The whole notion of such correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, sky and ground, above and below, is intensely Hermetic. Not surprisingly, therefore, Alastair Fowler, an acknowledged expert on Spenser, has discovered that the Faerie Queen contains a complex system of numerology as well as an ‘astral’ or planetary pattern within its central theme.34 Frances Yates goes further to deduce that the mysterious ‘House of Alma’ encodes, by means of allegory and numerology, the proportions of the Temple of Solomon.35 Another Elizabethan scholar, professor Angus Fletcher, sees a hint of Hermetic-Egyptian magic in Spenser's legend of the beautiful, noble and chaste lady-knight Britomart (an allusion to Elizabeth I), where the magician Merlin interprets the ‘vision of Britomart’ as being the ‘Temple of Isis’.36 Perhaps we should also note in passing that King Solomon is said in the book of Kings to have built a ‘house’ for his wife, an Egyptian princess, who, as a daughter of the pharaoh, would automatically have been identified by the ancient Egyptians with the goddess Isis: Then Solomon brought Pharaoh's daughter up to the City of David [Jerusalem] to her own house which he had built for her.37
Antilian intrigues
The possibility that the newly colonised territories of Virginia were somehow part of the Rosicrucian and Hermetic dream of universal reform in a utopian setting may have been detected by the historian and researcher, Ron Heisler.38 In an in-depth investigation into Michael Maier's sojourn in England between 1612 and 1616, Heisler discovered that ‘in Maier's associations there is a pattern of an unexpected dimension.’ This pattern emerges from a series of close contacts that Maier established in England with individuals who were all related in one way or another to the Virginia Company – a corporation of wealthy men whose royal charter, we saw above, had been drafted by Bacon.
Heisler's research reveals that when Maier published his first work in England, Arcana arcanissima, he personally sent copies to various notables, including Sir Thomas Smith and a certain Dr. Francis Anthony, both of whom were to become deeply involved with the running of the Virginia Company. Indeed Thomas Smith was its treasurer and Dr. Anthony became a member of its committee in 1619. Others involved with the company, such as its legal advisor John Selden, and the writer George Sandys, also seem to have had a special interest in Maier and his ideas.39 All this led Heisler to suspect that the Rosicrucian reformer's Atalanta Fugiens, published in 1617, ‘may have been deeply inspired by the utopian vision of America.’40
There is another connection with the Rosicrucian movement and the American colony of Virginia which might shed more light on this intriguing problem. In his remarkable study The Tessera of Antilia, scholar Donald R. Dickson presents evidence concerning the existence of a ‘utopian brotherhood’ known as Antilia (a name sometimes used in medieval times to refer to Atlantis). The brotherhood was apparently inspired by the Rosicrucian Manifestos and by ‘Baconian beliefs in experimental science as a key to prosperity.’41 To this end the brothers wished to purchase a small island in the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic on which to found their utopian society. Separately they also considered emigrating en masse to Virginia and establishing themselves there instead.42 It is obviously not irrelevant that our old friend Johann Valentin Andreae, the suspected author of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, was a key participant in the Brotherhood of Antilia.43
All this very much suggests, if not actually confirms, that the utopian vision of the New World, and perhaps more specifically of Virginia in North America, was modelled or inspired by the Rosicrucian programme as set out in the Manifestos as well as by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Also caught up in the blend was Freemasonry, that very real, visible and influential brotherhood, still with us today, that was launched on its present course on English soil in the early 17th century, right after the Rosicrucian scare …
Before Freemasonry came out
The origins of modern Freemasonry are veiled behind such a mass of legends and pseudo-history that the subject has become a true nightmare for even the most dedicated of researchers. The problem lies in the fact that today Freemasons define themselves as a ‘society with secrets’ whereas once, and no one actually knows for how long, they were a secret society that went to great lengths to be ‘invisible’. We've noted before that successful secret societies are, by definition, hard to trace in the historical record.
