The hermit was murdered on 21 January 861. He had been living for twenty-six years in the dark Sihl forest, a few hours’ walk south of Zürich, in a small cell with a small wooden Madonna statue and two ravens for company. The two men who came that night were robbers who thought pilgrims had left treasure at his shrine. There was no treasure. The earliest text about him, the Vita Meinradi of an anonymous monk of Reichenau Abbey, written within a generation of the event, says that the ravens followed the killers all the way to Zürich and exposed them in an inn. The men were arrested and burned at the wheel. The cell where Meinrad died became a shrine almost at once. Within a hundred years a Benedictine community had grown around it. Two centuries on, that community had constructed an institutional claim that Christ himself had consecrated their chapel one September night in 948. By the late Middle Ages a small limewood Madonna had been installed in the chapel and was beginning to be venerated as the heart of the pilgrimage. In the year 1493 the alchemist who renamed himself Paracelsus was born in a house next door, son of a bondswoman of the abbey. By the eighteenth century the entire site had been rebuilt in monumental Baroque. The shrine is still active.
This is the story of one square kilometre of central Switzerland and what twelve hundred years of unbroken religious traffic have done to it.
861: The murder in the forest
Meinrad of Einsiedeln was born around 797 into the family of the Counts of Hohenzollern. He was educated at the Benedictine abbey school on the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance, then one of the major monastic centres of the Carolingian world, under his kinsmen the abbots Hatto and Erlebald. He took the habit, was ordained priest, and was sent for a time to the dependent priory of Benken near Lake Zürich. The standard hagiographic explanation for what happened next is that he was a man who could not stand the foot traffic that his minor reputation for miracles drew, and that he wanted silence.
Around 828 he left the community to live as a hermit on the Etzel Pass, the saddle between Lake Zürich and the Sihl valley. He took with him a small wooden Madonna statue given to him by Hildegard, abbess of the Fraumünster in Zürich; the tradition is that the statue had a reputation for working wonders. By 835 he had moved deeper into the Sihl forest, to the site that became Einsiedeln. He fed two ravens.
He lived there twenty-six years. The earliest Vita Meinradi, written by an anonymous Reichenau monk in the late ninth century and preserved in the abbey’s own library tradition, says that on the night of 21 January 861, two robbers arrived expecting that pilgrims had left treasure with him. They killed him with his own walking-staff. There was no treasure. The two ravens, by the hagiographic account, pursued the killers all the way to Zürich and made such an unsettling racket at the inn where they had stopped that the men were noticed, arrested, and executed. The murderers’ names, Richard and Peter, are late-medieval block-book additions to the legend rather than early-source detail. The two ravens, however, are in the Vita and they are Meinrad’s iconographic attribute in every painting and statue of him from then to now. He is venerated as the Martyr of Hospitality. His feast day is 21 January. His relics were originally interred at Reichenau and returned to Einsiedeln in 1029.
The cell where Meinrad died was a shrine before any institution arrived. For the eighty years between his murder and the founding of the monastic community, a succession of individual hermits occupied the site, drawn by his memory.
934: The Benedictine community
In 934 the former Provost of Strasbourg Cathedral, Eberhard, came to the Sihl forest, took over the hermit-site, and built a small Benedictine monastery there with a church around the cell. He became its first abbot. The new church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The monastic community he founded is the unbroken thread of all of Einsiedeln’s subsequent history. It has now been there for almost eleven hundred years.
In 965 the third abbot, Gregory, was named Prince of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Otto I. The Einsiedeln abbots held the imperial title until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The abbey received imperial-immediate status, which made it administratively independent of the regional bishopric and answerable only to the emperor and the pope. The 965 imperial diploma is the canonical document of that relationship; an alleged earlier 947 charter is now considered dubious in the standard reference editions.
By the early eleventh century the community was a sustained ecclesiastical institution, its first manuscripts were being produced in a scriptorium that had begun functioning as early as the mid-tenth century, and it was already a destination for pilgrims. Sixty-four manuscripts in the present Stiftsbibliothek come from this earliest period.
