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Gerhard Dorn (c. 1530 – 1584) was a philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile.
Together with von Bodenstein, he rescued many of Paracelsus manuscripts and printed them for the first time. He also translated many of them into Latin language for the Basel publisher Pietro Perna and lived in Basel during the 1570s and Frankfurt in the early 1580s, where he died when he was in his mid-fifties.
Dorn argued that learning needed a reform as had religion in the Reformation, as had medicine in the teachings of Paracelsus. What was needed, he asserted, was a mystical and spiritual "philosophy of love"—his radical theology claimed that it was God, not man who was in need of Redemption and he defined the alchemical opus as a labor which redeemed not man but God, a proposal which came perilously close to being heretical in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy. His principal writings are included in Volume I of the Theatrum Chemicum.
As Monika Wikman summarized in her book Pregnant Darkness, "Alchemists such as Gerhard Dorn, in his work 'The Speculative Philosophy,' referred to this next alchemical stage inner as Unus Mundus, where splits are healed, duality ceases, and the individual, the vir unus, unites with the Anima mundi."Wikman, Monika. Pregnant Darkness. Berwick, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2004. Page 59 in trade paperback edition.
Dorn's writings were of great interest to the psychologist Carl Jung, enough for him to take Dorn's principal writings with him when traveling to India in 1938. He is one of Jung's most frequently quoted sources upon alchemy.
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