[Extract of a Manuscript on the Paracelsian Olympic Spirits]

I. The Curtain Rises.

Once upon a time, in the now dark tail of the years 1510 to 1516, a young, short, half-bald hermaphrodite [0] visited a man in his abbey St. James to Würzburg, whom they called the Black Abbot. There, the young man sat, almost still a boy in his body, and yet the piercing bright light of a star pushed over the horizon line of his mind, entirely wrapped up in the process of becoming. Silently, he looked at the old man, whom others had called “pansophiae splendor magus”[1], the mage shining with the light of pansophy, and drank his words eagerly.

These were printed words on old manuscripts, revealed by the Black Abbot to the boy, in the vernacular German, in Latin hands and Greek letters. Cryptic Greek authors again and again, for such was one of the many obsessions of the old man. But the boy did not read Greek, and so they sat among the books, and rather than reading, the old man told the hermaphrodite about the meandering pathways of forbidden knowledge running through these books. 

And as he listened, the boy realised that this was not just a story about books, but about the old man himself, whose life had become intricately intertwined with the relentless, wild hunt of forbidden knowledge – all of which he had sworn to find, grab and inhale. 

Five hundred years have passed since these nights in the abbey of Würzburg. We still wonder what the hermaphrodite might have learned from the Black Abbot’s life and the Black Abbot’s books? From this grizzled man, from whose heavy centre a pair of nimble eyes ceaselessly sought new aims, who seemed at once restless and broken. Broken in part by the storms of the world he had endured, and in part by his own vain hand.[2]

We dream back to these nights and wonder: What kind of lessons were these, that changed bodies here from mouth to mouth, from hand to hand? Of course, as it is the case with dreams, our picture is blurred. What we know for sure is this: Soon after this encounter, the black abbot died and drowned in the shadows of history. Forgotten he was not by accident, but by design: His many forgeries and fantasies had eroded the trust in his voice, nobody wanted to step onto the stones he had laid out to mark the narrow trail… A trickster, as the Black Abbot had been his entire life, was not entrusted with wisdom. Or so the people believed.[3]

The young man, the half-bald hermaphrodite, however, was about to embark on a journey the likes of which all of Europe had not seen before. His sharp, polemical voice – resounding in lecture halls, in pubs, and at crossroads all across the Old World – would change the face of medicine, of chemistry, and also of the forbidden arts forever.

This now is the story of one such fingerprint the great man, Paracelsus, left behind for us. To begin this story, we have to begin to see this fingerprint. Which like all fingerprints likes to go unnoticed, yet hides in plain sight, if only one knows how to look. 

II. The Black Abbot Enters.

And so we return to St. James in Würzburg, during the long nights when Paracelsus and Johannes Trithemius sat together and spoke. And we reconstruct some pieces of the puzzle that was likely to have come together and taken shape in the mind of Paracelsus at the time…

Quicquidem in mundo scibile est, scire semper cupiebam. Whatever in the world is knowable, I always desired to know. — Johannes Trithemius

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[…] Trithemius von Sponheim, who united in himself all the occult knowledge of his time, exerted a great influence as a teacher on the luminaries of the coming generation, even if he himself - apart from his steganography - was not active in the field of secret science in any other way than in the ecclesiastical sense, out of consideration for his position. — Carl Kiesewetter [4]

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People have gone too far with regards to him, sometimes in belief, sometimes in doubt. Those who are willing and able will recognise from the case of Trithemius that the historian, in his striving for the actual historical truth, must never forget to respect the often improbable, but even then not always untrue lore. — Paul Lehmann [5]

Trithemius had erected his very own “Druid’s harbourage”[6] first in Sponheim, and later on, during the time of the visit(s) of Paracelsus in Würzburg. We also know he had been obsessed not only with knowing “whatever in the world is knowable”, but more specifically with Classical Greek authors.

Let’s read two reports from visitors to Sponheim. The first one is retold by Klaus Arnold in his masterful biography from 1971. The second stems directly from a letter by the Dutch humanist Mattheus Herbenus Traiectensis (1451-1538) to one Jodocus Beyselius from August 1495.