948: The Engelweihe and its twelfth-century paper trail
Here is the central religious claim of Einsiedeln, set out in the form the abbey now teaches it: on the night of 13 September 948, Bishop Conrad of Constance arrived at the new chapel to consecrate it. He found that he was too late. Christ himself, accompanied by a host of angels and by the four Latin Doctors of the Church, had consecrated the chapel the night before. Conrad attempted the ceremony anyway, and an angelic voice interrupted him to say, in the canonical formulation: Die Kapelle ist bereits von Gott geweiht, “the chapel has already been consecrated by God.” Pope Leo VIII, sixteen years later in 964, formally recognised the miracle in a bull. The annual Engelweihfest on 14 September has commemorated the consecration ever since.
The claim is the most distinctive theological asset Einsiedeln has. It is also, on its documentary record, a creation of the twelfth century.
The earliest written trace of the Engelweihe survives as a marginal note added in a different hand to manuscripts of Hermann von Reichenau’s Chronicon, not as a tenth-century chronicle entry. Hermann (also called Hermannus Contractus, the Lame) died in 1054; his chronicle ends in his own lifetime. The Einsiedeln note appears in copies of the Chronicon against the years 948 and 964, in the form of the single Latin adverb caelitus, “from heaven.” Palaeographic analysis dates the marginal addition to the mid-twelfth century, roughly 1140 to 1160.
The supposed 964 papal bull of Leo VIII is fingiert, “fabricated,” in the standard reference literature. It is not preserved in the papal registers of any tenth-century sequence; it appears in the documentary tradition only in copies that themselves date from the same twelfth-century moment as the caelitus marginal note. The most likely reconstruction is that some time around 1150, in the workshop of the abbey itself or of a Benedictine ally, a previously oral tradition was given its first written form, the Chronicon margin was annotated to anchor it in a chronicle of acknowledged Reichenau authority, and a supporting papal-confirmation document was retroactively confected.
The full narrative as it now circulates, with Conrad’s vision, the angelic voice, and the Latin Doctors of the Church concelebrating with Christ, is the work of Georg von Gengenbach’s Einsiedler Chronik of 1378, four hundred and thirty years after the supposed event. The earliest surviving documentary reference to the Einsiedeln pilgrimage as an institutional practice is also fourteenth century. The Einsiedeln pilgrimage, in other words, was a pilgrimage to a chapel personally consecrated by Christ from at least 1150 onward, but the documentary evidence does not support that being how it was understood in 948 or in 964.
The abbey itself acknowledges this. The official Einsiedeln position, as published in modern abbey literature and on the abbey website, is that the Engelweihe is a medieval legend (eine mittelalterliche Legende) to be viewed critically. Pope John Paul II visited in 1984 and consecrated the new high altar in the lower choir on 15 June of that year, but he did not endorse the older legend as historical fact. The Engelweihfest each 14 September remains the abbey’s most important liturgical day, attended by tens of thousands of pilgrims, but the abbey itself no longer asks anyone to believe that Christ visited the building in person twelve hundred years ago.
This is not a defeat for the abbey’s pastoral mission. It is the standard mature position of an old institution that has stopped needing its origin myth to be literal in order for its origin myth to be theologically operative. The Engelweihe was real in 1150 to those who invented it, was real in 1378 to Georg von Gengenbach who narrated it, was real to every pilgrim from then until the historical-critical wave of the late nineteenth century, and is real today as a regulating idea of the pilgrimage even though the abbey no longer claims it as a tenth-century event. The chapel was holy enough that someone wanted to write Christ’s consecration of it into the historical record. That fact alone is a piece of intellectual history.
c. 1450: The Black Madonna
By the High Middle Ages the cult of the Virgin Mary had displaced the original Christ-consecration framing as the primary devotional content of the Einsiedeln pilgrimage. The shrine had become, in the language of the Marian-pilgrimage network, Unsere Liebe Frau von Einsiedeln, Our Lady of the Hermits.
The current statue of the Madonna in the Gnadenkapelle is a mid-fifteenth-century limewood carving, conventionally dated around 1450 (with the variant dating 1466 attached to its installation after a chapel fire). She is about 117 centimetres tall. She stands frontal, with a sceptre in her raised right hand and the Christ child on her left arm; the child holds a bird, by tradition a dove. The statue’s surfaces are now overwhelmingly hidden by the ceremonial robes that have been added across the modern period: she has a wardrobe of around thirty-three robes, the oldest dating from 1685, changed roughly twenty times a year by the abbey’s sacristan according to the liturgical calendar.
