Solomon's Secret Arts (6 page)

Medieval Arabs, Jews and Byzantines passed this grab-bag of heterodox thinking on to Western Christians, some of whom embraced it as a source of ultimate knowledge. Gradually, it was pieced together by European thinkers into a single tradition of occult philosophy. This began in the late Middle Ages in the secret treatises of Western Christian alchemists and ritual magicians, but it continued in the public writings of humanist scholars. The most celebrated humanist contributions to occult philosophy were made by the Florentines Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, as well as by the German humanist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Ficino revived the Neoplatonic theory of spirit, which he saw as existing throughout all of creation in the form of an organic “World Soul.” His younger colleague Pico, in spite of misgivings about the uses of magic, was fascinated by astrology and by the possibility of uniting all religions through occult philosophy. Although he too was inspired by Neoplatonism, Agrippa was more open in his embrace of practical and even popular magic, so much so that his name became notorious in connection with
it. Agrippa seems later to have recanted his interest in the workings of the occult, although the reasons for his recantation, and even its significance, are open to question.

To the works of these humanist philosophers may be added the medical-alchemical treatises of the Swiss-born doctor Paracelsus (Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim), who developed a complex anti-Aristotelian theory of the body and pioneered the use of chemical treatments for disease. The most important English contributions to occult philosophy in the age of humanism were the astrological and magical works of the extraordinarily talented John Dee, and the breathtaking theories of his compatriot Robert Fludd. Seeking to bind together the microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds in a single overarching explanation, Fludd delved into topics as diverse as music, memory, perception and the circulation of the blood, publishing his findings in massive and expensively illustrated volumes.
²⁷
The writings of these humanists, mixing heterodoxy and strokes of paganism with mysticism and the rudiments of experimental science, remained on the edge of intellectual respectability, yet they helped to stimulate a liberation of thought and imagination that spread across Renaissance Europe. As Paracelsus put it, “Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man.”
²⁸

Those who were suspicious of occult philosophy equated it with demonic magic. This implied that it was heretical, diabolical or unlawful, but could also suggest that it was “ignorant,” improvised or imaginary rather than rooted in learned sources. It therefore bore the mark of popular “superstition” as well as devil worship.
²⁹
In Western Christian lands, the occult never escaped this damaging, double-edged association with magic, which prevented it from becoming fully acceptable. Some writers, like Della Porta, Agrippa and Dee, were bold enough to appropriate the term magic for their own uses, but others studiously avoided it. By the mid-eighteenth century, almost no learned person in Britain was willing to label his or her own occult interests as magic, whether natural or supernatural, and the term became almost entirely associated with popular beliefs. By 1800, in spite of a striking revival of occult thinking, magic was widely linked in commercial discourse with conjuring, which was disdained as an unabashed form of trickery. Thus, magic and occult thinking would have different historical trajectories.

Yet the tangled linkages between the two do not allow either to be studied in isolation. While the subsequent chapters of this study concentrate on written sources rather than practices, magical behaviour will constantly impinge on the argument. The occult always retained a practical as well as an intellectual aspect. Writers on occult subjects might refer to popular magic favourably,
although this depended on how secure they felt in endorsing what many rejected as “superstition.” The astrological healer Nicholas Culpeper, for example, was fascinated by the potions, salves and curatives employed by village cunning men or wise women. Conversely, other famous astrologers who marketed their art with such great success in the late seventeenth century were careful to deny that they were mere “empirics,” dispensing practical solutions without regard to the theoretical basis of what they were selling. A history of the occult cannot restrict itself to the intellectual tradition of esoteric knowledge; it also has to chronicle the many points of contact, and of friction, between occult learning and traditional customs or beliefs.

The chapters of this book are synthetic in bringing together a variety of sources and approaches, but they are not meant to be encyclopaedic. Many minor writers are not discussed; others are dealt with only in passing. Issues that may be of great concern to individual readers may not be raised at all, or be explored in any detail. Witchcraft, for example, will not be discussed as much in the following chapters as some would like. Its importance to this argument is peripheral. Many writers saw witchcraft as evidence of the existence of malign or diabolical spirits. Because the activities of witches existed mainly in the minds of their supposed victims and judges, however, they do not fit comfortably into a history that examines the intersection of occult thinking and practice. No English or Scottish writer in the early-modern period, with the sole exception of William Blake, identified himself or herself as an admirer of the Devil. Witchcraft was seldom tied to the occult except by those who disliked both, and some occult writers had no belief in its reality at all. As a result, the fate of witches, important as it is to any understanding of social, cultural and gender relations in early-modern Britain, does not cast as much light on our theme as might be assumed.

While the main sources for this study are contemporary printed works, they can only be understood by taking other materials (letters, manuscripts, diaries) into account. But even the latter provide only partial and fragmented answers to the question of how contemporaries interpreted what they saw on the page. Reading is never a straightforward process, and we cannot hope to recover in any immediate sense the variable ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts were read—least of all, texts that aspired to mystery and arcane knowledge. Moreover, by annotating and copying printed texts, readers made them into new works bearing their own imprints, so that in a sense texts were multiplied into further texts. Historians can accurately reconstruct the printing history of books, the strategies by which they were marketed, the visual and rhetorical ploys by which they established authority, the references they contain and the responses to them registered by individual
readers. In summarizing and analysing the arguments of these texts, however, we are adding our own notations, informed by our own insights, including what we
think
might have been the reactions of contemporary readers. Of course, we cannot avoid this process of approximation and guesswork, or we are left with no more than the shell of a text, without much sense of its elusive content.
³⁰

Our responses to occult writings may be very different from those of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century readers, but we still need to work out what they signified at the time, often in the absence of clear guides. Alchemical writers were notorious for using a cryptic jargon in their works, so that only the “illuminated” reader would understand them. Uninitiated enthusiasts hoped to untangle that jargon, but it is questionable whether any really could, because its allusions pointed in so many different directions at once. In the same way, historians will never be able to unweave fully the intricate networks of allusion that make up the writings of Thomas Vaughan, William Stukeley or William Blake. This should not discourage us from trying to come as close as we can to what a contemporary reader might have made of them, or from attempting to reconstruct the patterns of thinking that informed their works, even if we can get no closer to these goals than a tentative gloss.

