Solomon's Secret Arts (20 page)

Pordage's son Samuel, who shared his parents’ religious views, published an enormous poem in 1661 that offered a mystical explanation of the universe. It concludes with an alchemical quest for the Stone that can command devils, angels and all spirits. In verses more passionate than mellifluous, Samuel Pordage urged his jaded contemporaries to abandon the “natural Magic” of worldly science for the “higher Magic” of the spirit:

Unlike Elias Ashmole, Samuel Pordage was suspicious of astrology, which could lead the unwitting into necromancy, and dismissive of practical alchemy. He further advised “the worldly Wise” to avoid philosophers like Plato or Hermes Trismegistus, along with “
Magii
” like Paracelsus or Agrippa, who proclaimed their own knowledge rather than that of God. Instead, the true magician should follow the path of a spiritual pilgrim, seeking the eternal virgin Sophia, “The Spouse of
Christ
, and all the Saints beside.”
¹⁰

The tendency of mystical writers to borrow occult language and concepts while distancing themselves from occult science began with Boehme, and would survive the Pordages. Their writings inspired a female prophet of the next generation, Jane Lead. She came from a minor gentry family and married her cousin, a wealthy London merchant, who left her destitute after his death in 1670. Her close contact with the Pordages gave her spiritual if not material capital, and she edited John Pordage's works after his death in 1681.
¹¹
Her powerful visions were centred on
Magia
, or “the created Power of the Holy Ghost” which would bring forth “fruitful Gifts and high working Powers” from the womb of a hermaphroditic Virgin (“both Male & Female for Angelical Generation”) named Sophia or Wisdom.
¹²
Lead's mystic language was infused with her own imaginative and highly gendered interpretations of spiritual things. To a far greater extent than her mentors, she came to reject reason and science. Her aversion to them may have been due in part to a feeling of exclusion—few women had access to scientific knowledge, and none was a member of the Royal Society—but it also stemmed from an ardent attachment to prophecy, and from an inspired reading of Behmenism. She would be at the centre of a significant religious movement in the 1690s.

At least one Behmenist visionary, however, embraced practical methods and made a fortune from providing medical advice: Thomas Tryon, a prosperous hatter who lived in the London suburb of Hackney. Tryon had experienced visions since the age of six, and as a young man studied astrology—“a Science too rashly decried by some,” he later opined, “who consider not the Subordinate Administration of the Almighty, by the Illuminated Powers of the Coelestial Regions, nor discern their Operations in Nature, and Influences on the Animal Life, in the complexions of Men and Things, and in the Generation and Preservation thereof.” Tryon did not seek to read fortunes, but “to discern the Complexion and Qualities of Animals, Minerals, and Vegetations” in order to diagnose ailments.
¹³
It was his acquaintance with Boehme's writings that led him to quit an Anabaptist congregation in the late 1650s and follow his own beliefs, which increasingly centred on vegetarianism. Tryon began producing pamphlets on the subject in the early 1680s, connecting it with a mystical cleansing of the body. His admirers included the playwright Aphra Behn and,
much later, Benjamin Franklin. Tryon was also a believer in dreams as a means of communication with the spirit world, which he advertised as part of the “Mystick Philosophy” of Pythagoras.
¹⁴
Describing himself as a “Student in Physick,” he wrote on a variety of medical subjects, including madness, as well as on overseas plantations, which he heartily endorsed, although he argued for better treatment for slaves.
¹⁵

Tryon was financially successful, but in his theological views he remained an outsider. No matter how much we may now wish to restore the reputations of visionaries and prophets, their open espousal of sectarian and heterodox principles made them a fringe element in British culture. Their insights depended on personal experience and testimony, not on acceptance by an established community of scholars. We will return to them later, but for now our attention will rest with those who struck out in a different direction, like Pordage's former patron, Elias Ashmole. For him, occult thinking rested on the hope that supernatural forces could be understood and employed in a physical endeavour that might be demonstrated publicly to others, especially to sceptics. This does not mean that occult thinking was merely functional or practical, because the
process
of understanding was for many of its adherents tantamount to evidence that it was “working.” Moreover, the mere promise of success could keep scholars toiling at their furnaces or staring at the stars for long periods of time. In one way or another, they were trying to test the occult, whether as a process or as a ritual or even as a pathway to visionary experience.

Belief, Doubt, Denial

Those who opposed occult thinking outright denied that it could ever be tested because it was based on error or delusion. The most extreme among these deniers was without doubt Thomas Hobbes, who combined a materialist approach to natural philosophy with a severely rationalist reading of Scripture. In his celebrated work
Leviathan
(1651), he ascribed “the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts and Goblins; and of the power of Witches” to an inability to distinguish between sense impressions and dreams. Like all products of the imagination, dreams derived from “
decaying sense
”: that is, from weak and often erroneous impressions of reality that were left in the memory. While an omnipotent God certainly had the power to send dreams or apparitions into the material world, Hobbes saw no reason to believe that he did so very often.
¹⁶

Hobbes's scrupulous deity was similarly stinting in his use of miracles. One of the most controversial passages in
Leviathan
defined miracles in a very precise way:

Miracles, then, were very rare events, designed to reveal the mission of God's extraordinary ministers, like Moses and Christ. As no devil, angel or spirit could perform a miracle, any wonders ascribed to them “must either be by vertue of some naturall science, or by Incantation, that is, by vertue of words [i.e. deception].”
¹⁸
Even the “Arts of Magick” supposedly employed by Moses in his competition with the Egyptian magicians—a favourite story among those who sought to justify the conjuring of spirits—were actually illusions, because they were not performed for the edification of the elect.