She is famously black. The question of why she is black has been answered in several incompatible ways across the centuries, and the answer that the documentary record actually supports is more interesting than any of them.
Three theories have circulated. The first and most popular is candle and oil-lamp soot, accumulated over centuries of votive devotion in a closed chapel: the statue darkened gradually as a side-effect of the worship she received. The second is the deliberate-dark-wood theory, that medieval carvers selected a dark hardwood for the statue and its blackness is original. The third, made popular by Ean Begg’s The Cult of the Black Virgin (Arkana, 1985, revised 1996), reads the European Black Madonna corpus as a survival of pre-Christian goddess iconography, with Cybele, Artemis of Ephesus, Anatolian Magna Mater, and Isis as the underlying substrate, and the medieval Madonna as the Christianised continuation.
All three theories struggle at Einsiedeln. Soot is partly right but cannot be the whole answer: the chapel was lit by candles for centuries and the soot is real, but the present blackness is too even and too dense for accumulated grime alone. The deliberate-dark-wood theory is wrong: the statue is limewood, conventionally pale. As for the pre-Christian-goddess reading, Ean Begg lists Einsiedeln in his general European gazetteer, but mainstream art-historical and archaeological scholarship has not attested a pre-Christian shrine at the Sihl-valley site, and the abbey-linked scholarship does not extend his thesis to the Einsiedeln statue specifically.
The documentary record points to a fourth answer, which is the one with a name attached to it. In the spring of 1798, with the French Revolutionary army about to occupy the abbey, the Madonna was smuggled out of the Gnadenkapelle. She was taken across the Haggenegg pass and through Bludenz to the Propstei St Gerold in Vorarlberg, where she was hidden through the years of the abbey’s suppression. During that period, in 1799, the restorer Johann Adam Fuetscher was commissioned to clean and renovate the statue.
His own restoration note records what he found. Under centuries of soot from candles, oil lamps, and incense, the statue’s underlying skin colour was the conventional light flesh-tone of late-medieval Marian carving. The wood beneath the soot was not black. Fuetscher then made a decision. He did not strip the statue back to its original colour. He instead repainted the face and the hands black, deliberately, in order to preserve the visual appearance the faithful had grown attached to over centuries of accumulated soot. The decision was pastoral and pragmatic: the statue that the pilgrims remembered had been a black Madonna, and the statue that returned to the chapel in 1803 was going to look like the statue that had left it in 1798.
The Madonna was returned to Einsiedeln on 29 September 1803, after the Act of Mediation had restored the abbey. The Gnadenkapelle she returned to was the old medieval chapel, but it would not survive much longer; in 1815 to 1817 it was dismantled and rebuilt in neoclassical style, with much of the original material preserved. The Madonna has stood in the rebuilt chapel ever since.
What this means is that the current blackness of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln is not centuries of candle soot, not original dark wood, not the survival of an Isis substrate. It is documented post-Revolutionary restoration paint, applied in 1799 by a named restorer to keep the pilgrimage object visually continuous with what pilgrims remembered. The black is the colour of the cult, not the colour of the wood. That is, if anything, a stranger and more interesting fact than the conventional answers.
1493: The alchemist next door
Forty-three years after the Black Madonna was carved, and roughly two kilometres from the chapel where she stood, a child was born to the doctor of the Einsiedeln area and his wife, a bondswoman of the abbey.
The house was in the hamlet of Egg, just outside the abbey precinct, by a bridge over the Sihl River. The child’s full name as recorded in the family papers was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. His father Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim was an illegitimate scion of a Swabian noble line whose seat was at Hohenheim near Stuttgart; he had become a physician and was practising in the Einsiedeln area. His mother is not preserved by name in any surviving document. What is preserved, in the standard biographies, is her institutional position. Before her marriage she was a bondswoman of Einsiedeln Abbey and worked as the superintendent of the abbey’s hospital. The child was therefore born into a household whose entire economic and medical existence was bound up with the abbey: his father a physician in its catchment, his mother a serf of the monastery and a senior nursing administrator in its medical infrastructure.
The traditional birth date is 10 November 1493. A respectable alternative tradition gives 17 December 1493; a minority of recent scholarship has argued for 1494. The honest position is that no contemporary baptismal record survives. The boy was certainly born in 1493 and certainly born by the Sihl bridge in Egg.
