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Paracelsus And The Biblical Foundations Of Magic: Natural, Celestial, And Demonic Astronomy, Dane Thor Daniel

Lake Campus Research Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Paracelsus’s understanding of magic--which he discussed in terms of the types of natural, “celestial” (or Christian), and demonic astronomy—is based largely on his idiosyncratic Biblical exegesis. An important and iconoclastic voice within early modern natural philosophy and medicine as well as Reformation spiritualism, the Swiss-German broke with medieval theories of magic via his synthesis of theology and magic. Although incorporating the mostly extra-Biblical concepts of the tria prima (salt, sulphur, and mercury), elemental matrices, and microcosm-macrocosm analogy, Paracelsus’s spagyrical world (or magico-alchemical cosmos) also featured a concept developed in his extensive theological writings, namely, that the universe consists of two …