Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  The pamphlet ended with a pathetic appeal for rich patrons to support the work of adepts in the present naughty world. According to “Philadept,” “the Honourable Mr. B.,” evidently Robert Boyle, had offered to do this for “Eirenaeus Philalethes,” but Boyle's inability to keep secrets had discouraged the great spagyrist from teaching him the mysteries of “the White Elixir.”42 “Philadept” heaped scorn on those wealthy men who might refuse to imitate Mr B. “What? Dost thou not consider the wretched condition the generality of Mankind is in, and how miserably they fare in this evil World, where men wickedly oppress and devoure one another? And wilt thou do nothing to attempt to relieve good part of them from the heavy Burthen they groan under? Hard-hearted Creatures!”43 “Philadept” seems to have been thinking of his own wretched condition, and his utopian vision degenerates into a self-serving rant.

  Two years later, a second pamphlet by the same author extended the theme of social idealism by proposing that adepts should be “declared sacred” and “admitted to the share of Government.”44 The pamphlet also recommended the creation of a unicameral Senate, the institution of public examinations for access to higher education and putting the poor to work: “It is, then, visibly, horribly shameful to have Beggars in a Common-wealth.” Cities were to be rebuilt on a regular plan, “unnecessary Trades” abolished and a moral reformation instituted. The last change would particularly affect women, who were to be required to wear handkerchiefs around their necks to prevent “obscenity and immodesty.”45 The underlying misogyny of the lonely male alchemist, clinging with almost monastic dedication to personal purity and resentful of the “frivolity” of women, endured to the end of the golden age, and beyond.

  “Philadept” sounds at times like the utopian socialist Robert Owen, but he was actually a voice from the past. His mixture of social reform with moral regeneration is reminiscent of the radical sectarians of the 1650s. The personal patronage that he craved was drying up under a new cultural regime in which writers and artists competed for a public audience. “Philadept” had little sympathy with the expansive and exploitative commercial society that was spreading its influence all around him. He strikes an interesting contrast with Daniel Defoe, a moderate Dissenter who was an enthusiastic exponent of speculative ventures or “Projects,” especially those that were concerned with practical innovations or new scientific discoveries. In 1697, Defoe had published an Essay on Projects, in which he compared the investment opportunities of his own age to the building of Noah's Ark or even the Tower of Babel (he regarded it as a well-intentioned failure). A project, according to Defoe, was “a vast Undertaking, too big to be manag'd, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing,” but which might sometimes bring about both “Public Good, and Private Advantage.”46 His definition might apply to alchemy as well. “Projection” bore a well-known alchemical meaning, relating to the “multiplication” of metals endorsed by the 1689 Parliamentary Act. In Defoe's pamphlet, investment in projects represents a new and more acceptable alchemy, free from the religiously suspect implications of the old.

  No wonder “Philadept” sounded such a glum tone, reaching at times a note of desperation. The old style of alchemical projection was simply going out of fashion, replaced by schemes for enriching oneself that had nothing to do with the attainment of a higher state of being. “Philadept” could have cited as an example of this decline the celebrated writer Richard Steele, author of The Tatler, who under the direction of a reputed adept carried out a series of alchemical experiments between 1697 and 1702. By his own admission, Steele was seeking a “Chymical Medicine for Poverty,” not enlightenment, but he soon renounced the spagyric art as “a plain Illusion of some evil Spirit.”47 “He wanted to rise faster than he did,” scoffed the satirist Delarivier Manley, whose lover John Tilly, governor of the Fleet prison, had helped to finance Steele's expensive efforts. According to Manley, the “secret in nature” that Steele sought “was never yet purchased, if purchased at all, but with great charge and experience.”48 While her mocking tone was quite different from his, Manley's views were not so far removed from those of “Philadept.” In his anxiety-filled writings, the despairing alchemist made a last appeal for a total revolution of society. Evidently, the promise of 1689, when Parliament called on every devotee of the art to work for the common good, was far from being realized. Instead, alchemy had become a path to riches for some, a huge disappointment for others.

