CHAPTER III.
Atherton. We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I believe, to conduct us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme, more correctly.
Willoughby. I shall scarcely bring you so far this evening. I have to trouble you with some preliminary paragraphs on the theosophic mysticism which arose with the Reformation, some remarks on the theurgic superstitions of that period, and a word or two about Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. A very formidable preamble,—yet necessary, I assure you.
And herewith, Willoughby, after solacing himself with a goodly bunch of grapes, began to read his essay.
On the Theosophy of Jacob Behmen.
§ 1. Mysticism and Science.
I have to trace the advance of mysticism into a new world. Prior to the Reformation the mystic sought escape in God from all that was not God. After that epoch he is found seeking at the hands of his Maker a supernatural acquaintance with all that He has made. Once his highest knowledge was that surpassing ignorance which swoons in the glory of the Infinite. Now he claims a familiarity passing that of common mortals with the mysteries of sea and land, of stars and elements. Escaping that monastic dualism which abandoned the world to Satan, mysticism will now dispute the empire of the prince of this world. Inspired from above, and haply not unaided by angelic ministries, the master of the hidden wisdom will devoutly elicit the benign potencies of the universe, and repel the malevolent. No longer a mere contemplatist—gazing up at the heights of the divine nature, or down into the depth of the human—the mystic of the new age will sweep, with all-piercing vision, the whole horizon of things visible. The theosophist covets holiness still, but knowledge scarcely less. Virtue (as aforetime) may be regarded by such mystics too much as the means to an end. But the end is no longer the same. With the theopathetic mysticism the exercise of the Christian graces and the discipline of fiery spiritual purgations were the road to a superhuman elevation—a vision and repose anticipating heaven. With the theosophic, Faith and Charity and Hope were the conditions of the higher knowledge. For never to the proud, the greedy, the impure, would heaven vouchsafe the keys of mystery and hazardous prerogative in the unseen world. To the contemplative mystic the three heavenly sisters brought a cloud of glory; for the theosophist they unclasped nature’s ‘infinite book of secrecy;’ in the hand of the theurgist they placed an enchanter’s wand.
The sphere of mysticism was not thus extended by any expansive force of its own. The spirit of a new and healthier age had ventured to depreciate the morbid seclusion of the cloister. Men began to feel that it was at once more manly and more divine to enquire and to know than to gaze and dream. After the servitude of the schools and the collapse of the cloister, the ambition of the intellect would acknowledge no limit, would accept of no repose. The highest aspirations of religion and the most daring enterprise of science were alike mystical. They coalesced in theosophy. Changes such as these were wrought by a power from without. Mysticism was awakened from its feverish dream by the spirit of the time—as Milton’s Eve by Adam from her troubled morning sleep—and invited to go forth and see ‘nature paint her colours.’
As the revival of letters spread over Europe the taste for antiquity, and natural science began to claim its share in the freedom won for theology, the pretensions of the Cabbala, of Hermes, of the Neo-Platonist theurgy, became identified with the cause of progress.
That ancient doctrine, familiar to the school of Plotinus, according to which the world was a huge animal—a living organism united in all its parts by secret sympathies,—received some fresh development in the fancy of every adept. The student of white magic believed, with Iamblichus, in the divine power inherent in certain words of invocation, whereby the aspirant might hold intercourse with powers of the upper realm. With the modern, as with the ancient Neo-Platonists, religion bore an indispensable part in all such attempts. Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity. Campanella demands a fides intrinseca,—that devout simplicity of heart which should qualify the candidate at once to commune with holy spirits and to baffle the delusive arts of the malign.[209]
But the theosophists of Germany were not, like the Alexandrians, slavish worshippers of the past. They did not resort to theurgy in order to prop a falling faith. They did not wield that instrument to prolong, by the spasmodic action of superstitious practice, the life of an expiring philosophy. Those formulæ of incantation, those ‘symbola’ and ‘synthemata,’ which were everything with Iamblichus, were with many of them only a bye-work, and by others utterly abjured. They believed devoutly in the genuineness of the Cabbala. They were persuaded that beneath all the floods of change this oral tradition had perpetuated its life unharmed from the days of Moses downward,—even as Jewish fable taught them that the cedars alone, of all trees, had continued to spread the strength of their invulnerable arms below the waters of the deluge. They rejoiced in the hidden lore of that book as in a treasure rich with the germs of all philosophy. They maintained that from its marvellous leaves man might learn the angelic heraldry of the skies, the mysteries of the divine nature, the means of converse with the potentates of heaven.[210] But such reverence, so far from oppressing, seemed rather to enfranchise and excite their imagination. In the tradition before which they bowed, the majesty of age and the charm of youth had met together. Hierocles brought to them Pythagoras out of an immemorial past; and there was no novelty more welcome in that restless wonder-loving present. Thus the theosophists could oppose age to age, and reverently impugn the venerable. Antiquity, in the name of Aristotle, so long absolute, had imposed a shameful bondage. Antiquity, in the name of Plato, newly disinterred, imparted a glorious privilege. The chains of the past were being filed away by instruments which the past had furnished. Ancient prescription became itself the plea for change when one half of its demands was repudiated in honour of the other.
