Solomon's Secret Arts (21 page)

Casaubon's writings incensed one reader, the Lancashire schoolmaster John Webster. He was by no means a Hobbesian; rather, he was a practising alchemist whose views on occult philosophy were not very different from those of Elias Ashmole. Unlike Ashmole, however, Webster had a sectarian past—during the Civil War period, he had attached himself to the mystic William Erbery, an admirer of Jacob Boehme. He had already set off a major controversy regarding English higher education by publishing in 1653 an attack on what he saw as a university system mired in outdated Aristotelian values. To the intellectually impoverished undergraduates of his day, Webster recommended the study of astrology, singling out for praise “my learned, and industrious Countrymen Mr. Ashmole, Mr. William Lilly, Mr. Booker, Mr. Culpepper, and others.” He went on to endorse Plato, Paracelsus, J.B. van Helmont and Descartes, a quartet certain to enlighten (or thoroughly bewilder) any young man. A furious reply to Webster's book followed from John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and the Oxford professor of astronomy Seth Ward. They defended the existing university curriculum from charges of backwardness and dismissed
the “gullery” of astrology—although they were also careful to express personal respect for Ashmole.
²⁵

After the Restoration, Webster switched his politics to royalism and apparently conformed to the Church of England, but he remained an ardent alchemist, with a pronounced magical bent. In his 1671 work
Metallographia
, dedicated to the royalist hero Prince Rupert, he extolled the “natural and lawful Magick” of the Egyptians, while revealing his own preference for “the Mystical part of Chymistry.”
²⁶
He even took on the great Isaac Casaubon, explicitly rejecting his critical views on the antiquity of the
Corpus Hermeticum
.
²⁷

It might seem implausible that John Webster, alchemist, astrologer and magician, would become one of the leading denouncers of witch beliefs. That he did can only be understood as a reaction to those defenders of orthodoxy who, like Meric Casaubon, lumped witchcraft together with occult philosophy under the rubric of diabolism. The enormous book that Webster published in 1677 on what he carefully labelled “Supposed Witchcraft” explains his position pretty clearly, although it has often mystified students of the period who have read it in search of a sceptical critique of magic. Webster begins with the complaint that alchemists and writers on occult subjects, including John Dee, have been falsely suspected of practising witchcraft by “the monster-Headed Multitude.”
²⁸
This seems an odd way to attack Meric Casaubon, who had never courted popularity, but it may reflect the harassed feelings of a former sectarian living amid the loud triumphs of the revived Church of England. For Webster, witchcraft was essentially a scurrilous accusation that rubbed off on serious students of the occult.

That accusation was manifestly unfair, in Webster's opinion, because witches, unlike occult philosophers, were not able to do anything supernatural. While he accepted that not all witches were imaginary, he insisted that they could not possibly possess the powers that were ascribed to them. He agreed fully with Casaubon's point that evil spirits, even the Devil himself, existed as incorporeal entities. Demons could do nothing in the physical world, however, without the approval of God; so their followers were deluded, as were those who saw the works of Satan everywhere around them. While Webster accepted that “the force of imagination” might be responsible for strange physical effects, like the altering of fetuses in the womb, he hastened to add that “the Devil acteth nothing in it at all, but the setting of his will upon that mischief.”
²⁹
Webster devoted an entire chapter of his work to demonstrating that spirits might “separately exist,” apart from bodies and even souls—a point expressly denied by the materialists Hobbes and Wagstaffe. He was also inclined to believe in the efficacy of magical charms.
³⁰
Webster devoted as much attention to these topics as he did to debunking witchcraft, which may explain why his
work was not reprinted in the eighteenth century by those who sought to remove witch beliefs from the law.