The enthusiasm of his friends for the Graecophile abbot sometimes took on strange forms: On a visit to Sponheim, Vigilius reports to Celtis that the abbot is Greek, the monks are Greek and so are the dogs, the stones and bushes are also Greek; the whole monastery seemed to be in the middle of Ionian country. — Klaus Arnold [7]

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Where (in the monastery) walking around is allowed (which usually happens after the first friends meet [sic!] and after the meal), the abbot shows me around and takes me to places in his admirable library, where I look at a large number of Hebrew as well as Greek books. For the quantity of Latin [books] of every kind of art, science and ability was immense. I am therefore full of admiration for the care that a single man has taken in acquiring and setting up so many different documents, and am decidedly amazed, for I would not have believed that there could be such a quantity of foreign books in the whole of Germany. For I have found there books in five languages, which differ widely in style and character, in ancient codices, which Trithemius’s attentive collecting zeal did not gather without much sweat. In this way, then, most learned Jodocus, I have found the Spanheim library crammed; for both itself and the walls of the entire abbot’s residence, which is extensive, and the vaulted ceilings are, as I have seen, adorned with Greek, Hebrew and Latin verses and characters in quite the most elaborate manner. Therefore I ponder for myself whether there is a Hebrew or Greek Academy in our Germany. That is the monastery of Spanheim, where you can draw more learning from the walls than from the dusty libraries of many, empty of books. For what Germany can have in antiquity and learning in the form of books, the monastery of Spanheim possesses through the care of its abbot Trithemius. I stayed with our abbot for eleven days […] — From a letter by the Dutch humanist Mattheus Herbenus Traiectensis (1451-1538) [8]

Herbenus’s letter makes it unmistakably clear: what the visitors found during their stay with the Black Abbot was not just an extraordinary library, but a fully immersive experience altogether. Entering Sponheim’s chambers, one was immersed in a thoroughly sacred space dedicated to an ancient world of learning and revelation, the blending of past and present, and the co-creation of humans and angels. A world that was both spiritually genuine, and yet highly artificial and constructed in a mundane sense.

Just as Albertus Magnus in his Speculum Astronomiae had tried to build a literary bulwark against the destructive forces of his time, so Trithemius had built his own physical bulwarks in Sponheim and later in St. James in Würzburg. These were to withstand the changing times in the same sense that they were to provide refuge for the knowledge, voices, and secrets of the philosophers, historians, and magicians, who had walked the narrow trail of mystical ascent and heresy over the last 1500 years. 

At the beginning of the 16th century, the floodgate that allowed Arabic literary sources to stream into Western currents of learned magic already stood open wide and far.[9] For over two hundred years flowers of Greek, Syrian and Arabic knowledge had sprang up again in the West, often drawing their life force from Egyptian and other ancient roots. In this continued process, Trithemius with his notorious libraries – the original larger one in Sponheim, and the second, still significant one in Würzburg – acted as a knowledge hub, away from academic oversight, which fed rivulets of Arabic, Greek and Syrian occult knowledge into the scholarly culture of Europe.[10]

No complete record of Trithemius’s libraries has come upon us. And even if that had, the titles relevant for our exploration most likely would not have been listed in plain sight, given Trithemius’s need to continuously disguise his alchemical and magical research, as well as his practical work with angels.[11]

However, the paleograher and philologist Paul Lehmann (1884–1964) spent over fifty years tracing the now lost and scattered volumes that once made up Trithemius treasures. While nowhere near to a complete index, his work from 1961 is giving a thorough impression of the scope and breadth of the material collected by the Black Abbot. Next to a massive corpus of Medieval historic and ecclesiastical writings, Trithemius had collected philosophical, theological and scientific works by Aristotle, Theon of Smyrna (1st century), Origen (3rd century), Tertullian (3rd century), John Chrysostom (4th century), as well as chronicles by Hegesippus (2nd century), Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century), Effrem Syri (4th century), Cassiodorus (6th century) – to name but a few. Of course, plenty of Neoplatonic and Hermetic source-works were present as well, such as by Proclus, Plutarch, Iamblichus, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Lullus, Reuchlin, and, not to miss, the original – and at that time only – manuscript of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia.

However, despite Lehmann’s relentless effort, we know nothing about the historically recorded collection of “Chaldean, Arabic, Indian, Ruthenian, Tartar, Gallic and Bohemian” [12] books that would be of particular interest. Only one magical tome, belonging to the grimoire genre, can still be traced down. Today preserved under the signature BSB Cod.hebr. 235, it unites an eclectic mix of Hebrew, Latin and German fragments on magical incantations and love spells, geomancy, technical tools for warfare, and astrologica – “a true picture of German unculture at the end of the 15th century”, as the eminent scholar on Medieval grimoire history, Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907) commented.[13]

Overall, Lehmann concludes, despite the slightly exaggerated praise his library garnered by some of Trithemius’s friends, his collection did not necessarily stand out due to its quantity of books and manuscripts, but certainly due to their rarity, exquisiteness, and versatility.[14]

