not the right kind of people. Paracelsus traveled differently. He listened to what the common man had to say. For him, the instinct of the common man became the intuition of a genius. He did not sever the bond between nature and the original intuitive power within man. He expresses this as follows: “By nature I am not finely spun; nor is it the custom of my country to achieve anything through silk-spinning. Nor are we raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheat bread, but on cheese, milk, and oat bread: this cannot produce refined company. Moreover, whatever one clings to all one’s days—what one received in youth—is simply too coarse compared to the subtle, pure, and ultra-refined. For those who are raised in soft garments and in women’s chambers, and we who grow up on dance cones, do not understand one another well.” — He knew that on his long journeys through Poland, Hungary, and as far as Turkey, he had always walked in the sun—not only in the sun of the physical world, but also in the sun of the spiritual. What distinguishes Paracelsus is his unified view of the spiritual realm. For him, therefore, a human being is not merely the object into which one delves through sensory observation, but rather stands in connection with the whole of nature. He says: Take a look at the apple, and then at the apple seed. You cannot understand how the apple seed grows unless you consider the whole apple. The seed draws its power from its surroundings—the apple—and so it is with human beings and the entire world, just as it is with the apple and the apple seed. — In Paracelsus’s view, one does not understand the apple seed if one examines only the seed and not the apple. Therefore, for him, there is no medicine and no natural science that is not at the same time astronomy and knowledge of God. It is in this context that one must understand human beings. Consequently, for him, the human being is divided into three aspects of human existence.

[ 13 ] We need to take a closer look at these three aspects. First, we have the physical human being, consisting of the same physical components, substances, and forces that are found everywhere else in nature. Thus, anyone who explores nature, who studies its minerals, plants, and animals, is actually studying—in the sense of Paracelsus—the very elements that make up the physical human being. It is as if one had taken all of physical nature around us and extracted a kind of essence, a kind of extract, from all the individual metals, plants, and animals, and formed the physical human being from it; this is how he views the physical human being, and he calls this physical human being the elemental human. For him, this is the lowest link, comparable to the apple seed—which, however, cannot be understood unless one understands the whole apple. Likewise, one cannot understand the elemental human unless one recognizes the earth with all its substances and forces, for the elemental human derives all its power from the earth. Then a force builds a finer substance into this physical elemental human. Paracelsus calls this the Archäus. He thus distinguishes the finer body—the builder of the physical body, just as it is the builder of the Earth—from the elemental body. In this way, he looks beyond what is outwardly perceptible to the senses to the foundation—from the body to the life body, from the outwardly physical to the force that underlies it. This is the first link in the human being, as understood by Paracelsus.

[ 14 ] He regards the second member, from a certain other perspective, as an apple seed. For this second member, the apple represents the entire celestial world. And just as the elemental body draws its forces and vital fluids from the earth and from what belongs to it, so the second human being draws his forces from what lives in the stars, from the laws of the stars. Just as blood, muscles, bones, and digestive juices come together, and the digestive juices are exchanged and transformed, and just as these depend on the earthly realm, so too are his instincts and drives, his desires and passions—indeed, his ideas, pleasure, and suffering— all that which Paracelsus summarizes under the two fundamental forces of the human soul’s nature—sympathy and antipathy—an expression of the entire stellar world, just as the apple seed is an expression of the entire apple. That is why he calls the second body the astral body or the body belonging to the stellar world.

[ 15 ] What acts externally as gravity, as the force of gravity, as the force of attraction and repulsion, is present within the human being—as if in an extract—as desire and aversion, as sympathy and antipathy, so that nothing within the human being in terms of instincts and passions can be understood other than through what Paracelsus calls “astrological astronomy.” This is a science of which the present age knows little. Astronomy has taken a different course. As a physician, Paracelsus wants nothing to do with it. He wants to know how the astral forces in outer space are connected to the human astral body. He relates to an astronomer much as a priest relates to a requiem priest. A requiem priest is one who recites the Mass and gets paid for it, whereas a true priest is one who penetrates the spirit. Paracelsus uses clear language here, which others often call crudeness. Now we have grasped the second part of human wisdom.

