And the king commanded, and they brought great stones, costly stones, and hewed stones, to lay the foundation of the house. And Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders did hew them, and the stone-squarers: so they prepared timber and stones to build the house. (I.Kings. V. 17-18.)
What are those golden builders doing? asked William Blake in his epic poem Jerusalem.68 A certain mystique once surrounded the art of building. Builders exhibited mighty powers; their successes were exemplary, their failures symbolic. Piercing spires strained for the supreme architect: the Creator Himself, architect of the infinite. And if, as John Dee maintained, the root of architecture lies principally in the imagination, then we may also consider the Hermetic principle whereby the cosmos is seen as the divine imagination projected, becoming visible to those in whom that divine imagination has been awoken. Thus enlivened, the architect or master mason becomes a spiritually significant figure. Dee the magus paraphrased the great Augustan architect Vitruvius' Architectura in his Mathematical Preface of 1570:
An Architect (sayeth he) [Vitruvius in his Architectura] ought to understand Languages, to be skillfull of Painting, well instructed in Geometrie, not ignorant of Perspective, furnished with Arithmeticke, have knowledge of many histories, and diligently have heard Philosophers, have skill of Musike, not ignorant of Physike, know the aunsweres of Lawyers, and have Astronomie, and the courses Caelestiall, in good knowledge.
For the Hermetist, architecture is potentially magical. Therein lies its dignity, a dignity linked, moreover, to what the building contains. What of a building designed to contain that which cannot be contained? I refer of course to the Temple of Jerusalem which biblical tradition asserts was first built under the auspices of Solomon the Wise (c.961-922 BC).
And king Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre: he was a widow's son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass : and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass and he came to king Solomon, and wrought all his work. (I Kings VII. 13ff.)
A close reading of the New Testament and extant Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that at the critical crux of 1st century Jewish religion lay the question of the proper administration, meaning, and essential nature of the Temple.
Documents from Qumran base much of their opposition to the ruling priestly party in Jerusalem on the conception of a strict, purified and ideal Temple. The first Christian martyr, Stephen, was stoned to death for announcing its imminent destruction. Jesus himself69 entered Jerusalem to attack the Temple's commercial wing with righteous indignation, thus securing his eventual arrest and crucifixion. The ‘abomination of desolation’, whose appearance would signify the final apocalypse (Daniel XI.31; Mark XIII.14) was expected to appear in the Temple. The return of the Jews from exile in Babylon in the fifth century BC was predicated on an imminent reconstruction of the Temple. Figuring prominently in the gospels and Acts, the Temple is where Jesus is presented to Simeon; it is where the boy Jesus astonishes the chief rabbis. John the Baptist's father Zacharias is a priest of the Temple. Jesus teaches his disciples in the Temple. The Apostles pray in the Temple. Paul comes and goes to the Temple in performance of the Nazarite vow. The Temple is frequently the Big Question. But there is more to the matter than mere ubiquity.
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgement also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place. (Isaiah XXVIII.16)
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the LORD's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes. This is the day which the LORD hath made; (Psalm 118. 22-24a).
Jesus of Nazareth based much of his radical doctrine on a precise reinterpretation of the nature of the Temple.
And he beheld them [in the Temple], and said, What is this then that is written, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, he shall be winnowed. (Luke XX. 17ff.)
The stone that falls from heaven has left a traceable pedigree within Jewish apocalyptic and prophetic literature. It appears in the prophecies ascribed to Daniel (Daniel II. 34-35. c.160 BC) as a fatal projectile sent by God against the great image symbolising the empire of Nebuchadrezzar. The false image with ‘feet of clay’ is smashed on impact. Transformed into a mountain which covers the whole earth, the mountain reminds us that it is God who “rules the heavens”. The polyvalent stone is supernatural.
In the quotation from Luke above, the falling stone of heavenly origin “winnows” the one on whom it falls; it divides the grain from the chaff. (Grain has a long-standing alchemical association with gold -Christian Rosenkreuz is described in the Fama as a grain hid in Christ for example). This process of winnowing occurs when the wheat is tossed into the air for the wind to do the work of division. The Hebrew word for ‘wind’ or breath is ruach, the word for spirit. The winnowing by the stone may be seen as a spiritual process, equivalent to the action of the philosopher's stone in alchemy. Perhaps Jesus knew of alchemy. It can certainly be argued that he understood the spiritual principles underlying it.
The coming of the stone is a salvific operation; it would be consistent for the believer to say that the best thing is to be hit by the stone, and remade into a new being. This is spiritual alchemy. In the alchemical context, the stone releases the divine spirit. Jesus identifies himself with the cornerstone of the Temple, the “precious” stone referred to by Isaiah.
And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death; and found none. For many bare false witness against him, saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands70. (Mark XIV. 55-58).
