Talk:Paracelsianism

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Potential foreign language sources

I removed these from further reading as this is English wikipedia, but there's no reason these can't be used as historical sources, so I'm putting them here for future use. Skyerise (talk) 17:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567-1625) [Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance 80]. Geneva: Droz, 2007.
Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle, eds. Corpus Paracelsisticum: Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Naturphilosophie in Deutschland. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001-.
- Vol. 1: Der Frühparacelsismus, Band 1 (2001): earliest documents of c. 1560
- Vol. 2: Der Früh paracelsismus, Band 2 (2004): final do séc. XVI ( Michael Toxites , Gerhard Dorn ; Georg Fedro, Markus Ambrosius, Laurentius Span, Balthasar Flöter, Gallus Etschenreutter, Bartholomäus Scultetus (1540–1614), Pietro Perna, Theodor Zwinger, Johann Albrecht)
- Vol. 3: Der Früh paracelsismus, Band 3 (2013): textos de 1569-1613 (Johann Hiller, Jonas Freudenberg, Adam Schröter , Lambert Wacker, Salomão Trismosin, Georg Forberger, Johannes Montanus , Johann Fischart , Johann Franke, Bernard Gilles Penot , Johannes Huser, Johann Schauberdt, Johann Thölde, Joachim Tancke, Benedictus Figulus.)
M. C. Ramos Sánchez, F. J. Martín Gil, J. Martín Gil. "Los espagiristas vallisoletanos de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y primera mitad del siglo XVII". Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia y de la técnica: IV Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas: Valladolid, 22–27 de Septiembre de 1986, 1988, ISBN 84-505-7144-8, pp. 223–228. (in Spanish)

Hi Skyerise! I strongly disagree with moving these sources to the talk page. Many readers of the English Wikipedia know other languages, and a significant portion of them actually has one of these other languages as a mother language. Listing non-English sources can be extremely helpful to those readers who know these languages, and there is no good reason to remove them from view. If there's one thing for which Wikipedia is actually reliable and which renders it useful for research purposes, it's bibliographical listings like these. I therefore restored the sources to the article. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Not pseudoscience

The definition of spagyric is 'pertaining to or resembling alchemy; alchemic'. Even in more modern definitions which take into account recent usage, 'spagyric extraction' is simply defined as a method of producing a more complete extract including the mineral salts. None of this is pseudoscience.

The use of these extracts in paraherbalism is where the pseudoscience comes in. We have a whole article on herbal medicine, which is not considered pseudoscience and is not categorized as such. So, the process and the extracts themselves are in no way pseudoscience, only subsequent use as a medicine under the belief that a "more complete" extract including the mineral salts may be more effective than the result of a process which isolates and extracts specific chosen compounds. And yet a spagyric extract has those same compounds and to the extent that it does there is no evidence that the additional material impedes the effectiveness of a dose with an equivalent amount of the chosen compound, just as there is no evidence that the additional components amplify the effectiveness.

Anyway, the pseudoscience involved here is paraherbalism, not the extraction theories or methods. The article should make that clear by noting that it is the paraherbal use of the resulting extract which is pseudoscience, not the al/chemical theories or processes involved. Skyerise (talk) 22:12, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Spagyrics is not just a method, it's a medical theory which indeed claims that it can augment the effectiveness of a compound by applying specific (al)chemical procedures to it. This claim has long since been rejected by scientific medicine (there's a reason why this article belongs to Category:Obsolete medical theories), yet its modern practitioners still represent it as effective and scientific. This may indeed (partly) fall under paraherbalism as you say. However, separating the technical methods of extraction from the goals which these technical methods are supposed to serve is wholly artificial: the act of preparing a spagyric potion would be completely meaningless if it would not be thought to be somehow effective.

But we're too much talking without the support of sources here. Let me quote Principe 2013's explanation of spagyrics:

Paracelsus believed that powerful medicines could be prepared even from poisonous substances using chymical means of separation, which he called Scheidung in his native German. Processes including distillation, sublimation, putrefaction, and solution could be used to divide a naturally occurring substance into its three primordial principles of Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt. He considered these three the useful and beneficial parts, and believed that their separation left behind the toxic “dregs” of the substance. Once purified, the tria prima could be recombined to yield an “exalted” form of the original substance, free from impurities and toxicity, and thus enabled to operate more powerfully and beneficially as a medicine. Always fond of inventing words, Paracelsus gave this process of separation and reintegration the name spagyria. The term has been explained as meaning “to separate and (re)combine,” from the Greek words span and ageirein, meaning “to draw out” and “to bring together.”

