Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Samber cannot be dismissed as a mere hack or crank. He was connected with some of the most influential figures in Freemasonry, including Richard Steele, and he evidently believed they wanted to read about magic.116 There was apparently a deep fascination with occult lore beneath the placid intellectual façade of the early Masonic movement. Furthermore, his ideas were not without consequences. Within a few years, more cautious writers had picked up one of his main suggestions: namely, that Freemasonry was essentially about “REJUVENESCENCE” or rebirth. For them, however, the discovery pointed in the direction, not of Rosicrucian myths, but of ancient mystery cults.

  The first known statement of this theory in Masonic literature is in a very short work entitled “A Defense of Masonry.” Apparently, no original copies of the pamphlet survive, but it was reprinted in 1738 as an appendix to the second edition of James Anderson's Constitutions. Often attributed to Anderson, it was probably written by Martin Clare, who ran an academy in Soho Square where “YOUTH are Boarded, Educated and qualified either for the University, or the Compting House, or the Publick Offices.”117 His clients were boys of the middling ranks of society, whom he shaped into gentlemen through instruction in French, dancing and fencing. At the same time, Clare did not neglect practical studies, and he wrote a frequently republished guide to trade and business for young men. He served as deputy grand master of the Grand Lodge in 1741, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. His interest in science led to the publication in 1737 of a work on hydrostatics, based on lectures “privately read to a set of Gentlemen” and dedicated to the earl of Burlington.118

  The “Defense of Masonry” shares the didactic tone of Clare's other writings, but it displays considerable ingenuity in linking Masonry with every conceivable occult predecessor. To begin with, the pamphlet cites the ancient Egyptians, “who conceal'd the Chief Mysteries of their Religion under Signs and Symbols, call'd HIEROGLYPHICS,” and who venerated Harpocrates, the god of silence (his image, with finger on mouth, appears in the decorations of Lord Burlington's house at Chiswick). According to Clare, “Pythagoras, travelling into Egypt, became instructed in the Mysteries of that Nation; and here he laid the Foundations of all his Symbolical Wisdom.” The ancient Jewish sect of Essenes are identified, oddly enough, as followers of Pythagoras. The Kabbala, of course, could not escape mention, although it merits little explanation beyond a mention of its emphasis on the ordering of letters and the remark that “DAVID and SOLOMON, they say, were exquisitely skill'd in it.” Finally, the Druids make an appearance as prefiguring Masonry through their white clothing, ceremonial feasts and mysterious sciences. “The Conformity between the Rites and Principles of Masonry,” concludes the writer, with evident satisfaction, “… and the many Customs and Ceremonies of the Ancients, must give Delight to a Person of any Taste and Curiosity.”119

  Taste and curiosity were defining features of the politely educated gentleman, perhaps a graduate of Clare's academy, who prided himself on cultural accomplishments more than on genealogy. Such a man would, of course, be familiar with Virgil's Aeneid, specifically with the passage in book six that describes the voyage of Aeneas into Hades. The hero is magically assisted in his journey by a golden bough, just as in an earlier passage from book three he finds the body of the Trojan prince Polydorus with the aid of a shrub. The author of the “Defense” compared both of these episodes to the discovery of the corpse of the Temple architect Hiram Abiff, who was buried under an acacia shrub, according to the legend associated with the Master Mason degree, the third and highest of the traditional degrees of English Freemasonry.120 Every classically educated person knew that the journey to Hades was a central motif of the mystery cults of ancient Greece, particularly the Eleusinian mysteries, so by linking Freemasonry with the Greek underworld, Clare was entering a rich territory of mythical speculation.121 The immediate impact of his theories may be reflected at Chiswick House, where an enormous painting of the rape of Proserpine, the story on which the rites of Eleusis were based, can still be admired in the octagonal Upper Tribunal.

