(22) "Immediately my head seemed tied tightly with a string, and soon after there happened to me a singular circumstance such as I had never before experienced. I observed with astonishment that I no longer felt and thought with the head, but with the region of the stomach, as if consciousness had now taken up its seat in the stomach. Terrified by this unusual phenomenon, I asked myself and inquired into myself carefully; but I only became the more convinced that my power of perception was became greater and more comprehensive. This intellectual clearness was associated with great pleasure. I did not sleep, nor did I dream; I was perfectly sober; and my health was perfect. I had occasionally had ecstasies, but these had nothing in common with this condition of the stomach, in which it thought and felt, and almost excluded all cooperation of the head. In the meantime my friends were troubled with the fear that I might go mad. But my faith to God, and my submission to His will, soon dissipated this fear. This state continued for two hours, after which I had same dizziness. I afterwards frequently tasted of the A---, but I never again could reproduce these sensations." (Van Helmont, Demens idea. Reprinted by P. Davidson in The Mistletoe and Its Philosophy.)

(20) The [sour, strong, or] bitter Gall, (viz. the terrible poisonous Flash of Fire) kindles the Warmth in the Heart, or the Fire, and is itself the Cause, from whence all else take their Original.

(18) Understand [or consider] it right; it is the Source- spirit [or working Spirit] out of the Gall which kindles the Heart, whereby the Life was stirred, which is choked as soon as the Tincture in the Blood of the Heart is extinguished. The right Soul has no Need of such Going-forth, it is much more subtle than the Brimstone- spirit, though (in the Life-time) it is in one only Substance.

(5) But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity?

What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or happiness be present under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing "Miseries of Priam."

"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely... until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness."

(47) And we must further a consider, that when the Shriek [or Crack] makes its Dwelling-house, in its strong Breaking-through, out of the Gate of the anxious Darkness, viz. the Tongue, that the Shriek [or Crack] has not then yet seen the Virgin; but when it reflected [or shined] back again into the Heart, into the opened Darkness, and found her so habitable, there then first sprung up its Joy, and Pleasantness, and it became paradisical, and desired not [to go] into the Tongue again, but into the Head, and [desired] there to have its Region out of the Source of the Heart. Therefore the Tongue ought not in all [or altogether] to be believed, for it sits not in the heavenly Region, as the friendly pleasant Virtue [does;] but it has its Region in the Crack and Flash, and the Flash is as near the hellish Region, as the Crack is, for they are both generated in the Sharpness of the Stars, in the Essences, and the Tongue speaks both Lyes and Truth; in which of the two the Spirit arms itself, according to that it speaks: Also it many Times speaks Lies in great Men; when it is armed from the Essences, then it speaks in the Crack, like a Rider in his [haughty, surly, vaunting State,] or high Mindedness. The Life of the Soul. The Gate.

(22) Have not all men then Mind? Thou sayest well, O thou, thus speaking. I, Mind, myself am present with holy men and good, the pure and merciful, men who live piously. [To such] my presence doth become an aid, and straightway they gain gnosis of all things, and win the Father's love by their pure lives, and give Him thanks, invoking on Him blessings, and chanting hymns, intent on Him with ardent love. And ere they give up the body unto its proper death, they turn them with disgust from its sensations, from knowledge of what things they operate. Nay, it is I, the Mind, that will not let the operations which befall the body, work to their [natural] end. For being door-keeper I'll close up [all] the entrances, and cut the mental actions off which base and evil energies induce.

(4) Which what it finds there active doth attract Into its substance, and becomes one soul, Which lives, and feels, and on itself revolves. And that thou less may wonder at my word, Behold the sun's heat, which becometh wine, Joined to the juice that from the vine distils. Whenever Lachesis has no more thread, It separates from the flesh, and virtually Bears with itself the human and divine; The other faculties are voiceless all; The memory, the intelligence, and the will In action far more vigorous than before. Without a pause it falleth of itself In marvellous way on one shore or the other; There of its roads it first is cognizant. Soon as the place there circumscribeth it, The virtue informative rays round about, As, and as much as, in the living members. And even as the air, when full of rain, By alien rays that are therein reflected, With divers colours shows itself adorned, So there the neighbouring air doth shape itself Into that form which doth impress upon it Virtually the soul that has stood still.

