OLD AND NEW ALCHEMY 261 



dignity, however, was much to seek in his behavior. He 

 quarrelled with the municipal authorities, or they with 

 him; insulted his colleagues, mystified his audiences, and 

 incurred obloquy by his extravagant self-laudations. De- 

 cried as a quack, and baited by numerous enemies, he with- 

 drew at the end of a year from an impossible position, and 

 resumed vagrancy in his multiple capacity of theosophist, 

 faith-healer, conjurer, physician, and seer. He died on 

 September 24, 1541, at the Inn of the White Horse in Salz- 

 burg, and was buried under the porch of the church of St. 

 Sebastian. The tale of his assassination by rival practi- 

 tioners was set going by Yon Sommering's discovery in 

 1815 of a fissure in his exhumed skull, produced, quite 

 probably and harmlessly, by a chance stroke of the grave- 

 digger's spade. 1 His "long sword" became legendary. 

 Its pommel, he himself asserted, lodged his familiar spirit, 

 and this was interpreted to mean that it contained some 

 portion of the "Azoth," or elixir (perhaps opium in some 

 shape), which he used as a remedy for disease. The crude 

 popular impression in the matter was conveyed by Samuel 

 Butler's quatrain: 



Bumbastus kept a devil's bird 



Shut in the pommel of his sword, 



That taught him all the cunning pranks 



Of past and future mountebanks. 



Hudibras, Part II. canto 3. 



Yet he had real genius. His "bald pate," he truly said, 

 sheltered thoughts that had not dawned upon Avicenna, or 

 permeated the universities. They were, indeed, mostly 

 fantastic, those thoughts of his, but they were often pro- 

 found. A man of science was disguised in the bedizenments 

 of wild folly that he at times deliberately put on. He 

 attached to himself followers, such as Benedictus Figulus, 

 who discerned his "searching and impetuous soul," and if 

 he contemned the would-be wise, he was liberal to the 



^ee Theophrastus Paracelsus. Eine Tcrltische Studie. Von Fried- 

 rich Mook, 1876; and Paracelsus-Forschungen. Von E. Schubert 

 and Karl Sudhoff, 1889. 