We can now see why Johannes Trithemius has rightly been called “pansophiae splendor magus”. And we shall move on to examine, why the young man who came to visit him in the early 1500s might have seen him quasi noster Pater Thritemius (“as our father Trithemius”) in a letter to a friend more than two decades later.[15]

III. Paracelsus Arrives.

In the 16th century, his father sent him to the University of Basel. However, it is well established that Paracelsus, to whom the wisdom of the physicians of that time was an abomination from an early age, did not actually undertake any regular academic studies, which by the scholars of the four past centuries was very badly held against him, who would often pave his own way. Later, Paracelsus came to […] Johann Trithemius von Sponheim, who probably mainly developed the occult disposition of the highly intelligent pupil. His love of the secret sciences, which had blossomed to great heights, then led him to the laboratory of the rich Sigismund Fugger at Schwatz in Tyrol, who, like Trithemius, was a famous alchemist and initiated his pupil into many secrets of the art of separation. — Carl Kiesewetter [16]

We know very litte about Paracelsus’s youth, and – as we shall see – that is more likely to be by his own design than by accident. However, when Paracelsus died, he did so surrounded by chests and drawers full of manuscripts from his own hand. Most of his works were never published during his life-time. Less than fifty years later, through the relentless effort by Johannes Huser (ca. 1545-1600/1601) a first ‘collected works’ edition came into print. Despite the painstaking attention Huser paid to distinguish authentic from pseudo-Paracelsian manuscripts at the time, the results remained ambiguous. 

Thus, later Paracelsus scholars – preeminently among them Friedrich Mook (1844-1880), Karl Sudhoff (1853-1938), Will Erich Peuckert (1895-1969), and Kurt Goldammer 1916-1997 – continued to debate and often disagree on the alleged authenticity of many foundational Paracelsian texts. 

The current state of knowledge is further limited by the fact that most of this research has remained directed towards Paracelsus’s medical and philosophical works. 

Karl Sudhoff held a distinct anti-magical attitude towards all matters Paracelsian, which strongly influenced his assessment of the genuineness of the earlier manuscripts and prints.[17] Sudhoff originally had planned to publish the theological writings in parallel to his new edition of Paracelsus’s natural, philosophical and medical writings. However, that endeavour was stalled and only completed by Goldammer who carefully edited and published the spiritual, religious and socio-political texts of Paracelsus in seven large volumes between 1969 and 1971. Despite their significant volume even these tomes only contain abbreviated versions (Kurzfassungen) of many of the original manuscripts, as Goldammer remarks in the sub-header of the books.

Against this background, it does not seem surprising that the complex question of what influences shaped the mind and world of the young Paracelsus has remained controversial. 

Will-Erich Peuckert, both in his Pansophie of 1935 and in his biography Paracelsus, published in 1941, avoids a direct answer to a possible pupil-teacher relationship with Trithemius. Instead, he emphasises that because of Paracelsus’s young age, it would have been the years 1511 to 1516 when he might have been in contact with Trithemius. He also concludes that Paracelsus must have had access to Agrippa's De Occult Philosophia in manuscript form, as he refers to it long before the book appeared in print. The scenario that Paracelsus read Agrippa’s original manuscript, which remained among Trithemius’s possession until his death, therefore does not seem unlikely to Peuckert either.[18]

The most detailed and objective assessment of the Paracelsus-Trithemius question was given to us by Goldammer in 1954. His essay The spiritual Teachers of Theophrastus Paracelsus spans over more than thirty pages. It presents a carefully researched perspective on each one of the five theological teachers who were confirmed by Paracelsus himself in the second book of his Great Miracle-Medicine (Grosse Wunderarznei) of 1536. 

[…] From childhood onwards I have pursued this work and learned from good teachers who were most profoundly grounded in the adepta philosophia and powerfully investigated the arts. First I was taught by Wilhelm von Hohenheim, my father, who never left me, and then by a large number, which cannot be named entirely, through many writings of the ancients and the moderns, by those who came here and made great efforts, as there were the bishop Scheit of Settgach, the bishop Erhart and his ancestors of the Lavanttal, the bishop Nicolaus of Hippo, the bishop Mattheus Schacht suffraganus Phreisingen and many abbots, like the one of Spanheim and the like more, and many among the other doctors and the like. I have also had great experience over a long period of time through many alchemists who have searched in such arts, namely through the noble and firm Sigmund Fugger of Schwaz together with a number of his laboratory assistants. Therefore, no one should be surprised that such corrections are now before their eyes […]. Now if experience is available and the meaning and reason of the four philosophies together with the volcanic art and the physical, whether it would not be fair to make such corrections and to separate what is false and erroneous from what is good. At the same time, it is also proper to continue to search and to improve things and to change them. — Paracelsus [19]

