Solomon's Secret Arts (33 page)

As it turned out, Wenham would be the last person convicted of witchcraft in England. The last accusations were made in 1717. The laws against
maleficia
or using witchcraft to do harm would remain on the statute books until 1736, but they were a dead letter. While the attitudes of rural folk may not have altered, the disappearance of witchcraft prosecutions reflected a definite shift in English elite attitudes. It was not merely partisan, as it seems to have affected both Whig and Tory judges. Was belief in the existence of good and bad spirits similarly waning among the elite? The subject of spirits, unfortunately, was hardly mentioned at all in the Wenham controversy.

Four years later, however, the last important debate about witchcraft in England closed the door firmly on the notion that there was a difference between the summoning of good and bad spirits. It was set off by Richard Boulton, a physician and medical writer.
¹⁴³
While Boulton was a Tory, he was not a party hack, and his
Complete History of Magick, Sorcery and Witchcraft
, published in two parts in 1715 and 1716, should not be regarded simply as a High Church reaction to the return of the Whig Party to power under George I. Boulton quoted with approval John Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, and he did not mention the Wenham case. The purpose of his
Complete History
was to encourage individual moral reflection, “to put us in Mind of the Delusions of Satan, and the ill Consequences that attend such who serve so bad a Master as the Devil,” not to encourage more witch prosecutions.
¹⁴⁴

Satan's delusions, according to Boulton, included magic, both ritual and popular. Two sorts of persons, he maintained, were attracted to magic, “
viz.
learned and unlearned; and [there were] two Methods also of exciting them to this forbidden Curiosity,
viz.
the Devil's School and his Rudiments.” The Devil's School began where natural causes ended. Those who sought further knowledge were often “apt to advance too high; and where lawful Arts and Sciences fail of giving them Satisfaction, they are apt to apply themselves to the black and unlawful Science of Magick.” Boulton knew a lot about the circles and conjurations found in works like the
Little Key of Solomon
, but he considered
them to be “forbidden Fruits” that made practitioners into slaves of the Devil. As for “the Devil's Rudiments” or unlearned magic, it consisted of “such unlawful Charms, which old Women often make use of to produce Effects without natural Causes.” The professional contempt of a medical man for the homeopathic cures of village wise women is palpable here. Boulton further condemned judicial astrology, chiromancy or palm reading and fortune-telling, “which are unfit to be practiced amongst Christians.”
¹⁴⁵
Witchcraft was no worse than magic, except that its practitioners knew they were truckling with the Devil. Witches, according to Boulton, had access to four types of evil spirits. The first were “
Lemures
or
Spectra
, which sometimes appear in the Form of dead Persons”—a mere trick, “since it is not possible the Souls of the Defunct should return.” The second were spirits “such as haunt and follow several persons,” while the third, “
Incubi
and
Succubi
,” enter into human bodies. Finally, there were “
Fayries
,” no longer innocent, whose king and queen made court with “those who were Brothers and Sisters of the Art of Witchcraft.”
¹⁴⁶

The Whig clergyman Francis Hutchinson's
Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft
is often regarded as a reply to Boulton, but in fact he had thought of publishing it as early as 1706. He had been dissuaded by the archbishop of Canterbury, who felt it would have a bad effect on the proposed union with Scotland—probably an accurate observation.
¹⁴⁷
When it appeared in 1718, Hutchinson's work marked a turning point for mainstream Anglican argument about witchcraft. While he did not deny the existence of spirits, he asserted that it was both unlawful and impossible to contact them: “tho’ the sober Belief of good and bad Spirits is an essential Part of every good Christian's Faith, yet imaginary Communications with them, have been the Spring both of the worst corruptions of Religion, and the greatest Perversions of Justice.” Books that dealt with witchcraft—he counted twenty-seven of them since 1660—simply promoted superstitious beliefs among the vulgar. “These books and Narratives are in Tradesmen's Shops, and Farmer's Houses, and are read with great Eagerness, and are continually levening the Minds of the Youth, who delight in such Subjects.”
¹⁴⁸
Hutchinson used narratives, including that of Jane Wenham, to disprove the notion that witches made compacts with the Devil, or could do harm through supernatural powers. Flushed with patriotism, Hutchinson connected “true Judgment” regarding witchcraft with “modern Improvements of natural and experimental Philosophy,” in which Great Britain led the world.
¹⁴⁹

It took four years for Boulton to reply with an impassioned vindication of his
Complete History
, which Hutchinson had not explicitly mentioned. Making a point-by-point reply to his presumed foe, Boulton accused the Whig cleric of trying to make “Party-Business of believing what the Scripture declares for Truth,” as well as of “excusing and extenuating the Sin of
Witchcraft
.”
¹⁵⁰
The last
part of Boulton's book included a long section on how immaterial substances could affect material ones, a subject on which he again cited John Locke. In fact, he overstated the differences between himself and Hutchinson. Both regarded spirits as real, and condemned attempts to communicate with them. For Hutchinson, the goal of such efforts was impossible, while for Boulton they would inevitably lead to bad results. The main distinction between the two writers was their view of the reality of witchcraft. As no witches were being prosecuted in England at the time, the dispute was not as significant as Boulton implied.

