Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  137. For Curll, see Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford, 2007). The second (anonymous) pamphlet by Bragge was Witchcraft Farther Display'd (London, 1712).

  138. The Impossibility of Witchcraft, Plainly Proving, from Scripture and Reason, That There Never Was a Witch, and That it Is Both Irrational and Impious to Believe There Ever Was (London, 1712). For the Protestant Post-Boy, see Phyllis J. Guskin, “The ‘Protestant Post-Boy’ and ‘An Elegy on the Death of Pamphlets,’” Notes and Queries, 223 (Feb. 1978), pp. 40–1.

  139. The Impossibility of Witchcraft, Further Demonstrated (London, 1712); Francis Bragge [junior], A Defense of the Proceedings against Jane Wenham (London, 1712); G.R., The Belief of Witchcraft Vindicated (London, 1712).

  140. “A Physician in Hertfordshire,” A Full Confutation of Witchcraft: More Particularly of the Depositions against Jane Wenham, Lately Condemned for a Witch; at Hertford (London, 1712), pp. 3, 45, 48.

  141. [Henry Stebbing], The Case of the Hertfordshire Witchcraft, Consider'd (London, 1715), p. 12.

  142. On the politics of this period, see Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Dr. Sacheverell (London, 1973); Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710–14 (Edinburgh, 1984).

  143. His biography can be found in ODNB, and his role in the medical controversies of the late 1690s is discussed in Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor, pp. 183–4.

  144. [Richard Boulton], A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft (2 vols, London, 1715–16), vol. 1, preface, sig. A3.

  145. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

  146. Ibid., pp. 18–23.

  147. Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations, pp. 143–4.

  148. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1718), pp. vi, xiv.

  149. Ibid., p. 133.

  150. Richard Boulton, The Possibility and Reality of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft, Demonstrated. Or, a Vindication of a Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft (London, 1722), pp. xii–xiii.

  Chapter Five: The Newtonian Magi

  1. The best discussion of Newton's followers is found in Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992). For the impact of science on religion, see Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976). Stewart and Jacob have cowritten a general examination of Newton's cultural significance entitled Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Technology and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

  2. For the criticism of “wonders” by the Newtonians Edmond Halley and William Whiston, see William E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002), pp. 160–3, 166–70. Whiston later reversed his views, as will be seen. John Flamsteed, a reluctant collaborator of Newton, disliked astrology but was open-minded on the subject of ghosts: Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2007), ch. 3.

  3. Jean-Théophile Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government, in Pierre Boutin, Jean-Théophile Desaguliers: Un Huguenot, Philosophe et Juriste, en Politique (Paris, 1999), pp. 229–33, ll. 121, 123, 153–5, 175.

  4. New College, Oxford, Ms. 361(2), f. 133, M&P, reel 24, cited in Frank E. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Harvard, 1963), p. 149.

  5. Royal Society, Ms. LXIX.a.2, William Stukeley, “Memoirs of Sr. Isaac Newton's Life 1752,” p. 131, f. 57 (accessed at http://ttp.royalsociety.org).

  6. Ibid., p. 151, f. 67.

  7. Newton to Locke, 14 Nov. 1690, in H.W. Turnbull et al, eds, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (7 vols, Cambridge, 1959–77), vol. 3, pp. 82–129. These letters were not published until 1754. The issue of heresy was by no means buried in Hanoverian England, although the charge against heretics that was usually brought in ecclesiastical courts was changed to “blasphemy.”

  8. Desaguliers, “Newtonian System,” in Boutin, pp. 221–2, 229, ll. 7, 19–20, 33, 127.

  9. Newton is called a “Pythagorean Magus” in Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1999), ch. 7.

  10. Freemasons Hall Library (hereafter FHL), 1130 STU, Stukeley Mss., vol. 1, pp. 51–67.

  11. For sociability, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2000); for Freemasons, Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia, 2006), and David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (Cambridge, 1988).

  12. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford, 1971), pp. 149, 154–5, 158–9.