With relieving freshness, Goldammer asks the central question “what would actually speak against the teacher Trithemius and the corresponding interpretation of the passage”. And he answers it himself: One “finds nothing”.[20] Instead, he emphasises the bias on Sudhoff’s part in attempting to find an alternative interpretation. For the latter followed his own agenda, attempting to purify Paracelsus’s apprenticeship years from the stain left by the association with the Black Abbot, in whom Sudhoff saw nothing but a “word-maker”, a liar and forger of history.[21]

Goldammer continues to examine critical works of Trithemius and their possible influence on the young Paracelsus. In step with the other ecclesiastical dignitaries mentioned by Paracelsus, we begin to see Trithemius as a facilitator of Late Medieval theology, of Renaissance spirituality, of humanism and mysticism as well as romanticised historicism. Trithemius the polymath is likely to have contributed significantly to Paracelsus’s own “comprehensive knowledge and his amazing expertise in all questions that moved the leading minds of the time.”[22]

Of course, we cannot expect to find evidence on the side of Trithemius for his encounter(s) with Paracelsus. The latter would have been too young for this to be a meeting of equals. Equally, he would have been too young for this to be a meeting of master and their master student, as it happened with Agrippa of Nettesheim, and attracted Trithemius’s hopes to have found the person who would carry on his torch.

Paracelsus himself has given us evidence enough: A precise lead for the one’s willing to follow the trail. As Goldammer concluded, there is sufficient indirect evidence to consider a personal relationship “between Paracelsus and Johann Trithemius as proven and secured.”[23] – What remained a mystery was the nature of this personal relationship.

IV. The Secret Conversation.

So once more we return to the study of St. James: the vaulted ceiling covered with Greek and Latin verses, the walls hidden behind leather-bound books, the night falling behind low windows. This is the place where we meet the Black Abbot and Paracelsus again. One of them tired of vainly trying to keep his life both in the updraught of magic and worldly power. The other one bright awake, just no longer a child and not yet a man. So they sit surrounded by the end of one life, and the beginning of another. While united in place, lonely together. For all his life the old man felt alive only in the silence of his writings, and the young man in the embrace of open nature.

Out of respect for age and position, we have to imagine their gathering as a monologue. Paracelsus explicitly counts the Abbot of Sponheim among his teachers of adepta philosophia, which according to his language steeped with vernacular and Latin neologisms, were the occult arts. 

It does not take a leap of imagination to consider that this was where Paracelsus first heard of the Graeco-Egyptian origin of alchemy: 

• Of a cosmos generated by the three living principles of mercury, sulphur and magnesia (i.e. salt) who set about their never-ending work in the four elements, generating the entire world as we encounter it.[24]

• Of the premise that adeptic knowledge cannot be gained from books, but from an inner source of knowledge instead. Maybe Trithemius alluded to the silver body, the mushaf as-suwar, the occult teaching vessel that must be generated inside man. In his long monologue he might have quoted from memory: “Know that you can neither understand nor know the meaning of what the sages wrote in their books, except with the help of the vessel.”[25]

• And Paracelsus might have heard that the transformation of metals was meant to be both an outer and an inner process. A spirit had to be acquired within the alchemist, through the purging forces of fire and light. Only then could the transformation of metals succeed, which equally was the transformation of the soul of the adepti philosophia.[26]

Retracing the steps Paracelsus took in his youth does not at all diminish the extraordinary accomplishments this man achieved, despite all odds and against the publicly expressed will of academia across Europe. Yet equally, we have to acknowledge that Paracelsus’s Great Work lies in bringing this knowledge and work to brimming life again in the 16th century – in his very own and genuine form of expression. It does not lie, though, in inventing it from scratch. As he said himself, his work was one of of correction, of advancement, and of weaving arcane knowledge back into lived experience. He did this by releasing an iconoclastic storm against the institutions of learning of his time, and by keeping himself anchored, throughout his life, in the community of common people, in remote nature, and in the companionship of spirits. 

While Paracelsus wasn’t the man he would become when he encountered the Black Abbot, important seeds might have been sown during these nights. Ironically, only some of these seeds indeed might have come from the occult manuscripts and books Trithemius gave him access to. Others, however, and possibly more important ones, would have come from the learnings he took from the life of the Black Abbot himself. 

In many ways, Paracelsus’s biography and books represent an exact antithesis of Trithemius’s. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that we want to suggest to consider Paracelsus a student of the Black Abbot. Just as one studies a certain subject or a specific specimen, so the young man might have studied Trithemius’s life decisions and the price he paid for these. Instead of learning to become alike to him, Paracelsus seems to have taken inspiration to follow his own genuine road of becoming, and to avoid the path the old man had taken. 

