Paracelsus
1493 – 1541 Swiss physician, alchemist, natural philosopher
Reforming physician and alchemist who founded a spiritual approach to medicine.
- Religion
- Christian nature mysticism, seeing the physician as reading the divine signatures written into nature and healing through alchemical medicine.
- Affiliations
- No society. His ideas seeded later Rosicrucian and Hermetic medicine.
Paracelsus rejected the medical orthodoxy of his day and built a system that joined alchemy, astrology, and Christian nature mysticism, using chemical remedies and the doctrine of signatures. He taught that the human being was a microcosm reflecting the larger cosmos. His writings became a major source for Rosicrucian and later Hermetic medicine.
Connections
- influenced Carl Jung — Wrote studies of Paracelsus as a forerunner of psychological alchemy.
- influenced Christian Rosenkreuz — Paracelsian ideas run through the Rosicrucian manifestos.
- influenced Robert Fludd — Built his medicine on Paracelsian foundations.
- influenced Robert Fludd — Fludd built his medicine on Paracelsian principles.