The Shades of Paracelsus

By Patrick McGowan

Anna Waters, 17, is a smart girl from a good home who has a passion for natural medicine. Inspired by a medieval miracle worker, she wants to bring the people of her town to healthier ways of living.

Al Flanagan, 24, a smooth talking and super ambitious businessman who works for a multinational pharmaceutical company is not going to let some reckless young schoolgirl threaten his market share or career path. But how far will he go to protect his patch?

We all wish every David could overcome their Goliath. But let’s not get too romantic about this; sometimes the Davids of this world are just not patient or clever enough, or perhaps the Goliaths are just too strong. Hmmm.

‘The Shades of Paracelsus’ is also a novel about place. It explores the Illawarra region of Australia, a place where the abrupt and unarguable logic of the escarpment meets the tireless expanse of sapphire waters of a pacific ocean. See how this place shapes the thinking of its people.

Within the book, Anna publishes her own ebook titled RU4UT?. With each purchase of Shades, the author will send you a free ecopy of RU4UT?. Please order by email to the author.

Being the author's first novel, he is making this available for free for a limited time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick McGowan
• Release date: Oct 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301305346

Patrick McGowan

I completed a Master of Creative Arts (Prose) at the University of Wollongong in 2011 and have been writing pretty much full time since then. Previously I have worked as metallurgist, health food retailer, government bureaucrat, diplomat and entrepreneur.While my work overseas for the Australian government took me on postings to many places including Europe, Asia and Africa, I like to write about the contemporary Australian experience. I began short story fiction writing in the nineties, had some short stories published, then put my writing on hold as I gave full attention to my diplomatic career.I'm a taiji health exercise enthusiast, an avid jade collector, and I'm also a keen follower of William Gass and his theory of sentence writing, that each sentence has a soul, and that all good literature comes from the well-constructed sentence.I live in Loftus, a suburb of Sydney, and am a member of the South Coast Writers Centre.

Book preview

The Shades of Paracelsus

by

Pat McGowan

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published by Pat McGowan on Smashwords

The Shades of Paracelsus

Copyright © 2011 by Pat McGowan

Fomelhaut Books, Sydney Australia

ISBN 9781301305346

author blog at www.pjmcgowan.com

The Shades of Paracelsus is a work of fiction. And apart from the character of Paracelsus who is a well-documented figure from history, all characters in this novel are fictional and bear no semblance to any person either living or dead.

Thanks to Dr Douglas Baker for several direct quotes from his work Paracelsus His Methods of Healing.

* * * * *

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told

My freedom I hold dear

How years ago in days of old

When magic filled the air

‘twas in the darkest depths of Mordor

I met a girl so fair

But Gollum, the evil one

Crept up and slipped away with her

(B, J & P)

* * * * *

Prologue

Excuse me while I yawn. Ahhh! All that oxygen soaking my lungs and energising my system. It feels so good. I was so sound asleep in a quiet, cosy corner of Salzburg before being disturbed. And now I’m awake. Oh well, let me share what I have witnessed before I huddle back up in the blankets of my dreams, for I am but an embodiment of the story I am about to tell you, and I long to once again be disembodied, returning to my snug and timeless slumber.

Salzburg? Salzburg? Oh, yes. These days, this town is best known for two reasons. We all know it as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the greatest musical genius of all times.

We know too that Doe, a deer, a female deer, Ray, a drop of golden sun, Me, a name I call myself, Far, a long, long way to run, is not from any Mozart song. We can all place these words in that mid-sixties song from the movie about the Von Trapp family filmed in the fields around Salzburg.

If you include the people who come to enjoy the music festivals held in the city, usually derived from the Mozart connection anyway, you can account for ninety-something per cent of visitors to this place.

The occasional person who is slightly better read can tell you that the Christmas carol, Silent Night, Holy Night, so close to the heart of the Christian canon of song, was first sung in Salzburg at the midnight mass for Christmas in 1918. They will most probably choose not to add that Silent Night, Holy Night was drawn from a well-known pagan song sung in this area at the time of the winter solstice for what may have been forever before it was taken into a church that first time.

Busloads of tourists, elderly people, parents dragging their children, backpackers, and music afficionados flock daily to this alpine city to experience its enchanting culture. Yet there is so much to this place that many of her visitors will never discover during their pilgrimages here, even if they go horse riding or trout fishing or hiking in the airy environs. In the face of its brightest lamps of these few famous moments of the city, the other more sublime markers of Salzburg history remain in the shadows. But shadows can be merely a different type of light that offers its own sensations and delights to those who seek them.

