Solomon's Secret Arts (26 page)

To begin with, we should consider what “decline” actually meant. It translated into fewer works on alchemy, less respect for astrology and the virtual disappearance of ritual magic among the educated. The publication of alchemical books in English had peaked between 1650 and 1675, with ten or more works appearing in some years. While the trade in newly published alchemical texts slowed down over the next quarter-century, up to a half-dozen new publications might become available every year. After 1700, this was reduced to a couple of volumes annually, and by the 1710s many years passed without any new book coming onto the market at all. Of course, educated people also read Latin. Alchemical publications in that language (including those printed outside Britain) similarly declined after 1700, but less dramatically.
¹
Because English and Scottish alchemists had access to older works, as well as to foreign publications, we should be cautious in asserting that there was an overall decline in the number of volumes available to readers. On the other hand, British publishers, always on the lookout for commercially lucrative possibilities, clearly perceived the alchemy market as being less strong
after 1700 than it had been in the previous half-century. They gradually gave up on an area of publishing that was no longer viewed as profitable.

Astrology was a different case. It suffered a further loss of prestige, but not of popularity. The number of almanacs published in England remained at more or less the same level throughout the period, so there was no drying-up of the public thirst for predictions.
²
Serious studies of astrology, however, became rare. Few bothered to examine whether it worked through natural magic or angelic influence.
³
The field was now dominated by John Partridge, an ardent Whig who had gone into exile during James II's reign and returned at the Glorious Revolution. His empirical approach to the celestial art pleased some privileged customers, but it was eccentric: anti-Copernican, firmly opposed to magic and fixated on the “Hileg” or predictor of death. Partridge's politics led to ferocious attacks on him, which he reciprocated. His bitter rival John Gadbury continued to practise his own reformed (and heliocentric) version of astrology, but his clients were of distinctly lower status. The silver age of English astrology ground to a bitter finish in the competition between these two men.
⁴

By the early eighteenth century, a fashionable tone of scepticism about supernatural claims was taking hold among younger intellectuals. It was hotly resisted by orthodox clerics, especially in Scotland, where an Edinburgh University student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged for blasphemy in 1697. He had dubbed Scripture “Ezra's fables” and called both Moses and Jesus magicians—a weird conflation of occult lore and irreligion.
⁵
Meanwhile, party politics raised the level of rhetoric concerning the occult to a very high pitch. The Whigs accused their Tory opponents of “superstition,” because some of them argued for the reality of witches or accepted the charms and spells associated with an older type of astrology. In exchange, the Tories accused Whigs who practised alchemy or supported astrology of being “enthusiasts” and “fanatics.” Party conflict was a crucial factor in determining the destiny of occult thinking after 1688, but it was only one strand among several that contributed to the decline. The precarious intellectual position of occult philosophy, evident since at least the 1660s, was arguably the underlying reason for its loss of momentum. Never having enjoyed the respectability and authority that it craved, the occult slid into retreat after 1688 because its place in an altered society became even more insecure.

Perhaps the hardest blows to fall on occult learning were the deaths of respected intellectuals: Robert Boyle died in 1691, Elias Ashmole in 1692, Henry Coley in 1695, John Aubrey in 1697, Samuel Jeake the younger in 1699. The alchemical publisher William Cooper barely survived the Glorious Revolution and his last known works date from 1689. Other major figures, like Thomas Vaughan, George Starkey, Robert Moray, John Heydon, William Lilly,
John Webster and William Andrews, did not live to see the Revolution. Sir Isaac Newton, of course, outlived them all, but he turned away from alchemy in the first decade of the eighteenth century. No scholars of similar stature emerged to replace these men, indicating how the occult had failed to establish itself as a recognized field of inquiry. At the same time, it cannot be argued that scientific endeavour benefited. On the contrary, the Royal Society shed much of its own reforming zeal after 1689, becoming more like a gentlemen's club.
⁶
The publication of Newton's
Opticks
in 1704 effectively marked the end of an era of burning scientific questions.

