Paracelsus, the wandering physician, wrote: "The art of transformation is the highest art. For what is alchemy but the separation of the pure from the impure, the extraction of light from darkness, the liberation of the spirit from the gross matter that imprisons it?"
He who was called bombastic and arrogant, who burned the books of Galen and Avicenna in the public square, who healed those the learned doctors had abandoned — he spoke of a deeper medicine:
"Man has a visible and an invisible body.
The visible is the house; the invisible is the inhabitant.
The body you see will return to earth.
But there is another body, built of starlight and spirit,
Which does not die when the earthly house crumbles."
Paracelsus taught that within base matter lies hidden gold. Not the gold of merchants, but the philosophical gold — the perfected state toward which all creation strains. The alchemist's task is not to create this gold but to reveal it, to remove the dross that conceals what was always present.
"The physician who knows nothing of alchemy cannot understand disease," he wrote. "For disease is impurity, and healing is purification. What the fire does to metal, transformation does to the soul."
"First there is putrefaction — the black stage,
Where all that you were must rot and dissolve.
Then comes the white — the washing, the purification.
And finally the red — the gold revealed,
The phoenix rising from its own ashes."
He wandered through Europe, learning from miners and midwives, from executioners and gravediggers, from all whom the universities despised. "I have not been ashamed to learn from vagabonds, butchers, and barbers," he declared. "For I sought not reputation but truth."
The physicians of his age sought to balance humors. Paracelsus sought transformation. "Do not give the patient what will maintain his disease in a gentler form. Give what will burn the disease out of him entirely, even if the burning is terrible."
Of death and rebirth, he wrote:
"Nothing can be made without first being destroyed.
The seed must die to become the tree.
The ore must be melted to release the metal.
The old man must perish for the new to be born.
This is the great secret: dissolution precedes reconstitution."
Paracelsus died at forty-seven, in poverty, in Salzburg. Some say he was thrown down a cliff by hired assassins sent by the physicians whose livings he had threatened. Others say the mercury and antimony with which he worked finally poisoned him. But his words remained:
"Decay is the beginning of all birth. It is the midwife of great things. It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved."
Teaching 7
You already possess the gold you seek. It lies hidden within the lead of your ordinary existence. The work is not acquisition but revelation — burning away what conceals the treasure.