His mother died around 1502, when the boy was about nine. His father then moved with him to Villach in Carinthia, in the southern Habsburg lands, where Wilhelm took up a post as town physician to the mining community. Paracelsus’s early scientific education was his father’s: botany, mineralogy, mining, chemistry, the practical natural philosophy of a small mining town in the Eastern Alps. He went to university, probably at Basel and Vienna, took a medical doctorate at Ferrara in 1515 or 1516, and then disappears into the European Wanderjahre of an itinerant Renaissance physician until he reappears as the city physician of Basel in 1527.
The Latinised humanist name Paracelsus, “beyond Celsus,” in conscious rivalry with the rediscovered first-century Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, is first attested in 1529. He himself, however, sometimes signed his name with an Einsiedeln reference rather than a classical one. He used Eremita, “hermit,” after the place of his birth, whose German name literally means “hermitage.” The Einsiedeln connection was, in his own self-presentation, not incidental.
The 1527 Basel year is the dramatic moment of his life. As city physician of Basel he had the privilege of lecturing at the University of Basel, and he scandalised the medical faculty by lecturing in German rather than Latin. He published, in German and Latin and in immediately combative form, harsh criticism of the conventional physicians and apothecaries of the city. At the St John’s midsummer student bonfire in the Basel marketplace in June 1527, he publicly threw a copy of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine into the fire. The exact day is contested in the secondary literature, with Wikipedia giving 23 June and other reputable sources giving 24 June; the safe formulation is the St John’s bonfire of June 1527. The gesture was symbolic of the larger gesture he was making in his Basel year and in his life: the rejection of the Arab-Galenic medical authority that had held Europe for half a millennium, and its replacement with a chemistry-based medicine of his own design.
During the same Basel period he attended Erasmus of Rotterdam’s printer-patron Johann Froben (Frobenius) successfully at the latter’s sickbed, and was asked by Erasmus himself, also ill, to treat him. Erasmus’s letter to Paracelsus survives, in the standard English translation:
I cannot offer thee a reward equal to thy art and knowledge — I surely offer thee a grateful soul. Thou hast recalled from the shades Frobenius who is my other half: if thou restorest me also thou restorest each through the other.
It is the single most generous Renaissance-humanist endorsement of Paracelsus and was extended at the same moment that the Basel medical faculty was trying to drive him out. He left the city in early 1528 after threats and a lawsuit and resumed his wandering life.
His major doctrines crystallised across the next decade. The tria prima (the three principles: sulphur as the combustible, mercury as the fluid-and-changeable, salt as the solid-and-permanent), an extension of the older Arabic two-principle sulphur-mercury alchemy by the addition of salt, was first set out in the Opus paramirum of around 1530. The most-cited single sentence in the history of toxicology, sola dosis facit venenum, “only the dose makes the poison,” is from his Third Defence, one of the seven Septem Defensiones of 1538. The recipe for the homunculus, the small artificial man grown from human seed in a sealed vessel of horse-dung warmth across forty weeks, is in Book I of De Natura Rerum, composed around 1537 and first printed posthumously in 1572. The synthetic Astronomia magna (also Philosophia sagax), the systematic statement of his Hermetic-astrological natural philosophy, was completed in 1537 and first printed posthumously in 1571.
He died on 24 September 1541 in Salzburg, at the age of forty-eight, in conditions that contemporaries described variously as natural causes and as murder. He was buried at the cemetery of Sankt Sebastian in Salzburg; his remains were relocated inside the Sebastianskirche in 1752. The standard modern biographies are Walter Pagel’s Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Karger, 1958, revised 1982); Charles Webster’s Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (Yale University Press, 2008); Andrew Weeks’s Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (SUNY Press, 1997); and Philip Ball’s The Devil’s Doctor (Heinemann, 2006).
The point, for an article on Einsiedeln rather than on Paracelsus himself, is this. The man who founded modern chemical medicine, who is one of the central figures in the European alchemical and Hermetic tradition that the Hermes Trismegistus corpus had carried since late antiquity, who stands as the Renaissance hinge between the Greco-Egyptian alchemy of Cleopatra the Alchemist and Zosimos of Panopolis and the systematic chemistry of the late seventeenth century, was born in a house next to the most-visited Marian shrine in the German-speaking lands, to a mother who served in that shrine’s hospital. He used “Eremita” as a name. The Einsiedeln connection was part of his identity from the start.