Here are a few examples of the lessons Paracelsus might have taken from Trithemius’s biography:

• Never to be constrained by institutions and orthodoxy. — Trithemius’s position in the Catholic Church was a critical enabler to establish his life’s work. Yet, at the same time it was a cage from within which he had to operate, and which constantly forced him to disguise and distort his alchemo-magical interest.

• Never to pander to those in power. — Trithemius had a weakness for being recognised and sought out by the powerful and mighty. His many historical forgeries can be interpreted equally as results of his mystical worldview, his biting sense of humor, and as white lies for the mess his pandering to those in power had gotten him into. Trithemius liked to gamble high, and he mostly lost high as well.

• Never to betray one’s own values, whatever the consequence. — Trithemius’s most ghastly work, the Antipalus maleficiorum(1508), can be read as an attempt to ward off the suspicion of heresy and black magic into which he had fallen as a result of the Steganographia affair. Nothing could have more blatantly betrayed Trithemius’s secret writings under the guise of the invented persona of Pelagius of Majorca than the opportunistic authorship of such a hate-spreading incendiary tome. Both Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus seem to have clearly recognised this major flaw in the Black Abbot's biography, and to have drawn their own conclusions from it. 

• Never to set one’s heart on material possessions. — Whether Trithemius tried to appeal to the mighty to gain the necessary means for his library in Sponheim, or whether the latter was an instrument to gain their attention, will always remain a mystery. May that as it be, the attachment he held to the huge operation that the Abbey Sponheim had become under his leadership, must have been immediately obvious to Paracelsus. Simmilarily, the traumatic impact upon the man’s life when he lost all of it in 1505. 

• Never to pursue adepti philosophia among books, but from nature and experience alone. — Trithemius’s life-long magical program had been to scrutinise and purge the demonic magic of his ancestors from its telluric influences, and to reconstruct it as a pathway towards becoming alike to the angelic mind. The uncompromising pursuit of this program had led him into a labyrinth of books from which he never escaped again. 

• Never to leave a bottle of wine unfinished in the hope of a better tomorrow. — Trithemius’s way of working was hasty, sloppy, downright fiery. In the end, it burned not only himself, but also the path he wanted to leave behind for others. His moral transgressions - whether in the form of literary forgeries or in the inflammatory writings of the witch craze - made his image dark and degenerate in the eyes of posterity. For what all this burning and driving forward, this delusion of truth, purity and eternity, Paracelsus might have wondered? A night out in the pub and the gutters makes an incredibly effective bridle for the intellectual mind, which is only too happy to run wild with geniuses.

For anybody who read biographies of both Trithemius and Paracelsus these brief enumerations portray a curious picture indeed: Two sides of a coin, two snakes curling around a staff, two pathways into lives filled with magic, which yet could not have been more different from each other. By rendering the anti-thesis of Trithemius’s life – yet maintaining his intellectual brilliance, his fiery temper and the peripheral storms of the 16th century – we arrive at a most accurate outline of the man Paracelsus was destined to become. 

Isaac Newton once famously said, we see further “by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In the same way, Paracelsus can be presumed to have stood on the shoulders of Trithemius: The latter’s failings became the former’s lessons. It is precisely not lineage in the sense of an unbroken continuation that we find between these two men, but the opposite: The forces that broke the older man, were conquered with paradoxical wisdom by the younger. 

Maybe Paracelsus wrote the above-mentioned letter, printed in 1606 and allegedly written in 1534, or maybe he did not. Either way, we now know how to read the term “quasi noster Pater, Trithemius” (as our Father, Trithemius): It marks the relationship of a spiritual student and teacher, who both saw magic as Promethean fire – and yet whose pathways into expressing and living with it could not have been more different.

Finally, now we also might know how to understand Paracelsus’s rare autobiographical reflections a few years before his death (1537/1538), when he says the following:

Not that it is enough to attack me in several articles, but to claim that I am a strange head with a last, that is, confused answer, that I do not meet everyone according to their liking, that I do not answer everyone according to their intention in a humble way; that is what they regard and consider to be a great vice in me. But I myself esteem it a great virtue and would not have it be otherwise than it is. I like my way only too well. But in order that I may answer for how my strange wisdom is to be understood, notice therefore. By nature I am not subtly spun. Nor is it my country’s way to gain anything by spinning silk. Nor are we brought up on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheat bread, but on cheese, milk and oat bread: all these do not make subtle journeymen. In addition, one is marked all one's life by what one received in youth […]. — Paracelsus [27]

