Solomon's Secret Arts
Page 29
In relation to occult matters, Bourne's analysis of popular antiquities reveals more about the author than it does about the common people in and around Newcastle. On the subject of spirits, he adopted neither a rationalist nor a sceptical stance, but rather an orthodox one, mixing a heavy dose of conventional Protestantism with a dash of seventeenth-century Neoplatonism. Ultimately, he sought to replace a “superstitious” interpretation of spirits with a doctrinally acceptable one. We may doubt, of course, whether the beliefs of ordinary Northumbrians in 1725 were actually so close to those of the ancient Britons as Bourne suggested, or whether they adhered to them with the consistent level of credulity that he implied. We can also fault him for ignoring printed sources that might have had an impact on folklore, like the ghost stories that had appeared in popular ballads and chapbooks since the late seventeenth century.7
Bourne's attempt to transform popular beliefs into Christian orthodoxy had been undertaken for decades in the Scottish Highlands by clerical observers of second sight. The fairies that had so perplexed Robert Kirk, however, ceased to play a part in these accounts. In 1707, a new collection of cases documenting second sight was posthumously published by the Episcopal dean of the Isles (the Inner Hebrides), the Reverend John Frazer. Having witnessed several instances of visions, Frazer accepted their veracity, but suggested that they might be due either to prior impressions made on the optic nerve or to angels. “Let us therefore Consider,” he proposed, “that an evil Angel, being permitted thereunto, can muster in our Brain the Latent intentional Species of external absent Objects, and can present the same to the Fancy in the methods best fitting his purpose.”8 Preoccupied with such explanations, Frazer paid scant attention to the beliefs involved in the cases he described. One old woman of Tiree who had second sight “freely confessed that her Father upon his Death-Bed taught her a Charm composed of Barbarous Words, and some untelligible [sic] terms,” which would result in the projection of images on the wall.9 How close this charm may have been to ritual magic is impossible to determine, as Frazer neglected to record its details.
Clerical writers consistently underplayed the actual content of “superstitions” in order to condemn their pagan or “papist” origins. Equally they ignored the role of print culture in shaping beliefs. A more nuanced, albeit condemnatory, approach was provided by the celebrated writer Daniel Defoe in three works published in quick succession in 1726–7: The Political History of the Devil, The History and Reality of Apparitions and A System of Magick. Defoe wrote them because he knew they would sell. By this time, he was bereft of important political patrons and dependent on book sales in order to maintain his family. In his novels and other writings, he had frequently courted a broad audience of the middling sort of people—those whose status lay between the great landed families and the labouring poor. His works did reach their targeted readers, as they generally made money and went into multiple editions. The Political History of the Devil was a minor hit in this respect, appearing in five editions by 1754 and being reprinted several more times before the end of the century. No doubt many of its readers were, like the author, religious Dissenters, for whom the Devil held a special fascination. Defoe's later works on apparitions and magic also sold briskly, judging by the number of editions that appeared before 1760.10
The Political History of the Devil is often ironic in its treatment, and many scholars have longed to see in it some sceptical purpose. Alas, they long in vain. The main intention of the work is to determine when the Devil is actually operating in the world, and when he is being blamed for things that are really the fault of human beings. Defoe never questions the reality of Satan, who is envisaged as a spirit, not as a physical being. The author affirms that “the Devil is really and bona fide in a great many of our honest weak-headed friends, when they themselves know nothing of the matter.” Underhand and devious, Satan's aim is “that he may get all his Business carried on by the Instrumentality of Fools … and that he may have all his Work done in such a Manner as that he may seem to have no Hand in it.”11 In pagan times the Devil worked mainly through omens and auguries, but in the present his minions are witches and magicians, to whom he has given the power “to walk invisible, to fly in the Air, ride upon Broom-sticks, and other Wooden Gear, to interpret Dreams … to raise Storms, sell Winds, bring up Spirits, disturb the Dead, and torment the living.” These powers turn out to be illusory. Through them, however, the Devil has “engross'd all the Wise-Men of the East,” including the famous Magi, as well as magicians and astrologers.12
