Esoteric Salzburg: Paracelsus, the Untersberg and The Magic Flute

For many, Salzburg is simply the city of Mozart, of Baroque churches and music festivals. Yet the city of the prince-archbishops also holds a less familiar history, made of alchemical medicine, legendary mountains and dark pages of witch-hunting. Between the tomb of Paracelsus, the caves of the Untersberg and the Masonic symbols of The Magic Flute, an itinerary emerges that reveals the esoteric face of one of the most elegant cities in Europe.

The tomb of Paracelsus

Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, was born in Switzerland in 1493 or 1494 and was a physician, alchemist and natural philosopher. He openly challenged the medicine of his day, founded on Galen and Avicenna, and proposed the use of chemical remedies, arguing that the physician should learn from experience and from nature rather than from books. His life was a continual wandering among the cities and courts of Europe.

He arrived in Salzburg shortly before his death in September 1541. He was buried in the cemetery of St Sebastian, and in the church porch today stands the monument with his Latin epitaph, which remembers him as a distinguished physician and benefactor of the poor. In the following centuries the tomb attracted visitors, and legends flourished around him, describing him as the possessor of the philosopher's stone and of an elixir of long life.

The Untersberg, the mountain of wonders

South-west of the city, on the border with Bavaria, rises the Untersberg, a limestone massif full of caves and cavities. Folk tradition places there a sleeping emperor, identified according to the version with Charlemagne or Frederick Barbarossa, who awaits the moment to awaken. It is said that his beard grows around a stone table and that, when it has gone all the way round, the end of time will come.

Other legends speak of dwarfs, wild women and monks who guard treasures in the depths of the mountain, and of wayfarers who, having entered a cave, came out years later believing they had stayed only a few hours. This wealth of tales made the Untersberg, in the twentieth century, a favourite place also for seekers of energies and mysteries, with modern interpretations lacking any evidence.

Witches and Freemasonry

From about 1675 to 1690 Salzburg was the scene of the so-called Zauberer-Jackl trials, named after the nickname of a young beggar accused of leading a sect of sorcerers, who was never caught. More than a hundred people, most of them boys and young vagrants, were put to death. It is one of the most tragic pages of the witch hunts in the German-speaking lands, directed above all against the poor.

A century later Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756, joined a Masonic lodge in Vienna in 1784. The Magic Flute, first performed in 1791 with a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, is rich in symbols linked to Masonic ideals: the number three, the trials by fire and water, the temple of wisdom. The opera is the meeting point between Mozart's music and the initiatory culture of the Enlightenment.

To visit Salzburg with this perspective is to discover that, beside the elegant city of the postcards, there is another, made of alchemical research, speaking mountains and painful memories, which deserves to be known and told with the same care. From the fortress of Hohensalzburg, which dominates the city from above, the eye takes in both the Baroque centre and the outline of the Untersberg, summing up in a single view the twofold soul of the place.