Solomon's Secret Arts (45 page)

Byrom first encountered William Law in March 1729, when the two men met at an inn in Putney. The learned clergyman had just published
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
, a classic of moral rigourism. While Byrom admired it, his relationship with Law was not initially close. He was at this time seeking out all sorts of religious teachers, including Edward Elwall, an eccentric ironmonger of Wolverhampton who lived according to his own interpretation of Jewish law. Byrom was gradually settling on a mystic path, however, and was pleased when Law, in a rare moment of humility, said of Madame Bourignon that “he wished he could think like her.”
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Byrom did not introduce Law to Jacob Boehme, but his transition towards “mystic divinity” definitely preceded that of the man often seen as his mentor. The journal's first reference to the Teutonic Theosopher comes in January 1731, when Byrom bought “two pieces of Jacob Behmen” at a book auction in London. He mentioned Boehme to Law in April 1737, at which point his friend responded “that it was by force that he had writ, that he had desired that all his books had been in one [set of volumes].” Clearly, Law had read at least some of Boehme's works by this time. By Law's own account, given to Byrom in 1743, “Dr. Cheyne was the providential occasion of his meeting or knowing of Jacob Behmen, by a book which the Dr. mentioned to him in a letter, which book mentioned Behmen.” This book, as is known through later testimony, was
Faith and Reason Compared
by a German Philadelphian named Baron Metternich.
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Faith and Reason Compared
actually owed more to John Pordage and Jane Lead than to Boehme. Metternich refers to God as the “Magic Eye,” which was one of Pordage's favourite images.
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He argues in favour of a religion based on direct revelation by God, working either through the imagination or the intellect. Metternich aimed to confute “Modern Rationalists,” who judge revelation, scriptural or personal, according to “Right Reason.” Far from providing a basis for judgment, in Metternich's view, “Reason darkens our pure Understanding, and hinders it from perceiving the subtile Influences of divine Light.”
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Law's research into Boehme, therefore, began with a Philadelphian, and it continued to be deeply affected by that movement. The remaining Philadelphians gave him open access to their archives, and Law became a busy copyist. He cited a manuscript work by Andreas Dionysius Freher to Byrom in April 1737, shortly
before
his first recorded remark concerning Boehme. He painstakingly copied Freher's “Serial Elucidations,” that is, his thoughts on Jacob Boehme, along with three versions of the “Three Tables.” Byrom participated in this rediscovery of the Philadelphians; he kept his own
manuscript version of Freher's “Three Tables” and owned a large collection of mystical diagrams that resemble the illustrations of Boehme made by Freher's disciple J.D. Leuchter.
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The Philadelphians held to unconventional beliefs concerning alchemy, astrology, “Magia” and angelic visions. Law never endorsed these things in print. When he took up the struggle against “Modern Rationalists,” he fashioned it as a defence of Christian orthodoxy rather than of immediate revelation. Law was not actively seeking personal union with God, and he remained deeply suspicious of spirit possession. Yet he threw himself into the study of Boehme, on whom he lavished extraordinary praise—“as a
chosen Servant
of God, he may be placed among those who had received the highest Measures of Light, Wisdom and Knowledge from
Above
.”
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What Boehme added to the fight against rationalism, in Law's view, was a mystical synthesis of theology and the material world. According to Law, Boehme “has made all that is found in the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of nature, to be one continual demonstration, that
dying
to self to be
born again
of Christ is the one only possible salvation of the sons of fallen
Adam
.” In Law's estimation, Boehme spoke not just to religious matters: he also provided insight into the structure of nature.