1704 to 1735: The Baroque rebuild
By the late seventeenth century the medieval and early-modern fabric of the Einsiedeln complex had reached the limit of its serviceable life. Abbots Maurus von Roll (elected 1670) and his successors planned a complete rebuild on monumental Baroque lines, in the Counter-Reformation idiom that the great south-German and Swiss monasteries (Melk, Ottobeuren, St. Gallen, Disentis, Muri) were then constructing as their physical answer to the Protestant Reformation.
The designer was Caspar Moosbrugger (1656–1723), a Vorarlberger lay-brother stonemason who had entered the Einsiedeln community as a Konversbruder, a lay-brother, in 1682. He had no formal academic architectural training. He became one of the most influential monastic-baroque architects of the Swiss Confederation almost entirely on the basis of his work at Einsiedeln itself and on consulting commissions across the great Swiss Benedictine houses: Disentis, Muri, Engelberg, Fischingen, Rheinau. He consulted on the rebuild at St Gallen. He worked in pen and pencil and in personal on-site supervision, where his contemporaries used academic architectural drawings, and his designs were built in situ, with the lay-brother negotiating each load-bearing decision with his stonemasons in the yard.
The foundation stone of the new monastic complex was laid on 31 March 1704. The new church was begun in 1719. Moosbrugger died in August 1723, before the church was complete; the project was completed by his brother Johann Moosbrugger. The interior frescoes and stucco, executed in the high Bavarian Baroque style for which they remain famous, were the work of the brothers Cosmas Damian Asam (1686–1739) and Egid Quirin Asam (1692–1750), the same pair responsible for the Asamkirche in Munich and for the abbey church at Weltenburg. The Asam brothers worked at Einsiedeln in 1724 to 1726. The finished church was consecrated on 3 May 1735, under Abbot Nikolaus Imfeld.
The single most architecturally distinctive decision of the entire rebuild was the preservation of the medieval Chapel of Grace (Gnadenkapelle), housing the Black Madonna, inside the much larger Baroque church. The principle of a sanctuary within a sanctuary, first established when the lower church was built above the original Chapel of the Saviour in 1226 after a fire, was maintained: the central religious object of the entire pilgrimage was preserved at its original ground-level location, with the entire Baroque architectural argument constructed around it rather than over it. The visitor entering the Baroque church today is led through the great Baroque nave to a small dark medieval-feeling chapel at its centre, a deliberate inversion of architectural scale that the Counter-Reformation builders considered theologically essential. The new church was a setting for the older holiness, not a replacement of it.
The medieval Gnadenkapelle itself, however, did not survive the French Revolutionary period intact. When the French army occupied the abbey in 1798, the chapel was dismantled. The present Chapel of Grace is a neoclassical reconstruction of 1815 to 1817, built using as much of the salvaged original material as possible but in the architectural idiom of its rebuild moment rather than of its medieval origins. The Black Madonna inside it is the original; the architectural setting is now two centuries old.
The Stiftsbibliothek, the abbey library, was founded effectively with the abbey itself in 934. The library now holds around 1,280 manuscripts (around 580 of them pre-1500), around 1,100 incunabula, and around 230,000 printed volumes. Its single most internationally cited manuscript is Codex Einsidlensis 326, a Carolingian sylloge of Roman inscriptions combined with a pilgrim’s guide to Rome, dating to around 800; it is the standard textual witness to several Roman inscriptions that are now lost. The standard scholarly edition is Gerold Walser’s Die Einsiedler Inschriftensammlung und der Pilgerführer durch Rom (Codex Einsidlensis 326) (Steiner, 1987). The foundational manuscript catalogue is P. Gabriel Meier’s Catalogus codicum of 1899, covering codices 1 to 500, completed in 2009 by P. Odo Lang’s volume on codices 501 to 1318 (Schwabe).
April 1760: Casanova proposes to take the habit
The new Baroque church had been consecrated for twenty-five years when one of the more unlikely visitors in the abbey’s history walked up from Zurich. Giacomo Casanova was thirty-five years old, three years out of his escape from the Piombi prisons of Venice, deep in his Madame d’Urfé period of alchemical confidence tricks across the courts of France, and fleeing the standard mix of creditors and angry husbands. He had walked roughly thirty kilometres from Zurich on foot. He came in through the abbey church, watched the monks at office, and was struck on the spot by what he calls in his Histoire de ma vie (Volume 14, Chapter XIII) une fantaisie singulière, a strange whim, to become a Benedictine monk himself.