Principe, Lawrence M. (2013). The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 128–129. ISBN 978-0226103792.

Clearly it's the separating and recombining itself which is thought to yield an “exalted” form of the original substance, free from impurities and toxicity, and thus enabled to operate more powerfully and beneficially as a medicine. There's no doubt at all that people like Jean Dubuis and Frater Albertus, who still claim in the 20th century that this method is effective, are engaging in pseudoscience. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:03, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see that you're working on an article titled Herbal alchemy (i.e., modern spagyrics), which as I argued above is a pseudoscience. If we're going to have a whole article about this, we should probably have more input in this discussion, as well as some help with finding proper sources. I have therefore put up a notice about this discussion on WP:FTN. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:50, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'd expect the scientific side to be able to provide scientific studies showing that spagyrics are no more effective than the equivalent use of the specific compound considered effective, extracted from the same herb, administered in equivalent dosages, along with a population that just gets a placebo for control.

But quite frankly, I think all they really have is Quackwatch quoting Dr. Tyler, who likely opined without such data. But I'm sure there must be data, right? Right? That's the scientific method, right? Skyerise (talk) 00:18, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is not the job of science to refute every crazy idea someone comes up with. Those who want the crazy idea accepted as sound need to find good evidence for it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:46, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The claim that medical compounds become more effective through the spagyric process has never been clinically proven. It's highly probable that some 18th-century iatrochemists have at some point been looking for such proof (there were even still some serious chemists researching chrysopoeia in the 19th century!), but that proof never came, and the claim –along with the theoretical framework of the tria prima upon which it was based– was utterly abandoned.

Modern adherents are again taking up that theory and the associated claims, without ever offering any clinical proof for it. Such an attitude is simply not scientific. Of course those who refuse to blindly accept these claims without any evidence do not in any way carry the burden of actively disproving them. Such active disproving is sometimes done for much more popular pseudo-therapies (e.g., homeopathy), but it is not in any way needed to reject unevidenced claims as unscientific. Advancing new (or old) medical claims while utterly failing to furnish clinical proof and to successfully engage with modern scientific theory is more than enough to be, in fact, pseudoscientific.

It's all quite unfortunate really that in an article about spagyria, a revolutionary 16th-/17th-century theory which opened the way to modern medicine by turning the focus away from antiquated Galenic theories of holistic 'humoral balance' and towards the technological production of medicines by chemically isolating active ingredients that are effective against specific diseases and pathologies, we should be focusing so much on the barely notable 20th-century 'spagyrists' who essentially reject modern medicine and the scientific method as a whole. It puts the word 'spagyric' in an entirely different light than it actually deserves.

Anyway, we need reliable sources (remember we're in WP:MEDRS territory here). On Dubuis and Frater Albertus, and on the fact that their revival of spagyrics is a form of paraherbalism (?), or just generally pseudoscientific. If no such sources are forthcoming, we should probably just remove the whole section. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly, who would do any such serious research, when the tenets rely on false premises (the herbs don't have the properties claimed, the "alchemy" does not perform what is claimed viewed from chemistry and rests on long discredited beliefs). It's a textbook case where WP:PARITY sources are fine to describe the system and where anything written by proponents is "in-universe"... —Paleo Neonate – 10:39, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the textbook should be changed: if the only sources are unreliable 'in-universe' sources and critical sources that per WP:PARITY are in their own way not-so-reliable, then the first consideration should be to perhaps just not include the information that depends on such unreliable or barely reliable sources.

In this case, if the only source is an in-universe book written by the occultist Joscelyn Godwin and published by Quest Books, then clearly it's better to have nothing at all for the time being. I'm not saying 20th-century spagyrics/herbal alchemy is un-notable per se (if good sources don't exist, they will most probably be written somewhere in the future), but that still needs to be established. I have removed the section on the modern revival, as well as the undue primary sources relating to this, accordingly. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:29, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm in case it can be used for more expansion, Shermer's The skeptic encyclopedia of pseudoscience mentions Paracelsus' "similia" doctrine revived by Hagnemann, adapted to the "signatures" concept in Homeopathy, but nothing about "spagyria" or "paracelsianism". —Paleo Neonate – 17:53, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Potential foreign language sources

Not pseudoscience

Further Reading Section