Selected Bibliography

• Acher, Frater; Black Abbot · White Magic, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2021

• Arnold, Klaus; Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Würzburg: Kommissionsverlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1971

• Arnold, Klaus; Fuchs, Franz (eds.); Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019

• Gopsch, Heinz; Goldammer, Kurt; Kramml, Peter F. (eds.); Paracelsus (1493-1541) - “Keines andern Knecht…”, Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 1993

• Grafton, Anthony; Worlds Made by Words - Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, Cambridge/ MA: Harvard University Press, 2011

• Hargrave, John G.; The Life And Soul Of Paracelsus, London: Victor Gollancz, 1951

• Hargrave, John G.; ”Paracelsus”, in: Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Sep. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paracelsus. Accessed 1 February 2022

• Lehmann, Paul; Nachrichten von der Sponheimer Bibliothek des Abtes Johannes Trithemius, in: Jansen, Max (ed.); Festgabe zum 7. September 1910 – Hermann Grauert zur Vollendung des 60. Lebensjahres gewidmet, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1910, p. 205-220

• Lehmann, Paul; Merkwürdigkeiten des Abtes Johannes Trithemius, München: Verlag der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1961

• Malter, Heinrich; Marx, Alexander (eds.); Gesammelte Schriften von Moritz Steinschneider, Bd. 1: Gelehrten-Geschichte, Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1925

• Kazhdan, Alexander P. (ed.); The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Vol. 3, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991

• Peuckert, Will-Erich; Theophrastus Paracelsus, Stuttgart, Berlin: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1941

• Saif, Liana; The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, London: palgrave macmillian, 2015

• Steinschneider, Moritz; Die arabischen Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen, Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1897

• Steinschneider, Moritz; Zur pseudepigraphischen Literatur insbesondere der geheimen Wissenschaften des Mittelalters aus hebräischen und arabischen Quellen, Berlin, 1862

• Steinschneider, Moritz; Zum Speculum astronomicum des Albertus Magnus, über die darin angeführten Schriftsteller und Schriften, in: Cantor, M. (ed.); Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, 16. Jahrgang, Heft 5, Leipzig: Verlag B.G. Teubner, 1871, p. 357-396

• Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Theophrast von Hohenheim, gen. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XI, München / Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1928 

• Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Theophrast von Hohenheim, gen. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XIV, München / Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1933 

• Zambelli, Paola; The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and his Contemporaries, Berlin: Springer, 1992

• Zosimos of Panopolis, The Book of the Keys of the Work, Kitāb Mafātīh as-san’a, Theodor Abt, Wilferd Madelung (eds.), Corpus Alchemicum Arabicum, Vol.II, Zurich: Living Human Heritage Publications, 2016

Endnotes

[0] For a more detailed description of Paracelsus’s congenital genetic condition see my upcoming book INGENIUM. The short of it is, that his skeleton shows characteristics of both male and female sex. After careful chemical and X-ray analysis in spring of 1990 the medical condition was determined as innate Adrenogenital syndrome. German readers can also revert to Gopsch, Goldammer, Kramml (eds.), 1993, pp. 53

[1]          Goldammer, 1955, p.39

[2]          Forgery, of course, is partly about Schadenfreude: perhaps, then, Trithemius deserves his place in the gallery of once-great scholars whose worlds were turned upside down by their own failings and the zeal of their enemies. Nevertheless, it seems possible that Trithemius saw his creative efforts in a very different light. Nikolaus Staubach has offered a very suggestive reading of the episode, which tries to explain it using actors' categories. He points out that Trithemius took a passionate interest in the sort of knowledge that holy men and women obtained by revelation. Trithemius himself began his career with a vision about knowledge.[…] Trithemius himself suggests that this interpretation may be valid. He made clear that his two fields of activity - magic and scholarship – were linked. One kind of magic that Trithemius practiced and recommended supports the notion that his revelations came to him, in his view, from a supernatural source. He emphasized repeatedly that certain men could perform miracles, if they led a sufficiently austere and rigorous life and dedicated themselves intensively enough to contemplation - and, he admitted, so long as a good spirit aided them, since no human could attain knowledge except through the senses or through the help of a supernatural being. — Grafton, 2011, p. 75/76

[3]          Lehmann, 1961, p. 4

[4]          […] Trithemius von Sponheim, welcher in sich alle occultistischen Kenntnisse seiner Zeit vereinigte, übte als Lehrer einen grossen Einfluss auf die Koryphäen der kommenden Generation aus, wenn er selbst auch - von seiner Steganographie abgesehen - auf geheimwissenschaftlichen Gebiet aus Rücksicht auf seine Stellung nicht anders als im kirchlichen Sinne polemisch tätig war. — Kiesewetter, 1977, p. 3