Nothing in Defoe's Political History of the Devil is unorthodox from a contemporary Protestant point of view. The work affirms the omnipotence of God and strikes a blow against popular “superstition,” such as belief in the Devil's cloven hoof. Occult philosophy is continually ridiculed. The same themes are visited again in The History and Reality of Apparitions. Here, too, Defoe debunks many popular tales of ghosts and visions, reducing them to psychological reactions, but insists that some apparitions are real and that they represent good or evil spirits. This subject finally brings Defoe to the edge of unorthodoxy, and the threshold of occult thinking. Not wanting to cross it, he avoids any extended discussion of spirits and instead instructs the reader not to fear them:
Whether they are good Spirits or bad, Angelick Appearances or Diabolick, they are under superior Limitations: the Devil we know is chain'd, he can go no further than the length of his Tether; he has not a Hand to act, or a Foot to walk, or a Mouth to speak, but as he is permitted … If then we are sure the Devil is restrained from hurting us, any otherwise than he is directed and limited … we may be sure that good Spirits are; for their Nature, their Business, their Desires are all fix'd in a general Beneficence to Mankind.13
Having arrived at what might be regarded as the crux of his argument, Defoe refuses to commit himself to any particular theory of spirits. After all, as he put it in an earlier discussion of angels, “we are not writing Divinity.”14
A System of Magick completes Defoe's three-pronged assault on the occult. The title is deliberately misleading: Defoe recognized that many would purchase the book hoping to find in it “a Book of Rules for Instruction in the Practice.” Instead, it contains a history of “the Black Art,” from antiquity to the present. In ancient Egypt, Persia and Babylon, according to Defoe, a magician was “a Mathematician, a Man of Science … a Kind of walking Dictionary to other People.” Magicians “studied Nature … made Observations from the Motions of the Stars and other Heavenly Bodies … and were Masters of perhaps a little experimental Philosophy.”15 Over time, however, this admirable system of natural magic degenerated into diabolism, initially among the Egyptians, who were “ridiculously Superstitious” and “soon mixt their Religion and their Magick together, their Philosophy and their Idolatry were made assistant to the general Fraud.” Satan, of course, facilitated this change by “subtily insinuating Dreams into the Heads of Princes and Great Men, and then by like Dreams communicating to his Correspondents … This was a particular Favour done in Aid of those Magicians, who were more than ordinarily in his good Graces.” From this devilish distortion of original magic arose what Defoe calls “the Black Art,” whose practitioners include “the Diviner and Soothsayer, the judicial Astrologer and Conjurer, the Inchanter and Charmer, the Witch and the Wizard, the Necromancer and Dealer with a Familiar Spirit.”16
The Devil ultimately proved himself to be a deceiver. The magicians of the present age, though in league with Satan, have no power to perform any supernatural acts. They have become mere tricksters. Defoe gives as his example of a modern magician one Dr Boreman, a cunning-man who lived near Maidstone in Kent. Described as a gentleman by his neighbours, Boreman lived in a house with a servant and enjoyed a considerable reputation for detection of lost items, giving advice to lovers, fighting the influence of witches and performing various other kinds of magic. Boreman denied that he used “unlawful Arts” or that he was in contact with a familiar, a sure sign of a witch.17 D
efoe remained convinced nonetheless that the doctor “must have had some unlawful Conversation with such Spririts or such Beings as I should still call Devils.” Boreman had apparently written many books, copies of which Defoe had not managed to obtain. Nonetheless, he compared them to those of “the right famous Enthusiast Jacob Behemen,” the German Theosopher, who is described as “a Kind of Visionist … His Writings are either Magick or Enthusiastick, or both.” One of Boreman's manuscripts was even entitled “177 Theosophick Questions.”18 This leaves the reader puzzled: could such a learned cunning-man actually be in league with the Devil?
