Paracelsus was the most wondrous intellect of his age and original thinker. Bold creator of chemical medicines, founder of courageous parties, ever victorious in controversy. He belonged to those great minds who have created a new mode of thinking on the natural existence of things. More than one pathologist, chemist, homœopathist, and magnetist has quenched his thirst for knowledge in his books. Alkahest, a Paracelsian term for which there is no end to the assumed explanations, is Chaos, i.e., primordial undifferentiated substance, containing within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man, including the “breath of life” itself in a latent state, ready to be awakened. Chaos is another name for Æther, the celestial virgin and spiritual mother of every form and being in the manifested world. Alkahest was used by Paracelsus to denote the menstruum or universal solvent that is capable of reducing all things. But the real alkahest is the all-pervading Divine Spirit of the higher Initiate, not the all-geist of the inferior Alchemist. Paracelsus was the greatest chemist of his age and peer of modern scientists. But he exhausted his ingenuity in endless transpositions of letters and abbreviations of words and sentences. For example, when he wrote sutratur he meant tartar; and by mutrin, nitrum! By mercurius vitæ, he meant the living spirit or aura of silver, not the quicksilver. Paracelsus declared that the affinity between stars and man is due to their identical composition. Embodied existence is the outcome of reciprocal sympathies and antipathies between the starry sky and man. Our body comes from terrestrial elements; the thinking principle, from the stars. It is not the spirits of heaven and hell that are the masters of nature but the Spirit of Man which is concealed in him, as the fire is concealed in the flint. Every living being possesses his own celestial power and is closely allied with heaven. The fact that everyone affects another and all, mutually and reciprocally, is evidence of the universal sympathy and antipathy that exists between everyone and everything. Éliphas Lévi quotes approvingly the doctrine of Paracelsus that every man, animal, and plant bears external and internal evidence of the influences dominant at the moment of germinal development. Pure magic stems from the imperial will of man. Will is neither spirit nor substance but everlasting ideation. Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. Paracelsus is the father of modern magic and proponent of the occult physics of the Kabbalah and Magnetism. True Magic is occult wisdom; reason, the folly of man. No armour can protect against Black Magic, for it injures the inward spirit of life. But there is a divine power in every man, which is to rule his life, and which no one can influence for evil, not even the greatest magician. Let men bring their lives under its guidance, and they have nothing to fear from man or devil. The great Adept removed disease by applying a healthy organism to the afflicted part. Watch out! A would-be healer, who is physically or morally ill, not only fails to heal but often imparts his illness to his patient, thus robbing him of what strength he may have. The divine spirit is a great thing, so great that no one can fully express its greatness. It requires no conjuration or ceremonies. Circle-making and incense burning are all tomfoolery and temptation by which only evil spirits are attracted, says Paracelsus. If we only knew the power of the heart, nothing would be impossible for us. The whole world is one living organism and outcome of a single creative effort. There is no death and nothing “dead” throughout nature. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone has ever been “created,” and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced becoming, by expanding from within without, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance in the abyss of matter. According to the Hermetico-Kabbalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster that evolved out of its “chaotic” self a new Kosmos. Yliaster is the universal matrix of Kosmos, the Father-Mother within. It is beyond space, time, and intellectual comprehension. Yliaster is Anima Mundi, the noumenon of Astral Light, and a cosmic veil between earth and the waters of Space that sprang out of Chaos. The Swiss-German Adept rediscovered some of the lost secrets of the Phrygian priests and the Asclepieia. He was a learned Theosophist and a far-famed physician-Occultist. He taught that Fire, i.e., the Spirit of the Flame, is the highest God. The Hermetic Fire is a ray of the One eternal and infinite Flame that starts from, and is immediately reabsorbed into, the parent essence. The Spirit of the Flame is invisible to all except to the eyes of another immortal Spirit. The occult properties of medicinal plants and minerals, and of the curative powers of certain things in nature, are far more important and useful than metaphysical and psychological Occultism or Theophany.

Isis Unveiled, A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern of Science and Theology by H. P. Blavatsky. Volume 1 of 2: The "Infallibility of Science. CONTENTS include: Before the Veil--Old Things with New Names--Phenomena and Forces--Blind Leaders of the Blind--Theories Respecting Psychic Phenomena--The Ether, or "Astral Light"--Psycho-Physical Phenomena--The Elements, Elementals, and Elementaries--Some Mysteries of Nature--Cyclic Phenomena--The Inner and Outer Man--Psychological and Physical Marvels--The "Impassable Chasm"--Realities and Illusion--Egyptian Wisdom--India, The Cradle of the Race. Reproduction of the 1877 Edition.

