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De vita longa
De vita longa
De vita longa — “On the Long Life” — is Paracelsus’s one rare Latin treatise, the text in which the secret doctrine of longevity receives its fullest statement (Jung 1967, CW 13 §n.33). The treatise is “mainly concerned with the conditions under which longevity, which in Paracelsus’s opinion extends up to a thousand years or more, can be attained” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §170). Paracelsus opens with a definition that tells the whole method: “Life, by Hercules, is nothing other than a certain embalsamed Mumia, which preserves the mortal body from the mortal worms and from corruption by means of a mixed saline solution” (De vita longa, in Jung 1967, CW 13 §170).
The treatise is a compendium of the arcane vocabulary — iliaster, aquaster, Ares, Melusina, Aniadus, Adech, Edochinum — that Paracelsus devised to camouflage a “natural transformation mystery” from the ecclesiastical one. Those live longest, he writes, who have lived “the aerial life” (vitam aeream) — a psychic, not a bodily, technique, executed by imaginatio as the active power of the astrum. The “aerial life” is a longevity of the higher man, “those who enjoy an unusually long life, like Enoch.”
The work is load-bearing for the Lineage because it is the one primary-text substrate on which Gerhard Dorn built his philosophical commentary, and on which Jung in turn built the monograph Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon and, later, the tripartite coniunctio scheme of Mysterium Coniunctionis. Without De vita longa there is no Dorn; without Dorn there is no unio-mentalis / unio-corporalis / caelum; without those there is no Jungian alchemy in its mature form.