The Gospel of John is more explicit. Following Jesus' rout of the Temple commerce, his enemies ask Jesus for an explanation:
Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body. (John II.19ff).
Should we follow the symbolism literally, the Jesus of the Gospel of John is responsible for his own raising: “I will raise it up”. Jesus appears to have the art of building at its highest degree. He can raise stones. He can raise himself. He can raise himself in another; he is an initiator:
And he [Andrew] brought him [Simon] to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, a stone. (John. I.42).
The new Temple envisioned by Yeshua ben Josef is made up of those who “worship God in spirit and in truth”. These living stones, rejected by prevailing powers, are set in place by the appearance of the keystone within themselves, those who have been, as it were, ‘hit’ by the Stone and become divine: golden builders.
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? (John. X.34).
The highest state for man, according to the Johannine Logos, is absorption in God whence the Logos derives, when “I and my Father are one.” (John X.30). The Logos acts as the hidden stone, buried in the soul - and if fallen man is to be ‘rebuilt’, the stone must be recovered. The saviour's ‘body’ is made of the regenerated stones: the Temple. His followers become the new temple-in-the-making: a spiritual body.
The parallel of language here between alchemy and architecture is extraordinarily striking. However, much of that surprise comes from our being accustomed to imagine stone as an inert material; this was not the case among the ancients. Stones themselves could contain a secret power. Certain features of landscape might be indwelled by spirits. S. Paul in I Corinthians X refers to a rabbinic legend whereby the rock from which Moses drew water for the Children of Israel in the wilderness actually followed the Israelites around in their wanderings. Paul then goes on to say that “that spiritual rock which followed them: that rock was Christ.” - a quite extraordinary idea until we consider that stones were associated in the ancient world with healing.
Josephus referred to how the Essenes had knowledge of healing stones. Thus was architecture deeply bound up with the idea of health: spiritual and consequently physical transformation. We are to ‘put our own house in order’. This should help us to understand the origins of such alchemical terms as the ‘philosopher's stone’ and the ‘elixir of life’. They denote the power to transform lower being into a higher state, to regenerate that floppy idiot called man into a living stone, a “house of fire” embodying God. According to gnostic tradition, the great stone - like the Gral of von Eschenbach and the krater containing divine nous of Corpus Hermeticum IV - comes from above:
And he said to them [his opponents], Ye are from beneath; I am from above : ye are of this world; I am not of this world. (John VIII.23.)
The Logos is the ‘lost word’ of Free Masonry.
The value of the preceding metaphysics will become apparent as we examine two giants of the 17th. Century: two builders, two men who were ‘hit by the Stone’, and who in seeking the Stone became ‘living stones’, dedicated to the rebirth, renewal, and reconstruction of the temple of knowledge, nature and of the divine society. In the process, they contributed to the spiritual genesis of two significant institutions which have, at their best, attempted to aid the liberation of humankind from the bondage of material constraint: freemasonry and the Royal Society. I refer to Johann Amos Comensky (or Comenius, 1592-1671), and Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).
Between the Westerkerk and Damrak in the city of Amsterdam, visitors still come to the house where Comenius lived in the 1660s. This house was only one of many havens in a long life lived on the move.
In the year in which the Fama Fraternitatis was published in Cassel (1614), Comenius returned from the Palatinate to his beloved Bohemia. There he wrote a vast pansophic encyclopaedia, an integration of all knowledge written on the micro-macrocosmic principle, envisioning all natural things as part of an unbroken whole, the which whole included the human mind and the spiritual activity of God. He was encouraged in this work by Johann Valentin Andreae, for Comenius dedicated his efforts not to the private world of academe but to the cause of public enlightenment. The new age would be built on the principle of opening the ‘book of nature’ and the house of wisdom to all. In learning lay the key to liberation, the freedom of mind over matter. Learning was not to be the servant of the state or of industry or capital. Capital, industry and the state were to be the servants of learning - a principle we may consider of no little value today.
This passionate and good man was further encouraged in his efforts by the configuration of two events. Firstly, the public diffusion of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and secondly, the political movement supported by many of his Church (the Bohemian Brethren) to install Frederick of the Palatinate and his wife the Princess Elizabeth as King and Queen of Bohemia. These events seemed to promise a new age of religious toleration, release from Catholic Habsburg domination and the rebirth of science.
To the delight of Comenius and many others suffering religious persecution, Frederick accepted the throne of Bohemia in September 1619, journeying south for the coronation in Prague Cathedral, an event witnessed by the joyous Comenius himself. Optimists expected James I to support his daughter (Elizabeth) should the Habsburgs intervene, but James did nothing. The Duke of Bavaria's Catholic army invaded. Only the outnumbered army of Christian of Anhalt (Augustus' brother) came to Frederick's aid. After the Battle of the White Mountain (8 November 1620), the “Winter King and Queen of Bavaria” were toppled, the Prague Palace was sacked, and the Thirty Years War began.
