William Cooper Reveal'd
If William Cooper is known today for anything, it is for being the first British book auctioneer. A Dutch invention, the public auction can be associated with commercial innovation and an increasing degree of social fluidity. Anyone could attend an auction (Cooper gave away free copies of his catalogues), and anyone with ready cash could bid on an item. Auction sales were not predictable, so they violated assumptions about a fixed social order in which objects conferring prestige were passed down from one genteel owner to the next. Cooper, in short, was an innovator, and he knew where to find an audience. Some of his auctions were held at Jonathan's Coffee-House in Exchange Alley opposite the Royal Exchange in the city of London, a hub of financial capitalism and the favourite haunt of speculators. Of course, the association of auctions with social levelling should not be carried too far. Cooper printed the title pages of his auction catalogues in Latin (even referring to himself as “Guilelmus Cooper bibliopolam”), and he hoped that they would “not be unacceptable to Schollers.” However unconventional his spelling, he was clearly aiming his sales at an educated public, not at ordinary people. Nevertheless, he remained an enterprising businessman who was not constrained by the usual conventions.89
Cooper's independence and boldness stand out in the introduction to Collectanea Chymica, a compendium of ten alchemical treatises that he published in 1684. Unlike most publicists of his day, he refused to pay court to a patron or protector, taking it upon himself to defend alchemy from its critics:
We seek no Mecaenas to flatter with a Dedication, nor crave we any shelter from great Personages, for we know that our Philosophy is the Worlds Contempt, and its Professors their scorn and derision, therefore we neither crave their Pardon nor fear their Frowns, but shall assert this truth only, that Arts have no Enemies but such as are Ignorant thereof, for which reason we fear no Jack-straws Insurrection though levelled against our learning, for true Wisdom is justified of her Children.90
In the charged political atmosphere of 1684, when the waning authority of Charles II had barely been re-established after the Exclusion Crisis, the reference to an insurrection by Jack Straws or social revolutionaries would have struck a responsive chord in the minds of many anxious readers. Cooper feared no such instability, because he possessed true wisdom.
He may have obtained it from the alchemical books that he published between 1669 and his death twenty years later. They included several new works by “Eirenaeus Philalethes” (Starkey): Secrets Reveal'd (Cooper's first known publication, issued in 1669), An Exposition upon Sir George Ripley's Epistle to King Edward IV (two editions appeared in 1677), Ripley Reviv'd (issued in 1679 in four parts, including the aforementioned Epistle, that were sold either together or separately), and The Secret of the Immortal Liquor Called Alkahest (included in Cooper's Collectanea Chymica, 1684). Before Starkey's premature death in 1665, only two works had appeared under his Philalethan pseudonym (The Marrow of Alchemy in 1654 and a pirated 1655 version of Ripley's Epistle that differs from Cooper's), while a third treatise, Introitus Apertus, appeared in a Latin version at Amsterdam in 1667. Cooper's editions resuscitated “Philalethes,” going so far as to claim that he was still alive. They also pressed the bookseller's rights to the alchemist's inheritance by asserting that the texts were based on original manuscripts, although Secrets Reveal'd was probably a translation from Latin. Adepts accepted the authenticity of these claims, and eagerly bought up Cooper's volumes. Isaac Newton, for example, owned and carefully annotated a copy of Secrets Reveal'd. It would not be far-fetched to assert that it was Cooper, rather than Starkey, who really established the reputation of “Eirenaeus Philalethes” as the greatest alchemist of the age.91
Unfortunately, Cooper was as secretive about himself as Starkey was about his supposed “friend” Philalethes. Cooper was born at Leicester in 1639, served his apprenticeship in London from 1655 to 1663, and was married in 1669 to Mary Cleere, who took over his business after his death in 1689. These few bare facts are almost all that we know about the man. Other details often cited in connection with his life relate to the mysterious “W.C., Esq.,” who edited Secrets Reveal'd and later wrote a Philosophicall Epitaph that was published by Cooper; but in spite of what scholars have long believed, this shadowy individual was not Cooper (who signed himself “W.C.B.,” and had no right to call himself “Esquire”), but William Chamberlayne, a minor royalist poet, physician and mayor of Shaftesbury in Dorset.92 While Cooper undoubtedly relished the confusion created by their initials, he never claimed that he had written or edited any work that appeared under the name “W.C., Esq.” It was Chamberlayne, not Cooper, who ran foul of the authorities under the English Republic, and who referred to the year 1652 as “a Living Grave,” implying that he had been imprisoned. Likewise, it was Chamberlayne who thanked his friend Elias Ashmole for “the small intermission of my Long troubles, 1662,” and who obtained from him a coat of arms.93