[ 16 ] The third part is what he calls the Spirit. This Spirit, in turn, relates to the much more powerful, larger apple—the entire spiritual world—just as the spark of God in human beings relates to the totality of divine powers in the world. Thus, Paracelsus distinguishes three aspects of the world: the divine-spiritual, the celestial, and the elemental-earthly. In human beings, there is an extract of these three things: from the divine-spiritual, the human spirit; from the celestial, the astral body; and from the elemental-earthly, the physical body. And just as one must study the material world—plants, animals, and so on—if one wishes to understand the human body, so too must the physician study and understand what takes place in the celestial world if he wishes to understand human beings. And since Paracelsus maintains that a disease can only be understood by tracing it back to its origin, he seeks the cause of illness in the drives and passions. He regards illness as a consequence of mental error and, ultimately—that is, in the highest sense—he attributes it to moral qualities, even though he does not trace these qualities back to the stars, for he is well aware that the effect need not occur so quickly.

[ 17 ] He sees an expression of the spiritual in everything physical. Thus, he says, anyone who wishes to investigate the cause of an illness must study the entire basis of the soul’s sympathies and antipathies, and he can only study this by studying the celestial bodies of the human being. So imagine how he approaches a sick person. With an intuitive gaze, this soul wanders from the outwardly diseased limb to what lives inwardly in the person’s soul. And from there, he turns to the astral influences of the celestial bodies and to the elemental influences of the Earth. This is what he does in every single case. That is true spiritual medicine. How he conceives of this, and how he tries to make it clear through his own imagery, he expresses beautifully in this unraveling of the entire world: This is a great truth that you should ponder. Nothing is in heaven or on earth that is not also within the human being, and God, who is in heaven and on earth, is also within the human being. — I have often cited another beautiful saying in which he uses a comparison to convey what he intended to say here. He says: Look out into nature. What is there? He sees a mineral, an animal, a plant; he regards them as individual letters, and man is the word composed of these individual letters. If one then wishes to “read” a person, one must gather the individual letters from the great book of nature. — For Paracelsus, this is not a matter of piecing things together haphazardly, but of synthesizing them through observation. This is what always enables him to have the entire world present in the specific individual case he must treat as a physician. What drives all of this is the genius-like moral force from which everything in him springs. Ultimately, it is something like moral indignation that rebels within him against the traditional methods of the time—curing patients and concocting mixtures for all manner of ailments. He says: “I am not here to enrich the pharmacists; I am here to heal people.”

[ 18 ] In order to be able to read Paracelsus’s writings even to some extent, one must realize that at that time he used terms in a manner quite different from how they were used later. When one reads about salt, mercury, and sulfur in Paracelsus today, one does not immediately have a clear idea of what he means; one thinks of what people generally refer to by those terms today. And then everything one reads in Paracelsus seems incomplete and childish. Anyone familiar with modern science has a certain right to regard Paracelsus as childish, but one must also delve a little deeper. I want to give an idea of how one can come to understand what he means when he uses the terms: salt, mercury, and sulfur.

[ 19 ] Paracelsus looks far back into the evolution of the Earth, into the evolution of the beings living around him, and of humankind itself. When he looks back in this way, a time comes to mind in which human beings had forms of existence quite different from those of today. No one was as clear-sighted as Paracelsus about what has come to be. Millions of years ago, the Earth was entirely different. We have often spoken of the Earth’s transformation. He looked back upon a human form that was still entirely animal-like, where the hands were still organs of locomotion, where human beings still lived in air and water. The Earth, the environment, was still quite different. Even modern physics looks back to an age when what now exists in solid form was still in a liquid state. Paracelsus, who proceeded from the spiritual, naturally saw a spiritual human being in the context of such an Earth, which still looked very different from today. On an Earth that was so much warmer than today, modern humans could not have lived.

[ 20 ] Back then, people lived under different conditions; at that time, metals were still in a liquid state and could hardly exist as vapor in the air. Back then, living beings could not exist in a solid form either; but they continued to evolve. Just as today the elemental human is connected to the physical world in the same way that an apple seed is connected to an apple, so, too, did prehistoric man stand in a different relationship to the Earth as it was in prehistoric times and in a different relationship to the entire surrounding astral world, so that what constitutes human beings today—that is, the physical human being, his soul as the astral body, and his spirit as the divine human being—has only recently come into being. It existed in a completely different way in the past. Human beings were still much closer to the Divine. The astral human being was born out of the astral world, and the physical human being was born out of the entire physical world.

