Solomon's Secret Arts (53 page)

Preston rose within English Masonry to the position of assistant secretary to the grand master, but he was apparently dissatisfied with the direction being taken by the Modern Grand Lodge, especially its attempts to impose rules on member lodges. A dispute over whether Masons needed the permission of the Grand Lodge to wear regalia in public led the Lodge of Antiquity, of which Preston was a member, into open secession.
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It reaffiliated in 1779 with the independent Grand Lodge of York, an archaic institution that had recently been revived, to establish a branch “South of the River Trent.” Preston became a leading figure in this breakaway organization, which quickly opened itself to the influence of European Masonry. The first lodge chartered by the “Grand Lodge South of the River Trent” took the title “Perfect Observance.” Its members were mostly foreign, and its grand master was the dynamic French engraver Peter Lambert de Lintot. In 1782, Lambert de Lintot successfully petitioned the Scottish Grand Lodge for permission to create a “Rite of Seven Degrees,” probably modelled on that of the Chapter of Clermont. It included the stages of Heredom, Knight Templar and “Rose Croix” within the sixth
degree, which required alchemical knowledge. Lambert de Lintot was also responsible for designing the symbol of the Perfect Observance Lodge, inspired by Leuchter's illustrations of Boehme—it included magic circles and astrological signs as well as various Masonic emblems.
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William Preston must have been aware of the growing occult influence within the new Grand Lodge. His own attitude towards higher degrees may be judged by his service, first as “Scribe Nehemiah” and then as “Joshua” or high priest, in the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons in 1781–3. He resigned from the latter position, possibly under pressure from the Grand Lodge of England.
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His apostasy from that organization, however, lasted only a decade, when he decided to return to official Masonry. He brought back with him the concept of a priestly Masonic order, to be titled “the Chapter of Harodim.”

Some foreign observers did not think the English would easily adopt the occult predilections of the German Freemasons. The Prussian officer and Freemason Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, who lived in England in the 1760s and 1770s, was of this opinion. “Magic, contented with exercising its despotism over the ten circles of High Germany,” he wrote contemptuously, “has not as yet, by a bold flight, attempted to cross the ocean.” If it did, he argued, the results would be “very uncommon,” as in England “every thing is in extremes.” Nonetheless, he admitted that “the English have a high opinion of the German alchymists,” which allows foreign projectors to “dupe them of their guineas.” Archenholz also observed that among the Jews of London, who he thought were rightly hated by the English for “roguery,” was a man “called Cain Chenul Falk, but better known by the name of Doctor Falkon, who for thirty years has been famous for his cabalistical discoveries.” Falk lived in a large house and, according to Archenholz, gave a great deal to the poor—a comment that complicates his otherwise anti-Semitic tone. “It is most probable that he is a very great chymist,” proposed the curious traveller, “and that he has, in that occult science, made some extraordinary discoveries, which he does not choose to communicate.”
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Samuel Falk, a German immigrant known as a “Ba'al Shem” or spiritual healer, resided in England for forty years after 1742. He spoke with angels, discovered hidden treasure and treated a number of illustrious non-Jewish patients, including Baron Theodore de Neuhoff, an adventurer who for a few months in 1736 had reigned as elected king of Corsica. Falk is supposed to have had extensive Masonic connections throughout Europe. Archenholz should perhaps have asked himself: in a diverse, commercial society that could maintain Samuel Falk in wealth and security, was it so unlikely that occult Freemasonry would find an audience?

