Paracelsus

“Paracelsus also rejected the notion that all things in the immediate physical world were composed of earth, air, fire and water. In his view, there were some things that preceded even them: the cosmological wombs, as he called them, of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. These were known as the ‘first three’ . . . The knowledge of powers – or how things knew what to do, and what they could be expected to do when applied as medicine – was, therefore, chemical at its root. This is where the new medicine staked out a new frontier. The human being was a divinely created, spiritually infused, chemical apparatus. The body worked in an alchemical way. Its parts possessed their own ‘inner alchemist’ that ‘knew’ how to separate what was useful to the body from what was not” (B. Mora, 32).