The occult strove to unlock ultimate truths. They will not be discovered in these pages, where every interpretation is only a partial truth. Plenty of writers and publishers in the early-modern period used the promise of “secrets revealed” as a lure to attract customers for their books. The purpose of this investigation is more modest: to devise a general framework within which the history of occult thinking can be understood in the century and a half after the English Civil War period. It has to take account of a changing cultural context, including religious transformations, the impact of a commercialized press, the rise of new types of sociability and the emergence of partisan politics. Each of these factors had a profound impact on the occult. Alchemy, astrology and ritual magic were tied from the first to religious heterodoxy and sectarianism, an association that lasted throughout the eighteenth century. Occult writers took full advantage of the commercial possibilities of publishing, especially in the hotly competitive cultural atmosphere of the 1780s. Occult secrets became selling points for clubs and associations that have been seen as models of early-modern sociability. Finally, the decline of occult thinking in the early eighteenth century was in part due to political struggles, just as its revival after 1780 can be attributed to a shift in the general cultural situation. We will not proceed very far in placing our subject in a historical context, however, before we encounter what seem to be two formidable obstacles to the survival of any type of occult thinking: namely, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
Science, Enlightenment and the Occult
The concept of a scientific revolution was only retroactively applied. Derived from the ideals of human progress that dominated nineteenth-century scholarship, it was characterized by the concept of revolution, necessary for any sudden, fundamental break with the past. A radical change in ways of thinking, it was proposed, separated medieval from modern thought about nature. The features of this scientific revolution were eloquently expressed in a famous work by Herbert Butterfield, published in 1949. His formulation has been enormously influential ever since.31 Its chief English protagonists were experimentalists like Robert Boyle and theorists like Sir Isaac Newton, who sought to understand the natural universe in rational and mathematical terms. They set European natural philosophers, or scientists, on a new track that distinguished them not just from their forebears, but from observers of nature in every other part of the world. Above all, their ideas worked, and to them we owe everything in modern technology, from microscopes to smartphones, as well as every aspect of our modern scientific mindset.
In recent decades, the concept of a scientific revolution has been assailed from a number of angles: for emphasizing change rather than continuity in science, for not taking enough account of the cultural context in which knowledge was pursued, for ignoring the contributions to science of occult ways of thinking, and for assuming a steady advance in verifiable scientific explanations.32 Few scholars would argue that science progressed in a linear fashion through revolutionary leaps, or by simple binary oppositions between right and wrong. The emphasis on slowly changing paradigms leaves plenty of room for contradictions and anomalies, for religious beliefs and spiritual objectives, as well as for eccentric or imaginative thinking. It also allows for the importance of social status, connections and intellectual credentials in establishing the respectability or trustworthiness of a natural philosopher.33 The role of figures like Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee and Fludd in fostering new interpretations of nature has been newly stressed by those who argue that science did not emerge as the antithesis of occult philosophy.
This last line of argument can of course be taken too far, and it has been. In the 1960s, the relationship of the occult to the prevailing conception of a scientific revolution became tangled up with a hypothesis attributed, somewhat unfairly, to Frances Yates. A leading scholar of occult philosophy in the Renaissance period, Yates was one of the earliest proponents of its influence on science. More particularly, she connected the formation of the Royal Society, the flag-bearing institution of scientific revolution in England, with the Hermetic and alchemical sensibilities of the mysterious secret society known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Although this was more a suggestion than a full-fledged theory, it set off a long-running debate. Decades of research have shown that, while numerous scholars and publicists throughout Europe wrote under the Rosicrucian label and claimed an association with Rosicrucian ideas, the notion of an organized international “Brotherhood,” widely accepted at the time, was a misconception that stemmed from a well-intentioned hoax by a group of enthusiastic German academics.34 On the other hand, the alchemical and occult interests of several leading members of the Royal Society and pillars of the English scientific revolution, including Boyle and Newton, are now so well substantiated as to be undeniable.35
The precise relationship between scientific discovery and occult thinking remains complex but, as the first three chapters of this book will demonstrate, the two were not at war with one another. Natural science did not advance by brushing aside the occult, or by disproving magic. On the contrary, when occult claims were submitted to scientific scrutiny, few definite conclusions were drawn, and no concerted process of outright debunking took place. For their part, the devotees of occult thinking eagerly embraced scientific terminology and new scientific findings. In the eighteenth century, to be sure, the formal dialogue between natural science and the occult gradually died out, but this was due not so much to scientific advancements as to the imposition of a rigorous distinction between questions that could be answered by natural explanations and those that could not. Scientists ceased to write about occult qualities in nature, and natural magic in Della Porta's sense of the term either became experimental science or faded away.