Comenius would lose his house, his library, his wife and one of his children in the ensuing conflagration. Shattered, he escaped to the protection of Count Zerotin at Brandeis. In 1622 he poured forth his despair into a masterpiece of Czech literature, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. To all those who have dreamed a great dream, attempted to manifest it in the public domain only to receive the rebuttal of the world's perennial wickedness, stupidity and blindness, this volume speaks.
The ‘Labyrinth’ of the world is in a sense Campanella's City of the Sun and Andreae's Christianopolis turned into a nightmare. The ordered streets of science lead nowhere; all knowledge is unsound. The Pilgrim is lost in the world. Then he hears the sound of a trumpet: the trumpet of Fame. It is the announcement of the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, the sound of universal reformation. Pilgrim is tempted to take an interest. Many books appear with promising titles of pansophic enlightenment but are found empty. Pilgrim is confused. The Brotherhood “said that they had the stone, and could by means of it entirely heal all illnesses and confer long life.” He dreams of Paradise, a paradise reborn through access to divine wisdom, but still the Brotherhood is silent. Pilgrim can wait no more; he resumes his journey, falling into greater despair at the sight of war:
Oh, most miserable, wretched, unhappy mankind! this then, is your last glory? this the conclusion of your many splendid deeds, this the term of your learning and much wisdom over which you glory so greatly?
A voice penetrates the darkness: “Return! Return whence thou camest to the house of the heart, and then close the doors behind thee!” Comenius is forced by the pressure of events and by profound torment into a cathartic inner experience, a descent into the depths of himself. In the process he encounters a new light, and unexpected aid:
Yet I saw that they [the Godly] were well sheltered; for I saw that their whole community was encompassed by a wall of fire. When I came nearer I saw that this wall moved, for it was nothing else but a procession of thousands and thousands of angels who walked around them; no foe, therefore, could approach them. Each of them also had an angel who had been given to him by God and ordained to be his guardian. I saw also…another advantage of this holy, invisible companionship - to wit, that the angels were not only as guards, but also as teachers to the chosen. They often give them secret knowledge of divers things, and teach them the deep secret mysteries of God. For as they ever behold the countenance of the omniscient God, nothing that a Godly man can wish to know can be a secret to them, and with God's permission they reveal that which they know…
The period of repairing his mind seems to have n several years. Eventually he revived and found, at the end of it all, that far from his ideals having been extinguished, they had matured and even intensified. Comenius never again seems to have lost the sense of divine guidance, and he was certainly cared for to the end of his seventy-nine years.
In 1626, four years after writing the Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, Comenius visited the court-in-exile of Frederick and Elizabeth, still regarded by their many supporters on the continent and in England as the rightful King and Queen of Bohemia. This impoverished court was a catalyst for the rebirth of science. On this occasion, Comenius presented Frederick with an illuminated manuscript of Lux in Tenebris (Light in the Darkness), a work containing the strange prophecies of Bohemian clergyman Christopher Kotter71. In Comenius' preface, he says that Kotter had warned Frederick not to use force against the Habsburgs in 1620. Kotter also prophesied the eventual return of Frederick to Bohemia in triumph and though this might have cheered up the dejected king, it was vain.
After her husband's death in 1632, Elizabeth's court continued to be a magnet both for those who believed that the Reformation had been betrayed, and for those who saw it entering a new phase of educational and philosophical enlightenment.
Comenius enjoyed other connections to Frederick and Elizabeth. Of his Heidelberg tutors, Abraham Scultetus had accompanied Frederick to Prague in 1619 as his chaplain, while Johannes Henricus Altingus remained Frederick's close friend until the latter's death. These connections deepened further after meeting the reformers Samuel Hartlib and John Dury in Poland, both of whom, like himself, were encouraged by Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles Louis.
Comenius first met Hartlib when he went to Poland in 1628 to form a community of exiled Bohemian Brethren. Both Comenius and Hartlib wrote educational works extolling the liberation of knowledge. Hartlib the Pole had also met the Scot John Dury at Elbing in Poland and decided that England was the best place to get the new reforms under way, encouraged by the writings of Rosicrucian-readers Dr Robert Fludd and Sir Francis Bacon.
Dury and Hartlib had good contacts. Sir William Boswell, Queen Elizabeth's diplomatic supporter, was not only Britain's ambassador to the Hague but was also Sir Francis Bacon's executor (Bacon had died in 1626). Was it co-incidence that Hartlib set out for England within a year of the publication of Bacon's fable of a perfected spiritual and scientific society, the New Atlantis (1627)? The story told in Bacon's New Atlantis is not only strongly reminiscent both of Andreae's Christianopolis (1619) - including a journey by sea to reach it and the appearance of a cross and cherubim's wings on an official scroll (the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross was “under Jehovah's wings”)-but it also presents us with the image of a new temple of science:
Ye shall understand, my dear friends, that amongst the excellent acts of that king [of the island], one above all hath the pre-eminence. It was the erection and institution of an order, or society, which we call Saloman's House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.
