John Channing Briggs
The Wisdom of the Ancients, published in 1609, gives us Francis Bacon’s commentary on 31 mythological figures, whose separate stories he interprets in the light of what he famously called the new learning (Bacon 1968). In framing his intriguing, eccentric collection of ancient myths, he presents himself as an explorer of the oldest forms of learning for the sake of the newest. He goes further, presenting his findings as intimations of the new learning within the old. He offered his readers a glimpse not only of ancient precursors of modern scientific discoveries, but of the dawn – fragmentary, perhaps largely subconscious, yet strangely prescient – of a new, scientific understanding of the world deep in the wisdom of the past, beneath the common understanding of what wisdom is or can be. For him the ancient stories yielded aspects of that wisdom, and in so doing pointed toward the hidden laws of the forms. The discovery of such laws, if their cryptic traces were recognized, would enlarge and renew mankind’s estate by offering the means of mastering mutability and extending life.
The popularity of the work’s many editions testifies to its early readers’ interest in the discovery of modern truths in ancient myths. Consistent with his role as a founder of the Virginia Company, Bacon’s mythography set out and hinted at the discovery of another world of new learning that confirmed the wisdom of the myths, intimated their connection with the world‐changing methods and principles of the new sciences, and manifested ways in which ambitious innovation might go wrong.
How was it possible for the ancient myths to carry such secrets? Bacon’s claim seems to run counter to much of his other work, and certainly against his stereotypical reputation as the herald of a new learning overcoming the idolatries of the old. But in another sense, the treatise is typical of his entire project. It is not enough to read The Wisdom of the Ancients as though it were the confirmation of a few modern principles of the new sciences (e.g., the generation of flame by friction in the story of Prometheus). Bacon’s work pushes deeper, offering glimpses of his scientific philosophy.
Bacon argued throughout his chapters that a foundational wisdom was adumbrated in the myths, a wisdom the ancients may have glimpsed but did not compass. The term is freighted with ancient and modern meaning, most of it drawn from the Wisdom Literature attributed to Solomon, whom Bacon considered to be the ancient world’s philosopher‐king of the new learning. A true reading of the wisdom of the myths demands a heretofore undiscovered method of interpretation: a decoding and sifting, and a means of understanding that is driven not by a conventional explorer’s desire but by the systematic suppression and sacrifice of preceding expectations. Wisdom is an abjuration of hope that somehow retains a vision of an unprecedented, scientific power of mastering nature.
The ancient poets took a very different set of paths when they entered the forest of ancient myth. First, we are impressed by their haunting tales of the ennobling and baleful power of love. In the myth‐ordering axletree that is the Trojan War, warriors and cities die for the sake of possessing Helen (and Helen’s possession of her captors’ spirits, either in love or by resistance). In loving war and warring love, Greeks and Trojans struggle with the very landscape, momentarily reconciling in magnanimity and mercy before their doom comes. Second, we see the great poets move toward forms of order. While the Golden Age gives way to silver, bronze, and iron, we read of the giants subdued, and Zeus or Jove taking precedence, somehow presiding over this world of flux. Aeneas emerges from the burning city with his household gods. Ovid’s Metamorphoses ends with anticipation of universal peace under Augustus.
Persisting through shipwreck and disaster after victory at Troy, Odysseus reestablishes the order of married love when he overcomes island enchantments and the suitors’ appetites in Ithaca. Aeneas, voyaging beyond his burning city, leads a remnant of the defeated Trojans to found a new Trojan dynasty in Rome. Ovidian transformations move toward an apotheosis of worldly authority. Love ruins and rebuilds; however imperfectly, order comes. The dynastic struggles among the gods, from chaos to Saturn to Jove, lead to a flawed yet more stable age.
Bacon does not ignore these large themes in the many lines of narrative that make up classical mythology. Yet it is important to notice how strange his selections are, and how odd his interpretations can be. Rather than imitating Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, or Ovid – those master interpreter‐creators who summoned and sculpted their materials with a new intensity and ordering genius – Bacon works with subtlety upon radically dispersed fragments, on pieces of narrative that rarely make their way into the old unifying texts. A reading of Bacon that looks for a confirmation of later scientific breakthroughs misses the point. Bacon intimates a deeper, coded order in the fragments. By definition, their strangeness and remoteness from anticipations of coherence makes them apt sources of the new knowledge, its method and principles.