Defoe heightens our uncertainty in the following pages, by admitting the possibility of good spirits and providing examples of them. He dwells on particular cases of second sight among the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands.19 Yet he soon lurches back into an attack on astrological charms and talismans, which leads him to a final, conclusive statement: good spirits may exist, but magicians do not command them. The spirits who answer spells and serve the desires of human beings are of a different order. “How are they thus ready and beneficent,” Defoe asks, “if they are thus to be call'd out of their happy Abodes, like Devils, with Spells and Conjurations, with Necromancy and Wizardism?” Why would prescient spirits have to be informed by a magician about the circumstances in which they are being asked to assist?20 Evidently, if Dr Boreman was in contact with spirits, they were demons.
Defoe represented magical practices as widespread in England. Unlike Bourne or Frazer, however, he related those practices, not to folk traditions, but to occult philosophy and science, derived largely from books. He admitted that the distinction between good and bad spirits was commonly accepted among practitioners of magic, although he rejected it personally. Finally, he wrote almost nothing about witchcraft, conceding at one point that it was “quite out of Use, and we have heard very little of it in this Part of the World for many Years.”21 The age of witches, apparently, had given way to the age of cunning-men.
The practitioners of popular magic themselves sided with the novelist rather than with the clerics in affirming the significance of print culture. Two magical healers of the early eighteenth century, Duncan Campbel and Timothy Crowther, left first-hand evidence of their familiarity with occult sources. Campbel (he always spelled his surname in this fashion) was a deaf and mute Scotsman resident in London who claimed to have second sight. He specialized in cases of witchcraft, which he treated according to traditional methods, using charms and sympathetic cures. One of his bewitched clients, the vintner and tobacco merchant Richard Coates, was advised to boil his own urine. Cured of the “Distemper” that distorted his head and limbs, the grateful Coates made a legal affidavit testifying to the effectiveness of Campbel's practices in 1725.22 Wary of astrology, Campbel nonetheless made extensive use of talismans, which he argued “ought not to be condemned by Persons the most averse to Superstition; and it would be as stupid to deny their Force, as it would be to refuse the Sun the Honour of warming us.”23 Occasionally, Campbel combined popular magic with alchemical treatments. He ascribed his own cure from epilepsy to the intervention of a Genius or “Guardian Angel,” who visited him in a dream with a recipe for a “Powder of Sympathy” made with the aid of a loadstone.24 Campbel enjoyed some high-ranking connections—he claimed that Queen Anne herself was “no Stranger to my Scrawls,” and the subscription list to his Memoirs, published posthumously in 1732, includes the names of several Scottish lords as well as Tory politicians. The bulk of his clients, however, seem to have been merchants and tradesmen of London, their wives and families.25
Campbel's well-to-do clientele and fervent self-promotion were not matched by Timothy Crowther, parish clerk of Craven, near Skipton in North Yorkshire, who practised as a rural astrologer and cunning-man between 1714 and 1761. One of his last acts, related to a dubious John Wesley shortly before Crowther's death, was to find a missing man: he had a boy stare into a looking glass until the man's murder was magically revealed. Crowther also dealt with cases of bewitchment, affliction by the King's Evil and the recovery of lost goods. His surviving “Charm-book” attests to his knowledge of astrological texts as well as of ritual magic. It includes ceremonial incantations straight out of the Little Key of Solomon: “I conjure and constrain, adjure and command the wise and subtle Spirits Abadan, Appolyon, Mephostophilis … that yu appear in the Crystall Stone or Berril Glass. Fiat, fiat, fiat.”26
Campbel and Crowther attest to a continuing exchange between popular magic and occult writings. This was further demonstrated by John Cannon, a Somerset excise officer and schoolteacher who kept a remarkable chronicle of his life down to 1743. As a literate man who read widely and held positions of importance in local affairs, Cannon does not belong to the lowest ranks of English society. Nonetheless, he grew up in a farming family in West Lydford, worked as a farm servant and mingled throughout his life with ordinary people who shared many of his attitudes. Cannon's ideas regarding the occult were indebted to folk traditions, but they were also shaped by reading or hearing about books on prophecy, astrology and ritual magic, the same publications that might have influenced a better-educated person. Cannon's chronicle makes no precise division between elite and plebeian beliefs, or between written and oral culture—in his experience, they were mingled together. He may not offer us a wholly “authentic” voice from the lower ranks, one untainted by elite learning, but he comes as close to a genuine plebeian voice as any source we are likely to find.