  At this moment of supreme doubt came a renewed literary attack. Alchemy still offered fair game to the satirists of the early eighteenth century. The most subtle of them was Jonathan Swift, who landed some choice blows on the alchemists in A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, published together in 1704. He derided Thomas Vaughan's Anthroposophia Theomagia as “a Piece of the most unintelligible Fustian, that, perhaps, was ever publish'd in any Language.” Paracelsus, like other “great Introducers of new Schemes in Philosophy,” was listed among “Persons Crazed, or out of their Wits.” Swift proposed that “wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be fruitful in the Proportion they are dark; And therefore, the true illuminated (that is to say, the Darkest of all) have met with … numberless Commentators.” Next to “true illuminated” appears a note: “A Name of the Rosycrucians.” Swift mischievously counselled the brothers of the Rosy Cross to “pray fervently for sixty three Mornings, with a Lively Faith, and then transpose certain Letters and syllables according to Prescription … they will certainly reveal into a full Receit of the Opus Magnus.” Swift also made merciless fun of the Kabbalists. “I have couched a very profound Mystery in the Number of Os multiply'd by Seven, and divided by Nine,” he informed them knowingly.49

  Alchemists had been mocked before, but Swift's satirical jabs were particularly sharp. Only half-crazed dreamers and poorly educated dupes would accept such “Fustian” as occult philosophy, he said. Swift associated the alchemists with religious enthusiasm and magic, just as Ben Jonson, Samuel Butler and other earlier satirists had, but he went further in implying that reason itself scoffed at such outlandish new ideas, which had no basis in classical learning or worldly experience. Swift was a Tory, but his message was designed to appeal to the whole English elite. If they wanted to leave the strife of the seventeenth century behind them, they must abandon the “crazed” modern systems that had inspired it.

  With occult philosophy under such withering attack, it is no wonder that alchemists chose to pursue their art in private, and in conditions of secrecy. One of them was Robert Kellum, whose alchemical papers from 1702 to 1721 survive in the collection of the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane. Details about Kellum's life are uncertain, but he wrote under a pseudonym, “J.D.,” that also appears on a pamphlet of 1724, protesting a Parliamentary Bill that restricted the sale of medicines by apothecaries and “Chymists.”50 Kellum's papers include many medicinal recipes and prescriptions, but he also wrote about various aspects of occult philosophy, including astrology and dreams. One of his female patients dreamed “that Nature like a Woman came to her Naked only in flannel.” The visitor then produced a “most poysonnous Creature,” with a yellow body and black and blue feathered wings, but no head. Nature informed the woman that if Kellum “knewe of the Use of this Creature, then I [i.e. Kellum] shou'd have or had all things in the World.”51 Here was the eternal dream of the alchemists, of using supernatural power to take control of nature—but with a dangerous twist. The secrets of nature turned out to be poisonous.

  Secrets were held to be just as politically dangerous in the decades after the Glorious Revolution as they had been under Charles II. The plots and conspiracies of the post-revolutionary era, however, were those of Jacobites, not of republicans. The supporters of the exiled James II and his son strove incessantly to undermine, subvert and overthrow the regime of William and Mary and their successors.52 The post-revolutionary regime was understandably averse to secrecy, which threatened its existence. That hostility carried over into the behavioural norms of its supporters. The Whig social
commentator Joseph Addison urged readers of his journal, The Spectator, to cultivate openness of character as a mark of good breeding and education. He praised “Discretion,” but condemned the low, secretive trait of “Cunning,” which “makes a Man incapable of bringing about even those Events which he might have done, had he passed only for a plain Man.”53

  Addison, along with his collaborator Richard Steele, helped to shape a post-revolutionary culture of polite manners and moderate religious principles that was compatible with commercial growth. Alchemy, with its veiled heterodoxy and radical social aspirations, was at odds with that culture. As a result, it went into a period of intellectual torpor or decline. Yet it was not discredited or refuted by science. The most direct assault on alchemy during this period was a religious one, made by, of all people, Thomas Tryon, the Behmenist astrologer and advocate of herbal remedies. He stated categorically that “the changing of Forms is forbidden by God's hand,” denied that anybody had ever isolated “the Seed of a Metal,” and described universal medicines as “altogether impossible, and as much to oppose the unalterable law of God.”54 Tryon had many admirers, but his outright condemnation of alchemy was not typical. The spagyric art was more often quietly laughed at as a waste of time or passed over in silence than countered by argument. It entered the new century in a diminished state, although not a condition of ignominy. It had, after all, stimulated a whole medicinal industry, and parts of it were integrated into university science curricula, within a discipline that was increasingly called “chymistry.”55 The art was not dead and, like the “Philosophical Mercury,” it might rise again.

