The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  Another important vehicle for the Hermetic tradition in England was a group of philosophers centred on Christ’s College, Cambridge, known some what misleadingly as the Cambridge Platonists, who were most active in the middle of the seventeenth century. They took the founding philosophy of the Renaissance and blended it with contemporary currents of thought, but at their core was the philosophia perennis of Marsilio Ficino – whose heart was Hermetic through and through.2 One of their most prominent members, Henry More, wrote that his thinking derived from ‘the Platonick Writers, Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus himself, Mercurius Trismegistus and the Mystical Divines’.3

  Given that list it would be just as accurate, if not more so, to describe this group as the Cambridge Hermeticists, although most historians are content to maintain their bias away from the Hermetica and towards the Greeks. The Cambridge group was in effect the direct continuation of the Florentine Academy of Ficino, the brotherhood of Hermeticists that drove the Renaissance. As historians J. Edward McGuire and Piyo Rattansi demonstrated in the 1960s, the Cambridge Platonists mainly derived their philosophy from the Corpus Hermeticum via Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In a 1973 essay on the Cambridge Platonists, Rattansi wrote that: ‘It is now clear that the Neo-Platonism of Ficino and Pico was deeply intertwined with the magical doctrines of the Corpus Hermeticum and the later Neo-Platonists.’4

  The Cambridge Platonists accepted Isaac Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetica, but did not acknowledge that this invalidated the philosophy. Henry More regarded only those parts that reflected Christian teaching as ‘fraud and corruption in the interests of Christianity’,5 and the rest as genuinely ancient. So, ironically, in More’s view, in looking for the original, true theology, the prisca theologia, we should pay most attention to those aspects of the Hermetica that are the least Christian.

  The philosopher regarded as the leader of the group, Ralph Cudworth, while accepting that significant parts of the Hermetica were Christian forgeries, challenged Casaubon’s logic. Why did proving some of the Hermetic books to be fraudulent mean that all of them must be? He also argued that if the aim of the forgers had been to build a path into the Church for Egyptian pagans, it would have made more sense to either have adapted genuine books of Hermes or incorporate the major themes of Egyptian thinking into their fakes. So, in Cudworth’s view, enough of the underlying philosophy and cosmology remained to draw valid conclusions. And as we will see, his was very close to the current historical position.

  THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE

  Among the distinguished refugees from the Continent, a key figure was the Polish polymath Samuel Hartlib (1600–62): Hermeticist, Paracelcist, promoter of Dee’s mathematical and geometrical works and an astrologer. With his Europe-wide circle of correspondents and contacts he was an ‘intelligencer’, a sort of one-man clearing house for information. He was a devoted networker in the interests of dissemination of all knowledge, from the intellectually obscure to the political – rather like Gian Vincenzo Pinelli in Padua during Bruno’s day.

  Hartlib was clearly a Rosicrucian. He worked to found a ‘pansophic college’ – an institution for the study of all-embracing wisdom, the acquisition of knowledge and its use for the betterment of society. Together with fellow traveller John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), a Czech scholar who also took refuge, briefly, in England, he proposed setting up a Collegium Lucis, or College of Light, for the advancement of learning, but primarily to train up a body of ‘teachers of mankind’.6

  Apart from being influenced by Andreae and the ideal of a learned society working for the advancement of humanity, he took the name for his projected movement, ‘Antilia’, from Andreae’s utopian work Christianopolis, which uses the word as a reference to an inner group within his perfect society. Presumably inspired by this was the utopian tale Hartlib wrote, a short pamphlet entitled A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641). However, his Rosicrucian connection is made most explicit in his letter he wrote to one of his chief correspondents, John Worthington (1618–71), Master of Jesus College, Cambridge – and one of the Cambridge Platonists:

  The word Antilia I used because of a former society, that was really begun almost to the same purpose a little before the Bohemian wars. It was as it were a tessera of that society, used only by the members thereof. I never desired the interpretation of it. It was interrupted and destroyed by the following Bohemian and German wars.7

  A tessera is a piece of a mosaic, but as the word was also used in ancient Rome to refer to a ticket, voucher or token, Hartlib seems to be hinting that ‘Antilia’ was the code name Rosicrucians used to recognize each other. This kind of knowledge implies he was himself a member. Yet another clue lies in the fact that his patron was Elizabeth of Bohemia who, as we have seen, together with her husband was the focus of intense Rosicrucian support.