As a result, in the decades after 1688, occult thinking was set adrift from natural philosophy and experimental science. Chapter Four examines that difficult transition, after which the occult began to take on different characteristics. Some influential thinkers in the first half of the eighteenth century, as will be shown in Chapter Five, tried privately to reconcile aspects of occult thinking with a Newtonian world-view. While firmly rejecting anything that smacked of popular magic, they continued to draw inspiration from astrology, alchemy and the interpretation of supernatural signs, but they did not want the general public to know about it and usually consigned their speculations to private writings, such as journals and diaries. In the end, their efforts to keep up the exchange between natural philosophy and the occult cannot be judged successful. Increasingly, as Chapter Six will show, the occult appealed to figures on the margins of intellectual respectability, who sought to counter mechanistic explanations of the universe by espousing various spiritual or supernatural theories that drew on one aspect or another of occult philosophy. Many of them were also attracted to mysticism, but it was their approach to nature, not their desire for union with God, that made their thinking occult. They differed from the experimental scientists who appear in the initial chapters of this book, but not entirely. While their attitudes to natural science were certainly out of step with those of the learned establishment, they aimed at addressing similar questions through spiritual rather than material suppositions. Their efforts would have a particular significance for the development of theories of the mind.
The occult lost much of its intellectual coherence after 1715, at least until the 1780s. We have to dig into the personal records of relatively obscure individuals in order to find its scattered traces. The withdrawal of the occult into private life, in an age that was dominated by an increasingly frenetic and dynamic commercial press, denoted a definite failure, but it also opened up certain opportunities. The booming public sphere of the eighteenth century was balanced by a quieter private sphere of contemplation and close friendships, usually exclusively male, in which ideas could be worked out and discussed between like-minded individuals. The cultivation of this private sphere was one of the purposes of Freemasonry, a sociable organi
zation that rested on vows of secrecy, mysterious rituals and an elaborate mythology of origins.36 Freemasonry provided a set of principles concerning male sociability and moral behaviour, bolstered by a highly imaginative collection of myths and legends. The principles of Freemasonry could be interpreted in a variety of ways: as a key to the mysteries of Scripture, as a rational system of ethics, as an explanation of the workings of nature or as a symbolic representation of occult philosophy. These were not contradictory or mutually exclusive readings, and all of them flourished within Masonic lodges.
In the rest of Europe, Freemasonry is associated by historians with the spread of the Enlightenment, which has often been seen as the antithesis of the occult. No better summary of this intellectual movement can be provided than that of Immanuel Kant, for whom enlightenment meant thinking for oneself, “daring to know,” rather than simply accepting received wisdom or “superstition.”37 Of course, the assumption of Kant and most other contemporary philosophers was that enlightened thinking would tend towards rationality, and would be more or less the same for all rational human beings. Unfortunately for those who have sought to characterize the historical Enlightenment in such linear terms, thinking for oneself might mean a ferocious individuality and a high degree of what contemporaries described as irrationality. It helped to bring about, as the last three chapters of this book will demonstrate, not the extinction, but the dramatic and tempestuous revival of the occult. Once again, occult thinking was reinvented, this time in a self-professedly enlightened form, but with all of the peculiarities that it had developed in the years after 1715. Just as the formal Enlightenment produced radical critics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who used its own language of “thinking for oneself” to hold it to account, so too did the occult revival give birth to dissenters like William Blake, who perceived it as insufficiently removed from the ways of the establishment.
