Paracelsus on the Role of Faith in Magic
“What is happening?
He is beginning to believe.”
Let’s do something dangerous. In the attempt to offer a short exposition on Paracelsus’s teachings on faith in magic, we will not begin in the 16th century, but in the perilous arena of modern pop culture.
The risk with studying historic sources of magic always is that we allow them to remain in the past. That their voice remains a distant echo, safe on its pages, rather than an imminent call to us in the present moment. In studying the history of magic as practitioners, our goal is to turn a dialogue of the dead into an invitation to ourselves. – It is with this in mind, that we will be leveraging a modern pop culture example as well as some of my own experiences to illustrate what we can learn from Paracelsus about faith in magic.
If you hold more of a purist preference, I invite you to study the direct translations from Paracelsus’s works included in this post. They alone hold ample powder to blow through brick walls in our minds. Much of what it takes is the spark of allowing Paracelsus’s voice to come through in our present moment.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Towards the end of the first instalment of the popular The Matrix series, the story’s hero is finally ready to fully transcend his identity away from the colourless software engineer he had been within the matrix, Mr. Anderson, and towards the saviour figure called Neo. This conscious change in believe forms the central theme of the film. It is coming to a climax when Neo chooses to stop running from the Matrix’s ubiquitous agent Mr. Smith, and to face him as an equal in power and potential. In classical cinematic identification with the protagonists, this is the moment, we, the viewer have been waiting for during the previous 120 minutes: A moment of self-authorisation, of self-empowerment over who we are, of what we allow to define or confine us. And even in one of the most daring science-fiction movies of its time, all of this hinges on the inherently human quality to take control over what we believe in.
For know this of faith, that faith can do this, whether I use it wrongly or not, yet it works signs. […] For it is faith that does it, it creates outcome, it bears its fruit, according to how you believe. Therefore, that you do not abuse it, the commandment is given, because it comes true. […] So it is with the faith: the same has force. If I believe wrongly, it goes out; if I believe righteously, it goes out. (Paracelsus, Liber de superstitionibus et ceremoniis 1)
In a world obsessed with technological progress, scientific innovation, industrial automation and, of course, artificial intelligence, it seems hard to find a subject that seems more archaic, backwards-looking or simply outdated than this: faith.
Now, the first thing we need to do to uncover the magical force called faith is to let go of any association with organised religion. To understand the inherent potential in man’s ability to believe in something, we have to free this organic capacity from millennia of debris heaped upon it by man-made religious organisations. While often using similar terminology, the latter most of the time have little to do with personal empowerment for actual spirit-work, and much more with rigorous power-politics and social exploitation.
Almost five hundred years ago, Paracelsus made this point unmistakably clear. In his collected works, we come across more than a dozen separate instances where he pauses to explain the natural force embedded into man that is faith. Above and in the following quotes, we are offering a few direct and modernised translations from his old vernacular in German.
If the medic […] anchors themselves in faith, then the faith splits itself into two: one faith in God, the other in Satan. If he believes truthfully, according to the Gospel, a mountain will sink itself into the depth of the ocean; and even much easier than that he will be able to heal a sick man. Such remedy does not need any help but faith in Divinity. Yet when his faith does not stand in God but in the infernal ones [inferos], it follows that such faith takes effect through the infernal forces, which hold a pharmacy that contains all mysteries of nature that are administered by them. (Paracelsus, Philosophia sagax 2)
As we can see from the quote, Paracelsus is very explicit on this point, that man should attach their faith to Divinity, but in principle is free to attach it to anything. In fact, if man was to attach it to the “infernal ones” what is waiting for them is not the usual threat of eternal damnation but rather an entire telluric pharmacy resided over by the chthonic spirits. So according to Paracelsus, it is the application of man’s free will to their capacity to have faith that opens the doors of spirit contact and enables daemonic access and affiliation.
