Essential Readings

"If you are interested in Paracelsus, or are doing undergraduate/postgraduate work that involves this important chemical and medical pioneer, this book is an absolute 'must'. It is very easy to get the wrong idea about Paracelsus, either by reading hagiographic accounts (which feature quite strongly in medical reference works) or from second and third hand accounts of his work by writers who are not really qualified to comment on it.

Paracelsus was a prolific writer, and one can 'prove' almost anything about him by taking a bit from here, and a bit from there. You want to prove he was a medical genius? That's easy - the accounts of his cures are astonishing (and probably not exaggerated). Or maybe you want to see him as a magus, bringing down forces from the macrocosm into our human control? That's easy too, because neo-Platonism runs through his work. Or how about describing him as a Christian preacher? He's that, too. And he's a political figure, proposing a kind of Christian socialism. He might also be a magician...

If you read this excellent book, which has been prepared by someone obviously expert in the field - and who has been guided by the greatest 20th century Paracelsian specialist - you can begin to get a feel for the breadth of Paracelsus' work, and you will surely find that simple classification of him is impossible. In fact, there is even material in these translations which reveal Paracelsus as a pioneer in identifying the potential and actual role of mathematics in natural philosophy - long before Galileo, and surely a worthwhile subject for further research.

Whilst this book represents only a fraction of Paracelsus' work, it seems to contain a fairly balanced and representative selection; only specialists would need to go deeper, for example into the details of his medicines - another interesting area for research. There's a very good description of Paracelsus' ideas about how the universe operates: a kind of matter/energy field, which is operated on by an active force, the Archeus. These ideas have quite close similarities with certain aspects of modern physics, and the book contains the best descriptions of these key aspects of his thinking that I have seen. There are also key biographical details and descriptions of other aspects of his 'philosophy'. Achieving all this in book of quite modest size is a real achievement, and it's a permanent fixture in my bookcase."
~ Written on 2003-11-11