Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  The impostures denounced by Gadbury in his almanac included many cases of bewitchment and possession, which he judged without exception to be phony or due to natural causes. In 1679, he went into great detail concerning a woman in London who claimed to be tormented by evil spirits, including that of her late husband, which had supposedly impregnated her. By reading her nativity, Gadbury judged her to be “flagitiously hypocritical.” The story prefaced a diatribe against those astrologers “who, (with great impudence, and greater fraud) have pretended to discover and cure witchcraft by the Stars … Astrology teacheth no such thing. The influences of the Stars are purely natural, and directed by natural Beams, or Aspects Geometrical: and do incline, but compel or constrain none. Therefore can they neither cause, nor cure witchcraft.”58 While he did not deny that witchcraft was possible, as was evident in Scripture, Gadbury apparently never met a witch or bewitched person whom he did not believe was mad, deluded or faking their symptoms. Of course, he reached these conclusions by charting their nativities. Apparently, astrology could still reveal that someone was not a witch. It could also precisely diagnose diseases. Gadbury did not doubt that the “true Astrological Physician … can justly distinguish of these differences [in diseases] by consulting the proper Significators of the Nerves, and Humors peccant, in the Decumbiture, Crisis, or Garniture of the Patient concern'd; and by considering their Position in Aiery, Watery, Erthy or Fiery Signs or Constellations.”59

  While he certainly wanted to disentangle astrology from its relationship with witchcraft, Gadbury was not in general a debunker of occult thinking. In fact, he was drawn towards those who sought to construct occult philosophies, like his friend Sir George Wharton. As will be seen, he endorsed the writings of the “Astromagus” John Heydon in the 1660s. As late as 1684, he recalled the pamphlet war between the “Theomagus” Thomas Vaughan and Henry More, noting that “Eugenius Philalethes [Vaughan] was treated in an exceeding base and scurrilous Manner by Dr. M. And therefore his severe censure of the Dr. was justly merited, as not only injuring him, but the Truth itself.”60 Gadbury's aim was thus not to reject the occult basis of astrology, but to separate it from “vulgar” or “superstitious” elements like ritual magic or witchcraft, which he represented as offshoots of religious enthusiasm. The problem with this high-minded approach was that it cut astrology off from one of its sustaining roots—popular belief in the everyday presence of angelic or demonic forces. For all his lofty Neoplatonic or humanist rhetoric, Agrippa had not hesitated to draw on popular belief; nor had Wharton or Ashmole or Vaughan. Gadbury was blazing a new trail for English astrology, but he was not enough of a sustained thinker to mark it out in a philosophical sense. Moreover, as a working astrologer of humble background, he lacked the authority necessary to impress the educated public.

  John Goad was admirably equipped to make up for those failings. A fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in London, Goad was not a professional astrologer, and he never edited an almanac. Widely read and thoughtful, he deplored equally “the unlucky Principle of Mechanism among the Learned, and of Nature (in the Brutish Notion) amongst the Vulgar.”61 He recognized Cartesian rationalism as the chief enemy of natural philosophy, and argued instead in favour of a celestial causality that united spirit and matter. Its agent was light, the subject of a recent, bitter dispute within the Royal Society between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Goad agreed with Newton in supposing that light was a body, rather than a “pulse” or motion propagated by a body. In a test of Newton's theory, Robert Moray had observed light from the planet Venus, and had published his findings in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions for 1672.62 Goad must have known of this experiment, carried out by another prominent exponent of occult philosophy. Goad's own theory was derived from the Neoplatonic assumption that light transmitted spirit. He noted that if anything “may be entitled to what Philosophers call the Spirit of the World, This is it, the smallest and most active Body in the World; in Motion confest to be Instantaneous, in subtlety incredible, and absolutely incomprehensible.”63 The energy of heavenly light, according to Goad, acted on the earthly air in order to produce changes in the weather, to cause diseases and to influence human behaviour.