(3) Therefore it is that I say, and have said, that evermore when the devil taketh any body, he figureth in some quality of his body what his servants be in spirit. For he enflameth so the imagination of his contemplatives with the fire of hell, that suddenly without discretion they shoot out their curious conceits, and without any advisement they will take upon them to blame other men’s defaults over soon: and this is because they have but one nostril ghostly. For that division that is in a man’s nose bodily, and the which departeth the one nostril from the tother, betokeneth that a man should have discretion ghostly; and can dissever the good from the evil, and the evil from the worse, and the good from the better, ere that he gave any full doom of anything that he heard or saw done or spoken about him. And by a man’s brain is ghostly understood imagination; for by nature it dwelleth and worketh in the head.

(3) O'er whatsoever souls the Mind doth, then, preside, to these it showeth its own light, by acting counter to their prepossessions, just as a good physician doth upon the body prepossessed by sickness, pain inflict, burning or lancing it for sake of health. In just the selfsame way the Mind inflicteth pain on the soul, to rescue it from pleasure, whence comes its every ill. The great ill of the soul is godlessness; then followeth fancy for all evil things and nothing good. So, then, Mind counteracting it doth work good on the soul, as the physician health upon the body.

(71) Timaeus: and He fashioned it dense and smooth and bright and sweet, yet containing bitterness, that the power of thoughts which proceed from the mind, moving in the liver as in a mirror which receives impressions and provides visible images, should frighten this part of the soul; for when the mental power bears down upon it with stern threats, it uses a kindred portion of the liver's bitterness and makes it swiftly suffuse the whole liver, so that it exhibits bilious colors, and by contraction makes it

(22) On the Astral Plane the soul also receives the aid and assistance of some of the great spiritual teachers of the race, whose chosen occupation is to administer to the wants of the pained and suffering souls who are striving to find the way out of their troubles and mistakes. Not only do these teachers administer to the strictly spiritual wants of the souls seeking their help, but in many cases the soul is given the advantage of great assistance in chosen occupations, such as art, science, music, invention, etc., from advanced congenial souls ready and willing to help strugglers on the path. Many an artist, musician, writer, or inventory has come into rebirth greatly benefited and improved by reason of contact with such helpers of the Astral Plane.

(3) For as the more excellent genera are exempt from all others, thus also their energies do not resemble those of any other nature. Hence, when you speak of divine mania, immediately remove from it all human perversions. And if you ascribe a sacred “ sobriety and vigilance ” to divine natures, you must not consider human sobriety and vigilance as similar to it. But by no means compare the diseases of the body, such as suffusions, and the imaginations excited by diseases, with divine imaginations. For what have the two in common with each other? Nor again, must you compare “ an ambiguous state ,” such as that which takes place between a sober condition of mind and ecstasy, with sacred visions of the Gods, which are defined by one energy. But neither must you compare the most manifest surveys of the Gods with the imaginations artificially procured by enchantment. For the latter have neither the energy, nor the essence, nor the truth of the things that are seen, but extend mere phantasms, as far as to appearances only.

(43) The Will now standing thus in the dark Anxiety, it rgets another Will to fly out of the Anxiety again, and to generate the Light; and this other Will is the Mind, out of which proceed the Senses [or Thoughts] not to continue in the Anxiety: And the Will [appears,] discovers itself in the Essences of the Sourness, as in the fierce Hardness of Death; and the Glimpse [or Glance] breaks through the Essences of the sour Hardness, as a swift [or sudden] Flash, and sharpens itself in the sour Hardness, that it becomes [pale, white, or] glimmering like a Flash of Fire, and in its sudden Flight breaks the sour Darkness; and there stands the Hardness, and the harsh Sourness of Death like a broken turning Wheel, which with the Flash of the Breaking flies swiftly as a Thought; as also then the re-conceived Will (which is the Mind) appears so very suddenly. And seeing it cannot fly forward out of the Essences, it must go into the turning Wheel, (for it cannot get from that Place,) and so it breaks the Darkness. And when the Darkness is thus broken, [then] the sharp Glance discovers itself in the pleasant Joy without [or beyond] the Darkness in the Sharpness of the Will, viz. in the Mind, and finds itself habitable therein, from whence the Flash (or Glance) is terrified, and flies up with strong Might through the broken Essences out of the Heart, and would go out at the Mouth, and raises itself far from the Heart, and yet is held by the sour [or harsh] Fiat, and it then makes itself a several Region (viz. the Tongue) wherein then stands the Shriek [or the Crack] of the broken Essences. And seeing then it reflects [or recoils] back again into the Heart, as into its first Dwelling-house, and finds itself so very habitable and pleasant, because the Gates of the Darkness are broken, then it kindles itself so highly in the loving Will, by Reason of the Meekness, and goes no more like a stern [or fierce] Flash through all Essences, but [it] goes trembling with great Joy; and the Might of the Joy is now many hundred Times stronger, than first the Flash [or Glance] was, which yielded [or discovered] itself through the sour harsh Essences of the Death, and goes with strong Might out of the Heart into the Head, in the Will [or Purpose] to possess the heavenly Region.

