Infernal Astronomy
The following excerpt presents the second previously unpublished chapter from my exploration on The Daemonic in Paracelsus’ Work. The first chapter can be accessed here. I wrote this text from a practitioner’s point of view with the dual intention of inspiring confidence in your own goêtic work, as well as overcoming traditional misconceptions about ritual magic that are often repeated in the West.
Additionally, these pages provide an essential basis for understanding the original works of Paracelsus. The latter is helpful when reading my own books on Paracelsus, such as Holy Heretics, INGENIUM and the soon-to-be-published extensive study of his Olympic Spirits.
LVX,
Frater Acher
In Paracelsus’ work, the term angel is used in its classic generic sense to denote all of God’s heavenly mediators, whether they are benevolent or harmful in relation to man. Accordingly, he often speaks of good and evil angels, similar to the way we find the term daimon or daimones used in ancient Greek. In Paracelsus’ cosmology, it is these angelic daimones that not only populate the invisible realms, but also make the visible world possible in the first place. From the grain of sand to the mustard seed, from the mountain to the human heart, everything is made up of
the three principles of salt, sulfur and mercury, which regulate the physical state and its transitions;
the four elements, which determine character and relationships in the world;
and the mediation of angels, which determine destiny and cognitive abilities.
In this sense, obviously also the Olympic Spirits qualify as angels. A correct paraphrase for the term angel in Paracelsus’ works would be celestial mediator and telluric mediator, i.e. non-human spirits defined according to their superlunar or sublunar points of operation and office.
So the power of the arts and the wisdom of God are given to man, that he may be a nigromanticus, a necromanticus, a geomanticus, a pyromanticus, a hydromanticus, a gabalist, an augurist. For these things are all in the creatures, that man may learn them.[1]
For he does not want us to be stupid fools, knowing nothing, understanding nothing, without prudence. But he wants us to be awakened in the great natural things he has given us, so that the devil may see that we are of God and are angels.[2]
God does not want Solomon alone to be wise, but that he be the wise man, and that we all be as wise as he. [Who else would think that Solomon alone should be wise, but only the desperate man who will not wake up? [3]
In a cosmos where the world itself is a never ending, always open book, what then is the need for the written word? According to Paracelsus, the answer lies in man’s inadequacy and deficiencies, not in the world that surrounds him.
The Book of Nature and the Book of Light are metaphorical books only. In actuality, as Paracelsus explains, they are hives of living teachers which respond individually and situationally to each one who approaches them. Their animistic hive-bodies are made up of myriads of beings, each holding their own kind of knowledge and wisdom. The pages of these books we turn with our feet, as Paracelsus instructs us.
For this I will testify concerning nature: Whoever wants to search it must tread its books with his feet. Scripture is explored through its letters, but nature is explored from land to land. As often as a land, so often a leaf. So is the Codex Naturae, so must one turn over its leaves.[4]
Surrounded by such daimonic and divine mentorship, Paracelsus found himself confronted with the essential question about the value of any physical book, even his own? Printed words are fixed, insensitive to the temperament of its reader, restricted by time and space, and confused by idioms and limited experience of its imperfect human author. Why use such ineffectual means to diminish the tutelage of the daimones? Why show a stale excerpt – that attracts misunderstanding like the devil attracts flies – when we can all have the whole living expanse of Natural knowledge?
The answer that Paracelsus found to this question characterizes his entire work: Despite his enormous oeuvre, he forbade himself to subject any specific technique with its situational details to a written fixation. The natural, scientific and poetic crafts as taught by the spirits were sacred to him, and he did not want to diminish them through cumbersome and erroneous human codification. At their heart, therefore, Paracelsus’ own books do not teach any crafts, but are intended to prepare the serious seeker to learn their own craft directly from the spirits. Paracelsus took the position of a guardian of the adytum, the workshop and human life itself. His work consisted of preparing seekers so that they could “ask, seek and knock”[5] all for themselves.
Let us then examine what is perhaps the most heretical example of the arts taught by the spirits, according to Paracelsus.