  This was occult thinking fit for any polite reader: highly suggestive, but not overtly magical. Clare's essay would reach a large Masonic audience throughout the British Isles and beyond, by its inclusion in both Anderson's Constitutions and The Free-Mason's Pocket Companion. Clare implied that the Freemasons possessed a supernatural wisdom previously known to the Egyptians, the Kabbalists and the initiates of mystery cults, but he gave little hint of what that wisdom might be. What impact his essay had on the far more critical approach of William Warburton is difficult to judge. We cannot even be certain that Warburton was a Freemason. His correspondence with Stukeley reveals nothing about the issue, and the only reference to Masonry in his printed letters is not very serious.122 Yet the argument of Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses not only builds on the suppositions of Clare's “Defense,” it uncovers the secret of the ancient mysteries in a way that would have thrilled Stukeley.

  The secret was life after death. Warburton maintained that the idea of an afterlife was not found in ancient Judaism, but was instead derived from “the most sacred Part of Pagan Religion.” He included in this category the Egyptian rites of Isis and Osiris, as well as the Greek and Roman cults. In this “secret Worship … none were admitted but those who had been selected by preparatory Ceremonies, called Initiations.”123 The sixth book of The Aeneid, Warburton opined, “is nothing else but a Description, and so designed by the Author, of his Hero's Initiation into the Mysteries of one Part of the ELEUSINIAN SPECTACLES.”124 Pythagoras, according to Warburton, used the mystery cults as the basis for his theory of the transmigration of souls. Less admirable was Hermes Trismegistus, a figure tainted with pantheism and “the rankest Spinozism”—unlike the exemplary Druids, who were heirs to the wisdom of the Egyptians concerning the afterlife.125 Hermes seems to correspond to John Toland, while the Druids, unsurprisingly, resemble Warburton's friend Stukeley.

  Warburton, however, was far more hostile to paganism than Stukeley. He took pains to point out that the ancient myths offered “vicious Examples” of the immorality of “licentious Deities.” The old trope of occult philosophy, that Moses had learned magic from the Egyptians, was transformed in the second part of The Divine Legation into the hypothesis that the great lawgiver had simply recognized the doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments in the hieroglyphic writings of the Egyptian priests. Originally conceived as a means of communication, hieroglyphics had become “a Vehicle of Secrecy,” just as the ancient mysteries had “degenerated into MAGIC.”126 Warburton was utterly contemptuous of the superstitious beliefs of the later Egyptians, including judicial astrology. He recognized no vital elements of the prisca theologia in Egyptian religion, and he delivered a grudging, back-handed compliment to the theories of Athanasius Kircher, who, “extravagant as he was, had yet some ground for his Reveries.” As for Newton's Chronology, Warburton considered it to have been misled “by little lying Greek Mythologists and Story-tellers.”127

  The Divine Legation removed any element of the supernatural from its account of ritual. This becomes evident in its discussion of the use of types. The typological repetition of elements, according to Warburton, changes an action from mere arbitrariness to having moral significance. In his view, typological stories were modelled on rituals, by which apparently meaningless events were re-created over and over so as to impart a moral message. Writing was related to ritual in combining arbitrary signs with a hidden message. Thus, while types are “rational Modes of Information,” they employ methods that are “obscure and mysterious.”128 They are occult without being supernatural. At the same time, Warburton's interpretation of writing excludes the possibility of fully rational interpretation. As soon as anything is written, it takes on a double meaning. In his insistence that social factors shape religious beliefs, Warburton was a man of the Enlightenment, but his sophisticated theory of types looks beyond enlightened reason, towards the cultural criticism of a later age.


  The reverend author may have been too far ahead of his time, as well as overly detached and equivocal in his approach to fundamental religious issues. The Divine Legation shocked its first readers and left them cold, and it has a similar effect today. Unlike Stukeley's mythic fantasies of Stonehenge, it inspired no imitators. In relation to Freemasonry, which he never explicitly mentioned, Warburton provided a long-winded, confusingly structured justification for an idea summed up in ten pages by Martin Clare's “Defense,” that the rituals of the Masons were descended from ancient mystery cults. While he removed that idea from occult speculation, Warburton added a further twist to it, by arguing that pagan rituals had bestowed the concept of life after death on the Jews. Ancient (or Masonic) initiations, therefore, were not just symbolic re-enactments; they were sacred practices that manifested a truth not known to the ancient Hebrews. This bestowed a weighty and universal purpose on Masonic rites.