This theosophy was a strange mixture of the Hellenic, the Oriental, and the Christian styles of thought. I shall assume as its emblem the church of St. John, at Rhodes, which, full of statues of saints and tombs of knights, broken, or rounded into mounds of sullied snow by the hand of time, is surmounted by a crescent, and echoes to the voice of the muezzin, while sheltering beneath its porch the altar of a Grecian God. But our incongruous theosophic structure, ever open and ever changing, enlarged its precincts continually. A succession of eccentric votaries enriched it ceaselessly with quaint devices, fresh flowers of fancy, new characters in mystical mosaic, and intricate arabesques of impenetrable significance.
Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies, and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world his book.[211] The leaves of that volume were continents and seas—provinces, its paragraphs—the plants, the stones, the living things of every clime, its illuminated letters.
In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research, flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of inspiration.
The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.
It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did, ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein, kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy, that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel, deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty court of every landgrave and elector.
Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed. Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested, therefore, on the knowledge of the intellectual vinculum (the divine potency inherent in certain words), the astral (the favourable conjunction of the planets), and the elementary (the sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, et hoc genus omne.[212]
CHAPTER IV.
Willoughby’s Essay—Second Evening.
§ 2. Cornelius Agrippa.
Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, is a favourable specimen of that daring and versatile order of mind which, in the sixteenth century, sought adventure and renown in every province of philosophy. His restless life is picturesque with the contrast of every imaginable vicissitude. A courtier and a scholar, a soldier and a mystic, he made the round of the courts of Europe. Patronized and persecuted alternately, courted as a prodigy and hunted down as a heretic, we see him to-day a Plato, feasted by the Sicilian tyrant, to-morrow a Diogenes, crawling with a growl into his tub. He lectures with universal applause on the Verbum Mirificum of Reuchlin. He forms a secret association for the promotion of occult science. He is besieged by swarming boors in some Garde Douloureuse, and escapes almost by miracle. He enters the service of Margaret, Regent of the Netherlands, then that of the Emperor, and is knighted on the field for heroic gallantry in the campaign against the Venetians. He is next to be heard of as a teacher of theology at Pavia. Plunged into poverty by the reverses of war, he writes for comfort a mystical treatise On the Threefold Way of Knowing God. The hand of the Marquis of Montferrat plucks him from his slough of despond, but ere long he is again homeless, hungering, often after bread, ever after praise and power. At the court of France, the Queen Mother shows him favour, but withholds the honour to which such gifts might well aspire. Then appears the famous book On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences.
It was wormwood to the proud spirit of Agrippa to be treated as a mere astrologer. To think that he must toil in obscurity like a gnome, calculating aspects, sextile and quartile, reckoning the cusps and hours of the houses of heaven, to subserve the ambition of an implacable intriguante, when his valour might adorn the tourney and his wisdom sway the council! He would fain have been in France what that great astrologer of the previous century, Martius Galeotti, had been in Hungary, to whom the Czar of Russia and the Khan of Tartary were said to have sent respectful presents of more than royal magnificence; who was ambassador alike of monarchs and the stars; who bore a share in the statecraft of the court at Buda, and charging abreast with the crowned helm of Matthias, rode down the ranks of the turbaned infidel. So the gallant knight and the ‘courtier of most elegant thread,’ the archimage, the philosopher, the divine, became for awhile a sceptic and a Timon. The De Vanitate Scientiarum ravages, with a wild Berserker fury, the whole domain of knowledge. The monk Ilsan of mediæval fable did not more savagely trample the roses in the enchanted garden of Worms,—Pantagruel did not more cruelly roast with fire his six hundred and nine and fifty vanquished horsemen, than did Agrippa consume with satire every profession and every calling among men. With reason might he say in his preface, ‘The grammarians will rail at me—the etymologists will derive my name from the gout—the obstreperous rhetoricians will plague me with their big words and inimical gestures—the intricate geometrician will imprison me in his triangles and tetragonals—the cosmographer will banish me among the bears to Greenland.’ Scholastic fanaticism could never pardon the man whose sarcasm had left nothing standing, save the Holy Scriptures. The monks and doctors of Lyons hurled back his tongue-bolts with the dreaded cry of heresy. His disgrace and exile they could compass, but they could not arrest those winged words or bow that dauntless spirit.
