Samizdat

“Likewise, the unitarian Neoplatonic position is seemingly upheld by Paracelsus’s doctrine of the soul: “Man has two bodies: one from the earth, the second from the stars, and thus they are easily distinguishable. The elemental, material body goes to the grave along with its essence; the sidereal, subtle body dissolves gradually and goes back to its source, but the spirit of God in us, which is like His image, returns to Him whose image it is.

Throughout the Astronomia Magna one sees that Paracelsus is using a threefold hierarchical view of the world: mundane, celestial, and eternal corresponding to the body, soul, and spirit. The spirit is divine and will, as in the emanationist Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus which was Ficino’s great inspiration, return to the godhead. This was the threefold hierarchical world of Neoplatonic cosmology, which came through Ficino and Pico to Trithemius and Agrippa, still present in John Dee’s rigid theurgy and Robert Fludd’s wonderful engravings.” […]

“The spirit instructs man in supernatural and eternal things, and after the separation of matter from spirit it returns to the Lord.”26 […]

“The Spanish scholar Carlos Gilly sees Paracelsus’s large but only recently edited theological writings as providing the basis of a new supradenominational religious current in central Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paracelsus rejected the Mauerkirche (the church of stone) in De septem puncti idolatriae christianae (1525). He did not want to found a new sect, but strove instead for a church of the spirit, subject only to God and nature.

Paracelsus’s “religion of the two lights,” namely the light of grace, and the light of nature, was taken up by Adam Haslmayr (ca. 1560–1630), the first commentator on the Rosicrucian manifestos, which invoked the example of Paracelsus. Haslmayr called the revelation of Paracelsus the Theophrastia Sancta, and this term became emblematic among followers of Valentin Weigel and others as a new gospel for a second, truly radical reformation.” […]

“Like the seventeenth-century Paracelsians, Jung celebrated Paracelsus for his source of knowledge in the twin “lights” of nature and revelation and believed Paracelsus’s work to be an early intimation of the role of the unconscious. Arguing that alchemy is “the forerunner of our modern psychology of the unconscious,” he claimed Paracelsus as a pioneer of “empirical psychology and psychotherapy.”

–Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, 2008, pg. 82-4.