  13. Ibid., p. 169.

  14. Ibid., p. 190.

  15. Ibid., p. 206.

  16. The assertion that Swift was himself a Freemason rests mainly on the publication in 1724 of an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Letter from the Grand Mistress of Free-Masons, to Mr. George Faulkner, Printer. It is peppered with insider jokes aimed at other Masons. Swift is now acknowledged to have been the author.

  17. The indebtedness of this section to Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980), chs 12–17, as well as to Manuel, Newton, Historian and Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), will be obvious to anyone who has read those works. Also of importance are the essays in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds, Newton and Religion: Context, Nature and Influence (Dordrecht, 1999).

  18. Much of that history is laid out in Helen Rosenau, Visions of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London, 1979), but see also Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1998), pp. 134–55.

  19. Hieronimo Prado and Juan Bautista Villalpando, In Ezechiel Explanationes et Apparatus Urbis, ac Templi Hierosolymitani Y (3 vols, Rome, 1596–1605). Prado worked only on the first volume, which deals with Ezekiel's prophecy; the description of the Temple, with lavish illustrations, appears in the second and third volumes, which were authored by Villalpando alone. For discussions of Villalpando's work, see René Taylor, “Villalpando's Mystical Temple,” in Juan Antonio Ramírez et al, Dios Arquitecto: J.B. Villalpando y el Templo de Salomón (Madrid, 1991), pp. 153–211; René Taylor, “Architecture and Magic: Considerations on the Idea of the Escorial,” in D. Fraser, M. Hibbard and H.J. Lewine, eds, Essays Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (2 vols, London, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 81–109.

  20. Samuel Lee, Orbis Miraculum, or The Temple of Solomon Pourtrayed by Scripture-Light (London, 1659), p. 189.

  21. Ibid., p. 168; also, John Bunyan, Solomon's Temple Spiritualiz'd, ed. Graham Midgley, Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 7 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 1–115.

  22. Johann Valentin Andreæ, Christianopolis, trans. Edward H. Thompson (Dordrecht, 1999), pp. 84–90, 161–2, 209–40, 257–8. See also Donald Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1998), chs 2–3.

  23. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, in James Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath, eds, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (London, 1876), pp. 129–65; J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 5.

  24. For Hartlib and Villalpando, see Bennett and Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, pp. 141–2; for Hartlib and Andreæ, see Dickson, Tessera of Antilia, ch. 5; for Macaria, see Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution: Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib and Macaria (Oxford, 1979).

  25. Christopher Wren, “Tracts on Architecture,” in Christopher Wren and Stephen Wren, eds, Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1750), pp. 356, 359–60.

  26. Bennett and Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, pp. 150–1; A.K. Offenberg, “Jacob Jehudah Leon (1602–1675) and his Model of the Temple,” in Johannes van den Berg and Ernestine G.E. van der Wall,
eds, Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht, 1988), pp. 95–115; “Traditional Reconstructions,” in Ramírez et al, Dios Arquitecto, pp. 100–4.

  27. For Wren's grand mastership, see James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Freemasons (London, 1723), pp. 41, 43, 46; [Anonymous], The Pocket Companion and History of Free-Masons (London, 1754), pp. 85–7, 91. His friendship with Robert Moray and his regard for stonemasons are confirmed in Wren and Wren, eds, Parentalia, pp. 210–11, 293, 306–7. For the importance to Freemasonry of the Temple, as well as the Tower of Babel, see Alex Horne, King Solomon's Temple in the Masonic Tradition (London, 1971).

  28. Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 39–40.

  29. George Renolds, The State of the Greatest King, Set Forth in the Greatness of Solomon, and the Glory of his Reign (Bristol, 1721), pp. 72–3.

  30. [Anonymous], The Temple of Solomon, with All its Porches, Walls, Gates, Halls, Chambers, Holy Vessels, the Altar of Burnt-Offering, the Molten-Sea, Golden-Candlesticks, Shew-Bread, Tables, Altar of Incense, the Ark of the Covenant, with the Mercy-Seat, the Cherubim, &c. As Also the Tabernacle of Moses, with All its Appurtenances According to the Several Parts Thereof; Contained in the Following Description and Annexed Copper Cuts. Erected in a Proper Model and Material Representation (London, 1724), quotation on sig. A2, p. 1; also, Home, King Solomon's Temple, pp. 54–5; W.H. Rylands, “Schott's Model of Solomon's Temple,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 13 (1900), pp. 24–5; Barthold Feind, “Dramaturgy of Opera,” in Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), p. 325.