So this is Salzburg: the famous musical city today, but which was originally named after the salt-mines located in the hills surrounding it, at a time when salt was a commodity of enormous value which was paddled down the River Danube on river craft of many shapes and sizes to the salt hungry markets of Europe. But let’s look behind the veil of Austria’s favourite state, to see how it became what it is today.

Austria, Osterreich or the Eastern State, for many centuries served as a buffer state to the Slavs and the Magyars and those other outsiders from the east and the north pulled through the ages by the magnetism of European life in the lower latitudes. Word of life in these southern towns and their inhabitants’ new ways of doing things seeped across the distances to stir the imagination of those in the grip of stagnant traditions in far away lands.

But as those from afar broke the chains of their own traditions and ventured to these new places, they were largely unaware of how they were being drawn to communities which themselves had long ago absorbed the cultures and traditions of those very same distant lands and distilled them into differently shaped containers whose contents tasted so fresh and new. Who can truly argue the only connection between the myths of Christos and Krishna is only in the sounds of their names? The recycling of culture and its myths goes back a long way in time to those who can but recognize it. The first person who said, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ must have lived an awful long time ago.

A casual glance even today will confirm that here in Europe there live many people who subscribe to the treadmill view of history and have become tired, and indeed utterly sceptical, of the pageantry of so called new ideas. These people, who are content to live out the drama of their lives without outside instruction, say they have seen it all before; the movements forwards and backwards, the comings and the goings of leaders and followers waving their freshly crafted banners high in the air, the great nation states in battle with their conservatives one day and their visionaries another. For these reasons, they have little time for those peddling new ideas today. For they silently hear in the back of their mind, in the recess of memory, voices reminding them that these ideas have all been tried before. The question they continue to ask is: why? Why all this excitement about what you have here? Can’t you see that these hormone-fired rushes of enthusiasm will gradually subside and eventually disintegrate until you and your ideas rest in your graves with your bones decaying slowly and peacefully below the feet of those are bound to prevail in coming centuries, and these newcomers will find their own new ways to flourish?

And Salzburg, the gem of Austria, oozes the substance we call Europe. It draws its special light from the bonfires of history, popping and sparkling and crackling with heroes and villains through the ages. This city knows well the need to tread carefully through each new age even as Europe today reinvents itself as a global feudal estate. With this in mind, what a clever idea to present to the world as a city of culture and music, benefactors to the world, a world with no borders.

This verdant city, sometimes called the Rome of the Alps, rests against the backdrop of white-tipped mountains all round and dotted with fortifications built by quarrelsome princes and archbishops whose flocks over the centuries so valued their independence as a principality. Beneath the fortress of Hohen Salzburg, now empty but which still watches unblinkingly over the city, and which still showers the city with its heavenly music on special occasions, lie the catacombs of the earliest Christians in Europe dating back to 150 AD, Christians seeking to bring a new light to the senses of the people whom they sadly thought were impoverished with regard to truth and beauty being so closed off from new ways sweeping the civilized world at that time. Even today, one must walk up the paths to this fortress, on their own feet, the only form of transport available.

Who would have been so outrageous at that time to stand up and say how blind these so called bearers of the new light were, blind to the real riches that came from the centuries of labour in these bounteous mines! The newcomers only saw salt, and maybe a few other minerals, perhaps a little copper, silver or even some gold. But the sublime fact was that, from these mines, the locals drew their own crystallizations of heavenly light through the ancient traditions which would have been well and truly lost but for the efforts of the occasional brave and dedicated individuals. Salzburg gives us a very special window into what Europe has gained and what it has lost in the processes of civilisation, modernisation and now globalisation.

Once upon a time as the miners traipsed along the well worn paths of the hills around Salzburg on their way to and from their place of work, crossing lakes and rafting through bat squeaking caves en route to their mines, singing songs which glorified the beauty and magic of the nature in those hills. Their songs were incantations to the primeval forces of nature. And at other times these workers with their tools slung over their shoulders walked in single file listening intently to the green of the forest which enveloped them as they communed through inner song with the beings of the air, water, earth and sun who for them were all alive and fully conscious and made decisions which impacted upon the lives of the people.

These workers had no doubt that the work of nature was served by invisible creatures who were not descendents of Adam but who had the power to perform what we would now call miracles on a daily basis. Indeed the inhabitants of these regions all knew stories of people who befriended such creatures and formed close working relationships with them. As one example of such creatures, we may use the word gnome though you wouldn’t know a gnome if you tripped over one today, not because gnomes don’t exist but because you are just so ignorant of the world where gnomes are found.