[ 21 ] Paracelsus spoke of the physical human being’s emergence from the physical environment in a much broader and nobler sense than today’s theory of descent. Paracelsus certainly recognized this, and he emphasizes it time and again, but for him, the human being is a convergence of everything that lives out there in nature. Human beings have passions; they possess them within themselves, albeit in a tempered form—just as, for example, the lion possesses them, and just as they exist in the natural world. When a human being, in the spirit of Paracelsus, looks at the lion, they see the same force that dwells within them today as their passion, born of the entire astral world. In the lion, this force is one-sided; in human beings, it is mixed with other forces. Thus, for Paracelsus, the entire animal world is humanity spread out like a fan. He sees everything that is distributed among the forms of animals within himself, invisibly in his inner being. In a certain sense, the same is true when a human being looks down upon the Earth. Even the metals, which have now become physical, are born from the same essence from which the physical human being is born. Please understand me correctly here, for this is far removed from today’s way of thinking. Paracelsus looks far back to the time when the physical human body first formed the heart. There are, after all, lower animals that have no heart, which have retained the form that human beings had at that time. For Paracelsus, this was the same period during which gold, too, emerged from a much more general essence of the earth, so that there is a connection between the formation of gold and the heart in human beings. Likewise, he intuitively sees a connection between an abnormality—such as cholera—and arsenic. He tells himself that the possibility of cholera arising depends on arsenic having been formed from the external world. Thus, he regards every single organ as belonging to the human unity, and it is true that it belongs to him just as any animal, plant, or substance in the external world does.

[ 22 ] I would like to read one more quote that will show you how he expresses himself in a very specific way. This is a statement taken from a number of sayings by Paracelsus, of which there are countless others. For him, the individual human being—in terms of his or her individual organs and the diagnosis of their diseases—stands in a very specific relationship to the physical world and the astral world. This relationship is differentiated in the most precise way. Today people admire the general platitudes about pantheism and the “view of nature,” but this is pure dilettantism if one does not realize that the great Paracelsus would not be satisfied with a “universal life” that simply plays itself out in the individual human being. Paracelsus speaks of something concrete: “From this it follows that you should not say, ‘This is cholera,’ ‘This is melancholia,’ but rather, ‘This is Arsenicus,’ ‘This is Aluminosum’; thus, too, ‘This is of Saturn,’ ‘This is of Mars,’ not ‘This is of melancholia,’ ‘This is of cholera.’ For one part belongs to the heavens, one part to the earth, and they are mixed together like fire and wood, so that each may lose its name; for there are two things in one.”

[ 23 ] Just as he explains the connection between the heart and gold, so too does he explain the connection between certain phenomena and Saturn, and between others and Mars and that which is related to Mars. Thus, for Paracelsus’s uniquely structured mind, human beings are situated within nature, within the world. And even if there is something to correct in Paracelsus’s work, what matters is the great, all-encompassing essence that lives within this soul.

[ 24 ] He attributes this to specific individual types. Thus, for him, everything that emerges as a precipitate in the mineral realm is elemental. At the same time, it arose during the period of evolution when the human-physical body was formed and took on the form it has today on Earth. Therefore, for him, whatever precipitates in the mineral realm—all that which is salty—is connected to the human-physical and the animal-physical. And everything that remains liquid after certain precipitates have formed, he calls mercurial, or changeable. Mercury is, for him, a typical example of this. Thus, we have a tendency toward solidification in the case of this liquid metal. For him, the soul, too, is born out of the same forces of the world from which the mercurial—mercury—is born. The deeper connection is such that it cannot be discussed in public at all.

[ 25 ] Sulfur in the world has a parallel origin with the emergence and present form of the spirit. However, this connection is not such that it can be used as a parable. No—these three things out in the world correspond exactly to the body, the soul, and the spirit in human beings.