Cooper also knew Ashmole, and through examining his publications we can reconstruct some of his other personal ties, including a connection with a group of London Presbyterian divines. Prominent among these was Lazarus Seaman, former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, whose library was sold in Cooper's first auction in 1676. The previous year, Cooper had issued a funeral sermon for Seaman, written by the Reverend William Jenkyn.94 It was the only sermon he ever published. Jenkyn had been involved in a conspiracy against the government of the Commonwealth in 1651, for which he was imprisoned. Two years after the Restoration, Jenkyn was ejected from his London parish because of his Presbyterian opinions, and became a lecturer at Pinners’ Hall, where Dissenting ministers were able to preach under the protection of sympathetic City merchants. Jenkyn was arrested again in 1684, in the Tory revenge that followed the Exclusion Crisis, and died in prison. We can conjecture that Cooper's opinions paralleled those of Jenkyn in some respects, perhaps in many. Cooper can also be linked with a third eminent Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Thomas Manton who, like Jenkyn, had been mixed up in the 1651 conspiracy and ended up as a preacher at Pinners’ Hall. Cooper sold Manton's book collection after his death.95
William Cooper, then, was probably a Presbyterian in religion. We can imagine him as unhappy with the Commonwealth, whose governors could not agree on a religious settlement, and equally disgruntled with the return of bishops and ceremonies after 1660. Yet he gave no obvious sign of being a political radical. The only known political work that he published, an anonymous 1674 “Defence of the Laws,” advocated obedience to established powers in Church and State—while acknowledging that many people were grumbling about both. “Lord chase out all Flashiness of opinion,” the author prayerfully concluded, “all Growlingness of Humour: And Restore them to their right senses to render obedience to thy Word, and submission to the Law: And they must be Happy, even against their Wills.”96 Perhaps we should picture Cooper as striving to be happy and loyal in late Stuart London, even against his will.
Alchemy may have taken his mind off religious controversy, because it rested on a truth that went beyond doctrinal differences. Judging by the material he chose to publish, Cooper believed that the practice of alchemy was spiritual as well as empirical. This was certainly the view of the other “W.C.,” Chamberlayne. Introducing a treatise on the Philosopher's Stone by the German physician Friedrich Helvetius, Chamberlayne advised his readers to “magnifie the great Creator, who hath not only given us this pretious Stone for our health and wealth, but withal a most glorious white Stone, clothed in Scarlet, viz. his Son Christ Jesus.”97 The analogy between the Stone and the body of Christ was evidently important to Cooper as well. His bookshop was marked by the sign of the pelican, a bird that was said to bleed itself to death in order to feed its young. The pelican was frequently used as a symbol of the Stone, transferring its gold-making tincture or “blood” to its “children,” the base metals. According to an even older piece of Christian symbolism, the pelican represented Christ, sacrificing himself for the world
.98
For Chamberlayne, and presumably for Cooper too, the aim of alchemy was the same as that of Christianity: the regeneration of human life. The Philosopher's Stone would achieve this on earth as Christ did in the afterlife. The worldly and divine spheres, however, were mixed up with one another. The alchemist's task was to figure out what brought them together, and what could separate them again. The divine power, according to the 1673 Philosophicall Epitaph, imparted life to all creation through the anima mundi or “Soul of the World.” Here Chamberlayne openly espoused an organic vision of the universe, according to which nature was informed by a living spirit, a manifestation of God: “Nature hath, nor had but one onely Agent (Hidden in the Universe) which is Anima Mundi, working by its universal Spirit.” We might trace this concept of the anima mundi back to the Hermetic tracts, Ficino, Robert Fludd or, most recently, Thomas Vaughan—but Chamberlayne was no pedant, and he gave no exalted lineage for an idea that he accepted as a fact of nature. The anima mundi expressed itself particularly through mercury, which could be imagined as a person (Mercury or Hermes) endowed with much the same regenerative properties as Jesus Christ himself. Chamberlayne summed up the excellence of mercury in three “Hieroglyphical Scutcheons,” to which he appended some cryptic verses about the “second birth”:
No Man's happy before his Death.
