Solomon's Secret Arts (22 page)

The Occult Experimentalists

All practising alchemists were experimentalists, but the individuals who will be considered in this section were known as experimental scientists for reasons that went beyond any specific interest they might have had in the occult. Without exception, they were inclined towards occult science from the start, and were trying to vindicate pre-formed assumptions. This may lead us to take a rather sceptical view of their objectivity, and to agree with the influential critique of seventeenth-century science proposed by Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer. In studying Robert Boyle's air-pump experiments, Shapin and Shaffer question the “disinterested” basis of experimentalism. They represent “disinterest” as a calculated device, designed to separate the “modest” scientific practitioner, who relied only on empirical data, from the mere “enthusiast,” who depended on personal visions or insights.
⁴⁴
In short, scientific method was a ruse, which merely gave the appearance of separating experimentalists from prophets. To some extent, this section will uphold such an interpretation,
by illustrating how experimentalism was repeatedly used to erase the telltale traces of occult philosophy and science.

To characterize the methods of late seventeenth-century science in this way, however, does not do them full justice. For a start, the power of “disinterest” to limit and shape scientific claims was not just a cultural subterfuge; it set down parameters for experimentalism, requiring practitioners to employ a certain type of nonsectarian language, to communicate with a recognized “fellowship” of natural philosophers and to acknowledge the objections that might be raised by those within or even outside that privileged group. While Restoration science was often guided by underlying philosophical motivations that interfered with the patient observation of expanding gases or celestial ellipses, it was equally constrained by the convention of presenting information publicly before various communities: scholars, clerics, educated amateurs, even the occasional foreign observer. Experiments could be repeated by those who did not entirely share the assumptions of their original performers, so different points of view had to be addressed or accommodated. Under such conditions, a “disinterested” scientist was not able to proclaim his adherence to occult philosophy openly, or even to publish experiments that rested on them. It would have ruined his credibility, even among those who shared similar beliefs. “Disinterested” science, in relation to the occult, was a self-denying ordinance with severely restrictive effects.

On the other hand, the free flow of ideas during the 1640s and 1650s, and the relative lack of concern with issues of heterodoxy, had made it possible to merge occult questions with experimental science, to a greater extent than would subsequently be imaginable. An easy-going interchange between the two permeates the voluminous correspondence of Samuel Hartlib, the German polymath. From the standpoint of practical alchemy, Hartlib's circle set an experimental standard that would be imitated for the rest of the century. The records of Hartlib's “Office of Address” are full of alchemical recipes, “Hermetic secrets” and notes on “secret experiments.”
⁴⁵
They were apparently shared among Hartlib's alchemical collaborators, including his son-in-law Frederick Clodius, Robert Child, John Dury and George Starkey. The strict regime of data collection, record-keeping and observation that Starkey adopted in carrying out his alchemical research has been praised by recent commentators.
⁴⁶
His influence on the thinking of other members of the Hartlib circle was profound. They too stuck to a “disinterested” line of inquiry in tackling alchemical issues.

Hartlib's correspondents did not, however, neglect occult questions, even when they involved the supernatural. Astrology was particularly frustrating for them, because the mysteries of its operations presented difficulties for the
experimental method. “Tis very probable,” commented the clergyman John Beale in 1657, “That wee oft times call those Influences planetary, which are but the operations or emanations of our owne inhabitable globe, though occasioned by the Light, or other applications of other Orbes.” In other words, natural earthly phenomena, like the movement of tides, should not be ascribed to planetary influences, although they might be related to the movement of celestial bodies. This did not mean that Beale wholly rejected astrological influences; rather, as he noted later in the same letter, “I am of this Heresy, That Astrology is a most serious affayre, if it were handled with ancient sanctity, as I conceive & find anciently recorded, That the holy Patriarchs did doe.”
⁴⁷
The problem with astrology was that its sacred and scriptural basis had yet to be rediscovered. We might not consider this to be a strictly scientific issue, but to the extraordinarily multitalented Beale—agricultural reformer, expert on cider-making and all-round source of expertise for Hartlib—it was just another area of natural inquiry, as it would later be for William Stukeley.