One can approach the reading of The Wisdom of the Ancients as an inquiry into laws of the forms, a quest that depends upon arduous inductive experience and wise cryptography. The experience of reading the work, like experimental experience appropriate to the new sciences, calls for a kind of humiliation as well as a special knowledge of codes. Ostentation and self‐indulgent imagination are vain anticipations of success, leftovers from the pseudo‐scientific efflorescence of the old learning (e.g., alchemy). What is needed is a methodological austerity heretofore unknown, a method enforced by mechanical and artful aids, enlivened by an assurance Bacon says can be found wisely in the springs of scripture. Those great distracters, desire and aspiration (in a word, love) must for these purposes be abjured, or rigorously transformed. The old idea of order – a limit, and yet a cryptic source of new ideas of order in the new sciences – must be simultaneously renovated and replaced.
The reduction and renovation of love is so paradoxically prominent in Bacon’s project that it is, characteristically, the subject of the book’s briefest and central chapter (chapter 16 of 31). “Juno’s Suitor, or Dishonour” is the tale of Zeus’s self‐humiliation in pursuit of Juno’s love. Having assumed the shapes of many beasts and a shower of gold, the suitor‐god’s effort to win the fickle goddess requires his transformation into the shape of the abandoned cuckold he would least aspire to be: “a wretched cuckoo, drenched with rain and tempest, amazed, trembling, and half dead.” This metamorphosis becomes Bacon’s model for wise men of court in the most unpromising circumstances. They must seek to master this truth of the moral sciences, not by flattering a most intractable and (Bacon adds) “proud and malignant” beloved, but by an “outward show and character of abjectness and degeneracy” (6.728). (This theme is one of the principles of courtly behavior in chapter 8, “The Favourite” [6.717].) Bacon’s version of Zeus’s story condemns perverse rulers and their effects on honorable courtiers who are unable to persuade them without appearing as degenerate as their rulers are. But he is also setting the stage, as we see him doing throughout his sequence of commentaries, for an understanding of true inquiry into the deepest secrets of nature. In chapter 27, the extreme case is Oedipus. The great riddle‐solver succeeds in extracting the monstrous Sphinx’s secret only because he approaches arduously and haltingly. His history of pain and desire as the maimed son of Laius turns the cruelty of father and fate to his advantage (6.757).
Debasement does not ultimately demean the scientific inquirer if he persists unto success; it elevates him: “For he who understands his subject is master of his end; and every workman is king over his work” (VI. 757). The antitypes of Zeus and Oedipus are the inexperienced, hasty young men (Memnon of chapter 14, or Icarus in chapter 19) whose unalloyed ambition, early ripeness, and “ostentatious” art doom them to the whims of malevolent powers.
Although The Wisdom of the Ancients ostensibly moves from courtly advice to scientific principles, it actually mixes them throughout – in counsel about political behavior that has implications for scientific method, and for the application of natural to moral science. Of its first ten chapters, nine interpret myths primarily in the light of political and moral questions (concerning speech, rebellion, the king’s weapons of governance, vain self‐regard, treaties, war, flattery, fame, and rashness), frequently with implicit applications to the disposition and wisdom of the scientific mind. Amidst these brief chapters, there is the long chapter 6, on Pan (or Nature), which includes observations about conduct at court. The remainder of the collection turns more emphatically to the myth’s adumbrations of the new sciences, with titles like “Philosophy,” the “Origin of Things,” “Matter,” “The Atom,” and “The Mechanic.” The most prominent and by far the longest chapters of this second section mix courtly morality and science, usually in the context of love. Love is a central theme of eight chapters, while at least as many – sometimes the same ones – revolve around ideas about the order of the natural universe.
We find that these echoes of the great ancient mythic themes profoundly change – even as they reflect – what Bacon is analyzing. Love, which is rarely far away from Bacon’s thoughts, turns into what is essentially a physical instinct. Order (at least in the lower world) becomes the manifestation of fundamental and masterable laws of nature. We learn that the way to attain such wisdom is at least as important as wisdom itself. There must be wise humiliation for the sake of a wise mastery of the laws, that is, for the sake of restoring to humankind its ancient state of life beyond mortal flux and mutability, without making it a false cure worse than the disease.
