“Sames must be cured by sames” declared the Swiss alchemist, mystic and physician, Philippus Auriolus Paracelsus (1493-1541), pictured above. This highly unconventional thinker took an all-embracing view of nature, and his ideas, coupled with his profound intuitive ability, served to reform medical thought. He experimented, made important discoveries, produced new chemical compounds, over-turned the established authorities, wrote much and travelled widely. He upset prevailing notions and fell foul of the medical establishment of his day. Interestingly, he also has a profound subtle link with the founder of the Theosophical Society, a link which will be revealed below. Meanwhile, there is a good case for believing that much of Paracelsus’ medical practice was based on the homeopathic principle.
Paracelsus is not mentioned by Samuel Hahnemann, founder of modern-day homeopathy, though he acknowledged his debt to others, like the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. Hahnemann, born in 1775 in Germany, was a man of immense moral courage and an unswerving devotion to truth. While translating William Cullen's A Treatise on the Materia Medica, he encountered the claim that, because of its astringency, Cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria. Hahnemann realised that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human organism. He experimented on himself, consuming various substances which might be used as homeopathic remedies, and observing what symptoms they produced in him. He concluded that in healthy people cinchona would evoke malaria-like symptoms. This led him, with intuition, to develop a healing principle: “that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms.” This principle, like cures like, was the essence of his new medicinal approach, to which he gave the name homeopathy. In an age when conventional medicine, with its use of blood-letting and leeches, together with its general lack of hygiene, was killing more people than it cured, Hahnemann’s system and ideas were godsends, and homeopathy was taken up in Europe, India and the USA because of its obviously beneficial results on both humans and animals.
Samuel Hahnemann’s remedies proved particularly effective during the cholera pandemic which hit Western Europe in the mid-19th century. When the epidemic came to London in 1854, the average mortality in orthodox hospitals was 51.8%, while at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital it was 16.4%. The government inspector, Dr MacLoughlin, an orthodox medic, reporting to parliament on the astonishing success of the homeopathic treatment for cholera, ended his statement by saying: “If it should please The Lord to visit me with cholera, I would wish to fall into the hands of a homeopathic physician.” In Britain, homeopathy was taken up by the Royal Family and much of the aristocracy. Queen Adelaide, the consort of William IV, summoned Dr Stapf, a friend of Hahnemann, to Windsor Castle in 1835 and later George V appointed the first royal homeopathic physician. More recently, there has been a major growth worldwide in public demand. France and Germany, in particular, have a very large number of homeopathic doctors, and it is taught to medical students there. In the UK, however, the medical Establishment has often rejected the ideas of Hahnemann, and much orthodox and reductionist science and medicine no longer accommodate these into their paradigms, though there are signs that as we enter the Aquarian Age their resistance is waning. But to reject these ideas is to misunderstand the changes brought about by the Enlightenment.
As the Age of Enlightenment took hold, Hahnemann was amongst other great innovators whose right-brain intuition rather than just left-brain rationalism were really responsible for the great strides made in science and medicine at that time by working (often unconsciously) in the flow of the ageless wisdom and rediscovering and re-presenting the ideas, notes and chords of energy medicine. For example, Hahnemann was a contemporary of the physician Anton Mesmer (1713-1815). Both were doctors who moved gradually towards more occult or metaphysical ideas. Both insisted that cure must always be preceded by an aggravation or crisis, no matter how brief and slight. Hahnemann cited Mesmerism in his book, The Organon, used Mesmeric techniques himself and made a connection between the vital force which, he believed, brought about healing, and Mesmer's animal magnetism. Hahnemann worked in the tradition of ancient esoteric energy healers like the god Asclepius and the alchemists, and his legacy in the 20th century fell to physicians like Dr Edward Bach and others.
From the Theosophical perspective, like cures like is a highly occult (meaning hidden), little understood law of nature. The Master DK said that "We might generalise and say that: 25% of the ills flesh is heir to arise in the etheric body. 25% in the mental body. 50% find their origin in the emotional body." Homeopathy works in a deeply occult way, on the etheric body, the vital energy blueprint of the physical body, and on other subtle bodies in the auric egg, using a subtle vibration imparted by the remedy to the whole of the aura. The esotericist Cyril Scott tells how a patient given a miniscule homeopathic dose of sulphur found that his silver cigarette case and the silver coins in his pockets turned black. Sulphur tarnishes silver, and even the vibration of sulphur, put into his etheric aura by the dose, had left its mark! So homeopathy is a branch of energy medicine in the Theosophic tradition. Cyril Scott also relates that the Masters of Wisdom revealed to him that the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had been Paracelsus in a previous life; and there are definitely similarities between their qualities and their lives. Whether Paracelsus/HPB might also have been Hahnemann in an intermediate life is an interesting speculation; the parallels amongst them all are definitely there.

Sources:
Homoeopathy by Keith A Scott and Linda A McCourt
An Outline of Modern Occultism by Cyril Scott
Isis Unveiled by H P Blavatsky
Ponder on This by Alice Bailey/DK Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber MD
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