‘Saloman’ is explained as a corruption of ‘Solomon’. The House (so similar in concept to the vault of Christian Rosenkreuz: “a compendium of the universe”) is a kind of distant temple, housing not so much God Himself as the knowledge of His creation in all its aspects, physical and spiritual. New Atlantis sends out agents (again like the Fraternity of Christian Rosenkreuz) to gather new discoveries:
we have twelve that sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations (for our own we conceal), who bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants of Light.
I suspect that Samuel Hartlib, when he left his Christian mystical and philanthropic society in Poland for England in 1628, saw himself as a figure not at all unlike a “Merchant of Light”. After founding a school for Protestant refugees in Chichester, Hartlib went to London in 1630, establishing himself as a leading reformer in England, keeping in close touch with both Comenius and the Hague72.
In 1640 he addressed A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria to the newly instated ‘Long’ Parliament. Hartlib compared his ideal tolerant state to the Macaria of Pico della Mirandola-enthusiast S. Thomas More's Utopia, and to Bacon's New Atlantis. Hartlib, in telling words, hoped that Parliament would “lay the corner Stone of the world's happinesse before the final recesse thereof…”
A general clamour for reform was fuelled by a profound excitement that a new Elizabethan age or Great Instauration (to use Bacon's words) might be returning to shower her blessings on a thirsty nation. The poet and later revolutionary Parliamentarian John Milton (1608-1674), friend of Hartlib, was moved to song:
Yea Truth, and Justice then Will down return to men, Th'enamelld Arras of the Rain-bow wearing, And Mercy set between, Thron'd in Celestiall sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing, And Heav'n as at som festivall, Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall. (Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity)
Would King Charles I, brother of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, get off the fence of political expediency and declare for Britain's rôle of defending and expanding the Reformation, bringing all Britons together of whatever religious persuasion in peace and prosperity? Would he welcome the Merchants of Light? For a heady moment it seemed so.
Hartlib wrote to Comenius and begged him to come to England. As Frances Yates put it in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972): “he [Comenius] believed that he had a mandate from Parliament to build Bacon's New Atlantis in England.” In 1641 John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, welcomed Comenius to England with a great banquet and informed Parliament that in considering much-needed reform the names of Comenius, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury should be considered exemplary73.
Inspired, Comenius wrote Via Lucis (the Way of Light) in London. Via Lucis presents the world as a comedy in which the divine wisdom plays with men of many lands. The play is not yet over, for the highest light - like the dénouement of a play - is reserved for the end. In order to bring this Light forth, Comenius advocated the establishment of a College or sacred society devoted to the common welfare of man. The idea had clearly lingered in Comenius' brain since the time of the Rosicrucian manifestos over two decades since. According to Comenius, a new science needs a universal spiritual and educational reformation to go with it:
When all instances and rules have been collected, we may hope that an Art of Arts, a Science of Sciences, a Wisdom of Wisdom, a Light of Light shall finally be established.
Comenius hoped that his educational primers, his “universal books”, would become available to all. The word of enlightened learning must be spread over the earth: “For though it is true that the world has not entirely lacked intercourse, yet such methods of intercourse as it has enjoyed have lacked universality.” The principle of universality is an important one, suggesting both the pristine wisdom of the ancients and the possibility of finding a common basis in knowledge that will transcend religious divisions, social divisions and national divisions; fraternity is the keynote. Comenius believes the “agents of general happiness and welfare” should be many. These agents must be guided by some kind of order (reminiscent of the Rules for the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross), “so that each of them may know what he has to do, and for whom and when and with what assistance, and may set about his business in a manner which will make for the public benefit.”
Nevertheless, King Charles had little interest in national reform, while parliament was in any case divided on what reforms were necessary. There was, however, one area of broad unanimity, that Charles should relinquish absolute authority over the collection of taxes, that is, that there should be no separate law to that established by parliament.
It is clear that the eirenic approach of such men as Hartlib and Comenius forebore partisanship in the burgeoning conflict. Comenius left for Sweden to undertake that country's educational reform while Dury left for the Hague in 1641. Samuel Hartlib stayed in England.
On 20 May of that same year, Hartlib's friend Robert Moray, quarter-master to the Royal army of Scotland, entered the Scottish Old S. Mary's Chapel Lodge (No.1) of Masonry at a place near or in Newcastle. This was one of the earliest masonic initiations on record. Moray, learned enthusiast both of the Rosicrucians and of alchemy, was the first president of the Royal Society.