What are the forms of abasement that go beyond mere humiliation and pain; those most conducive to the wise progress of the sciences? What are the greatest hazards to inquirers as they embark on that work? How do these relate, if at all, to the deeper order of the universe, as it might be formulated in what Bacon elsewhere calls Laws of the Forms? Does the Wisdom of the Ancients offer hints of what those laws are or might be? How precisely are they related to mastery over mutability?
Some answers to these questions can be found in Bacon’s treatments of love, which he tends to condemn in its traditional forms, or convert to a power of atoms. In the old stories, the treatment of love is often strange, sometimes horrifying, but in it one frequently recognizes aspects of the human experience of love. Jove’s amorous excesses in the old stories often have fearsome consequences (witness the end of Daphne or Arethusa), but they are also transformations of an anthropomorphic attraction. Jove is himself taken in by love.
In Bacon’s alembic the result is profoundly different. Love in The Wisdom of the Ancients swerves from human desire, losing human dimension. Zeus’s love makes Cassandra an object lesson, one who must live in a world indifferent to her prophecies. She must suffer justifiably as a self‐condemning exemplum of untimely – and hence, destructive – counsel. Likewise, love diminishes Narcissus not to fatal self‐absorption – a condition accessible to our moral discourse as well as our fascination – but to the scientific sin of “uselessness” (6.705). Endymion becomes a toady rather than the suffering mortal consort of the moon (one of Keats’s favorite mythological subjects). Pentheus and Acteon are object lessons for the need for secrecy at court and the avoidance of “rash audacity,” as though their agony of entrapment in the nets of eros meant nothing (6.719–20). Orpheus loses his wife to his culpable anxiety for her safety. Pan, or Nature, is punished by Cupid for attempting to rival him, and so – almost unique among the myths’ anthropomorphic beings – experiences few amours and has almost no issue. His marriage is to the almost sex‐less Echo, in Bacon’s terms a type of the best discourse of nature: one that faithfully mirrors its subject. Cupid is busy elsewhere (6.713–14).
Dionysus, whom Bacon calls Desire, is not much more prosperous. Dionysian desire is almost indistinguishable from perversion and disgust: “[E]very passion flourishes and acquires vigour by being resisted and forbidden” (6. 741). Like the passion of anger, love “goes on and on with infinite insatiable appetite” (6.743). Its saving quality, to the extent it has one, is the fact that “even the most noxious” desires arise from “the appetite and aspiration for apparent good,” while “the conception [beginning] of it is always in some unlawful wish” (6.741). Love’s desire for the Good is for seeming good. Unless reason rules over it, it tends to perish in its fruition. It is a warning to the distractible sons of science far more than a cause for lament. And in his way of telling the story Bacon is indeed judging love as much as he is forecasting the usefulness of the new objectivity to the new sciences. Once love triumphs over reason, it is “cruel, savage, and pitiless towards everything that stands in its way” (6.742).
There is an instructive exception to this pattern with regard to religion, in the story of Diomedes (on “Religious Zeal”), about the Greek warrior who wounds Venus during the Trojan War and is later killed by his host in order to lift a curse. In his general argument, Bacon turns the tale into advice to overzealous rulers who imitate Diomedes by doing violence to non‐conforming sects (in Bacon’s time most likely Christians who were thought beyond the pale). But Diomedes’ action is condemnable here not because he injures a type of love, but because he acts in passion, without sufficient “force of reason and doctrine and by sanctity of life and by weight of examples and authorities to correct and confute” (6.732).
Bacon identifies the transgression with the violation only of a certain kind of love. The rash reformer, like Pallas‐goaded Diomedes, indeed wounds a form of love when he visits violence upon dissenters. He blocks pity, which men must have for their fellows. Venus’s sect, insofar as it promotes pagan indulgence, might indeed be heretical (“vain and slight” [6.732]), but unthinking violence against it is eschewed because it destroys what Bacon’s Latin original calls misericordia (6.658): tender‐heartedness, compassion, pity. “[A]lmost every kind of violence is in the end unprosperous,” and religious violence is particularly damaging because it sets friend against friend until pity itself is disdained (6.733):
[A]lmost every crime is open to pity, insomuch that they who hate the offense may yet in humanity commiserate the person and the calamity of the offender, – and it is the extremity of evil to have the offices of compassion interdicted – yet where religion and piety are in question, the very expression of pity is noted and disliked.