MerCVry's Birth's best after's death,
MerCVrI's Life Was pVrg'D by StrIfe.
All's in Mervcury that the wise men seek.99
Evidently, finding the secrets of mercury was for him analogous to being reborn in Christ.
The Philosophicall Epitaph’s religious-alchemical rhetoric builds up to a sublime crescendo in which the adept is transferred into the divine sphere, just as his art reaches its earthly completion:
And therefore pray affectionately, That God, in and through Christ's spirit, may enliven thee from dead works, and separate light from thy dark body and Chaos of sin, that so being truly baptized into him and his Righteousness, by an Essential and Living Seed of Faith, thou maiest improve thy Talent, and mount through and above the quaternary defiling world into the Triune power, and at last come to the quintessential, or Super celestial Central circle of Peace, and Heavenly Beatitude.100
Alchemy, in other words, was not just a process within nature, a thing of the “quaternary defiling world.” It would lead the adept beyond the four elements, into the quintessential or fifth matter, and towards a “Heavenly Beatitude” that sounds like some sort of union with the divine. Ficino had famously written about the quintessence as the medium of communication between the anima mundi and the elemental world.101 This spiritual formulation for the “great work” ultimately has little to do with chemical mixtures.
Chamberlayne's words also point towards the magical. While he did not use the term magic in the Philosophicall Epitaph, he did not shy away from it when others chose to employ it. Bound with the Philosophicall Epitaph was an anonymous treatise named Jehior or The Day Dawning; or Morning Light of Wisdom, to which Chamberlayne wrote an enthusiastic preface. Jehior’s author was Paul Felgenhauer, a Bohemian Lutheran teacher and physician who penned apocalyptic propaganda for the Protestant side in the Thirty Years’ War, but who later became a pacifist.102 The title is clearly derived from Aurora, an unfinished early work by Jacob Boehme, and the argument is loosely based on Boehme's mystical-alchemical Theosophy, with strong doses of Paracelsus added. The universe, according to Felgenhauer, is ordered by triads. There are three basic principles of God, nature and the elements; three special principles of spirit, wind and water; and three particular principles of body, soul and spirit. Human beings themselves have a threefold existence: worldly, heavenly and divine: “So is an Elementary body, an Angelical and a Divine, very well to be distinguished on man.” The potential divinity of human beings can be put to use on earth, since inside man is “a threefold Magnet or Loadstone, whereby he can draw to him all Spirits in the world, and can do wonders.” This is the basis of “Natural Magick, which cometh out of Natural Faith” and operates within the world to alter nature. Natural magic is not caused by the stars, and it is not equivalent to witchcraft; on the contrary, it was studied by Moses and Daniel and the Prophets, and is perfectly godly. Nevertheless, it can be imitated by sorcerers and witches who are inspired by Lucifer.
