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Steiner's theories drew on various mystical and "ancient" systems of knowledge, and Beuys may have inherited some knowledge of and/or interest in alchemy from Steiner. According to artist-educator Johannes Mathiessen, a personal friend of Beuys, he adopted an alchemical-medical paradigm from the Swiss 16th-century physician and alchemist Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493?-1541). Paracelsus postulated that the three essential elements of alchemy--sulfur, mercury, and salt--and their counterparts in the human body--the head (thinking), the limbs (movement), and the breath (rhythm)--must be in balance or else certain kinds of illness would result. For example, death from a fever was a "warmth death." [19]
According to Harald Szeemann, Beuys' direct allusions to alchemy were rare. In speaking about the installation Basis-Raum Nasse Wäsche (from the 1979 Vienna Biennale) Beuys described an alchemical process in making of soap: combining salt and fat in an alkaline solution. He drew metaphoric connections between the colloidal process inhered in making soap to the colloidal material found in human blood and lymphatic fluids. The alkaline solution creates a skin on the soap, and this is connected to our desire to lather up--to "wrap" ourselves in soap; as Beuys explained, in the "placenta-character of the soap, a warmth-insulating-character. One could say, now he speaks like an alchemist--and that is exactly my interest."
Furthermore, his drawing Evolution is a drawing of a human form in a larger cosmic diagram that merges the basic principles of alchemy--including the three essential elements of sulfur, mercury and salt--with his own system of human and cosmic bodies. In Szeemann's interpretation of the diagram, the following three categories of elements are created:
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