Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Chapter Eight: An Occult Enlightenment

  1. Joscelyn Goodwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY, 1994); Dan Edelstein, ed., The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much (Oxford, 2010). The Super-Enlightenment can also be explored through the digital archive found at http://collections.stanford.edu/supere/.

  2. Russell McCormack, Speculative Truth: Henry Cavendish, Natural Philosophy and the Rise of Modern Theoretical Science (Oxford, 2004); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds, Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt., 2008).

  3. Quoted in Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of his Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (University Park, Pa., 2004), p. 99. See also John G. McEvoy, “Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher and Divine,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128, 3 (1984), pp. 193–8; W.H. Brock, “Joseph Priestley, Enlightened Experimentalist,” in Isabel Rivers and David Wyckes, eds, Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher and Theologian (Oxford, 2008), pp. 49–79.

  4. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth: or An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1, part 2 (1788), p. 304.

  5. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 40, Notes for lectures by Joseph Black, ff. 17–19.

  6. Price's Royal Society election certificate, in Royal Society Archives (hereafter RSA), EC/1781/08, shows that he was sponsored by Kirwan. The name “Higginbotham” has been crossed out and replaced with “Price.” Accessed at http://www2.royalsociety.org.

  7. James Price, An Account of Some Experiments on Mercury, Made at Guildford in May, 1782 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1782), pp. 1, 15. The first edition is entitled An Account of Some Experiments on Mercury, Made at Guildford in May, 1782. To which Is Prefixed an Abridgement of Boyle's Account of a Degradation of Gold (Oxford, 1782). It appeared in a German translation in 1783 under the title Versuche mit Quecksilber, Silber und Gold. Nebst einem Auszuge aus Boyles “Erzählung” (Dessau, 1783). Surprisingly, Price has a biography in ODNB, as well as in John Gorton, ed., A General Biographical Dictionary (3 vols, London, 1838), vol. 2.

  8. Patrick O'Brian, Joseph Banks; A Life (London, 1988), pp. 206–7; Warren Dawson, ed., The Banks Letters: A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks (London, 1958), pp. 54–5, 361; reviews are found in Medical Commentaries for the Years 1781–2 (London, 1787), pp. 176–90, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, 54 (1782), pp. 303–6, and The British Magazine and Review (3 vols, London, 1782–3), vol. 1, Oct. 1782, pp. 291–3. Gorton's General Biographical Dictionary gives the wrong date for Price's death, but states that Kirwan and the chemist Peter Woulfe were sent by the Royal Society to review his process.

  9. Price, Some Experiments, p. i.

  10. A different view of Banks can be found in John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 2003).

  11. The main contemporary printed source for his life is an autobiographical work, A Memoir of the Late Rev. John Clowes, A.M., … Written by Himself (Manchester, 1834). This is far less spiritually candid, however, than the two-volume manuscript entitled “A History of the Commencement & Progress in Great Britain of the Lord's New Church,” which is found in Chetham's Library, Ms. A.3.51–2. The biography by Theodore Compton, The Life and Correspondence of the Reverend John Clowes, M.A. (London, 1874), virtually sanctifies him.

  12. The changing religious situation in eighteenth-century Lancashire is discussed in Jan Albers, “Seeds of Contention: Society, Politics and the Church of England in Lancashire, 1688–1790,” PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1988, and Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865 (Oxford, 1994). A gloomier picture is presented in Michael Snape, The Church of England in Industrializing Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003).

  13. Thomas de Quincey, Autobiographical Sketches (Boston, 1853), pp. 156, 158.

  14. Chetham Library, Ms. A.3.51, ff. 14–15. For Clayton, see Richard Parkinson, ed., The Private Journals and Literary Remains of John Byrom, Chetham Society, vols 23, 24, 40, 44 (2 vols in 4 parts, Manchester, 1854–7), vol. 1, part 2, p. 509 n. 1.

  15. Chetham's Library, Ms. A.3.51, ff. 49, 62–3.

  16. [John Clowes], Dialogues, on the Nature, Design, and Evidence of the Theological Writings of the Hon. Emmanuel Swedenborg, with a Brief Account of Some of his Philosophical Works (London, 1788), p. 227. The publisher of this volume was John Denis, son of James Lackington's Behmenist partner.

  17. John Clowes, Sermons Preached at the Parish Church of St. John, Manchester (London, 1790), Sermon 20, “Deformity,” p. 228.