  31. Newton's reading of Villalpando is recorded in two documents, Yahuda Ms. 14 and 28, both now held in the National Library of Israel, Tel Aviv; M&P, reels 38, 39. A transcript of part of Yahuda Ms. 28 is found at the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00274.

  32. Newton's computation of the “sacred cubit,” written in Latin, was translated into English and published as “A Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews and the Cubits of the Several Nations; in Which, from the Dimensions of the Greatest Egyptian Pyramid, as Taken by Mr. John Greaves, the Antient Cubit of Memphis Is Determined,” in John Greaves, Miscellaneous Works (2 vols, Oxford, 1737), vol. 2, pp. 405–53. A transcript is available online at the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00276.

  33. Isaac Newton, “A Treatise or Remarks on Solomon's Temple … Prolegomena ad Lexici Prophetici partem secundam, in quibus agitur de forma Sanctuarij Judaici,” Huntington Library, Babson Ms. 434, M&P, reel 42, reproduced in Isaac Newton, El Templo de Salomón: edición crítica, traducción española y estudio filológico, ed. Ciriaco Morano (Madrid, 1996), pp. 1–69, quotation on p. 1; also available online at the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00079.

  34. Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended. To Which Is Prefix'd, A Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great (London, 1728), pp. 71–95.

  35. Ibid., pp. 188–90.

  36. Ibid., pp. 223–46.

  37. Ibid., p. 328. Newton was less harsh in his criticism of pagan religion than many of his sources, including Richard Cumberland, bishop of Peterborough, whose work Sanchoniatho's Phoenician History (London, 1720) deplored the idolatry of “Heathenism.”

  38. Newton, Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, pp. 12, 25. According to Manuel, Newton reduced the voyage of the Argo to “a practical diplomatic mission,” but this undervalues the transmission of the arts and science to the whole world: Manuel, Newton, Historian, p. 80.

  39. Antoine Faivre, The Golden Fleece and Alchemy (Albany, 1994), pp. 24–9; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy; or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 112, 130–1; Smithsonian Institution, Dibner Library, NMAHRB Ms. 1028B, NMAHRB Ms. 1032B (notes on Maier), M&P, reel 43; John T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot, Hants, 1998), pp. 234–7 (Nuysement and the Hartlib Circle).

  40. Newton, Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, pp. 15, 17.

  41. Ibid., p 25; Angela Voss, “The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino,” in Michael J.B. Allen, Valery Rees and Martin Davies, eds, Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy (Leiden, 2001), pp. 227–42; Peter Branscombe, Die Zauberflöte (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 12, 54.

  42. Stuart Pigott, William Stukeley, an Eighteenth-Century Antiquary (rev. ed., London, 1985); Peter J. Ucko, Michael Hunter, Alan J. Clark and Andrew David, Avebury Reconsidered: From the 1660s to the 1990s (London, 1991), pp. 53–7, 74–98; David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002); Aubrey Burl and Neil Mortimer, eds, Stukeley's Stonehenge: An Unpublished Manuscript, 1721–1724 (New Haven, Conn., 2005), pp. 1–21, for criticism of Haycock. The antiquarian context is described in Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004).

  43. W.C. Lukis, ed., The Family Memoirs of the Reverend William Stukeley, M.D., and the Antiquarian and Other Correspondence of William Stukeley, Roger and Samuel Gale, Etc., Surtees Society 73, 76, 80 (3 vols, Durham, 1882–7), vol. 1, p. 51; Bodleian Library, Ms. Engl. Misc. c.553, ff. 34v, 35–7.

  44. The trend away from astrology in almanacs is documented in Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), pp. 245–7.