Webster's book was answered by one final, tremendous blast from the Anglican trumpet: Joseph Glanvill's celebrated
Saducismus Triumphatus
, published in 1681. Glanville was a more conflicted upholder of orthodoxy than Casaubon. A Neoplatonist and promoter of science as well as a clergyman, he had begun to publish stories recounting cases of witchcraft or supernatural events in the mid-1660s, in an attempt to undermine scepticism, or “Sadducism” as he called it. When John Webster cast doubt on some of his evidence, Glanvill responded by editing a bumper collection of tales, all supposedly true, which he did not live to see into print.
³¹
Many of the stories dealt with cases of supernatural possession or apparitions rather than witchcraft, indicating how these categories were jumbled together in the worried minds of orthodox clergymen. Glanvill's main purpose was to illustrate through extended testimonies that evil spirits could move things, occupy the bodies of human beings and make general mayhem within the physical world. His personal experience of a particular haunting, involving “the drummer of Tedworth,” may have bolstered his credibility.
³²
The posthumously published compendium was a great success, and went through numerous editions by the early eighteenth century. It seems to have been just what readers wanted: a group of scary, well-documented and easily interpreted stories demonstrating a point everybody except Hobbes and his followers seemed to acknowledge: that supernatural events were commonplace and happened to very ordinary people.

Yet
Saducismus Triumphatus
was not only a story book; it also proffered an argument about invisible forces. It contained a long letter by Glanvill, addressing general objections to the reality of evil spirits: for example, that their actions were absurd or that they had no need to resort to the assistance of poor old women. His characteristic response to such scepticism was to point to human inability to grasp the meaning of supernatural events. In philosophical terms, Glanvill fell back on what he called “the
Platonick Hypothesis, that Spirits are embodied
,” or rather that they could occupy and manipulate material substances.
³³
Unlike Casaubon, he did not regard all spirits as diabolical, and went so far as to assert “that much of the
Government
of us, and our Affairs, is committed to the
better Spirits
.” Human contact with these good spirits, however, “is not needful for the Designs of the
better world
,” so their operations remain beyond our understanding or control.
³⁴
This was a rather weak argument, which would never have persuaded a ritual magician to desist from importuning angels. Surprisingly, Glanvill did not answer Webster directly in this letter, perhaps because he shared some of his antagonist's assumptions about the spirit world.

Glanvill's friend the philosopher Henry More was even more careful in his response to Webster, but in the end just as ambivalent about benign spirits. More, whom we have already encountered as the chief opponent of Thomas Vaughan, edited
Saducismus Triumphatus
after Glanvill's death. Having abandoned Cartesianism for Neoplatonism, he openly accepted the reality of spirits, and he did not consider all of them to be evil. In the philosophical essay that he appended to Glanvill's book, More argued against Descartes, the “
Hobbians
” and others who doubted that spirits could exist without physical bodies. If this was so, he asked, what was to be made of thoughts, the soul or even God? Using geometric diagrams that gave his argument a scientific appearance, he demonstrated to his own satisfaction that spirits could join with and act upon matter, just as matter might mysteriously adhere to itself. As More put it, “the
unition
of
Spirit
with
Matter
, is as intelligible as the
unition
of one
part
of
Matter
with
another
.”
³⁵
What he did not explain in this essay was whether human contact with immaterial spirits was ever benign and lawful. A letter written by More to Samuel Hartlib in 1652, however, contains the reflection that “if good spiritts enter into any man, any how, I should not easily suspect that man to be a bad man, for I conceive all spiritts have sense and are passible and abhor from coming near unchast impure, and wicked men, as we do to come near a stinking dunghill.”
³⁶
On this occasion, More conceded that good spirits could indeed have contact with humans, and only with good humans at that.

This was not what he wrote in the epistolary preface to Glanvill's book, however, where he implied that attempts to converse with spirits would play into the hands of the Evil One. He illustrated the point, appropriately enough, with a story. More recalled an old acquaintance, a country magistrate who confessed to having “used all the Magical Ceremonies of Conjuration he could to raise the Devil or a Spirit, and had a most earnest desire to meet with one, but never could do it.” This gentleman ardently believed that once, while a servant was pulling off his boots, he had felt the invisible hand of a spirit on his back. More drily advised him that such a “Goblin” would “be the first that will bid you welcome into the other World.”
³⁷
In other words, the spirit was a demon, and the man was bound for hell. The warning might have been addressed to John Webster, but it is offered in a tone of friendly counsel, and it lacks the condescension of Meric Casaubon. More felt a connection to the deluded adherents of occult philosophy. But for his attachment to orthodoxy and order, he might have been one himself.

