Revisionist assertions such as these are no longer particularly original or controversial, especially in relation to witchcraft. To assume that magic survived into the modern period has become a new orthodoxy, although its broader cultural implications have not been fully considered. As it relates to the eighteenth century, however, the argument for the survival of magic has to be qualified. Something in the magical cultures of England and Scotland did change after 1688, although the transformation was not one whose effects were found at every social level. The occult never again attained the intellectual impact or coherence it had enjoyed in the mid-seventeenth century. The argument that follows in the rest of this book will take an approach that emphasizes change as well as continuity. It is based on the occult writings favoured by the literate rather than on the magical behaviour of ordinary, and mostly illiterate, people. In short, it is a study of texts and how they were used, rather than of inherited customs or beliefs, which are difficult to isolate without using the testimony of educated observers.
How did these texts relate to magical practices? A basic assumption adopted here is that popular magic shared with occult thinking a desire to make use of spiritual or supernatural power. The wise woman or traditional healer, the alchemist, the astrologer and the ritual magus were engaged in similar endeavours, whose significance was as much intellectual as practical: that is, they wanted to exceed the boundaries of nature as they knew it, and to take charge of hidden forces that might be seen as diabolic or angelic, Satanic or divine. The village magician may not have given much thought to the philosophical significance of his philtres and potions, but he was nonetheless traversing the same territory as the learned astrological physician. Whether their methods were active or contemplative, efficacious or inefficacious, makes no real difference; nor does our modern view of them as rational or irrational, learned or half-crazed. What does matter is their relationship to what they perceived as the wonderful, the inexplicable or the supernatural. The herbal remedies of a cunning man may not have been magical at all, unless they claimed some power that went beyond that of nature. Similarly, alchemy was not always infused with the same level of occult thinking, although its practitioners so frequently summoned angelic forces in pursuing their “great work” that it has to be wondered whether they were ever able to make a distinction between natural and supernatural results.23
If magic, like the occult, is associated with human use of the supernatural, it might encompass aspects of formal religion, such as miracles, prophecy or even prayer. The practitioners of magic, in Britain as elsewhere, seldom saw any contradiction between their pursuits and religion; indeed, many of them perceived magical activity as a form of religious devotion. Others, however, saw a very deep contradiction. In the minds of the defenders of Christian orthodoxy, magic was always demonic. No truly pious practice, in their opinion, could aspire to any measure of control over supernatural forces; a Christian could merely petition God to intervene in nature through miracles, which only the deity was able to perform. As William Fleetwood put it in 1701, “no Power less than that of God, can unsettle that establish'd Course of Nature, which no Power less than his could settle and establish.”24 The weighty impact of this view on the history of occult thinking will be measured in later chapters.
Magic has been described by Richard Kieckhefer as “a kind of crossroads … a point of intersection” where religion met science, popular culture met learned culture, and fiction met reality.25 For our purposes, the metaphor is felicitous, because popular magic and occult thinking often travelled through the same points. This does not mean that they were identical, or that one simply depended on the other. Popular magic had its own vitality, its own methods and its own history; it was neither a “debased” form of the occult nor a misreading of learned interpretations of the supernatural. On the other hand, occult philosophers were not simply trying to elevate popular practices by endowing them with the aura of intellectual legitimacy. Few of them had any time or patience for “vulgar” customs; rather, they prided themselves on being the proponents of a distinct type of higher knowledge that dated back to the beginning of time, a prisca sapientia that had been known to Adam, Moses and King Solomon. The last of these Biblical figures was regarded as the master of all forms of secret knowledge, which he was thought to have enshrined in the features of his Temple (hence the use of his name in the title of this work). Once we begin to explore such ways of thinking, the history of magic as a set of practices or behaviours no longer explains much about the occult, and we have to find a different means of entrance into a narrow and very crowded sanctuary.
The Esoteric
If popular magic has dominated the field in British historical scholarship, the occult as a theoretical construct has been a pre-eminent concern outside Britain. A leading figure in this field of investigation has been the French religious scholar Antoine Faivre. In a dazzling variety of works, he has defined the occult as a category within what he has called esoteric religion.26 According to Faivre and others who adhere to his approach, the occult is neither a response to a lack of effective solutions to worldly problems, nor a set of practices distinguished by a desire to gain control over nature. Rather, it is part of a coherent tradition of knowledge, expressed in a body of writings that flourished for centuries on the fringes of the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The basic premise of occult knowledge is that a search for hidden causes in nature may lead towards something higher than nature: absolute wisdom, supernatural power or the divine.
