Part 5

Medibibaz, the Saracen of Africa, used it to change lead into gold in the following manner:—Take lead and melt it thrice with caustic (comburenti), red arsenic, sublimate of vitriol, sugar of alum, and with that red tuchia of India which is found on the shore of the Red Sea, and let the whole be again and again quenched in the juice of the Portulaca marina, the wild cucumber, a solution of sal ammoniac, and the urine of a young badger. Let all these ingredients then, when well mixed, be set on the fire, with the addition of some common salt, and well boiled until they be reduced to one-third of their original bulk, when you must proceed to distil them with care. Then take the marchasite of gold, prepared talc, roots of coral, some carcharoot, which is an herb very like the Portulaca marina; alum of Cumæ, something red and saltish, Roman alum and vitriol, and let the latter be made red; sugar of alum, Cyprus earth, some of the red Barbary earth, for that gives a good colour; Cumæan earth of the red sort, African tuchia, which is a stone of variegated colours and being melted with copper changeth it into gold; Cumæan salt which is pure red arsenic, the blood of a ruddy man, red tartar, gumma of Barbary, which is red and worketh wonders in this art; salt of Sardinia which is like.... Let all these be beaten together in a brazen mortar, then sifted finely and made into a paste with the above water. Dry this paste, and again rub it fine on the marble slab. Then take the lead you have prepared as directed above, and melt it together with the powder, adding some red alum, and some more of the various salts. This alum is found about Aleppo (Alapia), and in Armenia, and will give your metal a good colour. When you have so done you shall see the lead changed into the finest gold, as good as what comes from Arabia. This have I, Michael Scot, often put to the proof and ever found it to be true.

Whether the statement appearing in the manuscript under his name, that Michael Scot worked on this recipe, be true or not, one would not envy the task of the modern chemist who was called upon to compound the prescription. The basic idea of alchemy which, since the discovery of radium, is looked upon with some favour by certain advanced scientists, that all metals are reducible to a single substance, and therefore theoretically interchangeable, does not seem to find much place in this curious prescription, which suggests the idea of what we should call to-day a gold-substitute, rather than the genuine metal itself, in spite of the fact that we are told that the gold in question would prove “as good as what comes from Arabia.”

The greatest work of Scot as translator was his reproduction in Latin of the commentary of Averroes on the De Anima of Aristotle. This book, which expounded views on theological problems which were the reverse of orthodox, was long held back from publication by Scot’s patron, the Emperor Frederick, who hesitated to incur obloquy, and in especial the hostility of the Pope by reason of its publication. Friction, however, between the Papal See and the Emperor became so acute in the end that it appeared useless to attempt to placate papal bigotry further, and the publication in question was thus finally given to the world.

The study of the writings of Averroes had indeed taken very strong hold on Scot’s imagination, and if the story may be accepted as authentic, he even went so far as to attempt to evoke the spirit of the great Arabian, presumably with a view to securing his assistance in the work which he had in hand. There is nothing intrinsically improbable in the supposition that Scott practised or experimented in such methods of evocation. Averroes had only been dead some twenty years when Scot was in Spain, and holding the views he did, he may well have thought that the philosopher’s spirit had not passed so far from the physical plane that some form of necromantic conjuration of his conscious personality would be ineffectual. Here, as elsewhere, it seems impossible to draw the line between record of fact and that fabric of legend and tradition which has been woven round the story of his life.

A number of the tales told of Scot’s magical achievements reduce themselves in the light of modern knowledge to the results of highly developed hypnotic powers. It is familiar knowledge that such achievements are not unknown in India at the present day. A Florentine authority gives us one of these anecdotes. Scot’s guests at dinner, we are told, once asked him to show them a new marvel. The month was January. Yet in spite of the season he caused vines with fresh shoots and ripe grapes to appear on the table. The company were bidden each of them to choose a bunch, but their host warned them not to put forth their hands till he should give the sign. At the word “Cut!” lo, the grapes disappeared, and the guests found themselves each with a knife in the one hand and in the other his neighbour’s sleeve. Another story of a more or less similar character is told of a feast given by the Emperor to celebrate his coronation at Rome, which took place on November 22, 1220.

