CHAPTER EIGHT
An Occult Enlightenment?
HOW DID the occult revival relate to the Europe-wide phenomenon known as the Enlightenment? The question is far from a simple one. In some contexts, occult thinking was antipathetic to a movement associated with rationalist or sceptical ideas. In other ways, however, occult thinkers consciously and deliberately attached themselves to the concept of enlightenment, by lavishing praise on scientific advancement and the improvement of modern life. From one perspective, the occult might be seen as an alternative to the Enlightenment, because it was founded on sentiment and personal revelation rather than the application of pure reason. Thus, Joscelyn Goodwin has written of a “Theosophical Enlightenment” that extended from the late eighteenth century to the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. On the other hand, the occult could be imagined as part of a “Super-Enlightenment” that elevated human potential and wisdom beyond the limits of rational understanding.1 While the occult revival encompassed all of these possibilities, its major figures rarely took positions of opposition to the Enlightenment, which they tended to see positively, in terms of continuing intellectual growth. They rejected the complacent notion that England had been enlightened since Newton and had no further need of new ideas, least of all foreign ones. Insofar as we can identify an English Enlightenment in cultural terms, focused on human perfectibility, the occult revival fell in line with it.
Yet how compatible was the occult with science? In England, the late eighteenth century was an age of continuing scientific popularization, but apart from the private researches of Henry Cavendish, published as articles in the Philosophical Transactions, it did not produce many dazzling discoveries.2 It was a period when Joseph Priestley, noted scientist, Unitarian minister and admirer of the writings of David Hartley, could accept the existence of an unseen substance, first postulated by the alchemist J.J. Becher, that was released through combustion: namely, phlogiston. Priestley called phlogiston the “unknown cause of certain well-known events,” which made it an occult quality. He imagined its importance as equal to that of gravity. Phlogiston might be seen as a spiritual essence—alchemists had long held to the notion that spirits were gaseous—except that Priestley believed matter and spirit to be inseparable, which strengthened his certainty that phlogiston could be measured.3 Behind Priestley's scientific ideas lay the conviction that a benevolent God produced inexhaustible variety in nature through simple causes. The distance between such an outlook and alchemy was hardly immense.
In Scotland, to be sure, more radical scientific ideas were fermenting, particularly the geologist James Hutton's theory of the age of the earth, which envisioned “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”4 Occult philosophy, dependent on interpretations of the biblical story of creation, was impossible to reconcile with this view. Hutton's friend the great Scottish chemist Joseph Black stated unequivocally that alchemy was no longer part of science. In the lectures that he gave at the University of Glasgow in the 1780s, Black condemned the “Extravagances” of what he called “this Visionary pursuit … the Golden Dreams of the Alchymists.” He mocked “the Dupes to Alchymy” who “Were quite intoxicated With the prospect of that power, riches, & Grandeur, Which they were at the point of enjoying,” but he added: “What is Still more remarkable is that an infatuation so strange & ridiculous Should have prevailed in this enlightened Age.” He pointed particularly to the case of Dr James Price, “a Physician of reputation, learning & Worth, in England,” who in 1782 had published a pamphlet “in Which he informs us, that in some Experiments he made, he converted Mercury into Gold & Silver.” Black regretted that this work “may engage men of Genius & learning into the illusive researches of the Philosophers Stone.” While he gave alchemists credit for developing processes that were of benefit to medicine, Black was contemptuous of their practices, pouring special scorn on the “arrogance, Absurdity & profligacy” of Paracelsus.5
Hutton was a deist and Joseph Black a Moderate Presbyterian. Neither was likely to be tempted by occult thinking, although Black clearly feared its appeal to others. South of the Tweed, in fact, the scientific commitment to rationalism was at times less rigid. The affair of James Price illustrates a continuing fascination with alchemy among the English scientific establishment. Price was a promising young chemist in 1782. Only twenty-five years old, he had a degree from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, a Fellowship of the Royal Society, the patronage of the noted chemist Richard Kirwan—who supported phlogiston and considered Hutton an atheist—as well as an inheritance from a relative, which had required him to change his name from Higginbotham.6 In May 1782, at Stoke near Guildford in Surrey, Price performed a series of experiments with mercury. Using “a certain powder of a deep red colour,” he was able to produce small amounts of pure gold, and with a white powder he made silver. Price carried out his first experiments in the presence of a small number of local gentlemen, but his last attempts were made under the scrutiny of three peers (Lords Onslow, Palmerston and King) as well as William Man Godschall, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Price published the results of his work in a pamphlet printed by Oxford University Press, and within a short time received a medical degree from that university, which he publicly attributed to his previous labours in chemistry, rather than to his spagyric discoveries.7
