Solomon's Secret Arts (41 page)

Defoe heightens our uncertainty in the following pages, by admitting the possibility of good spirits and providing examples of them. He dwells on particular cases of second sight among the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands.
¹⁹
Yet he soon lurches back into an attack on astrological charms and talismans, which leads him to a final, conclusive statement: good spirits may
exist, but magicians do not command them. The spirits who answer spells and serve the desires of human beings are of a different order. “How are they thus ready and beneficent,” Defoe asks, “if they are thus to be call'd out of their happy Abodes, like
Devils
, with Spells and Conjurations, with Necromancy and Wizardism?” Why would prescient spirits have to be informed by a magician about the circumstances in which they are being asked to assist?
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Evidently, if Dr Boreman was in contact with spirits, they were demons.

Defoe represented magical practices as widespread in England. Unlike Bourne or Frazer, however, he related those practices, not to folk traditions, but to occult philosophy and science, derived largely from books. He admitted that the distinction between good and bad spirits was commonly accepted among practitioners of magic, although he rejected it personally. Finally, he wrote almost nothing about witchcraft, conceding at one point that it was “quite out of Use, and we have heard very little of it in this Part of the World for many Years.”
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The age of witches, apparently, had given way to the age of cunning-men.

The practitioners of popular magic themselves sided with the novelist rather than with the clerics in affirming the significance of print culture. Two magical healers of the early eighteenth century, Duncan Campbel and Timothy Crowther, left first-hand evidence of their familiarity with occult sources. Campbel (he always spelled his surname in this fashion) was a deaf and mute Scotsman resident in London who claimed to have second sight. He specialized in cases of witchcraft, which he treated according to traditional methods, using charms and sympathetic cures. One of his bewitched clients, the vintner and tobacco merchant Richard Coates, was advised to boil his own urine. Cured of the “Distemper” that distorted his head and limbs, the grateful Coates made a legal affidavit testifying to the effectiveness of Campbel's practices in 1725.
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Wary of astrology, Campbel nonetheless made extensive use of talismans, which he argued “ought not to be condemned by Persons the most averse to Superstition; and it would be as stupid to deny their Force, as it would be to refuse the Sun the Honour of warming us.”
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Occasionally, Campbel combined popular magic with alchemical treatments. He ascribed his own cure from epilepsy to the intervention of a Genius or “Guardian Angel,” who visited him in a dream with a recipe for a “Powder of Sympathy” made with the aid of a loadstone.
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Campbel enjoyed some high-ranking connections—he claimed that Queen Anne herself was “no Stranger to my Scrawls,” and the subscription list to his
Memoirs
, published posthumously in 1732, includes the names of several Scottish lords as well as Tory politicians. The bulk of his clients, however, seem to have been merchants and tradesmen of London, their wives and families.
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Campbel's well-to-do clientele and fervent self-promotion were not matched by Timothy Crowther, parish clerk of Craven, near Skipton in North
Yorkshire, who practised as a rural astrologer and cunning-man between 1714 and 1761. One of his last acts, related to a dubious John Wesley shortly before Crowther's death, was to find a missing man: he had a boy stare into a looking glass until the man's murder was magically revealed. Crowther also dealt with cases of bewitchment, affliction by the King's Evil and the recovery of lost goods. His surviving “Charm-book” attests to his knowledge of astrological texts as well as of ritual magic. It includes ceremonial incantations straight out of the
Little Key of Solomon
: “I conjure and constrain, adjure and command the wise and subtle Spirits Abadan, Appolyon, Mephostophilis … that yu appear in the Crystall Stone or Berril Glass. Fiat, fiat, fiat.”
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Campbel and Crowther attest to a continuing exchange between popular magic and occult writings. This was further demonstrated by John Cannon, a Somerset excise officer and schoolteacher who kept a remarkable chronicle of his life down to 1743. As a literate man who read widely and held positions of importance in local affairs, Cannon does not belong to the lowest ranks of English society. Nonetheless, he grew up in a farming family in West Lydford, worked as a farm servant and mingled throughout his life with ordinary people who shared many of his attitudes. Cannon's ideas regarding the occult were indebted to folk traditions, but they were also shaped by reading or hearing about books on prophecy, astrology and ritual magic, the same publications that might have influenced a better-educated person. Cannon's chronicle makes no precise division between elite and plebeian beliefs, or between written and oral culture—in his experience, they were mingled together. He may not offer us a wholly “authentic” voice from the lower ranks, one untainted by elite learning, but he comes as close to a genuine plebeian voice as any source we are likely to find.

