Paracelsus’s Two Mothers

Jung reads the structural figure of Paracelsus in a single sentence: “as a man he had one father, but as a spirit he had two mothers” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §238). The two mothers are Mater Ecclesia — the Church, to whom Paracelsus “remained faithful all his life, despite the very free criticism he levelled at the ills of Christendom” — and Mater Natura, the pagan mother of the light of nature (Jung 1967, CW 13 §148).

The figure is biographical and psychological at once. Paracelsus’s personal mother “died early, and she probably left behind a great deal of unsatisfied longing in her son” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §147); “when Paracelsus says that the mother of the child is the planet and star, this is in the highest degree true of himself.” The Great Mother archetype rises in him in the split form the Renaissance forces on anyone who holds both inheritances open: the ecclesiastical mother and the natural-magical mother as two simultaneously loved authorities.

The split is not resolved in Paracelsus; it is held. “Conflict was deeply rooted in Paracelsus’s nature; indeed, it had to be so, for without a tension of opposites there is no energy” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §147). The energy of the work is the energy of the unresolved tension. Jung names this structure the Faust-prototype: the one Christian-pagan figure whose unresolved inheritance becomes, four centuries later, Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The “dark shadow, that other Paracelsus” is what the one mother cannot see of the other.

Sources

• carl-jung: the two-mothers structure as the Faust-prototype ground
• paracelsus: Mater Ecclesia held in fidelity; Mater Natura held in reading
• hermetic-transmission: the Renaissance split this figure bears