No third voice appeared in the controversy, to propose, with John Webster, that witches might not be real, but benevolent spirits were, and could do good things for humanity. An intellectual pathway that had been open in the Restoration period was now closed. Until the late eighteenth century, nobody would again make a serious argument in print to the effect that the summoning of spirits was both possible and lawful. Witches would no longer hang in England and, after 1727, they would no longer burn in Scotland, but the devotees of occult thinking, whether learned or unlearned, had become intellectual outcasts. They had no more place in Hutchinson's “modern” universe than they had in Boulton's pious cosmology. Yet they persisted in the shadows for the next half-century, and in the end they came back out into the light, in altered form.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Newtonian Magi

A
NATHEMATIZED BY
the orthodox, deprecated by the polite, the occult was fading by 1715. Yet remarkably, a small number of influential men within the English intellectual elite still longed, if not to resuscitate it, then at least to appropriate it in ways that were compatible with natural philosophy. They were Newtonians, and the period after 1715 was their age of glory. Although the revered scientist lived only until 1727, Sir Isaac's disciples would dominate scientific and philosophical discourse until the 1760s.
¹
Whigs to a man, they had lofty aspirations, hoping to reshape the entire British cultural landscape to accord with their master's genius. As Newton was himself reticent and occasionally enigmatic about the wider implications of his work, his followers were relatively free to interpret what it all meant, and they went about it with gusto. They questioned prodigies or wonders, derided popular “superstitions” and scorned magical explanations—or, at least, in some contexts they did.
²

Perhaps the most enthusiastic of Newton's interpreters was the French Huguenot exile, Anglican clergyman and preparer of experiments for the Royal Society Jean-Théophile Desaguliers. In 1728, Desaguliers published a gushing poetic tribute to his recently deceased mentor, in which he demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the Newtonian system was not just the best explanation of the universe, but “The Best Form of Government.” Newton appears in the poem as a “tow'ring Genius” who “shews th'
Almighty Architect'
s unalter'd Laws.” These divine laws apply to political as well as celestial affairs:

The same principle of attraction underlies the “
perfect Model
” of government, one in which mutual love and respect for law keep both the king (i.e. the sun) and his subjects (i.e. the planets) in harmony.
³

Newton's “
perfect Model
” seemed to leave no room for supernatural explanations. Indeed, the triumph of the Newtonians might be interpreted as a death knell for the occult. Despite his long-lasting addiction to alchemy, Newton had never
publicly
espoused any intellectual position that could be tied to occult thinking. Limiting himself to mathematical proofs and empirical observations, he kept aloof from the hypotheses of Hermetic philosophers and speculations of Behmenists. “Inchanters, Magicians, Sorcerers, Necromancers & Witches,” he wrote about ancient magic, “signified deceivers & cheats who … pretended to supernatural powers.”
⁴
He reviled both “Popish superstition” and popular gullibility.

Of course, to depict Newton as a foe of the occult meant suppressing the evidence of his private alchemical writings. Accordingly, when his devoted acolyte the antiquarian William Stukeley penned a memoir of Newton in 1752, he glossed over the problem of the master's hidden fixations with a baldly disingenuous claim: “as to chymistry in general, we may very well presume, Sr. Isaac from his long, & constant application to that pyrotechnical amusement, had made very important discoverys, in this branch of philosophy, w[hic]h. had need enough of his masterly skill, to rescue it from Superstition, from vanity, & imposture; from the fond inquiry of alchymy, & transmutation.”
⁵
Stukeley, who had access to Newton's manuscripts, must have known these words to be untrue, but their veracity remained unchallenged for nearly two centuries. The unpublished but frequently cited memoir further characterized Newton's religious views as thoroughly conformist. Stukeley asserted that, while “those of Arrian principles, have taken great pains to inlist Sr. Isaac into th[e]ir party,” they did so in vain, because “the ch[urch]. of England intirely claims him as her Son, in faith, & in practise.”
⁶
As a young man, Newton would probably have been deeply disturbed by this statement, but the older Newton might well have nodded his grey head in assent. An office-holder and pillar of respectability, he had no wish to be known as a heretic. Indeed, he had suppressed the publication of two anti-Trinitarian letters that he had written to John Locke.
⁷

Despite Stukeley's obfuscations, however, Newton's heirs did not wholly obliterate these embarrassing aspects of his legacy—nor did they actually wish to do so. Like their mentor, they too felt the attraction of occult thinking, but they imitated his reticence and did not publicize their desire for hidden knowledge. Instead, they disguised what was not fully respectable in the garb of observations on antiquity, philosophy, religion and cosmology. Scouring
learned accounts in search of hidden connections, they attempted to rewrite occult thinking as a historical artifact that retained meaning and power in the present. Desaguliers himself provides an example. His poem on the Newtonian system linked the harmony of the universe with the Pythagorean “Music of the Spheres,” describing the planets as circling the sun “in Mystick Dance.”
⁸
The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, noted for his idea of the transmigration of souls as well as for heliocentrism, had fascinated occult writers from Ficino to Fludd, and his theory of music had drawn Newton's interest.
⁹
Stukeley would later echo Desaguliers on the “Music of the Spheres” and the “Mystick Dance.”
¹⁰
Was this meant as a metaphor or as a more literal description of a supernatural process?

The answer was not straightforward. The Newtonians insisted on natural explanations for any phenomenon that could not be classified as a divine sign, but this left a great deal of space for speculation. For them, the mythology of the Egyptians, the cosmologies of the Greeks and the healing powers of pagan priests provided fragmentary evidence of God's plan for the universe. Understanding them or, better still, reconciling them with scriptural revelation could lead to personal insight, which might elevate its possessor to a higher plane. Stukeley called those who held such insight Druids. As he imagined the ancient British holy men to be cousins of the Zoroastrian priesthood of Persia, he did not object to referring to them as “Magi,” although he would have insisted that the term had nothing to do with conjuring. At the same time, their divine wisdom was not purely natural, because it illuminated the mind and intentions of God.