Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Such attacks were not ignored by occult Freemasons in Britain. Hugh Percy, the duke of Northumberland, who only recently had been poring over a tablet containing “some of the highest & most secret Mysteries of the Order,” sent to him by “one of the Magi,” was duly alarmed by Barruel's book.107 In January 1799, he complained to General Rainsford that “the Abbé Barruel is too severe,” although he recognized that the “three Degrees of Old Masonry, are exempt from the severest Charges,” and were “only a kind of Ground Work to all the Wickedness & Blasphemy of the other higher Degrees,” by which “Atheism, & Rebellion, & every other smaller Crime is taught & practised.” If Barruel had “unjustly accused the Fraternity,” it was in targeting these higher degrees. “As far as I have gone,” Percy added, with admirable equanimity, “I confess I see no Grounds for his Assertions, but apparent Injustice, but as the Portuguese say, veremos [we will see].”108 Evidently, Percy was unsure about the public reaction to Barruel's attacks—or the government reaction for that matter. The last page of his letter is missing, and Rainsford may have destroyed it for fear that its contents could bring unwanted attention from the authorities. After all, a war was raging and everybody knew that the government was opening correspondence and searching for evidence of subversion. It is difficult to say whether Rainsford had anything to worry about, but in any case the outcome of Barruel's onslaught among English Masons was fairly clear. The influence of the occult lodges waned in the early nineteenth century, to the point of their being labelled “un-English” by some Masonic historians. The higher degrees, as has been seen, were already being brought under control. In 1813, when the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Lodge of Antients were finally reunited, the degree system became uniform throughout England, and an era of ritual experimentation was closed.109

  The Masonic writer William Preston responded to Barruel and Robison by denying any connection between English Masonry and the Illuminati, but few dared to defend the occult lodges.110 One lonely champion was the Irish lawyer, patriot and Parliamentarian Francis Dobbs, a vocal opponent (on Scriptural grounds) of the Act of Union with Great Britain. In 1800, he published at Dublin and London a book of prophecy that bears some resemblance to the outpourings of Richard Brothers. Dobbs regarded the Avignon Society as having “an intercourse with good spirits,” although he condemned the Illuminati for being influenced by evil spirits and “preparing the way for the Antichrist.” He recalled a meeting in London with thirty members of the Avignon Society, probably in 1786 when Grabianka was visiting the British capital. Sharing a prophetic dream with them, he found that three of those present had experienced the same vision, which could only have happened “by supernatural means.”111 Dobbs's attempt to separate the benign, occult Masons of Avignon from the diabolical, rationalist Masons of Bavaria may not have been very convincing to educated British or Irish readers, who had been led by Barruel and Robison to view all foreign Freemasons with equal horror.

  Barruel had not spared the Swedenborgians from complicity in the French Revolution, since so many occult lodges (including that of Avignon) had looked to Swedenborg as a spiritual guide. This prompted the Reverend John Clowes—working, as he assured the publisher Robert Hindmarsh, under direct angelic inspiration—to take up his pen in an attempt to refute the Abbé's unfair aspersions. Clowes indignantly countered Barruel by maintaining that Swedenborg was a convinced monarchist, and “by shewing that his ideas of liberty, equality, reason and the rights of man were not such as were propagated by the occult lodges.”112 On the contrary, if Swedenborg occasionally mentioned such concepts, they referred to spiritual rather than political states of being. Of course, it is difficult to grasp how they could fail to have political implications too, since the spiritual and material worlds were so closely intertwined in Swedenborg's mind. Clowes was offering a narrow and restrictive interpretation of the baron's highly adaptable ways of thinking. It was an interpretation that would delight the founders of the New Jerusalem Church, who were seeking to escape from the glare of public disapproval.

  Clowes's conservative rewriting of Swedenborg would not play so well among other admirers of the baron, notably William Blake. Unlike those former advocates of occult thinking who were moving worriedly towards loyalism in the 1790s, Blake stuck stubbornly to more dangerous visionary opinions. His visions reflected the survival of a politically engaged reading of occult sources. As an artist, Blake was unique. In his combination of the radical and the occult, however, he was not alone.

  Against Pharaoh: Mary Pratt

  The private views of those who were interested in the occult are difficult to penetrate, but we have been granted extraordinary insight into the mind of one female Behmenist who shared many things with William Blake. Her name was Mary Pratt, and she was hardly an influential figure in late eighteenth century society. She left to posterity only a short pamphlet on magnetic healing, referred to above, and a few rapturous letters on mystical union with God. Her other writings and drawings were destroyed after her death.113 She was nonetheless important, and not only because she drew from many of the same sources as Blake. Pratt's mysticism arose from a particularly trying set of female experiences. Her hardships, while hardly typical, were common among women who aspired to break out of a contemporary mould of femininity. This did not make Pratt a proto-feminist, like Mary Wollstonecraft. Rather, she espoused a feminized path to mysticism that depended on the occult. It was more subjective than ideological, but its implications were shocking to those who knew her.

  Mary Pratt's social milieu was very different from the artisanal world of William Blake. Her family lived in comfortable circumstances in a fashionable district of London. Born Mary Moule around 1740, she was married in June 1760 to Jonathan Pratt at St Mary's Church, Marylebone Road. Her husband was a distant relative of chief justice Sir Charles Pratt, who later became Lord Camden. A son, named for his father, was born to the Pratts in November 1763, and christened at St Mary's. Two daughters would follow. Mary's husband was a liveryman or fully enroled member of the Haberdasher's Company, but in a tradesman's directory for 1790 his occupation was listed as “bricklayer, plaisterer and slater,” and his wife described him as a builder. By 1776, the family was living at 41 Great Portland Street, near where the Adam brothers would soon lay out the very grand Portland Place. As the area gentrified, the Pratts acquired a famous neighbour, James Boswell, who purchased number 47 in 1790 and died there five years later. Boswell's literary friend William Seward resided next door to the Pratts at number 40, and another friend, the Irish poet John Courtenay, rented “a neat little house” around the corner. Jonathan Pratt was a man of enough property to be chosen as a juror for the Middlesex sessions in 1790.114

  If Mary Pratt enjoyed a privileged social standing, she was still far enough below the position of a gentleman's wife to have to devote more time to housewifery than to leisure.115 As she put it, her husband's business “calls for my attendance at home, where my domestic avocations occupy me wholly.” It was not a happy household. Mrs Pratt complained that she had “a persecuting husband and an ungodly infamous son, who is allowed plenty of money, while I am dealt with like Hagar the Ismaelite—kept without a shilling.”116 On account of her religious visions, she had been imprisoned by her relatives in a private madhouse for six weeks: “I have been in prison, for the cause, and have been stript of all things for the Lord's sake … from thence My Beloved the Lord Jehovah set me free: and I adore him for it.”117 In retelling the story, she fashioned it to reflect tales of Christian martyrdom, rather than to protest the victimization of her gender, but it can only remind modern readers of the legal powerlessness of married women in the face of their husbands’ authority.

  Jonathan Pratt was a Swedenborgian and a member of the New Jerusalem Church. He was also a contributor to the New Magazine of Knowledge Concerning Heaven and Hell, a monthly Swedenborgian publication that appeared in 1790–1. Several letters were addressed to the New Magazine by an anonymous writer titling himsel
f “Ignoramus.” A marginal notation in a copy owned by the British historian E.P. Thompson identified “Ignoramus” as none other than Jonathan Pratt.118 His contributions began with two letters arguing that astrology should be taken seriously, as an example of the influence of spirits on matter. The moon, in particular, might affect the brain, “as to modify the rational influx of the soul, into the disordered ideas of a madman's ravings.”119 Was he thinking of his wife, Mary? “Ignoramus's” letters then shifted to the deeper topic of the nature of evil, which he interpreted as the loss of man's original divinity. He confirmed that Jacob Boehme “is no despicable author on that head, although I must freely acknowledge that I do not fully comprehend him.”120 In August 1791, “Ignoramus” entered into a controversy with Benedict Chastanier regarding universal restitution or salvation for all. Sticking to the more conventional view, “Ignoramus” concluded that “till the will is changed from evil to good, misery must be the consequence.”121 If he rejected universalism, “Ignoramus” nonetheless believed that Christ was not God, although he contained the divine within his humanity. He opined that, just as Christ inherited divine nature from his Father and corporeal nature from his mother, so too “the form of a man's soul being from the father, remains to eternity, but the form induced from the mother may be put off, and is put off as to gross corporeity by all.”122 This disparaging comment on mothers was “Ignoramus's” last major contribution to the journal.

  E.P. Thompson associated “Ignoramus” with a conservative, denominational strain of Swedenborgianism that was rejected by William Blake.123 Yet in many respects Jonathan Pratt was not very far removed from Blake. Pratt was a founding member of the New Jerusalem Church at its inception in April 1792. Blake had attended the meeting three years before at which the idea of a new denomination was suggested; he and his wife signed the proposal. As late as 1797, his friend John Flaxman thought that Blake could be brought into the fold of the New Jerusalem Church.124 Blake's alienation from Swedenborgianism, which was never total, seems to have originated in his beliefs that humans possessed an innate divinity and no soul was destined to damnation, views he may have derived from Boehme. Pratt also lauded Boehme; for him, damnation was not predestined, but was equivalent to the human choice of evil. Blake's views on gender, at least in this period, were similar to those of Pratt.125 Both men can be considered as free interpreters of Swedenborg.

  By contrast, Mary Pratt really despised “the deluded Swedenborg,” as she called him in her letters. “My partner in life,” she wrote in 1792, “is an adherent to these wild doctrines who call themselves the New Jerusalem Church … poor hoodwinked mortals, blindfolded by the seducer, to their own destruction.”126 Blake never expressed himself so strongly against “the Assessor” or his followers. By the time she wrote these words, moreover, Mary Pratt was already a public figure, whose pamphlet on spiritual healing had gone through two editions. She was probably better known as a writer than Blake, whose poems had appeared in tiny editions, or her own husband, who wrote anonymously.

  A sign of her independence from her husband's religious views may be found in a 1778 collection of religious poems, addressed to members of the Congregational Church in Redcross Street. Mary subscribed to the volume; her husband did not.127 Her marital status was not mentioned in the pamphlet on magnetic cures, which she printed at her own expense in 1789. Her name appeared as “M.P.” on the title page, where she was also identified as “a Lover of the Lamb of God” but she signed the dedication to the archbishop of Canterbury as “Mary Pratt [no Mrs], 41 Portland Street, Mary-le-Bone.”128 While the work is hardly a feminist tract, its point of view is distinctly female. Lucy de Loutherbourg is given credit for the cure of “a woman possessed with Evil Spirits” who happened to be a near-neighbour of Mary Pratt and whose condition (“she was like a Lunatic”) paralleled her own alleged madness.129 Mary Pratt may have seen aspects of herself in these female figures, both sufferers and healers.

  She was totally disinterested in the scientific aspects of magnetic healing. For her, the cures were divine, and suggested parallels with the miracles of the Apostles. She called for public prayers to be offered up “for such an astonishing proof of God's love to this favoured Land.” The last comment was not a statement of national pride; in fact, Mary Pratt had little confidence in God's continuing favour to Britain. The public prayers, she wrote, were necessary now, as at the time of King George's recovery from madness, “that we as a People may avert and deprecate those judgments, which at this awful hour have fallen on other Nations.”130 The pamphlet was dedicated on 21 July, one week after the fall of the Bastille. Thus, Pratt linked the miraculous cures of the Loutherbourgs with the political situation of the nation, just as her own recovery from supposed madness might be linked with the recovery of King George.