[5]          Man ist ihm gegenüber bald im Glauben, bald im Zweifeln zu weit gegangen. Wer's will und kann, wird an dem Fall Trithemius erkennen, da der Geschichtsforscher bei seinem Streben nach der tatsächlichen geschichtlichen Wahrheit nie die Achtung vor der oft unwahrscheinlichen, aber auch dann nicht immer unwahren Überlieferung vergessen darf. — Lehmann, 1910, p. 219

[6]          Druidenherberge, Arnold, 2003, p.21

[7]          Arnold, 1971, p.79

[8]          Ubi (scil. in monasterio) occasio deambulandi concessa est (quod plerumque post primorum amicorum congressus atque refectiones fit) circumfert (abbas) me atque illico in admirandam bibliothecam suam introducit, ubi plurima turn Hebraea, tum Graeca volumina intueor. Nam Latinorum in omni arte, scientia et facultate ingens copia erat. Demiror itaque unius hominis in tam variis monumentis consequendis constituendisque exactam diligentiam atque vehementer obstupesco, cum in tota Germania non existimaveriurn tantum peregrinorum voluminum extitisse. Nam quinque linguarum, sermone et charactere a se longe distantium, libros in codicibus perantiqnis illic repperi, quos Trithemii vigilans studium non sine multo sudore comportavit. Hoc igitur modo, Jodoce doctissime, fulcitam inveni Spanhemensem bibliothecam; nam eam solum verum etiam et parietes totius domus abbatialis, que ampla est, et testudines camerarum Graecis, Hebraicis, Latinis versibus caracteribusque decentissime omata aspexi. Quamobrem ego ita mecum resputo, si in Germania nostra Hebraea aliqua Graecave academia sit. Ea Spanhemense coenobium est, ubi plus eruditionis concipere possis ex parietibus quam multorum pulverulentis atque librorum inanibus bibliothecis. Quicquid enim antiquitatis et eruditionis Germania in libris habere potest monasterium Spanhemense Trithemio abbate procurante possidet. Mansi apud abbatem nostrum dies undecim - — Lehmann, 1961, p. 23-24

[9]          These texts were brought to Europe as a result of the increased contact with Muslim Spain and Byzantium and were translated into Latin during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They constituted to European natural and occult philosophers a body of works containing philosophical notions of astral generation and causation that validate astrology and astral magic in non-supernatural terms, or without 'Diabolicall Principles' as Lilly would say, thus contributing to the flourishing of European occult philosophy. — Saif, Liana; The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, London: palgrave macmillian, 2015, p.3 — For its critical influence from the 13th century onwards Albertus Magnus’s Speculum Astronomiae has to be mentioned, as well as Moritz Steinschneider’s groundbreaking essays from the late 19th century (see Bibliography).

[10]        Lehmann, 1961, p. 23

[11]        For a masterful summary and reading of the source material, see: Grafton, Anthony; Worlds Made by Words - Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, Cambridge/ MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 56-78

[12]        Lehmann, 1961, p. 18

[13]        In hebräischer, lateinischer, deutscher Sprache Beschwörungen, Geomantisches, Kriegstechnisches, Astrologica, Liebeszauber u.a., “ein wahres Bild deutscher Unkultur im Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts” (M. Steinschneider).  — Lehmann, 1910, p. 212; also see: Lehmann, 1961, p. 33, today the volume is kept in the Bavarian National Library under the signature BSB Cod.hebr. 235, where it has been made available in digital form 

[14]        Lehmann, 1961, p. 20

[15]        Sudhoff, 2000 (1894), p. 454

[16]        Im 16. Jahrhundert schickte ihn sein Vater auf die Universität nach Basel. Doch ist es wohl ausgemacht, dass Paracelsus, dem die damalige Weisheit der Ärzte schon frühzeitig ein Gräuel war, eigentlich keine regelmässigen akademischen Studien gemacht hat, was ihm, der sich nachmals seinen eigenen Weg bahnte, von den Fachgelehrten der vier verflossenen Jahrhunderte sehr übel aus gelegt wurde. Später kam Paracelsus zu […] Johann Trithemius von Sponheim, welcher wohl die occult Veranlagung des hochintelligenten Schülers hauptsächlich ausbildete. Die mächtig emporgeblühte Liebe zu den Geheimwissenschaften führte ihn darauf in das Laboratorium des reichen Sigismund Fugger zu Schwatz in Tirol, welcher wie Trithemius ein berühmter Alchemist war und seinen Schüler in mancher Geheimnis der Scheidekunst einweihte. — Kiesewetter, Carl; Geschichte des neueren Okkultismus, New York: Georg Ulms Verlag, 1977 [Leipzig, 1891]

