Solomon's Secret Arts (13 page)

It might be assumed that alchemy is confined to the first type, or natural magic, but Felgenhauer continually suggests that it has a higher, supernatural
purpose as well. This becomes manifest in the changes that take place in the human body as it ascends to a god-like state. The transition from the elementary to the angelical to the divine body is represented as a chemical process, based on salt, which has its own elementary, angelical and divine forms (the central role of salt was derived from Paracelsus). All sublunary creatures “have a Coelestial body hid within them inwardly” that is “nothing else but a Christalline, yea new born salt of life.” Attaining knowledge of this hidden body is itself an alchemical process. Wisdom, like gold, should be passed through the crucible of fire seven times, before receiving a “new birth” through a baptism with water.
¹⁰⁴

Seventeenth-century Anglican clergymen would have shaken their venerable heads at the author of
Jehior
, judging him to be an unorthodox Christian, perhaps even a member of some eccentric sect. After all, the followers of Jacob Boehme in England tended to be mystical enthusiasts, like Samuel Pordage, or radical sectarians, like William Erbery.
¹⁰⁵
Felgenhauer's own works had been burned by Lutheran authorities. His assumption of an innate divinity within human beings would have shocked any Calvinist, who saw the body as wholly corrupt and utterly dependent on the grace of God for salvation. Even a Quaker, who believed that an “inner light” could be found within all, might have been nonplussed to discover that the light was nothing more than a type of salt. More disturbing still, the author of
Jehior
suggests that “the Coelestial body” is discovered through humanly attained knowledge, not by divine revelation. Felgenhauer's version of the “new birth” sounds like a supernatural transformation induced by human efforts. In
Jehior
, the whole structure of the Church of England, or of any Church for that matter, has been replaced by the mind of the adept operating on the universe.

William Chamberlayne evidently saw his own views reflected in
Jehior
. Yet there is no evidence that he was anything other than a communicating Anglican. He must have taken the oaths attached to the Test and Corporation Acts, declaring adherence to the Church of England, in order to serve as mayor of Shaftesbury. He might have replied to accusations of unorthodoxy by pointing out that
Jehior
posed no direct challenge to any doctrine of the established Church. It was a meditation on the divine, not a call to separation or sectarianism. Radical in its implications, undemonstrative in its approach,
Jehior
might have been regarded as eccentric, but not as dangerous to the Restoration settlement in Church and State.

Read in conjunction with the
Philosophicall Epitaph
, however,
Jehior
casts William Chamberlayne—and through him, his publisher, William Cooper—as a high-flying, magical alchemist, whose occult views were far removed from the experimental alchemy of George Starkey. The implied opposition between
magus and scientist is misleading. As the first editor of the works of “Eirenaeus Philalethes,” Chamberlayne was as much an advocate of empirical or experimental methods as were any of his contemporaries. In fact, most of the alchemical works published by William Cooper were step-by-step descriptions of laboratory processes, written by “Philalethes,” Sir Kenelm Digby, Van Helmont or the great “Arab” alchemist (in reality, he was probably a medieval monk) who wrote under the name of Geber. All of these men were experimentalists. They have all been associated with the “scientific revolution,” and particularly with the corpuscular theory of matter that provided chemistry with a new intellectual foundation in the late seventeenth century.
¹⁰⁶

Cooper seems to have been just as pleased to publicize their writings as he was to affix his name to the mystical effusions of
Jehior
. In the
Catalogue of Chymical Books
that he first published in 1673, Cooper made no distinction between works that we would today call scientific, like Robert Boyle's
Sceptical Chymist
, and those that declared themselves to be magical, like the writings of John Heydon. Van Helmont's works stand alongside those of Elias Ashmole and “Eugenius Philalethes,” as if they comprised a single body of knowledge. Cooper added an appendix to the catalogue in 1675, in which he included a few books that “cannot absolutely be called Chymical, but have a very near affinity thereunto, the knowledge of natural Philosophy being an Introduction to supernatural things.” Among them we may be surprised to find, not only four translated works by Jacob Boehme, but also the
Ars Notoria
by Robert Turner, and the
Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy
spuriously ascribed to Agrippa. Judging by the diverse entries in his
Catalogue
, Cooper was not abashed by the magical associations of such publications. They were all part of a chemical philosophy that blended supernatural and natural wisdom. The concluding section of the
Catalogue
indexes chemical articles that had appeared in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, the leading scientific periodical of the day. It may be hard for us to understand how anyone can have treated the
Ars Notoria
as seriously as the
Philosophical Transactions
, or read Boyle's tracts on the hidden properties of air as “an Introduction to supernatural things,” but this perhaps proves nothing more than the distance at which we stand from the alchemical mindset behind Cooper's
Catalogue
.
¹⁰⁷

Magic and science, empiricism and the supernatural: within alchemy, these were not in opposition, but constantly played off each other, combining and separating through a language both allusive and elusive, never fully merging but never wholly apart. Today we may regard the product of this alchemical marriage as an intellectual monster, an unnatural union of opposites, but Cooper and Chamberlayne obviously found it enchanting and believed it would
bring forth the greatest secrets of nature. They were wrong. Cooper's
Catalogue
was the swansong of the alchemical heyday, not the opening for an even grander second act. If it had been updated a century later, very little that was new could have been added to it. Alchemical theory, along with ritual magic and other occult ways of thinking that were flourishing in late seventeenth century, began to fade away after 1688. This does not mean that alchemical practice disappeared—there is plenty of evidence that it did not—but few people wrote about it. Before the 1690s, few signs can be seen that occult philosophy was about to falter. Its chief opponent, however, was already very apparent: not the natural sciences, but religious orthodoxy. Did the accusation of demonic magic finally bring alchemy down?

