As he aged, Law wrote less and less about worldly affairs. Ensconced in his native village of King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, he spent his last years occupied with charitable works and reverential reading of the Teutonic Theosopher. “Next to the scriptures my only book is the illuminated Behmen,” he admitted in 1759.116 His last great project was to encourage a new edition of Boehme's writings. As will be seen, that editorial enterprise would have momentous consequences for the history of occult thinking in Britain. It would preserve the Behmenist magic of the Philadelphians, which Law had absorbed, into the last decades of the century, and would produce spiritual manifestations beyond anything John Byrom could imagine.
Magical Architecture: John Wood of Bath
The learned mystics tried to separate certain strands of occult thinking from popular beliefs. Others moved in the opposite direction, by popularizing learned arguments that borrowed from the occult. This can be observed in the literature of Freemasonry. By the mid-eighteenth century, offshoots or rivals of the Grand Lodge of England were using promises of occult knowledge to gain adherents. The Antient Grand Lodge, which officially separated from the mainstream of English Masonry in 1751, wanted a return to the “Old Constitutions,” meaning a greater concentration on the Temple of Solomon as the source of “the secret Mysteries of the Craft.” The chief publicist for the Antients, Laurence Dermott, claimed to have been visited in a dream by the four head porters of Solomon's Temple, who assured him that the Masons who built that structure “were the greatest Cabalists then in the World.” Dermott defined the Kabbala as “their secret Science of expounding divine Mysteries.”117 Initiates into Antient Masonry would presumably learn those same mysteries.
The renewed focus on the secrets of Solomon's Temple is also found in the writings of the remarkable architect and historian John Wood the elder of Bath. He was the designer of many prominent buildings in the spa town, including the Royal Circus and Queen's Square. His chief patron was Ralph Allen, the mastermind of the English Post Office system, who owned the quarry that provided Wood with stone, and whose house at Prior Park Wood designed. The architect died in 1754, three years after the founding of the Antient Grand Lodge, but there is no record of his being a member. His writings, however, are almost incomprehensible without the assumption of Freemasonry behind them. Their confident pronouncements about the hidden meanings of buildings show that the changing landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain, both rural and urban, could still be seen as loaded with ancient mysteries.
Wood was one of a number of British architects of the first half of the eighteenth century whose work displays the influence of Freemasonry.118 The most important among them was Nicholas Hawksmoor, member of a Masonic lodge in Ludgate Street whose master was the antiquarian Richard Rawlinson, a Nonjuror and friend of Richard Roach. Hawksmoor made notes on Ezekiel's vision of the Temple, and he incorporated into his buildings aspects of Solomonic architecture, such as the twisted columns and cube design at St Mary Woolnoth in London. His plans for colleges at Oxford resemble Villalpando's Temple reconstructions. The fabled tomb of Mausoleus at Halicarnassus provided a model for the tower of St George's, Bloomsbury, and Hawksmoor constructed another classical mausoleum for the earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard. To Freemasons, the original mausoleum to which all later examples referred was the grave of Hiram Abiff. Hawksmoor's buildings, therefore, embody a symbolism of death and regeneration that reflected the ritual of the lodges.119 Hawskmoor's admirer the architect Batty Langley was a tireless publicist for the Freemasons as well as for a “Gothic” or eclectic style, in opposition to classical Palladianism. Langley's magnum opus, the gigantic Ancient Masonry (1732–6), was dedicated to the grand masters of the Craft.120