By then, Price had become worried by the reaction to his experiments. His former patron Kirwan and other Fellows of the Royal Society were shocked by Price's “charlatanism,” as the Society's president, Joseph Banks, reported to his close friend Charles Blagden. A medical doctor, Blagden was at first open-minded, although he reported that Price “must be the highest of chemists or a lunatic.” Nonetheless, he blasted the conferral of the Oxford degree as a “disgrace,” and soon decided that the experiments were “an imposture.” Banks himself remained more equivocal, as he entered into direct communication with Price in the late summer of 1782. The young chemist declared to the president that he had deduced the idea of extracting gold from the experiments of an unnamed friend, who had discovered how to make silver by a similar process. Price refused to reveal the name of his friend or the nature of the two powders. His secrecy concerning these remarkable additives, as well as his inability to reproduce them, aroused the suspicions of reviewers in the press, although they were careful not to reject his claims entirely. By December, Godschall was advising Price either to repeat his experiment in a laboratory that was not his own, or to reveal the secret of the powders. Cornered, Price saw no way out other than to take his life by drinking laurel-water, which he did on 31 July 1783. His unconscious body was discovered two hours later by a fellow physician. Godschall judged him insane, reporting to Banks that his father had suffered from the same malady.8
The sad affair of James Price happened at the historical moment when the British colonies in America were being lost and the nation faced defeat at the hands of France. The sense of apprehension at being overtaken by the French in scientific as well as military terms is evident in the correspondence of Joseph Banks. Price had capitalized on it. The noblemen who had observed his experiments were all Whigs and reluctant supporters of peace; they may have seen his processes as a way of salvaging the reputation of Britain through a single remarkable scientific coup. As for Banks, he was a beleaguered president, and in 1782 was marshalling his forces for a fight against the Royal Society's foreign secretary—none other than Charles Hutton, the compiler of almanacs. To win the struggle, Banks had to play his cards carefully. He remained duly cautious about Price, giving the young man ample opportunity to prove himself.
Young though he was, Price knew the game he was playing. By including an account of an experiment by Robert Boyle in the first edition of his pamphlet, he established a direct link with the only member of the Royal Society who had ever had the temerity to publish a paper on alchemy in the Philosophical Transactions. Price vaguely acknowledged the resemblance of his work to “passages in ancient chemical writers,” without acknowledging tha
t the red and white powders were celebrated among students of the spagyric art.9 He was also aware that no alchemist had ever fully described the powders, which were usually ascribed to a mysterious friend or benefactor. In short, Price exploited an understanding of alchemy that was already in the minds of his audience. Few of his critics explicitly denied that alchemy was possible; they merely doubted Price's results. It was only in the aftermath of the affair that Joseph Black could look back on it as a final repudiation of alchemy.
Price's story can be compared to the claims of the electrochemists Marvin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 to have discovered “cold fission.” In both cases, the announcement of experimental success commanded broad media attention, in part because it addressed current anxieties—the failure of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986 had caused public disillusionment with nuclear science. The scientific community demanded further proof, but did not rule out the validity of the claims until it proved impossible to replicate the experiments. That this would be the case with nuclear fission may not be surprising. That it applied in 1782–3 to work on alchemy suggests that the attitude of scientists towards the occult philosophies of the past may have been more ambivalent than is usually recognized. Ambivalence particularly characterized the behaviour of Banks, who will appear repeatedly in this chapter, not as a symbol of enlightened science, but as a colleague and patron of some of the most remarkable occult thinkers in late eighteenth-century England.10
The following sections deal with a number of these individuals. We will begin with a comparison of two men with very different occult inclinations: the Swedenborgian clergyman John Clowes and the Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor. They represent not just the diversity of approaches to occult traditions, but also the wide scope of responses to the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections deal with the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, the alchemist Sigismund Bacstrom and the occult Freemasons, concluding with the career of the great international charlatan Count Cagliostro. The activities of these individuals illustrate a tangled and shifting relationship between enlightened discourse and occult thinking. The result may not have been a steroid-driven “Super-Enlightenment,” but it was certainly a dynamic exchange. Shockingly, the occult even began to seem respectable, although insufficiently so to save James Price from exposure and suicide, or Count Cagliostro from humiliation and exile.