The treatise On the Threefold Way of Knowing God, shows how, by Divine illumination, the Christian may discern the hidden meanings of the New Testament, as the Cabbalist evolves those of the Old. It teaches the way in which the devout mind may be united to God, and, seeing all things in Him, and participating in His power, may even now, according to the measure of faith, foretell the future and controul the elements.
The De Occulta Philosophia[213] (a youthful work re-written in his later years) treats of the three kinds of magic—the Natural (the science of sympathies and antipathies, whereby the adept accelerates or modifies the process of nature so as to work apparent miracles); the Celestial, or Mathematical (astrology); and the Religious, or ceremonial (theurgy).
Once on a time, the savans were sorely puzzled by certain irregular holes on the front of an ancient temple. One, more sagacious than the rest, suggested that these indentations might be the marks of nails used to fasten to the stone metallic plates representing Greek characters. And, in fact, lines drawn from one point to the next were found to form letters, and the name of the deity stood disclosed. In like manner, the student of natural magic sought to decipher the secret language of the universe, by tracing out those lines of sympathy which linked in a mysterious kindred objects the most remote. It was believed that the fields of space were threaded in every direction by the hidden highways of magnetic influence; traversed from all points by an intricate network of communication uniting the distant and the near—the celestial and terrestrial worlds. Science was charged with the office of discovering and applying those laws of harmony and union which connect the substances of earth with each other and with the operation of the stars. Through all the stages of creation men thought they saw the inferior ever seeking and tending towards the higher nature, and the order above shedding influence on that below. The paternal sun laid a hand of blessing on the bowed head of the corn. The longing dews passed heavenward, up the Jacob’s ladder of the sunbeams, and entering among the bright ministeries of the clouds, came down in kindly showers. Each planet, according to its mind or mood, shed virtues healing or harmful into minerals and herbs. All sweet sounds, moving by the mystic laws of number, were an aspiration towards the music of the spheres—a reminiscence of the universal harmonies. The air was full of phantasms or images of material objects. These, said Agrippa, entering the mind, as the air the body, produce presentiments and dreams. All nature is oracular. A cloudy chill or sultry lull are the Delphi and Dodona of birds and kine and creeping things. But the sense of sinful man is dull. The master of the hidden wisdom may facilitate the descent of benign influences, and aid the travailing creation, sighing for renewal. It is for him to marry (in the figurative language of the time) the ‘lower and the higher potencies, the terrestrial and the astral, as doth the husbandman the vine unto the elm.’ The sage can make himself felt in the upper realm, as on the earth, by touching some chord whose vibration extends into the skies. From the law of sympathy comes the power of amulets and philtres, images and ointments, to produce love or hate, health or sickness, to arrest the turning arms of the distant mill, or stay the wings of the pinnace on the Indian seas. Such was Agrippa’s world.
According to Baptista Porta, a certain breath of life, or soul of the world, pervades the whole organism of the universe, determines its sympathies, and imparts, when received into the soul of the inquirer, the capacity for magical research. Similarly, in the theory of Agrippa, the fifth element, or æther, is the breath of this World-Soul. Within the spirit thus animating the body of the world lie those creative powers, or qualities, which are the producers of all things visible. The instruments of this universal plastic Power are the stars and the spirits of the elements.
With all the theosophists man is a microcosm—the harmonized epitome of the universe: a something representative of all that is contained in every sphere of being, is lodged in his nature. Thus he finds sympathies everywhere, and potentially knows and operates everywhere. Since, therefore, the inmost ground of his being is in God, and the rest of his nature is a miniature of the universe,—a true self-knowledge is, proportionately, at once a knowledge of God and of creation. The sources of Religion and of Science are alike within him.