  45. Edmund Weaver, The British Telescope … 1731 (London, 1731), p. 36.

  46. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/1, f. 28; Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/3, f. 8; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.132, ff. 53v–4.

  47. Capp, English Almanacs, p. 242.

  48. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/2, f. 28; Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/3, ff. 15, 28.

  49. Wellcome Library, Ms. 4729. The manuscript originally belonged to Richard Edlyn, a noted astrologer of the reign of Charles II.

  50. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/6, ff. 20v, 24.

  51. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/7, f. 23; Ilsetraut Hadot, Studies on the Neoplatonist Hierocles, trans. Michael Chase, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 94 (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 99–124, quotation on p. 113. For the Cambridge Neoplatonist influence on Stukeley, see Haydon, Stukeley, pp. 149–50.

  52. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/8, f. 5.

  53. Stukeley's conversations with Newton about the ancient world, dating from April 1726, are found in Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. c.533, p. 41. In the fourth edition of his New Science of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of All Things (London, 1725), p. 169, and in later editions of the same work, Stukeley's friend William Whiston proposed that the zodiac was divided into twelve parts before the Deluge, but he mentioned nothing about the zodiacal symbols.

  54. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (3 vols, Rome, 1652–5), vol. 2, part 1, pp. 160–2. For Kircher, see Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York, 2004), and Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Wisdom (London, 1979); also Haydon, Stukeley, pp. 140–1.

  55. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Eng. Misc. d.719/10, ff. 4–5; William Stukeley, Palæographia Britannica: or Discourses on Antiquities That Relate to the History of Britain. Number III. Oriuna Wife of Carausius, Emperor of Britain (London, 1752), pp. 33–4. The Bible does not mention Adam sacrificing two pigeons, although Noah sacrifices two doves after the Ark reaches land. Doves and pigeons were the only birds that could lawfully be sacrificed by the Israelites, according to Leviticus 12:6–8.

  56. “Eirenaeus Philalethes” [George Starkey], Secrets Reveal'd (London, 1669); Dobbs, Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, pp. 176, 181–3; A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetick Art … By a Lover of Philalethes (London, 1714).

  57. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. c.5
33, ff. 22, 27; Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/18, f. 11v; Ms. Engl. Misc. d.456, f. 167; for Diana, Ms. Engl. Misc. c.533, f. 37; FHL, 1130 STU, vol. 3, ff. 33–4, 41–4.

  58. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/19, f. 9; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.196, ff. 39–40, 52; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.129, f. 2.

  59. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. c.533, f. 37; FHL, Stukeley Mss., vol. 3, no. 4, ff. 1, 4, 33–4, 41–4; FHL, Stukeley Mss., vol. 3, no. 9B, “Bezaleel.” The dedication of the second part of “Bezaleel” to Martin Ffolkes has been crossed out, suggesting that it was written around the time of Ffolkes's death in 1754.

  60. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.128, f. 96; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.131, ff. 19, 30–1; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.132, ff. 5v–12, 53v–58, 61, 75, 77.

  61. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.139, ff. 72, 74.

  62. William Stukeley, “Cosmogonia, or Spring, Asserted to Be the Time of Creation,” in Palæographia Sacra. Or Discourses on Sacred Subjects (London, 1763), p. 65.

  63. The significance of the Druids in British culture has been underlined by several important works, including A.L. Owen, The Famous Druids: A Survey of Three Centuries of English Literature on the Druids (Oxford, 1962); Stuart Piggott, The Druids (Harmondsworth, 1975), ch. 4; Ronald Hutton, The Druids: A History (Hambledon, 2007); Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven, Conn., 2009), esp. chs 2–4. See also Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), pp. 296–326.

  64. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl Misc. e.135, f. 15; Piggott, Stukeley, ch. 4; Haycock, William Stukeley, ch. 7; Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, pp. 86–102.

  65. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.135, f. 19. For British national sentiment in this period, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1982), and Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 3.

  66. Paul-Yves Pezron, The Antiquities of Nations: More Particularly of the Celtae or Gauls, Taken Originally to Be the Same People as our Ancient Britons, trans. D. Jones (London, 1706).