  18. Compton, Life and Correspondence of Clowes, p. 62.

  19. [Clowes], Dialogues, p. 7.

  20. For examples, ibid., p. 146; John Clowes, The Caterpillars and the Mulberry Bush, or A True Picture of the Bad Passions and their Mischievious Effects (Manchester, 1800), p. 10.

  21. Chetham's Library, Ms. A.3.52, f. 106; George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (5 vols, London, 1794), vol. 1, pp. 102, 281. In his Essays on the Microscope (London, 1787), p. xviii, a work printed by the Swedenborgian Robert Hindmarsh, Adams referred to two of Swedenborg's scientific tracts.

  22. Chetham's Library, Ms. A.3.52, ff. 56–7. The book was On Science: Its Divine Origin, Operation, Use and End; Together with its Various Interesting Properties, Qualities and Characters (Manchester, 1809).

  23. All of these materials, along with several biographical essays on Taylor, were published in Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper, eds, Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings (Princeton, 1969).

  24. Thomas Taylor, “A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries,” in Raine and Harper, eds, Thomas Taylor, p. 374.

  25. Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collections of Greece and Rome (New Haven, Conn., 2003); Goodwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, ch. 1; Michael Vickers, “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases,” Past and Present, 116 (1987), pp. 98–137, for Hancarville's influence on collecting; Peter Funnell, “The Symbolic Language of Antiquity,” in Michael Clark and Nicholas Penny, eds, The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824 (Manchester, 1982), pp. 50–64.

  26. Pierre François Hugues, Baron d'Hancarville, Recherches sur l'Origine, l'Esprit et les Progrès des Arts de la Grèce (3 vols, London, 1785). Hancarville borrowed, without revealing it, some aspects of alchemical imagery, like “the philosophical egg,” symbol of chaos, from which “the world issued by means of the Generative Being”: ibid., vol. 1, p. 176. Eager to establish his originality, he barely acknowledged a debt to previous theorists of the diffusion of symbols, like Athanasius Kircher or William Stukeley. Kircher is cited on minor matters in vol. 2, p. 300, and vol. 3, p. 154, while Stukeley appears in vol. 1, p. 458, in relation to the serpentine form of Avebury.

  27. Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (London, 1786); B.F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (London, 1985).

  28. Taylor, “Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries,” p. 345.

  29. Thomas Taylor, “The Hymns of Orpheus,” in Raine and Harper, eds, Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 173.

  30. Thomas Taylor, “The Platonic Philosopher's Creed,” in Raine and Harper, eds, Thomas Taylor the Platonist, pp. 440–1, 442–3, 444–5.

  31. Taylor, “Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries,” p. 387.

  32. Taylor, “Platonic Philosopher's Creed,” p. 440.

  33. Flaxman has been curiously neglected by biographers. See Margaret Whinney, “Flaxman and the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (1956), pp. 269–82; Sarah Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair: Patronage, Primitivism and the Art of John Flaxman,” The Burli
ngton Magazine, 117, 871 (1975), pp. 644–51; David Bindman, ed., John Flaxman (London, 1979); David Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755–1826: Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (New York, 1980); Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, pp. 237–45.

  34. B.L., Add. Ms. 39781, ff. 129–30.

  35. John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1829), pp. 331–2.

  36. W.S. Lewis, A. Dayle Wallace and Edwine M. Martz, eds, Horace Walpole's Correspondence with the Countess of Ossory (3 vols, New Haven, Conn., 1965), vol. 3, pp. 82–3.

  37. Goodwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 133; “Anthony Pasquin” [John Williams], “Memoirs of the Royal Academicians,” in his An Authentic History of Painting in Ireland (London, 1794: reprint, London, 1970), p. 120.

  38. The only sustained study of Sibly's thought is Allen G. Debus, “Scientific Truth and Occult Tradition: The Medical World of Ebenezer Sibly (1751–1799),” Medical History, 26 (1982), pp. 259–78. Biographies of Ebenezer and Manoah Sibly are found in ODNB.

  39. George Mensforth, The Young Student's Guide in Astrology (London, 1785), pp. v, 17–18.

  40. Richard Phillips, The Celestial Science of Astrology Vindicated (London, 1785).

  41. The Astrologer's Magazine; and Philosophical Miscellany (London, 1794). The successor to The Conjuror's Magazine, it ran for twelve monthly issues.

