The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus & the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

a review by Erik Davis

It's
a rare treat to be able to trace an abiding intellectual obsession to a
single moment in time. But so it is when I ponder my ongoing
fascination with the occult fringes of science, and, more generally,
with the anthropology of knowledge. It was senior year in high school,
and for once I was paying attention to Mr. Grey, a physics teacher
whose name I don't actually remember but whose entire being radiated
the sort of officious banality my typically romantic and alienated teen
self loathed. A retired Navy guy (this was San Diego) with a gravely
voice and a grey buzzcut, Mr. Grey was a droning, pedantic bore, and it
is no wonder that I spent most of the classes in the back row, cracking
jokes with Chuckles and playing hot'n'heavy footsie with the impish
Jenny Cole. I liked physics, but I ignored the class.

This was
not the case, however, on the day we dug into Kepler's three laws of
planetary motion. Reading about Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits
in the textbook had fascinated me, not so much because I love astronomy
(which I do), but because the textbook had had the rare generosity of
mentioning that, while Kepler thought that the three laws were pretty
nifty, what really rocked his boat was his discovery that the
relationship between the planetary orbits could be neatly mapped onto a
nested organization of the five Platonic solids, wherein the vertices
of one solid touched the faces of the next largest solid in the series.
In other words, Kepler thought that what we now consider his immortal
astronomical discoveries were less significant than his
metaphysical—and essentially occult—speculations about the
geometrically perfect harmony of the spheres.

This visionary
dimension seemed deeply important, so I asked Mr. Grey whether Kepler's
wacky Platonic Russian doll should have any bearing on our
understanding of Kepler's achievement. He didn't even understand the
question, and we blubbered back and forth for a bit until I gave up and
resumed the footsie action. To Mr. Grey, all that mattered was the
usefulness of the laws; all the rest was trash.

To me, the
speculative context made all the difference, because it showed the
vital and organic correspondences between what we think of as science
and what we think of as occult or theologically-informed cosmology.
More to the point, it told us something vital about Kepler himself.
Years later, when I read Arthur Koestler's great book The Watershed, I
felt confirmed in my view that this historical conjunction is not just
of historical interest, but strikes at the heart of the meaning and
function of cosmology, certainly in the Renaissance, and
possibly–probably–today. More deeply, it points to the role that the
poetic imagination–the fancy that weaves analogies and
correspondences–plays in the construction of our “real world.”

All
this was brought back to me recently when I was in London. I was
scanning the ever-excellent and ever-expanding book collection of my
pal the Pilkdown Man. Topping one of the towers of text was The Devil's Doctor, a book about Paracelsus and “the World of Renaissance Magic and Science” by the British science writer Philip Ball.
It was a fortuitous discovery, because, as part of an ongoing but
essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently
been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant
sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of
medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally
by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus
instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality,
and self-healing powers of the body.

Having already brushed up
against Paracelsus' own rich but impenetrable prose, I was immensely
relieved that Ball had appeared to lead me through the Renaissance
thickets by the secondary hand. (I told you I was lazy.) Given the
noodle-limp dollar, The Devil's Doctor was about the only thing I
purchased in the UK. I read almost the whole thing on the plane ride
home, in between marveling at the glittering, melting majesty of
Iceland and Greenland as they unrolled below me and marveling at the
complete absorption of all but one of my fellow travelers in the movies
flickering across their cramped little screens.

Ball's book is a
marvel of the middle of the road—clear and readable, entertaining and
informative, and quietly significant. With sympathy and a tart wit,
Ball tells Paracelsus' fascinating story, which is rich enough for a
crusty biopic starring Harvey Keitel. Ball also puts this very strange
man in context by painting a number of relevant historical backdrops:
medieval medicine, the proto-sciences of mining and metallurgy,
Renaissance astrology, the early Reformation, the legend of Faust.

These
micro-histories alone are worth the price of admission, but what truly
delights is Ball's portrait of Philip Theophrastus Bombast von
Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, a cranky, brilliant and, yes, bombastic
vagabond healer. Paracelsus was seemingly in love with skewering sacred
cows and pissing off the local muckety-mucks—especially those doctors
who siphoned their high-status positions from the muck of ignorance and
credulity. Medieval doctors didn't even carry out the gruesome
surgeries of the day, which were left to lower-class barbers while the
“scholars” flipped through Galen and plucked out recommendations.
Paracelsus hated these guys.