In contrast to Hawksmoor, John Wood the elder was one of the leading architects of the Palladian style, which may show that Masonic affiliations did not dictate stylistic choices. Wood's Origin of Building: or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected (1746) can be read as an attempt to reconcile Palladianism, which looked to Roman architecture for models, with the Solomonic roots of Masonry. Wood's account is loaded with Masonic lore, such as the story of the two pillars on which all human knowledge was inscribed and which survived the Flood. He also included many of his own interpretations, such as his reading of biblical names, which “discover to us the source of the Art Magick.”121 Wood wandered quite willingly into the occult, without any of the hesitations that restrained more learned authors. He paid considerable attention to magical questions, such as how Joktan son of Heber learned the “Trick, of animating inanimate Things,” which must have been quite a party turn. According to Wood, the magic of the Chaldeans was bequeathed to the Druids, while that of the Egyptians was learned by Moses, providing a foundation for the art of building. The skilled architect, Wood opined, had to be a good magician, as he needed to know all “the Wisdom of the Egyptians,” including “Astrology, Geometry, Optics, Arithmetic, History, Philosophy, Music, Physic.”122
Like Newton, whose Chronology he frequently cited, Wood perceived the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem as a turning point in human history, not so much because of its prophetic significance, but because it “represented the Universe.” Wood agreed with Newton that the Temple was destroyed by “King Bacchus” or Sesostris, whose “sacred Scribe,” Hermes Trismegistus, was “the Inventor of all the Arts and Sciences.”123 What part Hermes played in disseminating the architecture of the Temple to the Greeks and Romans is not clear, but Wood had no doubt that the Temple of Diana at Ephesus was based on Solomon's Temple. As for the buildings of the Druids, Stonehenge “answers the very Description of the Temple of Jerusalem, as it was directed to be built by Cyrus.”124 Wood proudly assures us that his own renovations at the cathedral of Llandaff in Wales adopted the same model. We may find all this to be a fantastic mishmash, but we should remember that it differs mainly in tone, not in method, from the more learned but equally questionable works of Newton or Stukeley. It also provides us with an unparalleled insight into how a major working architect perceived his own craft.
Encouraged by the Tory collector and antiquarian Edward Harley, 2nd earl of Oxford, Wood made a careful description of Stonehenge in 1740. He even claimed to know its original name, Choir Gaure. The dimensions of Stonehenge's megaliths, which Wood measured precisely, were in his view derived from Pythagorean number symbolism related to the lunar year. In determining its origins and purpose, Wood fell back on the Druidic theory that had already been established by Stukeley, but added his own odd perspective. Druidism was for Wood a global phenomenon that had apparently spread from Britain to India and China, where it inspired Confucius. The Druidic courts met, or so Wood maintained, yearly on the feast of John the Baptist, which happened to be the chief Masonic commemoration day.125 Wood suggested that the Druids practised in their great Temple forms of necromancy in honour of Proserpine:
Can there now, my Lord [Oxford], remain any doubt but that the Ceremony of Conjuration was one of the uses which the Druids, so eminent for their Magick, as well as for their Skill in playing upon the Harp, put those parts of our Antient Works …? And where could this Magical Ceremony be better performed here, than in the Temple of her that was supposed to preside over the Dead as Queen of the Infernal Regions?126
This weird passage evokes the classical underworld, central to the learned pretensions of Masonic ritual, but it relates Druidic beliefs to popular magic rather than to ancient mysteries.