Before we come to the question of why alchemy failed, we have to consider astrology, which followed a very different orbit. Astrology remained enormously popular in the late seventeenth century, although it was already beginning to lose some of its intellectual bearings. Astrologers governed over a highly commercialized occult science, which they had removed from the restricted sphere of intellectual speculation and allowed to circulate in the open marketplace. The fate of astrology has to be addressed before we can determine why Elias Ashmole, Thomas Vaughan and William Cooper would have no successors in the early eighteenth century.

CHAPTER TWO

The Silver Age of the Astrologers

I
F THE
late seventeenth century was the golden age of the alchemists, it was the silver age of the astrologers. Arguably, the intellectual peak of English astrology came earlier, perhaps between 1603, when Sir Christopher Heydon published his influential
Defence of Judiciall Astrologie
, and the 1650s.
¹
During the Civil Wars and Interregnum period when predictions and prophecies made a powerful political impact, the careers of numerous famous astrologers reached their height, among them John Booker, Nicholas Culpeper, William Lilly, Richard Saunders, John Tanner, George Wharton and Vincent Wing.
²
Astrological almanacs circulated in impressive numbers—Lilly's
Merlinus Anglicus
reportedly sold thirty thousand copies in 1649. The spread of almanacs made astrologers into household names and obliged them to adopt a more public face. To show the respectability and collegiality of their profession, the astrologers of London organized an annual feast between 1647 and 1658.
³
What better sign that the readers of the stars, no matter how humble their origins (many of them had in fact been skilled artisans before turning to the study of the heavens), formed a learned society, no less distinguished than that of doctors?

The analogy with physicians is not random; at its height, astrology was closely bound up with medicine.
⁴
In the late sixteenth century, an irregular practitioner of healing like the astrologer Simon Forman could still land himself in trouble with qualified doctors (he was finally licensed to practise by Cambridge University in 1603), but by the early seventeenth century, such medical luminaries as Richard Forster, president of the College of Physicians, or Richard Napier, who specialized in mental disorders, freely consulted the stars in effecting cures.
⁵
Regularly studied at the English and Scottish universities, astrology was accepted by many educated people as a subject that could be seriously debated, and whose methods could be changed by new information. Joshua Childrey, a clergyman who ended up as archdeacon of
Salisbury after the Restoration, published a brief pamphlet in 1652 that endorsed the Copernican or heliocentric system and condemned the “old Astrology” as “pur-blind.”
⁶
Within little more than a decade, several professional readers of the stars had abandoned the Ptolemaic or geocentric model, and were using heliocentric ephemerides, or tables of planetary movements, such as those calculated by Childrey, Vincent Wing and Thomas Streete. Henry Coley wrote in 1687 that “this
Hypothesis
of
Copernicus
, is now generally approv'd of by all, or most of the most learned
Mathematicians
[i.e. astrologers and astronomers] of all Nations.”
⁷
Nothing better illustrates the intellectual vitality of astrology than this rapid alteration, among many important practitioners, of its most basic principles.

The popularity and acceptability of astrology did not change suddenly in 1660. Every year, thousands of clients were advised and hundreds of thousands of almanacs were sold. Lilly, Booker, Saunders, Tanner, Wharton and Wing lived on into the reign of Charles II, and were succeeded by younger professional astrologers like William Andrews, Henry Coley, John Gadbury, George Parker and John Partridge.
⁸
Censorship became more rigorous after the Restoration, and the political views of astrologers occasionally landed them in trouble, as in earlier periods, but the abandonment of overt prognostications about the government probably did not make a great difference to the astrological profession, because so many of the younger practitioners were royalists. William Lilly, who was closely associated with the former republican regime, was exceptional in his experience of censorship, imprisonment and repeated legal difficulties. A political lightning rod, he had in fact suffered much the same treatment at the hands of the republican government.
⁹

Meanwhile, simple “how-to” books for astrological beginners proliferated, among them the physician Joseph Blagrave's
Introduction to Astrology
, which appeared in 1682, dedicated to his patient Elias Ashmole.
¹⁰
Lilly, Coley, Gadbury and Partridge wrote similar treatises on the basic principles of drawing up and reading charts. On the other hand, expensive and erudite studies of astrology were still being published, like John Goad's magnificent
Astro-Meteorologica
, a collection of astrological aphorisms that appeared in 1686. A few months after Goad's death in October 1689, a Latin version of his book appeared under the slightly altered title
Astro-meteorologia Sana
. It included a long preface studded with classical quotations, many of them in Greek, alongside references to the mathematician Isaac Barrow and the chemist Robert Boyle.
¹¹
Even if astrological prophecies, or “
Vulgar Prognosticks
” as Goad called them, had fallen into disrepute for political reasons since the restoration of the monarchy, it remained possible for him to claim that “
Natural
Astrology … conduceth to the advance of
Religion
.”
¹²
Of course, there were
opponents of the art, including the future astronomer royal John Flamsteed, who fumed in an unpublished manuscript of the early 1670s that “Astrology finds no ground to sustaine it in nature,” and complained of its “equal vanity and falsehood.” The astrologers had answers for them. “None ever yet condemn'd
Astrology
that thoroughly understood it,” counselled John Gadbury, adding that “the Noblest and Most useful
Sciences
, or
Mysteries
, are liable to Fraud and Deceipt … and yet in themselves are not the worse or less serviceable to Mankind.”
¹³