Raising Hell (20 page)

The next morning, feeling very much better, the maid went to her mistress’s room and pulled aside the bed curtains. The old lady looked at her with confusion, asking who she was and what she wanted.

“Who am I?” the servant replied. “I’m your maid.”

“But that can’t be,” the noblewoman said. “My maid is a woman fifty years old.”

The maid put her hand to her face, then turned to look at herself in the mirror. What she saw there was a fresh-faced twenty-year-old, free of wrinkles, cured of the colic, and probably out of a job.

THE ALKAHEST

If there was a third string to the alchemists’ bow, a third secret that the fraternity was bent on discovering, it was the alkahest, or universal solvent.

All things in the universe, according to the alchemists’ understanding, could be broken down in the end to what they called the
prima materia,
the first matter, the essence to which everything, both material and immaterial, could be reduced.

But this essence was very tough to pin down and isolate. It was fleeting, fragile, impossible to discern with the naked eye. If this ultimate reduction of all things was captured at all, it would have to be in the form of a mysterious liquid, which would have the power of dissolving all things it came into contact with.

The difficulties become readily apparent.

One of the first to pursue the alkahest was Paracelsus, who claimed, in his book entitled
Members of Man,
that the alkahest acts “very efficiently upon the liver; it sustains, fortifies and preserves from the diseases within its reach. . . .” In another of his books,
On the Nature of Things,
Paracelsus discussed an elixir that can transmute and perfect metals. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly (and in alchemy texts, nothing is ever clear or explicit), it sounds again like he’s claiming to use the alkahest to conduct his experiments.

In the early seventeenth century, a Dutch alchemist named Jan Baptista van Helmont took the cue from Paracelsus and went after the alkahest in a big way. Claiming to have used divine inspiration in his pursuit of the elusive essence, he said he’d finally found it. It dissolved everything it touched, he proclaimed, just “as warm water dissolves ice.” Not only that, it was the most spectacular wonder drug the world had ever known: “It is a salt, most blessed and perfect of all salts; the secret of its preparation is beyond human comprehension and God alone can reveal it to the chosen.” Of which he seemed to be about the only one.

But for the next couple of hundred years, the search was on—and heated. Alchemists, chemists, doctors, magicians, herbalists, seers, everyone was after this great prize, and many of them claimed, at one time or another, to have found it. One of the more impressive claims was staked by Johann Rudolf Glauber, a German pharmacist born in Carlstadt in 1603. What Glauber had actually stumbled upon was sodium sulfate, which he called Glauber’s salt. Echoing van Helmont, he declared that anyone pursuing this arcane research must understand that “such a work is purely the gift of God, and cannot be learned by the most acute power of human mind, if it be not assisted by the benign help of a Divine Inspiration.” Offering some encouragement to those who hoped to follow his lead, he said he was sure “that in the last times, God will raise up some to whom He will open the Cabinet of Nature’s Secrets. . . .”

Another alchemist, Johann Kunkel, wasn’t so sure. Perhaps frustrated by his own unsuccessful attempts, Kunkel declared that “such a dissolvent does not exist, and I call it by its true name,
Alles Lugen ist,
’all that is a lie.’ “ Voicing the obvious and insurmountable problem, Kunkel said, “If the alkahest dissolves all bodies, it will dissolve the vessel which contains it; if it dissolves flint, it will render liquid the glass retort, for glass is made with flint.” Although Kunkel’s declarations didn’t put an absolute stop to the search—one adept asserted that he’d found the universal solvent and that he was able to store it in a vial of wax—much of the enthusiasm was inevitably lost.

PARACELSUS

He was bald and fat, with a violent temper and a caustic tongue. His manners were notoriously coarse, and his clothes shabby and disheveled. His face was known to turn purple with rage. But Paracelsus was also a pioneer of medical science and an occultist of the first stripe. Everywhere he went—and in his life he went virtually everywhere, from Sicily to Sweden to France to Egypt—he stirred up trouble, made headlines, and challenged
the authorities, whether they were secular or scientific, religious or royal. When he died under mysterious circumstances at the age of forty-eight (some say he was poisoned, others that he was thrown from a cliff by his enemies), he left behind him a legacy of obscure texts, fantastic stories, and, perhaps most important, scientific methods that are in essence used to this day.

He also gave us the word “bombast.” Born Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim in 1493, his own name came to signify a loud and aggressive personality. It was only later in life that he chose to call himself Paracelsus, to signify his superiority to the ancient Roman physician known as Celsus. Modesty was never one of his virtues. His father was a Swiss physician, and his mother had supervised a hospital before getting married, but Paracelsus was bored and restless with the usual course of study. Even at sixteen, when he discontinued his studies at the University of Basel, he was already fed up with the rote learning that passed for education in his day. He took off for the abbey at Sponheim, where he absorbed all that he could from the abbot there, Trithemius, whose own chemical experiments—in search of the philosophers’ stone and the universal cure-all, which he called the Grand Catholicon—were considered the most advanced and successful to date.

His next stop, when even that began to pall, was the Tirol, where he studied firsthand the lives of the miners who toiled for the wealthy and powerful Fugger family.

Paracelsus learned a lot there. First, he learned a great deal about minerals, ores, and precious metals, about stones and soil. All of this knowledge would later figure greatly in his chemical and astrological studies.