  Goad was well versed in every aspect of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. A traditionalist, he rejected the heliocentrism of Galileo and Johannes Kepler, in favour of Tycho Brahe's concept of the planets circling the sun, which in turn circled the earth. He answered Pierre Gassendi's objections to astrology—“If it rain to day, it doth not rain again the same day 12 Month”—by pointing out that the planetary aspects did not follow a yearly cycle. He was familiar with the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes concerning the elasticity of air, although he referred to it in a peculiar way. He denied Hobbes's contention that frost was due to wind, “of which he is excellently admonished by the Noble Mr. Boyle,” and ascribed it to planetary aspects instead. This led him into a rather twisted argument about whether planetary light, which presumably conveyed warmth, could in fact be “a Friend to Cold,” although the “Faculty” of cold was not contained in it. From there, Goad proceeded to consider the phenomenon of armies in the air, portents of war that had often been perceived in the troubled 1640s. In opposition to Descartes, who had attributed them to superstition, Goad defended their existence. “A Supe[r]natural Power cloathed in Nature,” he wrote, “may be Legible, as Visible.”64

  Goad's insistence on the legibility of the supernatural led him to admit that “there may be something in Cabala, Gematry, something in the mysterious Force of Numbers, in Critical Days, Climacteric Years, The Doctrine of Magnetisms, Sympathies, and Natural Magic, Transmutations of Metals, Doctrine of Moles in the Body, Doctrine of Signatures of Planets, Dreams, Chiromancy, Genethliacal Skill,” etc. However, he was adamant in rejecting anything that smacked of hidden qualities or might be associated with demonic powers. “Let not the Reader think in the least we will add Geomancy, Steganography [hidden messages], occult Philosophy, or any thing whose grounds hide from Mortal search, or have a Sulphurous flavour of the unclean Spirit.”65 His inclusion of occult philosophy in this list was an obvious swipe at Agrippa. Unlike Blagrave or Lilly, Goad did not believe that the language of the stars conveyed angelic authority. The power of astrology lay in its proper interpretation, not in its magical potential. By suggesting that the supernatural was, like nature, a book to be read correctly, Goad was surprisingly modern in his sensibilities. Applied rigorously, however, his principles would rule out horary astrology, or asking direct questions of the stars—the bread-and-butter of professional astrologers. Would the latter accept the views of a man who sought to deprive them of their most lucrative source of business?

  In the event, Goad's views never had much chance to make an impact. They were fatally undermined by his religion. Goad was dismissed in 1685 as headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School on a charge of having converted to “Popery.” It was not a false accusation: he publicly announced his adherence to Roman Catholicism in the year that Astro-Meteorologica appeared. Goad prefaced the book with a fulsome dedication to King James II (not surprisingly, it was missing from the 1689 Latin version). Isaac Newton, who was engaged in a furious campaign to prevent Catholics from receiving appointments at Cambridge, would certainly not have appreciated Goad's endorsement of his theory of light, no matter what the great scientist may have thought of astrology. After the Glorious Revolution, which he did not long survive, Goad's scholarship faded into obscurity.

  The attempt by Gadbury and Goad to separate astrology from popular and demonic magic, while retaining its supernatural foundations, may have foundered for political and religious reasons, but it was not the only reformist initiative undertaken by the astrological writers of late seventeenth-century England. Josiah Childrey, the Anglican cleric, inventor of improved telescopes and defender of heliocentrism, advocated astrology as a purely empirical study, carried out in accordance with Francis Bacon's m
ethods of scientific inquiry. “The stars have an influence on us, and some small matter touching this influence Astrology knows,” Childrey argued, “yet no more, and of no more use, than to assure her that she doth know something of it. But her vanity is, she promiseth more than she is able to perform: and is led much more by fancy & plausibilities, than sound reason.”66 He urged astrologers to compile charts of the stars and compare them to historical events in order to demonstrate the correspondences that would establish their art as a science in the Baconian sense.