Paracelsus actually expresses a very straightforward idea: Like breathing, like standing on a cliff and calling to the sea, like carefully tasting an unknown fruit for its bitterness or sweetness, faith is an inherent skill embedded into each human. Unlike the physical senses and their external capabilities, however, faith resides on the inside, on the intersection between man’s mind and soul. Therefore, faith as a capability is equally rooted in our heart as it is in our head.3
If we were to translate Paracelsus’s explanations on faith in the above quotes and elsewhere into a 21st century position, we could give it as such: He defines the human capability of having faith in something as the ability to flow into one – whether this means becoming one with an idea, an object, or a person, may this be temporarily or permanently. For Paracelsus, therefore, faith is our capacity to flow and merge into full identification with something. To have faith in something means that relating to this particular idea, person or object we burn the bridges of “If and But”, and resolve the boundaries of “I”.
Let’s illustrate this in a mundane context and consider the person you love most in your life: The relationship you hold to them is special for many reasons. One critical reason for all of us, however, is the fact that in this person’s presence we do not need to guard ourselves. Loving them, among many other things, means we are willing to lower all defence mechanisms in their presence, and openly hand ourselves over to them. That does not mean we do this in an egotistical or self-abandoning way. But in a way that blurs the lines between “I” and “Thou”, a way that allows this other person to step up so close to us that in some moments rather than sensing two separate people we begin to experience a unified a field of us: Perceptions, words, emotions flow unconstrained between us. Like clouds temporarily assume one body, so we become one. In these moments, the threshold that normally separates us from the world has turned so low, so thin, that even with the tips of our fingers we cannot feel it any more.
Like a magnetic field, activated by an electric current, faith is the force that unites. It is nothing in itself, but a field of potential that requires both careful activation and deliberate direction. A magnetic field requires at least two objects that react to it so it can take effect in the world. Faith also requires at least two objects between which it can work to close out distance and distinction. Faith, therefore, is a human’s inherent capability to – consciously or unconsciously – create affiliation, alikeness, or in magical terms, sympathy.
This is why Paracelsus pauses so often to explain the power and poison that can be the force of faith: In our magical operations faith is a most essential and yet most often overlooked tool. In magic, unlike in a romantic relationship, we do not use it to lower the threshold between ourselves and another person. Instead, we use it to lower the threshold between the physical realm that contains our bodily self, and the realm of the spirit. In magic, at its most essential level, faith is what at least temporarily pulls us out of our identification with our blood, bones, skin and hair, and allows us to step over the threshold of becoming fully one with our travelling spirit.
Here is a helpful example that you can practice for yourself: You might be familiar with Josephine McCarthy’s root-exercise of accessing the Flame of the Void. The importance of this simple yet essential spiritual operation cannot be overstated. Here is a brief excerpt of the longer exercise:
[…] Light a candle and close your eyes.
See the candle flame with your inner vision and see it grow before you. Be aware of a flame within you, the flame of being seated deep in your centre. The flame within you grows strong, and the candle flame before you grows bigger. See yourself in your imagination step into the candle flame and let the two flames merge. You bathe in the flames that do not burn, and the power of life flows through the flames and into your body, strengthening you.