We should also remain aware that many of these texts were consciously written for
use
, not simply for edification: that is, they were designed to be employed in some form of practice. How they were used is often very difficult to reconstruct. At times, the text demanded a rigorous adherence to every word, but this was possible only through some sort of translation of symbols or jargon. At other times, texts were more user-friendly, providing explanations and allowing themselves to be considered selectively. Of course, unless we can follow the strategies of the author, we cannot really know to what purposes they were to be put. Still, that there was a constant connection in occult writings between the written word and practical activity of some sort cannot be overlooked.

The occult strove to unlock ultimate truths. They will not be discovered in these pages, where every interpretation is only a partial truth. Plenty of writers and publishers in the early-modern period used the promise of “secrets revealed” as a lure to attract customers for their books. The purpose of this investigation is more modest: to devise a general framework within which the history of occult thinking can be understood in the century and a half after the English Civil War period. It has to take account of a changing cultural context, including religious transformations, the impact of a commercialized press, the rise of new types of sociability and the emergence of partisan politics. Each of these factors had a profound impact on the occult. Alchemy, astrology and
ritual magic were tied from the first to religious heterodoxy and sectarianism, an association that lasted throughout the eighteenth century. Occult writers took full advantage of the commercial possibilities of publishing, especially in the hotly competitive cultural atmosphere of the 1780s. Occult secrets became selling points for clubs and associations that have been seen as models of early-modern sociability. Finally, the decline of occult thinking in the early eighteenth century was in part due to political struggles, just as its revival after 1780 can be attributed to a shift in the general cultural situation. We will not proceed very far in placing our subject in a historical context, however, before we encounter what seem to be two formidable obstacles to the survival of any type of occult thinking: namely, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

Science, Enlightenment and the Occult

The concept of a scientific revolution was only retroactively applied. Derived from the ideals of human progress that dominated nineteenth-century scholarship, it was characterized by the concept of revolution, necessary for any sudden, fundamental break with the past. A radical change in ways of thinking, it was proposed, separated medieval from modern thought about nature. The features of this scientific revolution were eloquently expressed in a famous work by Herbert Butterfield, published in 1949. His formulation has been enormously influential ever since.
³¹
Its chief English protagonists were experimentalists like Robert Boyle and theorists like Sir Isaac Newton, who sought to understand the natural universe in rational and mathematical terms. They set European natural philosophers, or scientists, on a new track that distinguished them not just from their forebears, but from observers of nature in every other part of the world. Above all, their ideas
worked
, and to them we owe everything in modern technology, from microscopes to smartphones, as well as every aspect of our modern scientific mindset.

In recent decades, the concept of a scientific revolution has been assailed from a number of angles: for emphasizing change rather than continuity in science, for not taking enough account of the cultural context in which knowledge was pursued, for ignoring the contributions to science of occult ways of thinking, and for assuming a steady advance in verifiable scientific explanations.
³²
Few scholars would argue that science progressed in a linear fashion through revolutionary leaps, or by simple binary oppositions between right and wrong. The emphasis on slowly changing paradigms leaves plenty of room for contradictions and anomalies, for religious beliefs and spiritual objectives, as well as for eccentric or imaginative thinking. It also allows for the importance of social status, connections and intellectual credentials in
establishing the respectability or trustworthiness of a natural philosopher.
³³
The role of figures like Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee and Fludd in fostering new interpretations of nature has been newly stressed by those who argue that science did not emerge as the antithesis of occult philosophy.

This last line of argument can of course be taken too far, and it has been. In the 1960s, the relationship of the occult to the prevailing conception of a scientific revolution became tangled up with a hypothesis attributed, somewhat unfairly, to Frances Yates. A leading scholar of occult philosophy in the Renaissance period, Yates was one of the earliest proponents of its influence on science. More particularly, she connected the formation of the Royal Society, the flag-bearing institution of scientific revolution in England, with the Hermetic and alchemical sensibilities of the mysterious secret society known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Although this was more a suggestion than a full-fledged theory, it set off a long-running debate. Decades of research have shown that, while numerous scholars and publicists throughout Europe wrote under the Rosicrucian label and claimed an association with Rosicrucian ideas, the notion of an organized international “Brotherhood,” widely accepted at the time, was a misconception that stemmed from a well-intentioned hoax by a group of enthusiastic German academics.
³⁴
On the other hand, the alchemical and occult interests of several leading members of the Royal Society and pillars of the English scientific revolution, including Boyle and Newton, are now so well substantiated as to be undeniable.
³⁵

The precise relationship between scientific discovery and occult thinking remains complex but, as the first three chapters of this book will demonstrate, the two were not at war with one another. Natural science did not advance by brushing aside the occult, or by disproving magic. On the contrary, when occult claims were submitted to scientific scrutiny, few definite conclusions were drawn, and no concerted process of outright debunking took place. For their part, the devotees of occult thinking eagerly embraced scientific terminology and new scientific findings. In the eighteenth century, to be sure, the formal dialogue between natural science and the occult gradually died out, but this was due not so much to scientific advancements as to the imposition of a rigorous distinction between questions that could be answered by natural explanations and those that could not. Scientists ceased to write about occult qualities in nature, and natural magic in Della Porta's sense of the term either became experimental science or faded away.