Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  79. Alexander Tilloch, ed., The Philosophical Magazine, 1 (June 1798), sig. A2.

  80. The Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1826, vol. 10 (London, 1826), pp. 320–34, quotations on pp. 321–2, 331. Tilloch is also noticed in ODNB. His learned musings on the Apocalypse, dealing particularly with the date and structure of the book, were published as Dissertations Introductory to the Study and Right Understanding of the Language, Structure and Contents of the Apocalypse (London, 1823).

  81. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 22, f. 19, where Tilloch's name is crudely scratched out of the initiation certificate; GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Mss. vols 1–19, of which vols 1, 9, 11, 15, 16 and 17 are mostly written out by Tilloch, and vol. 18 is in a third hand.

  82. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 2, no. 3, p. [i]; Bacstrom Ms. 5, no. 2, p. [ii].

  83. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Papers, vol. 14, letters of 29 Dec. 1805, 28 May 1808. Bacstrom must have been among the earliest inhabitants of Albion Street. It had disappeared by the early twentieth century.

  84. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 6, no. 8; Ms. 8, no. 3; Ms. 9, no. 7; Ms. 14, no. 13, letter of 29 Dec. 1805; Beinecke Library, Mellon Ms. 141, ff. 22v–24. For a recipe communicated to Belisario by a rabbi, see GUL, Ferguson Ms. 311, no. 4.

  85. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 3, no. 5, and vol. 4; GUL, Ferguson Ms. 25 (same material as preceding), 99 (a collection of short texts transcribed by Sibly), 305 (astrology).

  86. Wellcome Library, Ms. 3657, ff. 13–23; GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 14, no. 1; Beinecke Library, Mellon Ms. 141, f. 1. Bacstrom claimed that the younger Garden had founded the almshouses, which made his later residence there ironic. In fact, they were founded in 1703 by R. Morell, although Garden may well have given them a donation of £2,000, as Bacstrom asserts. Sampson Low, junior, The Charities of London in 1861 (London, 1862), p. 185.

  87. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 14, no. 8. No burgemeester of Amsterdam had the name Gommée, which sounds like Gomes, a common surname among the Dutch city's Sephardic Jewish community.

  88. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 9, no. 3, Ms. 14, nos 6 (Rosenheim, Charas Stella), 7 (La Fountain); Wellcome Library, Ms. 1030, ff. 97v, 98–100. For the Lafontaines, see Hans Vollmer, ed., Allgemeines Lexicon der Bildenden Künstler, vol. 22 (1928), pp. 208–9.

  89. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 22, ff. 22–40v.

  90. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 1031, f. 31, 62–3.

  91. Humphry Davy, “The Bakerian Lecture, on Some New Phænomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity,” in Alexander Tilloch, ed., The Philosophical Magazine, 32 (Oct.–Dec. 1808), pp. 3–18, 101–12, 146–54; Richard Knight, Humphry Davy: Power and Science (Cambridge, 1992), chs 5, 9; James Hamilton, Michael Faraday (London, 2002), ch. 1.

  92. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 1031, ff. 31v, 63.

  93. GUL, Ferguson Ms. 314, no. 5.

  94. GRL, MHC, Bacstrom Ms. 8, no. 1.

  95. George S. Draffen, “Some Further Notes on the Rite of Seven Degrees in London,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 39 (1956), pp. 100–1.

  96. W. Wonnacott, “The Rite of Seven Degrees in London,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 39 (1926), pp. 85, 86.

  97. G.W. Speth, “A Symbolical Chart of 1789,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 3 (1890), pp. 36–7, and “Editor's Note,” in ibid., p. 109; “Masonic Charities,” The New Age Magazine, 18, 2 (1913), p. 172; R.A. Gilbert, “Shaping the Cubic Stone: Masonic Symbolism in Lambert de Lintot's Engraving,” Hermetic Journal, 39 (1988), pp. 23–8.

  98. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,665, ff. 50–1.

  99. ODNB remains the best source for his biography, but for his most important appointment, see “Commissary Rainsford's Journal of Transactions, etc., 1776–78,” in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1879 (New York, 1880), pp. 314–543. His letters on the posting of troops during the Gordon Riots are in B.L., Add. Ms. 23,669, ff. 63–6, 68–70.

