Esoteric Coffeehouse

Homeopathy is the brainchild of Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor practicing at the beginning of the 19th century. As a young physician, Hahnemann became discontented with the mainstream medicine practiced during his era, which often employed harsh and doubtful measures such as bloodletting, purging, blistering and excessive doses (1). His own experience and observation led him to propose a radically new medicine, homeopathy, which could be translated as “the cure is like to the disease”. Homeopathy is based on a few pillar principles developed by Hahnemann, which I will attempt to summarise below:

1. The law of “similars”. This law, which is rightfully considered as the basic tenet of homeopathy, had been the mainstay of several ‘dissident’ physicians such as Hippocrates, Paracelsus or Stahl. The law maintains that cure should be similar, rather than opposed to disease. In other words, patients should take medicine that is apparently ‘stimulating’ the illness. This may sound rather absurd in our day-and-age, when it is ‘self-understood’ that the medicine should be contradictory to the disease: thus, when we have an infection we take antibiotics to ‘reduce’ or ‘eliminate’ it. Who would even consider taking something that would increase the infection? Yet some famous physicians, including Hahnemann, thought that a contrary medicine only quashes the symptoms, without addressing the real problem. The infection may be reduced or eliminated, but the body’s disease would only find some other outlet to express itself. That is because, in Hahnemann’s views, disease goes deeper than what we normally think as illness. Disease is a spiritual entity, rather than a physical one (2).

2. Theory of the vital force (“vitalism”). Homeopathy belongs to a long lineage of scientists or philosophers that believed that, behind the apparent materiality of the universe lay a spiritual force that organized matter (3). Proponents of this theory include Aristotle, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Stahl, Bergson, Driesch and others (4, 5). Hahnemann subscribed to this view, maintaining that the body was animated by a spiritual force he called “dynamis”, which was responsible for maintaining and regulating the body (6). Far before the ideas of homeostasis and immunity were introduced into medicine, he believed that the body had the capacity of self-regulating itself. However, he also considered that, when disease takes over, the body is no longer able to protect itself and the physician must then intervene.

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Before New Age, there was Spiritualism. Just like New Age, Spiritualism started as an American counterculture movement. Just like New Age, it was a spontaneous, ‘democratic’, unorganized form of belief that did not have religious hierarchy or sacred books, at least until very late. The vestiges of Spiritualism are still with us today: ghost sightings, poltergeists, haunted houses, possessed people, mediums etc. Movies like Ghost and the Sixth Sense are but the latest manifestations of a movement that sprang in the middle of the 19th century. Even though Spiritualism waned sometime between the two World Wars, beliefs in ghost manifestations have survived. After all, a 2006 Gallup Organization poll revealed that 32% of Americans believe in ghosts (1).

At the core of Spiritualist belief was the alleged phenomenon of ghost apparitions. The dead appeared to the living in organized sessions called séances, being channeled by human beings with special paranormal gifts called mediums. The pattern was laid out through the first séance that launched the Spiritualist craze, which took place in Hydesville, New York in 1848. The Fox sisters allegedly communicated with the spirit of a dead person which heralded a new era when “the spirits clothed in the flesh are to be more closely and more palpably connected with those who have put on immortality” (2). From there on, the Spiritualist movement spread like wildfire across the United States. Mediums appeared everywhere, organizing spectacular séances where noises (rappings), table turning, automatic writing, levitation, partial or total ghost materialization and others occurred. The democratic nature of séances attracted a great number of those disgruntled with organized religion as well as women seeking liberation from Victorian conventions (3).

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My earlier two-episode vampire analysis has prompted me to thinking about the quest for immortality, which is probably as old as mankind. The first known hero story, that of the Sumerian Gilgamesh, has the prince unsuccessfully seeking the plant that would bestow him immortality. In the Bible, the first human beings, Adam and Eve, were apparently created immortal only to lose the gift due to evil temptation. Adam and Eve’s story assumes that humanity was initially meant to be immortal. But if immortality is the natural state of mankind, would it be possible to recover it by some means?

I shall conspicuously pick from the countless attempts at achieving immortality those related to alchemy. Commonly described as the art of making gold, alchemy often had the goal of achieving life-extension or immortality. In fact, scholars consider that life extension, not gold was the foremost goal of Chinese alchemy (1). In the West, the attainment of the elixir vitae was initially secondary to the art of goldmaking (2). The first author to emphasize it was the Arab alchemist Jabir (3). He conceived of the “elixir vitae”, another name for the magical Philosopher’s Stone, which transformed metals into gold. The alchemists who came to possess the Stone would then be expected to live many years, or even forever.

From this concept an entire legend of immortal alchemists was born. One of the earliest embodiments was the French alchemist Nicholas Flamel (1330 – 1418), which was reputed to have faked his own death (4) and was recently featured in a novel as an ‘immortal’ (5). The Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, though less associated with alchemy, was portrayed as having lived several hundreds of years in Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal (6). Yet perhaps the most influential ‘immortal’ in his age was the mysterious Count of St Germain, whom I have talked about in my previous article. He was reputed to have lived hundreds or even thousands of years, a legend that he apparently cultivated as well (7).

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