In the late 1650s, Beale wrote a series of detailed letters to Hartlib on visions, spirits and apparitions. Unlike Tany, the Pordages or Jane Lead, however, he took a methodical and experimental approach to these occult matters. His means of testing them included personal experience, as he described in a letter of 1657: “But whilst with much humiliation, fasting, & prayer I sought the Lord for his heavenly wisedome & instructions, & closely adherd to the revelations of the holy worde, & weighed all the kinds of wisedome there particularised, recited, or exemplifyed, I found those depths that made mee very much despise all other kinds of humane learneing.” Beale was approaching what he believed to be the highest form of knowledge: communication with spirits. Although he saw spirits as either heavenly or demonic, and did not believe, as the Neoplatonists did, that they inhabited all things, Beale was nonetheless convinced that “the Angells have as much to doe with us & for us nowe, as ever they did for our forefathers.”
⁴⁸
Mystical conversation with them, he maintained, could be facilitated by proper preparation. He advised Hartlib that “the Spirite of Man by art & discipline, by preparation of ye body & minde may in dreames & trances, in syncopes, & fits of bodily weakenesses have a deepe insight into things absent, & things to come, & things secrete.”
⁴⁹
What “things secrete” did he see? The letters do not reveal this.

His silence is understandable. Even under the Protectorate, natural philosophers were concerned with the possibility of being accused of practising magic, heterodoxy or diabolism. They might take refuge in a delicate combination of mechanical explanations and vague occult metaphors. This was the case, for example, with Sir Kenelm Digby's weapon salve, the recipe for which appears in a note contained in Hartlib's papers.
⁵⁰
Digby, a Roman
Catholic naval commander and diplomat as well as an alchemist, had gone into exile during the Civil War period.
⁵¹
He raised a furore in 1658 when he published an address that he had delivered at Montpellier, claiming discovery of the much sought-after weapon salve, which “naturally, without any Magic, cures wounds without touching them, yea, without seeing of the Patient.”
⁵²
The weapon salve debate had begun in the late sixteenth century and had long fascinated natural philosophers. If a “sympathetic” cure of this sort could be shown to work, then it might validate the thesis that the objects of nature had affinities with one another that were either supernatural or caused by unknown, unseen factors.

Historians of science have praised Digby for suggesting a purely mechanistic rather than spiritual approach to the problem of the weapon salve, but his discovery was more complicated than that.
⁵³
Digby invented a yarn about getting the secret of the salve—actually, a powder of vitriol—from a travelling Carmelite monk, a figure of mystery straight out of an alchemical romance. His theory of how the powder worked was based on a fantastic tale of light carrying atoms out of the wound, “like Cavaliers mounted on winged coursers.” Digby's
Discourse
also contained references to other remedies, like one for the removal of warts that involved rubbing hands in the light of the moon.
⁵⁴
While these were supposedly natural, the parallel with magical cures was evidently a selling point. By dressing up mechanical science with touches of the supernatural, Digby was able to promote his discovery with great success. His lecture went through no fewer than forty editions by the early eighteenth century.

Digby was more of a showman than Robert Boyle, who regarded the occult seriously but took pains to exclude it from his published work. Boyle was the most celebrated English scientist of his time, until the appearance of Newton's
Principia Mathematica
. Through his connection with the Hartlib circle, he was able to learn the methods of experimental alchemy from George Starkey. His alchemical pursuits over the next forty years have been brilliantly reconstructed by Michael Hunter and Lawrence Principe.
⁵⁵
While his approach to alchemy was essentially empirical, Boyle was fascinated by spirits and never gave up hope of contacting them through the Philosopher's Stone. Apart from one notable lapse, however, Boyle kept his ideas on alchemy and its supernatural ends out of his many publications on purely mechanical science. His concern with respectability and Anglican orthodoxy, especially after the Restoration, made him unwilling to expose himself to charges of enthusiasm or diabolism.