He sought an audience with the prince-abbot and made an offer. Casanova never names the abbot in the memoir, but the office in April 1760 was held by Nikolaus II Imfeld, who had been abbot since 1734 and remained so until his death in 1773. This is the same Imfeld who had consecrated the completed Baroque church in 1735. Casanova proposed to enter the community and to bring a dowry of ten thousand crowns for his keep, which is the standard eighteenth-century arrangement by which a postulant of means joined a Benedictine house as a donatus. The abbot dined him on snipe and woodcock with a salmon-trout, under a papal dispensation that allowed the community to eat meat year-round, then sent him back to Zurich in his own carriage with sealed letters and a fortnight to think it over, with the instruction to wait for him at the inn called the Hôtel de l’Épée.
Two things broke the spell before the fortnight was out. The first was the library. Casanova had asked to be shown it before he left and found, in his own words in the Machen translation: “nothing under the size of folio, the newest books were a hundred years old, and the subject-matter of all these huge books was solely theology and controversy.” He asked the abbot whether the monks at least kept private libraries of their own with travels, history, and the sciences. The abbot’s answer is the line that should be on the Einsiedeln coat of arms: “Not at all; my monks are honest folk, who are content to do their duty, and to live in peace and sweet ignorance.” For Casanova, who was at that point of his life a working bibliophile and Hermetic consultant for half the aristocracy of Western Europe, this was a closing argument. The second was a woman, who arrived at the Hôtel de l’Épée on 23 April in a riding habit. He left for Geneva without waiting for the abbot’s return visit and never came back to Einsiedeln.
1798 to today
On 3 May 1798 the French Revolutionary army occupied the abbey. The monks were dispersed, the buildings sequestered, the medieval Chapel of Grace dismantled, and the Black Madonna saved only because she had been smuggled out via Vorarlberg in advance. The community was suppressed for around three years. The monks returned in 1801. On 19 February 1803, under Napoleon’s Act of Mediation, the abbey was formally reinstalled as a Benedictine community, although its centuries-old imperial-immediate status was gone. The Madonna returned to Einsiedeln on 29 September 1803. The Gnadenkapelle was rebuilt in neoclassical style in 1815 to 1817 with the original material.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the community continued, expanding into territorial-abbey status, maintaining the pilgrimage, running the Stiftsschule (the abbey gymnasium for around 400 students), the printing press (founded 1664, still functioning), the winery, the stud farm, and the manuscript library. The abbey is currently governed by Abbot Urban Federer O.S.B., elected in December 2013. The community has around 40 monks, with an average age unusually low for a European monastery of its size due to a continuous flow of new members in the past decade. The annual Engelweihfest on 14 September remains the centrepiece of the liturgical year. Around 800,000 visitors a year cross the threshold of the Gnadenkapelle, of whom 150,000 to 200,000 are formally registered as pilgrims to the Black Madonna rather than as architectural or tourist visitors.
By Marian-shrine standards Einsiedeln is a mid-sized European pilgrimage destination, with annual attendance an order of magnitude below Lourdes (around five to six million), Fátima (a record 6.8 million in 2023), Częstochowa (around four and a half million), and Guadalupe (around twenty million). It is by some distance the most-visited Catholic shrine in the German-speaking lands.
The accumulation is the point
If you stand in the centre of the Baroque nave at Einsiedeln today and look forward, you are looking at the dark Gnadenkapelle that was rebuilt in 1815 to 1817 on the site of the medieval chapel that was rebuilt in 1226 on the site of the chapel that was built around 940 on the site of Meinrad’s ninth-century hermit cell. Inside that chapel stands the limewood Madonna who was carved around 1450, smuggled out to Vorarlberg in 1798, deliberately painted black by Johann Adam Fuetscher in 1799, and returned to her place in 1803. In the abbey’s library next door are sixty-four manuscripts from the tenth-century scriptorium, the Carolingian sylloge of Roman inscriptions that is Codex Einsidlensis 326, and the medieval manuscripts of Hermann von Reichenau’s Chronicon in whose mid-twelfth-century margins someone wrote caelitus against the years 948 and 964 and started the Engelweihe legend that the abbey still commemorates every September. Two kilometres away is the bridge over the Sihl where Paracelsus was born in 1493 to a serf of the abbey, in the household of the abbey-area physician, in the daily traffic of a Marian pilgrimage that had been arriving on foot from Strasbourg and from Augsburg and from the upper Rhine for half a millennium. He was alive at the same moment that the Madonna in the chapel was being carved. He grew up watching the pilgrims arrive.