The pages were still on foot with ewers and basins of perfumed water and embroidered towels, when suddenly Michael Scot appeared with a companion, both of them dressed in Eastern robes, and offered to show the guests a marvel. The weather was oppressively warm, so Frederick asked him to procure them a shower of rain which might bring coolness. This the magician did accordingly, raising a great storm, which as suddenly vanished again at their pleasure. Being required by the Emperor to name his reward, Scot asked leave to choose one of the company to be the champion of himself and his friend against certain enemies of theirs. This being freely granted, their choice fell on Ulfo, a German baron. As it seemed to Ulfo, they set off at once on their expedition, leaving the coasts of Sicily in two great galleys, and with a mighty following of armed men. They sailed through the Gulf of Lyons, and passed by the Pillars of Hercules, into the unknown and western sea. Here they found smiling coasts, received a welcome from the strange people, and joined themselves to the army of the place; Ulfo taking the supreme command. Two pitched battles and a successful siege formed the incidents of the campaign. Ulfo killed the hostile king, married his lovely daughter, and reigned in his stead; Michael and his companion having left to seek other adventures. Of this marriage sons and daughters were begotten, and twenty years passed like a dream ere the magicians returned, and invited their champion to revisit the Sicilian court. Ulfo went back with them, but what was his amazement, on entering the palace of Palermo, to find everything just as it had been at the moment of their departure so long before; even the pages were still holding rounds with water for the hands of the Emperor’s guests. This prodigy performed, Michael and the other withdrew and were seen no more; but Ulfo, it is said, remained ever inconsolable for the lost land of loveliness, and the joys of wedded life he had left behind for ever, in a dream not to be repeated.

On Scot’s return to the court of Frederick II., after his sojourn in Sicily, he added the study and practice of the medical art to his other activities. Lesley states that he “gained much praise as a philosopher, astronomer, and physician,” and Dempster speaks of him as “one of the first physicians for learning.” He appears to have treated cases which would not yield to the ordinary medical pharmacopœia, and in particular he specialised in leprosy, gout, and dropsy. Acting apparently under his advice, Frederick II. instituted various reforms in the practice of medicine. It was stipulated that the course preliminary to qualification should consist of three years in arts, and five in medicine and surgery. Laws were passed forbidding the adulteration of drugs, while physicians were prohibited from demanding a greater fee than half a taren of gold per day, and this gave the patient the right to be visited three times in the course of the twenty-four hours. It was stipulated that the poor should be attended free of charge. Certain recipes of Michael Scot’s are still extant, and can be studied in Latin in the British Museum. One of these bears the name of the Pillulæ Magistri Michaelis Scoti. They seem to be something in the nature of a universal panacea, and perhaps if the prescription were taken up by some enterprising modern chemist, they might rival the fame of the celebrated Beecham’s Pills!

It appears that Scot had ambitions in the way of ecclesiastical preferment; but though the Emperor put himself out to secure his favourite the position which he coveted, and in fact appealed to the Pope on his behalf, nothing practical came of these representations. Probably Scot’s fame was of too dubious a kind to recommend him to the heads of the orthodox Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom the Pope applied in his interest, does not seem to have responded in any friendly fashion. Finally, an offer was made to Michael Scot of the Archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland, but in those days the Irish were little better than a barbarous race, and they spoke the language of Erse, which was a sealed book to their prospective bishop. In any case, though the Chapter had actually elected him to the post, he decided to decline. He apparently had too much principle to accept the position of an absentee bishop, and a home among a wild and uncultured race would hardly have been to the liking of a man who had associated with the most intellectual minds of Europe. These hopes of ecclesiastical preferment having fallen through, Frederick, after long delay, decided to take steps for the publication of the translation of the works of Averroes, and certain books of Aristotle, with the commentaries thereon of the Arabian philosophers. He issued an imperial circular announcing the appearance of these, and sent Michael Scot as his emissary to arrange for their publication in the principal European centres of learning. Finally, after visiting Bologna and Paris, Scot made his way to England, where he appears to have visited Oxford about the year 1230. Tradition says that he journeyed thence to his native land of Scotland. But shortly after this we lose sight of him altogether, and though there is no authoritative evidence with regard to his death, he seems to have passed away by or before the year 1232. In this year the Abbreviatio Avicennæ was published at Melfi, in the Latin version which Scot had translated. Henry of Colonia was selected by Frederick to transcribe the work from the imperial copy, and Scot’s biographer is probably right in regarding this work as a wreath laid by his imperial friend on his grave. The matter would assuredly have been placed in Scot’s own hands if he were still alive.

Scot is related to have foretold that his death would take place by the blow of a stone falling on his head, and tradition says that being in church one day with head uncovered at the sacring of the mass, a stone, shaken from the tower by the motion of the bell rope, fell upon his head, mortally wounding him. Presumably this incident occurred in Scotland; if, that is, there is any truth at all in the story.