Faivre's esoteric approach might be accused of giving too much unity and direction to writings that are often characterized by highly individualistic, sometimes conflicting and occasionally chaotic points of view. This deprives certain occult writers—William Blake comes immediately to mind—of what may be their most salient feature: their inventiveness or even quirkiness. In addition, students of esoteric religion are open to the criticism that they have regarded the texts they study as comprising a discrete and largely self-referential intellectual tradition, hermetically sealed so as to ward off the taint of other forms of thought, not to mention social trends and popular practices. This has led, on the one hand, to some dubious claims of connections between writers whose similarities may be less significant than their differences and, on the other hand, to a lack of interest in what may be classified as “non-esoteric” influences. Finally, scholars of esoteric religion have a tendency to interpret whatever they are studying with the greatest seriousness, so that hucksters or charlatans turn into philosophers, and minor references in obscure esoteric works take on labyrinthine significances that would have bewildered their original authors.
In spite of these shortcomings, the esoteric approach has helped to restore the philosophical and theological importance of writings that have too often been dismissed as irrelevant. By relating these works primarily to religious questions, it has placed them, correctly, within a sphere of inquiry that was dominant in western European thought until the nineteenth century. Because occult writers quoted frequently from one another and drew freely on one another's ideas, the suggestion that they perceived themselves as working within an intellectual tradition is certainly not misguided, although it is easily overstated. Even if that tradition was indebted to invention as much as to inheritance, it represented received wisdom to those who tried to make sense out of it. Occult thinking, in short, was a hybrid plant with very deep roots. It had an extensive, albeit episodic, intellectual history, which has to be reviewed here briefly, as a background to the argument that follows.
Many of the chief sources of occult thinking in Europe appeared in Egypt during the early Christian centuries, a period of remarkable religious syncretism. This was the age of the Gnostics, who sought divine wisdom through philosophy, of the Alexandrian alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis and, above all, of “Hermes Trismegistus,” the mythical author of the diverse Greek and Latin works later collected under the title of Corpus Hermeticum. While
the Corpus Hermeticum was set down on papyrus long after the building of the pyramids by writers familiar with Christianity and Gnostic thought, its various components were to some extent informed by memories of the learning of Pharaonic Egypt. Until the mid-seventeenth century and beyond, the Corpus Hermeticum was read more or less uncritically as a pure distillation of ancient Egyptian teachings on everything from hieroglyphs to alchemy. Another ancient school of thought, emphasizing the dominance of spirit over matter, was introduced in the third century CE by Greek and Near Eastern philosophers: Plotinus, his student Porphyry and Porphyry's Syrian follower Iamblichus. Because they sought to revive a version of the Platonic theory of forms (which they called spirits), they were known as Neoplatonists. Plotinus saw the Divine Mind or Nous as an emanation of the indivisible One; in turn, the World Spirit and all individual spirits emanated from the Nous. Iamblichus was particularly interested in magic, which he linked with the preservation of polytheism. During the early Middle Ages, these Egyptian and Neoplatonic texts were preserved, reinterpreted and augmented, not by Christian but by Arab scholars, many of whom made original contributions to occult thinking. Meanwhile, a Jewish form of gnosis, or divine wisdom, was elaborated in the writings known as the Kabbala, gathered together and transcribed in the thirteenth century.
Medieval Arabs, Jews and Byzantines passed this grab-bag of heterodox thinking on to Western Christians, some of whom embraced it as a source of ultimate knowledge. Gradually, it was pieced together by European thinkers into a single tradition of occult philosophy. This began in the late Middle Ages in the secret treatises of Western Christian alchemists and ritual magicians, but it continued in the public writings of humanist scholars. The most celebrated humanist contributions to occult philosophy were made by the Florentines Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, as well as by the German humanist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Ficino revived the Neoplatonic theory of spirit, which he saw as existing throughout all of creation in the form of an organic “World Soul.” His younger colleague Pico, in spite of misgivings about the uses of magic, was fascinated by astrology and by the possibility of uniting all religions through occult philosophy. Although he too was inspired by Neoplatonism, Agrippa was more open in his embrace of practical and even popular magic, so much so that his name became notorious in connection with it. Agrippa seems later to have recanted his interest in the workings of the occult, although the reasons for his recantation, and even its significance, are open to question.
To the works of these humanist philosophers may be added the medical-alchemical treatises of the Swiss-born doctor Paracelsus (Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim), who developed a complex anti-Aristotelian theory of the body and pioneered the use of chemical treatments for disease. The most important English contributions to occult philosophy in the age of humanism were the astrological and magical works of the extraordinarily talented John Dee, and the breathtaking theories of his compatriot Robert Fludd. Seeking to bind together the microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds in a single overarching explanation, Fludd delved into topics as diverse as music, memory, perception and the circulation of the blood, publishing his findings in massive and expensively illustrated volumes.27 The writings of these humanists, mixing heterodoxy and strokes of paganism with mysticism and the rudiments of experimental science, remained on the edge of intellectual respectability, yet they helped to stimulate a liberation of thought and imagination that spread across Renaissance Europe. As Paracelsus put it, “Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man.”28
Those who were suspicious of occult philosophy equated it with demonic magic. This implied that it was heretical, diabolical or unlawful, but could also suggest that it was “ignorant,” improvised or imaginary rather than rooted in learned sources. It therefore bore the mark of popular “superstition” as well as devil worship.29 In Western Christian lands, the occult never escaped this damaging, double-edged association with magic, which prevented it from becoming fully acceptable. Some writers, like Della Porta, Agrippa and Dee, were bold enough to appropriate the term magic for their own uses, but others studiously avoided it. By the mid-eighteenth century, almost no learned person in Britain was willing to label his or her own occult interests as magic, whether natural or supernatural, and the term became almost entirely associated with popular beliefs. By 1800, in spite of a striking revival of occult thinking, magic was widely linked in commercial discourse with conjuring, which was disdained as an unabashed form of trickery. Thus, magic and occult thinking would have different historical trajectories.