  Astrology Falls from the Heavens

  Astrology, already highly commercialized, was less at odds with British culture after the Glorious Revolution. Measured by the number of almanacs published between 1689 and 1715, the celestial art does not appear to have declined at all. This ignores their actual content, however, which by the early 1690s was overwhelmingly tame, repetitive and dull. The Stationers’ Company continued to hold a monopoly on their production and sale, and was more determined than ever to keep their writers from putting anything controversial in print.56 Overall, there is little reason to disagree with the assessment of historian Bernard Capp, who wrote that, by 1720, the almanac “lacked the vitality and individuality of many of its Tudor and Stuart forebears.”57 The decline in content began to set in after the Glorious Revolution, when only two almanac writers devoted much attention to the principles of their art: John Partridge and John Gadbury. They were engaged in a bitter conflict with one another over the significance of astrology, which in the end damaged its already shaky intellectual foundations.

  The Glorious Revolution was a supreme moment of victory for Partridge, who returned from exile in the Netherlands to launch explosive salvos against his Tory enemies. In a characteristically passionate pamphlet of 1689 entitled Mene Tekel (which might be translated as “The Writing is on the Wall”), Partridge vindicated his own prediction for “this wonderful Year” of 1688: namely, that James II would die, which had come to pass in a symbolic sense. He then went on to savage his enemy John Gadbury as a former Ranter, a toady to Oliver Cromwell, a pimp and a convert to Roman Catholicism.58 Gadbury responded by accusing Partridge of being a republican, of abusing Charles I and Archbishop Laud, and of having “Labour'd hard, Sir, to approve your self another Stephen Colledge [an anti-Catholic activist executed for high treason in 1681], and been guilty of as many Anti-Monarchical Gim cracks … and have presented the World with as many Raree-Shows.”59 The quarrel continued in their almanacs, where Partridge went so far as to accuse Gadbury of hiring assassins to murder a man whom he suspected of sleeping with his wife. For his part, Gadbury refused to answer “the Ungrateful, Scurrilous, (not to say horridly Scandalous) Snarlings of my Quondam Pupil J.P. against me, year after year.”60

  The mud-slinging between Partridge and Gadbury went on fitfully until the latter's death in 1704. Without doubt, it helped to sell almanacs, and so was tolerated by the Stationers’ Company. It also produced some of the last serious philosophical discussions of early-modern astrology. After temporarily renouncing further attacks on Partridge, Gadbury attempted in 1693 to present a more intellectual justification for his art, in a supplement that was added to his regular almanac. His theories, he explains, rest on traditional foundations: a hierarchical view of nature, the assumption of sympathetic powers and the view that bodies are vehicles for spirits. “That Inferiours are influenc'd by Superiours, none are so Sceptical to deny,” Gadbury begins. To him, “it is very obvious that the Sympathies and Antipathies of the planets and Stars above, with persons and things below, do certainly produce the true Sorites [heaps] of Nature, that hold together (by Lincks as it were) all Mundane Beings.” As the stars are at a great altitude, so too are they “very Powerful, Excellent and Pure; and may therefore most reasonably be supposed to Influence, Alter, preserve, Increase and Destroy all these lesser and grosser Terrene Compositions.”

  The effects of the stars are felt not within matter or “Atoms” but in movements of the spirit. What could explain emotional states like love, hatred or evenness of temper other than astrology? The heavens could even give a spirit to inanimate objects. “If it [a Body] be Soul-less, then it is moved or changed by something Superiour to it, which serves as a Soul, or Principle of Life, to inform and govern. It is indeed the Spirit of Breath that is in it, that gives it Motion, Augmentation, Vision, Gust, and Odour.” Bodies are in themselves nothing, except “Domicils or Habitations for Souls or Spirits to dwell in.” Because the human body is “a Map, or Epitomy of the Coelestial Clock-work,” the changes in its soul follow those in the heavens. Put simply, “the Stars alter our Humours; our Humours change our Minds; our Constitutions mutate our Judgments; our Judgments create in us divers Appetites and Desires.” Of course, the influence of the stars is not irresistible—that would deny the reality of sin. All astrologers, according to Gadbury, reject the idea that the stars impose a fatal necessity on human beings.61 This last point would prove another bone of contention with Partridge.