  Try as he might, Hartlib failed to get his projected pansophic college off the ground, writing despairingly to Worthington in October 1660: ‘We were wont to call the desirable Society by the name of Antilia, and sometimes by the name of Macaria, but name and thing is as good as vanished.’8 Like many other academics and intellectuals who had flourished under the Commonwealth, he had probably simply lost favour at the restoration of the monarchy.

  But a month later came the first meeting of what was to become the Royal Society. And it seems that, wherever the initial idea came from, there was an attempt to use it to achieve the ‘Antilian’ dream.

  The train of events that led to the foundation of the Royal Society is more complicated and more esoteric than many modern writers would have us believe. Despite the restrictions of the ongoing Civil War, it began in London in 1645 with an informal meeting of scholars who set out to explore new ideas in natural philosophy – as science was then called. In what was almost certainly no coincidence, the two prime movers were in the retinue of the exiled Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, Frederick and Elizabeth’s son. The two were Charles Louis’ secretary, Theodore Haak, and his chaplain, John Wilkins. Charles Louis had been invited to live in London by Parliament, whose cause he backed. All very odd for the son of a Stuart – especially given that he was the nephew of the king who Parliament was fighting against.

  John Wilkins – the future Bishop of Chester, inventor of the metric system and something of an oddball for a Church of England chaplain – was really the driving force behind the formation of the Royal Society. At the age of forty-two, the highly ambitious Wilkins married Cromwell’s sixty-three-year-old widowed sister, presumably a move that did nothing to prevent his inexorable rise. He also wrote a defence of Copernicanism in 1641 (Discourse Concerning a

  New Planet), and more creatively, a flight of fancy with the self-explanatory title, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638). His attempt to introduce a new universal language to be used by natural philosophers instead of Latin was terminally halted when his entire print run was lost in the Great Fire of London.

  In his hugely popular book Mathematicall Magick, published in 1648, Wilkins specifically references the Fama Fraternitatis. His book was based – as he freely acknowledged – on mathematical works by Dee and Fludd and even declared that he took the title from Cornelius Agrippa.

  It was at this juncture that the now-famous references to an ‘Invisible College’ appeared. These were in letters written in 1646 and 1647 by one of the most eminent founders of the Royal Society, the chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91) – credited with turning alchemy into chemistry – who alluded to a gathering of scholars and philosophers of which he was a part and which called itself by this mysterious name.

  Not only was the intriguing term ‘invisible’ used in the Rosicrucian manifestos, but it carried clear echoes of the mysterious, even sinister, ‘College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross’, otherwise known as the ‘Invisibles’ in Paris. Boyle’s comments were almost certainly a kind of Rosicrucian in-joke.

  Many writers have seen a connection between this enigmatic group and the founding members of the Royal So
ciety, and hinted at the existence of an anonymous behind-the-scenes cabal. But maybe too much mystery has been read into these connections since the group Boyle refers to is relatively easy to identify. Historian Margery Purver, in Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), shows that the Invisible College was the circle centred on Hartlib.

  The references to the Invisible College appeared in letters that the young Boyle wrote to Hartlib and make the connection between Hartlib and the activities of the college very explicit. On 8 May 1647 he wrote: ‘You interest yourself so much in the Invisible College, and that whole society is so concerned in all the accidents of your life …’9 In other correspondence from around the same time, Boyle calls Hartlib the ‘midwife and nurse’ of the college.10

  The Invisible College was Hartlib’s Antilia, or more accurately the group of learned men he hoped would become Antilia. Considering this in combination with the ‘invisible’ clue suggests that it is essentially a Rosicrucian brotherhood. However, this doesn’t mean the connection with the Royal Society is nonexistent: Hartlib hovers in the background during its inception and at least initially it embodied his Rosicrucian ideals. And significantly, Boyle was one of the most active founder members.

