Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  67. Henry Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata: An Archaeological Discourse on the Antiquities, Natural and Historical, of the Isle of Anglesey, the Antient Seat of the British Druids (Dublin, 1723), pp. 55, 62–3, 71. The Druidic doctrine of transmigration had also been emphasized by Thomas Brown in his “Short Dissertation about the Mona of Caesar and Tacitus, the Several Names of Man, Whether Io Was the Principal Seat of the Ancient Druids, &c.,” printed in William Sacheverell, An Account of the Isle of Man (London, 1702), pp. 145–75.

  68. Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata, p. 62.

  69. John Toland, “A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning: Containing an Account of the Druids,” in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland (2 vols, London, 1726), vol. 1, p. 8; Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 213–35.

  70. Toland, “A Specimen,” pp. 161–3.

  71. William Stukeley, Stonehenge: A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids (London, 1740), p. 2; William Stukeley, Abury: A Temple of the British Druids (London, 1743), pp. 96–7.

  72. Stukeley, Abury, p. 54.

  73. Stukeley, Abury, p. 54; Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 160, 506–10, quotation on p. 508.

  74. Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (2 vols, Amsterdam, 1678), vol. 2, pp. 96–101.

  75. Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 387–434, esp. p. 405.

  76. The figure of a king wrapped in the embrace of a dragon appears occasionally in alchemical literature; for example, on the title page of a 1610 novel by the French writer Béroalde de Verville, L'Histoire Véritable ou Les Voyages du Prince Fortuné (Albi, 2005), where the dire situation is described on pp. 57–60. The interpretation of the constellation Engonasis as a Christian allegory had been specifically condemned as a heresy by the early Church Father Hippolytus, whose writings on the Druids were read by Stukeley, but this part of Hippolytus's text was not known until 1851. Hippolytus, “The Refutation of All Heresies,” trans. J.H. MacMahon, in Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. v: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian (Buffalo, 1888), book IV, chs 47–8, pp. 43–5; book V, ch. 11, p. 65.

  77. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.133, f. 56; Stukeley, Stonehenge, pp. 51–4. Stukeley later named Midian as the grandfather of the wife of Hercules, which made Abraham the physical forebear of the Druids. William Stukeley, “A Sunday's Meditation. June 24, 1759. Hescol, sive Origines Brittanicæ,” in Palæographia Sacra, pp. 121–33.

  78. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (4 vols, London, 1635), vol. 1, nos 45, 47. Wither's emblems were widely copied throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  79. “Lambsprinck,” De Lapide Philosophico (Frankfurt, 1577), reprinted in Musæum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum (Frankfurt, 1625), p. 353; Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (Oppenheim, 1618), Emblema 14.

  80. “Eirenæus Orandus,” ed., Nicolas Flammel, his Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures Which he Caused to Bee Painted upon an Arch on St. Innocents Church-yard in Paris. Together with the Secret Booke of Artephius, and the Epistle of John Pontanus: Concerning Both the Theoricke and the Practicke of the Philosopher's Stone (London, 1624), pp. 7–8. For an eighteenth-century illustrated version of Flamel, see “Abraham Eleazar,” Uraltes Chymisches Werck (Erfurt, 1735), whose emblems can be admired at http://www.alchemywebsite.com/britlib1.html.

  81. Dobbs, Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, pp. 130–2.

  82. Stukeley, Abury, p. 38.

  83. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.133, f. 53v.

  84. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.133, f. 14; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.134, ff. 11–12; Ms. Engl. Misc. e.138, f. 14.

  85. FHL, Stukeley Mss., vol. 1, pp. 125–90, quotation on p. 153.

  86. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.133, f. 23.

  87. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.129, ff. 12–18; Ms. Engl. e.134, ff. 56–9; Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/13, f. 32v.

  88. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. 719/13, ff. 28v–52v, numbered backwards.

  89. Stukeley, Abury, p. 56.

  90. Arthur Macgregor, Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London, 1994), pp. 213, 271; Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. e.132, f. 27v. Sloane's alchemical manuscripts have been listed by Adam Maclean at http://www.alchemywebsite.com/britlib1.html.