In concluding this chapter, however, we should turn Archenholz's scepticism northwards, and ask why an occult revival was developing in London, Bristol and other English towns, but not, apparently, in Edinburgh or Glasgow. The commercial prospects for publishing works of occult thinking were more limited in Scotland than in England, due in part to competition with the London press. While the sentimental novel made a considerable splash north of the Tweed—the success of Henry Mackenzie, author of
The Man of Feeling
, provides evidence of this—the Gothic genre does not seem to have been as popular, perhaps because Scots still took the Devil seriously. Evangelical religion certainly made inroads in the north, especially through mass revival meetings like the celebrated Cambuslang Rant in 1742, but not on the same scale or with the same intensity as in England. Swedenborgianism gained converts very slowly there. Finally, and most significantly, the dominance of the Moderate Presbyterian connection from the 1740s until the 1780s, within both the universities and the Kirk, meant that any attempt at occult thinking would meet with formidable opposition from a relatively united intellectual establishment, which condemned such wrong-headedness as “superstition” or diabolism.
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Outside Freemasonry, Scots with an interest in occult matters were likely to feel isolated, so they tended to migrate south or to publish their works in London.

This point should remind us that there was no single British Enlightenment. The English variety had roots in the empirical philosophy of the late seventeenth century, which was established as orthodoxy after 1715. Those who continued to “think for themselves” were often placed in a position of antagonism to what resembled a semi-official English culture. Newton and Locke were firmly rooted national icons, so it was difficult to re-examine their premises without seeming to question the whole basis of post-revolutionary English society. The speculative discussions of science, moral judgment and “common sense” that marked the Scottish Enlightenment were more difficult to initiate in England without inviting the accusation of scepticism or enthusiasm. At the same time, English culture in the late eighteenth century allowed enormous scope to thinking that was on the margins of respectability—so long as it posed no immediate threat to conventional ideas. In part, this reflected an absence of effective means of internal suppression or censorship. England also lacked the structural coherence among academic and clerical institutions that gave unity and direction to Scottish intellectual life. As a result, the Enlightenment that emerged in England during the late eighteenth century was more oppositional, more splintered, more varied and, in some ways, weaker than its Scottish counterpart. On the one hand, it did not generate radical philosophies that supplanted old suppositions; on the other, it permitted the flourishing of a
multiplicity of different critical viewpoints, including occult ones. Tolerance of marginal ideas was less likely to happen in the smaller, more homogeneous world of Scottish culture. Yet, as will be seen, no matter how marginal they were, the denizens of the English occult revival showed little intention of actually
opposing
the Enlightenment. On the contrary, they would do their best to
accommodate
it. The next chapter will consider how successful their efforts were.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An Occult Enlightenment?

H
OW DID
the occult revival relate to the Europe-wide phenomenon known as the Enlightenment? The question is far from a simple one. In some contexts, occult thinking was antipathetic to a movement associated with rationalist or sceptical ideas. In other ways, however, occult thinkers consciously and deliberately attached themselves to the concept of enlightenment, by lavishing praise on scientific advancement and the improvement of modern life. From one perspective, the occult might be seen as an alternative to the Enlightenment, because it was founded on sentiment and personal revelation rather than the application of pure reason. Thus, Joscelyn Goodwin has written of a “Theosophical Enlightenment” that extended from the late eighteenth century to the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. On the other hand, the occult could be imagined as part of a “Super-Enlightenment” that elevated human potential and wisdom beyond the limits of rational understanding.
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While the occult revival encompassed all of these possibilities, its major figures rarely took positions of opposition to the Enlightenment, which they tended to see positively, in terms of continuing intellectual growth. They rejected the complacent notion that England had been enlightened since Newton and had no further need of new ideas, least of all foreign ones. Insofar as we can identify an English Enlightenment in cultural terms, focused on human perfectibility, the occult revival fell in line with it.

Yet how compatible was the occult with science? In England, the late eighteenth century was an age of continuing scientific popularization, but apart from the private researches of Henry Cavendish, published as articles in the
Philosophical Transactions
, it did not produce many dazzling discoveries.
²
It was a period when Joseph Priestley, noted scientist, Unitarian minister and admirer of the writings of David Hartley, could accept the existence of an unseen substance, first postulated by the alchemist J.J. Becher, that was released
through combustion: namely, phlogiston. Priestley called phlogiston the “
unknown cause
of certain well-known events,” which made it an occult quality. He imagined its importance as equal to that of gravity. Phlogiston might be seen as a spiritual essence—alchemists had long held to the notion that spirits were gaseous—except that Priestley believed matter and spirit to be inseparable, which strengthened his certainty that phlogiston could be measured.
³
Behind Priestley's scientific ideas lay the conviction that a benevolent God produced inexhaustible variety in nature through simple causes. The distance between such an outlook and alchemy was hardly immense.

