Solomon's Secret Arts (16 page)

By the time Booker was writing, however, an alternative approach to the supernatural basis of astrology was already being championed by the young reformer John Gadbury. Better educated than most astrologers of the older generation, he had nonetheless enjoyed their support in rising to the heights of astrological fame. Gadbury was a protégé of George Wharton, and edited the works of that venerable figure, whose royalist politics he shared. It was Gadbury who first published Wharton's Neoplatonist treatise on the Spirit of the World, and he praised the writings of his mentor, including his tracts on chiromancy or palm reading, as “little less than a compleat
Encyclopedia
, or Summary of all Sciences.”
⁵⁶
Gadbury became celebrated as a foe to “conjuring” and a bitter critic of other astrologers, whose slipshod methods he deplored. Rightly or wrongly, he excoriated most of his competitors, including William Lilly, as religious Dissenters. Although he was accused of flirting with esoteric religious groups himself during the Civil War and Interregnum period, after 1660 Gadbury loudly declared his devotion to the Church of England and his undying hostility to religious sectarians, whom he now associated with fanaticism and fraud. “Dreams, Whimsies, Enthusiastical Nonsense and Blasphemies, under pretence of Divine Inspiration, will no longer befool this (of late twenty years) cheated Kingdome,” he wrote in 1663, adding: “The Imposture is discovered.”
⁵⁷
In an age of restored monarchy and religious uniformity, astrology should abandon the occult “fooleries” of Lilly and embrace a rational method.

The impostures denounced by Gadbury in his almanac included many cases of bewitchment and possession, which he judged without exception to be phony or due to natural causes. In 1679, he went into great detail concerning a woman in London who claimed to be tormented by evil spirits, including that of her late husband, which had supposedly impregnated her. By reading her nativity, Gadbury judged her to be “flagitiously hypocritical.” The story
prefaced a diatribe against those astrologers “who, (with great impudence, and greater fraud) have pretended to discover and cure witchcraft by the Stars … Astrology teacheth no such thing. The influences of the Stars are purely natural, and directed by natural Beams, or Aspects Geometrical: and do incline, but compel or constrain none. Therefore can they neither cause, nor cure witchcraft.”
⁵⁸
While he did not deny that witchcraft was possible, as was evident in Scripture, Gadbury apparently never met a witch or bewitched person whom he did not believe was mad, deluded or faking their symptoms. Of course, he reached these conclusions by charting their nativities. Apparently, astrology could still reveal that someone was
not
a witch. It could also precisely diagnose diseases. Gadbury did not doubt that the “true Astrological Physician … can justly distinguish of these differences [in diseases] by consulting the proper Significators of the Nerves, and Humors peccant, in the Decumbiture, Crisis, or Garniture of the Patient concern'd; and by considering their Position in Aiery, Watery, Erthy or Fiery Signs or Constellations.”
⁵⁹

While he certainly wanted to disentangle astrology from its relationship with witchcraft, Gadbury was not in general a debunker of occult thinking. In fact, he was drawn towards those who sought to construct occult philosophies, like his friend Sir George Wharton. As will be seen, he endorsed the writings of the “Astromagus” John Heydon in the 1660s. As late as 1684, he recalled the pamphlet war between the “Theomagus” Thomas Vaughan and Henry More, noting that “Eugenius Philalethes [Vaughan] was treated in an exceeding base and scurrilous Manner by Dr. M. And therefore his severe censure of the Dr. was justly merited, as not only injuring him, but the Truth itself.”
⁶⁰
Gadbury's aim was thus not to reject the occult basis of astrology, but to separate it from “vulgar” or “superstitious” elements like ritual magic or witchcraft, which he represented as offshoots of religious enthusiasm. The problem with this high-minded approach was that it cut astrology off from one of its sustaining roots—popular belief in the everyday presence of angelic or demonic forces. For all his lofty Neoplatonic or humanist rhetoric, Agrippa had not hesitated to draw on popular belief; nor had Wharton or Ashmole or Vaughan. Gadbury was blazing a new trail for English astrology, but he was not enough of a sustained thinker to mark it out in a philosophical sense. Moreover, as a working astrologer of humble background, he lacked the authority necessary to impress the educated public.