Agrippa borrows from the Phædrus four kinds of inspiration,—the Poetic, the Dionysian (revealing visions), the Apollinian (imparting hidden wisdom), and that of which ascendant Venus is the pure patroness—Rapturous Love, which carries us to heaven in ecstasy, and in the mystic union with Deity discloses things unutterable. He compares the soul, as ordinarily in the body, to a light within a dark lantern. In moments of mystical exaltation, it is taken out of its prison-house, the divine element is emancipated, and rays forth immeasurably, transcending space and time. His Platonism, like that of so many, led him from the sensual and the formal to the ideal. Greek was, with reason, accounted dangerous. Plato was a reformer side by side with Luther among the Germans. How loathsome was clerkly vice beside the contemplative ideal of Plato.
In those days almost every great scholar was also a great traveller. The wanderings of Agrippa and his theosophic brethren contributed not a little to the progress and diffusion of occult science. These errant professors of magic, like those aërial travellers the insects, carried everywhere with them the pollen of their mystic Lily, the symbol of theosophy, and sowed the fructifying particles in minds of kindred growth wherever they came. Their very crosses and buffetings, if they marred their plans of study, widened their field of observation; were fertile in suggestions; compelled to new resources, and multiplied their points of view,—as a modern naturalist, interrupted during his observant morning’s walk, and driven under a tree by a shower, may find unexpected compensation in the discovery of a new moss upon its bark, or a long-sought fly among its dropping-leaves.
Gower. Agrippa’s philosophy gives us a highly imaginative view of the world.
Atherton. A beautiful romance,—only surpassed by the actual results of modern discovery.
Willoughby. In those days every fancied likeness was construed into a law of relationship: every semblance became speedily reality;—somewhat as the Chinese believe that sundry fantastic rocks in one of their districts, which are shaped like rude sculptures of strange beasts, do actually enclose animals of corresponding form. And as for the links of connexion supposed to constitute bonds of mysterious sympathy, they are about as soundly deduced as that connexion which our old popular superstition imagined, between a high wind on Shrove Tuesday night, and mortality among learned men and fish.
Gower. And yet how fascinating those dreams of science. What a charm, for instance, in a botany which essayed to read in the sprinkled or veined colours of petals and of leaves, in the soft-flushing hues, the winding lines, the dashes of crimson, amethyst, or gold, in the tracery of translucent tissues empurpled or incarnadine,—the planetary cipher, the hieroglyph of a star, the secret mark of elementary spirits—of the gliding Undine or the hovering Sylph.
Willoughby. So too, in great measure, with anatomy and psychology; for man was said to draw life from the central sun, and growth from the moon, while imagination was the gift of Mercury, and wrath burned down to him out of Mars. He was fashioned from the stars as well as from the earth, and born the lord of both.
Atherton. This close connexion between the terrestrial and sidereal worlds was to aid in the approximation of man to God. The aim was noble—to marry Natural Science, the lower, to Revealed Religion, the higher; elevating at once the world and man—the physical and the spiritual; drawing more close the golden chain which binds the world to the footstool of the eternal throne. While a spirit dwelt in all nature, transforming and restoring, and benign influences, entering into the substances and organisms of earth, blessed them according to their capacities of blessing (transforming some with ease to higher forms of beauty, labouring long, and almost lost in the grossness and stubbornness of others), so also in the souls of men wrought the Divine Spirit, gladly welcomed by the lowly-hearted, darkly resisted by the proud, the grace of God here an odour of life, and there made a deepening of death upon death.
Willoughby. How close their parallel between the laws of receptivity in the inner world and in the outer. They brought their best, faithfully—these magi,—gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Gower. Talking of sympathies, I have felt myself for the last quarter of an hour rapidly coming into rapport with those old poet-philosophers. I seem to thirst with them to pierce the mysteries of nature. I imagine myself one of their aspiring brotherhood. I say, to the dead let nature be dead; to me she shall speak her heart. The changeful expression, the speechless gestures of this world, the languors and convulsions of the elements, the frowns and smiles of the twin firmaments, shall have their articulate utterance for my ear. With the inward eye I see—here more dim, there distinct—the fine network of sympathetic influences playing throughout the universe, as the dancing meshes of the water-shadows on the sides of a basin of marble——
Willoughby, (to Atherton, with a grotesque expression of pity.) He’s off! Almost out of sight already.
