The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  The real conflict twixt reason and spirituality, (the so-called ‘Enlightenment’), while still to come, may still in small part be attributed to the Royal Society's meetings eschewing contentious questions of religion and the spirit. Such a division went against the pansophy favoured by members of the old guard such as Comenius, falling perhaps into too cosy a harmony with that Cartesian dualism which sundered the worlds of mind and matter. We can now see, for example, Newton's mathematical vision as a parergon of his mystical insight, demonstrated in his extensive devotion to alchemy.

  The case of Vaughan's 1652 publication of the Fame and Confession of the Fraternitie of the Rosie Cross is a case in point where the varied private and public interests of the first Royal Society fellows are concerned. According to F.N Price's preface to a facsimile reprint of this publication80, Thomas Vaughan was to some degree patronised by Robert Moray (c.1600-1675), a devoted seeker after the Philosopher's Stone. Then as now, devotees of the alchemical art were usually well aware of each other's existence. Connection between them might also explain how it came to be that the version of the Fama employed by Vaughan was identical to that formerly in the possession of the Scots Hermetist and fervent alchemist Sir David Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres (1585-1641)81. In about 1647 Moray married Sophia, Lindsay's daughter, and it may have been through this connection that Moray obtained a copy of the Fama suitable for Thomas Vaughan's purposes.

  The 1650s saw a flurry of Hermetic works published in English and there is circumstantial evidence of co-ordination. In the same year Vaughan published the Fame and Confession, Elias Ashmole published his great collection of English alchemical manuscripts, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum as part of his search for the Philosopher's Stone. (Ashmole called himself Mercuriophilus Anglicus, the English lover of mercury.)

  Ashmole was also a Free Mason, joined fraternally to Robert Moray and a founder-member of the Royal Society. The Theatrum Chemicum also contained a positive vindication of Count Michael Maier, an account of the esteem in which English alchemy was held by Maier, and a report of the tradition that Maier had been treated in a manner not befitting his station when he was in England. Ashmole clearly saw Maier as a very significant envoy. Was Bacon also thinking of such as Maier when he wrote of the “Merchants of Light” who travel unnoticed in the world? Not many people would have known of this or cared much about it - other than men like Robert Fludd, a man who showed himself on many occasions to be willing to stand out from the crowd and come to the defence of those attacked for Rosicrucian, mystical or Paracelsian interests.

  Between 1621 and 1633 Fludd published work after work defending Rosicrucian, micro-macrocosmic and Paracelsian philosophy against the criticisms of the astronomer Kepler, Libavius, Patrick Scot and, most especially, the Jesuit proto-mechanistic philosopher and protector of René Descartes, Marin Mersenne. This debate held the attention of all the thinking part of Europe. Mersenne regarded Fludd's ideas as the height of philosophical and theological impiety and summarised some of them thus, in his Lettres, (II.p.441):

  Compounded from God and this ethereal Spirit is the Anima Mundi. [soul of the world, or, sometimes, Logos]. The purest part of this Soul is the Angelic nature and the Empyrean heaven, which is understood to be mixed into all things. The Demons are part of the same essence, but joined to evil material. All souls, whether of men or of brutes, are none other than particles of this same Soul. This Soul is also the Angel Michael or Misattron. What is more, the same Soul is the true Messiah, Saviour, Christ, corner-stone and universal rock, on which the Church and all salvation are founded.

  Fludd's interest in the symbolism of the rock or stone is also evident in his pseudonymously published Summum Bonum (1629), another (late) defence of the Rosicrucians. Fludd says that the House of the Holy Spirit referred to in the Fama, (which will always remain invisible to the unworthy) is in fact a spiritual dwelling resting upon the rock that is Christ. He quotes S. Paul in support of his contention:

  Your habitation was not made by the lords of men, but we have a spiritual building in the heavens, which is the House of Wisdom on the Mount of Reason, built upon the spiritual rock.