John Goad was admirably equipped to make up for those failings. A fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in London, Goad was not a professional astrologer, and he never edited an almanac. Widely read and thoughtful, he deplored equally “the unlucky Principle of
Mechanism
among the Learned, and of
Nature
(in the Brutish
Notion) amongst the Vulgar.”
⁶¹
He recognized Cartesian rationalism as the chief enemy of natural philosophy, and argued instead in favour of a celestial causality that united spirit and matter. Its agent was light, the subject of a recent, bitter dispute within the Royal Society between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Goad agreed with Newton in supposing that light was a body, rather than a “pulse” or motion propagated by a body. In a test of Newton's theory, Robert Moray had observed light from the planet Venus, and had published his findings in the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions
for 1672.
⁶²
Goad must have known of this experiment, carried out by another prominent exponent of occult philosophy. Goad's own theory was derived from the Neoplatonic assumption that light transmitted spirit. He noted that if anything “may be entitled to what Philosophers call the
Spirit
of the
World
, This is it, the smallest and most active
Body
in the World; in
Motion
confest to be
Instantaneous
, in subtlety incredible, and absolutely incomprehensible.”
⁶³
The energy of heavenly light, according to Goad, acted on the earthly air in order to produce changes in the weather, to cause diseases and to influence human behaviour.

Goad was well versed in every aspect of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. A traditionalist, he rejected the heliocentrism of Galileo and Johannes Kepler, in favour of Tycho Brahe's concept of the planets circling the sun, which in turn circled the earth. He answered Pierre Gassendi's objections to astrology—“
If it rain to day, it doth not rain again the same day 12 Month
”—by pointing out that the planetary aspects did not follow a yearly cycle. He was familiar with the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes concerning the elasticity of air, although he referred to it in a peculiar way. He denied Hobbes's contention that frost was due to wind, “of which he is excellently admonished by the Noble Mr. Boyle,” and ascribed it to planetary aspects instead. This led him into a rather twisted argument about whether planetary light, which presumably conveyed warmth, could in fact be “a Friend to Cold,” although the “Faculty” of cold was not contained in it. From there, Goad proceeded to consider the phenomenon of armies in the air, portents of war that had often been perceived in the troubled 1640s. In opposition to Descartes, who had attributed them to superstition, Goad defended their existence. “A Supe[r]natural Power cloathed in Nature,” he wrote, “may be Legible, as Visible.”
⁶⁴

Goad's insistence on the legibility of the supernatural led him to admit that “there may be something in
Cabala, Gematry
, something in the mysterious Force of
Numbers
, in
Critical
Days,
Climacteric
Years, The Doctrine of
Magnetisms, Sympathies
, and
Natural
Magic,
Transmutations
of Metals, Doctrine of
Moles
in the Body, Doctrine of
Signatures
of
Planets, Dreams, Chiromancy, Genethliacal
Skill,” etc. However, he was adamant in rejecting
anything that smacked of hidden qualities or might be associated with demonic powers. “Let not the Reader think in the least we will add
Geomancy, Steganography
[hidden messages],
occult Philosophy
, or any thing whose grounds hide from Mortal search, or have a Sulphurous flavour of the
unclean Spirit
.”
⁶⁵
His inclusion of occult philosophy in this list was an obvious swipe at Agrippa. Unlike Blagrave or Lilly, Goad did not believe that the language of the stars conveyed angelic authority. The power of astrology lay in its proper interpretation, not in its magical potential. By suggesting that the supernatural was, like nature, a book to be read correctly, Goad was surprisingly modern in his sensibilities. Applied rigorously, however, his principles would rule out horary astrology, or asking direct questions of the stars—the bread-and-butter of professional astrologers. Would the latter accept the views of a man who sought to deprive them of their most lucrative source of business?