Higher than natural magic, Felgenhauer asserts, is “a Prophetical and Apostolical Magical art, which cometh out of Gods Spirit in his Children, in which the word with glory dwelleth.” It is equivalent to prophecy, and it employs an inward rather than an outward voice. “Prophetical Magick” is mimicked by the Devil in the use by his agents of crystals and magic rings to communicate with spirits. More exalted still is “a higher Magick of God's Children, which worketh over and beyond nature, and that through faith, as when Moses divided the waters with his Rod; and Joshua bade the Sun and Moon to stand still.” Interestingly enough, sorcerers can also copy this supernatural sort of magic, and “things are really performed by them,” although their inspiration is Satanic rather than godly.103
It might be assumed that alchemy is confined to the first type, or natural magic, but Felgenhauer continually suggests that it has a higher, supernatural purpose as well. This becomes manifest in the changes that take place in the human body as it ascends to a god-like state. The transition from the elementary to the angelical to the divine body is represented as a chemical process, based on salt, which has its own elementary, angelical and divine forms (the central role of salt was derived from Paracelsus). All sublunary creatures “have a Coelestial body hid within them inwardly” that is “nothing else but a Christalline, yea new born salt of life.” Attaining knowledge of this hidden body is itself an alchemical process. Wisdom, like gold, should be passed through the crucible of fire seven times, before receiving a “new birth” through a baptism with water.104
Seventeenth-century Anglican clergymen would have shaken their venerable heads at the author of Jehior, judging him to be an unorthodox Christian, perhaps even a member of some eccentric sect. After all, the followers of Jacob Boehme in England tended to be mystical enthusiasts, like Samuel Pordage, or radical sectarians, like William Erbery.105 Felgenhauer's own works had been burned by Lutheran authorities. His assumption of an innate divinity within human beings would have shocked any Calvinist, who saw the body as wholly corrupt and utterly dependent on the grace of God for salvation. Even a Quaker, who believed that an “inner light” could be found within all, might have been nonplussed to discover that the light was nothing more than a type of salt. More disturbing still, the author of Jehior suggests that “the Coelestial body” is discovered through humanly attained knowledge, not by divine revelation. Felgenhauer's version of the “new birth” sounds like a supernatural transformation induced by human efforts. In Jehior, the whole structure of the Church of England, or of any Church for that matter, has been replaced by the mind of the adept operating on the universe.
William Chamberlayne evidently saw his own views reflected in Jehior. Yet there is no evidence that he was anything other than a communicating Anglican. He must have taken the oaths attached to the Test and Corporation Acts, declaring adherence to the Church of England, in order to serve as mayor of Shaftesbury. He might have replied to accusations of unorthodoxy by pointing out that Jehior posed no direct challenge to any doctrine of the established Church. It was a meditation on the divine, not a call to separation or sectarianism. Radical in its implications, undemonstrative in its approach, Jehior might have been regarded as eccentric, but not as dangerous to the Restoration settlement in Church and State.
Read in conjunction with the Philosophicall Epitaph, however, Jehior casts William Chamberlayne—and through him, his publisher, William Cooper—as a high-flying, magical alchemist, whose occult views were far removed from the experimental alchemy of George Starkey. The implied opposition between magus and scientist is misleading. As the first editor of the works of “Eirenaeus Philalethes,” Chamberlayne was as much an adv
ocate of empirical or experimental methods as were any of his contemporaries. In fact, most of the alchemical works published by William Cooper were step-by-step descriptions of laboratory processes, written by “Philalethes,” Sir Kenelm Digby, Van Helmont or the great “Arab” alchemist (in reality, he was probably a medieval monk) who wrote under the name of Geber. All of these men were experimentalists. They have all been associated with the “scientific revolution,” and particularly with the corpuscular theory of matter that provided chemistry with a new intellectual foundation in the late seventeenth century.106
Cooper seems to have been just as pleased to publicize their writings as he was to affix his name to the mystical effusions of Jehior. In the Catalogue of Chymical Books that he first published in 1673, Cooper made no distinction between works that we would today call scientific, like Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist, and those that declared themselves to be magical, like the writings of John Heydon. Van Helmont's works stand alongside those of Elias Ashmole and “Eugenius Philalethes,” as if they comprised a single body of knowledge. Cooper added an appendix to the catalogue in 1675, in which he included a few books that “cannot absolutely be called Chymical, but have a very near affinity thereunto, the knowledge of natural Philosophy being an Introduction to supernatural things.” Among them we may be surprised to find, not only four translated works by Jacob Boehme, but also the Ars Notoria by Robert Turner, and the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy spuriously ascribed to Agrippa. Judging by the diverse entries in his Catalogue, Cooper was not abashed by the magical associations of such publications. They were all part of a chemical philosophy that blended supernatural and natural wisdom. The concluding section of the Catalogue indexes chemical articles that had appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the leading scientific periodical of the day. It may be hard for us to understand how anyone can have treated the Ars Notoria as seriously as the Philosophical Transactions, or read Boyle's tracts on the hidden properties of air as “an Introduction to supernatural things,” but this perhaps proves nothing more than the distance at which we stand from the alchemical mindset behind Cooper's Catalogue.107
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