Freemasonry as a recognised institution originated in Britain in 1717 with the formation of the Grand Lodge of England, an event that is documented in the second edition of the Constitutions of Freemasons published by James Anderson in 1738.44 But all this tells us is the moment when the former secret society publicly declared its existence, thereafter becoming visible – though still a society with secrets.
In 1722, sixteen years before Anderson's Constitutions appeared, a brother named J. Roberts helpfully published a compilation of the so-called Old Charges of Freemasonry, also known as the ‘Gothic Manuscripts’. These, as the names suggest, are a collection of old manuscripts – some of which date from the late 14th century – in which is given a ‘history’ of the Craft of Freemasonry.45 According to the manuscripts, the origins of Freemasonry go back to the antediluvian patriarch Lamech who lived before Noah's Flood. To Lamech's three sons – Jabal, Jubal and Tubal – and one daughter called Naamah, is accredited the invention of all the essential ‘crafts’ on which civilisation is based. We are told that Jabal was the inventor of geometry, Jubal invented music, Tubal invented the smelting trades, and Naamah was the inventor of weaving.46 Knowing that one day God would punish humankind for its sins with a cataclysm of flood and fire they took precautions to write down all their learning on two huge pillars made of stone so that their discoveries would not be lost to mankind forever but could be recovered by the survivors. As the Old Charges inform us: The one stone was called marble that cannot burn with fire. The other was called lateras that cannot drown with water. Our intent is now to tell you truly how and in what manner these stones were found whereon these crafts were written. The Greek Hermenes that was son unto Cush, and Cush was son unto Shem who was son unto Noah – this same Hermenes was afterwards called Hermes the Father of Wise Men, and he found out the two pillars of stone wherein the sciences were written and taught them forth … 47
The ‘Greek Hermenes’ is understood to be, of course, Hermes (the Thoth of the Egyptians and the Mercury of the Romans). As for ‘Hermes the Father of Wise Men’, there can be little doubt that this is reference to Hermes Trismegistus.
The rest of the ‘history’ in the Old Charges consists of a very convoluted and circuitous narrative that passes through Babylon, the coming of Abraham to Egypt (whence ‘he taught the Egyptians the seven sciences’) and finally brings us to the most important moment in the Masonic story – the building of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. We are told that through the construction of this magnificent edifice ‘the worthy Craft of Masons was confirmed in the country of Jerusalem.’48
From there the Old Charges hop, skip and jump through space and time to try and show how this ‘worthy Craft of Masons’ was brought into Europe via France and finally to England in the ‘time of St. Alban’.49 Perhaps not totally unrelated is the curious fact that Francis Bacon, at the peak of his career, was granted the title of Viscount St. Albans by James I – thus linking him, in name at least, to this strange genealogy of Freemasonry in Britain.
We also note with interest that the Old Charges cast Hermes, the ‘Father of Wise Men’, as the finder and repromulgator of lost knowledge. Though the effect may not be intentional this is a scenario that does very much call to mind the rediscovery of the Hermetic writings in 1460 and their subsequent repromulgation. We saw in Chapter Eight that Marsilio Ficino and his intellectual successors, including men like Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella more than a century later, really believed that the lost ‘magical religion’ or ‘science’ of the Egyptians had been rediscovered and felt strongly that it should be ‘taught forth’.
An invisible college in dangerous
times
Over two decades James I’s extremely unpopular and confusing foreign policy, as well as his authoritarian attitude and contempt for Parliament, had created a deep and dark mood of discontent in England. When he died in 1625 he was succeeded by his cultivated but weak and somewhat unstable son, Charles I, who was destined to lead the monarchy into a headlong collision with Parliament and with the people. Disaster loomed ahead.