In the event, Goad's views never had much chance to make an impact. They were fatally undermined by his religion. Goad was dismissed in 1685 as headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School on a charge of having converted to “Popery.” It was not a false accusation: he publicly announced his adherence to Roman Catholicism in the year that
Astro-Meteorologica
appeared. Goad prefaced the book with a fulsome dedication to King James II (not surprisingly, it was missing from the 1689 Latin version). Isaac Newton, who was engaged in a furious campaign to prevent Catholics from receiving appointments at Cambridge, would certainly not have appreciated Goad's endorsement of his theory of light, no matter what the great scientist may have thought of astrology. After the Glorious Revolution, which he did not long survive, Goad's scholarship faded into obscurity.

The attempt by Gadbury and Goad to separate astrology from popular and demonic magic, while retaining its supernatural foundations, may have foundered for political and religious reasons, but it was not the only reformist initiative undertaken by the astrological writers of late seventeenth-century England. Josiah Childrey, the Anglican cleric, inventor of improved telescopes and defender of heliocentrism, advocated astrology as a purely empirical study, carried out in accordance with Francis Bacon's methods of scientific inquiry. “The stars have an influence on us, and some small matter touching this influence Astrology knows,” Childrey argued, “yet no more, and of no more use, than to assure her that she doth know something of it. But her vanity is, she promiseth more than she is able to perform: and is led much more by fancy & plausibilities, than sound reason.”
⁶⁶
He urged astrologers to compile charts of the stars and compare them to historical events in order to demonstrate the correspondences that would establish their art as a science in the Baconian sense.

No prominent astrologer strictly followed Childrey's advice until the emergence of John Partridge in the late 1670s. Where Childrey was a royalist who had studied at Oxford, Partridge was an outspoken Whig who had trained as a cobbler. Although John Gadbury would become his mortal enemy during the Exclusion Crisis, in 1679 the two men were close enough for Gadbury to contribute a preface to one of Partridge's books. The dedication was to the royalist astrologer—and Gadbury's mentor—Sir George Wharton. Already, however, Partridge was insistent that astrology was a science, resting on strict rules and not on the influence of any occult forces. “ASTROLOGY is a singular, innocent Science,” he explained, “Teaching how to judge of all future Events, by the Motion of the Stars only, and not by the help of any kind of Prophetical or Diabolical Inspiration, as some think.”
⁶⁷
In this as in all of his subsequent writings, Partridge provided no explanation whatsoever of why the motion of the stars foretold future events. He was not interested in such questions, which might have led to supernatural conclusions. In this regard, Partridge was a paragon of Baconian science, the astrologer of whom Childrey had dreamed; but he remained a stubborn traditionalist in his methods, sticking to the pre-Copernican universe. Although he was forced into exile during the reign of James II, Partridge was to return after 1688, full of resentment at his enemies. In the subsequent decade, he became the most influential astrologer in the kingdom. The scientific supernaturalism of John Goad's astrology would give way to a severe astrological rationalism that forsook any attempt at theory.

The Astromagus: John Heydon of Hermupolis

If the tendency in astrology after 1660 was to minimize the role of the occult and to pursue instead the scientific and the empirical, we nonetheless have to take into account one great exception: John Heydon, the so-called “Astromagus.” In the late 1650s and 1660s, he published a series of hefty tomes that expounded a unique cosmology based on a hodgepodge of alchemy, astrology and magic. His works made a remarkable impact for about a decade, only to become virtually irrelevant in the early 1670s. Heydon exemplifies the occult road that astrology failed to travel in the late seventeenth century, but that was to emerge again in the late eighteenth century in the works of Ebenezer Sibly.

It is often difficult to determine when a writer of the past should be called a charlatan or a con man. In the case of John Heydon, no evidence exists to suggest that he did not believe what he wrote, although his vaunted world-system was based as much on blatant imitation as on inventive fantasies. He had his critics: Elias Ashmole called him “an Ignoramus and a Cheate,” while an anonymous adversary dubbed him a “Powder-Monkey, Roguy-Crucian,
Pimp-master-general, Universal Mountebank.”
⁶⁸
What we can deduce with some certainty is that he was a plagiarist and highly inconsistent in his opinions. He wrote less from personal conviction than from a desire to make a name for himself through grandiose assertions and copying the labours of others. Yet amid the intellectual ferment of the 1660s, his strategy worked. Heydon gained a following, which reached into the highest circles of Charles II's court.