Gower, (apparently unconscious of the interruption.) Yes, I will know what legends of the old elemental wars are stored within yon grey promontory, about whose grandsire knees the waves are gambolling; and what is the story of the sea—what are the passions of the deep that work those enamoured sleeps and jealous madnesses; and what the meaning of that thunder-music which the hundred-handed surf smites out from the ebon or tawny keys of rock and of sand along so many far-winding solitary shores. I will know what the mountains dream of when, under the summer haze, they talk in their sleep, and the common ear can perceive only the tinkle of the countless rills sliding down their sides. There shall be told me how first the Frost-King won his empire, and made the vanquished heights of earth to pass under those ice-harrows which men call glaciers.
Atherton. ‘The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever!’
Gower. On the commonest things I see astral influences raining brightness—no homeliness without some sparkle of the upper glory;—as the wain and shoon of the peasant on some autumn night grow phosphorescent, and are sown with electric jewellery. With purged eyesight I behold the nascent and unfledged virtues of herbs and minerals that are growing folded in this swaying nest named earth, look hungering up to their parent stars that hover ministering above, radiant in the topmost boughs of the Mundane Tree. I look into the heart of the Wunderberg, and see, far down, the palaces and churches of an under-world, see branching rivers and lustrous gardens where gold and silver flow and flower; I behold the Wild women, and the jealous dwarfs, and far away, the forlorn haunts of the cairn-people, harping under their mossy stones; while from the central depths sounds up to me the rolling litany of those giants who wait and worship till the Great Restitution-Day. There among those wilderness rocks I discern, under a hood of stone, a hermit Potency, waiting for one to lead him up to the sunny multitudinous surface-world, and send him forth to bless mankind. O long-tarrying Virtue, be it mine to open the doors of thy captivity! Thou mineral Might, thou fragment from the stones of the New Jerusalem, thou shalt lodge no more in vain among us! I have felt thy secret growing up within my soul, as a shoot of the tree of life, and therewithal will I go forth and heal the nations![214]
Atherton. No, not till you have had some supper. I hear the bell.
Gower. It is the nineteenth century, then? Ah, yes, I remember.
Willoughby. Away, you rogue!
CHAPTER V.
The reason that Men do not doubt of many things, is, that they never examine common Impressions; they do not dig to the Root, where the Faults and Defects lye; they only debate upon the Branches: They do not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it has been so and so understood. It is not inquir’d into, whether Galen has said anything to purpose, but whether he has said so or so.—Montaigne.
Willoughby’s Essay—Third Evening.
§ 3. Theophrastus Paracelsus.
Due place must be given to the influence of that medical Ishmael, Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, he studied medicine at Basle, and travelled Europe for fourteen years from Sweden to Naples, and from France to Poland. The jealous hatred awakened by a most reasonable project of reform drove him from Basle soon after his return. Vituperated and vituperating, he became a wanderer throughout Germany, everywhere forming, or followed by, successive groups of disciples. He died at the age of forty-eight, in a little inn—but not, as report has long said, drunk on the taproom floor;—a victim, more probably, to the violence of assailants despatched against him by some hostile physicians.[215]
Paracelsus found the medical profession of those days more disastrously incompetent, if possible, than we see it in the pages of Le Sage and Molière. It was so easy of entrance, he complains, as to become the tempting resource of knavery and ignorance everywhere. With a smattering of Greek a doctor might be finished and famous. A dead language was to exorcise deadly maladies. Diseases were encountered by definitions, and fact and experiment unheeded amidst disputes about the sense of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. When a new life began to struggle to the light from beneath the ruins of scholasticism, the fearless vehemence of such a nature became its appropriate organ. Paracelsus was the first to lecture in the vernacular. Instead of reading and commenting on the text of Galen, or extracting fanciful specifics from Raymond Lully, or John de Rupecissa, he resolved to observe and judge for himself wherever the ravages of disease or war might furnish him with facts. Preposterous as many of his own remedies may have been, he merits the title of a reformer in effect as well as purpose. He applied, with great success, mineral preparations before unknown, or little used; performed celebrated cures by the use of opium, and exposed the fraudulent pretensions of the alchemist and the astrologer. To the persecution and gross abuse of the profession he replied in torrents of undiluted and inexhaustible Billingsgate. While his velvet-cloaked brethren, with faces blandly inane or portentously inscrutable, mounted, with step of cat-like softness, to the chamber of the obese burgomaster or the fashionable lady, Paracelsus gloried in grandiloquent shabbiness and boisterous vulgarity. He boasted that he had picked up many a hint while chatting as an equal with pedlars, waggoners, and old women. He loved to drain his can on the ale-bench before wayside hostelries with boors such as Ostade has painted. Ragged and dusty, footing it with his knapsack on his back under a broiling sun, he would swear that there lay more wisdom in his beard than in all the be-doctored wiseacres of all the universities of Europe.
