Page:Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus Vol I (IA cu31924092287121).djvu/18

xii tuition of the Abbot Trithemius, who is regarded as an adept of a high order, and had been previously the instructor of the more celebrated, though less illustrious, Henry Cornelius Agrippa. From this mysterious ecclesiastic, who at the present day, in so far as he is remembered at all, is best known by his treatises on cryptic writing, he is supposed to have acquired "the Kabbalah of the spiritual, astral, and material worlds." About 1516 he is still found at Basle pursuing his researches in mineralogy, medicine, surgery, and chemistry, under the guidance of Sigismund Fugger, a wealthy physician of that city. Subsequently, having got into some trouble with the authorities, he fled, and commenced his nomadic life, which an apparently inaccurate tradition represents to have begun at the age of twenty years. Though his father was still alive he appears to have been without any means of subsistence, and supported himself, like many distressed students of that period, by psalm-singing, astrological predictions, chiromantic soothsaying, and, it is even said, by necromantic practices. He wandered through Germany, Hungary, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. In the last mentioned country, if it be true that he ever reached it, he is reported to have been made prisoner by the Tartars, to have been brought before "the Great Cham," to have become a favourite at the court of that potentate, and to have accompanied his son on an embassy from China to Constantinople. In spite of the tuition of Trithemius, he had apparently something to learn, and that was nothing less than "the supreme secret of alchemistry," the "universal dissolvent," the Azoth, alcahest, or sophic fire. This was imparted to him by a generous Arabian, about whom no other particulars are forthcoming. It is easy to see that the greater part of this nomadic legend is purely fabulous, and so also, in all probability, is his subsequent journey to India and Egypt. It is not an unusual device to account for obscure periods in the lives of Hermetic philosophers by extensive eastern travellings. However this may be, Paracelsus ultimately returned to Europe, and passed along the Danube into Italy, where he appears as an army surgeon, and where also his wonderful cures began. He is said to have re-entered Germany in 1526, at the age of thirty-two, and if this be accepted the date 1516, when he is supposed to have been at work with Sigismund Fugger, will be found approximately correct. It is to the period immediately succeeding his return that most of his biographers assign his induction into a professorship of physics, medicine, and surgery, at the university he entered