Cannon's first reference to the occult comes in an entry for 1688, when his brother was cured of a rupture by a “sympathizing remedy”—being passed naked three times each morning through the split sapling of an ash tree. This was done on the advice of “doctors & others who thought themselves able and experienced in such cases.”
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No doubt they were cunning-men like Timothy Crowther, their knowledge a mixture of tradition and book learning. Fifteen years later, Cannon had an encounter with a ritual magician, John Read, a shepherd and farm servant who “gave himself to know English learning, figuring, poetry, and a smack of Astronomy [i.e. astrology],” and who possessed “occult wit.” One Sunday, young Cannon was walking in a field with Read, when

Nevertheless, Cannon knew enough about what Read was doing to call it “occult sciences.” The shepherd-magus later moved to Dorset, after carefully burying “two books of the magic art, one of which was entitled Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy,” probably the 1651 English translation with a preface by Thomas Vaughan.
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That a farm labourer in rural Somerset was using Agrippa's
Three Books
for conjuring may seem extraordinary, but it aptly illuminates the commerce between popular and educated magic. It is less surprising to discover that Cannon was a believer in omens, portents and prophetic dreams, precisely the beliefs Henry Bourne had condemned as symptomatic of plebeian “superstition.” Many of the omens mentioned by Cannon were linked to animals—a hare, breeding rooks, a croaking raven, a perching cormorant—which suggests that their predictive authority may have originated in some long-established, orally transmitted folk belief.
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He derived other omens, however, from reading contemporary newspapers, thus turning the latest form of written communication into a source for prognostication. One of these newspaper accounts concerned a “sky battle” seen over Edinburgh in 1740, a portent of impending Jacobite rebellion.
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Cannon was also fascinated by “Merlin's prophecies,” found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's
British History
. He transcribed them from Aaron Thompson's 1718 edition, blithely disregarding Thompson's condemnation of them as “Nonsense and unintelligible Jargon.” Cannon bound this transcription with copies of the sixteenth-century predictions of Mother Shipton and Robert Nixon.
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Nixon's prophecies were hugely popular: at least twenty-one editions were printed between 1714 and 1745. Their first editor, the Whig historian John Oldmixon, made them pointedly political, maintaining that they upheld the succession of the Hanoverian dynasty.
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Whether or not Cannon would have agreed with this interpretation is unclear—his politics tended towards Toryism—but he evidently regarded the cryptic words of “the Cheshire prophet” as meaningful for his own day.

Cannon was also an avid reader of almanacs, as can be surmised from occasional references in his chronicle. He copied out the allegorical poem and “hieroglyphic” from Francis Moore's
Vox Stellarum
for 1740, and took notes on the eclipses forecast in John Partridge's
Merlinus Liberatus
for 1743, including a major lunar eclipse in October.
³³
He wrote out a letter by the York mathematician
George Smith that he came across in the
Gentleman's Magazine
for March 1737, relating the lunar occultation or “transit” of the star Aldebaran to the downfall of the Babylonian Empire.
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Cannon trained himself in astrology by reading instructional books of the late seventeeth century, including John Middleton's
Practical Astrology
(1679), Richard Saunders's
Astrological Judgements
(1677) and an unidentified work by the almanac-maker Daniel Woodward.
³⁵
He was also familiar with more recent writings, such as William Whiston's theory that a comet preceded the biblical Deluge. A serious student of astronomy, Cannon was interested in comets, particularly that of 1680, which had seemed to reverse its direction when it drew near to the sun. In fact,
two
comets had been observed. Cannon cited Newton and Halley on the comet, wondering what might have happened if it had actually hit the sun.
³⁶