The precise origins of the Royal Society are still debated. There is in its earliest history (that of Thomas Sprat, published in 1667) a certain cut-and-dried yet nonetheless vague quality as to its genesis, suggesting there may have been much more to the matter than met the eye. Some of this vagueness is due to the fact that the institution (originally called the ‘Royal Society of London, for Improving of Natural Knowledge’) was born at a time when the Restoration of Charles II seemed insecure. Furthermore, many linked science with diabolic magic or utopian, revolutionary reform.
There is general agreement that the Society was conceived in the 1640s, arising from discussions which took place during the Civil War and its aftermath. These activities, regardless of the political views of its earliest proponents, were then linked firmly to the Restoration of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia's nephew Charles II. Thanks to Sir Robert Moray, who had laboured tirelessly for the exiled Charles between 1654 and 1657 in France, Holland and Scotland, it became the Royal Society.
According to Royal Society member John Wallis, writing in 1678 and 1697, the Society grew out of meetings held in London in 1645 in private homes and at Gresham College. The meetings included founder members Dr John Wilkins (later bishop of Chester), but then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine in London, and Theodore Haak, a German from the Palatinate. These men were, like Comenius and Hartlib, patronised by Elizabeth of Bohemia. According to Wallis, it was Haak “who, I think, gave the first occasion, and first suggested these meetings and many others.”
Further evidence comes from the letters (1646-1647) of alchemist and experimental scientist Robert Boyle. Boyle, a correspondent of Hartlib, mentions an ‘Invisible College’, a phrase with which we should be familiar, recalling how Descartes was held in suspicion in Paris in the 1620s for being a member of the “Invisibles”, that is, the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross74. In one letter, Boyle asks his tutor to send him some books, a favour “which will make you extremely welcome to our Invisible College”, while in a letter for February 1647 Boyle writes excitedly about his having made the acquaintance of a quite remarkable group of people:
The best on't is that the cornerstones [my emphasis] of the Invisible or (as they term themselves) the Philosophical College, do now and then honour me with their company… men of so capaceous and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge… as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than an universal good-will can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind to their care.
This almost sounds as if Boyle has entered the bosom of Andreae's Christian Fraternity or Societas Christiana - or even the Rose-Cross Fraternity itself! Somebody or bodies were presumably living out the ideals which Andreae, Comenius, Hartlib, Dury and Elizabeth of Bohemia held so dear: courage, spiritual idealism, open-mindedness, loving care and systematic science. To be fair this does not sound quite like the Royal Society, but it does sound like the kind of atmosphere in which such an undertaking could develop. It begins to look as though Comenius and Hartlib had played their part as “Merchants of Light” very well.
According to Thomas Sprat's official history, the Royal Society grew out of meetings held in John Wilkins' rooms at Wadham College, Oxford between 1648 and 1659. Regular visitors included the polymath Christopher Wren, William Petty75 and the famous diarist John Evelyn. Evelyn described the rooms as having been filled with “many artificial, mathematical and magical curiosities.”
Wilkins, who as we have seen was chaplain to Elizabeth's son Charles Louis was also the author of a book called Mathematical Magick (1648) based on the work of both John Dee (Mathematical Preface, 1570) and on a section on mechanics from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (Oppenheim, 1619). Wilkins cites the magician-scholar and Hermetic enthusiast Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) as his authority for employing the term “mathematical magick” for that branch of science dealing with mechanical invention. This was a fairly bold statement to appear in an era of regular witch-trials - for both Agrippa and Dee had been accused of diabolical pacts. Wilkins also demonstrates a loose knowledge of the Rosicrucian material. In describing an underground lamp (an example of mathematical magick), he compares it to the lamp “seen in the sepulchre of Francis [sic, clearly taking Fra., ie: frater to mean ‘Francis’] Rosicrosse, as is more largely expressed in the Confession of that Fraternity.” (still unpublished in English at that time).
Perhaps it was due to Wilkins' inaccurate rendering of the substance of the Rosicrucian manifestos that led Thomas Vaughan to publish (for the first time in English) a printed version of both the Fama and Confessio in 1652. Indeed it appears that the 1650s, with their uncertainty regarding the future of the nation after the execution of Charles I in 1649, saw both a revival of interest in the Rosicrucians76, as well as a ferocious attack on the Renaissance spiritual tradition which fed into that interest. Thomas Vaughan, twin-brother of the poet Henry Vaughan, author of the beautiful poem Peace, is an example of a second-generation ‘Rosicrucian’ -English-style - a man who made no apology for his magical interests:
That I should profess magic… and justify the professors of it withal is impiety to many but religion with me …Magic is nothing but the wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the creature. It is a name - as Agrippa saith - not distasteful to the very Gospel itself. Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He Himself discovered. (Quoted by Francis King in his Magic, the Western Tradition, (BCA, 1975).