When you are ready, see yourself step forward through the flames with the intent to pass into the void. You step through the fire and find yourself in a still dark place where there is no time, no space and no movement. There is nothing but stillness and silence. You let your thoughts fall away, let your sense of your body fall away and the details of your life, they too fall away, leaving you still and silent. […]
(Josephine McCarthy, Working with the Void)
This exercise offers a powerful and safe way to experience the power of faith: I’d invite you to do this exercise on a day of average chaos and madness, with average calm and purpose, in the same way you would clean your teeth before going to bed. Note the results. Then I’d invite you to do it again with faith: This means that as you sit in silence, looking at the flame, getting ready to do this small operation, you decide to make it count as if it was the last thing you’ll ever do. Performing magic with faith, means you hand over all of yourself to the work of the very moment. Contrary to the attitude of an academic researcher or an anthropologist on their field studies, you immerse yourself fully. You are all in. You bring all of your skin into this operation. Most importantly for the present exercise, performing it with faith means you switch your identity fully into the flame. The flame becomes Neo, the flame becomes you. What you experience inside this flame, and once you have stepped through it on the other end, you are willing to accept as stark and raw reality. No human filtering, no “Ifs or Buts”…
It’s your faith that decides whether performing the Flame of the Void will be a short mindfulness meditation, or an expedition into an unknown reality. It’s your faith that determines if you will work this operation as a soothing wellness strategy, or if you punch that door open into a magical reality. In short, faith is the currency that determines how much this operation will matter. Faith invites us to not hold anything back, but to operate in unconditional trust. Faith has to flow in equal amounts from the fire of our minds and the wellspring of our hearts.
In light of this, it should be obvious how adept and agile a magician has to become in handling their faith: In one moment they need it to be a firehose, in the next the measured drips from a vial. They will want to apply it in spades to the moment when they cross the threshold into the inner realm, and pull free from the iron grip of physical reality. And yet they will handle it as carefully as their own heart, when deciding to which spirit (or person) to apply it to. Allowing ourselves to become alike is the binding poison that is made up of a human’s capacity to have faith.
Here is a personal and rather extreme example: Once, I allowed a spirit in vision to tattoo a magical sigil onto my solar plexus. Next to crossing the abyss, that counts among the most daring and courageous magical operations I ever conducted. At that moment when it happened, I knew with the same certainty as I feel oxygen flowing into my lungs now, that this would change the rest of my life – and of many lives to come. There was nothing left of me that stood outside this moment and experience. I was in it; no thresholds, no safe-keeping, no way back. It took a lot of experience and technique, craft if you want, to arrive at this moment, to enable it. However, this moment would have been nothing but a ghostly echo, had I not worked in unconditional faith with the spirit who was present with me.
Equally, it is important to understand that the degree of faith I was willing to invest in this moment, would have not changed anything about the ontological reality of the spirit I was working with. That spirit, just like the myriad of spirits we are constantly surrounded by, couldn’t care less about how much faith I brought to the table of our work. Instead, the side of the equation where it mattered was entirely my own: In magical operations faith determines the degree of fully embedded consciousness we bring to an operation. It determines how much of our awareness, our inner senses, our subtle perception we will be able to switch on and away from the physical reality. Faith is the only gatekeeper, the only threshold between Castaneda’s tonal and nagual, or Gustav Meyrink’s Hüben und Drüben.
As beings endowed with free will, we hold the power to allot and charge our consciousness with faith. Faith then becomes the great activator, the master-switch of shifting our presence from here to there. This is not because we randomly and one-sidedly create our own fantasy-reality, but because we operate with faith in its original etymological sense: in the idea of placing our entire trust into something. Faith can become the key that during our magical operations temporarily allows us to shift from embodied human into embodied spirit.
Obviously, there is much more to be said and experienced about faith in magic and Paracelsus position on it. Naturally, it is arduous work – both in practice and education – to overcome centuries of misperception and confusion over this central term. All too often has it been either belittled as the opposite of knowing, or as the fundamentalistic sibling of imagining. And yet, helping us learn how to coin this term anew in the light of an essential human capability is of critical importance. Already almost five-hundred years ago, this very idea formed a cornerstone of Paracelsus’s magical program.
For now, we will close with three additional short translations, which provide rich food for further study on the subject of faith in magic. The first one is taken from Paracelsus’s The Books of the Invisible Illnesses (Die Bücher von den Unsichtbaren Krankheiten, 1531/1532); the second one from the first volume that forms part of his Philosophia magna: de divinis operibus et seretis naturae. The third one emerges from the periphery of the possibly spurious Archidoxis magica, and together with other shorter treatises was first printed as an appendix to the latter in Strasbourg in 1570. We will never know if this last paragraph truly emerged from the hand of Paracelsus; however, the spirit with which it was written wonderfully illustrates Paracelsus’s understanding of the essential role of faith in magic.