In Scotland, to be sure, more radical scientific ideas were fermenting, particularly the geologist James Hutton's theory of the age of the earth, which envisioned “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”
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Occult philosophy, dependent on interpretations of the biblical story of creation, was impossible to reconcile with this view. Hutton's friend the great Scottish chemist Joseph Black stated unequivocally that alchemy was no longer part of science. In the lectures that he gave at the University of Glasgow in the 1780s, Black condemned the “Extravagances” of what he called “this Visionary pursuit … the Golden Dreams of the Alchymists.” He mocked “the Dupes to Alchymy” who “Were quite intoxicated With the prospect of that power, riches, & Grandeur, Which they were at the point of enjoying,” but he added: “What is Still more remarkable is that an infatuation so strange & ridiculous Should have prevailed in this enlightened Age.” He pointed particularly to the case of Dr James Price, “a Physician of reputation, learning & Worth, in England,” who in 1782 had published a pamphlet “in Which he informs us, that in some Experiments he made, he converted Mercury into Gold & Silver.” Black regretted that this work “may engage men of Genius & learning into the illusive researches of the Philosophers Stone.” While he gave alchemists credit for developing processes that were of benefit to medicine, Black was contemptuous of their practices, pouring special scorn on the “arrogance, Absurdity & profligacy” of Paracelsus.
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Hutton was a deist and Joseph Black a Moderate Presbyterian. Neither was likely to be tempted by occult thinking, although Black clearly feared its appeal to others. South of the Tweed, in fact, the scientific commitment to rationalism was at times less rigid. The affair of James Price illustrates a continuing fascination with alchemy among the English scientific establishment. Price was a promising young chemist in 1782. Only twenty-five years old, he had a degree from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, a Fellowship of the Royal Society, the patronage of the noted chemist Richard Kirwan—who supported phlogiston and considered Hutton an atheist—as well as an inheritance from a relative, which had required him to change his name from Higginbotham.
⁶
In May 1782, at
Stoke near Guildford in Surrey, Price performed a series of experiments with mercury. Using “a certain powder of a deep red colour,” he was able to produce small amounts of pure gold, and with a white powder he made silver. Price carried out his first experiments in the presence of a small number of local gentlemen, but his last attempts were made under the scrutiny of three peers (Lords Onslow, Palmerston and King) as well as William Man Godschall, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Price published the results of his work in a pamphlet printed by Oxford University Press, and within a short time received a medical degree from that university, which he publicly attributed to his previous labours in chemistry, rather than to his spagyric discoveries.
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By then, Price had become worried by the reaction to his experiments. His former patron Kirwan and other Fellows of the Royal Society were shocked by Price's “charlatanism,” as the Society's president, Joseph Banks, reported to his close friend Charles Blagden. A medical doctor, Blagden was at first open-minded, although he reported that Price “must be the highest of chemists or a lunatic.” Nonetheless, he blasted the conferral of the Oxford degree as a “disgrace,” and soon decided that the experiments were “an imposture.” Banks himself remained more equivocal, as he entered into direct communication with Price in the late summer of 1782. The young chemist declared to the president that he had deduced the idea of extracting gold from the experiments of an unnamed friend, who had discovered how to make silver by a similar process. Price refused to reveal the name of his friend or the nature of the two powders. His secrecy concerning these remarkable additives, as well as his inability to reproduce them, aroused the suspicions of reviewers in the press, although they were careful not to reject his claims entirely. By December, Godschall was advising Price either to repeat his experiment in a laboratory that was not his own, or to reveal the secret of the powders. Cornered, Price saw no way out other than to take his life by drinking laurel-water, which he did on 31 July 1783. His unconscious body was discovered two hours later by a fellow physician. Godschall judged him insane, reporting to Banks that his father had suffered from the same malady.
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