On the basis of principles substantially the same with those represented by Agrippa, Paracelsus developed, in his own way, the doctrine of signatures, and the relationships of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
The special illumination of the Holy Ghost was not more essential to the monastic perfection of preceding mystics, than to the success of the theosophist in that devout pursuit of science inculcated by Paracelsus. The true Physician—he who would be wise indeed in the mysteries of nature, must seek with ceaseless importunity the light that cometh from above. In the Scriptures, and in the Cabbala, lies the key to all knowledge. Medicine has four pillars: (1) Philosophy, generally equivalent, as he uses it, to physiology,—the study of the true nature of material substances in their relation to the microcosm, man; (2) Astronomy, embracing especially the influences of the heavenly bodies on the human frame; (3) Alchemy, not gold-making, but the preparation of specifics—chemistry applied to medicine; (4) Religion, whereby the genuine professor of the healing art is taught of God, and works in reliance on, and union with, Him.[216] In the spirit of the ancient mystics he describes the exaltation of one whose soul is inwardly absorbed, so that the ordinary operation of the external senses is suspended. A man thus divinely intoxicated, lost in thoughts so profound, may seem, says Paracelsus, a mere fool to the men of this world, but in the eyes of God he is the wisest of mankind, a partaker of the secrecy of the Most High.[217] Like Agrippa (and with as good reason) Paracelsus lays great stress on Imagination, using the term, apparently, to express the highest realization of faith. Bacon observes that Imagination is with Paracelsus almost equivalent to Fascination. He speaks of the Trinity as imaged in man, in the Heart, (Gemüth), in Faith, and in Imagination,—the three forms of that spiritual nature in us which he declares a fiery particle from the Divine Substance. By the disposition of the Heart we come to God; by Faith to Christ; and by Imagination we receive the Holy Spirit. Thus blessed (did we but truly know our own hearts) nothing would be impossible to us. This is the true magic, the gift of Faith, which, were its strength sufficient, might even now cast out devils, heal the sick, raise the dead, and remove mountains.[218]
In the sixteenth century we still trace the influence of that doctrine, so fertile in mysticism, which Anselm bequeathed to the schoolmen of the middle age. We are to know by ascending to the fount of being, and in the primal Idea, whence all ideas flow, to discern the inner potency of all actual existence. But in Paracelsus we see especial prominence given to two new ideas which greatly modify, and apparently facilitate the researches of theosophy. One of these is the theory of divine manifestation by Contraries,—teaching (instead of the old division of Being and Non-being) the development of the primal ground of existence by antithesis, and akin, in fact, to the principle of modern speculative philosophy, according to which the Divine Being is the absorption (Aufhebung) of those contraries which his self-evolution, or lusus amoris, has posited. This doctrine is the key-note in the system of Jacob Behmen. The other is the assumption that man—the micro-cosm, is, as it were, a miniature of the macro-cosm—the great outer world,—a little parliament to which every part of the universe sends its deputy,—his body a compound from the four circles of material existence,—his animal nature correspondent to, and dependent on, the upper firmament,—and his spirit, a divine efflux wherein, though fallen, there dwells a magnetic tendency towards its source, which renders redemption possible through Christ. There is nothing, accordingly, in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, which may not be found in the minor world of man. On this principle, further, depends the whole system of signatures in its application to the cure of human malady.[219]
Paracelsus defines true magic as the knowledge of the hidden virtues and operations of natural objects. The Cabbala imparts instruction concerning heavenly mysteries, and teaches the loftiest approximation to the Supreme. By the combination of these sources of knowledge we come to understand, and can partially produce, that marriage between heavenly influences and terrestrial objects, called, in the language of theosophy, Gamahea.[220] True magic is founded solely ‘on the Ternary and Trinity of God,’ and works in harmony with that universal life which, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, animates all nature,—even the granite, the ocean, and the flower. The magic of Paracelsus disclaims the use of all ceremonies, conjurations, bannings, and blessings, and will rest solely on the power of that faith to which the promise was given, that spirits should be subject to it, and mountains plucked up at its fiat.[221] We are here far enough from the theurgic ritual of Iamblichus. But large room still remained for superstitious practice, and Paracelsus could not refuse his faith to the potency of certain magical words, of waxen images, and of pentacula inscribed with magic characters. The universal life of nature was mythologically personified in the sylphs and gnomes, the salamanders and undines, somewhat as the thought of supernatural presence found its representation in the nymphs, the nereids, and the hamadryads, of ancient Grecian fable.[222]