Yet the tangled linkages between the two do not allow either to be studied in isolation. While the subsequent chapters of this study concentrate on written sources rather than practices, magical behaviour will constantly impinge on the argument. The occult always retained a practical as well as an intellectual aspect. Writers on occult subjects might refer to popular magic favourably, although this depended on how secure they felt in endorsing what many rejected as “superstition.” The astrological healer Nicholas Culpeper, for example, was fascinated by the potions, salves and curatives employed by village cunning men or wise women. Conversely, other famous astrologers who marketed their art with such great success in the late seventeenth century were careful to deny that they were mere “empirics,” dispensing practical solutions without regard to the theoretical basis of what they were selling. A history of the occult cannot restrict itself to the intellectual tradition of esoteric knowledge; it also has to chronicle the many points of contact, and of friction, between occult learning and traditional customs or beliefs.
The chapters of this book are synthetic in bringing together a variety of sources and approaches, but they are not meant to be encyclopaedic. Many minor writers are not discussed; others are dealt with only in passing. Issues that may be of great concern to individual readers may not be raised at all, or be explored in any detail. Witchcraft, for example, will not be discussed as much in the following chapters as some would like. Its importance to this argument is peripheral. Many writers saw witchcraft as evidence of the existence of malign or diabolical spirits. Because the activities of witches existed mainly in the minds of their supposed victims and judges, however, they do not fit comfortably into a history that examines the intersection of occult thinking and practice. No English or Scottish writer in the early-modern period, with the sole exception of William Blake, identified himself or herself as an admirer of the Devil. Witchcraft was seldom tied to the occult except by those who disliked both, and some occult writers had no belief in its reality at all. As a result, the fate of witches, important as it is to any understanding of social, cultural and gender relations in early-modern Britain, does not cast as much light on our theme as might be assumed.
While the main sources for this study are contemporary printed works, they can only be understood by taking other materials (letters, manuscripts, diaries) into account. But even the latter provide only partial and fragmented answers to the question of how contemporaries interpreted what they saw on the page. Reading is never a straightforward process, and we cannot hope to recover in any immediate sense the variable ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts were read—least of all, texts that aspired to mystery and arcane knowledge. Moreover, by annotating and copying printed texts, readers made them into new works bearing their own imprints, so that in a sense texts were multiplied into further texts. Historians can accurately reconstruct the printing history of books, the strategies by which they were marketed, the visual and rhetorical ploys by which they established authority, the references they contain and the responses to them registered by individual readers. In summarizing and analysing the arguments of these texts, however, we are adding our own notations, informed by our own insights, including what we think might have been the reactions of contemporary readers. Of course, we cannot avoid this process of approximation and guesswork, or we are left with no more than the shell of a text,
without much sense of its elusive content.30
Our responses to occult writings may be very different from those of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century readers, but we still need to work out what they signified at the time, often in the absence of clear guides. Alchemical writers were notorious for using a cryptic jargon in their works, so that only the “illuminated” reader would understand them. Uninitiated enthusiasts hoped to untangle that jargon, but it is questionable whether any really could, because its allusions pointed in so many different directions at once. In the same way, historians will never be able to unweave fully the intricate networks of allusion that make up the writings of Thomas Vaughan, William Stukeley or William Blake. This should not discourage us from trying to come as close as we can to what a contemporary reader might have made of them, or from attempting to reconstruct the patterns of thinking that informed their works, even if we can get no closer to these goals than a tentative gloss.
We should also remain aware that many of these texts were consciously written for use, not simply for edification: that is, they were designed to be employed in some form of practice. How they were used is often very difficult to reconstruct. At times, the text demanded a rigorous adherence to every word, but this was possible only through some sort of translation of symbols or jargon. At other times, texts were more user-friendly, providing explanations and allowing themselves to be considered selectively. Of course, unless we can follow the strategies of the author, we cannot really know to what purposes they were to be put. Still, that there was a constant connection in occult writings between the written word and practical activity of some sort cannot be overlooked.
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