Sarah L. Matics

October 17, 2001

STS 129

Within the Matrix: the Divergence of Creation and Art

A Matryoshka nesting doll, a work of Russian folk art in which increasingly tiny wooden dolls emerge from the hollow cavity of the larger doll encasing them, provides a strikingly visual analogy to the matrix, or womb, theory that Paracelsus describes in his Volumen Paramium between 1530 and 1534. Physician, philosopher, teacher, and writer, Paracelsus applied the combinative nature of alchemy to his own career, experimenting within, and indeed contributing to, a budding natural philosophy rooted in chemical principles and organic, spiritual forces (Conrad 313). Central to Paracelsus' 16^th Century philosophical construct the matrix theory serves not only as a vital account of human life and development, but also as a mechanism whereby Paracelsus explores the divergence of creation and art. Constructing the womb as the paradigm over which this bifurcation of creationism and artistry transpires, Paracelsus genders these processes and probes the gender roles of the 15^th Century God.

For Paracelsus wombs are three in variety, and all life arises from this vital, moist, and intrinsically feminine organ of gestation. Water, the surface upon which the "Sprit of the Lord moved," comprises the initial womb, for "water was the matrix of the world" (Paracelsus 13). In this maternal womb, writes Paracelsus, "heaven and earth were created" (23). Then, much like the Matryoshka doll, "heaven and earth each in turn became a matrix," in which God forms Adam, following Adam's creation with the creation of woman, the eternal womb. Thus, "woman" then became "the maternal womb of all men" (24). According to Paracelsus the woman and the womb are equivalents, for he describes, "Woman is enclosed in her skin as in a house, and everything that is within it forms, as it were, a single womb" (24). The shell of the female secrets the womb within the bodily interior, the microcosmic and unseen world of man: the "inner firmament" (25). Paracelsus' fascination with the occulted womb, as well as his mystic sense of the "invisible" matrix (13) resonates with his descriptions of medicinal practice. A physician only becomes a physician "when he knows that which is unnamed, invisible, and immaterial" (64). Recognition of a disease, coursing hidden throughout the inner walls of the body, remains the trademark of the physician’s ability to heal.

Indeed with great care Paracelsus measures the demarcation between the interiority of the human body and the natural world surrounding man. Skin, the supple covering of the body, "delimits the shape of the human body, and through it [man] can distinguish…the Great World and the Little World, the macrocosm and the man" (17). Enclosed within the tender film of skin resides man, the Little World. Without: the macrocosm: the cosmos, the whole of life and the extent of creation. Dividing enclosed private internal mechanics of the human body and the external, observable, and knowable natural realm coincides not only with Paracelsus' classification of particular diseases but also with the methods by which, according to Paracelsus, a physician may apprehend and treat a disease. To understand health, claims Paracelsus, a physician, for example, "must know that there are more than a hundred, indeed more than a thousand, kinds of stomachs" and that "consequently, if you gather a thousand persons, each of them will have a different kind of digestion" (87). Such specification of the organ within each initial man--- and thus the necessary particularity both of the disease and of the treatment distinct to each---hardly facilitates standardized treatments for afflictions; rather the differences among organs that perform similar functions require the physician's ability to read, decipher, and thereby interpret the symptoms and manifestations of the disease. In knowing "the customs, peculiarities, and nature of [the patient's] country" (89), a physician must also contextualize the disease. Just as maladies reveal their differentiation in the form of external symptoms, so too does "everything external in nature point to something internal" (91). Even the essence of the Great World and the Little World "are distinguished only by the form in which they manifest themselves, for they are only one thing, one being" (19). The Great World and Little World for Paracelsus are thus two sides of the same coin, yet thin skin between these realms nonetheless serves to dislodge total unification of, and interpenetration between, them. Symptoms are indeed not the disease itself but merely indications of the malady; likewise the Great World represents and allows one to understand the workings of the Little World, the inner firmament of man. If such external representations are to become symbols and symptoms of the internal world, then surely the process of apprehending the internal realm is one of collecting these distinct signs and assembling them into a series of coherent meanings. Art is this very process of combining and interpreting and originates within the function of the womb.

Paracelsus assigns the womb two main tasks: combining parts into wholes and serving as a place of gestation in which the mother's imagination shapes and modifies the fetus. Primarily the womb combines the "seed of man and the seed of woman" (27). For example "the seed from the man's brain and the seed from the woman's brain make together….one brain" (27). In this depiction of conception a pair of seeds comprises each distinct bodily component. Paracelsus further explains:

When the seeds of all members come together in the matrix, this matrix combines the seed of the head with the seed of the brain…putting each in its proper place, and thus a single member is place where it belongs, just as a carpenter builds a house from pieces of wood (27).

