The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus And the World of Renaissance Magic And Science - Hardcover

Ball, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374229791 ISBN 13: 9780374229795

Verlag: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A portrait of the sixteenth-century Swiss physician and alchemist evaluates the myths attributed to his character and his contentious relationship with the medical establishment and universities of his time, in an account that traces his journeys across Europe and his achievements in light of period intellectual, political, and religious factors.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Philip Ball is the author of Life’s Matrix (FSG, 2000), Bright Earth (FSG, 2002), and Critical Mass (FSG, 2004), which won the Aventis Science Book Prize in 2005.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Devil's Doctor

CHAPTER ONE

Black Madonna

A Country Doctor

 

First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.

Paracelsus, physician, magician, alchemist, urge, demiurge, deus et omnia was born under the sign of the occult, ruled by Mars and driven by a mountain in his soul.

--Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (1997)

 

 

 

Every year on the fourteenth of September, it is as if the small Swiss town of Einsiedeln, in the canton of Schwyz, returns to the time when Paracelsus was born there. The town square, dominated by the vast Benedictine abbey, is dark but for thousands of candles flickering in glass pots from every wall and windowsill. As the moon rises above the wooded hill that overlooks the scene, the evening is scented with the resinous tang of incense. From out of the abbey comes a solemn procession of pilgrims, each with a flame in hand, led by priests robed in white and monks in their dark habits. The only incongruous element is a brass band in chocolate-box uniforms, lending the scene a touch of fairground baroque. It is the end of summer, and the night air grows chill. Outside, beyond the town, darkness gathers.

The candle-carrying pilgrims who parade each year in Einsiedeln mark the annual celebration of the Miraculous Consecration. The first church and monastery were erected there in 948 by the wealthy Canon Eberhard of Strasbourg, but plans for their consecration byBishop Conrad of Constanz were preempted. On the eve of the ceremony, the bishop was astonished to find the chapel filled with a choir of angels, while the service was conducted by Christ Himself, assisted by St. Peter, St. Gregory the Great, and the Four Evangelists. Not trusting his own senses, and entreated by Eberhard and the Benedictine brothers to carry out the ceremony as had been planned, the bishop began the ritual the next day only to be halted by God's voice telling him that the place was already consecrated. Hearing Conrad's account, Pope Leo VIII forbade any subsequent attempt at consecration.

Einsiedeln was already a site of pilgrimage when the abbey was built. But there had been nothing there except wild forest when, in the ninth century, the Benedictine monk Meinrad arrived from Bollingen on Lake Zürich. In a clearing by the River Sihl, Meinrad established a hermitage where he withdrew in 829 for a life of solitary contemplation. He took with him a Madonna and Child carved from hard black wood, a gift from Abbess Hildegarde of the convent on Lake Zurich. To house this statue Meinrad made a shrine, and the "Black Madonna" became known as Our Lady of Einsiedeln. The original figurine was destroyed by a fire, but a fifteenth-century copy still stands in a gilded case in the entrance to the abbey.

As people began to seek out this ascetic hermit and ask for his blessing, the rumor spread that Meinrad had accumulated great wealth. One day brigands turned up at the lonely hut and cut down the monk, who greeted them mildly with an offer of food. But they searched in vain for treasure. According to legend, two ravens, witnessing the murder, flew to Zurich to raise the alarm, so that the thieves were caught and burned at the stake. Meinrad, martyred in 861, was subsequently canonized. Einsiedeln does not forget its founding legend, for the two black ravens are everywhere still today: on the town's coat of arms, on the Black Madonna's shrine, even on the logo for the local beer.

By the fifteenth century the town had grown around the monastery, with a hospital where sick pilgrims were treated. Some time in the 1480s Paracelsus's father, a young medical graduate of the University of Tübingen named Wilhelm von Hohenheim, arrived in Einsiedeln and became physician for the town and hospital.

FALLEN FROM GRACE

Wilhelm may have wandered this way more or less aimlessly from southern Germany, without money and lacking even the formal qualification of a doctor, for he did not complete his postgraduate studies at Tübingen. Although the family name von Hohenheim implied nobility, his father Georg had been disgraced and became impoverished, and moreover Wilhelm was illegitimate and had been raised on his uncle's farm in the village of Rieth in Württemberg.

Hohenheim Castle stood near Stuttgart in Swabia, and it was the seat (the name means "mountain home") of Conrad Bombast, who died in 1299. Conrad was a soldier and a feudal tenant of the count of Württemberg, with claim to the tithes of the villagers of Plieningen and Ober-Esslingen. But by the time Georg rode as a commander of the Teutonic Knights on a crusade to the Holy Land in 1468, the fortunes of the Bombasts were in decline. They had farther yet to fall.

Bombast, an old Swabian name, has inevitably given rise to the idea that Paracelsus's bluster and arrogance lie at the root of the word "bombastic." One feels that ought to be so, but it is not. Baum means "tree" in German (in the Swabian dialect it is rendered Bom), and Baumbast is the fibrous layer of a tree's bark. But in the sixteenth century "bombast" had also come to mean cotton padding, inappropriately derived from bombax, the medieval Latin name for the silkworm, and it is from this origin that the connotation of puffed up derives. The family line of the Bombasts von Hohenheim ended in 1574, but there were still Bombasts in Württemberg in the nineteenth century.

The story of Ritter (knight) Georg Bombast von Hohenheim has something of a Paracelsian tenor, for he was a man toppled from his position of power by his own ungovernable impulses. He fathered Wilhelm in 1457 by an unnamed mistress--no great embarrassment for its time, although disadvantageous for Wilhelm--and Georg came to hold high rank with the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem.

In 1489 Georg became embroiled in a bitter political argument in Stuttgart, and his fierce tongue caused him to be summoned before the High Court of Justice, which decreed that Georg's estate (such asit was) was forfeit. Thereafter the disgraced von Hohenheims were a family of paltry means and little consequence. It may have been his father's downfall that set Wilhelm on his travels south. Others say that his arrival in Einsiedeln was no happenstance, but that he was summoned there from Württemberg to take up his position as town physician in 1481.

A COUNTRY DOCTOR

There is a woodcut of Einsiedeln from 1577 that shows the abbey lodged on a hill beneath forests that climb up the mountainside. A cluster of houses is scattered farther down the slopes, and the road winding up to the abbey from the valley floor is busy with pilgrims on foot and on horse. Down a ravine, steepened by artistic license, tumbles the torrent of the Sihl, and the water is straddled at one point by the wooden Teüfelsbrücke, the Devil's Bridge. Beside this bridge is a sturdy building, somewhat larger than the humble lodgings of the town, and this, one assumes, is the inn where a footsore Wilhelm rested after his long journey.

The inn, set in green hills about three miles from the town, was run by the family of Rudi Ochsner. It stood on ground owned by the abbey, to which the Ochsners were feudally bound. Behind the inn, cattle graze in gently undulating meadows--but the hierarchy of the picture is clear enough, with the abbey dominating the vista like a lord's castle. The inn stood until the nineteenth century, when it was burned down.

Today there is another tavern in its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374229791
• ISBN 13: 9780374229795
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 436
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar