Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  22. Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001); Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, “The Last of the Witches: The Survival of Scottish Witch Belief,” in Goodare, ed., The Scottish Witch-Hunt, pp. 198–217.

  23. Recently, William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe have argued that alchemy should be considered primarily as an experimental rather than as an occult pursuit. While it serves as an important corrective, this view does not fully explain the motivations of the majority of alchemists. See William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, eds, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 385–431; William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002); William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, 2005); William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006).

  24. William Fleetwood, An Essay upon Miracles (London, 1701), p. 10. Apart from Keith Thomas, few historians of magic have considered “church magic”: prophecies and prayer. The boundary between magic and religion, however, has been a central concern for cultural anthropologists: Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, 1990).

  25. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1, 9, 14. For more on the definition of magic, see the essays collected in Brian P. Levack, ed., Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology (12 vols, New York and London, 1992), vol. 1.

  26. A good introduction is Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (New York, 1994). See also the immense bibliography in Richard Caron, Joscelyn Godwin, Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jean-Louis Vieillard Baron, eds, Ésotérisme, Gnoses et Imaginaires Symboliques: Mélanges Offertes à Antoine Faivre (Leuven, 2001), pp. 875–918. The subject can be further explored through Arthur Versluis, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (Lanham, 2007) and Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2008). For a definition of the field, see Wouter Hanegraaff, “Some Remarks on the Study of Western Esotericism,” Esoterica, 1 (1999), pp. 3–19.

  27. General works on the development of occult philosophy include Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols, New York, 1923–58); D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958); Désirée Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964), chs 1–4; Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley, Cal., 1972); D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1972); Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984, 2005); Brian P. Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” in Charles B. Schmitt, ed., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp.; P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (New York, 1999); Mark Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford, 2007). For Hermes Trismegistus, see Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge, 1986); Brian Copenhaver, ed. and trans., Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge, 1992); Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007).

  28. Jolande Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York, 1951), p. 119.

  29. “Superstition” is discussed in various historical contexts in S.A. Smith and Alan Knight, eds, The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present (Oxford, 2008).

  30. For the interpretation of printed texts, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited,” American Historical Review, 107, 1 (2002), pp. 87–105; Adrian Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” ibid., pp. 106–25; and Eisenstein's reply, ibid., pp. 126–8; also, William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).

  31. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London, 1949); I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); David C. Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: A Preliminary Sketch,” in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–26.

  32. See Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions (2nd ed., Princeton, 2009); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1998); Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1987); Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984); M.L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, eds, Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1971).

  33. The paradigm theory derives from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed., Chicago, 1996). For respectability and trust, see Simon Schapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994); Adrian Johns, “Identity, Practice and Trust in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” Historical Journal, 42, 4 (1999), pp. 1125–45.

  34. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972); Robert S. Westman and J.E. McGuire, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles, 1977); Brian P. Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermeticism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science,” in Lindberg and Westman, eds, Reappraisals, pp. 261–301; Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (3rd ed., York Beach, Maine, 1997), which traces the later history of Rosicrucian organizations; Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum, eds, Magic, Alchemy and Science: The Influence of Hermes Trismegistus (Florence, 2002); Didier Kahn, “The Rosicrucian Hoax in France,” in William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, eds, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 235–344.

  35. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980), esp. ch. 8; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: or, The Hunting of the Greene Lyon (Cambridge, 1975); Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Hunter, “Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” British Journal of the History of Science, 23 (1990), pp. 387–410; Larry Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, 1998).

  36. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (Cambridge, 1988), and Margaret Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia, 2006).

  37. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question, ‘What is Enlightenment?'” in H.S. Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 54–60.

  38. Auguste Viatte, Les Source Occultes du Romantisme (2 vols, Paris, 1927); Ernst Benz, The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy, trans. Blair R. Reynolds and Eunice M. Paul (Allison Park, Pa., and Paris, 1968); René Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie Templière et Occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles (Paris and Louvain, 1970); Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature: Physique Sacrée et Théosophie, XVIIIe–XIXe Siècles (Paris, 1996).

  39. An excellent introduction is Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh, 20
01).

  40. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000).

  41. Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in Medicine (Stroud, Gloucs, 2003); Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Duxford, Cambs, 2002), and her Fatal Attraction: Magnetic Mysteries of the Enlightenment (New York, 2005).

  Chapter One: The Alchemical Heyday

  1. Dee has been the subject of television shows as well as several biographies, including Peter French, John Dee: The World of the Elizabeth Magus (2nd ed., London, 1987); Nicholas Clulee, John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London, 1988); Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I (New York, 2001): Glyn Parry, The Arch Conjuror: John Dee (New Haven, 2012). Recent studies of his writings include William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995); Deborah Harkness, John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999); György E. Szóny, John Dee's Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs (Albany, 2004).

  2. This conclusion is based on the research of the modern alchemist Adam Maclean, who has made a graph of the printing dates of 432 alchemical works published in English between 1500 and 1800. He noticed a “sudden explosion” of publications in the late seventeenth century. The graph can be found on Maclean's alchemical website at http://www.levity.com/alchemy/eng_bks.html. The bibliographies of “Chymical Works” compiled by William Cooper in 1673, 1675 and 1688, which are described below, reinforce the same point: see Lauren Kassell, “Secrets Revealed: Alchemical Books in Early-Modern England,” History of Science, 49, 162 (2011), pp. 61–87. John Ferguson, the Scottish collector, calculated that more alchemical works appeared in English between 1650 and 1675 or 1680 “than in all the time before or after those dates.” Quoted in Ronald Sterne Wilkinson, “The Hartlib Papers and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry, Part I,” Ambix, 15, 1 (Feb. 1968), p. 56.

  3. C.H. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work (5 vols, Oxford, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 57, 391, vol. 4, p. 1891 n. 1.

  4. Frederick Talbot, “The Life of John Heydon,” in John Heydon, The Wise-Mans Crown: or, The Glory of the Rosie-Cross (London, 1664), pp. [i–xvi]; William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Boston, 1994; Chicago, 2003).

  5. For Hartlib and his circle, see George H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (London, 1953); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London, 1975); Mark Greengrass, M.P. Leslie and T.J. Raylor, eds, The Advancement of Learning in the 17th Century: Samuel Hartlib and his World (Cambridge, 1994).

  6. For the mystery of his identity, see Karin Figala and Ulrich Petzold, “Alchemy in the Newtonian Circle: Personal Acquaintances and the Problem of the Late Phase of Newton's Alchemy,” in J.V. Field and F.A.J.L. James, eds, Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 173–92. For Shadwell, see Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London, Volume 3: County of Middlesex (London, 1795), pp. 383–90.

  7. “Christian Rosencreutz” [Johann Valentin Andraea], The Hermetick Romance; or The Chymical Wedding, trans. E. Foxcroft (London, 1690). Foxcroft is referred to frequently in the correspondence of his relative Lady Conway with the philosopher Henry More: see Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, eds, The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684 (Oxford, 1992), passim. The identification of Foxcroft as the “Mr. F.” of Newton's manuscripts, especially King's College Library (KCL), Cambridge, Keynes Ms. 33, accessed through Sir Isaac Newton: Manuscripts and Papers (forty-three-reel microfilm collection, 1991: hereafter M&P), reel 19, has been challenged by Karin Figala, “Newton as Alchemist,” History of Science, 15 (1977), p. 103; but he appears again in a document edited by Karin Figala, John Harrison and Ulrich Petzold, “De Scriptoribus Chemicus: Sources for the Establishment of Isaac Newton's (Al)chemical Library,” in Peter Harman and Alan Shapiro, eds, The Investigation of Difficult Things: Essays on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 146–7.

  8. Beinecke Library, Mellon Ms. 62, f. 143.

  9. Newman, Gehennical Fire, p. 173. The quotation is from Samuel Hartlib.

  10. East Sussex Record Office (ESRO), FRE 5465; also FRE 5700–3 for Starkey's letters; Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 46–8.

  11. John Matson to Robert Boyle, 18 May 1676, in Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe, eds, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle (6 vols, London, 2001), vol. 4, p. 409.

  12. Peter Elmer, “The Library of John Webster,” Medical History, Supplement, 6 (1986), p. 19; The Last Will and Testament of Basil Valentine, Monk of the Order of St. Bennet (London, 1671), with note to the reader by J.W. For Webster as a member of the “Antinomian underground” in the 1630s, see David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Revolution England (Stanford, 2004), pp. 314–15.

  13. Wellcome Library, Ms. 3657, ff. [13–24], quotation on f. [15].

  14. Ronald Sterne Wilkinson, “The Hartlib Papers and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry, Part II,” Ambix, 17, 2 (July 1970), p. 105.

  15. John Heydon, A New Method of Rosie Crucian Physick (London, 1658), p. 38.

  16. F.E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (Oxford, 1947), esp. ch. 11; Alan Rudrum, “Bibliographical Introduction,” in Alan Rudrum and Jennifer Drake-Brockman, eds, The Works of Thomas Vaughan (Oxford, 1984), pp. 1–31.

  17. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1982), p. 282; Rudrum, “Bibliographical Introduction,” p. 23.

  18. David Stevenson, ed., Letters of Sir Robert Moray to the Earl of Kincardine, 1657–73 (Aldershot and Burlington, 2007), p. 128, and references in the index to chemists, Glauber and Paracelsus. Moray's Freemasonry is discussed below, in Chapter four.

  19. Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 3–9; Wilkinson, “Hartlib Papers, Part I,” pp. 64–5.

  20. Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, Ms. BE.D. (Ripley Scroll), accessed at http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/library/read/collection/ripley/ripley.php. See also R.I. McCallum, “The Ripley Scroll of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh,” Vesalius, 2, 1 (1996), pp. 39–49; Stanton J. Linden, “Reading the Ripley Scrolls: Iconographic Patterns in Renaissance Alchemy,” in György Szónyi, ed., European Iconography, East and West (Leiden, 1996), pp. 236–49. Sixteen Ripley Scrolls exist in the UK, and four in the US. They date from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Copies were owned by John Dee (Wellcome Lib., Ms. 692), the astrologer Simon Norton (Bodl. Lib., Ashmole Roll 53) and William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Ms. 276).

  21. Dickinson and Twysden are noted in ODNB; for Twysden and Faber, see KCL, Keynes Ms. 50, M&P, reel 19.

  22. Newman published a translation of Basil Valentine's Triumphant Chariot of Antimony (London, 1678), with notes by the physician Theodor Kirkringius.

  23. William Salmon, Medicina Practica, or Practical Physick (London, 1692), pp. 163–696.

  24. Glasgow University Library (GUL), Ferguson Ms. 322.

  25. See Allen Debus, The English Paracelsians (New York, 1965) and The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (2nd ed., New York, 2002).

  26. P.M. Rattansi, “The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,” Ambix, 12 (1964), pp. 1–23; Charles Webster, “English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: A Background to the ‘Society of Chymical Physicians,’” Ambix, 14 (1967), pp. 16–41; Harold J. Cook, “The Society of Chemical Physicians, the New Philosophy, and the Restoration
Court,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 61, 1 (1987), pp. 61–77.

  27. Meric Casaubon, Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil and Divine (London, 1668), pp. 16–17; Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986).

  28. Figala and Petzold, “Alchemy in the Newtonian Circle,” p. 182.

  29. This appears in the Getty Library copy of Elias Ashmole, The Way to Bliss (London, 1658), p. 26.

  30. Rudrum, “Biographical Introduction,” p. 12; Stephen Clucas, “The Correspondence of a XVII-Century ‘Chymicall Gentleman’: Sir Cheney Culpeper and the Chemical Interests of the Hartlib Circle,” Ambix, 40, 3 (Nov. 1993), p. 149. “Mistress Ogelby” may have been the wife of John Ogilby, Charles II's cosmographer; her death in 1677 was noted by Ashmole: Josten, ed., Ashmole, vol. iv, p. 1507.

  31. Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 82–3.

  32. J. Kent Clark, Goodwin Wharton (Oxford, 1984), pp. 7–9, ch. 4. No mention of alchemy is found in Maurice Ashley, Major John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster: A Study of the English Republican Movement in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1947).

  33. Josten, ed., Ashmole, vol. 1, passim; also, Michael Hunter, “Elias Ashmole, 1617–1692: The Founder of the Ashmolean Museum and his World,” in his Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995), pp. 21–42.

  34. Robert Latham, ed., The Shorter Pepys (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 89, 136.

  35. Josten, ed., Ashmole, vol. 2, p. 505.

  36. Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), ch. 4.

  37. Lois Schwoerer, “Liberty of the Press and Public Opinion, 1660–1695,” in J.R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688 (Stanford, 1982), pp. 199–230. The best overall account of censorship in the early-modern period remains Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, Ill., 1965), pp. 219–33.