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

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.

CHAPTER ONE

Black Madonna

 

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.