  91. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of All Things (6th ed., London, 1755), pp. 3, 34. Whiston was responding to the theories of Thomas Burnet, The Sacred History of the Earth (2 vols, London, 1681–2), according to which the universe was created from nothing and the earth was originally a smooth, round egg, broken apart by the Deluge. Burnet's evolutionary approach left little room for an alchemical rediscovery of primal matter. For the controversy, see James T. Force, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 32–62; Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1984), pp. 66–9.

  92. His Arianism and subsequent religious struggles are discussed in Stewart, Rise of Public Science, ch. 3, and his prophetic views in Force, William Whiston, pp. 63–89.

  93. William Whiston, An Account of a Surprizing Meteor, Seen in the Air, March the 6th, 1715, at Night (London, 1716), p. 88.

  94. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. 719/7, f. 40. In Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (2 vols, London, 1753), vol. 1, p. 132, Whiston also reversed his opinion on whether comets and meteors were signs of the Apocalypse. For his changing view of “wonders,” see Burns, Age of Wonders, pp. 170–4.

  95. William Whiston, A Vindication of the Sibylline Oracles (London, 1715). Christians had long accepted the oracles relating to the birth of Christ, but Whiston went further in arguing that all of these arcane pronouncements were prophetic utterances. For Whiston's fixation with the prophetic biblical book 2nd Esdras, see Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1999), pp. 267–79.

  96. William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal'd (London, 1717), p. 127; William Whiston, An Account of the Dæmoniacks (London, 1737), pp. 49–75; William Whiston, Mr. Whiston's Account of the Exact Time When Miraculous Gifts Ceas'd in the Church (London, 1749), p. 25.

  97. William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (2nd ed., 2 vols, London, 1753), vol. 2, pp. 108–10. The best account of Whiston's role in the Toft affair is is Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1995), pp. 38–44.

  98. William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (London, 1749), pp. 333–4, 602–10.

  99. Stukeley, Stonehenge, p. 39. Avebury, in Stukeley's view, was twice as old as Stonehenge, and built without tools.

  100. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Engl. Misc. d.719/8, f. 17v.

  101. For various aspects of Freemasonry in this period, see Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991); John Money, “Freemasonry and the Fabric of Loyalism in Hanoverian England” in Eckhart Hellmuth, ed., The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990), pp. 235–74, as well as a work on colonial and republican America that has resonance for Britain, Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

  102. Toland's reading of Bruno has been examined in numerous works, including Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, pp. 228–45; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, pp. 150–4; Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 31–2, 172; Robert Rees Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York, 1991), pp. 95–9.

  103. John Toland, “De Genere, Loco, et
Tempore Mortis Jordani Bruni Nolani,” in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, vol. 1, p. 312.

  104. John Toland, Pantheisticon. Sive Formula Celebrandæ Sodalitatis Socraticæ (“Cosmopoli,” i.e. Amsterdam, 1720), pp. A2, 5, 9. An English translation is found in John Toland, Pantheisticon: or, The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society (London, 1751), but it is often more difficult to follow than the original.

  105. The original sentence is awkwardly constructed: “Hinc, Spagyricis, proh dolor! spes ulla Chrysopoeia non relinquitur.” The English translation of 1751 is more blunt: “Hence, Chymists, alas! may despond of ever finding the Philosopher's Stone.” Toland, Pantheisticon (Latin ed.), p. 40; Toland, Pantheisticon (English ed.), pp. 55–6.

  106. Toland, Pantheisticon (Latin ed.), p. 77; Toland, Pantheisticon (English ed.), pp. 95–6.

  107. J.M. Blom, “The Life and Works of Robert Samber (1682–circa 1745),” English Studies, 70, 6 (1989), pp. 507–50; also, the article on Samber by J.M. and F. Blom in ODNB.