[17]        See his Preamble to the 14th Volume of the Collected Works, in which appendix he grouped works that according to him were “Spuria Paracelsi”. How he arrived at such a definite assessment, Sudhoff did not share. The two main criteria seemed to have been that the original manuscripts by Paracelsus had been lost by the time these pieces were published in the second half of the 16th century (XII), and, secondly, that they treated topics which he pejoratively summarised as “occult stuff” (XXIX). Sudhoff rigid’s subjectivity is summed up by his closing comment: “So the presumption remains. More must be left to future research. It will hardly be able to shake my point of view.” (XXXIII) — see: Sudhoff, Vol. XIV, 1933, I - XXXIII 

[18]        Peuckert, 1941, p. 22 and Peuckert, 1956 (1935), 208-209. For the possession of Agrippa’s original manuscript, titled ‘De magia’, with Trithemius see: Arnold, Klaus; Fuchs, Franz (eds.); Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019, p. 287. For a reprint of Paracelsus’s ‘De occulta philosophia’ see Sudhoff, Vol. XIV, 1933, p. 513-542

[19]        […] von Kindheit auf hab ich die ding getrieben,und von guten unterrichtern gelernet, die in der adepta philosophia die ergründesten warent und den künsten mechtig nach gründeten. erstlich Wilhelmus von Hohenheim, meinen vatter, der mich nie verlassen hat, demnach und mit sampt im ein große zal, die nit wol zu nennen ist, mit sampt vilerlei geschriften der alten und der neuen von etlichen herkomen, die sich groß gemühet habent, als bischof Scheit von Settgach, bischof Erhart und sein vorfaren von Lavanttal, bischof Nicolaus von Yppon, bischof Mattheus Schacht suffraganus Phreisingen und vil ept, als von Spanheim und dergleichen mer, und vil under den anderen doctor und dergleichen. auch so ist ein grosse erfarnus beschehen und ein lange zeit her durch viel alchimisten die in solchen kuensten gesucht haben, als nemlich der edel und fest Sigmund Füger von Schwaz mit sampt einer anzal seiner gehaltnen laboranten. darumb sol sich niemants verwundern, das ietzt solche correcture vor augen ist […]. Wo nun die erfarnus ist und das herkomen und der grunt der vier philosophorum mit sampt der künst vulcani und der phisici, ob nit bilich sei soliches zu corrigieren und das falsch, das irrig vom guten scheiden, darbei auch weiter zu suchen und die ding zu besseren, zu enderen wol gebürlich ist. — Sudhoff, Vol. X, 1928, p.354-355 

[20]        Goldammer, 1955, p.36

[21]        Goldammer, 1955, p.36

[22]        Goldammer, 1955, p.40

[23]        Goldammer, 1955, p.41

[24]        Zosimos, 2016, p. 84/85

[25]        Zosimos, 2016, pp.45, also see p.223

[26]        And the metal bodies are also like that: They obtain a spirit when they are burnt over a gentle fire and are turned into spiritual ashes. In fact, they obtained that spirit from the fire and the air in the same way as human beings inhale the spirit from the air. Just as the bodies are burnt in the fire and the air, those bodies also obtain the spirits from the fire. As the created beings change and transform from one nature to another nature, this one dies and the other one lives. In the same way, the copper is burnt by the sulphur and changes from one nature to another, until God completes for you what you are seeking. — Zosimos, 2016, p.225

[27]        Nit das genug sei, mich in etlichen Artikeln anzutasten, sonder das ich sei ein wunderlicher kopf mit lezer antwort, nit einem ietlichen aufwüsch nach seinem gefallen, nit einem ietlichen antwort auf sein fürnemen beim demütigen; das achten und schezen sie eine große untugent an mir zu sein. und ich aber selbst schez es für ein große tugent und wolt nit, das ander wer dan wie es ist. mir gefelt mein weis nur fast wol. damit ich mich aber verantwort, wie mein wunderliche weis zuverstehen sei, merkent also. von der natur bin ich nicht subtil gespunnen, ist auch nicht meins lants art, das man was man was mit seidenspinnen erlange. wir werden auch nicht mit feigen erzogen, noch mit met, noch mit weizenbrot, aber mit kes, milch und haberbrot: es kann nicht subtil gesellen machen. zu dem das eim all sein tag anhengt, das er in der iugent empfangen hat […]. — Sudhoff, Vol. XI, 1928, p. 151-152