In investigating this aspect of the Theosopher's writings, Law finally crossed the line separating mystic divinity and occult philosophy, proposing that the Newtonian cosmos should be turned on its head. The bold idea, no doubt derived from the Philadelphians, was germinating in Law's mind by 1742, when he published his first extended defence of Boehme. There he suggested: “The illustrious Sir
Isaac Newton
when he wrote his
Principia
… could have told the world, that the
true and infallible
Ground of what he there advanced, was to be found in the
teutonick Philosopher
, in his
three first Properties of Eternal Nature
.”
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The Newtonian theory of gravity, in other words, had been plagiarized from Boehme. Soon after, in a letter to Dr Cheyne, Law explained the evidence for this outrageous claim. “Dr. Newton,” an unidentified relative of the great man, had informed Law that he and Sir Isaac had set up furnaces to find the Philosopher's Stone after reading the works of Boehme. They failed, but Law opined that Newton had learned from the experience. He noted that attraction was a universal property in Boehme as well as “the grand foundation of the Newtonian Philosophy.” This could not be a coincidence. No one could try to learn the secret of the tincture from Boehme “without knowing and believing as B— does, the ground of Universal attraction, and therefore Sir Isaac's silence, and ignorance of this ground must have been affected & for certain reasons which can now only be guess'd at.” Law repeated this astonishing story to Byrom in May 1743.
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Its veracity is highly dubious. No extensive transcripts by Newton from Boehme's works have survived, and the two men had very different understandings of alchemy as well as of gravity. Furthermore, the notion of extracting an alchemical recipe from Boehme's writings is absurd—unless one follows Freher's handwritten treatise on redemption as a spagyric process, which Law must have read. In fact, the story of the Behmenist origins of gravity tells us more about Law than it does about Newton. Law wanted to give it credit because he believed in Boehme as well as in alchemy. He confessed to Byrom that he had confidence in certain claims of the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone, and the two men “agreed that it could not possibly be forgery.” Law had evidently heard about Newton's spagyric experiments, and was eager to count the great scientist in the Behmenist camp.
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Law convinced himself that Newton had been misled—in fact, the man of science had reversed the true order of nature. In a 1752 tract entitled
The Spirit of Love
, Law maintained that “all the
Matter
of this World is from
spiritual Properties
, since all its Workings and Effects are according to them.” Regarding the laws of matter and motion, “the illustrious Sir
Isaac
ploughed with
Behmen
’s Heifer”: that is, he concocted worldly theories out of principles that pertained to spirits.
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Did Law weigh the philosophical implications of this argument? If matter
consisted
of spirit, and all spirit was part of God, then the deity was present in everything—an arrangement not far removed from that set forth in
Kabbala Denudata
, or the pantheist philosophy that was usually called “Spinozism.” Boehme's heifer, in other words, was ploughing a spiritual version of Spinoza's “Substance.” No wonder Bishop Warburton, who detested Law, accused Boehme of “rank Spinozism.” Byrom, whose piety and benevolence Warburton actually admired, denied the charge, which he considered tantamount to an accusation of atheism, in a polite exchange of letters with the bishop in 1752.
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It remains unclear, however, whether Law would have justified a Neoplatonic universe of differentiated spirits, or a Kabbalistic one in which all spirits were essentially versions of the same divine being.

In any case, we should not assume, as their critics did, that Law and Byrom were simply credulous men who were willing to stomach things that defied rational judgment. Byrom, for example, took a non-committal position regarding Mary Toft, who supposedly gave birth to rabbits: “I neither believe nor disbelieve, because I do not suppose the matter has as yet been thoroughly examined on both sides.” As to witches, he had “no notion of those things,” although he was inclined to believe Madame Bourignon's story of the “witches’ school.”
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For his part, Law mocked rationalists for their obsession with wanting to know the unknowable, like “the inward Structure of Solomon's
Temple, and all of its Services,” an unsubtle jab at the preoccupations of Newton, Stukeley and the Freemasons.
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We should also be wary of linking mystical religious attitudes too closely with a Jacobite mindset, as there were considerable differences among the adherents of the exiled Stuart claimant to the throne. Jacobitism did not induce heightened spirituality or acceptance of the supernatural, even if many Jacobites believed that the exiled Pretender had the ability to cure scrofula by the laying-on of hands.
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Jacobites did not often write in favour of the royal healing power, and it is difficult to say what Law or Byrom thought of it.

As he aged, Law wrote less and less about worldly affairs. Ensconced in his native village of King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, he spent his last years occupied with charitable works and reverential reading of the Teutonic Theosopher. “Next to the
scriptures
my only book is the
illuminated Behmen
,” he admitted in 1759.
¹¹⁶
His last great project was to encourage a new edition of Boehme's writings. As will be seen, that editorial enterprise would have momentous consequences for the history of occult thinking in Britain. It would preserve the Behmenist magic of the Philadelphians, which Law had absorbed, into the last decades of the century, and would produce spiritual manifestations beyond anything John Byrom could imagine.