In those times, gnomes loved nothing better than to serve their human friends and reward them richly. That is just what they did. And we are not talking about symbolically rich rewards in the way of great inspiration or good ideas. We are talking about something much more real. The best way to explain this is to give an example of one of the many ways those friends of gnomes benefited from such friendships. Consider the occupation of metal farmer, a well-known and well-respected occupation back in those earlier times. Dear reader, please ask yourself where you ever got the idea the earth beneath our feet is just clods of dirt and rock welded together by the crimson moisture of fallen generations. One day we will rediscover the truth that the earth is a world of living, breathing and swirling forces subject to the will of those who live within it.

At that time it was well known there are many cases of prospectors having been to places searching for precious metals and leaving convinced there was no metal in that area. And then at some time soon after that, a gnome may lead their friend to that same place which would be radiating a blinding golden light whose source was genuine gold ore. There are too many cases of this in history for us to speak ill of those who believe it. Copper was only first unearthed in this area in relatively recent times after the assistance of a well-loved gnome on the mountain.

Other gnomes are known to have helped through sharing the healing properties of the mountains with the humans. The radioactive waters of the mountains around Salzburg have become famous for their therapeutic and healing powers for those who bathe in their waters. In much the same vein the whole history of herbal medicine linked to the area around these hills is another miraculous story that has been shared across the world to benefit untold people. It was from this area that the old saying ‘In words and herbs and stones there lies a special power,’ was taught to children at school. Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if somebody was bold enough to gather up all these old traditions and present them as a body of knowledge to us today? Would the truth presented to us at the wrong time blind us? Or does the truth always remain the truth which sooner or later must be brought to the surface for the world to deal with its illusions of the ages?

Nowadays, the efforts of those in the old times are distant memories. But the notes of the songs that miners sang to glorify nature still hang in the air if one can but listen. Today we intuitively know the music from this region is special, but there is not a real lot known about the deeper layers of European consciousness from which the music came, from a place where people worked side by side with others in teams built on trust and with a simplicity we struggle to envisage in this age where we glorify the individual as if absolute. None of us want to hear the shocking truth that fairy tales carry truths. This would cause irreparable damage to the pride we hold in our modern civilisation. Meanwhile our most superficial culture still carries the seeds of truth in there somewhere:

‘The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears.’

Now who was that? Who woke me? Oh, yes, here is that story I said I would share with you before I return to the ocean of my dreams.

Chapter 1

They stumbled off the school bus like skittish cattle being pushed down a ramp. Anna Victoria Waters launched herself out of the bus bending her knees to absorb the impact of her landing. She took a sharp step to the left, braked and twisted around to search out her two friends still buried in the crowd of others pouring off the bus. Anna was wearing her school colours; dark green blazer and light green tunic. Those other students ploughed past her.

Anna’s eyes, green chasing blue, suggested a primal innocence. However, when she had the desire these same eyes could project a cruel intensity that scorched all within the span of her attention. Anna’s face was smooth, her smile revealing two dimples and perfect teeth. Her high forehead gave the impression of one who did a lot of thinking, one who always knew what she talking about. This only emphasised her powerful gaze when she chose to use it. Her thin red lips added to this sense of her ability to focus.

The collar of Anna’s blouse under her tunic was messed up. After all, she had not long gotten out of bed and had rushed for the bus. After piling off, Anna’s friend, Tania, reached out to straighten Anna’s collar. She then gave Anna a light peck on her cheek. Tania was a strong girl, big for her age, and with long blond hair. She liked to wear her uniform short. It made her legs feel free.

There, there, dear, Tania said, inviting role play.

Thanks, Mum, Anna replied, with a matching smile.

They waited for Megan and the three of them walked together, randomly bumping into each other as they moved towards the school gate. Megan was the tall, skinny one. She had long straight, stringy, brown hair, and had a patchy, blemished face, but a lovely smile.

Anna suddenly jumped out in front of the other two as they took their bearings on the footpath. Hey. I’m going to give my talk on that healer bloke, she said.

You crazy bitch, Tania said.

Why are you so mad? Megan added.

Anna raised her hand to silence them. Just listen. Listen to me.

We are.

I’ve gotta share this stuff. It’s so unreal.

But Mrs Volk has already said you can’t. She told you that last week. Why are you pushing so hard? Tania asked.

If you listen, I’ll tell you.

Okay. Tell us. Tell us.

I’ve done lots of reading on this guy. He still has a lot to do with today. My talk isn’t about what happened hundreds of years ago. It’s about what we can do now.

Megan, who seemed so unco-ordinated while walking because of her height that she was sometimes nicknamed Unco, shook, or rather wobbled, her head. You sure have lost me.

Anna turned and smiled to Megan. This guy is cool. Super cool.

How cool?

He’s king of cool.

Why?

He was a doctor. And a rebel. A real one. And he spoke out about the bullshit other doctors and churchmen in the country went on with cause he was smarter than them, Anna said. Catching her breath, she continued. Plus he was an astrologer and a magician.

Tania, walking on Anna’s right, walked into her, pushing with her left shoulder. Was he good looking?

You know he was so serious about his work that he had his balls cut off so he wouldn’t let women take his mind off his work.

Wow, Sister Anna, he sounds almost as twisted as you. I bet you wish you had balls so you could do the same.

Megan interrupted. You know, Volk told us to find a topic about something modern, something that shows our progress today. A fifteen-minute talk. A doctor cutting his balls off for the sake of his career is not the most progressive thing I’ve heard this week.

Darlings, I won’t tell them that. I’m just telling you this because you’re my best friends.

Anna, dear, Volk can be a real battle axe, you know. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

I have to. Even she needs to know. Anna recalled her conversation with Mrs Volk that last week. She actually thought Mrs Volk’s dark eyes lit up when she first heard Anna raise the idea of introducing this person, Paracelsus. It was only after Anna started talking about his ideas on medicine that Volk went cold and started putting up objections. Anna even remembered wondering if she detected some anger on Volk’s voice.

Anna began to consider whether she was prepared to offend people if she was to embark full scale on her crusade. She nearly walked into a light post.

Megan grabbed her at the last moment. Hello, Anna. Planet earth calling.

Anna steadied herself. Oh, I was just wondering why Volk hates my subject so much.

I reckon the subject of natural health makes her sick, Megan said.

I have a confession to make, Tania whispered.

Ooh, what is it?

My Mum made me swear that I don’t tell anyone and I promised I wouldn’t.

Tania, we’re so close. You don’t have to worry about us.

Oh, perhaps you’ll find out soon enough. Tania balked.

No. No. Tell us, Tan.

My Mum works at the hospital and she said Volk’s husband is sick. She keeps it herself. The family’s tried many different methods of treatment and none’ve worked.

I knew it, I knew it. Something was telling me to make this speech and now it makes perfect sense.

What?

Volk needs my help, that’s what.

You’re just going to upset her more, Anna.

What do you mean? This is my big chance.

Yeah and get a big fat zero for your assessment.

Anna stopped again. Girls, you’re not listening. This is big news. I have to let it out. Even I can’t stop myself.

Ha, like Kazza can’t stop herself after one glass of wine. Kazza, a friend in their class, earned a bad reputation during end of year parties last year.

They all laughed.

But it’s true, I am pissed on the idea. This guy is almost as big as Jesus Christ. I’m not saying it’s religion but he has more to say to us today than anyone else I’ve ever come across.

Anna, we’ve decided you’re confused.

Let me be confused. Please.

You’re so confused that yesterday when you were in the library, you walked right past my brother without saying hello. Tania laughed. He’s heart broken.

They stopped and hugged each other, and laughed and squealed.

The frenetic noise of the morning playground was punctured by the school buzzer. Noise levels dropped. It was time for class; time to get serious. Megan’s body stiffened. We may need a coffin for you Anna. Today is going to be your funeral.

Don’t talk like that, Meeg!

Guys, all I ask is that you listen to me. Anna pleaded. And what ever you do, don’t distract me.

Ha, you should be telling us not to cry. Because we’re all going to be so sad by the end of this.

As Anna kept walking, the two other girls stopped and huddled together. Another two of their friends ran up and joined the huddle to share the secret. The four of them soon started talking loudly.

Anna turned back around. What are you guys doing?

Tania and Megan broke away. Okay, sister, the gang has agreed. We think you’re mad, but we defend your right to be mad. We will support you all the way. Volk better not do anything bad to you.

Thanks, girls.

Some boys moved towards them. What’s your talk on, Anna?

She stared them all down. Penis enlargement operations. She spoke slowly and emphatically. You better listen carefully.

Yeah, well, I reckon you may need to spend some time on boob jobs too, by the look of your friends here, one of the boys said.

He and his two mates turned to look at Megan. You ought to research boob implants if you ever want a boyfriend, he said laughing and then moving on with his mates.

Huh, your head looks like the result of a penis enlargement operation gone wrong. You think that’s going to find you a girlfriend? Megan