  In the decades after the “Defense” and The Divine Legation, the secrets of Freemasonry failed to measure up to such high-flown expectations, whether supernatural or not. Many of the mysteries of the Craft had already been openly revealed in print, by disgruntled Brothers or critics of the lodges. The result was what might be called an inflation of secrets. Competing Masonic groups offered new mysteries and even new degrees that promised higher levels of secret knowledge. The result was division and disillusionment within the ranks of the Brotherhood. Whether the number of lodges or members actually fell in this period is difficult to determine, but, by 1760, the Grand Lodge of England could not claim to control a unified Masonic movement.129 The high hopes of the 1720s and 1730s had not been fulfilled.

  Yet the Masonic writings of Toland, Samber and Clare, along with the theories of Stukeley and Warburton, had defined the parameters of an enduring Masonic discourse. This represented the Craft in exalted terms, as the inheritor of fundamental secrets that were certainly sacred and might be supernatural. Picturing themselves as priests or Druids, alchemists or Pythagoreans, many Masons retained an attachment to the occult mindset that had inspired Ashmole and Moray in the seventeenth century. It would be wrong to claim that Masonry was an occult movement in any focused intellectual sense, but it exploited a symbolic language that had been dredged out of a vast reservoir of occult beliefs and practices, including Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, the raising of spirits, alchemy and astrology.

  A similar process of appropriation, as this chapter has shown, can be detected among the Newtonians who formed the intellectual establishment of the early Hanoverian period. In searching for ultimate meanings and divine intentions, they were willing to sacrifice natural or rational explanations in favour of what we would call imagination and contemporaries sometimes decried as “Fancy.” Accordingly, they turned back towards the occult philosophies of earlier centuries, which they revised to suit their own purposes. The supernatural elements in these philosophies were adapted to scriptural, historical, mythic or even scientific scenarios. In Newton's Chronology, Stukeley's zodiacal studies, Whiston's rambling prophecies and the evocation of ancient mysteries by Masonic writers, traces of occult philosophy coexisted with the initial glimmerings of the Enlightenment. This may seem a sad anticlimax to the occult heyday of the late seventeenth century, when alchemy, astrology and magic burned so brightly, but it represents a significant survival, which would have further ramifications within British culture. For some who stood outside the intellectual establishment, however, the legacy of occult thinking remained a coherent system whose appeal had never been reduced, and a force that could be used to subvert rather than to enhance enlightened reason. We have to turn to these marginal figures in order to recognize how strong the attraction of the occult remained, despite the massive gravitational pull of Newtonianism.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Occult on the Margins

  THE NEWTONIANS who sought to reclaim the occult as support for their own theories were not concerned with its coherence. They borrowed what they needed from alchemy, astrology or Neoplatonism, ignoring the rest. This chapter, by contrast, deals with those who faithfully preserved one aspect or another of occult tradition. Few of them were well connected. For social, political or religious reasons, they existed on the margins of cultural authority. Some of them belonged to the wide and nebulous region that separated formally educated members of the elite from the rest of the English and Scottish population—that is, they had a measure of learning but were not gentlemen, even in the loosest sense of the term. Others were set apart by fundamental beliefs, because they were mystics, Tories, Jacobites or Nonjurors. Less obstructed by the constraints of respectability than the Newtonians, these marginal men and women embraced the fading glow of occult philosophy in ways that were spiritually adventurous. They were often suspicious of “reason,” which they associated with the hegemony of Whigs in Church and State, or Newtonianism in natural philosophy. Their espousal of spirituality, sentiment and feeling, however, placed them in harmony with cultural trends of growing significance.