So he had to keep on trucking. At a
time when few folks traveled far from their birthplaces, Paracelsus
wandered everywhere—the Holy Land, Egypt, western Europe, England,
Sweden, Russia, Turkey. He picked up tips from Tartar shamans, drank
and ranted in bars, mocked those in power, and healed a lot of people.
My favorite tale took place in Basle, during one of Paracelsus'
controversial and, as usual, short-lived teaching gigs. In a lecture
hall filled with doctors, Paracelsus claimed he was about to reveal the
greatest secret of medicine—and then unveiled a steaming plate of human
shit.

The crap was more than a prank. As Ball explains, it also
derived from Paracelsus' alchemical belief in the potential fecundity
of waste and decay. Indeed, one of Paracelsus' many remarkable (and
often kooky) innovations was to apply the basic dynamics of alchemical
transmutation to the intertwined world of plant medicines and the human
body. Ball calls it “alchemical materialism,” a sort of enchanted
bio-chemistry. Even the concept of metabolism arose from Paracelsus'
dynamic and, in many ways, highly corporeal understanding of bodily
being—a corporeal understanding that looked to herbs and minerals but
was by no means adverse to the invocation of astrological forces or the
healing power of mumia—aka, powdered mummy.

It's to Ball's
enormous credit that, while remaining firmly rooted in western science,
he understands and appreciates the premodern, theological (and magical)
aspects of Paracelsus' worldview. The Renaissance is almost defined by
this extraordinary conflict between the premodern imagination and a
budding skeptical modernity—in fact, it is precisely Paracelsian-style
“natural magic,” with its pragmatic, operative character, that bridges
the gap between dusty Aristotelian book lore and empirical science.
Ball defines Paracelsus himself as a “skeptical mystic”—deeply beholden
to alchemical cosmology, but also critical of the existing social order
and its medical shibboleths. It is because of this perspective—in
betwixt and in-between—that Paracelsus was able alter and reimagine the
west's fundamental culture of healing.

And of poisoning. One of
Paracelsus' great insights, which sometimes earns him accolades (or
blame) as the grandfather of homeopathy, was that “poison” is a
relative term, if not a hidden balm. Mercury, for example, whose
toxicity was known, could cure syphilis, but only in moderation. “Is
not a mystery of nature concealed in every poison? What has God created
that He did not bless with some great gift for the benefit of man? Why
then should poison be rejected and despised, if we consider not the
poison but its curative virtue?”

There is something searching and
empirical about this insight. At the same time, it also reflects the
deeply dialectical nature of alchemy, which finds in antinomies echoes
of the fundamental dynamics of the soul. In the end, Ball is enchanted
by these dynamics while recognizing that they are, from a scientific
view, wrong-headed. I remain tremendously enamored of what Ball calls
“chemical theology”, but I also understand why Ball insists on the
errors of the approach. When I caught pneumonia last spring, I was
gobbling down penicillin, not wielding a dowsing rod or measuring the
heavens.

Ball praises Paracelsus for rejecting the hide-bound
medicine of the medieval docs, but you can tell that the biographer
also recognizes what we moderns lose when we leave the magical
correspondences of the religious imagination behind. In the end, this
loss of “soul” just might wind up sickening our bodies as well—to say
nothing of the planet. “In all things there is a poison,” wrote
Paracelsus. “It depends only upon the dose whether a poison is a poison
or not.”

The superstitious and sometimes harmful credulity of
religious tradition can certainly be considered a poison. But for many
of us moderns, hurtling towards a chilly posthumanism, a draught of the
poetic and cosmic imagination that feeds religious credulity can wipe
away the pain. And even, potentially, heal it. For though skepticism
and empirical reason have cleared away many cobwebs of theological
error, we are all swimming in the toxic sludge these cultural solvents
have left in their wake. The alchemist can envision the gold growing in
the sludge; the realist only marvels at the mess we've made, and turns
up the collar of his coat.