  THE ROYAL SOCIETY

  As John Gribbin points out in The Fellowship (2005), the Royal Society was the result of two groups coming together. The first was a group that had met informally in John Wilkins’ rooms at Wadham College, Oxford, from 1648 and throughout the years of the Commonwealth and which included Boyle and Christopher Wren. The second consisted of royalists with an interest in natural philosophy returning from exile with the Restoration in 1660. The two groups met when attending a series of open lectures at Gresham College in London.

  At a meeting on 28 November 1660 a group of twelve natural philosophers and enthusiastic amateurs – including Boyle, Wilkins and Wren and led by William, Viscount Brouncker – decided to form a society for promoting the emerging ‘experimental philosophy’, or what we now know as the scientific method, using experiment to test hypotheses. They took as their motto ‘Nullius in verba’, literally ‘on the word of no one’, but ‘take no one’s word for it’ certainly has a more modern ring.

  The new society was particularly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English courtier, lawyer and philosopher. His major work is the 1605 book The Advancement of Learning, which, as its title suggests, surveyed the state of scholarship in his day and proposed ways in which natural philosophers might extend their knowledge. He argued for a methodical and systematically organized approach to investigating the natural world, and also called for a united international ‘fraternity in learning and illumination’.11

  Historians long regarded Bacon as the archetypal voice of reason, a beacon of light in an age of superstition, but in 1957 the Italian historian Paolo Rossi’s Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science challenged this long-held view. From closely examining Bacon’s life and work, Rossi showed that he was as much a devotee of the Hermetic tradition as the other thinkers we have so far discussed. Rossi notes in particular the ‘influence of the hermetic doctrine’ on Bacon’s ideas on the nature of metals.12 He also, according to Rossi, firmly believed in the anima mundi. Basically the great man was another passionate disciple of the Renaissance occult philosophy (although he wanted to reform that, too). He included natural magic, astrology and, particularly, alchemy, within his fields of knowledge. He was just careful not to draw attention to them.

  Ernest Lee Tuveson observed that Bacon’s ‘conception of natural processes owes much to hermeticism, and other traditional [i.e. esoteric] sources’,13 and asked why he therefore condemns the likes of Dee, Fludd and Paracelsus. He concludes that, although Bacon shared their underlying philosophy, he disagreed about the methods that should be used to put it into practice, advocating the application of objective reasoning instead of magic. However, we can suggest a rather more expedient, if not cynical, motive: Bacon was in need of the king’s favour, and was all too aware that there were certain subjects that were best avoided.

  King James I, offspring of the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots was a weird little man with a paranoid terror of witches and would go to any lengths to protect himself from the threat of witchcraft, real or imagined (mostly the latter, but your innocence would hardly matter if you were accused and condemned and rolled down a hill inside flaming barrels on his orders). It was James’ horror of all things occult that had been responsible for Dr Dee’s decline.

  In many ways Bacon was Dee’s successor, another man of many talents who was involved in court and diplomatic activity under the patronage of the monarch. He rose to prominence at court immediately after Dee’s fall from grace, for example producing the masque performed on the day following the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatine. But rising to prominence in those days was no guarantee of a long happy life – one had to work at it constantly, which usually involved shameless amounts of regal boot-licking.