  Marginality is a relative concept that may not apply to all aspects of an individual's life. It did not mean insignificance or total lack of influence. The religious sect known as the French Prophets was small, but it made a considerable impression. The Nonjurors John Byrom and William Law or the architect John Wood of Bath cultivated their own circles of admirers. In some cases, marginal thinkers may have been closer to the mainstream of popular culture than their better-established rivals, especially in their views on spirits, ritual magic, alchemy and astrology. We should be cautious, however, about pressing such claims too far. The marginal writers considered in this chapter were often just as disdainful of popular “superstition” as were the Newtonians. In addition, to make a valid comparison between popular beliefs and the ideas of more educated people, even those who may have been outside the intellectual establishment, content and significance have to be taken into account. This is not an easy task, as the following section explains.

  Popular Belief under Scrutiny

  What did the common people believe?1 We can convey a sense of what learned observers thought they believed, but such accounts were always coloured by strong biases. In addition, some first-hand material from the practitioners of popular magic has survived; we may debate whether or not it was typical. To discover what ordinary people generally thought about the occult, we have to make inferences on the basis of thin evidence. Testimony from members of the lower ranks of society about their own beliefs is seldom available. Nevertheless, the chronicles of John Cannon, considered in the last part of the section, allow a remarkable measure of insight into the mind of one rural connoisseur of occult matters.

  Any interpretation of popular culture relating to the occult is bound to be heavily dependent on elite impressions. With monotonous predictability, these tended to condemn the occult beliefs of the common people as “superstition.” The Protestant ministers who were largely responsible for defining “superstition” equated it not with blind irrationality, but with the remains of paganism or Roman Catholicism.2 Never simply descriptive, the term was a fizzing bomb to be hurled at one's enemies in a continuing cultural war. The assault troops in that war were the clerical commentators who compiled collections of material on the customs of the common people. The most famous of such collections was published in 1725 by Henry Bourne, an Anglican curate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, under the revealing title Antiquitates Vulgares, or “Vulgar Antiquities.” Bourne expressed his aim as the regulation of customs, and the abolition of “such only as are sinful and wicked.” He nonetheless objected to many of the attitudes or beliefs of the common people, because he linked them with pagan cults and “Popery.” “As to the opinions they hold,” he wrote, “they are almost all superstitious, being generally either the produce of Heathenism, or the Inventions of indolent Monks.”3 The opinions that he described, of course, were selected precisely because they illustrated his central point.

  Bourne's book is crammed with details concerning rituals lik
e bowing towards altars (a bad thing, in his view, because “Popish”), well dressings (a more or less innocent thing) and twelfth-night ceremonies (very bad indeed, as they led to immorality and vice). Occult beliefs enter his discussion in connection with “superstitions” pertaining to the spirits of the dead. Bourne was convinced that popular beliefs concerning spirits comprised, not just a set of false assumptions based on ignorance, but the remains of antiquated and discredited religious systems. For example, he insisted that to believe ghosts wandered about graveyards at night was to embrace a relic of the “Heathenism” that could be found in the writings of classical authors. While he could not deny that apparitions of blessed saints had frequently been seen at holy places, his explanation was that they were “not the Souls of the Saints themselves, but the good Angels appearing in their Likeness.”4 Spirits really were moving about everywhere, but they were angels, not ghosts.

  According to Bourne, the common people amused themselves in the evenings by recounting fanciful stories of apparitions. “Some of them have seen Fairies, some Spirits in the Shapes of Cows and Dogs and Horses; and some have even seen the Devil himself, with a cloven Foot. All of which, is either Hearsay or a strong Imagination.” The Devil might indeed be seen abroad in the world, affirmed Bourne, but fairies, hobgoblins and sprites were the detritus of paganism; they “wander'd in the Night of Ignorance and Error,” but “did really vanish at the Dawn of Truth and the Light of Knowledge.”5 Truth and knowledge were spread by correct faith, which certainly countenanced the possibility of supernatural events. Bourne himself accepted that the Devil might have a physical presence and inhabit some haunted places. He consequently included in his text a version of the Roman Catholic exorcism ceremony, commenting that prayer would surely work better against the Devil than “such feeble Instruments as Water and Herbs and Crucifixes.” As for guardian angels, Bourne fully endorsed the popular belief in them, but opined “that it seems more consonant with Scripture, that we are attended by a Number of Angels, than by a particular Tutelar Angel.”6