Evidently, John Cannon did not regard Newtonianism as having made the heavens unsuitable for predictions. To be sure, he was slightly self-conscious about his taste for augury, confessing himself “on certain occasions to be somewhat superstitiously given to the art,” but he never mentioned any scientific or rational objections to it.
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Cannon could be dismissive of some who shared his passion for prognostication, like Samuel Downton, “an old sophistical fellow pretending surgery, philosophy, astrology &c.”
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Yet on the whole he did not judge the Somerset folk around him to be particularly backward or ignorant. Cannon might not have been unwilling to see himself as enlightened: after all, he thought for himself, came to his own conclusions, read widely and took advantage of every opportunity to learn about the world. He even expressed a passing interest in Freemasonry, although he never joined a lodge.
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He would probably have been astonished if anyone had informed him that astrology, augury and occult science had been outmoded and debunked by an enlightened age.

Cannon's outlook, like Campbel's and Crowther's, was in large measure a survival from the seventeenth century, when critical inquiry and occult philosophy were more congenial partners. By the mid-eighteenth century, occult thinking was no longer respectable or fashionable among the learned elite, but Cannon did not move in such august circles. The print culture that he appropriated, through pamphlets, chapbooks, periodicals and newspapers, gave him no reason to question his acceptance of occult beliefs, and even supported the assumption that his attitudes were compatible with modern trends. Cannon personified, with remarkable accuracy, the “enchanted world” that was imagined by Defoe in his works on the occult, and he even shared some of Defoe's opinions of that world: that the Devil was at work in it, that visions and apparitions were potentially beneficial, that magicians served Satan even when they imagined otherwise. This occult outlook may have been under
threat at the universities or among the “wits” of the Royal Society, but John Cannon was blissfully unaware of it.

The Witchcraft Act: A Turning Point?

John Cannon lived through the passage of the celebrated Witchcraft Act of 1736. Could he possibly have had nothing to say about it? In fact, he ignored it entirely. Like Daniel Defoe, he did not have much to say about witchcraft itself either. Two incidents mentioned in his chronicle indicate that he accepted its reality, but they do not demonstrate any desire to revive the persecutions of the past. In October 1736, only a few months after the new law went into effect, “a strange & sudden hurricane of wind and rain” swept through Glastonbury. People said it was “conjuring weather,” meaning it had been caused by a witch. Indeed, one Margaret Dewdney of Glastonbury, “who was suspected naughty” (that is, of being a witch), had reputedly put a curse on a local farmer for refusing her “a pig's innard.” Being unable to make milk or cheese thereafter, the farmer asked Dr Bathurst of Devizes in Wiltshire, presumably a cunning-man, to raise the Devil in order to reveal who had brought this affliction upon him. The Devil duly appeared, occasioning the tremendous storm. When he vanished, the doctor beheld “the representation of 2 women & one man,” the true perpetrators of the curse.
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This was as much a story of ritual magic as of witchcraft. Under the witchcraft statute passed under James I in 1604, which condemned necromancy, the good doctor was just as guilty of diabolism as Margaret Dewdney or her associates, and just as liable to face capital punishment. The identification of the culprits, however, seems to have brought the case to an end. No attempt was made to punish them. Four years later, Cannon recorded a second case of sorcery, which had a similar outcome. After an argument with a female customer, a saddler named William West of Street felt uneasy and unable to drink. On his way home through Glastonbury, he “was by an invisible hand hurried into the abbey over gates, stiles, rubbish & the ruinated walls.” Arriving home, he saw in his room the same customer with whom he had quarrelled. He consulted “a certain woman,” probably a village wise woman, who burned his fingernails and a lock of his hair in a piece of paper, “which they pretended a remedy & cure for witchcraft.” Apparently, it worked, although West's head was twisted backwards in the course of the cure. Cannon acknowledged that there were many opinions about what had happened, but in his view West was “overlooked, bewitched or the Devil was in him.”
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