The new monarch pursued the same unpopular foreign policy as his father and proved to be even more tyrannical and dictatorial. His early marriage to the French Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria, the sister of King Louis XIII, did not go down well with the Puritanism that pervaded in the House of Commons. But most of all it was Charles I’s mismanagement of the new war with Spain and France, and his abusive raising of funds through illegal taxations to finance a war in Scotland also, that finally brought the Parliamentarians to quasi-open revolt in 1640.
The unthinkable rumours of civil war in England were everywhere. These were extremely dangerous times for everyone. The Thirty Years War was still raging in central Europe, Spain and France were at war with England, and in England itself the monarchy and Parliament were at serious odds. Mistrust and treachery had become the norm, and one had to be exceedingly prudent even to survive, let alone to prosper, in this highly perilous and volatile environment. The state of generalised distrust and chaos also created a need amongst certain groups in society – intellectuals, the elite gentry and the military for example – for a neutral forum in which they could safely exchange views on politics, religion and science. It would much appear that the network and system of Masonic lodges, veiled by their multifarious rituals and screening system of recruitment and, above all, secrecy, may have provided just the right structure to satisfy such a need.
Operative, and possibly even a form of ‘speculative’ (i.e. esoteric, as opposed to strictly practical) Freemasonry had long existed in Scotland, probably since the late 15th century.50 As time passed an acception system was introduced that allowed the recruiting of those men of stature and position in society who were not necessarily engaged in the operative stone-masonry, building and architectural trades.51 This ‘acception’ system was almost certainly the precursor to the ‘speculative’, i.e. non-operative, enrolment system of the modern society of Freemasons. It would also much appear that acception was brought into England with the coming of the Stuart dynasty. Now, with the English Civil War looming ahead, it conveniently provided a ready-made network through the lodges in which the accepted English elite could meet in secrecy, in brotherly friendliness and within a liberal atmosphere – the whole veiled in rituals and symbolism that were intended to bond together men from different backgrounds but with similar social goals and spiritual aspirations.
Open parliamentary rebellion finally came in 1642. After a failed attempt to arrest five members of Parliament, Charles I and his Royalist supporters quit London and set up court-in-exile at Oxford, that traditional hub of elitist intellectuals and scholars. It was there, in the following years, that a strange fraternity of literati began to meet, calling themselves – evocatively – the ‘Invisible College’. The earliest surviving written reference to this mysterious Invisible College comes from the celebrated physicist, Robert Boyle ( 1627 – 1691 ), in a letter he wrote to his tutor in France in 1646. In this letter Boyle states that he is now diligently applying himself to ‘natural philosophy’ based on the principles of ‘our new philosophical college’ and requests certain books from his tutor that ‘will make you extremely welcome to our Invisible College.’52 A few months later, in 1647, Boyle again mentions the Invisible College in a letter to a friend, saying that, The cornerstones of the Invisible or (as they term themselves) the Philosophical College, do now and then honour me with their company … [These are] men of so capacious and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge … [They are] persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal goodwill can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind to their care.53
The term ‘Invisible College’, as well as the description of its activities and concerns given above, immediately brings to mind, of course, the Invisible College of the Rosicrucian brotherhood. Also the lofty intellectual and humane qualities of the college brothers, to which Boyle alludes, are, as we saw in the previous chapter, the very same qualities attributed to the Rosicrucian brothers – notably, for example, on the posters that sensationally appeared all over Paris in 1623.54
It turns out that Boyle had spent some time in Paris in his youth, during an educational tour of France and Geneva, and it is not impossible that he could have heard of the Rosicrucian Invisible College through his tutors or other acquaintances. Frances Yates observes that there is, on face value, an uncanny similarity in the terminology used by Boyle in his letters to his tutor and the terminology used by Francis Bacon in New Atlantis. Both authors speak of a learned and elite brotherhood that is ‘invisible’ and whose goal is the betterment of all mankind – which both hope to achieve through an enlargement of knowledge and by doing benevolent deeds.55
Many researchers agree that Theodore Haak and John Wilkins were probably the founders of Boyle's Invisible College.56 Theodore Haak was a German immigrant who had settled in England in the 1620s, and John Wilkins was a vicar who later became bishop of Chester. At first there seems to be nothing in common between the two men, until it is realised that Haak was a refugee from the Palatinate and that John Wilkins acted as chaplain for Prince Charles Louis, the eldest son of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart. Others who might have been connected to Boyle's Invisible College were the architect Christopher Wren and the alchemist Elias Ashmole. The Invisible College first met in London in 1645 then moved to Oxford in 1648. Let's look more closely at its activities and its members and at what it was trying to achieve.