If it lacked giants, the period after 1689 saw the popularization of science through periodicals like
The Athenian Mercury
, published by John Dunton between 1690 and 1697. In its pages, a group of writers answered questions from the public, often concerning scientific matters. Their views summed up the impact of the new scientific philosophy.
The Athenian Mercury
never discussed alchemy, and was contemptuous of the astrology found in almanacs, “the best of which more often
miss
than
hitt
.”
⁷
It issued a brief, dismissive reply to a pointed inquiry by Samuel Jeake that was designed to cast doubt on the heliocentric theory.
⁸
Asked whether charms had any real force, the writers replied that “if there's any thing in ‘em,
abstracted from Fancy
… it must be Diabolical—but they can't do no more than the Devil himself, who can only
represent the Object
, not force the Will to embrace it.”
⁹
Surprisingly, given this assumption that diabolic power was restricted, the journal fully accepted the reality of ghostly apparitions, to which a whole issue was devoted on Halloween 1691.
¹⁰
It also endorsed belief in witchcraft, reprinting as evidence testimony from the Salem witch trials. Admittedly, not all readers of
The Athenian Mercury
trembled at the thought of ghosts or witches. One of them wrote that belief in the Devil's works was “against the Essence of God Almighty … and scarce any Story of Witchcraft,
&c
, but has been detected to be Artifice, or Natural.”
¹¹
His scepticism, however, seems to have been exceptional.

The opinions of
The Athenian Mercury
show that at least one major organ of scientific thought did not reject supernatural occurrences, although it tended to see them as caused by the Devil. The emphasis on diabolism was widely reiterated in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution: for example, by the influential Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter in a 1691 work entitled
The Certainty of the World of Spirits
. Baxter emulated Glanvill's
Saducismus Triumphatus
by presenting eyewitness examples of witchcraft, apparitions, spirit voices and other interventions of the Devil. He admitted that angels had a role in human affairs, but hastily added: “I will not desire so to alter the stated Government and Order of God, as to expect here visible Communion with Angels.”
¹²
Such views, which were common to Scots Presbyterian, Anglican
and Dissenting clerics, served to bind Protestants together at a moment of deep political division. They posed a challenge to those who espoused occult thinking, because they judged spiritual communication as diabolic.

The resurgence of the Devil in religious writings after 1688 did not reverse the downward trend in witch trials, which in England had already dwindled to almost nothing. Yet it surely contributed to the noticeable decline in works that dealt seriously with occult philosophy. Decline, to be sure, did not mean demise. The continuation of a small stream of new writing on alchemy allowed adepts to find fresh works to excite them, even in the post-revolutionary decades. Astrology continued to guide the hopes and fears of many readers, and the desire to talk with spirits was not extinguished. It would be another ninety years, however, before the occult would begin to regain the public profile that it had enjoyed in the late seventeenth century.

Alchemy between Philosophy and Commerce

The Glorious Revolution initially raised the hopes of the alchemists, but the results of the subsequent two decades can hardly have lived up to their expectations—except perhaps in a commercial sense. Alchemy was already changing into a business before 1688, but in the next two decades it would be transformed from a subject of philosophical speculation to a set of practices valued mainly as a basis for proprietary medicines. As a result, it lost much of its intellectual significance and became tied to the fortunes of ambitious businessmen whose commercial empires extended throughout Britain and abroad. At the same time, the remaining alchemists gradually lost touch with a post-revolutionary culture that emphasized competition, moderation and openness.