  42. For details on Sibly's life, I am indebted to Susan Sommers of St Vincent's College. DWL, Ms. Walton I.1.43, pp. 112–17, printed in Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of … William Law (London, 1854), pp. 595–6; Ebenezer Sibly, An Elegy Sacred to the Memory of that Patron of Virtue, the Truly Admired and Pious John Till Adams, M.D. of Bristol (Bristol, 1786); E. Ward, “Ebenezer Sibly,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 71 (1958), pp. 48–53; Jonathan Barry, “Piety and the Patient: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth Century Bristol,” in Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 155, 171.

  43. Ebenezer Sibly, A Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology (London, 1788), pp. 1051–55. A Google search for the term “Sibly Chart” produced about ten thousand matches in November 2011.

  44. Sibly, Celestial Science, pp. 1059, 1117.

  45. Ibid., pp. 1060, 1082–3.

  46. Placidus de Titus, A Collection of Thirty Remarkable Nativities, to Illustrate the Canons, and Prove the True Principles of Elementary Philosophy, ed. and trans. M.S. Sibly (London, 1789), preface, p. 5. The list of publishers of this work may identify a third Sibly brother, named Edmund, as well as a mysterious “J. Sibly,” Manoah's partner, who was not his wife, Sarah. Manoah also published and added a preface to Claudius Ptolemy, The Quadripartite; or, Four Books Concerning the Influences of the Stars, ed. John Whalley and others (London, 1786).

  47. Manoah Sibly, Twelve Sermons (London, 1796).

  48. Sibly, Celestial Science, pp. 1093–5.

  49. Ebenezer Sibly, The Medical Mirror or Treatise on the Impregnation of the Human Female (London, [1796]), p. 75.

  50. Sibly, Medical Mirror, pp. 49–52.

  51. Sibly, Culpeper's English Physician, pp. 202–11; Sibly, Celestial Science, pp. 59, 63, 66; Ebenezer Sibly, A Key to Physic, and the Occult Sciences (London, 1794), pp. 22–8, 51–2.

  52. [Ebenezer Sibly], An Universal System of Natural History (London, [1794]), pp. 7–8. For racial thinking in this period, see Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 4.

  53. Ebenezer Sibly, Culpeper's English Physician; and Complete Herbal (London, [1798]), pp. iii–iv, ix.

  54. Sibly, Universal System, p. 312.

  55. Ibid., pp. 52–9; Sibly, Medical Mirror, p. iii; Sibly, Culpeper's English Physician, p. 215.

  56. Sibly, Culpeper's English Physician, p. ix.

  57. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 128, ff. 17–19, 27v–37, 50v–54; Francis Barrett, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer; Being a Complete System of Occult Philosophy (London, 1801), part 2, chs 34–46.

  58. John Parkins, The Cabinet of Wealth, or The Temple of Wisdom (Grantham, 1812), p. 6. Parkins was also the author of The Universal Fortune-Teller; or, An Infallible Guide to the Secret and Hidden Decrees of Fate (London, 1810). For his biography, see Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2007), pp. 73, 115–18, 140–3.

  59. John Worsdale, Genethliacal Astrology (2nd ed., Newark, 1798), pp. xvii, 72–3. Worsdale also published A Collection of Remarkable Nativities, Calculated According to the Rules and Precepts of Claudius Ptolemy (Newark, 1799), which indicates that he rejected the Copernican system.

  60. Worsdale, Genethliacal Astrology, p. 14.

  61. Ibid., pp. vii.

  62. Ibid., pp. 54–5.

  63. J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), p. 49.

  64. A Catalogue of the Very Curious, Extensive, and Valuable Library of Richard Cosway, Esq., R.A. ([London], [1821]), p. 43, lot 782.

  65. S. Bacstrom, “Erzählung einer Reise nach Spitzbergen im Jahr 1780,” in J.W. von Archenholz, ed., Minerva, 2, 6 (1802), pp. 406–29.

  66. Kew Botanical Gardens (hereafter KBG), Banks Papers 1.222, 28 June 1786.

  67. Wellcome Library, Ms. 1030, ff. 98–100. Bacstrom remembered hearing lectures at Strasbourg on “the Spiritual Resuscitation of Plants” by the Jesuit Father Erhard, but a student at the Lutheran college might have been able to attend lectures by a Catholic professor. I have calculated his birth year from a statement made in 1771 that he was then twenty-eight years old.