Thomas Vaughan was connected with the first English version of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Moule, 1651)77, writing an Enconium on the magus of Nettesheim under the same pseudonym by which he published the Fama the following year, Eugenius Philalethes, ‘Lover of Truth’. This name also appeared in Andreae's Christian Mythologies (1619). Vaughan's ideological position lies firmly in the extra-curricular school:
Now a new East beyond the stars I see Where breaks the Day of thy Divinitie : Heav'n states a Commerce here with Man, had He But gratefull Hands to take, and Eyes to see. Hence you fond School-men, that high truths deride, And with no Arguments but Noyse, and Pride; You that damn all but you your selves invent, And yet find nothing by Experiment; Your Fate is written by an unseen Hand, But his Three Books with the Three worlds shall stand.
Vaughan would plainly like to have seen a reform of science, but is doubtful whether even the Baconian approach would yield the kind of spiritual awareness he found in Agrippa. The magician was suspicious of the imminent move towards a scientific method that would exclude the wonders of spiritual magic. For him these wonders constituted the heights of human perception. Within the context of the hopes of such as Hartlib and Comenius - that in seeking the truth through the works of God manifest in nature one may return to the Light – Vaughan's is an almost refreshingly sceptical view. One senses that Vaughan is waging a (not quite) private war for the place of Magic in the reform programme, and he does it explicitly since it might appear that few others would dare to. This was a very dangerous area, especially for those in the universities (such as Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren) who were attempting to establish reformed science as an academically legitimate activity.
The faltering ecclesiastical domination of the universities (during the Protectorate) and the particularly Aristotelian bent of Oxford meant that Magic in its fullness was regarded by some as a suspect deviation from what was considered to be a sound classical, theological and humanistic education, or, simply, diabolical witchcraft. The nature of this conflict would have a definite effect on the exoteric character of any established scientific society.
Vaughan's publication of the Fama and Confessio may have emboldened the puritan divine John Webster to write an extraordinary plea for the teaching of Hermetic and Paracelsian philosophy, along with Jacob Böhme, in British universities. These subjects were “in some measure acknowledged” by the Rosy Cross Fraternity, he writes, while mathematics as described by John Dee (from whose Mathematical Preface he quotes) is also recommended78. Webster was obviously very well versed in the field of contemporary Hermetic studies, including Bacon and Fludd in his programme, believing them to be in agreement. (Bacon did not accept the micro-macrocosmic philosophy.) The book received a stinging reply from Seth Ward, an habitué of Wilkins' philosophical discussions in Oxford79.
Ward had no time for the Hermetic tradition in its Rosicrucian form and ridiculed Dee and Fludd. Frances Yates' Rosicrucian Enlightenment (p.187) takes the view that this work indicates some kind of change of tack in the core group which was to become the Royal Society, veering away from the magic which Wilkins had been happy enough in 1648 to attach to the word mathematics. I doubt this. Ward's work is clearly titled to be a vindication of the academic establishment; Webster's book was an attack on the universities' core curriculum. Furthermore, there may have been some smarting from Vaughan's tirade against “fond school-men”. The last thing Oxford needed was a witch-trial drummed up because some felt threatened by science.
The men who were to make up the eventual 114 founder members of the Royal Society were men of very different outlooks, as one might expect. Furthermore, the Royal Society was not at its inception a purely academic institution or university society. It included men from different backgrounds who doubtless held contrary opinions on many matters. Nevertheless one can see why spiritual magic might not be placed at the centre of the Royal Society's interests. The subject was contentious, by its nature a private pursuit, from which knowledge of natural science might come but, as with the Fama's conception of gold deriving from spiritual alchemy as a parergon, such knowledge would be a by-product of the spiritual opus.
The aim of the Royal Society was to present in good conscience a universality of natural knowledge, that on which all men could agree. Spiritual experience, whether magical or otherwise, goes beyond reason. The men of the Society would obviously differ in their ability to grasp the rational but they were not setting up reason as a god, only as a yardstick.
The real conflict twixt reason and spirituality, (the so-called ‘Enlightenment’), while still to come, may still in small part be attributed to the Royal Society's meetings eschewing contentious questions of religion and the spirit. Such a division went against the pansophy favoured by members of the old guard such as Comenius, falling perhaps into too cosy a harmony with that Cartesian dualism which sundered the worlds of mind and matter. We can now see, for example, Newton's mathematical vision as a parergon of his mystical insight, demonstrated in his extensive devotion to alchemy.
