Taylor was not writing for saints. His audience consisted of sophisticated lovers of antiquity, which they appreciated for its distinctly non-Christian side. The fascination of the English elite with classical art had never been greater than in the 1780s. The Grand Tour to Europe had become a standard element in the education of the well-born and wealthy, and Rome was no longer out of bounds for young Protestant tourists. Ample supplies of money allowed them to buy heaps of classical statuary, cameos, gems, vases—often faked or restored by Roman dealers, but highly desirable nonetheless as status symbols and indicators of educated taste. The Society of Dilettanti, formed in 1732, became the leading club for aristocratic collectors, admirers and promoters of classical art. Connected from the first with Freemasonry and tinged with libertinism, the Dilettanti were drawn towards interpretations of antique art that emphasized the Eleusinian mysteries, symbolic representations of myth and, above all, sex. They were guided by the works of Pierre François Hugues, who called himself the baron d'Hancarville, and who edited a series of lavishly illustrated volumes on Greek vase painting.25 In a lengthy treatise on Greek art published in 1785, Hancarville argued for a universal system of symbolic representation, diffused through Egypt, Persia, India and Japan as well as the Greco-Roman world. The basic message of this symbolic system, as preserved in the rites of the mystery cults, was the generative power of the supreme deity: in short, divine sex.26
Hancarville's confusing symbolic notions were rendered more coherent by Richard Payne Knight in his 1786 study of the ancient worship of Priapus. For Knight, the penis in classical art stood for “the generative or creative powers” and was the basis for interpreting the worldwide system of divine symbols. Like Hancarville, Knight did not hesitate to make comparisons with Hindu or Japanese art, although he regarded Christianity as an enemy to Priapic religion. By maintaining that ancient forms of representation ultimately rested on sex, Knight was launching a thinly veiled attack on the Christian beliefs of his own day. His work was disseminated chiefly among the Dilettanti, who included Sir Joseph Banks. It would have a profound impact on several important connoisseurs of ancient art, among them Charles Townley, whose collection of marble statuary can still be admired at the British Museum.27
Thomas Taylor shared Knight's pagan and anti-Christian proclivities, but none of his enthusiasm for “generation.” His avowed intention was to revive ancient Platonism, a more respectable intellectual tradition than the worship of Priapus. Like Hancarville, however, Taylor felt that nobody prior to him had succeeded in understanding the ancients. In discussing the meaning of the Eleusinian mysteries, for example, Taylor dismissed Warburton's “malevolent and ignorant aspersions” regarding “this sublime institution.”28 For him, the central point of the mysteries was not the immortality of the soul, but its purification through a separation from the dirt and deadness of matter. Here he parted company with Hancarville and Knight. Far from seeing sex as its foundation, Taylor recognized in Greek religion a celebration of a self-motivated soul “more ancient than body … all corporeal motion must be the progeny of soul, and of her inherent energy.”29 This unworldly and ascetic message may have been too esoteric for Freemasons or Dilettanti, but it was sure to attract their attention. Taylor was trying to make ancient religion more philosophically acceptable, by removing its offensive part: the divine phallus. Clowes would surely have approved.
