For Paracelsus, alchemy was not merely about the creation of gold, but was a medical and mystical philosophy that explained the functioning of the body (the transformation of food into flesh, blood and excrement) as well as the more general principles that revealed the mysteries of the earth.
He was an intellectual vagabond: a pacifist who always carried a great broadsword by his side, even in bed, and a footloose intellectual who traveled from Ireland to Moscow, and from Algiers to Uppsala.
Yet writers from Blake to Borges have been captivated by his words, and he has become "a cipher for arcane and occult knowledge."
Ball succeeds in convincing us that, despite his arcane ideas, his vision of the "strangeness and the beauty of the magical universe" remains both inspiring and important. As Paracelsus himself wrote, "it is a divine gift to investigate in the light of Nature."
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