Hobbes drove home his attack on the occult in the fourth book of
Leviathan
, where he dedicated a chapter to the refutation of “
Daemonology
,” the theory that incorporeal spirits operated in the world. Firmly based on materialist assumptions, this was a response, not just to popular belief in devils and ghosts, but to Neoplatonic philosophy as well. Hobbes sought to disprove—not very convincingly, it should be admitted—that spirits, including angels as well as demons, ever appeared without bodies in Scripture. They were always corporeal, and therefore could not inhabit or possess another person or thing, since two bodies could not occupy the same space at the same time. When Christ was said to have cast out demons, he was actually using God's word “to command Madnesse, or Lunacy (under the appellation of Devils, by which they were then commonly understood), to depart out of a mans body.”
¹⁹
Belief in spirits without bodies, according to Hobbes, was derived from the relics of “Gentilisme” or pagan religion. Such superstition had no place in true Christian faith.

Thus, Hobbes decried the common “Wonders” that were taken by the public as miracles or signs of divine providence, as well as the bodiless spirits that flitted through the literature of alchemy, astrology and ritual magic. Only bodies, extension and matter existed: all else was fantasy. His strict materialist approach, however, was too radical for most late seventeenth-century thinkers, even those who shared Hobbes's hostility to certain aspects of the occult. Perhaps the only contemporary writer on occult subjects who mirrored Hobbes's philosophical attitude was the Oxford scholar John Wagstaffe, known in his time as a “wit” and a hard drinker. He argued in 1669 that all scriptural references to spirits, magic and witchcraft were mistranslations of the original
Hebrew. The real sources of witch beliefs, in Wagstaffe's opinion, were “Heathen Fables,” falsely propagated as Christian doctrine by “Papal Inquisitours.” Wagstaffe chose witchcraft as a specific target, but he was aiming at all “superstitious” beliefs, including those of Neoplatonists, who were “addicted unto Fabling and Allegorizing.”
²⁰

As materialists, Hobbes and Wagstaffe were suspected of denying the existence of the soul, and were equated with atheists. Their influence during the Restoration period could not compare with that of another writer on witchcraft, a pillar of Anglican orthodoxy with a highly respected surname, who was famous in his lifetime although he is now largely forgotten: the Reverend Meric Casaubon. In contrast to Hobbes and Wagstaffe, Casaubon argued that spirits were real and could exist in a disembodied form. He regarded communication with them as absolutely unlawful, however, and therefore held occult pursuits to be vain, dangerous and ultimately Satanic. Casaubon's position was, to a large extent, representative of Anglican orthodoxy during the Restoration period.

Meric Casaubon was the son of the renowned classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, who had shown that the Hermetic writings dated from the Christian era and not from ancient Egypt.
²¹
(Few Hermeticists paid any attention to the findings.) Meric shared his father's suspicious attitude towards occult philosophy, which in his mind appealed mainly to religious enthusiasts and sectarians who were ultimately led astray by the Devil. To demonstrate the point, Casaubon published in 1659 a wordy, rambling preface to an edition of the experiments in ritual magic of the Elizabethan magus John Dee. Casaubon presented the experiences of Dr Dee as certain evidence of the reality of spirits, and therefore as a blow to atheists like Hobbes. He was in no doubt, however, that the spirits contacted by the “Skryer” or medium Edward Kelly were not angelic, as the deluded Dr Dee fondly imagined, but were instead manifestations of the Devil. Casaubon extended this accusation of diabolism to the works of Paracelsus, to mystical alchemy (he called the Philosopher's Stone “a meer cheet”), to Kabbalism and even to the mysterious Book of Enoch, “a very superstitious, foolish, fabulous writing; or to conclude all in one word, Cabalistical, such as the Divel might own very well, and in all probability was the author of.”
²²

In a postscript, Casaubon even hinted darkly, without saying so directly, that Elias Ashmole, who had recently published excerpts from Dee's experiments in his
Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum
, was moving down the same dark path as his Elizabethan predecessor. This was a serious charge, which may have influenced Ashmole's decision not to publish the second part of his
magnum opus
. Unfortunately, Casaubon's pious purposes were partially undermined by
his printer. Trying to lure the curious and the magically inclined to buy the book, he made Dee's name more prominent than the author's own on the title page, and added a frontispiece that depicted other famous practitioners of magic. Yet nobody could mistake the message of Casaubon's text—contact with spirits was never lawful.

Casaubon followed up the exposure of Dee with a learned tract entitled
Of Credulity and Incredulity
, published in 1668. It contained a crushingly sarcastic commentary on “the wonders of Chymistry: by some so much doted upon (right Mountebanks, and cheaters in this) that they would refer all mysteries and miracles, even of Religion, unto it.” Casaubon admitted nonetheless that he had been cured of a near-fatal illness by Dr Thory's pills.
²³
Seeking out a middle ground, he admitted the existence of occult qualities in nature, including celestial influences, because the ancients believed in them, but painted spiritual interference in the world as malign. To dissociate himself from Hobbesianism, Casaubon made a point-by-point answer to the “atheist” John Wagstaffe, whom he denounced as wrong about Scripture, wrong about the origins of witch beliefs and utterly wrong about the reality of witchcraft.
²⁴
The last point became crucial to
Of Credulity
’s success. Although the discussion of witches took up only twenty out of more than two hundred pages of dense theological reasoning, it clearly helped to sell copies. When a reprint appeared in 1672, after Casaubon's death, it was retitled
A Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches and Supernatural Operations by Pregnant Instances and Evidences—
a title Casaubon was unlikely to have agreed to, had he still been alive. Evidently, the public was perceived as wanting to read about witches, not about the heavier subjects of credulity and incredulity.