The case of Vaughan's 1652 publication of the Fame and Confession of the Fraternitie of the Rosie Cross is a case in point where the varied private and public interests of the first Royal Society fellows are concerned. According to F.N Price's preface to a facsimile reprint of this publication80, Thomas Vaughan was to some degree patronised by Robert Moray (c.1600-1675), a devoted seeker after the Philosopher's Stone. Then as now, devotees of the alchemical art were usually well aware of each other's existence. Connection between them might also explain how it came to be that the version of the Fama employed by Vaughan was identical to that formerly in the possession of the Scots Hermetist and fervent alchemist Sir David Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres (1585-1641)81. In about 1647 Moray married Sophia, Lindsay's daughter, and it may have been through this connection that Moray obtained a copy of the Fama suitable for Thomas Vaughan's purposes.
The 1650s saw a flurry of Hermetic works published in English and there is circumstantial evidence of co-ordination. In the same year Vaughan published the Fame and Confession, Elias Ashmole published his great collection of English alchemical manuscripts, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum as part of his search for the Philosopher's Stone. (Ashmole called himself Mercuriophilus Anglicus, the English lover of mercury.)
Ashmole was also a Free Mason, joined fraternally to Robert Moray and a founder-member of the Royal Society. The Theatrum Chemicum also contained a positive vindication of Count Michael Maier, an account of the esteem in which English alchemy was held by Maier, and a report of the tradition that Maier had been treated in a manner not befitting his station when he was in England. Ashmole clearly saw Maier as a very significant envoy. Was Bacon also thinking of such as Maier when he wrote of the “Merchants of Light” who travel unnoticed in the world? Not many people would have known of this or cared much about it - other than men like Robert Fludd, a man who showed himself on many occasions to be willing to stand out from the crowd and come to the defence of those attacked for Rosicrucian, mystical or Paracelsian interests.
Between 1621 and 1633 Fludd published work after work defending Rosicrucian, micro-macrocosmic and Paracelsian philosophy against the criticisms of the astronomer Kepler, Libavius, Patrick Scot and, most especially, the Jesuit proto-mechanistic philosopher and protector of René Descartes, Marin Mersenne. This debate held the attention of all the thinking part of Europe. Mersenne regarded Fludd's ideas as the height of philosophical and theological impiety and summarised some of them thus, in his Lettres, (II.p.441):
Compounded from God and this ethereal Spirit is the Anima Mundi. [soul of the world, or, sometimes, Logos]. The purest part of this Soul is the Angelic nature and the Empyrean heaven, which is understood to be mixed into all things. The Demons are part of the same essence, but joined to evil material. All souls, whether of men or of brutes, are none other than particles of this same Soul. This Soul is also the Angel Michael or Misattron. What is more, the same Soul is the true Messiah, Saviour, Christ, corner-stone and universal rock, on which the Church and all salvation are founded.
Fludd's interest in the symbolism of the rock or stone is also evident in his pseudonymously published Summum Bonum (1629), another (late) defence of the Rosicrucians. Fludd says that the House of the Holy Spirit referred to in the Fama, (which will always remain invisible to the unworthy) is in fact a spiritual dwelling resting upon the rock that is Christ. He quotes S. Paul in support of his contention:
Your habitation was not made by the lords of men, but we have a spiritual building in the heavens, which is the House of Wisdom on the Mount of Reason, built upon the spiritual rock.
This view is directly paralleled in Thomas Vaughan's own Lumen de Lumine (Light from Light, 1651) where Vaughan writes as if he is himself a Rosicrucian brother. Vaughan clearly feels a spiritual identification with its dwelling-place, writing of a mountain “situated in the midst of the earth or centre of the world that is both small and great. It is soft, also above measure hard and strong. It is far off and near at hand, but by providence of God invisible. In it are hidden the most ample treasures, which the world is not able to value.” Vaughan has been, it seems, ‘hit by the Stone’. His works, which successfully introduced the general public to Rosicrucianism, produced a significant wave of supportive material which continued to appear for about a decade adding a (perhaps useful?) mystique to the efforts to establish an ordered scientific community.
For example, in 1656 an anonymous translation of Michael Maier's Themis Aurea (1618) appeared, giving the rules of the Rosicrucian Fraternity. Probably published by Nathaniel and Thomas Hodges, men with strong astrological interests, it was significantly dedicated to Elias Ashmole, “the onely Philosopher in the present age” - clear evidence of an attempt to get the socially rising Ashmole on the side of the independents. Indeed in the 1650s we see the spiritual alchemists fighting back, attempting to win the thinking part of England over and Robert Moray, behind the scenes, in encouraging Vaughan, is plainly sympathetic - and there can be little doubt that that sympathy would also extend to Comenius' pansophic enterprise as well. However, the main catalyst for all these efforts was the Fama itself - surely “the greatest publicity stunt of all time.”
