8o PARACELSUS 



and your resistance to the will of God will be your 

 eternal death " (Be, Homunculis). 



In regard to the marriage obligations, Paracelsus says : 

 " If a woman leaves her husband, she is then not free 

 from him nor he from her ; for a marriage union having 

 once been formed, it remains a union for all eternity." 

 This means that by entering wilfully into sexual relation- 

 ship with another being, we become attached to it in 

 our will, and a partaker of its future Karma. A woman 

 to whom a man is bound by promise and sexual inter- 

 course becomes, as it were, a part of the man, and cannot 

 be divorced from him by any ceremony or external 

 separation. They constitute, so to say, one mind, and 

 the component parts of the mind, which represent the 

 carnal man, are not separated until the time of the 

 second death/ 



Sexual intercourse without love is merely a kind of 

 onanism with a corporeal form substituted for the merely 

 mental image ; but if sanctioned (not " sanctified ") by 

 love, it is then a union, not merely of body, but also of 

 soul ; not of the spiritual soul, which needs no such 

 union, it being already one with all other such souls 

 in the substance of Christ, but a union of that which 

 constitutes the lower mind of man.^ 



^ This goes to account for cases of vampirism, when the elementary of 

 a dead person is still attracted to the object of its affections and obsesses 

 him or her (Incubi and Succubi : *' Spirit-husbands and "Spirit-brides"). 



2 It is not the flesh and bones of a man which form attachments and 

 make and break promises, but the internal, carnally minded man ; and 

 this man will be bound by his attachments and promises long after the 

 house in which he has lived (his body) will have ceased to exist. In 

 regard to this subject, Paracelsus regards it as dangerous to give further 

 details. 