  This view is directly paralleled in Thomas Vaughan's own Lumen de Lumine (Light from Light, 1651) where Vaughan writes as if he is himself a Rosicrucian brother. Vaughan clearly feels a spiritual identification with its dwelling-place, writing of a mountain “situated in the midst of the earth or centre of the world that is both small and great. It is soft, also above measure hard and strong. It is far off and near at hand, but by providence of God invisible. In it are hidden the most ample treasures, which the world is not able to value.” Vaughan has been, it seems, ‘hit by the Stone’. His works, which successfully introduced the general public to Rosicrucianism, produced a significant wave of supportive material which continued to appear for about a decade adding a (perhaps useful?) mystique to the efforts to establish an ordered scientific community.

  For example, in 1656 an anonymous translation of Michael Maier's Themis Aurea (1618) appeared, giving the rules of the Rosicrucian Fraternity. Probably published by Nathaniel and Thomas Hodges, men with strong astrological interests, it was significantly dedicated to Elias Ashmole, “the onely Philosopher in the present age” - clear evidence of an attempt to get the socially rising Ashmole on the side of the independents. Indeed in the 1650s we see the spiritual alchemists fighting back, attempting to win the thinking part of England over and Robert Moray, behind the scenes, in encouraging Vaughan, is plainly sympathetic - and there can be little doubt that that sympathy would also extend to Comenius' pansophic enterprise as well. However, the main catalyst for all these efforts was the Fama itself - surely “the greatest publicity stunt of all time.”

  The struggle was well worth the effort for what was at stake involved nothing less than the question of what would constitute the theoretical and practical basis of reformed learning in England. That struggle was in my opinion chiefly a struggle between British ideological freelancers and the English academic establishment caused, in the 1650s, by the Church of England's having temporarily lost its grip on ideological power. There was an endemic crisis of authority which was not resolved until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (and then only partially).

  Haunted by Dee's Spirits

  Robert Moray, in his efforts to help the exiled King Charles, did the scientific movement an inestimable service in at last achieving a clear authority and stamp of approval for the development of learning and investigation of science in this country. Before this could take place however, the enemies of the Hermetic interpretation of reality were to cast a missile straight to the centre of the debate.

  In 1659 Meric Casaubon published extracts from John Dee's Spiritual Diaries, (A True and Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and some Spirits.). The presentation was anything but sympathetic. Casaubon wished to leave his readers in no doubt that the great mathematician was a conjuror of devils, a Faustian figure who had given up his sanity to serve the servitors of darkness. On the frontispiece Dee is associated with what the editor considers to be other dangerous ‘illuminati’ - a telling expression tainting the entire Renaissance magical tradition by association. In his editorial stocks Casaubon places Paracelsus, Mahomet, Trithemius, Appolonius of Tyana, Edward Kelley, and of course John Dee himself. Throughout the editing and footnotes Casaubon especially stresses a supposed kinship between devilry and “Enthusiasm”, dangerous to public order and spiritual health. These men, he holds, are nothing short of subversive, and their learning is a cloak for Satanism.

  In 1659, with Tumbledown Dick (Richard Cromwell) struggling to maintain control, ‘enthusiasm’ could only mean one thing: religious anarchy of the type which had appeared most alarmingly (to some) in the Civil War period: the Levellers, Anabaptists, holders of Conventicles, Ranters, Prophets, Quakers. Casaubon is saying, ‘tolerate this, and you'll know what to expect: demonic possession, witchcraft, apocalyptic subversion’. But who
is being attacked? Casaubon's motives may be mixed - and it is still a mystery how he got hold of the diaries in the first place - had they been doing the rounds? It is well known that Elias Ashmole for one was a keen collector of anything to do with Dee82. Is Casaubon's book a covert attack on Ashmole? Ashmole's activities and magian reputation were well known. How many knew of his Free Masonry and his connection with several of the founders-to-be of the Royal Society? The government had tried to ban the book - Dee had been a government agent for Elizabeth I - but it had already reached the public. Its publication further damaged Dee's reputation, except among the discerning few, and put the whiff of conspiracy forever around the concept of the illuminati.