The Mystic and the Pagan
The occult revival was not a unified phenomenon. It encompassed too many different points of view for that to be the case. Even within a relatively well-defined group like the Swedenborgians, deep divisions existed on the most fundamental issues, such as eternal punishment. As occult thinking in this period was often personal and individualistic, it might be wondered whether its revival had any intellectual coherence at all. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that the same issues that had perplexed occult thinkers in the past gave their successors a certain unity of direction in the late eighteenth century. One of those issues was the role of spirits in the natural world.
Two contrasting figures serve as examples of occult thinking on spirits. John Clowes, born in 1743, was the rector of St John's Church in Manchester, which had been founded by John Byrom's son, Edward. Clowes was among a tiny number of Anglican clergymen who adopted the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. He refused to support the move towards an independent Swedenborgian Church, however, and remained a practising minister of the Church of England. Famed for his piety, Clowes was deeply conservative in politics.11 Living in a part of England that was marked by profound economic, social and religious changes, by the dramatic growth of the cotton industry and a sudden rise in population, Clowes rejected the path taken by Ralph Mather, who preached the doctrines of Swedenborg to labouring folk in the open air and supported the rights of textile-workers.12 Instead, Clowes cultivated the life of a reclusive mystic. Thomas de Quincey, the future essayist and opium-eater, as a boy knew Clowes well and called him “holy, visionary, apostolic, he could not be treated disrespectfully … Assuredly, Mr. Clowes was no trifler, but lived habitually a life of power, though in a world of religious mysticism and apocalyptic visions.”13 Never married, Clowes was petrified of attractive women, and kept around his house images of St John the Baptist, whose saintly features he apparently resembled.
He was no occult enthusiast. He probably never read a line of Paracelsus and would have considered Agrippa diabolical. In fact, he took a dim view of non-religious literature in general. In his manuscript autobiography, Clowes draws attention to his early education at the Salford school directed by the Reverend John Clayton, an ardent Jacobite. There, he notes with approval, “the young Mind, being instructed in the Doctrines of the Gospel, was less exposed to the Danger resulting from the perusal of Heathen Literature, & from the perplexities & Impurities of Heathen Mythology.”14 Could a less enlightened statement be imagined? The young Clowes's reading list was indeed very religious, although hardly orthodox. It included the mystics William Law, Madame Guyon and Pierre Poiret, the Neoplatonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme and, most surprisingly, Jane Lead. No wonder Clowes gravitated towards Swedenborg. One morning, he awoke to a feeling of “most delightful Harmony in the Interior of his Mind,” which he interpreted as an awareness of “a Divine Glory, surpassing all Description … in close Connection with that Divinum Humanum, or Divine Humanity” that he had recognized in Swedenborg's works.15 This amounts to a Behmenist reading of the baron, who saw himself as specially gifted with insight into the spiritual world but was not always generous in dispensing the visionary benefits of “Divine Humanity” to all.