These observations would not be surprising to historians of the Enlightenment in continental Europe. The enlightened connection to occult philosophies and practices, encompassing everything from Swedenborgianism and Mesmerism to various strains of occult Freemasonry, has long been recognized by French and German scholars as an integral feature of the cultural life of the last decades of the eighteenth century.38 The British Enlightenments, on the other hand, have seldom been viewed in such a way. The Enlightenment in Scotland is identified with the scepticism of David Hume, the “progressive” historicism of William Robertson and the “common-sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid.39 Its English counterpart has been seen as a fundamental cultural shift towards reason, secularism and transparency—“the creation of the modern world,” in the late Roy Porter's breathless assessment.40 The suggestion that alchemists, astrologers, ritual magicians, magnetic healers and occult Freemasons could have had something to do with this triumphant procession towards modernity is not one that has occurred to many British historians. Yet, as the final chapters of this book will argue, such was the case. Outside the institutions of learning, the informal connections between occult thinking and science may actually have grown in the eighteenth century, as a once-rarefied field of knowledge opened up to enthusiastic amateurs as well as to the commercialized publicity surrounding processes like electricity and magnetism.41
The winding, muddy and often submerged paths of occult thinking in the eighteenth century may not be as familiar to British historians as its more visible public byways in the late seventeenth century, but they were well travelled nonetheless. Adherents of the occult kept up a lively interaction with conventional intellectual trends, reconfiguring Hermeticism and Neoplatonism to suit the age of steam engines and revolutionary politics. As in the past, they eagerly absorbed heterodox religious ideas and maintained a keen interest in popular magic. Far from seeking to undermine the Enlightenment, they wanted to be a part of it, which should cause us to question just how far the boundaries of “thinking for oneself” might extend. Yet occult thinkers continued to lack respectability and remained vulnerable to attacks by those in authority, as well as to the vagaries of public opinion. The reaction to the French Revolution in the 1790s proved devastating to them, because they were now associated with dangerous political ideas. But the attempt to stamp them out was not successful, and they survived long beyond the end point of this book. When the guardians of the temple of British intellectual orthodoxy, founded on the cultural values of the educated Anglican elite, reluctantly began to make room for other points of view in the course of the nineteenth century, the denizens of occult philosophy were still swarming in the shadows, perhaps more numerous than ever. They emerged into the daylight after 1875, calling themselves Theosophists, Spiritualists, Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, Druids, Wiccans, Knights of the Golden Dawn, all lending their voices to the cacophonous yet vibrant disharmony of British public culture.
PART ONE
AURORA, 1650–1688
CHAPTER ONE
The Alchemical Heyday
WHEN WAS alchemy at its peak in England and Scotland? Ask somebody that question today, and the answer is likely to be “the Middle Ages” or perhaps “the Tudor period.” The term “alchemy,” after all, conjures up the image of damp monastic walls harbouring a sage in a long robe, with unkempt hair and a preoccupied look, who stares intently at mysterious crucibles and bubbling retorts. He is a seeker after the mad goal of making gold, half-scientist and half-mystic, immortalized (and frequently lampooned) by artists and writers throughout the early-modern period, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Ben Jonson. If the imaginary alchemist bears a resemblance to any historical personage, it might be to John Dee, the Elizabethan magus, with his scholar's cap, wizened features and long white beard, a subject of continuing fascination from his own time to ours.1
Measured in terms of the printed word, however, the high point of alchemy in Great Britain was actually in the last half of the seventeenth century. The vast majority of printed alchemical works in English, perhaps as many as two-thirds of them, appeared between 1650 and 1700.2 Manuscript sources of alchemy are more difficult to date or count up effectively, as we cannot always be certain when they were written or copied. Nevertheless, the biggest collection by far of alchemical manuscripts ever held in English hands was assembled by Elias Ashmole, a fervent alchemical adept, between 1648 and 1692. At his death, he left 620 volumes of manuscript materials to Oxford University, including hundreds of alchemical works. The contents of his collection stretch back to the Middle Ages, but Ashmole's fervent collecting belongs to the same period as the majority of printed books.3 Our imagined alchemist, then, should really be wearing a cravat, long coat and breeches. His surroundings should be a panelled room or even the garden of a college at Oxford or Cambridge. Bewigged and clean-shaven, he should look more like Isaac Newton than John Dee. As this chapter will show, however, late seventeenth-century alchemists came in a variety of disguises, and they did not all share the same attitudes. To understand alchemy, therefore, it is not enough to bring a “typical” figure back to life: we have to imagine the lives, complex and vibrant, of the members of a diverse intellectual community, before asking what exactly made their work occult.