Paracelsus on Faith in Magic
Modernised Translations from his Collected Works
You know how the Gospel is giving a succinct understanding of the might and power of faith, where it says the following sentence [Luke 17:6]: And if you had as little faith as a grain of mustard seed, but from within this faith and with the power of it you said to the mountain: you, mountain, send yourself down into the ocean, then so it will be. Therefore, you should know that our power, which the body commands from its flesh and blood, is but a small power, but that our mighty power lies in the faith alone. And as gentle and easy as we might pick up a grain of mustard seed and throw it into the ocean, as if there existed no weight, just as gentle and easy we throw the giant mountains into the ocean through our faith. That is why we have to understand faith and that wondrous powers reside within it, powers which the visible body may not think of in its own senses. (…) all power that we should need and have will exist through faith. And this is how the power of faith should be understood and seen, as we have shown here.
But further you should understand, the spirits are equally capable of this, and they may throw the [mountain] Olympum into the Read Sea, or they may throw all oceans on Mount Aetna, and similar things, if God imposed it. Therefore know, the spirits have no body, neither blood nor flesh, and thus they don’t hold the [respective] powers; they affect everything through the faith that they have. So remember the sum of the Gospel is this, as if Christ wanted to speak: What are you, humans, in your powers? Nothing. But this I say to you, from where you shall take your power: take it from faith. Once you have faith, and even if it was as little as a mustard grain of seed, behold, you will be as powerful as the spirits. For then, despite you being humans, your might and power will be equal to the spirits (…). So remember, it is through faith that we turn ourselves into spirits.
– Paracelsus, Die Bücher von den unsichtbaren Krankheiten4
But where faith will not fall into your heart, but into ceremonies, [holy] images, [and sacred] paintings, you will have to have these. But now know that it is an evil heart with thee. For though these things move thee and make thee groan, yet the cause and beginning is nothing. This means: you have taken the beginning from the images, and into the images it goes again. If you have taken the beginning from the ceremonies, it returns to them. If you have taken it from the painting, it goes back into it. For all things return to their first beginning, from which they came. And these beginnings are transient, are mortal. Likewise, your faith will be mortal, transient and fragile.
– Paracelsus, Liber de superstitionibus et ceremoniis5
For what theologian (who has also understood magic) has ever cast out a devil or otherwise expelled or brought to him a spirit? Or much less and lower that he has ever made a sick person well or otherwise done any help, just by his faith? I doubt that he moved a great mountain by it, and even cast it into the sea? From this it follows that they themselves understand little and not much about this faith of which Christ speaks, and yet it is in their mouths every day, they talk and teach much about it, and yet they themselves do not know how to try it, and thus perform a sign of which one would like to say understand faith and know how to use and prove the same. And when another one comes who does a sign by faith, whether good or evil, they call him a sorcerer, although it is beyond their reason and human wisdom, and they do not know how to distinguish magic from sorcery. For magic is a pure and nimble art, not stained and sullied with ceremonies or incantations as is nigromantia. For in it neither ceremonies, conjurations, consecrations, benedictions, nor maledictions are used and added, but only faith, of which Christ says that it moves mountains and casts them into the sea. The one who can also command all spirits and ascendants, who can master and conquer them, in him this faith is perceived.