First combining each pair of seeds into a single body part such as a brain, a head, or an arm, the womb then assembles these parts into a whole fetus. In this second stage of production the womb constructs like a carpenter, fitting parts together into a coherent, functional form. Yet if the womb participates in combinatorics, so too does the God of which Paracelsus conceives. Though Paracelsus genders God as male, nonetheless he ascribe to God's psychology a womb-like desire to combine parts into whole. God, asserts Paracelsus, "wills to make out of two, and not out of one; he wills man composed of two and not of one alone" (28). God's wish, therefore, is to combine the seeds of two people, a man and woman, and from those seeds to produce one human, the child. Thus the Paracelsian God, while physically male and in possession of the male seed that fathers heaven and earth within the watery first matrix (13), nonetheless embodies the intention and volition of the inherently feminine matrix.

This deistic transsexualism arises not only from the symmetry of God's will to combine and the womb's function to assemble, but also from the capacity for imagination that God and woman share. Paracelsus declares that "the imagination of a pregnant woman is so strong that it can influence the seed and change the fruit in her womb in many directions" (32).. With each mental image the mother conceives, she exercises moral power upon the developing child concealed within her womb while determining "the health and sickness of the body" (32). The mother, then, retains ethical responsibility for the physical integrity of the child she bears. Paracelsus confirms, "Even while in the womb, unborn, man is burdened with the potentialities of every disease" (76). Thus the mother's cognitive conceptions obligate the health of the conception within her to hearty or frail constitution. Recalling the emphasis Paracelsus places upon the idea of the external revealing the internal, the child becomes at birth, and remains throughout its life, a reflection of the mother's private, internal thoughts.

In similar manner did God imagine, at the node of worldly creation, conceiving of objects---land, animal, and man---not existing prior to His shaping of them. The formative capacity of the womb mirrors the conceptualizing powers of the transsexual God; again the mental forces of the Paracelsian God identify with those of the mother. This faculty of imagination is a creative, as opposed to artistic, authority. If "the world is as God created it" (14), then God brought into existence a terrestrial and spiritual system in a method alike to the means by which the mother brings the physical aberration or wellness of her child into permanence. The imaginative faculty therefore an inherently creative one, both God and the mother possess an uniquely generative power. Though one could argue that the mother has no faculty to imagine outside of those aspects of the world which, through God’s creation, already exist, yet the process of her imagination creates, and affects, the heath of her child directly; she creates within the Little World a quality that did not exist before her imaginative process occurred.

If the creator imagines, the artist combines. In the Paracelsian framework, creation prefigures art. If "God has created art" and "has entrusted this art to man" (127), then art is, like the clay of earth, a part of God's enclosed system. Though "a potter is able to make a thousand different things from clay" (14), he remains incapable of making the clay itself. Of combining the parts of God's world into familiar, or even unfamiliar forms, the artist's inspiration and vocation consists; creationism, however, remains inaccessible to man. As Paracelsus assets: "There is nothing left for anyone to create because everything was adequately created [by God]" (15). Thus the production of new wholes from parts---such as the building of a palatial estate from wood rough hewn---must be a corollary of creation. Art as a process naturally follows creationism, stirring within the Little World sensual impulse to embody the powers of the divine Creator.

Yet art is not creation, and man therefore continuously against limits vigorously pushes. The Little World plays at the "necessary" and "indispensable" art of alchemy (144) exemplifies the process of art. Like the artist of metaphor who from two unlike ideas creates a single meaning through their combination, and like the womb from whom two seeds makes a unified person, so too does the alchemist combine chemicals and heat to "transmute all things from one form into another" (Newman 326). Paracelsus combines putrefied sperm and heat within the horse's womb, attempting to beget the homunculus (Newman 328). The "transparent" and bodiless homunculus" recalls Paracelsus' fascination with both the unseen and the ability of the invisible womb naturally to produce what the limits of human art cannot achieve: viable life. Subversion of the matrix, with God at center, is but translucence. Not even a shadow, not even a wisp of vapor as the chemicals combine in heat, the little man nonetheless embodies the ultimate Little World; for he is the metaphor combining the hope of man to create with the inability in the Paracelsian system to achieve that end beyond art. He is the symbol of a man who lacks skin and natural limit, yet the consequence is incorporeality.