That accumulation, twelve hundred years of one religious tradition layering on top of another on the same hundred metres of ground, is what Einsiedeln actually is. The Engelweihe is a twelfth-century invention; the Black Madonna’s blackness is the work of an 1799 restorer; the Baroque church was commissioned in the eighteenth century to enclose a fifteenth-century Madonna who in turn stood over a ninth-century hermit’s cell. Every layer was added by someone making a specific decision in a specific year, and every layer is still there. The pilgrim who walks into the Gnadenkapelle today is in the same room as Meinrad’s bones and Fuetscher’s brush and Conrad’s reported visitation and the boy who would become Paracelsus.
The pilgrimage is still happening. Each 14 September brings the Engelweihfest, the Madonna’s wardrobe is changed about twenty times a year through the liturgical calendar by the abbey’s sacristan, the printing press in the conventual basement still runs, and the community has around forty monks. The chapel that the abbey itself now teaches was not consecrated by Christ in 948 is, however, the chapel that the abbey itself has been continuously consecrating and rebuilding for twelve hundred years. That continuity is the actual miracle.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Vita Meinradi, anonymous Reichenau monk, late 9th century. Standard edition in Otto Holder-Egger, ed., Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum and related MGH volumes.
- Hermann von Reichenau, Chronicon, 11th century (Hermann d. 1054). The Einsiedeln caelitus marginal note added to the manuscript tradition in a different hand, mid-12th century.
- Georg von Gengenbach, Einsiedler Chronik, 1378. The first fully developed narrative of the Engelweihe.
- Pope Leo VIII, alleged bull of 964 confirming the Engelweihe. Flagged as fingiert (fabricated) in the standard reference literature; almost certainly produced in the mid-twelfth century alongside the Hermann von Reichenau marginal note.
- Johann Adam Fuetscher, restoration note on the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, Propstei St Gerold, 1799 (preserved in the abbey archives).
- Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. Basel: S. Karger, 1958; 2nd revised ed. 1982.
- Webster, Charles. Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
- Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
- Ball, Philip. The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. London: William Heinemann, 2006.
- Paracelsus. Opus paramirum, c. 1530. (The tria prima doctrine.)
- Paracelsus. Septem Defensiones, 1538. (Source of ‘sola dosis facit venenum’.)
- Paracelsus. De Natura Rerum, composed c. 1537, first printed 1572. (The homunculus recipe.)
- Paracelsus. Astronomia magna (also Philosophia sagax), completed 1537, first printed 1571.
- Begg, Ean. The Cult of the Black Virgin. London: Arkana / Penguin, 1985; revised 1996. (For the comparative European Black Madonna thesis; treat as the popular reading.)
- Walser, Gerold, ed. Die Einsiedler Inschriftensammlung und der Pilgerführer durch Rom (Codex Einsidlensis 326): Facsimile, Umschrift, Übersetzung und Kommentar. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1987.
- Meier, P. Gabriel. Catalogus codicum manu scriptorum qui in Bibliotheca Monasterii Einsidlensis O.S.B. servantur. Einsiedeln and Leipzig, 1899. (Codices 1–500.)
- Lang, Odo. Katalog der Handschriften in der Stiftsbibliothek Einsiedeln, Zweiter Teil: Codices 501–1318. Basel: Schwabe, 2009.
- Kloster Einsiedeln, official abbey publications and the abbey website kloster-einsiedeln.ch.
- Casanova, Giacomo. Histoire de ma vie. Volume 14 (Switzerland), Chapter XIII. English translation: Arthur Machen, London 1894 (Project Gutenberg ebook 2964); modern critical English: Willard R. Trask, History of My Life, Vol. 6, Ch. 8 (Harcourt-Brace / Johns Hopkins UP, 1966–1971). French critical: Brockhaus-Plon 1960–1962; Pléiade ed. Lahouati & Luna, Gallimard, 2013–2015.