At the same time, Taylor did not confine himself to theory. He concocted an alternative form of religious belief, including a new definition of the occult. In a short work of 1805, entitled “The Platonic Philosopher's Creed,” he summed up his belief in a universe that depended on a “divine intellect,” within which reside ideas that “are the paradigms or models of every thing which has a perpetual subsistence according to nature.” This universe, however, was not one of dead matter; rather, it was a living entity, “a divine animal,” containing beings that were themselves little worlds, with a divine intellect, a divine soul and, ultimately, a deified body. Humans had a “gnostic” capacity to unite themselves with the divine intellect, but this was possible only through purification “from the defilements of a mortal nature” and elevation “to the vision of true being.” After death, the human soul would pass into other bodies, including those of animals, until eventually it “would be conjoined with the gods.”30
Taylor's use of language was tortuous. He avoided the word “spirit,” which was not part of the Platonic vocabulary that he affected to imitate, but he freely employed the term “soul.” He coined the adverb “occultly” to mean “symbolically” or “non-materially.” In the story of Proserpine's rape, for example, “the soul's descent, viz. her desertion of a life wholly according to intellect … is occultly signified by the separation of Proserpine from Ceres.”31 In his “Creed,” Taylor coined the term “the occult” to refer to the non-material causality by which qualities are produced within the divine intellect. He expressed this in a woefully constructed sentence: “number may be considered as subsisting occultly in the monad, and the circle in the centre; this occult being the same in each with causal subsistence.”32 His understanding of the occult included the process by which the ritually purified soul merged with the godhead, elevating itself above nature.
Although he longed to escape from Christianity into a pagan Neverland, Taylor's principles were strongly marked by Christian influences. His revulsion against materiality seems closer to Christian mysticism than to paganism or even Gnosticism, in which the world is not quite so easy to shake off, and immateriality is more a destiny than a choice. Notions of the essential goodness of “divine intellect,” the moral badness of unbridled sexuality and the ultimate happiness of the afterlife keep creeping into his argument, in spite of the ambiguity of his ancient sources. Taylor's Platonic forms or paradigms resemble the angelic spirits invoked by Swedenborg, because they are perfect, and because human souls, weighed down by material deformities, are constantly striving towards them. It would be wrong to call Taylor a Christian, and his absolute rejection of the material universe goes much further than Swedenborg's view of matter as debased spirit. Nonetheless, the distance between Taylor the pagan and the mystic Clowes was not unbridgeable.
In fact, Taylor and Clowes were connected through the sculptor John Flaxman. Taylor gave lectures at Flaxman's house, and the artist's line illustrations of Greek myths were informed by the Platonist's researches. Flaxman, however, was an ardent Swedenborgian, whose attitude towards the baron's writings closely reflected that of his good friend Clowes.33 In 1814, the sculptor received a letter from the venerable rector of St John's, praising him and his family for “the heavenly Affection with which all of you cherish the Truth of that new & blessed Dispensation, which … I have been called upon to patronize & defend.”34 Five years later, Flaxman presented a tablet to the Manchester church commemorating his friend's fifty years of ministry. In it, Clowes is seen pointing the way to heaven for the benefit of a little crowd of well-behaved children. Austere and classical, the tablet depicts a Platonic world of perfect forms.
Flaxman perceived the beliefs of Taylor and Clowes as operative descriptions of the universe. He provided his own judgment on them in the lectures that he delivered at the Royal Academy after 1810. “Beauty,” he maintained, “is to be considered as pertaining to two orders of creation—the supernatural and the natural. In the Pagan mythology, the supernatural order consists of superior and inferior divinities, beatified heroes, and purified spirits.” According to Flaxman, however, pagan artists could not approach Christian supernaturalism. “The gradations of celestial power and beauty in the orders of angels and archangels, the grandeur and inspiration of prophets … and the sanctity of apostles, have produced examples of grace, beauty, and grandeur of character, original in themselves, and not to be found in such variety among the remains of antiquity.”35 For Flaxman, supernatural beauty is the ultimate aim of art.
