Everything about Gerhard Dorn totally explained
Gerhard Dorn (c.
1530 –
1584) was a
Belgian philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile.
The details of Gerhard Dorn's early life, along with those of many other
16th century personalities, are lost to history. It is known that he was born about 1530 in
Mechelen, which is part of modern-day Belgium's
Antwerp Province. He studied with
Adam von Bodenstein, to whom his first book is dedicated and began publishing books from around 1565. He used
John Dee's personal
glyph, the
Monas Hieroglyphica on the title page of his
Chymisticum artificium.
Together with von Bodenstein, he rescued many of
Paracelsus's manuscripts and printed them for the first time. He also translated many of them into
Latin for the
Basle publisher Peter Petra and lived in Basle during the
1570s and
Frankfurt in the early
1580s, where he died when he was in his mid-fifties.
Dorn claimed to have found a better philosophy and a more
Christian way of thinking in Paracelsus and was one of Paracelsus's strongest advocates. He depreciated practical laboratory work in favor of theoretical study of the human mind, considering the prevailing education of his day too scholastic. Like many
alchemists, Dorn was hostile to the philosophy of
Aristotle, with its emphasis upon the material world declaring that "whoever wishes to learn the alchemical art, let him not learn the philosophy of Aristotle but that which teaches the truth".
Dorn argued that learning needed a reform as had religion in the
Reformation, as had medicine in the teachings of Paracelus. What was needed, he asserted, was a mystical and spiritual "philosophy of love"—his radical theology claimed that it was God, not man who was in need of Redemption and he defined the alchemical opus as a labor which redeemed not man but God, a proposal which came perilously close to being heretical in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy. His principal writings are included in Volume I of the
Theatrum Chemicum.
As Dr. Monika Wikman summarized in her book
Pregnant Darkness, "Alchemists such as Gerhard Dorn, in his work 'The Speculative Philosophy,' referred to this next alchemical stage [innerhealing] as
Unus Mundus, where splits are healed, duality ceases, and the individual, the
vir unus, unites with the world soul."
Dorn's writings were of great interest to the psychologist
Carl Jung, enough for him to take Dorn's principal writings with him when traveling to
India in 1928. He is one of Jung's most frequently quoted sources upon
alchemy.
Sources
Quotation from
Theatrum Chemicum (vol.1
Speculative Philosophy)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Gerhard Dorn'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://gerhard_dorn.totallyexplained.com">Gerhard Dorn Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
