Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his
_Celestial Medicine_ and his _Twelve Signs_ the whole mystery of
healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women,
which are not accorded but at odds with nature and supernature. The
spirits of discord are indeed always with us; and whether you see them
as witches, disguised in the living human form, or as monstrous and
terrifying dream-figures, or as floating impalpable atmospheres, they
are vigilantly to be guarded against. We know

"Vervain and dill
Hinders witches from their will!"

in the old herbals; but we need new drugs. As for that witch which hath
haunted all of us, "Maladicta," Lilly in his _Astrology_ has a remedy.
"Take unguentum populeum, and Vervain and Hypericon, and put a red-hot
iron into it: You must anoint the back-bone, or wear it in your breast."

The haunting apparitions are not all of earth. Cornelius Agrippa, in his
book of the Secret Doctrine, shows that they are astral too. The
familiar spirits of Mars, in his account, are no lovelier than Macbeth's
witches:--"They appear in a tall body, cholerick, a filthy countenance,
of colour brown, swarthy or red, having horns, like Harts' Horns, and
gryphon's claws, and bellowing like wild Bulls."

But the spirits of Mercury are delightful. They indeed are "of colour
clear and bright, like unto a knight armed,--and the motion of them is
as it were silver-coloured clouds." So, if Mars has troubled the world,
as in the unhappy history of our own time, we must hope for the brighter
forms, and the remedial and aerial messengers of Mercury.