Another prediction is also attributed to Michael Scot by the same chronicler—Pipini. He states that he foretold the manner also of the Emperor’s death, which he declared would take place “ad portas ferreas”; that is, “at the iron gates,” and in a town named after Flora. Frederick, it is said, interpreted this as referring to Florence, which city he accordingly made a point of avoiding. During his last campaign, however, in the year 1250, he fell ill at Florentino, in Apulia, where he slept in a chamber of the castle. His bed, says the story, stood against a wall recently built to fill up the ancient gateway of the tower, the iron staples on which the gate had been hung still forming part of the wall. It is stated that the Emperor, learning these particulars, and calling to mind Michael Scot’s prediction, exclaimed, “This is the place where I shall make an end, as it was told me. The will of God be done, for here I shall die.” A few days later the great Emperor passed to his rest.

Of Michael Scot’s learning and erudition there can be no question, in spite of the unfavourable criticisms of Roger Bacon with regard to his knowledge of languages, which are the less worthy of notice in view of the fact that Bacon’s own accomplishments in this direction were far inferior to those of Scot. A fairer criticism of his work would be based on its lack of originality, and the fact that the greater part of his literary output was borrowed either from the Arabians or the Greeks. His talents as a past master of mathematics were never in dispute, and his researches into the problems presented by astronomy enjoyed a great vogue in his own day.

While there is no evidence but that of highly-coloured tradition to suggest that Michael Scot was the adept he is represented as being in magical spells and incantations, there is nothing in our historical knowledge of his career which renders the practice of such arts by him at all incredible, or indeed unlikely. Legend has magnified this portion of his many-sided activities to the exclusion of that branch of his labours which might well, one would have thought, have earned for him more enduring fame. The lovers of the marvellous have thus surrounded with a mysterious and semi-sinister halo the name of a man whose chief work in life lay in the paths of philosophy, astronomy, and medical research. It seems not improbable that the last of these pursuits led this daring thinker into the investigation and practice of what to-day we term hypnotism, and its employment to the bewilderment of his acquaintances in the creation of illusions, the source of which we now recognise in the power of a master mind to mould by sheer force of will the plastic imagination and subjective consciousness of his audience.

IV PARACELSUS

The embattled forces of conservative orthodoxy are so strong that one is sometimes tempted to wonder how it is that the world ever goes round at all; how it is that the forward movement of progress succeeds, as it apparently does, in getting the better of so many retrograde tendencies, so much prejudice, so strong a clinging to the stereotyped conditions of the day. After all, the more one thinks about it, the more one becomes convinced that the whole progress of the world is the work of the very, very few; that the positive and progressive intellect is the rare exception, and that if democratic conditions really prevailed (as of course they never do) all civilisation would go backwards and gradually revert once more to chaos. What a mockery, after all, Democracy is! And how hopelessly the modern world is deluded in thinking that anywhere or at any time Democracy has in reality held sway! As a matter of fact, the many have never ruled, have never wished to rule; they have merely asked for some strong man to lead them. Where was ever the flock of sheep that did not follow the bell-wether? Here and there we meet with a master mind that—for good or evil—leads the multitude—or, if he does not lead, at least points the way where others will eventually follow. Side by side with him we see the multitude either drifting or being led. “Work!” said Voltaire, that most popular of writers, “work for the little public!” Voltaire knew, as all great leaders have known, before and after, that it is the “little public” that ever dominates the situation. It is the “little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.” “It is a sight beloved of the gods,” says the old saying, “to see a good man struggling against adversity.” But is it not a finer sight still, to see a strong man battling with the forces of orthodoxy, and refusing to yield his ground? A man of such a mould was Philip Bombast of Hohenheim, better known by his assumed name of Paracelsus. Never was there any one to whom Shelley’s celebrated line

The sun comes out and many reptiles spawn,

was more absolutely appropriate. The hostility and venomous antagonism of his own profession, with a few notable exceptions, followed and persecuted him throughout his entire medical career. The boldness and independence of his medical attitude galled the leaders as well as the rank and file of the profession. But what was still more galling to them than his lack of orthodoxy, was the fact that his novel methods, as they must have appeared to the doctors of that day, were so immeasurably more successful than their own. Paracelsus, indeed, never gave nor asked for quarter. John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees who came to him as “a generation of vipers” was no bad parallel to Paracelsus’s stinging invective on the ignorance and tradition-loving proclivities of his own profession.

