Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim)

Paracelsus (1493–1541), born Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was a Swiss-German physician, alchemist, and reformer who overturned classical medicine by insisting on observation, chemistry, and a Hermetic vision of the human as a microcosm of the cosmos.

Among his earliest works, the Volumen Medicinae Paramirum (written in the 1520s–1530s), sets out his doctrine of the five entia, the five causes of disease, ranging from the influence of the stars and poisons to spiritual causes and the will of God.

Across his writings he developed a theory of imaginatio in which the imagination is not fantasy but a genuine operative force. Paracelsus matters to the mind-power lineage because he gave imagination an explicit causal role in health and reality.

He held that a charged imagination could act as the medium of magical and pathological effects, that “the spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material,” and that faith and inner conviction shape the body’s condition.

This conviction, that mental and imaginative states are real agents in physical outcomes, runs directly forward into mesmerism, mental healing, and the New Thought claim that mind heals the body. His microcosm-macrocosm framework and his fusion of alchemy with medicine also deeply shaped Böhme, Fludd, and Vaughan.