Mumial Hermetic Healing

The first English translation of a forgotten 1908 study of Central European hermetic medicine.

In 1908, Czech hermeticist Otakar Griese set out to document a healing tradition already fading from living memory: mumial treatment, in which a patient's own hair, blood, or bodily emanations - their personal "mumia," or vital essence - were transferred to plants, minerals, or animals believed to draw the illness out with them.

Drawing on Paracelsus, Agrippa, Robert Fludd, and the doctrine of signatures, and grounded in Baron von Reichenbach's theory of the Od, Griese's study lays out the full logic of this system: how remedies were matched to the body by resemblance and astrological timing, how magnets and copper sulfate were used to draw and hold the Od, and dozens of specific remedies drawn from historical hermetic practice.

This edition presents Griese's original text together with A. R. Svoboda's 1949 revisions and afterword - clearly distinguished throughout - in a new, carefully annotated English translation, with an editor's preface situating Griese within Czech occultism and a note on how to read the text responsibly.

This is a historical and cultural document, not a medical guide. The remedies described here are presented for their historical and scholarly interest; several involve substances now known to be unsafe, and none have been evaluated by modern medicine.

For readers of the history of alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Central European occultism, this is a primary source that has never before been available in English.