Gerhard Dorn

Gerhard Dorn (about 1530 to 1584) was a philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile, born about 1530 in Mechelen in what is now Belgium. He studied with Adam von Bodenstein and began publishing around 1565. Together with von Bodenstein he rescued many manuscripts of Paracelsus and printed them for the first time, translating many into Latin for the Basel publisher Pietro Perna, and he lived in Basel in the 1570s and in Frankfurt in the early 1580s, where he died. He found in Paracelsus a better philosophy and a more Christian way of thinking, favoured theoretical study of the human mind over laboratory work, and was hostile to Aristotle. He argued that learning needed reform as religion and medicine had been reformed, and called for a mystical and spiritual philosophy of love, with a radical theology in which the alchemical work redeems God rather than man. His principal writings are in volume one of the Theatrum Chemicum, and Carl Jung quoted him frequently on alchemy.