  By 1791, Mary Pratt had become “the most intimate friend” of an Anglican minister of mystical inclinations, the Reverend Richard Clarke. Like Blake, Clarke believed in universal salvation and continuing revelation, or “the Everlasting Gospel.” He also had faith in alchemy, but not in Swedenborg.131 It was Clarke who brought Mary Pratt into contact with his friend Henry Brooke, an Irish painter and nephew of the celebrated novelist of the same name. A disciple of Boehme, Brooke sought out like-minded mystics throughout the British Isles. In a correspondence that lasted from December 1791 to October 1792, Pratt instructed Brooke in a supremely confident tone that frequently verged on the ecstatic. “I (truly) live in Paradise,” she wrote, “having passed by the Angel that stands at the Gate to guard the Tree of Life … Jehovah has clothed me and I see and rejoice in my own beauty: not by my attainments; not by my sufferings—tho’ grievous and terrible … No—it was by the Lords free gift … He espoused vile me!” She did not mean this in a figurative sense: she really believed that she was living in heaven, as the bride of Jehovah. She made the amazing claim: “I am the first, who ever had the honor to have the seventh seal opened to them: the time was not come, till it came to me.”132

  This was not simply madness. It was a mystical conviction based on experience as well as on extensive reading. Pratt eagerly shared with Brooke the list of her favourite authors, an eclectic and international bunch. She recommended Boehme, of course, but also the Spanish Catholic mystic Miguel de Molinos and the French Quietists, Madame Guyon and Madame Bourignon. Among English mystics, Pratt had been inspired by the puritan Peter Sterry and the Philadelphians Richard Roach and William Bromley, although she noted that none of them had entered paradise while alive, as she had. She mentioned her “delight” in the writings of the radical Civil War preacher William Erbery, but we should not readily assume, as E.P. Thompson did, that she identified with his politics, because she said nothing about them. She omitted Jane Lead, the spiritual leader of the Philadelphians, although Brooke noted in a letter to Clarke the similarities between Pratt's mystical assertions and those of the late seventeenth-century prophetess, who also had a vision of the breaking of the seventh seal. Mary Pratt further asserted that she had read “many (almost all) Hermetic books,” and had “sought Earth, Sea and Air, speaking in a figure,” meaning that she had studied alchemy and ritual magic.133

  Mary Pratt was not a passive reader: she brought to these mystical and occult tracts a highly gendered sensibility that focused on the travails of the female body as the starting point for spiritual exaltation. Like other mystics, she condemned “[t]his foul body” as “like a beast; its appetites, its passions, its gratifications are vile.” Yet at the same time, her body provided a way to the divine. Heaven had opened up to her through the pain of childbirth: “I felt, when the Man child was born in me,—you would hardly credit it—the pain was the pain of hell, intolerable; neither could the humanity have sustained it: but Love tried the crucible, in a sevenfold fire.” The “Man child” was both her “ungodly infamous son,” Jonathan, and Jesus Christ, whose divinity is nowhere acknowledged by her. This contrasts sharply with her husband's view of Christ's divine maleness, paired in
him with a degraded human femaleness.134

  Mary Pratt preferred Jehovah to Jonathan, and she often evoked images of marriage and union to describe her relationship with the Almighty. It may be impossible today to read her description of “the ecstatic rapture of a Union with him Jehovah, the Lord,” without thinking of sexual abandonment: “You feel dissolved, annihilated, melted, dignified, swallowed up in him.” Her vision of heaven, however, was rooted not in sexuality but in a chaste matrimonial harmony, centred on the sharing of food: “for in equality as between man and wife, the connubial endearments are in Union, they taste reciprocal delights, for my beloved is mine, and I am his, he feedeth among the lilies; or he feedeth with me in spotless purity.—Come walk in the garden of Love, and taste pure delight and ineffable pleasure … It is extatic! It is glorious! it is divine!”135 Pratt frequently used images of eating and drinking, of “mannah” and “celestial food,” to convey the pleasures of union with God. Medieval female mystics drew the same connection between the maternal body as a source of food and the nourishing power of Christ's body.136 Pratt had clearly absorbed this tradition, although it is not clear where she had encountered it.