  No prominent astrologer strictly followed Childrey's advice until the emergence of John Partridge in the late 1670s. Where Childrey was a royalist who had studied at Oxford, Partridge was an outspoken Whig who had trained as a cobbler. Although John Gadbury would become his mortal enemy during the Exclusion Crisis, in 1679 the two men were close enough for Gadbury to contribute a preface to one of Partridge's books. The dedication was to the royalist astrologer—and Gadbury's mentor—Sir George Wharton. Already, however, Partridge was insistent that astrology was a science, resting on strict rules and not on the influence of any occult forces. “ASTROLOGY is a singular, innocent Science,” he explained, “Teaching how to judge of all future Events, by the Motion of the Stars only, and not by the help of any kind of Prophetical or Diabolical Inspiration, as some think.”67 In this as in all of his subsequent writings, Partridge provided no explanation whatsoever of why the motion of the stars foretold future events. He was not interested in such questions, which might have led to supernatural conclusions. In this regard, Partridge was a paragon of Baconian science, the astrologer of whom Childrey had dreamed; but he remained a stubborn traditionalist in his methods, sticking to the pre-Copernican universe. Although he was forced into exile during the reign of James II, Partridge was to return after 1688, full of resentment at his enemies. In the subsequent decade, he became the most influential astrologer in the kingdom. The scientific supernaturalism of John Goad's astrology would give way to a severe astrological rationalism that forsook any attempt at theory.

  The Astromagus: John Heydon of Hermupolis

  If the tendency in astrology after 1660 was to minimize the role of the occult and to pursue instead the scientific and the empirical, we nonetheless have to take into account one great exception: John Heydon, the so-called “Astromagus.” In the late 1650s and 1660s, he published a series of hefty tomes that expounded a unique cosmology based on a hodgepodge of alchemy, astrology and magic. His works made a remarkable impact for about a decade, only to become virtually irrelevant in the early 1670s. Heydon exemplifies the occult road that astrology failed to travel in the late seventeenth century, but that was to emerge again in the late eighteenth century in the works of Ebenezer Sibly.

  It is often difficult to determine when a writer of the past should be called a charlatan or a con man. In the case of John Heydon, no evidence exists to suggest that he did not believe what he wrote, although his vaunted world-system was based as much on blatant imitation as on inventive fantasies. He had his critics: Elias Ashmole called him “an Ignoramus and a Cheate,” while an anonymous adversary dubbed him a “Powder-Monkey, Roguy-Crucian, Pimp-master-general, Universal Mountebank.”68 What we can deduce with some certainty is that he was a plagiarist and highly inconsistent in his opinions. He wrote less from personal conviction than from a desire to make a name for himself through grandiose assertions and copying the labours of others. Yet amid the intellectual ferment of the 1660s, his strategy worked. Heydon gained a following, which reached into the highest circles of Charles II's court.

  He seems to have come from a distinguished gentry family, although his followers made outrageous claims that he was descended from an improbable Roman, Caesar Heydon, and from a nonexistent king of Hungary. If we can believe the less exalted genealogical information found in his works, then he was the grandson of Sir Christopher Heydon, a noted gentleman astrologer of the early seventeenth century, and the son of a lieutenant-general of the ordnance to Charles I. It is unlikely that he commanded troops in the Civil War (he was too young), or that he travelled to Egypt and Persia, as one admirer maintained. He began writing in the mid-1650s, just as he was settling down to the mundane life of an attorney at Clifford's Inn. Like other ambitious young men, he picked up astrology as a lucrative hobby, and married the widow of a leading practitioner of the art, Nicholas Culpeper. From the first, he used the stars unwisely, by meddling in politics. As early as 1658, he announced in print that only a Rosicrucian (presumably like himself) could have predicted Charles I's death, adding ominously, “and now others, are so written.”69 His willingness to forecast the deaths of rulers landed Heydon in prison on two occasions, once under the Protectorate and again under Charles II. The second forecast was made in 1667 for the duke of Buckingham, one of the most conniving politicians at the Restoration court and Heydon's chief patron. Samuel Pepys was informed that Buckingham “hath been endeavouring to have the King's nativity calculated, which was done, and the fellow now in the Tower about it—which itself hath heretofore … been held treason, and people died for it.”70 Heydon was not put to death; instead, he found time between bouts of confinement to write bulky tomes on “Rosie-Crucian Physick,” alchemical philosophy, magic, numerology and cosmology.71