Yet when the commentary is taken as a whole, Diomedes’ wounding of Venus is also a wounding of the mythological legacy of love. The world of myth surrounding Venus drops away. Ungoverned zeal is fundamentally abhorrent because it is an unpractical loss of reason that wounds kindness.
In the work overall, Bacon’s commentaries dwell upon the new scientific frame of mind. He endorses the non‐violent persuasion of nature, but not out of pity or desire. He says that inquirers should “woo” her “with due observance” in order to learn her secrets (6.736). In a set of passages that echo elsewhere in Bacon’s works, he humanizes matter in the person of Proteus, and goes so far as to make the search for natural knowledge an interrogation. He takes pains to explain how Proteus will reveal his secrets under a form of torture:
[I]f any skillful Servant of Nature shall bring force to bear on matter, and shall vex it and drive it to extremities as if with the purpose of reducing it to nothing, then will matter (since annihilation or true destruction is not possible except by the omnipotence of God) finding itself in these straits, turn and transform itself into strange shapes, passing from one change to another till it has gone through the whole circle and finished the period; when, if the force be continued, it returns at last to itself. And this constraint and binding will be more easily and expeditiously effected, if matter be laid hold on and secured by the hands; that is, by its extremities (7.726).
Torture is the means to get Proteus to talk – to reveal the past, present, and future.
Bacon’s swerve from ancient eros regarding method and matter is accompanied by his ambivalent treatment of Christianity. As we see in his discussion of Prometheus, the new sciences repeatedly approach topics of great moment to Christianity while avoiding their explicit development:
It is true that that there are not a few things [in the myth of Prometheus] beneath which have a wonderful correspondency with the mysteries of the Christian faith. […] But I purposely refrain myself from all licence of speculation in this kind, lest peradventure I bring strange fire to the altar of the Lord (6.753).
Bacon’s philosophy of matter and motion in The Wisdom changes mythological history to harmonize with Christianity, but only sparingly, and for the purposes of the new sciences. Thus he recasts the mythological history of the world’s progression from age to age for the purpose of accounting scientifically for motion and change, and then harmonizes that understanding with biblical authority. Ostensibly, he presents Democritus’ idea of the eternity of matter and the Bible’s rendering of the Creator’s all‐creating power as though they were one. But the argument proceeds in two directions at once, citing questionable biblical authority for the atomistic view that matter is eternal (6.723), while using the history of the ages to make a place for Venus’s power of motion (that is, her power as the motion of the atom). Although the second part of the account has no connection to Genesis, Bacon makes a point of saying it does not question the biblical Creator’s ultimate power (6.725). Is it true, then, that matter is indeed eternal in the face of that power?
Bacon’s use of classical mythology both assists and complicates his effort to thread his way through this labyrinth. His summary of the transition from a time of chaos – identified with Coelum (probably the Roman god Coelus, or Uranus, the father of Saturn) – to a universe loosely governed by changeable Saturn, and then to the one under Jove’s greater power, is shown to be a progression toward greater order. Jove presides over motion and change, and so holds it (as far as he is able) in check. Venus or “concord” is born (here Bacon does not cite the unsettling mythological fact that she arises from the deposed Saturn’s severed testicles). The new version of love is motion that complements order. Venus produces radical change on the atomic level but does not disturb the larger order of things – the eternity of matter under Jove, and the biblical God’s power over all. The goddess ensures that “change proceeds part by part only, the total fabric remaining entire and undisturbed” (6.724).
We see that the motions of Venus and Cupid (called the atom in a later chapter) are therefore governed by a new kind of love adapted to the new sciences. This love can somehow change everything about atoms’ relation to one another yet nothing about matter itself. It is as though Ovid’s passion‐driven metamorphoses were concentrated in the story of Proteus – the shape‐shifter Bacon identifies with matter, who manifests all possible forms until his essential nature is revealed. In fact the contrast is more drastic. The old myths’ metamorphoses of gods and men were of course most commonly from one type of being to another: from mortal flesh to tree, animal, or living star. There were monsters but they too were living beings, not assemblages. The agents of metamorphosis, when we knew what they were, were gods. The atomistic world permits and requires Bacon’s wise man of science to be ready to annihilate his subject for the sake of discovering its true substance and form, and hence to be able to create new entities at will (6.726). Without injuring eternal matter, the inquisitor can then know “the conditions, affections, and processes of matter” (6.726), without knowing them as beings with their own forms.