(1) Whenever by delight or else by pain, That seizes any faculty of ours, Wholly to that the soul collects itself, It seemeth that no other power it heeds; And this against that error is which thinks One soul above another kindles in us. And hence, whenever aught is heard or seen Which keeps the soul intently bent upon it, Time passes on, and we perceive it not, Because one faculty is that which listens, And other that which the soul keeps entire; This is as if in bonds, and that is free. Of this I had experience positive In hearing and in gazing at that spirit; For fifty full degrees uprisen was The sun, and I had not perceived it, when We came to where those souls with one accord Cried out unto us: "Here is what you ask." A greater opening ofttimes hedges up With but a little forkful of his thorns The villager, what time the grape imbrowns, Than was the passage-way through which ascended Only my Leader and myself behind him, After that company departed from us.

(14) For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods.

It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul- and not of all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the body.

A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make felicity; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest: the body must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the appearances.

Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it.

When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the negative take away?

(1) AND on this manner is this madness wrought that I speak of. They read and hear well said that they should leave outward working with their wits, and work inwards: and because that they know not which is inward working, therefore they work wrong. For they turn their bodily wits inwards to their body against the course of nature; and strain them, as they would see inwards with their bodily eyes and hear inwards with their ears, and so forth of all their wits, smelling, tasting, and feeling inwards. And thus they reverse them against the course of nature, and with this curiosity they travail their imagination so indiscreetly, that at the last they turn their brain in their heads, and then as fast the devil hath power for to feign some false light or sounds, sweet smells in their noses, wonderful tastes in their mouths; and many quaint heats and burnings in their bodily breasts or in their bowels, in their backs and in their reins and in their members.

(10) The belief that nearly all diseases have their origin in the invisible nature of man (the Astrum) is a fundamental precept of Hermetic medicine, for while Hermetists in no way disregarded the physical body, they believed that man's material constitution was an emanation from, or an objectification of, his invisible spiritual principles. A brief, but it is believed fairly comprehensive, résumé of the Hermetic principles of Paracelsus follows.

(14) As light bears witness of life-which is its source-so the mind bears witness of the spirit, and activity in a still lower plane bears witness of intelligence. Thus the mind bears witness of the heart, while the generative system, in turn, bears witness of the mind. Accordingly, the spiritual nature is most commonly symbolized by a heart; the intellectual power by an opened eye, symbolizing the pineal gland or Cyclopean eye, which is the two-faced Janus of the pagan Mysteries; and the generative system by a flower, a staff, a cup, or a hand.

(29) When the Will thus draws to it, then it becomes inwardly and outwardly impregnated, and is darkened; the Will cannot endure this, viz. to be set in the Dark, and therefore falls into great Anxiety for the Light; for the outward Materia [or Matter] is filled with the Elements, and the Blood is choaked [checked or stopped;] and there then the Tincture withdraws, and there is then the right Abyss of Death, and so the inward [Materia or Matter] is filled from the Essences of the Virtue, [or Power,] and in the inward there rises up another Will, out of the stern Virtue of the Essences, [that it might] lift itself up into the Light of the Meekness; and in the outward stands the Desire to be severed, the Impure from the Pure, for that the outward Fiat does.

(12) But the reasoning faculty, being peculiar to the human soul, ought not to be impelled similarly with the irrational animals, but ought to discriminate appearances, and not to be carried away by them. The powers, then, of which we have spoken hold out beautiful sights, and honours, and adulteries, and pleasures, and such like alluring phantasies before facile spirits; as those who drive away cattle hold, out branches to them. Then, having beguiled those incapable of distinguishing the true from the false pleasure, and the fading and meretricious from the holy beauty, they lead them into slavery. And each deceit, by pressing constantly on the spirit, impresses its image on it; and the soul unwittingly carries about the image of the passion, which takes its rise from the bait and our consent.