Cannon's first reference to the occult comes in an entry for 1688, when his brother was cured of a rupture by a “sympathizing remedy”—being passed naked three times each morning through the split sapling of an ash tree. This was done on the advice of “doctors & others who thought themselves able and experienced in such cases.”27 No doubt they were cunning-men like Timothy Crowther, their knowledge a mixture of tradition and book learning. Fifteen years later, Cannon had an encounter with a ritual magician, John Read, a shepherd and farm servant who “gave himself to know English learning, figuring, poetry, and a smack of Astronomy [i.e. astrology],” and who possessed “occult wit.” One Sunday, young Cannon was walking in a field with Read, when
he thought convenient to shew me a piece of his cunning. For making a circle on the ground with a stick he had in his hand, having ordered me to abide in the center, & having also drawn some figures or characters in the dust & use[d] words, the air suddenly changed & grew darkish & became like a mist with a rushing wind, & rumbling like thunder at a distance, that it surprised me, insomuch as I requested him not to proceed any further for I believed it diabolical … This I confess was no delight to me … On the contrary, I utterly despised anything sounding of magick or occult sciences.
Nevertheless, Cannon knew enough about what Read was doing to call it “occult sciences.” The shepherd-magus later moved to Dorset, after carefully burying “two books of the magic art, one of which was entitled Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy,” probably the 1651 English translation with a preface by Thomas Vaughan.28
That a farm labourer in rural Somerset was using Agrippa's Three Books for conjuring may seem extraordinary, but it aptly illuminates the commerce between popular and educated magic. It is less surprising to discover that Cannon was a believer in omens, portents and prophetic dreams, precisely the beliefs Henry Bourne had condemned as symptomatic of plebeian “superstition.” Many of the omens mentioned by Cannon were linked to animals—a hare, breeding rooks, a croaking raven, a perching cormorant—which suggests that their predictive authority may have originated in some long-established, orally transmitted folk belief.29 He derived other omens, however, from reading contemporary newspapers, thus turning the latest form of written communication into a source for prognostication. One of these newspaper accounts concerned a “sky battle” seen over Edinburgh in 1740, a portent of impending Jacobite rebellion.30 Cannon was also fascinated by “Merlin's prophecies,” found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's British History. He transcribed them from A
aron Thompson's 1718 edition, blithely disregarding Thompson's condemnation of them as “Nonsense and unintelligible Jargon.” Cannon bound this transcription with copies of the sixteenth-century predictions of Mother Shipton and Robert Nixon.31 Nixon's prophecies were hugely popular: at least twenty-one editions were printed between 1714 and 1745. Their first editor, the Whig historian John Oldmixon, made them pointedly political, maintaining that they upheld the succession of the Hanoverian dynasty.32 Whether or not Cannon would have agreed with this interpretation is unclear—his politics tended towards Toryism—but he evidently regarded the cryptic words of “the Cheshire prophet” as meaningful for his own day.
Cannon was also an avid reader of almanacs, as can be surmised from occasional references in his chronicle. He copied out the allegorical poem and “hieroglyphic” from Francis Moore's Vox Stellarum for 1740, and took notes on the eclipses forecast in John Partridge's Merlinus Liberatus for 1743, including a major lunar eclipse in October.33 He wrote out a letter by the York mathematician George Smith that he came across in the Gentleman's Magazine for March 1737, relating the lunar occultation or “transit” of the star Aldebaran to the downfall of the Babylonian Empire.34 Cannon trained himself in astrology by reading instructional books of the late seventeeth century, including John Middleton's Practical Astrology (1679), Richard Saunders's Astrological Judgements (1677) and an unidentified work by the almanac-maker Daniel Woodward.35 He was also familiar with more recent writings, such as William Whiston's theory that a comet preceded the biblical Deluge. A serious student of astronomy, Cannon was interested in comets, particularly that of 1680, which had seemed to reverse its direction when it drew near to the sun. In fact, two comets had been observed. Cannon cited Newton and Halley on the comet, wondering what might have happened if it had actually hit the sun.36