– Paracelsus, De occulta philosophia 6
Footnotes
Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, Band XIV, München und Berlin: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1933, p. 367-369. Modernised German version: “Denn das wisse vom Glauben, dass der Glaube das vermag, ob ich ihn falsche gebrauche oder nicht, so wirkt er doch Zeichen. […] Denn der Glaube der tut es, er gibt Werk, er gibt seine Frucht, je nachdem wie du glaubst. Darum dass du ihn nicht missbrauchst, darum ist das Gebot gegeben, denn er wird wahr. […] So ist es mit dem Glauben: der selbige hat Kraft. Glaube ich falsch, es schreitet hinaus, glaube ich gerecht, es schreitet hinaus.” ↩︎
Peuckert, Will-Erich (ed.); Paracelsus - Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV, Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2009, p. 294/295 ↩︎
The magical method called prayer in such a context breaks free from any orthodox handcuffs. Equally distorted like the term faith through centuries of dominion of organised religion, prayer is not a liturgical text learned by heart and recited at the correct moment. In stark opposition, Paracelsus portrays it as the science and art of knowing how to “seek and knock”. If done “in the appropriate way and with a pure and unconditional heart, all that we seek will be given to us to be found, and all that is otherwise occult and cast away from us, will be opened and unsealed.” (Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, Band XIV, München und Berlin: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1933, p. 513) ↩︎
Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, Band IX, München und Berlin: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1933, p. 260-261 ↩︎
Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, Band XIV, München und Berlin: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1933, p. 371. Modernised German version: “Wo aber der Glaube in dein Herz nicht fallen will, sondern in die Zeremonien, [heiligen] Bilder, [und sakralen] Gemälde, so wirst du diese haben müssen. Jetzt wisse aber, dass es ein böses Herz ist bei dir. Denn ob diese Dinge dich schon bewegen und zum Seufzen bringen, so ist doch der Grund und Anfang nichts. Das meint: du hast den Anfang von den Bildern genommen, und in die Bilder geht er wieder. Hast du den Anfang von den Zeremonien genommen, so kehrt er wieder in diese zurück. Hast du ihn von dem Gemälde genommen, so geht er wieder darein. Denn die Dinge gehen alle wieder in ihren ersten Anfang zurück, aus dem sie gekommen sind. Und diese Anfänge sind vergänglich, sind sterblich. Ebenso wird dein Glaube sterblich sein, vergänglich und zerbrechlich.” ↩︎
Sudhoff, Karl (ed.); Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, Band XIV, München und Berlin: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1933, p. 538-539. Modernised German version: “Denn welcher Theologe (der auch hat die Magie verstanden hat) hat je einen Teufel ausgetrieben oder sonst einen Geist vertrieben oder zu ihm gebracht? Oder noch viel weniger und geringer, dass er je einen Kranken gesund gemacht oder sonst eine Hilfe getan hat, allein durch seinen Glauben? Ich bezweifele dass er dadurch einen grossen Berg versetzt und gar ins Meer geworfen hat? Daraus folgt, dass sie diesen Glauben, von dem Christus spricht, selber wenig und gar nicht viel verstehen, und doch faehrt er ihnen täglich im Maul herum, reden und lehren sie viel davon, und wissen ihn selbst doch nicht zu probieren, und damit ein Zeichen zu tun, von dem man sagen möchte sie verstuenden den Glauben und wissen den selben zu gebrauchen und zu bewähren. Und wenn ein anderer kommt, der durch den Glauben ein Zeichen tut, es sei gleich gut oder böse, heissen sie ihn einen Zauberer, obgleich es ueber ihre Vernunft und menschliche Weisheit geht, und sie wissen die Magie und Zauberei nicht zu unterscheiden. Denn die Magie ist eine reine und behände Kunst, nicht mit Zeremonien oder Beschwörungen befleckt und besudelt wie denn die Nigromantia. Denn in ihr werden weder Zeremonien, Beschwörungen, Heiligungen, Segnungen, noch Verfluchungen gebraucht und hinzugenommen, sondern allein der Glaube, von dem Christus sagt, dass er die Berge versetzt und ins Meer wirft. Derjenige der auch allen Geistern und Aszendenten gebieten kann, der sie meistern und bezwingen, in dem nimmt man diesen Glauben wahr.” ↩︎