But he also studied the injuries the miners routinely suffered in the pits and the bronchial diseases they endured. And he rapidly became disenchanted with the standard medical wisdom and practices. Up until that time, doctors relied almost entirely upon the wisdom of the ancients, on the theories and advice handed down by Galen and Avicenna and Aristotle. Paracelsus would have none of it; if he couldn’t see something with his own
eyes, he refused to believe it. If he couldn’t determine the efficacy of some treatment by testing it on his own patients, he made up his own treatment instead. He was bold, he was uncompromising, and he was, above all, open to knowledge wherever it might come from.

“Everywhere,” he writes, “I inquired diligently and gathered experience of the true medical art, not alone from doctors but also from barbers, women, sorcerers, alchemists, in convents, from the low ranks and from those of the nobility, from the intelligent and the simple-minded.”

When he returned to Basel in 1526, he was made town physician and given a teaching appointment at the university there. But in no time he had riled his fellow faculty members, first by lecturing in German (when Latin had always been the accustomed tongue) and second by challenging the standard texts. Indeed, he went so far as to take the books of Galen and Avicenna, toss them into a brazen vase, and burn them.

Not that this endeared him to any of the other practicing physicians of his day. (Or the apothecaries, who made their living selling the concoctions that the ancients had formulated and prescribed.) Paracelsus was attacked for his theories and for his lack of professional degrees. But he argued back that he had learned what he knew from the best source of all—life itself, which he had observed and analyzed. “Whence have I all my secrets,” he asked, “out of what writers and authors? Ask rather how the beasts have learned their arts. If nature can instruct irrational animals, can it not much more men?” The fact that Paracelsus presented lectures based on his own discoveries and observations was revolutionary.

But it was all, ultimately, too much for Basel to handle. Things came to a head when one of Paracelsus’s patients, whom he had successfully cured, refused to pay his bill. Paracelsus brought suit against him, and, though he was indisputably in the right, he lost the case; that’s when he decided there was no point in remaining there. He packed up his belongings and left—but not before dropping a few choice words for the “wormy lousy
sophists” who had, he felt, influenced the verdict and made his university tenure so troublesome: “You are nothing but teachers and masters combing lice and scratching,” he declared. “You are not worthy that a dog should lift his hind leg against you. Your prince Galen is in hell, from whence he has sent letters to me, and if you knew what he told me, you would make the sign of the cross on yourselves with a fox’s tail.” Pronouncements like these made Paracelsus fresh enemies wherever he showed up.

But it was his genius, combined with the undeniable force of his personality, that also made him such an influential figure. And though his scientific methods and much of his philosophy were wise and insightful—it was Paracelsus who was one of the first to understand the powerful influence of the mind on the body, to realize that the dread of disease was sometimes worse than even the disease itself—he was also the ardent proponent of mystical ideas and systems that defied not only logic but any empirical attempts to verify them. He was, quite clearly, a man of vast contradictions.

“Resolute imagination,” he once said, “is the beginning of all magical operations.” And through the practiced use of imagination, Paracelsus believed many things were possible: “It is possible that my spirit, without the help of my body, and through an ardent will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. It is also possible that I can bring the spirit of my adversary into an image and then fold him up or lame him at my pleasure.” He believed that imagination could allow a man to predict the future and to see what his friends were doing, even if they were in another country.

He also contended that it was possible to create life in the laboratory and claimed that he’d done it himself—that he’d formulated an artificial human being, a creature known as a
homunculus.
He even offered the recipe in one of his books. First, it was necessary to deposit a sizable specimen of human semen into a flask, then seal the flask tightly and bury it in a pile of horse manure. It was also important to “magnetize” the sample
properly, though it’s not entirely clear what that meant. Forty days later, Paracelsus claimed, a tiny, transparent proto-human would appear inside the flask.

The next step was to take the flask back into the lab and start adding to it daily doses of human blood; for forty weeks, the flask was to be kept at the steady temperature of a mare’s womb. If everything had been done according to the instructions, at the end of that time you’d have a fully formed, though small, human child, altogether normal in every other way. “It may be raised and educated,” Paracelsus wrote, “until it grows older and is able to look after itself.”

Paracelsus had devised an elaborate and mysterious system in which all things in the universe were interconnected, and influenced each other for good or ill. And man was simply a microcosm of the whole; to understand how all things operated on each other in the outer world was to understand how they would operate inside the individual human being. For instance, he believed in a strong astral influence upon the body: “A physician who wishes to be rational must know the constitution of the universe as well as the constitution of man. . . . All the influences that come from the sun, the planets and stars act invisibly upon man, and if these influences are evil they will produce evil effects.”

Each of the major organs in the body, according to Paracelsus, was developed under the influence of a particular planet or star and worked in some mysterious conjunction with it. The heart, he asserted, was in sympathy with the sun, while the brain related to the moon; the gallbladder was under the sway of Mars, the kidneys Venus, and the spleen Saturn. Thus, he argued, “If a man gets angry, it is not because he has too much bile, but because the Mars combative element in his body is in a state of exaltation. If a man is amorous it is because the Venus element in his body is in a state of exaltation.” If those two in particular come together, the result is a fit of jealousy.

Plants and metals, too, had their celestial correspondences. But if the physician was sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable,
he could take all of this into account when tending to his patients. His reasoning may not have always been right, but Paracelsus’s prescriptions often were; in an era when bleeding and purging and emetics were the usual methods, he used new plant-and mineral-based pharmaceuticals of his own invention, employing opium, mercury, sulfur. He recommended natural baths, and opening sick rooms to fresh air and sunlight, and taking antiseptic measures when performing surgery. He asserted that epileptics, contrary to popular wisdom, were not lunatics possessed by demons but simply people afflicted with a strange disease.