  Bacon was a highly ambitious man. As Arthur Johnston notes in his introduction to a 1973 edition of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon’s life was ‘a long pursuit of political power’.14 In practice this meant mounting a campaign to attract the king’s attention and favour – which certainly worked. In fact, as Jerome R. Ravetz, lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds cautions: ‘All Bacon’s published writings are propaganda; their function was to convert his audience, and their relation to his own private views was purely incidental.’15

  Bacon enjoyed a succession of appointments at court that culminated in his elevation as Lord Chancellor in 1618. As an appeal to James I’s intellectual pretensions, The Advancement of Learning opened his campaign of self-advancement and eventually earned him a job putting his proposed reforms of learning and education into practice. Fittingly, the very first paragraph includes the hardly subtle appeal for ‘the good pleasure of your Majesty’s employments’. 16 The book was addressed directly to James, whom he overtly flatters: ‘There hath not been since Christ’s time any King or temporal Monarch, which has been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human.’17 Bacon certainly knew how to lay it on with a trowel, echoing Bruno’s wildly over-the-top flattery of James’ predecessor, Elizabeth I. More interestingly he dared to liken James to Hermes Trismegistus:

  Your Majesty standeth invested of that triplicity, which in great veneration was attributed to the ancient Hermes; the power and fortune of a king, the knowledge and illumination of a priest, and the learning and universality of a philosopher.18

  This particular description of Hermes is taken from Marsilio Ficino – which presumably Bacon relied on James not knowing.

  Bacon’s call for a ‘fraternity in learning and illumination’ may have influenced the authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos, but if so he was also influenced in turn by them. There are clear signs that he was familiar with the Fama Fraternitatis in his utopian New Atlantis, published in 1627, the year after he died, and which was a particular influence on the Royal Society’s founders. Bacon seems also to have read and digested Campanella’s City of the Sun (published four years earlier) – or maybe it is a coincidence that his plot, too, involves shipwrecked sailors encountering the inhabitants of a perfect society (the preservers of an early, pure form of Christianity, whose officials wear white turbans bearing red crosses)?

  Given Bacon’s unofficial interests, it is rather ironic that he is seen to represent the beginning of the divergence of magic and science.

  A more elusive and unequivocally arcane influence on the origins of the Royal Society was Freemasonry. Although the origins of Freemasonry are still controversial and obscure, whatever its roots it had certainly emerged as a significant institution by the mid-seventeenth century. Many historians have seen the Brotherhood as a repository of the Hermetic tradition, though this is not to suggest that Freemasonry is only about Hermeticism.19

  Significantly, Masonic writer Robert Lomas points ou
t that one of the rituals an initiate undergoes when entering the second degree makes specific reference to the heliocentric theory: ‘The sun being at the centre and the Earth revolving around the same on its own axis … the sun is always at the meridian with respect to Freemasonry.’20 Even in the mid-seventeenth century heliocentricity was still not fully accepted – and in Catholic countries was an outright heresy – so the Masons’ emphasis is all the more telling.

  A Masonic influence on the early Royal Society is now generally acknowledged, but its extent and significance are more controversial. However, what is less contested is that the Society’s main connection with the Freemasons was embodied by one of the driving forces behind its foundation – the man who secured its royal patronage, Sir Robert Moray (1609–74). His Masonic initiation in 1641 has the distinction of being the first to be recorded on English soil.

  Described by Lomas as ‘a first-rate fixer and born survivor’,21 Moray was a mixture of James Bond and soldier of fortune – but with mystical trappings. His origins remain obscure, but he first made his mark as a member of the Scots Guard of Louis XIII’s army in 1633, when he spied for Cardinal Richelieu. He then turns up as the quartermaster of the Scottish Covenanters’ Army when it marched on England in 1640. This campaign was part of the struggle over control of the Church in Scotland during which the Scots occupied parts of northern England including Newcastle, where Moray was initiated into a Masonic lodge on 20 May 1641. It is generally thought that he used his Masonic connections for intelligence work. After the end of the Covenanters’ campaign, he returned to the French court for yet more soldiering and spying and eventually established himself as an emissary between the French court and that of Charles I, who knighted him in 1643. Moray went on to become the King’s secretary, and after Charles’ execution he joined Charles II’s exiled court in Paris and became heavily involved in the negotiations to set him on the restored English throne.