  100. B.L., Add. Ms. 23, 667, ff. 18v–19v. For the Avignon Masons, see Joanny Bricaud, Les Illuminés d'Avignon (Paris, 1927), chs 5–6; Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore and London, 1975), ch. 5.

  101. L.F. Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (2 vols in 4 parts, London, 1877), vol. 2, part 2, p. 810; Lynne R. Wilkinson, The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture (Albany, N.Y., 1996), p. 118; Samuel Beswick, Swedenborg Rite and the Great Masonic Leaders of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1870), ch. 7. Beswick was the reviver of the “Swedenborg Rite of Masonry” in North America, and his treatment of its eighteenth-century origins is not always reliable, but his comments on the Exegetical Society are supported by other sources.

  102. Alnwick Castle, Ms. 599, pp. 108. Mendelssohn had a daughter named Jeanette, who was six years old in 1770, but the intended recipient of this letter sounds older and there is no indication that Rainsford was praising her father. For Jewish women who led salons in Berlin, see Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1988), ch. 6.

  103. B.L., Add. Ms. 23, 675, ff. 11–16, 24, 33–4.

  104. Ibid., ff. 21–2; B.L., Add. Ms. 23, 669, f. 99.

  105. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,669, ff. 85–6, 91.

  106. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,670, f. 53; Add. Ms. 23,675, ff. 58–9; Wellcome Library, Ms. 957, “Extract from the Tables of Rotalo.”

  107. Alnwick Castle, Ms. 619, pp. 14, 16–17, 42.

  108. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,669, ff. 123–4. For Grabianka, see M.L. Danilewicz, “The King of the New Israel: Thaddeus Grabianka (1740–1807),” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 1 (1968), pp. 49–73.

  109. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,675, f. 15v; B.L., Add. Ms. 23,669, f. 86.

  110. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,669, ff. 102–3, 129–30.

  111. Wellcome Library, Mss. 4032–9.

  112. Alnwick Castle, Ms. 624. For Goethe and Welling, see Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 76, 88, 222.

  113. Wellcome Library, Ms. 3078, ff. 2–27v.

  114. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,675, f. 41; SL, NSW, Banks Papers 06.014; Philosophical Transactions, 57 (1768), pp. 410–12; Dawson, Banks Letters, pp. 158, 837; Gorton, ed., General Biographical Dictionary, vol. 2, under “Price, James” (information confirmed by biographical details available through RSA catalogue, accessed at http://www2.royalsociety.org). Woulfe's certificate of election as F.R.S., signed by the speech therapist Henry Baker, founder of the lectures, as well as by John Ellis and Daniel Solander, is in RSA, EC/1766/20, accessed at http://www2.royalsociety.org. Woulfe is noticed in ODNB.

  115. Ian Kelly, Casanova: Actor, Lover, Priest, Spy (New York, 2011), p. 246. Percy is noticed in ODNB.

  116. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,668, ff. 4–5. Dutens and Morse are noticed in ODNB. Rainsford was one of Morse's proposers for his Fellowship in the Royal Society in 1789: RSA, EC/1789/02, accessed at http://www2.royalsociety.org.

  117. John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares, with Addenda to Every Chapter of That Work: As Also an Appendix, Containing Such Articles on the Subject, As Have Been Omitted by That Author (London, 1810; 1st ed. 1777), pp. iv, xi. Brand is noticed in ODNB.

  118. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,668, f. 7v.

  119. See Gregory R. Johnson, ed., Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings (Chicago, 2003).

  120. The only English-language biography remains Arthur Edward Waite, The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, the Unknown Philosopher, and the Substance of his Transcendental Doctrine (London, 1901).

  121. B.L., Add. Ms. 23,668, f. 5.

  122. Isabel Cooper-Oakley, The Comte de St. Germain: The Secret of Kings (Milan, 1912: reissued on Google Books, 2008), p. 90. The words are those of the landgrave August von Hessen-Philipsthal. For a more critical but arguably rose-coloured view of St.-Germain as having nothing to do with the occult sciences, see J.H. Calmeyer, “The Count of St. Germain or Giovannini: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” Music and Letters, 48, 1 (1967), pp. 4–16; David Hunter, “Monsieur le Comte de S
t.-Germain: The Great Pretender,” Musical Times, 144, 1885 (2003), pp. 40–4. Many nonsensical stories have been built up around this interesting character.