The Community of Alchemists
Although chrysopoeia or spagyria, the alchemical art of making gold from base metals, was heating up throughout Great Britain in the second half of the seventeenth century, the great wen of London was its principal furnace. There, crowded into the tiny alleys of Little Britain, a neighbourhood behind St Paul's Cathedral that stretched down to Fleet Street, lived the booksellers—William Cooper, Matthew Smelt, Andrew Sowle, Thomas Salusbury and others—from whose shops alchemical treatises could be purchased. Nobody could hope for success in the alchemical art without reading many of them. London was a magnet for anyone who wanted to make money out of the occult sciences, no matter where they were born. The astrologer-alchemist-magician John Heydon, a West Countryman by birth, settled in the capital, first as a lawyer, then as an “Astromagus,” as he termed himself. London also drew th
e celebrated George Starkey, who was born in Bermuda, educated at Harvard College and became famous in England under his pseudonym of “Eirenaeus Philalethes.” Both writers spent time in the English capital's notorious prisons.4 Others were drawn to London for more philanthropic reasons. From Charing Cross, where Parliament pulled down the Eleanor cross, the medieval monument that gave it its name, in 1647 and replaced it with a fish shop, the German immigrant Samuel Hartlib managed his “Office of Address,” an international web of communication for those interested in scientific knowledge, including alchemy. Hartlib promoted the careers of Starkey and many other alchemical adepts, including a fellow German, Frederick Clodius, who eventually married Hartlib's daughter.5 A later Dutch immigrant, the mysterious W. Yworth, William Yarworth or Willem Ijvaert, set up a “New Spagyrical Academy” in the London suburb of Shadwell, near the bustling Thames dockyards.6
Oxford and Cambridge were more genteel hotbeds of alchemy. The university towns provided a protective environment for the secretive experiments of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, but they also sheltered many lesser figures with Hermetic passions—men like Ezekiel Foxcroft, a Fellow of King's College who lovingly translated a Rosicrucian work, The Hermetic Romance, in 1690.7 Flashes of evidence provide glimpses of how chrysopeia fired the imaginations of adepts in other provincial English towns. A wonderful story spread in 1651 of how a stranger named Mervin had made gold from lead at the shop of a Bath goldsmith.8 Why he chose to do this in Bath is anybody's guess. George Starkey moved for a time to Bristol, “to asist [sic] the work of Refining there and to pr[actise] physick.”9 Apparently, the work of refining at Bristol preceded his arrival, but nothing more is known about the local alchemists whom he assisted. Meanwhile, Starkey's former roommate at Harvard College, the clergyman and alchemist John Allin, migrated to the tiny, declining port of Rye in Sussex, where he served as vicar from 1654 to 1662. There, Allin found himself among a little group of adepts, including the amateur astrologer Samuel Jeake, who received from the generous minister the gift of a book describing “the true use of the Elixir Magnus.” Reverend Allin apparently introduced Starkey to some of his Rye friends, with whom the great alchemist shared secrets concerning the great process.10 At nearby Dover a few years later, the former mayor John Matson corresponded enthusiastically with Robert Boyle, sending him alchemical recipes and complaining that his experiments could proceed no further without “The Comeing of a lampe furnace from paris.”11
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