  Frances Yates believed that this publication may have sealed the determination of the Royal Society to confine its meetings to purely scientific problems, to avoid mention of religion or social utopias and to adopt that sobriety which in its dryness is the unmistakable mark of much of British academe. I am not convinced. The beginnings of the Royal Society were in fact a somewhat ramshackle affair. Like all new things it took time to find its feet, and most work as was done was done by individual fellows in private. Furthermore the discussions and interests of the scientists of this period were frequently regarded as absurd by the popular Press, impious by the Church, and of little interest to the classically and theologically dominated universities. It seems to this author that the attack of Casaubon was, again, an attack on the overall direction of learning. It was genuinely feared by some that Dr Dee's brand of private interests might subvert the public welfare or even give the magi not only the magical, but the political power to effect changes in the natural (read divine) order of things. Hermetists tend to consider the highest knowledge to be the privilege of initiation. The sober meetings of the first Royal Society would have allayed such fears; people enjoyed mechanical gadgets.

  It is remarkable that the question of spiritual orientation was put before the Royal Society as early as 1668 by one of the very men without whom the Society may never have existed. That now very old man Comenius appears once more on the horizon, grey, wizened, sharp as a knife. Like the Ancient Mariner he was there, and he was watching. Very well informed, he knew exactly what was going on. He had seen all the tricks long, long before, when the Fama was young, and he was too. In 1668, he published The Way of Light in Amsterdam and wrote a dedicatory epistle to the “illuminati” of the Royal Society:

  Illustrious Sirs, It is not unfitting that a book entitled The Way of Light should be sent to you, illustrious men whose labours in bringing the Light of Natural Philosophy from the deeper wells of Truth is coming to be proclaimed and published throughout Europe. It is the more appropriate since the work was conceived in that country where the territory offered to us for the search for Light and Truth has passed into your keeping, according to that word of Christ, (applicable in its proper sense to this occasion): Others have laboured and you have joined them in their labours.

  Comenius continues:

  Throughout the world the news will be trumpeted that you are engaged in labours the purpose of which is to secure that human knowledge, and the empire of the human mind over matter, shall not forever continue to be a feeble and uncertain thing.

  And then came the warning. Should knowledge for its own sake be pursued, or for power over nature only without thought as to the ends of that knowledge (the Way of Light) then that house of knowledge would surely turn out to be “a Babylon turned upside down, building not towards Heaven, but towards Earth.”

  Alas!

  Notes for Part Two

  1 In March 1610 Galileo published his epoch-marking Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) in which he described seeing “stars in myriads, which have never been seen before, and which surpass the old, previously known, stars in number more than ten times.”

  2 Possibly a comment on the inadequacies and conceit of pre-Renaissance scholastic learning in the universities.

  3 The “inhabitants of the elements” were described in detail by Paracelsus in his book On nymphs, sylphs, pygmies and salamanders published by Johann Huser in 1591. Paracelsus says that there are two sorts of flesh: that issuing from Adam, the first earthy man, and secondly, a ‘subtle’ flesh, filled with extraordinary possibilities, such as being able to travel through walls. Adamic flesh has soul and has been redeemed by Christ. Non-Adamic creatures do not have soul but in other respects resemble man : in mores, language and reason. Undines and nymphs live in water, sylphs in the air, pygmies in the earth and salamanders in fire. God makes them appear to human eyes, lets them live so as to show man the marvels of His natural opus. If they marry with man, they gain a soul and have descendents. Nevertheless, dallying with these creatures can be fraught with danger for humans, since they dispose of knowledge which is not theirs. They know the future as well as the past and present, joining to human reason the science and intelligence of spirits. Christian meets them again on the fifth day of the Chymical Wedding. They conduct the seven symbolic boats to the Olympus tower to witness the nuptial regeneration.

  Belief in the elemental inhabitants implies knowledge of the virtues or divine signatures inherent in things, and speaks of a time before the poetic and truly imaginative consciousness was sundered from academic science. As late as 1791, the brilliant botanist and natural scientist, Dr Erasmus Darwin of Lichfield (instigator of theories of evolution completed by his grandson Charles Darwin), used the images of the elemental creatures to announce his important Botanic Garden, (illustrated by William Blake among others), calling them ‘Rosicrucian’. To study the ‘elements’ in plants, animals and minerals in order to discover their mysterious inner life was magia naturalis and is the origin of modern botany and genetics. According to Paracelsus’ contemporary Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), magia naturalis permits the magus to determine mysterious relations in the very bosom of nature, the action of ‘that which is above and that which is below’ : the ‘vital fluid’ or ‘mercury’ which penetrates, crosses and animates all the universe. The same “magic panvitalism” is at the basis of Paracelsus' theories, enabling him to see magic as the art of reading the hidden realities of the “Book of the Universe”. The fact that God tolerates this activity was taken as a sign that we are capable of making use of it. Furthermore, magia naturalis might yet reveal man's truest nature. Nature veils consciousness. The Fama announces the unveiling.

