Paracelsus (1493 to 1541) is remembered today as a founder of modern pharmacology. The principle that "the dose makes the poison" goes back to him. Less well known is that this restless Swiss physician was also a practising astrologer, as were many university-trained doctors of his age, and that he wrote one of the most remarkable defences of astrology ever made. It is a defence that firmly rejects fatalism.
The Great Astronomy
Paracelsus set out his philosophy of nature in a large work called the Astronomia Magna, also known as the Philosophia Sagax. He completed it in 1537, but it was not published until 1571, thirty years after his death.
In it he described a "sagacious philosophy" with nine branches, one of which was astrology, the study of spiritual influences. For Paracelsus, astronomy and astrology were not narrow technical subjects. They were the study of the deep correspondence between the great world of the cosmos and the small world of the human being.
He belonged to a Renaissance current of thought, shared with Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, that drew on Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Pythagorean ideas. At its centre was the ancient teaching of the macrocosm and the microcosm: the universe is a great being, and the human being is a small universe that mirrors it.
The firmament within
Paracelsus took this idea further than most. A human being, he wrote, is a lesser universe who carries the whole firmament, with all its powers, hidden within. There is an outer heaven of stars and an inner heaven in each person, and the two are always in communication.
He went so far as to describe two kinds of stars: the heavenly and the earthly, the stars of folly and the stars of wisdom. Just as there is a great world and a little world, he said, the little one can rule the great, and the stars within a person can govern the stars of heaven.
One historian has called this Paracelsus's "two-way astrology". The stars influence us, but we, through what is within us, also influence the stars.
Who is ruled by the stars?
This led Paracelsus to his most famous conclusion. There was an old saying that a wise man may rule the stars. Paracelsus said he believed it, but in his own sense.
"The stars are subject to the philosopher, they must follow him." Only a person who still lives at the level of an animal, he wrote, is driven and compelled by the stars, as surely as a fish is caught by the fisherman or a bird by the snare.
Why is such a person driven? Because, Paracelsus said, they do not know themselves. They do not know how to use the powers hidden in them, and they do not know that they carry the stars within, as a microcosm holding the whole firmament.
Human wisdom, by contrast, is no one's slave and has never given up its freedom. The wise person, who lives by divine wisdom and is made in the image of the divine, rules over both of their bodies, the starry one and the material one. Such a person, Paracelsus wrote, will conquer the stars.
In a passage recorded by his nineteenth-century biographer Franz Hartmann, Paracelsus put it even more bluntly: "It is absurd to believe that the stars can make a man." Whatever the stars can do, he said, we can do ourselves, because the wisdom we receive from God rules over the heavens.
Astrology as inner knowledge
For Paracelsus, then, the purpose of astrology was not to predict a fixed fate. It was to know the inner firmament: the forces of mind and feeling that move within a person and correspond to the movements of the sky.
Hartmann explains that when Paracelsus spoke of "stars" he often meant not only the physical planets but the states of mind and feeling that they represent in the cosmos. The physical body draws its food from the earth. The "sidereal" or starry part of a person receives its moods and thoughts from the stars. But the spirit receives its wisdom from God, and it is the spirit that rules.
This gave astrology a central place in his medicine. A physician, in his view, had to understand the whole person, including this inner heaven, and not merely treat the body as a machine.
Why Paracelsus still matters
Paracelsus rejected the popular, fatalistic astrology of his day just as firmly as he rejected bad medicine. Yet he never rejected the deeper science. His teaching offers a clear middle path: the stars are real powers, and a person who does not know themselves will be carried along by them. But a person who knows the firmament within can rise above that compulsion.
It is a view that sits very close to the heart of jyotish: the chart describes a pattern, and self-knowledge is the key to freedom within it.
Related reading: Osho on Astrology, Part 1: The Oldest and Most Rejected Science.
Sources
- Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna (1537), excerpts in English translation, University of California, Irvine course readings.
- Franz Hartmann, The Life of Paracelsus, Chapter 8, "Alchemy and Astrology".
- "Paracelsus's Two-Way Astrology II: Man's Relation to the Stars", The British Journal for the History of Science (Cambridge).
- Renaissance Astrology, "Paracelsus".
- Wikipedia, "Paracelsus".