Did the learned More believe his colleague Glanvill's fantastic tales of phantom drummers, levitating children and ghostly apparitions? In fact, he had recounted similar incidents to his pupil Lady Anne Conway in the 1660s.
³⁸
More saw them as useful moral lessons, and did not deign to question them. To be sure, others thought that they
should
be questioned. Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, herself an accomplished philosopher and advocate of empirical science, corresponded with Glanvill, but dismissed his supernatural tales as “nothing but slights and jugling tricks.” She confessed to a belief in “Natural Magick; which is, that the sensitive and rational Matter oft moves in such a way, as is unknown to us,” such as when a corpse moved in the presence of its murderer, but she refused to accept that “Spirits wander about in the Air, and have their mansion there; for men may talk as well of impossibilities, as of such Things which are not composed of Natural Matter.” She did not object to astrology, because if the light of stars can reach our eyes, “their effects may come to our bodies.” The “spiritual rays” cast out by witches, however, she found to be entirely incredible. Although Cavendish had a Hobbesian streak, she did not reject spirits entirely, and she was even willing to accept the reality of fairies. As for witches, she expressed concern that “many a good, old honest woman hath been condemned innocently, and suffered death wrongfully, by the sentence of some foolish and cruel Judges.”
³⁹
Critics of witchcraft seldom sympathized with wrongly accused old women. Cavendish may have done so because, unusually for a learned writer, she was a woman herself.

In an intellectual world dominated by educated men, the “Hags” who comprised the main victims in witch trials, and who were still being hanged in the 1660s and 1670s, did not command much attention. The controversy over witchcraft was never really about them. Even Margaret Cavendish was ultimately less concerned with witches than she was with the fundamental philosophical issue, the reality of spirits. Her arguments, like those of Hobbes, Wagstaffe, Casaubon, Webster and Glanvill, were composed for the edification of learned readers; they were not designed to sway the minds of the justices of the peace who presided over witch trials. If English witchcraft accusations slowly came to an end after 1660, it was because judges became reluctant to put their trust in the testimonies of poor, illiterate and often malicious accusers, not because they had suddenly become Hobbesian materialists.
⁴⁰

The fading away of witch trials also happened in Restoration Scotland, where no intellectual debate over witchcraft took place, and where “thinking with demons” was strongly upheld by both the established Episcopalian clergy and the displaced Presbyterians.
⁴¹
The main Scottish writer on the subject was the Presbyterian George Sinclair, former professor of philosophy at Glasgow University and an experimental scientist who was best known for having written a treatise on hydrostatics. His book
Satan's Invisible World Discovered
, published in 1685, imitated the strategy of
Saducismus Triumphatus
by publishing eyewitness accounts of the works of the Devil in Scotland, to which
other stories were added, including several lifted directly from Glanvill. Sinclair's preface poured scorn on Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza (“or rather
Maledictus
”) and Descartes, as the founders of modern atheism.
⁴²
He made no attempt to countenance “benign spirits” or to argue from Neoplatonic principles about the existence of incorporeal forms. Sinclair was the Casaubon of the north, and the continuing popularity of his book, down to the nineteenth century, reminds us that, if the defenders of strict religious orthodoxy had been the only voices heard in the British Isles, witches might have continued to hang—or, north of the Tweed, to burn.
⁴³

We cannot trace the decline of witchcraft to the debate (or, in Scotland, to the lack of debate) of the Restoration period. On the other hand, we
can
draw from these writings the observation that occult philosophy faced formidable, albeit divided, opponents: materialists on the one hand, orthodox Anglicans on the other, with prominent Neoplatonists providing unexpected assistance to the latter. From different philosophical positions, the critics of occult thinking hammered away at alchemy, astrology and ritual magic, which they reviled as superstitious, enthusiastic or diabolic. Facing such strong intellectual and theological opposition, many who were attracted to the occult came to believe they could best defend themselves by adopting an empirical approach. By detached observation and “disinterested” experimentation, the watchwords of the Restoration intellectual establishment, the claims of occult philosophy, occult science and even popular magic could be put to the test, and proven true or false.