  Heydon's name first appeared in print in 1655, as the author of a long, dull visionary poem dedicated to Henry Cromwell, the Protector's younger son.72 Soon after, he jumped on the Rosicrucian bandwagon. Although he maintained that he was not a member of the Brotherhood (as any true Brother would have been obliged to do), he nonetheless seemed to have access to all of their supposed secrets, in particular their medical remedies. He defined a Rosicrucian as “a partaker of Divine things, and a companion of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal Angels.” Heydon apparently knew two of them, residents of the West Country, Mr Walfoord and Mr T. Williams, both of whom had miraculous powers: “they walk in the Air; they frustrate the Malicious aspect of Witches; they cure all diseases.” The second characteristic was important, because a Rosicrucian might otherwise be taken for a witch. The resemblance between Heydon's exalted Brothers of the Rosy Cross and the benandanti of Friuli, supernatural witch-fighters who have been investigated by Carlo Ginzburg, is striking, but it is doubtless due to a common store of western European magical lore rather than to any familiarity on Heydon's part with Venetian Inquisitorial records.73 In any case, Heydon was not overly knowledgeable about the literature of Rosicrucianism. Nevertheless, he billed himself as the only reliable source on the subject, dismissing Thomas Vaughan, who had translated Christian Rosenkreuz's Testament, as “swift and rash.”74

  Writers who offer to reveal secrets to the public, but are not able to deliver on the promise, must either then further raise the stakes of the game or risk losing their audience. After the Restoration, Heydon chose the first option. He dedicated a book on Rosicrucian “Axiomata” to James, duke of York, and filled it with geomantic figures, used for summoning angels. This ceremonial activity, usually derived from the Little Key of Solomon, had excited aficionados of the occult from John Dee to Elias Ashmole, and was particularly fascinating to an older generation of astrologers, who saw it as an exalted manifestation of their art. According to Heydon, in order to master the “Naturall Magic, in which we believe King Solomon excelled,” one simply had to cast a telesme or sigil engraved with the angel's name and assorted numerological information, and the angel would appear “like a man sitting on a chair, holding a balance in his hand.” It was as simple as that. “Angels may be as frequently converst with as Devills by the direction and help of the Figure before,” the Astromagus cheerfully announced.75

  Heydon followed up this exercise with a series of volumes that drew on alchemy, astrology, numerology and ritual magic to compose a complex cosmology. These had grand titles, often including Greek words: The Harmony of the World (1662); The Holy Guide, Leading the Way to Unite Art and Nature (1662); Theomagia, or The Temple of Wisdom (1663); a second edition of The
Wise-Man's Crown, including new materials (three volumes, 1664–5); and Elhavareuna or The English Physitians Tutor (1665). As if all this were not enough, he wrote a staunchly monarchist treatise on government, entitled The Idea of the Law Charactered from Moses to King Charles, which he published in the year of the Restoration, as well as a Rosicrucian argument in favour of Christianity, Psontonphancia (1664). His works had a number of different publishers, which suggests that he was an author much in demand. Judging by the dedications and endorsements that he proudly attached to his writings, he also had influential friends. These included Prince Rupert, the duke of Ormonde and the earl of Oxford, not to mention a host of alchemical and occult writers, from George Starkey to Robert Turner.76 We may wonder whether all of these encomia were genuine, or all of the dedications well received, but Heydon was certainly known to Ormonde and Buckingham, and for a few years in the early 1660s, he was a darling of the reading public.

  Heydon's works are mostly compilations of occult knowledge, bits and pieces that do not add up to much of a system, except in his own vibrant imagination. Unlike Thomas Vaughan, he was content to repeat the ideas of others (sometimes in their own words), rather than to reimagine the universe himself. He remained obsessed with the Rosicrucians, who took on increasingly bizarre features in his writings. In Theomagia, he describes how “the Rosie Crucian Priests shave their heads, and wear no hair upon them … they not only refuse to eat most part of pulse, and of flesh meats, Mutton and Pork, for that sheep and swine breed much excrement, but also upon their daies of sanctification and expiatory solemnities, they will not allow any Salt to be eaten with their viands.” Heydon was here evoking the image of an Egyptian priesthood dedicated to the myth of the sister and brother “Beata” (Nature) and “Eugenius,” who resemble Isis and Osiris.77 Such passages might seem like pure fancy, but decades later they would be paralleled in the lore of Freemasonry. The conviction that occult secrets ultimately originated with the mysterious Egyptians was hardly original, of course, but Heydon's elaborations may have been picked up by later promoters of secret societies.