[ 26 ] By its very nature, sulfur is connected to the spirit, mercury to the soul, and salt to the body of man. Furthermore, whatever else a person consumes is related in some way to these, because it is derived from them. Therefore, such an example shows us that we need to delve deeper into the matter. It is not enough simply to understand Paracelsus’s expressions; we must approach Paracelsus’s books with thorough preparation, and then we will understand him. We must be clear that he always has the whole picture in mind, so that he says to himself: If a person has an illness, it is an interruption, a disturbance of a certain balance, which he calls magnetic balance; and—just as a magnetic needle never points to a single pole but always combines north and south magnetism—so, too, every process of digestion within the human body corresponds to a process of digestion outside in the world, which he then seeks out. And in the etheric human being he seeks the cause of the individual; in the physical, he seeks the expression of the spirit. In this respect, he calls the physical body the “mummy.” This is a significant term that one must first understand. It is a certain essence that underlies the physical body; the mummy is different in a healthy person than in a sick one, because the whole and the individual parts are altered. Therefore, one need only recognize the mummy—the changes in the etheric body—to discern what a person is lacking.

[ 27 ] In short, we are gaining insight into the depths of a spiritual life from which there is so much to learn. We must realize that only in-depth spiritual research can once again understand what lies within Paracelsus, and that once Paracelsus is understood in this profound way, he will no longer appear as a figure to be regarded merely as an interesting historical subject, but as a figure who must be viewed from a higher vantage point—and from whom we can still learn much, much more even today, at least in terms of method. This is the way we should approach Paracelsus. Anyone who does so will find, in Paracelsus’s charming yet blunt manner, a distinction between today’s approach to research and his own—a distinction he had already drawn for his contemporaries. For he distinguishes between two kinds of reason: the reason that looks into the entire realm of spiritual life, and the one that focuses only on the individual. He calls the former “the first reason.” He calls it that because it leads to the hidden spirit of things, and he calls the other kind of reason “public folly in the face of hidden wisdom.” He expresses himself even more charmingly—or crudely—at one point by saying: One must distinguish between a human-divine reason and a bestial reason. — He does not speak in terms of the animal and spiritual nature of man, but rather of the bestial nature. He understands this kinship in such a way that man is to be regarded as the son of the animal species. The animal nature is spread out into individual facets; in human beings, the animal nature is synthesized. He once says: “Man is thus the son of the entire rest of the animal world.” But if he were to want to be like the other bestial beings, they would not understand this; then the bestial beings would look upon him as if he were a wayward son and be astonished at what he has become.

[ 28 ] In other respects as well, you will find in Paracelsus the opportunity to receive elementary guidance on certain truly theosophical fundamental concepts. What Paracelsus says about dreams and sleep is, in the truest sense, exactly what spiritual science has to say on the subject; he simply expresses it in his magnificent language. When a person sleeps, the elemental body is present in space, and what is active is the astral self. Then the astral self can communicate with the stars, so that one need only recall this communication with the stars to bring help to the sick person and cure them. He traces all of this back to the prophets. To him, they are worth more than anything that came later. He does not call Moses, Daniel, or Enoch magicians; rather, he says: If one understands them correctly, they are the forerunners of this great astronomical-astrological medicine that has worked for humanity. A man like this was, in a certain sense, permitted to possess self-confidence, and the power of his work flows from this self-confidence. But he was also fully aware that what he had established must live on—and will live on—among those who are able to recognize it. Despite everything, a great deal—a very great deal—of gossip, including historical gossip, has been leveled at him. People even examined his skull in order to slander him; because this skull had a hole in it—and since people place great importance on such external details—they concluded that it was a fact that he had fallen while intoxicated and fractured his skull. This is how they sought to judge his entire life. One can cite the parable of Jesus Christ and the dead dog, in which Jesus Christ pointed out the animal’s beautiful teeth. With such a figure, nothing else concerns us except what we can learn from him—that which made him a benefactor of humanity, the many obstacles he overcame, and that through which he became immortal.

[ 29 ] Let me conclude with his own words, which he hurls in the faces of his opponents, where he tells them: “I will explain and demonstrate to you in such a way that my writings must remain true until the very last day of the world, and yours will be recognized as full of gall, poison, and a brood of snakes, and will be hated by people like toads. It is not my will that you should fall or be overthrown in a single year, but rather that after a long time you yourselves must reveal your shame and fall through your own remorse. I will judge you after my death more than before it. And even if you devour my body, you have eaten only dung: Theophrastus will wage war against you through my body.”