The struggle was well worth the effort for what was at stake involved nothing less than the question of what would constitute the theoretical and practical basis of reformed learning in England. That struggle was in my opinion chiefly a struggle between British ideological freelancers and the English academic establishment caused, in the 1650s, by the Church of England's having temporarily lost its grip on ideological power. There was an endemic crisis of authority which was not resolved until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (and then only partially).
Robert Moray, in his efforts to help the exiled King Charles, did the scientific movement an inestimable service in at last achieving a clear authority and stamp of approval for the development of learning and investigation of science in this country. Before this could take place however, the enemies of the Hermetic interpretation of reality were to cast a missile straight to the centre of the debate.
In 1659 Meric Casaubon published extracts from John Dee's Spiritual Diaries, (A True and Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and some Spirits.). The presentation was anything but sympathetic. Casaubon wished to leave his readers in no doubt that the great mathematician was a conjuror of devils, a Faustian figure who had given up his sanity to serve the servitors of darkness. On the frontispiece Dee is associated with what the editor considers to be other dangerous ‘illuminati’ - a telling expression tainting the entire Renaissance magical tradition by association. In his editorial stocks Casaubon places Paracelsus, Mahomet, Trithemius, Appolonius of Tyana, Edward Kelley, and of course John Dee himself. Throughout the editing and footnotes Casaubon especially stresses a supposed kinship between devilry and “Enthusiasm”, dangerous to public order and spiritual health. These men, he holds, are nothing short of subversive, and their learning is a cloak for Satanism.
In 1659, with Tumbledown Dick (Richard Cromwell) struggling to maintain control, ‘enthusiasm’ could only mean one thing: religious anarchy of the type which had appeared most alarmingly (to some) in the Civil War period: the Levellers, Anabaptists, holders of Conventicles, Ranters, Prophets, Quakers. Casaubon is saying, ‘tolerate this, and you'll know what to expect: demonic possession, witchcraft, apocalyptic subversion’. But who is being attacked? Casaubon's motives may be mixed - and it is still a mystery how he got hold of the diaries in the first place - had they been doing the rounds? It is well known that Elias Ashmole for one was a keen collector of anything to do with Dee82. Is Casaubon's book a covert attack on Ashmole? Ashmole's activities and magian reputation were well known. How many knew of his Free Masonry and his connection with several of the founders-to-be of the Royal Society? The government had tried to ban the book - Dee had been a government agent for Elizabeth I - but it had already reached the public. Its publication further damaged Dee's reputation, except among the discerning few, and put the whiff of conspiracy forever around the concept of the illuminati.
Frances Yates believed that this publication may have sealed the determination of the Royal Society to confine its meetings to purely scientific problems, to avoid mention of religion or social utopias and to adopt that sobriety which in its dryness is the unmistakable mark of much of British academe. I am not convinced. The beginnings of the Royal Society were in fact a somewhat ramshackle affair. Like all new things it took time to find its feet, and most work as was done was done by individual fellows in private. Furthermore the discussions and interests of the scientists of this period were frequently regarded as absurd by the popular Press, impious by the Church, and of little interest to the classically and theologically dominated universities. It seems to this author that the attack of Casaubon was, again, an attack on the overall direction of learning. It was genuinely feared by some that Dr Dee's brand of private interests might subvert the public welfare or even give the magi not only the magical, but the political power to effect changes in the natural (read divine) order of things. Hermetists tend to consider the highest knowledge to be the privilege of initiation. The sober meetings of the first Royal Society would have allayed such fears; people enjoyed mechanical gadgets.
It is remarkable that the question of spiritual orientation was put before the Royal Society as early as 1668 by one of the very men without whom the Society may never have existed. That now very old man Comenius appears once more on the horizon, grey, wizened, sharp as a knife. Like the Ancient Mariner he was there, and he was watching. Very well informed, he knew exactly what was going on. He had seen all the tricks long, long before, when the Fama was young, and he was too. In 1668, he published The Way of Light in Amsterdam and wrote a dedicatory epistle to the “illuminati” of the Royal Society:
Illustrious Sirs, It is not unfitting that a book entitled The Way of Light should be sent to you, illustrious men whose labours in bringing the Light of Natural Philosophy from the deeper wells of Truth is coming to be proclaimed and published throughout Europe. It is the more appropriate since the work was conceived in that country where the territory offered to us for the search for Light and Truth has passed into your keeping, according to that word of Christ, (applicable in its proper sense to this occasion): Others have laboured and you have joined them in their labours.
Comenius continues:
Throughout the world the news will be trumpeted that you are engaged in labours the purpose of which is to secure that human knowledge, and the empire of the human mind over matter, shall not forever continue to be a feeble and uncertain thing.
And then came the warning. Should knowledge for its own sake be pursued, or for power over nature only without thought as to the ends of that knowledge (the Way of Light) then that house of knowledge would surely turn out to be “a Babylon turned upside down, building not towards Heaven, but towards Earth.”
Alas!