  Gadbury's multi-part essay may be the most extensive explanation of astrology ever offered in an almanac. It owes nothing to corpuscular theory, Newtonian gravity or any recent scientific argument. Not surprisingly, it was strongly denounced by the leading scientific periodical of the day, The Athenian Mercury, which attacked it point by point in an effort to discredit “the Folly and Impiety of such as pretend to Judicial Astrology.”62 Intellectually, Gadbury's article resembles the writings of John Goad, whose Catholicism made him unacceptable to post-revolutionary astrologers, and whom Gadbury was brave enough to memorialize in 1694, five years after Goad's death. It also bears strong traces of Neoplatonism, although these may be derived from astrological sources rather than Henry More or the Cambridge Platonists. Gadbury was still a serious practitioner of his art, but in his understanding of it nothing much had changed since the days of Josiah Childrey.

  Partridge's almanac, meanwhile, continued to fire off explosive salvos at the pope, Louis XIV and Catholics in general. As a response to Gadbury, however, he issued his own astrological manifesto, Opus Reformatum. In this extraordinary work, Partridge denied that “I intend to destroy the Art of Astrology … my real Intent and Design is to excite the Lovers of this Contemptible Science, to refine it, and make it more coherent in its Principles, and more certain in its Use and Practice.”63 In other words, he wanted to turn it into “a Branch of Natural Philosophy.” He was not at all interested in establishing a philosophical basis for the celestial art. On the contrary, he defined astrology as “a bundle of Experience improved into Rules by continued observations of those Accidents and Effects that did always attend different Directions and Positions: Hence it then follows, That Like Common Causes must always have Like Effects, or else Rules of Exception laid down.”64 The problem with this approach, of course, is that it fails to explain the causal link between changes in the heavens and events on earth. Even if a pr
ecise parallel between them could be proven by observation, as Partridge believed it could, it would not demonstrate that one was acting on the other.

  This did not bother Partridge at all. He rejected theories that proposed rays of light or ethereal forces as conduits for astral power, and he was implacably hostile to any explanation that rested on spirits, which he associated with superstition and conjuring tricks. He decried one “little ruddy-faced Conjurer” who always made excuses when he failed to raise spirits, and who foolishly used finger- or toenail parings in his attempts to read the future. Partridge was utterly scornful of astrologers who claimed to be able to make people fall in love or find lost persons (“by force of Magic as they call it”) or detect withcraft, calling them “a Crew of Scandalous Cheats.”65 While he could not lump “Catholick John” Gadbury in with them, he nonetheless heaped abuse on his rival's methods, accusing him of conspiring with Goad to turn Protestants into papists.

  Partridge had his own peculiarities. A large part of Opus Reformatum was reserved for discussion of the Hileg, or “Giver of Life,” the point on a nativity that gives celestial indications of death. The main astrological sources for the Hileg relied on Ptolemy's earth-centred conception of the universe. This was another anomaly in Partridge's “scientific” astrology: he rejected the heliocentric Copernican universe. In this respect, the Whig astrologer had learned nothing from the most celebrated Whig scientist, Isaac Newton. Gadbury recognized his opponent's weakness on the point, and in 1695 included in his almanac “A brief Enquiry into the Copernican Astrology,” which reproduced material from the writings of “my late Learned Friend” Joshua Childrey.66 Partridge was provoked into issuing a blistering reply in a 1697 pamphlet entitled Defectio Geniturarum. With scathing comments, he systematically picked apart nativities by Gadbury and Henry Coley, illustrating their mistakes and incorrect interpretations. In a flood of patriotic zeal, Partridge also attacked the methods of J.B. Morin, the French astrologer whose Astrologia Gallica had inspired Samuel Jeake the younger. Nonetheless, his assessment of contemporary English astrology in Defectio Geniturarum was thoroughly grim: “Astrology is now like a dead Carkass, to which every Crow or Rook resorts and takes a Mouthful, and then flies to the next Tree.” It had been ruined by “your Magick Mongers, Sigil-Merchants, Charm-Broakers, &c. A Crew of Knaves more fit to be punished than encouraged.”67 Partridge denounced Gadbury's theories as “nothing else but Pythagorean Whims, or Rosicrucian Maggots and Delusions, set on foot to undermine Truth.”68