In the chemistry of Paracelsus all matter is composed, in varying proportions, of salt—the firm coherent principle, of quicksilver—the fluid, and of sulphur—the fiery, or combustible.[223]
The theory of signatures proceeded on the supposition that every creature bears, in some part of its structure or outward conformation, the indication of the character or virtue inherent in it—the representation, in fact, of its idea or soul. Southey relates, in his Doctor, a legend, according to which he who should drink the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled to hear the voice and understand the speech of plants. Such a man might stand on a mountain at sunrise, and hearken to their language, from the delicate voices of wild flowers and grass blades in the dew, to the large utterance of the stately trees making their obeisance in the fresh morning airs;—might hear each enumerating its gifts and virtues, and blessing the Creator for his bestowments. The knowledge thus imparted by a charm, the student of sympathies sought as the result of careful observation. He essayed to read the character of plants by signs in their organization, as the professor of palmistry announced that of men by the lines of the hand. Such indications were sometimes traced from the resemblance of certain parts of a plant to portions of the human frame, sometimes they were sought in the more recondite relations of certain plants to certain stars. Thus citrons, according to Paracelsus, are good for heart affections because they are heart-shaped; and because, moreover, they have the colour of the sun, and the heart is, in a sort, the sun of the body. Similarly, the saphena riparum is to be applied to fresh wounds, because its leaves are spotted as with flecks of blood. A species of dentaria, whose roots resemble teeth, is a cure for toothache and scurvy.[224]
The theosophists, working on principles very similar to those of the alchemists, though with worthier and larger purpose, inherited the extraordinary language of their predecessors. That wisdom of Gamahea, which was to explain and facilitate the union of the celestial and terrestrial in the phenomena and processes of nature, naturally produced a phraseology which was a confused mixture of theological, astrological, and chemical terms. To add to the obscurity, every agent or process was veiled under symbolic names and fantastic metaphors, frequently changing with the caprice of the adept. Thus the white wine of Lully is called by Paracelsus the glue of the eagle; and Lully’s red wine is, with Paracelsus, the blood of the Red Lion. Often the metaphor runs into a kind of parable, as with Bernard of Treviso. He describes what is understood to be the solution of gold in quicksilver, under the regimen of Saturn, leaving a residuum of black paste, in the following oriental style:—
‘The king, when he comes to the fountain, leaving all strangers behind him, enters the bath alone, clothed in golden robes, which he puts off, and gives to Saturn, his first chamberlain, from whom he receiveth a black velvet suit.’[225]
In like manner, in the Secretum Magicum attributed (to Paracelsus), we find mention of the chemical Virgin Mary, of chemical deaths and resurrections, falls and redemptions, adopted from theological phraseology. We read of the union of the philosophic Sol,—Quintessentia Solis, or Fifth Wisdom of Gold, with his Father in the Golden Heaven, whereby imperfect substances are brought to the perfection of the Kingdom of Gold.[226]
The conclusion of Weidenfeld’s treatise on the Green Lion of Paracelsus may suffice as a specimen of this fanciful mode of expression, which can never speak directly, and which, adopted by Jacob Behmen, enwraps his obscure system in sevenfold darkness:—
‘Let us therefore desist from further pursuit of the said Green Lion which we have pursued through the meads and forest of Diana, through the way of philosophical Saturn, even to the vineyards of Philosophy. This most pleasant place is allowed the disciples of this art to recreate themselves here, after so much pains and sweat, dangers of fortune and life, exercising the work of women and the sports of children, being content with the most red blood of the Lion, and eating the white or red grapes of Diana, the wine of which being purified, is the most secret secret of all the more secret Chymy; as being the white or red wine of Lully, the nectar of the ancients, and their only desire, the peculiar refreshment of the adopted sons, but the heart-breaking and stumblingblock of the scornful and ignorant.’[227]