Magical Architecture: John Wood of Bath

The learned mystics tried to separate certain strands of occult thinking from popular beliefs. Others moved in the opposite direction, by popularizing learned arguments that borrowed from the occult. This can be observed in the literature of Freemasonry. By the mid-eighteenth century, offshoots or rivals of the Grand Lodge of England were using promises of occult knowledge to gain adherents. The Antient Grand Lodge, which officially separated from the mainstream of English Masonry in 1751, wanted a return to the “Old Constitutions,” meaning a greater concentration on the Temple of Solomon as the source of “the secret Mysteries of the Craft.” The chief publicist for the Antients, Laurence Dermott, claimed to have been visited in a dream by the four head porters of Solomon's Temple, who assured him that the Masons who built that structure “were the greatest Cabalists then in the World.” Dermott defined the Kabbala as “their secret Science of expounding divine Mysteries.”
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Initiates into Antient Masonry would presumably learn those same mysteries.

The renewed focus on the secrets of Solomon's Temple is also found in the writings of the remarkable architect and historian John Wood the elder of Bath. He was the designer of many prominent buildings in the spa town, including
the Royal Circus and Queen's Square. His chief patron was Ralph Allen, the mastermind of the English Post Office system, who owned the quarry that provided Wood with stone, and whose house at Prior Park Wood designed. The architect died in 1754, three years after the founding of the Antient Grand Lodge, but there is no record of his being a member. His writings, however, are almost incomprehensible without the assumption of Freemasonry behind them. Their confident pronouncements about the hidden meanings of buildings show that the changing landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain, both rural and urban, could still be seen as loaded with ancient mysteries.

Wood was one of a number of British architects of the first half of the eighteenth century whose work displays the influence of Freemasonry.
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The most important among them was Nicholas Hawksmoor, member of a Masonic lodge in Ludgate Street whose master was the antiquarian Richard Rawlinson, a Nonjuror and friend of Richard Roach. Hawksmoor made notes on Ezekiel's vision of the Temple, and he incorporated into his buildings aspects of Solomonic architecture, such as the twisted columns and cube design at St Mary Woolnoth in London. His plans for colleges at Oxford resemble Villalpando's Temple reconstructions. The fabled tomb of Mausoleus at Halicarnassus provided a model for the tower of St George's, Bloomsbury, and Hawksmoor constructed another classical mausoleum for the earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard. To Freemasons, the original mausoleum to which all later examples referred was the grave of Hiram Abiff. Hawksmoor's buildings, therefore, embody a symbolism of death and regeneration that reflected the ritual of the lodges.
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Hawskmoor's admirer the architect Batty Langley was a tireless publicist for the Freemasons as well as for a “Gothic” or eclectic style, in opposition to classical Palladianism. Langley's
magnum opus
, the gigantic
Ancient Masonry
(1732–6), was dedicated to the grand masters of the Craft.
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In contrast to Hawksmoor, John Wood the elder was one of the leading architects of the Palladian style, which may show that Masonic affiliations did not dictate stylistic choices. Wood's
Origin of Building: or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected
(1746) can be read as an attempt to reconcile Palladianism, which looked to Roman architecture for models, with the Solomonic roots of Masonry. Wood's account is loaded with Masonic lore, such as the story of the two pillars on which all human knowledge was inscribed and which survived the Flood. He also included many of his own interpretations, such as his reading of biblical names, which “discover to us the source of the Art Magick.”
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Wood wandered quite willingly into the occult, without any of the hesitations that restrained more learned authors. He paid considerable attention to magical questions, such as how Joktan son of Heber learned the “Trick, of animating inanimate Things,” which must have been quite a party turn. According to
Wood, the magic of the Chaldeans was bequeathed to the Druids, while that of the Egyptians was learned by Moses, providing a foundation for the art of building. The skilled architect, Wood opined, had to be a good magician, as he needed to know all “the Wisdom of the Egyptians,” including “Astrology, Geometry, Optics, Arithmetic, History, Philosophy, Music, Physic.”
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