Today’s post continues the series Leora Skolkin-Smith started with this post about the invention behind her novel Hystera.

All the characters Lilly invents are fictional but, after doing a lot of research in texts as far back as Babylonia , Egypt, and the Middle Ages, I based them on the practices, facts, and personages most known as the world’s first psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. In their times they were suspected as being mystics and sorcerers. In this first story, the healing doctor is based a famous physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist named Paracelsus living in the 1500’s. This renegade “doctor” was born Phillip von Hohenheim in Einsiedeln, Switzerland and later took up the name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Many have noted that he was the very first psychiatrist. Because of this, he became well-known throughout Switzerland and Germany as a practitioner of the outlawed science of “alchemy.” Psychiatrist Dr. George Mora, on the occasion of the American Psychiatry Association’s Anniversary Celebration of Paracelsus’ most famous book, Diseases That Deprive Man of Reason, published in 1567, wrote:

Although Paracelsus has been called a fore-runner of modern psychiatry, his thinking was and remains highly controversial, as this author points out. His approach to reality was essentially an expression of medieval philosophy; he was, however, among the first to locate the roots of the personality in passions and the will and to consider the pathos of man's existential condition between instincts and spirit.

This was the first story I wrote, from Lilly’s point of view, in her notebook.

HISTORICAL POSITIONING I. Philus, a Swiss merchant specializing in the sale of rare mummy  powder to physicians all across the country. Geneva, 1541:

In the cellar of Philus’ shop there were shelves stacked with unsold bottles of treacle, viper’s fat, narwhal teeth, and cow dung. Upstairs, the clerks were complaining that Philus was behind the other merchants, that his ledgers revealed the cost of his labor and supplies far outweighed his profits.

Philus sat on the stairwell, between the shelves and the complaints. On his lap was the treatise of Paracelsus.

The eternal light of nature has no speech,” Philus read from the treatise, “it causes evestrum (ghosts) to appear in the astral spheres of men and women in their sleep. The evestrum are shadows that belong to a realm that is neither corporeal nor spiritual. Life is nothing but embalmed mumia. All things that corrupt life must yield before it. The cures for physical illness are simple: treat frost blisters with children’s hair boiled by a red-haired person, live toads should be used to treat bubonic pustules. All these common cures are useless when confronted with a disease of the mind. The evestrum are impervious to even the strongest of these remedies. To cure a mental disease the physician must understand the passageway to the Philosopher’s Stone and how the spiritus vitae vapors become misplaced and rise up to corrode the soul.

“You know what they say about Paracelsus,” Philus’ fiancée, Elizabeth, told Philus yesterday. “That he converses with the dead. And that his mother died of suicide, so he became a eunuch. His real name isn’t Paracelsus. He only calls himself that to annoy people. He thinks he’s a doctor, but he never even got his medical degree. He wears a sooty leather jacket and stinks like a sow. But somehow he cured King Christian’s wife of melancholia, though it sure is mysterious how. Probably his stench alone shocked her out of it. Father says he’s really a sorcerer. And that he has the elixir of life in the pommel of a sword he stole from a hanging man before his death.”

Ernst Wurtenberger, Olivia’s  father, was a slender and eloquent scholar. He became ill during the epidemic that spread across Europe. In Amsterdam, thirty children were reported to have suddenly thrown themselves on the ground. Faces pushed against the dirt, backs erect, for periods of a half-hour to one-and-a-half hours. When they got up again, they remembered nothing unpleasant though their faces were scratched and bleeding. They arose as if they had just been sleeping. Exorcisms were chanted. And the children vomited up snakes, feathers, pieces of cloth, and earthenware. In the convent of Nazareth at Cologne, nuns were reported to be tormented in the same manner, throwing themselves on the ground suddenly, limbs convulsing as if sexually embracing a man. Other instances similar to these were reported all across the continent.