If Clowes was part of a mystical tradition that drew on older occult ideas, Tayl
or looked forward to the New Age philosophies of the twentieth century, which seek to revive the spiritual and supernatural wisdom of ancient religions. Some critics recognized the link between Taylor and religious enthusiasm. Horace Walpole offered a scathing, catty assessment of the Platonist's writings in a letter of 1789 to Lady Ossory:
Taylor's book [The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus … on the First Book of Euclid's Elements] was shown to me this summer by one of those wiseacres that call themselves learned men, and who told me it was tremendous. I was neither alarmed nor curious … I guess however that the religion this new apostle recommends is, not belief in the pantheon of pagan divinities, but the creed of the philosophers, who really did not believe in their idols, but whose metaphysics were frequently as absurd; and yet this half-witted Taylor prefers them to Bacon and Locke … Taylor will have no success, not because nonsense is not suited to making proselytes, witness the Methodists, Moravians, Baron Swetenberg [sic] and Louterbourg the painter, but it should not be learned nonsense.36
Walpole was correct in predicting that Taylor's works would not attract many readers. He gained only a tiny number of devotees. One of them was the eccentric society painter Richard Cosway, a Swedenborgian who attended Taylor's lectures at Flaxman's house. He was reputed by the satirist “Anthony Pasquin” to have become “an adept in the Orphean Art,” which involved the use of magic to control both living and inanimate objects.37 Whether or not magical power had been Taylor's intention is beside the point; by invoking the supernatural features of ancient paganism, he allowed his audience to make what they wanted of it, even if they violated the austere principles that he endeavoured to inculcate. Like his “perpetual lamp,” it seems, Taylor's Platonic philosophy was always dangerously close to blowing up in his face.
The Astrologer: Ebenezer Sibly
Unlike those of Thomas Taylor, the writings of Ebenezer Sibly, which Walpole might have labelled “plain nonsense,” sold huge numbers of copies. Sibly was the most successful writer of the English occult revival, and if we wish to understand its relationship to the Enlightenment, he has to be given serious attention.38 The occult philosophy that is scattered throughout his works was not particularly original or profound. Nonetheless, Sibly was an important intellectual figure for “lowbrow” readers of the middling ranks, whose appetite for his enormous multi-part encyclopaedias seems to have been almost limitless, and who cannot have read far into them without discovering that they were informed by an occult point of view almost as strongly entrenched as those of Clowes and Taylor.
Sibly's career took place amid an upsurge of interest in the principles of astrology, after more than sixty years of comparative neglect. Defeat in the American War of Independence, which shook the confidence of Britons in their own providential destiny, may have had something to do with this. Suddenly, the public wanted to know more about an uncertain future. In 1785, George Mensforth made a pitch to younger audiences in The Young Student's Guide in Astrology, a cheaply priced how-to book for beginners that described astrology as “a natural science.” Addressing readers who were more familiar with the Bible than with Newton, Mensforth argued that the Copernican system was “more agreeable to nature,” and that scriptural descriptions of the sun rising had been designed for “vulgar understandings.”39 Mensforth's pupil Richard Phillips made a brief defence of the art in The Celestial Science of Astrology Vindicated. Only eighteen years old at the time, Phillips went on to become an almanac-maker, a wealthy bookseller and a radical London politician, as well as a vegetarian and a denier of the theory of gravity.40 The rebirth of astrology was further celebrated in The Astrologer's Magazine, which appeared in monthly instalments in 1793–4. This extraordinary periodical allowed devotees to compare observations and even to quarrel with each other's interpretations. Ebenezer Sibly was often criticized in its pages.41
Like other astrologers of the period, Sibly was a largely self-taught man of humble origins. Born in London in 1751, his father, described as a “mechanic,” was a carpenter by trade and a Baptist in religion. Ebenezer's early education was never considered worth mentioning. He moved in the final years of the American War of Independence to the naval town of Portsmouth, where he practised as an astrologer and medical healer among naval officers and local merchants, some of whose portraits adorn his work. In 1784, he left Portsmouth for Bristol. As Ralph Mather had noted, however, Bristol was home to some who held to an “inward” Methodism, inspired by the teachings of William Law and Jacob Boehme. Ebenezer Sibly was associated with one of them, the bookseller Thomas Mills, who published his earliest known work. It was a tribute to a fellow Bristolian and practitioner of astrological medicine, the Quaker doctor John Till Adams, who was apparently Sibly's mentor.42 Sibly's first major astrological publication, A Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology, was issued between 1784 and 1788. The initial three parts of the work dealt with astrology, the fourth with apparitions, witchcraft, divination and necromancy. The massive tome contained an unusual astrological exercise that would ensure Sibly's undying fame: the nativity or birth chart of the United States of America, dated 4 July 1776. An online search reveals just how widely this chart is still used today.43 Sibly was bold enough to publish it right after the end of the war.