  123. “The Confession of Comte de Cagliostro,” in Parkyns Macmahon, ed., Memorial, or Brief, for the Count de Cagliostro, Defendant: against the King's Attorney General, Plaintiff: in the Cause of the Cardinal de Rohan, Madame de la Motte, and Others (London, 1786), pp. 10–31.

  124. Iain McCalman, The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (London, 2003), chs 1–5; W.R.H. Trowbridge, Cagliostro (New York, 1910), pp. 49–73, for details on the second London trip; Évelyne Lever, L'Affaire du Collier (Paris, 2004).

  125. Hélène Maspéro-Clerc, “Samuel Swinton, Éditeur du Courier de l'Europe à Boulogne-sur-Mer (1778–1783) et Agent Secret du Gouvernement Britannique,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 57 (1985), pp. 527–31; McCalman, Last Alchemist, ch. 6; “Lucia,” The Life of the Count Cagliostro (London, 1787), pp. xxii–iii. “Lucia,” hitherto unidentified, may in fact be Lucy de Loutherbourg, wife of Cagliostro's most ardent supporter in England.

  126. For Gordon, see ODBN and Iain McCalman, “Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), pp. 343–67; for Morande, Simon Burrows, A King's Ransom: The Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger and Master-Spy (London, 2010).

  127. Copies of the Lodge minutes can be found in Bodl. Lib., Ms. Rylands d.2, pp. 138–40, with the General Advertiser article on pp. 151–7. For the Morning Herald advertisement and the Gillray print, see McCalman, Last Alchemist, pp. 169–72.

  128. An English translation of the “Letter” is in P.A. Malpas, “Cagliostro: A Messenger Long Misunderstood,” The Theosophical Path, 42, 1 (1932), pp. 101–20; an even longer version was worked into “Lucia,” Life of Cagliostro, pp. 9–54.

  129. “Anthony Pasquin” [John William], Memoirs of the Royal Academicians (London, 1796), pp. 80–1.

  130. McCalman, Last Alchemist, ch. 6.

  131. This is the main thesis of Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eigtheenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 2004).

  Chapter Nine: Prophets and Revolutions

  1. William Godwin, St. Leon, ed. William Brewer (Peterborough, Ontario, 2006). Godwin's source of alchemical information was Johann Heinrich Cohausen, Hermippus Redivivus: or, The Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave, ed. and trans. John Campbell (London, 1744). As his later Lives of the Necromancers (London, 1834) amply shows, Godwin was not an admirer of occult philosophy in general.

  2. In 1832, Scott's close friend the scientist and inventor Sir David Brewster would address a work debunking magic to him: Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London, 1852).

  3. Joseph Taylor, Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses, Developed (London, 1814), p. vii; Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2007), pp. 212–13.

  4. [Francis Barrett?], The Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers (London, 1815). Whether Barrett actually wrote this work remains unclear.

  5. John Parkins, The Cabinet of Wealth, or The Temple of Wisdom (Grantham, 1812), p. 5.

  6. See Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), ch. 5; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), ch. 5.

  7. Emanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise Concerning the Last Judgment, and the Destruction of Babylon … Originally Published at London in Latin, in 1758 (Boston, 1828), p. 63.

  8. Karl-Erik Sjödén, Swedenborg en France (Stockholm, 1985), ch. 1; H.M. Graupe, “Mordechai Schnaber-Levison: The Life, Works and Thought of a Haskalah Outsider,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 41 (1996), pp. 1–20. Levison, who published several medical tracts under the name “George Levison” while working at the General Medical Asylum in Welbeck Street, is noticed in ODNB. I have not been able to trace a copy of A Plain System of Alchemy.

  9. This very rare work, transcribed by Adam Maclean from a copy in the Helsinki University Library Rare Book Collection, is accessible at http://www.alchemywebsite.com/spiritual_stone.html.

  10. C.B. Wadström, Observations on the Slave Trade, and a Description of Some Part of the Coast of Guinea, during a Voyage, Made in 1787 and 1788, in Company with Doctor A. Sparrman and Captain Arrehenius (London, 1789).

  11. J.B. Wadström and Auguste Nordenskjöld, Plan for a Free Community upon the West Coast of Africa, under the Protection of Great Britain; But Intirely Independent of All European Laws and Governments (London, 1789), pp. iv, 31, 39–40. The best account of the Swedenborgian colonization plan is Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 2.