Boyle's earliest writings bear the clearest marks of occult philosophy and mystical religion. His unpublished draft of a “Study of the Booke of Nature,” written in 1649, contained numerous citations from John Everard's translation of Hermes Trismegistus, “that great Philosopher, Priest & King, whom some
have esteem'd ancenter than Moses.”
⁵⁶
A decade later, Boyle published a religious work,
Seraphic Love
, whose title was derived from “those nobler Spirits of the Caelestial Hierarchie, whose Name … expresses them to be of a flaming Nature.”
⁵⁷
In this treatise, the use of “Chymicall Metaphor” along with celestial and magnetic images is reminiscent of Jacob Boehme, whose writings Boyle may have encountered during his trips to Europe.
Seraphic Love
follows Boehme's Theosophy in equating God with a dialectical principle of Love that contains “so strong a Magick, as to Transform the Lover into the Object Lov'd.”
⁵⁸
When, in 1660, Boyle published the results of his famous experiments on the air pump, however, he avoided any reference to spiritual forces and offered strictly mechanical explanations. After Henry More raised objections to these experiments, and proposed the existence of a spiritual “Hylarchic Principle” that might explain them, Boyle responded by reiterating the “purely Corporeal and Mechanical” nature of compression, and vigorously denying the possibility of any such “Incorporeal Creature.”
⁵⁹
According to Boyle, More's spiritual view of nature was no different from that of the Chinese ruler who mistook a watch for a living thing.

Boyle's rejection of spiritual or supernatural explanations for experimental results might be read as a cautious reaction to the re-establishment of Anglican orthodoxy after 1660. The Restoration had changed many acolytes of occult thinking into conformists. John Beale and even John Webster returned, at least outwardly, to the embrace of the Church of England. Boyle's conformism, however, went deeper than a mere defensive reaction. Unlike the Neoplatonists, Boyle had never seen spirits as residing in all of nature; rather, as
Seraphic Love
made clear, good spirits occupied the ranks of angels and provided the models for communication between human beings and the deity. Of course, bad spirits also existed, as Boyle acknowledged in the preface that he appended in 1658 to an account of the noisy interactions of a demon with a French Protestant minister.
⁶⁰
Because he linked them either with the promise of mystical experience or the threat of diabolism, not with natural phenomena, Boyle was determined not to involve spirits in mechanical explanations.

He reserved his private thoughts on spirits for the observations on alchemy that he kept among his personal papers. Through the 1670s and early 1680s, Boyle carried out alchemical experiments, although most of his correspondence with other alchemists was destroyed by later editors. In a rare surviving work, a dialogue on alchemy written around 1680, Boyle imagined a conversation between friends that turns to the subject of whether “the acquisition of the Philosopher's-stone may be an inlett into another sort of knowledge and a step to the attainment of some intercourse with good spirits.” “Arnobius” (who seems to speak for the author) responds to the objections that intercourse with
spirits was either impossible or diabolical, by demonstrating, first, that there have been proven conversations between men and demons, and, second, by providing “some instances of Spirits whom wee have more reason to look upon as good than bad that have conversd with men.”
⁶¹
Boyle knew that his friend Joseph Glanvill was compiling a collection of examples of the first sort, that is, conversations with diabolic spirits, but he may also have been aware of the reluctance of Glanvill (and More) to comment publicly on communication with good spirits.
⁶²
The views of “Arnobius” constituted Boyle's answer to Glanvill's reticence, as well as to More's error in seeing spirits at work everywhere.

The dialogue remained unpublished, however, perhaps because Boyle had been sensitized to the difficulties of making even the most oblique public references to alchemy. In 1676, he published (under a pseudonym, with a Latin translation alongside it) an article in the
Philosophical Transactions
in which he hinted that he had discovered “that which the Chrysopaean Writers mean by their
Philosophick Mercury
,” allowing the transmutation of metals into gold. He also let it slip that the president of the Royal Society, viscount Brouncker, had already repeated his experiment. When he read the article, Isaac Newton was concerned enough to write to the journal's editor, Henry Oldenbourg, to register his doubts about the process and complain that such revelations could lead to “immense dammage to the world if there should be any verity in the Hermetick writers.” He recommended “high silence” to the “the noble Author.”
⁶³
The incident was not repeated. Boyle would thereafter maintain a distinction between public and private experiments. His reputation as a scientist would come to rest on his espousal of a mechanical philosophy rather than his conviction that the possessor of the Philosopher's Stone could hold conversations with angelic spirits.