Many to whom the name of Paracelsus is familiar are accustomed to look upon him as little more than a singularly successful quack who revived the traditions of an earlier school of Occultism in defiance of the more scientific methods of his own time. As a matter of fact, the doctors of his day were, in the vast majority of cases, merely theorists with little real practical experience, but with a fair store of book-learning of a very indifferent kind. It was Paracelsus whose medical knowledge was derived from experiment and experience, and who had acquired the greater part of his medical and surgical skill from wide and varied travelling and visiting more countries and more different nationalities than any other medical expert of his day, and who had learnt by actual association with all sorts and conditions of men in different climes, far more than any book-learning had ever taught him.

The period of Paracelsus’s career coincided with the Reformation of Luther, and with the wider and more general Renaissance movement. This latter development had brought back in its train the study of classical learning and classical ideals which had fallen into discredit about the period of the first triumph of Christianity and its establishment as a world-religion. The attitude of the earlier Christians, who looked upon the Pagan deities as devils, and Greek and Roman classical writers as apologists for devil-worship, had passed away; and the highest dignitaries of the Church were now often noted for their classical erudition and ripe scholarship. With the return of classical ideals came back also into favour in a number of unexpected quarters the doctrines of Neoplatonism. When Hypatia perished at Alexandria, orthodox Christianity set its foot on Plotinus and all his works. The struggle at the end had been one rather between Christianity and the later Greek philosophers with their Neoplatonic conceptions than between Christianity and Pagan Rome. The gods of Rome were dead already. Pan was dead past resurrecting. The danger that threatened Christianity was the triumph of such Emperors as Julian the Apostate—Julian, whose master was Plotinus, and whose religion was Neoplatonism merely dressed in an old Roman garb. To the thinkers and philosophers of that time the triumph of Christianity seemed like the victory of exoteric religion over the inner esoteric truths. Back, now, with all that was best of the scholarship and art of Greece and Rome, came the mystic doctrines of the Alexandrian philosophers—back, not in triumph, but daring once more to reassert themselves in the face of a hostile world that had long even forgotten their existence. A thousand years separated Hypatia from Cornelius Agrippa—a thousand years which, in the realm of thought, might well be characterised as the Dark Ages. Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was born at Cologne in 1486. Seven years later, on 10th November 1493, at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, a son was born to Dr Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, and was christened Theophrastus, in honour of Theophrastus Tyrtamos, a Greek physician, philosopher, and follower of Aristotle. This child was subsequently to be known to fame and held up to obloquy under the title of Paracelsus.

It was a period in which the world was in labour with great events. Only a year before Columbus had landed on American soil. In the same year, or the previous one, passed away a man whose life was destined to create as great a revolution in the history of the human race as that of Columbus himself—William Caxton. Returning from a long sojourn in the Netherlands in or about 1474, Caxton established his printing press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and before his death at least sixty-four books are known to have been issued from this first English Printing House. Ten years exactly before Paracelsus’s birth, a third of these great makers of revolutions had seen the light. On 10th November 1483, Martin Luther was born at Eisleben in Lower Saxony, and when the subject of these notes was twenty-four years old, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses against the Doctrine of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg. Paracelsus, when occasion offered, did not attempt to disguise his sympathy with this bold reformer, though he took no actual part in the movement, and he was accused by his enemies of being a medical Luther, a charge which he took pains to show that he did not in any way resent. Another noteworthy character in the realm of History and Literature, Lorenzo de Medici, had passed away a year before our hero’s birth. In England the Wars of the Roses were over, and Henry VII. was busy establishing monarchy on a firm basis, the people, worn out by incessant struggles, being glad to accept the Tudor rule, sympathetic as it always was to the middle and commercial classes. In Europe there was no Austrian Emperor, and Italy was still fated, for centuries to come, to remain a geographical expression. The Holy Roman Empire extended from the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea on the North to the Adriatic on the South. Poland and Lithuania extended far along its Eastern border, and the outmost limit of the realm of the Muscovite was still 500 miles east of the site where a century later Peter the Great was to found and give his name to the capital of the Russian Empire. The conquering Turk was thundering at the gates of Christendom. Ferdinand and Isabella, patrons of Columbus, reigned at Madrid. Everywhere throughout the civilised world vast changes were impending, everywhere the horizon was widening, and men’s minds were being directed into new channels and to fresh fields of enterprise and of opinion.