  12. Wadström and Nordenskjöld, Plan for a Free Community, pp. 43–4, 50.

  13. C.B. Wadström, Plan for a Free Community at Sierra Leone, upon the Coast of Africa, under the Protection of Great Britain (London, 1792); C.B. Wadström, An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the West Coast of Africa (2 parts, London, 1794–5).

  14. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1995), pp. 5–6, 15–20, 183–4, 189–91; also, Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Ga., 2005).

  15. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, pp. 40, 43–4.

  16. Ibid., pp. 347–8; Carretta, Equiano the African, pp. 339–40, 345–50, 361–2. Hardy's trial was transcribed by Manoah Sibly in The Genuine Trial of Thomas Hardy, for High Treason, at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, from October 28 to November 5, 1794 (2 vols, London, 1795).

  17. William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (rev. ed., New York, 1988), p. 9. Blake's ties to “international Swedenborgians,” including Wadström, are noted in Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt., 2007), ch. 5.

  18. The Astrologer's Magazine; and Philosophical Miscellany, Sept. 1793, p. 52. The printer, William Locke of Red Lion Street, Holborn, was known for issuing musical works. He was declared bankrupt in November 1793: Exeter Working Papers in Book Trade History: The London Book Trades, 1775–1800, accessed at http://bookhistory.blogspot.com/2007/01/london-1775–1800-l.html.

  19. Frank O'Gorman, “The Paine Burnings of 1792–3,” Past and Present, 193 (2006), pp. 111–55.

  20. Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, Conn., 2004), pp. 101–4; and for an image of Napoleon as a benign conjuror, ibid., pp. 48–9.

  21. John Martin, Animal Magnetism Examined: in a Letter to a Country Gentleman (London, 1790), p. 9.

  22. Patricia Fara, “An Attractive Therapy: Animal Magnetism in Eighteenth-Century England,” History of Science, 33 (1995), pp. 127–77; Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1994). The term “magnetist” was used by practitioners of animal magnetism at the time, and I have employed it here, although “magnetizer” is more conventional English.

  23. For Mesmerism in other parts of Europe, see Frank A. Pattie, Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine (Hamilton, N.Y., 1994); Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), ch. 6.

  24. J.B. de Mainauduc, Proposals to the Ladies, for Establishing an Hygiæn Society, in England, to Be Incorporated with That of Paris (London, 1785), p. 11.

  25. John Bell, The General and Particular Principles of Animal Electricity and Magnetism, &c. in Which Are Found Dr. Bell's Secrets and Practice (London, 1792)
, p. 23.

  26. John Bell, New System of the World, and the Laws of Motion (London, 1788), pp. 6, 51.

  27. For Gassner and Mesmer, see H.C. Erik Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, Conn., 2005), pp. 18–31.

  28. Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed (London, 1791), pp. 17–18, 28.

  29. Mary Pratt, A List of a Few Cures Performed by Mr. and Mrs. De Loutherbourg, of Hammersmith Terrace, without Medicine (London, 1789), pp. 1, 10.

  30. Contemporary exposés of the principles of magnetism include A True and Genuine Discovery of Animal Electricity and Magnetism: Calculated to Detect and Overthrow All Counterfeit Descriptions of the Same (London, 1790), which was reprinted in A Practical Display of the Philosophical System called Animal Magnetism (London, 1790). See also the article in The Times, no. 1879, 12 Jan. 1791, probably by “Maria” (see note 46 below), which does not mention the “Crisis.”

  31. Martin, Animal Magnetism Examined, pp. 30–1.

  32. J.B. de Mainauduc, The Lectures of J.B. de Mainauduc, M.D., Member of the Corporation of Surgeons in London (London, 1798), vol. 1, p. 196. Only the first volume was published.

  33. Bell, General and Particular Principles, pp. 19, 60–1, 67–76. For Puységur, see Pattie, Mesmer, pp. 216–27; Michel Pierssens, “Le Merveilleux Psychique au XIXe Siècle,” Ethnologie Française, n.s. 23, 3 (1993), pp. 351–66; Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychology (New York, 1970), pp. 70–4. The comparison with Shakers was also made by the American Samuel Stearns in The Mystery of Animal Magnetism Revealed to the World (London, 1791), pp. 43–51.

  34. See Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987), ch. 4; Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001).

  35. William LeFanu, ed., Betsy Sheridan's Journal: Letters from Sheridan's Sister (Oxford, 1986), pp. 123–4.