The Noble Genius of Paracelsus

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 46 pages

Blavatsky's assessment of Paracelsus as the most wondrous intellect of his age and an original thinker — bold creator of chemical medicines, founder of courageous parties, ever victorious in controversy — and as one of those great minds who created a new mode of thinking about the natural existence of things. More than one pathologist, chemist, homœopathist and magnetist, she notes, has quenched his thirst for knowledge in his books.

The long middle section is given to alkahest, a Paracelsian term to which there is no end of assumed explanations. Her own reading is that alkahest is Chaos, primordial undifferentiated substance containing the essence of all that makes up man, including the breath of life itself in a latent state; that the night dew which symbolised creation out of chaos in the northern mythologies is the Astral Light, creative and destructive at once; and that Chaos is another name for Æther, the celestial virgin and spiritual mother of every form in the manifested world. Against this she sets the other explanations — the menstruum or universal solvent capable of reducing all things, an alkaline salt of tartar, the German all-geist meaning all-spirit, and Johann Rudolf Glauber's spirit of salt. A closing section on his standing as a chemist notes the endless transpositions of letters that make his writings hard to follow: sutratur for tartar, mutrin for nitrum.

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