Weidmann, Pia Holenstein, and Urs L. Gantenbein. Nova acta paracelsica: Beiträge zur Paracelsus-Forschung. Neue Folge 17. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 141 (DuBruck).

Summary

We have chosen issue 17 of Nova acta paracelsica for review in order to introduce our readers to Paracelsus studies, alive and well, in Switzerland (Schweizerische Paracelsus-Gesellschaft). In view of contemporary experiments with alternative medicines, a retrospective about Paracelsus, the great scholar of healing, born in the last years of the fifteenth century, is especially timely (see also my “Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus: Highways and Byways of a Wandering Physician [1493–1541],” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 [2000]: 1–10).

Nova acta paracelsica 17 contains five articles by specialists and a reprint of thirteen poems “in Paracelsus's orbital sphere” (Dunstkreis) by Herbert Fritsche. Alois M. Haas (Uitikon-Waldegg) distinguishes magic and alchemy, both considered sciences in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but discusses only magic, for Paracelsus an amalgam of Christian and Neoplatonic/Stoic thoughts. Lucien Braun (former president of Strasbourg University) continues on magic, this time within Hohenheim's writings. For Paracelsus magic is a revelation of nature (on earth and in the heavenly constellations), an invisible force, “an eye for perceiving the secrets of nature” (18 — my translation), with humankind “imbedded” in the universe. In Dr. Paracelsus's words, sickness is a harmful (pathogenic) force in patients who can be healed by medicinal herbs; ailments differ for men and women, whether living in mountainous habitats or flatland. Magic is an epistemological tool as well as an astral function of healing. Today, Braun adds, we distinguish an alchemist from a magician, whereas for Hohenheim the two practitioners may possibly be reduced to one and the same person whose magic has (or equals) aspects of philosophical anthropology.

Regula Forster (Zürich) discusses hermetics and alchemy in an Arabic version of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, held to be included in a letter of Aristotle to his pupil, Alexander the Great, written in the Near East and found in the tenth century A.D. This text, believed to be an autograph of the Greek philosopher’s, was very popular in the Middle Ages (29–30) and was translated into all European languages. It contains: rules of conduct for kings (a speculum principorum), advice on keeping good health, on choosing ministers, secretaries, etc.; on hermetics and alchemy. Forster then analyzes a twelfth-c. version which may have influenced Paracelsus.