Stukeley blew up at this—eventually. Warburton, who knew Wood through his friend Ralph Allen, first alerted Stukeley in November 1747 that “the Bath architect was printing a book on Stonehenge agt. me,” which was incorrect as Wood's treatise did not target Stukeley's work.127 Apparently, Stukeley did not bother to read the book for sixteen years, by which time Wood had been dead for almost a decade. In August 1763, Stukeley recorded: “I read over Wood the architects acct. of Stonehenge, written to contradict me. Tis such a heap, a ruin of trifling, nonsensical, impertinent, &
needless measuring of the Stones, designd to be rude, as if they were the most nice & curious Grecian pillars.” This was just the beginning: “the whole performance,” Stukeley fumed, “he stuffs with fabulous whimsys of his own crackt imagination, wild extravagancys, concerning Druids, without the least true foundation.” In the end, Stukeley labelled it “a diabolical work, quite needless … a hodgpoch [sic] of conceit, & ignorance, & impudent malice.” Wood's naming of Stonehenge as “rocking stone” (Choir Gaure in Welsh) “may have amused the vulgar, fond of giving into a magical notion in every thing, belonging to the Druids,” but, to the learned antiquarian, Wood's “entrance into the sacred inclosure, seems … like Satan breaking over the hallowed mound of Paradise.” Warburton confirmed that Wood “was a great Fool, & not less a knave,” whose book on architecture was “ridiculous.”128
Stukeley's rage at Wood's theories may seem disingenuous, as they closely resembled those of the learned antiquarian himself. His ranting at Wood's measurements is particularly curious. These were perhaps the Bath architect's most original contribution to the history of Stonehenge, and Wood would use them as a basis for the design of the famous Circus at Bath. Of course, what Stukeley really resented was that an unlearned provincial of the middling sort would dare to propose an interpretation of the great English monument. Worse still, Wood's treatment of Stonehenge was littered with “vulgar” notions, many of them having to do with magic. He might have been even more incensed had he read Wood's final publication, A Description of Bath.
This amazing, bizarre and hugely successful guidebook, first published in 1742 and reissued in an expanded, two-volume version in 1749, was designed as publicity for the taste and civility of Bath, the booming spa town that was the site of most of Wood's important building projects. Bath was at the forefront of the “urban renaissance,” the expansion of public and private spaces in English towns that reflected the new commercial prosperity as well as the desires of a growing body of consumers.129 Wood's Description was in part a compendium of fantasies about his native town, which he grandiosely compared with Alexandria, Babel, Ezekiel's vision of the Temple and Babylon. According to Wood, Bath was founded by King Bladud, whom he described “not only as a Magician; but, by the Magical Art, [as] making the Hot Waters of the City boil out of the Ground in three different Places.” Wood proposed the hypothesis that Bladud had studied with Pythagoras, making him a sort of Masonic precursor. His city at Bath was built in the form of a “T,” which “forms the Hieroglyphical Figure of the Antients that represented the Principle of all Evil, and their Deliverance from it.” “T” stood for Typhon, a monster of Greek mythology who also appears in alchemical literature.130
Wood went on to praise the British Druids as “the most religious People in the World; they never grew weary of Life till they had seen a thousand Years compleat; and therefore … could not be without the Belief of the Immortality of the Soul.” These long-living Druids (had Wood been reading Robert Samber?) were worshippers of Apollo and Diana, who knew mathematics as well as necromancy and built a “great School of Learning” at Bath. In short, they were not so different from some of the enterprising eighteenth-century inhabitants of the town, including Wood himself. The architect's plans for improving Bath through paving, lighting and the construction of a “Grand Place of Assembly,” along with a “Grand Circus,” were meant to restore the metropolis to its former Druidic glory as “the very Elysian Fields of the Antients.”131 To give a further flavour of mystery to the place, Wood ended his long description with several ghost stories, including one that involved a young woman who hanged herself after reading a passage about betrayal in Orlando Furioso, and another concerning the phantom of “a Black Moor” who somehow failed to materialize during a “Ceremony” at a wealthy Quaker's house.132
We should not take Wood's book too seriously. As in all his writings, he was trying to entertain as well as educate his readers. But though they might tremble at ghosts and gasp at the monstrous Typhon, they also longed to turn Bath into a hub of commerce and civilization. In his general outlook, Wood was not very far removed from John Cannon, who lived only a few miles away and who knew Ralph Allen's family.133 Cannon was less bombastic, but he shared with Wood a fascination with magic, omens and apparitions, which he did not perceive as contradictory to modern learning. Stukeley, Warburton and the defenders of Newtonian orthodoxy might fume, but ordinary Britons continued to graft “vulgar” notions of occult philosophy to the latest cultural trends. While the West Country temperament doubtless has to be taken into account, it is not unlikely that the mentality of people like Wood and Cannon could be found in many other parts of Britain. Neither backward nor unsophisticated, it preserved the occult thinking of the seventeenth century well into the age of “urban renaissance” and Enlightenment.