This development could not have been foretold in 1689, when alchemy still seemed to be riding high. An impressive illustration was the list of 190 subscribers to an edition of the works of the celebrated German alchemist Johann Rudolph Glauber, discoverer of many useful medicinal compounds. The enormous folio volume, translated by Christopher Peake, writing under the personal title “Philo-Chymico-Medicus,” was one of the last works published by William Cooper. The subscribers included the lord mayor of London, the Quaker William Penn, the president of the Royal College of Physicians and a large number of doctors and surgeons. The handsome book, prepared before the Glorious Revolution, was dedicated to Edmund Dickinson, a noted alchemist who had been physician in ordinary to Charles II and James II. The preface also praised Dickinson's friend Robert Boyle, “The Honour both of our Age and Country.” The two men had led “Chymistry” out of the dark
age, when few were “so much as lightly Tincted with the
Hermetick Philosophy
.”
¹³
Yet we may wonder how many of the medical practitioners who subscribed to the book were themselves even “lightly Tincted” with Hermeticism. No doubt many just wanted to be associated with the prestigious names of Glauber, Dickinson and Boyle, or with chemical processes that might lead to profits.

The new regime seemed even better disposed to alchemy than the old. A smashing political triumph for the alchemists came in the immediate wake of William and Mary's accession, when the Act of Henry IV outlawing “multiplying,” or the transmutation of base metals into gold, was repealed. As early as 29 April 1689, only two weeks after the new monarchs had been crowned, Robert Boyle wrote to Christopher Kirkby, a merchant and alchemist living in Cornwall, opining “that the act of
Henry
the 4th has been, and, whilst it shall remain in force, will be, a great discouragement to the industry of skilful men, which is very happily improved in this inquisitive age. And therefore, that the repealing of a law, so darkly and ambiguously penned, will much conduct to the public good.”
¹⁴
Boyle went on to testify before Parliament that he had witnessed transmutation, which must have excited MPs who were increasingly worried by the lack of silver and gold coinage in a nation on the verge of a major war against France. For them, the removal of legal restrictions on alchemy amounted to sound monetary policy.
¹⁵
By August 1689, the Whig-dominated Parliament had passed a bill repealing the medieval statute, and King William III had signed it into law (1 W. & M. c. 30). The new Act recognized that “divers Persons have by their Study, Industry and Learning, arrived to great Skill and Perfection in the Art of Melting and Refining of Metals, and otherwise Improving their Ores … and Extracting Gold and Silver out of them,” which must constitute the most explicit legislative endorsement of alchemy ever given in England.
Spagyria
, however, would now benefit the state, not the individual adept. Any gold or silver made out of copper, tin, iron or lead was to be brought to the Mint in the Tower of London, assayed and used for “the Increase of Moneys.”
¹⁶

It is very likely that Isaac Newton, MP for Cambridge University, had a hand in the passage of the bill. Yet nothing is known about his involvement, because he continued in his guarded attitude towards alchemy after the Revolution. Following Boyle's death in 1691, Newton confided to John Locke, a trustee of Boyle's papers, that he had no wish to learn the alchemical secrets of his late friend. In an arrogant tone all too typical of the great scientist, Newton declared that he was not interested in Boyle's recipe for transmutation, based on the “red earth” or dry mercury that was linked to the essence of Adam (whose name, in Hebrew, means “red earth”). “I do not desire to know what he
has communicated,” he wrote to Locke, “but rather that you would keep the particulars from me … because I have no mind to be concerned w
^th
this R
_x
[recipe] any further then just to know the entrance [the first step].”
¹⁷
Newton had not renounced alchemy, of course, and for the first time his efforts enjoyed the assistance of another human being, the young Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. They remained secret.

Perhaps encouraged by the Parliamentary Act, Newton's alchemy reached a culmination in 1693, when he wrote in his personal papers a long comment entitled “Praxis” that recorded his discovery of a process by which “you may multiply to infinity.”
¹⁸
Shortly thereafter, he entered a period of depression and paranoia that some historians have linked to mercury poisoning, although he did not suffer the tremors or loss of teeth that usually accompany that condition. After his recovery, he was appointed as warden of the Mint by the Whig government, from which position he guided the major recoinage effort of 1696. He became master of the Mint in 1700.
¹⁹
So far as is known, he never tried to increase the production of English specie by “multiplication.”