Rosicrucianism was not a sect, is was but one of many branches of the same tree. Rosicrucians no longer exist, the last of that fraternity having departed in the person of Cagliostro. Occultism is a double-edged weapon for one who is unprepared to devote his whole life to it. The theory of it, unaided by serious practice, will always remain a foolish and ignorant speculation. He who rejects the immortality of man’s soul cannot perceive the unity of homogeneity of his Creator through the plurality of heterogeneity, and he therefore condemns himself to live hand-by-hand with death in the “vale of tears.” Any attempt to learn about Occultism by book study alone will always prove insufficient — even to the analytical mind trained to extract the quintessence of truth scattered throughout myriads of contradictory statements — unless supported by practice and experience. As primitive Christianity split into numerous sects, so the science of Occultism gave birth to a variety of doctrines and brotherhoods. For example, the Egyptian Ophites, became the Christian Gnostics, shooting forth the Basilideans of the second century. And the original Rosicrucians, created the Paracelsists or Fire-Philosophers, the European Alchemists, and other branches of their sect. The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross was not founded until the middle of the thirteenth century, by Christian Rosenkreuz — a reformed sorcerer. The Rosicrucians gave birth to the early Theosophists, at whose head was Paracelsus, and to the Alchemists, one of the most celebrated of whom was Thomas Vaughan who wrote the most practical things on Occultism, under the name of Eugenius Philalethes. The Welsh Alchemist was definitely “made before he became.” Unlike the European Rosicrucians who, in order “to become and not be made,” have struggled alone, violently robbing Nature of her secrets, the Oriental “Rosicrucians” in the serene beatitude of their divine knowledge, are ever ready to help the earnest student struggling “to become” with practical knowledge, which dissipates like a heavenly breeze the darkest clouds of sceptical doubt. Whereas the lofty principles and doctrines of Christ and Buddha were calculated to embrace the whole of humanity, Confucius confined his attention solely to his own countrymen without troubling his head about the rest of mankind. Intensely Chinese in patriotism and views, his philosophical doctrines are as much devoid of the purely poetic element, which characterizes the teachings of Christ and Buddha, as the religious tendencies of his people lack in that spiritual exaltation which we find, for instance, in India. Confucius did not have the depth of feeling and spiritual striving of his contemporary, Lao-tzu. The heavy, childish, cold, sensual nature of the Chinese explains the peculiarities of their history. Marginal are the differences between the Rosicrucian and the Oriental Kabbalah. American Spiritualism, which has proved such a sore in the side of the materialists, will soon become a science of mathematical certitude, instead of being regarded only as the crazy delusion of epileptic monomaniacs. The Zohar is an inexhaustible mine of hidden wisdom and mystery for all subsequent Kabbalists. All recent Kabbalahs are copies of the God’s Splendour. While the Oriental Kabbalah remained in its pure primitive shape, the Mosaic or Jewish one is full of drawbacks, and with the keys to many secrets purposely misinterpreted. If the primitive Rosicrucians learned their first lessons of wisdom from Oriental Masters, that was not so with their direct descendants, the Paracelsists: the Kabbalah of the latter Illuminati degenerated into the twin sister of the Jewish. The custodians of the real Kabbalah of primitive humanity are certain Oriental philosophers. Their location will not be revealed until the day when humanity shall awake from its spiritual lethargy, and open its blind eyes to the dazzling rays of Truth. Thus the light of Truth will finally dissipate the unhealthy mists of the battalions of religious sects which disgrace our times. They will warm up and recall into new life the millions of wretched souls, who shiver and are half frozen under the icy hand of deadly scepticism. Occultism without practice will ever be like the statue of Pygmalion that no one can animate without infusing into it a spark of the Sacred Divine Fire. The Jewish Kabbalah, the only authority of the European Occultist, is based on the secret meanings of the Hebrew scriptures, which afford no hope for the adepts to solve them practically. More! The likelihood of anyone becoming a practical Kabbalist-Rosicrucian through studying the Jewish Kabbalah single-handed, without being initiated and so being “made” such by someone who “knows,” is as foolish as to hope to thread the Cretan labyrinth without a clue, or to open the secret locks of the ingenious inventors of the mediaeval ages, without having possession of the keys. The Seventh Rule of the Rosicrucian “who became but was not made” has its secret meaning, like every other phrase left by the Kabbalists to posterity. The Rosicrucian has to struggle alone and toil long years in the hope of finding out some of the lesser secrets of the great Kabbalah. His mental, moral, and physical fitness will be tested to the extreme. His spirit will have to pass through the ordeal of incarnation and life, and be baptised with matter before he could attain inner knowledge. There is nothing new under the Sun. There is not a science, nor a modern discovery in any section of it, which was not known to the Oriental Occultists of the hoary antiquity. What would not modern physicians, practitioners of their blind and lame science of medicine, give for a part of the knowledge of botany and plants! The hope of finding remnants of such wisdom as Ancient Asia possessed, ought to tempt our conceited modern science to explore that territory assiduously. Religions and sciences, laws and customs, they are all the direct products of Oriental Occultism, disguised by the hand of time, and palmed upon us under new pseudonyms. The time is near when the old superstitions and the errors of centuries will be swept away by the hurricane of Truth. There is scarcely a rite or ceremony of the Christian Church that does not descend from Occultism. When the devout worshippers of the Vatican lift up their eyes in mute adoration upon the head of their God on Earth, their Pontifex Maximus, what they admire the most is the caricatured head-dress, the Amazon-like helmet of Pallas Athene, the heathen goddess Minerva.

Rosicrucians emerged in Europe as an antidote to the material side of alchemy and to stem the tide of the folly. From this point of view, the Rosicrucians are group of Reformers. The spiritual side of man must be awakened and utilised, before the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir of Life, can be discovered. Wonder-seekers then, as now, craving for power and wealth, did not appreciate that higher ethics are prerequisite to real wisdom. The Rosicrucians were alchemists in the spiritual sense and professors of divine magic, which is devoid of selfishness, love of power, ambition, and lucre. Most divergent are the lines of thought between Christian and Occultist.