Utopia on hold for the Civil War
While in England, Theodore Haak acted as an unofficial diplomat for the Palatinate and, more especially, as the representative and agent to the Bohemian bishop, Jan Amos Komenský, better known as ‘Comenius’ (1592 – 1670).57 Comenius had been the bishop of the Bohemian Church of the Unity of Brethren until its fall in 1620 after the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. He was exiled with his fellow Protestants in 1628 and settled in Poland, where he became rector of the gymnasium at Leszno. There he developed a new Christian philosophy, a pansophia or ‘universal knowledge’ expressed in one common language to facilitate communication and understanding among scholars throughout the world. Comenius's ideas were published in 1631 in a work entitled Janua Linguarum Reserata, which attracted the interest of the great German philanthropist and educationalist Samuel Hartlib who had been living in England since the mid-1620s.
‘Hartlib, in his whole life and work’, wrote Frances Yates, ‘was something like what an R. C. Brother, if real and not invisible, might have been.’58 Dubbed the ‘Great Intelligencer of Europe’, Hartlib had set himself up as a human clearing-house, establishing a society known as the ‘Office of Address’ in order to promote a ‘commonwealth of learning’. The office encouraged and facilitated the intellectuals of Europe to correspond and to exchange ideas, and bears comparison with Francis Bacon's ‘House of Salomon’. Both concepts centre on an elite international brotherhood whose objective is to reform society and serve all mankind.
In 1640, two years before the Civil War broke out in England, the Long Parliament proposed radical reforms that, if implemented, would have bloodlessly stripped the Stuart monarchy of much of its power. Amidst a mood of great public excitement and enthusiasm there were those who began to believe that the utopian society they had so much dreamed of might perhaps be achieved in England. Zealous speeches were given in Parliament, amongst them one by special invitee Samuel Har
tlib who presented his own vision of an ‘English utopia’. He hoped that Parliament would adopt it and ‘lay the cornerstone of the world's happiness’.
According to Frances Yates, the experience of addressing such a lofty crowd in such a lofty place went to Hartlib's head: In this thrilling hour when it seemed that England might be the land chosen … to be the scene of the restoration of all things, when the possibility dawned that here imaginary commonwealths might become real commonwealths, invisible colleges real colleges, Hartlib wrote to Comenius and urged him to come to England to assist in the great work … Comenius in far away Poland was overjoyed. He believed that he had a mandate from Parliament to build Bacon's New Atlantis in England.59
Comenius arrived in England in 1641, and was received by Haak and Hartlib. Among them was another of Hartlib's friends, the Scottish minister John Drury whom Hartlib had known since the 1620s. It was, in fact, Drury who had been instrumental in bringing Comenius to London. A staunch Protestant and outspoken reformer, Drury had just published a book in which he urged the restoration to the Palatinate of Prince Charles Louis, eldest son of the exiled Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. It will be recalled that Charles Louis's personal chaplain was John Wilkins, and we may well wonder, in view of such connections, whether Hartlib and Comenius might not have taken part in the activities of Haak and Wilkin's Invisible College. At any rate, while in England, Comenius wrote a book entitled Via Lucis, the ‘Way of Light’,60 in which he calls for the formation of an elite fraternity of learned men. These brothers, moreover, are to be guided by some ‘order’ or ‘sacred society’ devoted to the welfare of humankind and they are to spread the light through the use of a universal language.
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