  68. State Library, New South Wales (hereafter SL, NSW), Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, Series 06.140, dated March 1771; Series 06.141, Bacstrom to Banks, 8 March 1771, accessed through http://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks/. The use of exclamation marks is typical. See also J.G. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journals of Joseph Banks, 1768–71 (2 vols, Sydney, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 68, 73. Beaglehole calls Bacstrom a Dutchman, noting the occasional spelling of his name as “BacStrom.” The bill for a hammock and two pillows for Bacstrom appears in SL, NSW, Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, Series 06.096, 4 May 1772.

  69. Neil Chambers, ed., The Letters of Joseph Banks: A Selection, 1768–1820 (London, 2000), pp. 35–6; H.E. Connor and E. Edgar, “History of the Taxonomy of the New Zealand Native Grass Flora,” Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 32, 1 (2002), p. 100. Bacstrom is not mentioned by name in the chief account of the northern expedition, Uno von Troil, Letters on Iceland (London, 1780), and he does not appear in Edward Duyker and Per Tingbrand, eds, Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence, 1753–1782 (Melbourne, 1995).

  70. S. Bacstrom, “Account of a Voyage to Spitsbergen in the Year 1780,” from The Philosophical Magazine, July 1799, reprinted in John Pinkerton, ed., A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World (17 vols, London, 1808), vol. 1, pp. 614–20.

  71. KBG, Banks Papers 1.222, 28 June 1786. These letters from Bacstrom to Banks, and Bacstrom's career down to 1801, are catalogued in Dawson, ed., Banks Letters, pp. 26–7, and are discussed in Douglas Cole, “Sigismund Bacstrom's Northwest Coast Drawings and an Account of his Curious Career,” BC Studies, 46 (1980), pp. 61–86.

  72. KBG, Banks Papers 1.222 (Northumberland); 1.240, 21 Aug. 1786 (Cagliostro); 1.245, 26 Sep. 1786 (New Holland). The planned colony for convicts in the latter was, of course, Botany Bay.

  73. A Short Essay on the Virtues of Dr. Norris's Antinomial Drops (London, [1775?]), p. 31. The last edition of this pamphlet that contains Shute's letter was apparently printed in 1788. For admissions to the Inner Temple, see http://www.innertemple.org.uk/archive/itad/legal_profession.html.

  74. KBG, Banks Papers 2.46, 15 June 1791; 2.49, no date. Unnamed in the letter, Shute is identified in GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 6, no. 2, p. [6]. For Paradise Row, see GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 2, no. 9. A drawing of a smelting furnace in Bacstrom's hand survives in the Rainsford papers at Alnwick
Castle, Ms. 573A, pp. 191–2.

  75. KBG, Banks Papers 2.50, 18 Aug. 1791; SL, NSW, Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, Series 73.035, Banks to Bacstrom, 21 Aug. 1791. The imperial dimensions of the Nootka Sound crisis are considered in John M. Norris, “The Politics of the British Cabinet in the Nootka Crisis,” English Historical Review, 70, 277 (1955), pp. 562–80, while its local implications are treated in Daniel Wright Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver, 2000), ch. 7. See also George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World (6 vols, London, 1801), and Janet R. Fireman, “The Seduction of George Vancouver: A Nootka Affair,” Pacific Historical Review, 56, 3 (1987), pp. 427–43. A collection of sixty-three paintings by Bacstrom is in the Beinecke Library, WA MSS S-2405, under the title “Drawings and Sketches Made during a Voyage Around the World, 1791–1795.” The paintings can be viewed online at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=CNO.

  76. KBG, Banks Papers 2.153, 18 Nov. 1796.

  77. Copies of this document can be found in Wellcome Library, Ms. 33657, ff. 1–7; GUL, Ferguson Ms. 22, ff. 6–12 (misdated 1797 for 1794); GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 19 (an ornate version, illuminated in colour).

  78. KBG, Banks Papers 2.153. The Lodge of Antients no. 10 was constituted in 1751 at the Red Lyon, Cross Street, Long Acre, but in March 1792 was “granted and revived” to Lodge no. 159, which met at the Ship in the Strand. Bacstrom, who was living at East Street (now Lollard Street), Lambeth, may have been received by members of the old lodge. Robert Freke Gould, The Atholl Lodges: Their Authentic History (London, 1879), pp. 5, 31.