  4 Some time in the 1590s, Johann Valentin's close friend Tobias Hess, while investigating the vogue for apocalyptic prognostications, obtained the book Mystica et prophetica libri Geneseos interpretatio, published by Theodor Gluichstein (Bremen 1585) and written by the heretic Giacomo Brocardo. Brocardo saw the date of Luther's birth (1483) as the starting-point for the last age. This age would last 120 years. The significance of the number 120 was taken from Genesis VI.3 : “And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh : yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” This is almost certainly the origin of the account in the Fama whereby the body of Christian Rosenkreuz is interred for precisely 120 years, and the tomb is opened to find the prophecy fulfilled.

  5 Paracelsus was not born until 1493 - nine years after R.C. is supposed to have been interred - another good reason for seeing the account as an allegory.

  6 Men like John Dee's avaricious scryer Edward Kelley, who fell from a wall in Prague while trying to escape imprisonment in 1595. Kelley had promised to produce alchemical gold to the Hermetic enthusiast and Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II.

  7 The reference to Paracelsus demonstrates just how closely intertwined were the major thought-streams of the period. It was an easy matter to cross from apocalyptic, to alchemy, to radical spiritual reformation, to mysticism, magic and back again to apocalyptic. Little wonder that Andreae, for one, craved a cleansing and general tidying-up of the European knowledge-base. Men had lost sight of the wood for the trees.

  8 Not only would the fact that the Fama issued from Lutheran territory (T�
�bingen) have alerted Catholic authority. In the city of Freiburg in the Austrian Habsburg lands of Breisgau, a man could be arrested for practising the iatrochemical medicine of Paracelsus. Fifty years previously, Thomas Erastus had demanded the death penalty for followers of Paracelsus' ‘heresy’. See Article by Carlos Gilly: ‘Theophrastia Sancta’ – Paracelsianism as a religion, in conflict with the established churches. (BPH, Amsterdam, 1999)

  9 Haslmayr sent letters and essays to Widemann from Genoa. He even wrote a commentary on John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) : Monarchia stellae signata, but accidentally dropped the manuscript into the sea at Messina in 1613.

  10 Augustus' immersion in the field of alchemical transmutation is recalled in the guide book sold to visitors to the castle of Plötzkau since unification.

  11 In 1625, Joachim Morsius, the itinerant scholar from Lübeck, published the legendary catalogue of magical manuscripts Nuncius Olympicus. The work mentions 228 very rare mss. From references to a “pious man” who had been in the galleys for four and a half years, it is to be presumed that these were the manuscripts of Adam Haslmayr brought by Figulus to Eglin in Marburg in 1612.

  12 Dr. Christopher McIntosh (author of The Rosicrucians. Weiser. 1998).

  13 Artaxerxes introduced a reformed calendar in 441 BC, employing the names of the deities which had accrued to Zarathushtra's dualist religion, including the god Mithra, a task executed by the mysterious caste of the Magi.

  14 One can also see in all of this the beginnings of science as a ‘new religion’: find the inner knowledge secreted in nature and so cause progress to perfection. Interpretations of Darwin have led to assumptions that progress and ultimate perfection are inevitable within a ‘natural selection’ process : an implicate intelligence is at work at the ‘sub-atomic’ level beyond current understanding. The psychology of apocalyptic is still with us, whether ‘objective’ science ‘likes it’ or not. Just look at the ‘eco-crisis’ : science appears to suggest a moral imperative little different to that of the first few chapters of Genesis : to get back to ‘Eden’, we should perceive our ‘oneness’ with the Garden of Nature, completely forgetting that it is our very experience of ‘conscious objectivity’ which has banished us from such a simple ‘home-coming’ in the first place! Spiritual men and women have known better than to put their faith simply in the natural world.