In several expository pamphlets, Clowes confronted head-on the question of direct contact with spirits, which for many was the most problematic aspect of Swedenborgian theology. He stuck to the idea that everyone had access to the unseen world. In a 1788 tract, Clowes put the following words into the mouth of a supporter of the baron:
Know, then, Sir, and understand, that according to the Testimony of the sacred Writings, as opened by Baron Swedenborg, every Man hath Communication and Association with the invisible World of Spirits, whether he knows it or not, according to the Nature, Quality, and Measure of his Love, and the Nature, Quality, and Extent of his Wisdom, as grounded in that Love.16
This did not mean that every human being was on the same spiritual level. Clowes shared Swedenborg's belief that spirits were differentiated by the degree of love that they manifested in their worldly lives. The afterlife simply eternalized the earthly condition of the human spirit—it was a continuation of the essential state of a spirit, rather than a simple punishment. Clowes preached to his flock at Manchester that “your immortal spirits and their INTERNAL FORMS are in a continual state of change, either to a greater and more infernal deformity, or to a higher and more angelic state of BEAUTY and loveliness.”17 Although the term “INTERNAL FORMS” suggests Neoplatonism, for Clowes not even the forms of spirits were fixed; they matured or became degraded over time. Nonetheless, everyone had constant access to them. In a letter of 1799 to the Swedenborgian printer Robert Hindmarsh, Clowes expressed a belief that many of his sermons were “dictated throughout by spirits, when I have chanced to awake in the course of the night.”18 This went far beyond the cautious theories of More and Cudworth.
Clowes's thinking was certainly mystical, but what made it occult? The answer lies in his approach, not to spiritual experience, but to nature. Mystical thinking focused on the individual's relationship to God; occult thinking sought to bring supernatural power or understanding to bear on nature. In this sense, occult thinking was always a counterpart to natural philosophy or science, even among mystics in the age of the Enlightenment. For all his disdain for “Heathen” literature and secular philosophies, Clowes never turned his back on the natural world. He particularly praised Swedenborg for giving a spiritual account of nature:
He did not think it the Province of Science to darken the sublime Truths of Theology; and you will therefore always find him referring natural Ph
ænomena to spiritual Agency. He never loses Sight of the close Connection between the two Worlds of Matter and of Spirit; and thus his System opens to the Mind the most edifying Speculations, by teaching it to consider all the visible Universe, with every thing that it contains, as a Theatre and Representation of that invisible World from which it first derived it's [sic] Existence, and by Connection with which it continually subsists.19
Clowes referred to Swedenborg's theology as “heavenly Science.”20 He was delighted to meet, among the Swedenborgians in London, the mathematical instrument-maker George Adams junior, author of a series of lectures on experimental philosophy that were intended to counter the “destructive ideas of the atheists of France” by vindicating “a DIVINE MIND or WISDOM that hath wrought with a view to certain ends.”21 Clowes wanted to grasp that divine wisdom. He actually wrote a book on natural science, supposedly dictated to him by spirits. According to his own account, while riding between York and Hull, “a Book appeared to be presented to his mental eye for perusal entitled a Work on Science … During his Ride, he had an Opportunity of reading the Book attentively through, from Beginning to End.” Happily, he was able to write down the chapter titles, and the contents came back to him over the next few years.22
Thomas Taylor the Platonist seems the diametrical opposite of Clowes in a number of ways. Born into a Dissenting family in 1758, he was at first intended for the ministry, but his fondness for mathematics, Latin and Greek led him in different directions. He eloped at a young age, causing his wife's family virtually to disinherit her. Taylor was obliged to seek employment, first as a school usher, then as a bank clerk. Keen to make a mark on the world, he designed a “perpetual lamp,” supposedly based on ancient designs, which he demonstrated at the Freemason's Tavern. The whole scenario was a cliché of the Enlightenment—an eternal light revealed to the public in a house of Masonic brotherhood—but, unfortunately, the lamp exploded. The incident brought Taylor to public attention nonetheless, and he soon found a patron, the businessman William Meredith, who was willing to support his scholarly endeavours. These included translations of the Platonist philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry, a version of the “Hymns of Orpheus” with a preliminary discourse on Orphic philosophy, and an essay on the mystery cults.23 Few contemporary writers could be more distant from the mystic Clowes than Taylor, who became known as “the Pagan.” While it may not be true that he sacrificed a bull to Zeus in his suburban home, Taylor did come to despise Christian priests, whose characters he described as “consummate arrogance united with a profound ignorance of antient wisdom and blended with matchless hypocrisy and fraud.”24 Clowes would have been horrified.
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