In the fourth book of his great Astronomia Magna or Philosophia Sagax, Paracelsus explains the nature of infernal astronomy. This is one of the four astronomies that the philosophus adeptus must learn.[6] Paracelsus gives its nine orders as follows: Magica, Nigromantia, Nectromantia, Astrologia, Signatum, Artes Incertae, Philosophia Adepta, Medicina Adepta, Mathematica Adepta.[7]
Now the teachers of these arts are the tricky telluric spirits themselves. Although they naturally like to “screw and seduce”[8] people, God created them to watch over essential and important natural knowledge. So there are things to be learned from them, arts to be studied with them, despite the dangers involved in wanting to learn from devils. Paracelsus says:
Astronomia Inferiorem: This astronomy takes its origin from the natural firmament and is used solely by the infernal spirits. These are naturales astronomi and the parts [of their art] are most skilfully opened by themselves or by men [who have learned from them].[9]
And earlier in the same book he alludes to the infernal wisdom even more explicitly:
[…] If the doctor works with faith, faith is divided. One believes in God, the other in Satan. If he believes rightly, that is, in the content of the gospel, then a mountain sinks into the depth of the sea and much quicker can he heal a sick person. Such medicine needs no help but God alone in faith. But if he does not believe in God, but his faith is with the infernal spirits, then it follows that the same faith also works through the infernal power, which has its own pharmacy, in which are all the mysteries of nature, which they administer.[10]
The nine arts of infernal astronomy are therefore part of an underworld pharmacy whose access is guarded by those spirits that Paracelsus in his folkloric vernacular simply likes to denote as devils.[11]
But how does Paracelsus instruct us to learn from the devils? What signposts does he give us to the black art? In other words, how close does he come to the medieval form of the grimoire in his authentic writings? Now, not unexpectedly, Paracelsus strides out confidently on the exact opposite path. For in his books he does not explain the grammar of the infernal astronomy. Instead, he teaches us the essential understanding of and shows us the hidden access points through which we can acquire these arts all by ourselves.
Here is not the place to repeat what I have written elsewhere about the essential foundations of faith and indifference, perfectionand improvisation, which can be derived from Paracelsus broad and lengthy expositions on the inert qualities of the proper student.[12] Instead of these implicit capabilities of the philosophus adeptus, let us turn to two passages in which Paracelsus gives surprisingly explicit advice on how best to learn from the devils. For dealing with them, it turns out, in its general approach is the same as with all other spirits. We find the following instructions as part of his elucidations on the art of Nectromantia, itself a sub-species of the infernal astronomy.[13]
Now see what the art gives and in what it works. It proves in the Light of Nature that every creature, sensitive or insensitive, is endowed with a natural spirit. Not only the grown things, but also the lasting ones. So know this spirit’s type and quality. Just as a corpus is recognised in its shadow, so where the shadow is, there must be a corpus. How therefore a corpus is recognised by the shadow in a likeness of approximately what the corresponding corpus may be, know then to understand that in the same way as no shadow may be without a corpus and no corpus without a shadow, so also it may not be that there was any corpus in the elements without such a shadow-spirit, that is [its] vision and is a shadow of the same, an appearance as in a mirror. So the spirits go out from the creatures which appear under our eyes, not that they are spirits, but according to the likeness of a shadow they are to be understood. So you should know what appears there and not assume otherwise.
And such shadow and mirror-like figure is commanded to the art Nectromantia, which can bring it there, as an apothecary brings the herb into the tins. Or as this example proves: there goes a voice of a man, which is heard and yet his person is not seen, and by means of the voice is understood approximately what the corpus is, that is what kind of corpus that is, from which the voice comes. So the name spirit comes, as if the voice would be called a spirit and yet it is not a spirit, but a voice from the same corpus. So no thing exists without such a spirit, as I have now told, that is no corpus is without a shadow or voice. And as the sun makes any shadow, so there is another sun that makes the shadow in the nectromantia and is called sol gaba nale.[14]
In his treatise on the imagination, Paracelsus answers the question of how we can come into direct contact with spirits. Paracelsus use of the term imagination, however, must not to be confused with the concept of fantasy. For him the former is an extremely plastic mental power endowed to all human beings, through which we can create conscious communion with non-human beings from the surrounding world. Here are his concise instructions:
But how we should go about getting a voice or an answer to our question can be understood from the following example. It is as if I were to say to someone, “Go to this place at night and stand under the sky and watch carefully for the time when the bell rings so many times. Then you will hear a voice from the air telling you and answering what you desire.” Now he believes my words and goes and waits for the voice, and his faith and his imagination would be so strong in him that he could not or would not think of anything else but that he alone waits for that hour and that voice, which alone is in his mind. Now he would undoubtedly hear a voice like a human voice, but he would not see anything physical. And such voices are not always from our ascendant, but often from the angels and ministering spirits.[15]
As Paracelsus emphasizes in several places, his magic – he avoids the term whenever possible, replacing it commonly with philosophy – is not one of coercion and human sovereignty over non-human co-inhabitants.[16] Solomon’s magic and Paracelsus’ strongly animistic form of spirit-contact are at the polar ends of what Western magic has to say about the dark arts. With Paracelsus, we find ourselves in the midst of a tradition that had almost already vanished in Europe during his lifetime. For in his philosophy, like the spirits themselves, the magician also assumes the position of a mediator. All parties who meet in the circle of this art are mediums. The angelic participants are mediums of God, each one guarding a certain field of natural knowledge and knowing how to transmit it. The human ones - striving towards their own angelic nature – are mediums in the flesh, gifted with the agency to reintegrate what they learn from the spirits into society and for the benefit of all. Gathering all conceivable knowledge from nature, translating the wisdom of life and death into human artistry, that was the human purpose as perceived by Paracelsus.