  108. Robert Samber, Roma Illustrata: or A Description of the Most Beautiful Pieces of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Antique and Modern, at or near Rome (London, 1723), Dedication. For Burlington's role as a patron, see James Lees-Milne, Earls of Creation (London, 1962), ch. 3; Jacques Carré, Lord Burlington (1694–1753): Le connoisseur, le Mécène, l'Architecte (Clermont-Ferrand, 1993); John Harris, The Palladian Revival: Lord Burlington, his Villa and Garden at Chiswick (New Haven, Conn., 1994).

  109. [James Anderson], The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (London, 1723), p. 48; Carré, Burlington, pp. 66–72.

  110. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rawl. Poet. 134b, f. 82. For Wharton, see Lewis Melville, The Life and Writings of Philip, Duke of Wharton (London, 1913); Mark Blackett-Ord, Hell-Fire Duke: The Life of the Duke of Wharton (Windsor, 1982). Burlington has also been labelled a Jacobite, on more slender and questionable grounds, by Jane Clark in “The Mysterious Mr. Buck: Patronage and Politics, 1688–1745,” Apollo, May 1989, pp. 317–22, “‘Lord Burlington Is Here,’” in Toby Barnard and Jane Clark, eds, Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life (London, 1995), pp. 251–310, and “‘His Zeal Is Too Furious’: Lord Burlington's Agents,” in Edward Corp, ed., Lord Burlington: The Man and his Politics Questions of Loyalty (Lewiston, N.Y., 1998), pp. 181–98.

  111. “Eugenius Philalethes” [Robert Samber], Long Livers: A Curious History of Such Persons of Both Sexes Who Have Liv'd Several Ages and Grown Young Again (London, 1722). The preface was republished with an introduction by the Masonic historian Edward Gould in 1892. The work is further discussed in Edward Armitage, “Robert Samber,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 11 (1896), pp. 103–32. See also “Eugenius Philalethes” [Robert Samber], A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1721).

  112. [Samber], Long Livers, pp. v, vi, xxii–iii, xlix, li–ii. The “book M” is introduced in “Christian Rosenkreuz” [J. V. Andræa], Fama Fraternitatis, or, A Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Laudable Order of the Rosy Cross, p. 5, which was included in “Eugenius Philalethes” [Thomas Vaughan], The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R:C: Commonly, of the Rosie Cross (London, 1652). As Samber adopted Vaughan's pseudonym, it is probable that he used this translation of Rosenkreuz's work.

  113. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rawl. Poet 11, ff. 74–5.

  114. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rawl. Poet 133, ff. 79–160v, quotation on f. 91v. For Cuper and Jurieu, see Gerald Cerny, ed., Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization: Jacques Basnage and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987), pp. 99, 167. An explanation of Teraphim is found in The Jewish Encyclopedia (12 vols, New York, 1901–6), vol. 12, pp. 108–9. Their connection with astrology is not of course biblical, but is derived from rabbinical literature.

  115. Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rawl. Poet 133, No. III, ff. 162b–168.

  116. Steele supported a proposal by Samber to publish a translation of Ovid's Metamporphoses: Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rawl. Poet. 134b, f. 152v.

  117. R.F. Gould, “Martin Clare,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 4 (1891), pp. 33–41; Martin Clare, Youth's Introduction to Trade and Business (5th ed., London, 1740), title page; [Martin Clare], Rules and Orders for the Government of the Academy in Soho-Square, London ([London], [c. 1740]).

  118. Martin Clare, The Movement of Fluids, Natural and Artificial (2nd ed., London, 1746), sigs A2, A4.

  119. “A Defence of Masonry, Publish'd A.D. 1730. Occasion'd by a Pamphlet Entitl'd Masonry Dissected,” in James Anderson, The New Book of Constitutions of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Acceped Masons (London, 1738), pp. 219–22. As Anderson's name appeared on this edition of the Constitutions, there was no need to disguise his authorship of the “Defence.” Samuel Prichard's anti-Masonic pamphlet, Masonry Dissected, appeared in 1730 and was frequently reprinted.

  120. “Defence of Masonry,” pp. 224–5.

  121. That the Eleusinian mysteries were well known to a broad audience is illustrated by their description in standard works of reference like A Dictionary of All Religions, Ancient and Modern (London, 1723).