He could be daring in part because he did not have to conform to the expectations of patrons. Sibly's works were always published for a broad public, without the support of subscribers. They were written in a chatty, matter-of-fact style that was easy to follow, and they were full of anecdotes. In spite of his breezy literary voice and obvious commercial aspirations, Sibly was a serious student of occult philosophy. He had read widely in alchemy and ritual magic as well as astrology. In the fourth part of his Celestial Science, he even ventured to offer a theory of the occult. Employing a distinction that was common among earlier astrologers, he separated astrology, which he called “natural,” from magic, which he labelled as diabolical. Both types of occult science operated through spiritual powers that defied human reason, but the former was benign whereas the latter could result in damnation. By the end of the treatise, however, Sibly had confused his categories, and was arguing “that there are two distinct species of magic; one whereof, being inherent in the occult properties of nature, is called natural magic; and the other, being obnoxious and contrary to nature, is termed infernal magic, because it is accomplished by infernal agency or compact with the devil.”44 Both types of magic depended on the work of spirits. This definition was evidently borrowed from the writings of Agrippa, who exerted a strong influence on the astrologer's imagination.
Sibly's conceptions of the spirit world were derived from Jacob Boehme as well as from “the noble and learned Swedenbourg,” whose nativity chart was included in his first major compilation. To this mixture he added dashes of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism (especially the idea of a universal soul), along with thinly disguised bits of the notory or divinatory arts, mostly pinched from Agrippa. Like Swedenborg, Sibly perceived man as a spirit, moving from worldly constraints towards an angelic state; like Boehme, he saw palpable signs of human divinity in the body as well as in the stars. He divided non-human spirits into three groups, a classification he seems to have invented himself. The first was “astral spirits, which belong to this outward world, and are compounded of the elemental quality, having their source from stars.” They transmitted astrological influence, offered up the treasures of the earth to alchemical adepts, and facilitated herbal, electrical or magnetic healing. This was an admission of a belief rarely discussed by astrologers: that the stars were inhabited by angels. The second group of spirits was infernal or diabolical, the source of black magic. The third group consisted of the ghosts or apparitions of dead people, which did not seem to have any innate moral qualities at all.45 By making room for ghosts among the three classes of spirits, Sibly was taking account of the widespread popular acceptance of apparitions, and gesturing towards the preconceptions of his readers. He did
not try to make his views on ghosts consistent with Neoplatonic or Swedenborgian concepts of spirits; rather, he addressed the fears and somewhat muddled perceptions of ordinary Anglicans or Methodists of the middling sort.
Seeking an even larger audience for his work, Sibly moved to London soon after the publication of his Celestial Science. There he joined his younger brother, Manoah, who had set up in the capital during the late 1770s as an astrological publisher, teacher of Greek and Hebrew, and transcriber of legal proceedings. Manoah Sibly's astrological publications were reprints of classic works, including a collection of nativities by Placidus de Titus, the seventeenth-century Italian astrologer whose claim that the stars foretold the time of a person's death had been revived by John Partridge. For Manoah, these grim forecasts demonstrated “the infallibility of that science.”46 Manoah Sibly would later become a Swedenborgian minister and, curiously enough, head of the Chancery Office at the Bank of England. As a preacher, he seems to have avoided occult matters, unlike so many other Swedenborgians. His didactic and rather boring sermons, delivered before regular New Jerusalem congregations, did not so much as mention astrology.47 Whether the topic ever came up at the Bank of England is a matter of pure speculation.
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