There has been much discussion as to what exactly is connoted by the name “Paracelsus,” and how it came to be first adopted. What seems clear is that von Hohenheim adopted the name himself, and was not, as some have held, given it by his admirers. It was a usual practice in those days to write books under some Latin nom de plume, frequently some adaptation into Latin of the name of the writer. In all probability the last two syllables of the name, “celsus,” were suggested by “Hohen” (or “high”), “Hohenheim” being literally translated as “high home.” With regard to the first two syllables it is noticeable that these were occasionally employed by Paracelsus in giving name to his medical treatises. There is thus one treatise called “Paramirum,” and another “Paragranum.” This word “para” seems to have been used in the sense of giving the word to which it was prefixed a superlative value. Thus “Paramirum” would mean “extremely wonderful.” The whole word is doubtless a polyglot hotchpotch, the first part being Greek and the second Latin; but mediæval writers had little scruple in adapting the classical tongues to their own requirements.

To follow the writings of Paracelsus it is necessary to understand his phraseology, his jargon, as we should call it in the slang of to-day. Without this he is as incomprehensible as is the dog Latin of a scientific textbook to one who is not a scientific specialist—or, to give another example, as the language of Astrology is to one who is not an Astrologer. Paracelsus held that there were three basic substances necessary to the existence of all bodies. These he called Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt. Sulphur corresponds to fire, or rather to the principle of inflammability; Mercury to water, or fluidity; and Salt to earth, or solidity. For a full glossary of the terms which he employed, readers are referred to the volume on The Life and Philosophy of Paracelsus, by the late Dr Franz Hartmann. In this terminology Azoth stands for the creative principle in Nature, or the spiritual vitalising force; the Ilech Primum is the causative force; Cherio, the essence of the thing, the “fifth principle,” which constitutes what we call its essential qualities; the Evestrum is man’s astral body, his ethereal counterpart, that may act to him as guardian angel and warn him of dangers; the Elementaries are the astral corpses of the dead, and must not be confused with the Elementals, or Nature Spirits—Sylphs, Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes; Magic is the conscious employment of spiritual powers to act on external Nature. Many of these expressions have been adopted by the Theosophists of the present day and by students of Occultism.

It is clear, though Paracelsus long antedated Hahnemann, the founder of Homœopathy, that much of his medical teaching is what we should now call Homœopathic. Hahnemann, in fact, borrowed extensively from Paracelsus. Take, for instance, Paracelsus’s teaching with regard to the quintessence or virtue of each substance. This, he taught, though infinitesimal in quantity, even in large bodies, had none the less the power to affect the mass through and through, as a single drop of gall embitters, or a few grains of saffron colour a large quantity of water. The application of homœopathic cures by those ignorant of homœopathic principles has frequently led to mistakes in this connection; as, for instance, the administration of doses many times in excess of what the complaint requires, the result being the entire failure of the medicine to produce the intended effect.

“There are wide differences,” says Paracelsus, striking again a very homœopathic note, “between what the ancient doctors taught and what we here teach, and therefore our healing art differs widely from theirs. For we teach that what heals a man also wounds him, and what wounded will also heal him. For the nettle can be so changed that it cannot burn, the flame so that it does not scorch, and the chelidony so that it does not cicatrize. Thus similars are good in healing, such and such a salt to such and such a sore. And the things which heal a wound in Nature heal the same sort of wound in man.”

“Many kinds of rust,” says Paracelsus again, “occur in the minerals; for each mineral has its own peculiar nature.” This rust is in the form of a disease, and iron has one disease, while copper has another. In a similar way a man has a sore and it is healed by treatment. The metal, too, has a sore, and can be healed by treatment. “Metallic bodies,” says Paracelsus, long antedating the discoveries of the present day, “are as liable to death as the others, for their salt is arsenic.” The whole earth is linked together, and the life that passes through the bodies of men passes also through the bodies of minerals. Paracelsus had no patience with those who taught of a panacea that would heal all diseases. He described them as people who “rode all horses with one saddle,” through whom more harm than good was effected. He maintained that a doctor must know the sick and all matters appertaining to their state “just as a carpenter knows his wood.” He mentions six essential qualifications for the practical physician.

(1) A doctor (he says) must know how many kinds of tissue there are in the body, and how each kind stands in relation to the man.

(2) He must know all the bones, such as the ribs and their coverings, the difference between one and another, their relations to each other and their articulations.

(3) He must know all the blood-vessels, the nerves, the cartilages and how they are held together.

(4) He must know the length, number, form, condition, and purpose of each member of the body, its particular flesh, marrow, and all other details.