By the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, the occult mentality was changing. Formerly, its main concern had been the defence of long-held beliefs, including the reality of spirits, the persistence of magic or the significance of alchemy. After 1760, due in part to the efforts of mystics like Law, new beliefs were created out of the old, ranging from a refashioned Behmenism to a revamped astrology. A revival of occult thinking was set in motion throughout Britain, from which the modern concept of “the occult” would arise. John Wood would have felt at home in such an intellectual environment. Its character was brash, commercial, cosmopolitan and urban-centred. It focused on educated members of the middling ranks of society. It would shake up the settled cultural universe of the Newtonians beyond recognition.
PART THREE
GLAD DAY, 1760–1815
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Occult Revival
BETWEEN 1760 and 1800, England witnessed a remarkable revival of occult thinking.1 The same phenomenon does not appear to have happened in Scotland. The English revival was more a reinvention than a simple revamping of traditional ideas. The established practices of alchemy, astrology and ritual magic, which had been declining among educated people for some time, were reconfigured—pulled apart, jumbled together and combined with different elements. New conceptions of occult philosophy and science emerged that would last into the modern age. Their main characteristics were: first, a high degree of commercialization; second, a greater insistence on the interconnectedness of occult thought, whether magical or mystical, learned or popular; and, third, a relative indifference to empirical or scientific “proof” of occult claims. “The occult,” a term that was coming into fashion by the early nineteenth century, was increasingly imagined as an underlying or alternative reality that operated by its own rules and might not be susceptible to rational verification. The existence of such a sphere was upheld by the authority of time-honoured traditions, as well as by experience. This was a leap into heterodoxy, both from a religious and a scientific point of view. For some, it marked a final rejection of the intellectual respectability craved by Elias Ashmole and Isaac Newton alike. It would disgust many scientific or philosophical minds, but it attracted creative writers and artists, who began to perceive the occult as a territory of boundless imaginative liberty.
That liberty was never really complete. Occult thinking continued to look back to older models of explanation, which were often constricting, and it never fully separated itself from prevailing standards of aesthetic or even scientific judgment. Most occult thinkers continued to crave acceptance, and they were acutely sensitive to changes in the cultural climate that might leave them looking backward or out of touch. For this reason, they regularly attempted to accommodate those trends that were associated with the Enlightenment, although they brought to the task a high degree of hostility (often misplaced) to some of the main figures of that intellectual movement, among them Newton, Locke and David Hume. At the same time, by claiming imaginative freedom, they could put themselves at odds with prevailing political trends. By the 1790s, occult philosophy had established a strong link with reformist and even radical thought, which would engender suspicion and ho
stility from those in power.
What were the causes of the occult revival? This chapter will consider the most important of them. Without the increasing commercialization of the press, occult writings would not have rediscovered an audience. That audience, however, no longer consisted of educated, professional people and would-be gentlemen; it had moved deeper into the ranks of the middling sort, to encompass tradesmen, shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen and artisans who were often less interested in reading philosophy than in gaining practical knowledge, or simply being entertained. An appeal to the feelings or sentiments became essential to the success of many occult projects. Literature that was associated with sentimentality often drew on occult themes, and the popular literary style known as the “Gothic” was virtually constructed from them. As in previous centuries, however, religious change was probably the most significant stimulus for occult thinking. Evangelicalism, the upsurge of Behmenism and the influence of the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg provided considerable boosts to esoteric speculation. At the same time, occult strains of Freemasonry were emerging in Germany and France, due in part to the creation of higher degrees in England and Scotland. Taken together, these factors created a multitude of active cells of occult thinking, rather than a unified movement. Within those cells and their successors, the occult would be preserved for the next century, and longer.
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