However, such a process was not a Faustian matter of acquiring knowledge at all cost, but rather one of humbly serving the world and our fellow beings. For how much more important, we could say with Paracelsus, is the service of the wise and knowing, the tested and experienced, the prudent and skilled, than the bungling of the uneducated and inexperienced, the ignorant and self-important? We are lower than the animals, says Paracelsus, unless we set out on the narrow path, each of us in our own art, and prove ourselves worthy again of our daimonic nature.
One last curious remark may be permitted. The fact that the kind of unceremonial, direct interaction with spirits that we encounter in Paracelsus has been maintained by practitioners right up to modern times is interestingly documented by none other than Franz Bardon. Contrary to the rigid and extremely complex instructions he knew for his students on how to invoke spirits, his own approach to invocations stands in impressive parallel to the last Paracelsus quote above.
Mrs. Pravica, who always stayed with her friend Votavova during her visits to Prague, witnessed these “evocations” several times: “Bardon sat at the kitchen table and drew the seal of the beings in the air with his hand. Suddenly the room was filled with a hissing sound, as if a whole flock of birds were flying through the room. He turned pale and stiff, and his eyes turned upward. When he woke up, he dictated.”[17]
Footnotes
[1] HE9,429 — In the following all direct transliterations and subsequent translations into English are following Johan Huser’s edition of Paracelsus’ collected works in ten volumes in Basel from 1589 to 1591. The references are composed of the initials of the edition ([H]user [E]dition), followed by the volume number and the page number. – The original can be accessed online and searched for specific sections here: https://www.paracelsus-project.org/
[2] HE9,430
[3] HE9,430
[4] Paracelsus, Drey Bücher an die Landtschafft Kärnten: Defensiones vnd Verantwortung vber etliche Vnglimpffungen seiner Mißgönner, HE2,177
[5] Matthew 7:7-8: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
[6] The other three are Astronomia Naturalis, Supera, and Olympi Novi.
[7] HE10,396
[8] HE10.394
[9] HE10,66
[10] HE10,243
[11] It must be emphasized that this way of acquiring knowledge is in a different category from making a pact with the devil and bringing about change through his direct intervention. The devil in Paracelsus is the personified adversary of God; the devils are all tricky telluric spirits. (see: HE10,243)
[12] For further reference see Frater Acher, INGENIUM - The Alchemy of the Magical Mind, Exeter: TaDehent, 2022, p. 291-301
[13] For a detailed examination of Nectromantia please refer to the chapter of the same title in my book The Olympic Spirits (ThreeHands Press, 2024).
[14] Sudhoff (ed.), Vol. XII, 1929, p. 157-159 , for the Latin expression at the end, we should read the sun that gives the spirit of one’s birth. (see: Pagel, Walter, The Smiling Spleen – Paracelsianism in Storm and Stress, New York: Karger, 1984, p. 99)
[15] HE9,388
[16] Another parallel to the True Practice of Abraham of Worms should not go unmentioned here. There, too, the practitioner is explicitly instructed to deal with the spirits in a wise and moderate manner. In the 18th chapter, subtitled ”how else to deal with spirits in all things," it says: "[...] namely as their master and not as their servant, and again as their master and not as their god. But in all things keep a proper balance, for we are not dealing with men here, but with spirits who know more than we ourselves can understand. [...] But in all things, what you can have with good, do not seek with severity." (Kollatsch, 2020, p. 117, translation by author)
[17] Emil Stejnar, Franz Bardon - Tatsachen und Anekdoten um einen Eingeweihten, Vienna: ibera Verlag, 2010, p. 17, translation by author. I would like to thank Walter Ogris for the reference to this passage.