During this time, Ernst Wurtenberger also experienced an uneasiness, as if fat were growing on his fine, trim intellect. He had night visions of Aristotle raging through the hall,  demanding that his student lacerate his failing mind while Ernst lectured to his classes. Awake he heard: “What a fraud! A big buffoon!” from a voice outside himself, though not coming from anywhere else. Walking, he saw eyes in the ground, glistening like dewy berries, looking up at him and mocking. Finally, in the middle of a lecture, Ernst lost control of his consonants. Blood and vowels knocked against the walls in his head. His legs loosened like released sphincters, as imagined eyes embedded in his lecture platform glared. He stomped on the eyes with his wobbling legs. And then, his body collapsed.

The priests sprinkled unicorns’ horn on the floor around Ernst’s death-bed. Only his daughter Olivia dared touch him – sitting on the edge of his bed, stroking, whispering: “Wake up, Father.” The priest warned that Ernst could vomit up harsh objects, that she could be in danger. But Olivia did not leave. While her mother prayed and slept in the cathedral, Olivia shook and spoke to her father as he lay unconscious, feared by the priests and gossiped about by the whole village.  Olivia would not abandon him, and every night she slept by his whitened cheeks.

Ernst awoke only once. He reached for his daughter’s hair and asked: "Olivia, why aren’t you in the nursery? Why are you so big?”

It was said that Ernst entered his daughter after death. Raping her with the member of the incubus, spilling corrupted semen on her eggs, he committed the sin of Onan. And that she became the child of this union as well as the mother. As the child, she grew to be like Ernst, speaking in his voice. As the mother, she suckled child-Ernst. When Eberhard tried to make her stop, she cried: “No! He’ll die if I don’t nourish him!”

“Friar Beck says he’s never seen anything like this,” Elizabeth had told Philus. “She acts like a male child and then, all of a sudden, she starts swaddling herself in cloths, singing lullabies to herself and grabbing her own body like a mother puts her arms around her baby, then rocking herself. I can’t tell you how strange it is. She’s as changeable as the biles, Father says, “and that no emotion expresses itself on her face without its contradiction also appearing. You can never tell if she is happy or sad, but both opposites flicker on her face at the same time. It’s eerie! At least in our family, if we’re angry, we’re angry. We aren’t angry and pleased at the same time. I’m beginning to be grateful that Father’s cheeks bloat when he’s angry. At least I know what he feels. And Mother says I don’t have to worry about being ugly if my cheeks happen to bloat like his when I’m angry. Because at least I’m not like that poor Olivia Wurtenberger, Mother says. Everyone is talking about that poor Olivia Wurtenberger.” Elizabeth had said, “She’s just gets madder and madder. I can’t believe such a person as Paracelsus is being sent to cure her. If I were Friar Beck, I’d throw that crazy woman into the sulphur flames like the villagers want. But maybe asking this Paracelsus to come to Geneva to cure her is doing the same thing as that. Or maybe it’s worse.”

“Life is nothing but embalmed mumia,” Philus read now from Paracelsus’s treatise. “But the Philosopher’s Stone is like the fire which purifies the rotten and soiled skin of the salamander and makes him reborn. It transforms life into something higher than mumia and gives one mastery over the chaos of nature.”

Philus closed the treatise. He stood up from his seat on the stairwell and walked down the steps to his musty shop. He hid the treatise behind some of the odd-shaped bottles, and then he left the cellar.

He found Paracelsus drinking ale alone in the tavern across the street. "‘Sire,” he said to him, “my name is Philus. I’m a merchant. I know you don’t know who I am. But I’d like to assist you. I’d like to help you cure Olivia Wurtenberger. I’ll be quiet. And I won’t disturb you.”

Paracelsus and Philus went together to the Wurtenberger’s castle. Their pact was that they would go there naked of any known remedy. But between them, against  Paracelsus’s leg, the sword stolen from a hanging man before his death would dangle. And the pommel of that sword was, for the first time, to be opened.”

Leora Skolkin-Smith is the author of Edges,  The Fragile Mistress, and the Fiction Studio novel, Hystera.

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