  122. Lewis Theobald to Warburton, 24 Feb. 1730, in John Nichols, ed., Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (8 vols, London, 1817–58), vol. 2, p. 517, a reference to Masonry in Shakespeare. This comment may be directed at Alexander Pope, who was a Freemason. Warburton, of course, later befriended the poet and became his literary executor. For The Divine Legation, see also B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5.

  123. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses (3 vols in 2 parts, London, 1738–41), vol. 1, pp. 133–4.

  124. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 182. Warburton devoted fifty pages of the first volume to Aeneas's journey into Hades.

  125. Ibid., pp. 332–3, 403–9, quotation on p. 408. For more against “the infamous Spinoza,” see part 2, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 310–11.

  126. Ibid., vol. 2, part 1, pp. 113, 153.

  127. Ibid., vol. 2, part 1, pp. 201, 206.

  128. Ibid., vol. 2, part 2, p. 639. Unlike Stukeley, Warburton concentrates on the formal characteristics of ritual or writing and is not much concerned with the origins of the sacred ideas behind them.

  129. Still poorly understood, the difficulties of British Freemasonry in the mid-eighteenth century were first indicated by R.F. Gould in The History of Freemasonry: Its Antiquities, Symbols, Constitutions, Customs, Etc. (6 vols, London, 1882–7), vol. 3, chs 17–19.

  Chapter Six: The Occult on the Margins

  1. This question has been asked more often by historians of other parts of Europe, beginning with Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978) and including F. Steven Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (Hambledon and London, 2000).

  2. Alexandra Walsham, “Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of Folklore,” in S.A. Smith and Alan Knight, eds, The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 3 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 178–206.

  3. Henry Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares: or, The Antiquities of the Common People (Newcastle, 1725), pp. x–xi. For Bourne, see Walsham, “Recoding Superstition,” pp. 193–9; Sash Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2007), pp. 181–3. The campaign to reform popular customs is considered in David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994).

  4. Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, p. 63.

  5. Ibid., pp. 77, 84.

  6. Ibid., pp. 114, 224.

  7. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, ch. 2, gives a thorough analysis of these.

  8. John Frazer, ΔEYTEPOΣKOΠIA [Deutoroskopia] or, A Brief Discourse Concerning the Second Sight, Commonly So Called (Edinburgh, 1707), p. 25, reprinted in Michael Hu
nter, ed., The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2001), p. 200.

  9. Ibid., pp. 11–12. For more on second sight, see “Theophilus Insulanus” [Donald Macleod], A Treatise on the Second Sight, Dreams and Apparitions (Edinburgh, 1763); Martin Rackwitz, Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Traveller's Accounts, c. 1600–1800 (Münster, 2007), pp. 505–12.

  10. Discussions of these three works can be found in Rodney Baine, Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens, Georgia, 1969), and Katherine Clark, Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Basingstoke, 2007). See also Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations, c. 1650–c. 1750 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 136–8; Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 522–6; John J. Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 2005), pp. 169–73.

  11. [Daniel Defoe], The Political History of the Devil (London,1726), pp. 2, 226.

  12. Ibid., pp. 341, 343–4.

  13. [Daniel Defoe], An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (London, 1727), p. 341.

  14. Ibid., p. 21.

  15. [Daniel Defoe], A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art (London, 1727), sig. A3, pp. 1–2.

  16. Ibid., pp. 65, 102–3, 226.

  17. Ibid., pp. 285–316. The profession in general is discussed in Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003). A certain Dr Borman was assessed for eight hearths in the parish of Bexley, Kent in 1664: Duncan Harrington, ed., “Kent Hearth Tax Assessment, Lady Day, 1664: CKS Q/RTh,” accessed at http://www.hearthtax.org.uk/communities/kent/kent_1664L_transcript.pdf. Bexley is not near Maidstone, but it is on the main road to it from London. Daniel Borman was town chamberlain of Maidstone in 1685–6, and William Borman a common councilman, or town officer, in 1745: http://www.kent-opc.org/Parishes/Court/MaidstoneChamberlains.html; http://www.kent-opc.org/Parishes/Court/MaidstoneJuratsetal.html.