The love traditionally embodied by Venus and Cupid is thereby mostly emptied, in Bacon’s analysis, of recognizable human desire. There are “affections,” but they are impulses far more than desires. The mysterious Cupid, the atom, is an “impulse of desire impressed by God upon the primary particles of matter which makes them come together” by “repetition” and “multiplication.” The god’s mechanical instinct is sealed by the Creator, joining other atoms by seemingly arbitrary means. With or without parents (Bacon cannot tell) he is “the most ancient of the gods,” quite possibly the agent who “out of Chaos begot all things, the gods included” (7.729). But what there is of love in his motions is beyond human ken: “a thing which mortal thought may glance at, but can hardly take in.” He is not the ancient “blind and babbling” god of erotic yearning – as the Peripatetics thought – the god who seeks what his erotic thirst lacks in beauty or virtue. Rather, this mysterious Cupid possesses “a single desire or primary motion simply and absolutely” (6.730). Democritus saw this, Bacon argues, but wrongly believed that motion was directed toward the center of the world. The desire of Bacon’s Cupid’s is toward other atoms near it. Separated from the vagaries of erotic aspirations, Cupid’s motion is eminently available, once its paradoxical motions can be grasped, to scientific manipulation.
Bacon asserts that the direction of Cupid’s motion is undecipherable. He means by this that upon closer examination, the motion – if not the motive – can be detected and used by those who are wise, who see in its appearance of “very little providence” the power and direction (if not the intention) of true Providence (7.731). The seeming randomness of providential motion is paradoxically the key to its order. Bacon’s Venus somehow preserves concord in the universe by joining one atom to the next, and “Cupid has an allegorical meaning full of wisdom.” With Venus, Cupid “contrives out of subjects peculiarly empty and destitute of providence, and as it were blind, to educe by a fatal and necessary law all the order and beauty of the universe” (6.731). Man cannot know God’s providential purposes, but the wise man can know the work of God’s will in such providential patterns of motion and order that enable him to crack the providential code at work in the lower Jovian world.
The goal of the endeavor is to secure for the sons of science a power over change, and hence power over mortality. Jupiter’s realm, in which men live, is haunted by flux and mutability. It might eventually confirm Lucretius’ fear that it too will lapse into disorder (1872, 6.724). But the promise of a self‐restoring order, thanks in part to the new sciences, is now apparent. The new learning has come into the world to do what the old natural philosophy, bodied forth in the myth of Orpheus, aspired but failed to do: “nothing less than the restitution and renovation of things corruptible,” or, in the lower world, “the retardation of dissolution and putrefaction” (1872, 6.721). According to the story of Prometheus, the old order has come down to us having lost the ancient promise of immortality, which the new learning might now recover. Like Orpheus, those wise inquirers who possessed it could then venture into the underworld and bring Persephone into the light to stay. Going beyond Orpheus, whose anxious love ruined his exploit, the new sciences hold the promise of pursuing that goal by transcending humankind’s long history of vacillation, vain hope, and perplexity over the mysteries of nature (6.720).
The project of overcoming mortality requires inquiry free from wayward imaginings and misleading ambitions for the sake of mastering Proteus. It is understandable, therefore, that Baconian science has long been identified with technology, as though science were an art of technological understanding and manipulation free of speculation. But that truth is seriously incomplete. While The Wisdom of the Ancients exhibits a fascination with technological discoveries and applications, it expresses strong reservations about such innovation for its own sake, even for pursuing the goal of achieving immortality. Daedalus is Bacon’s object lesson in this regard, and the story of Prometheus is the shadowing forth of technology’s salvation when the myth is rightly understood.
The new learning needs a form of piety and grace. A form of divine intervention is necessary because Bacon sees a great potential for evil in the dark history of one of the most prominent of ancient artificers, Daedalus, who worked for Minos, the tyrant whose perversities demanded the invention of ingenious types of machinery. Daedalus “the mechanic” is a master inventor, admirable in his skill. He is also a vile murderer, the furnisher of “remedies as well as instruments of evil” (6.734). He makes both the prized ornaments of religion and the “instruments of lust” and death, as well as the threaded clue to freedom and the labyrinth that requires that clue. His art is adaptable to all purposes and void of the power to determine what those purposes should be: “For the mechanical arts may be turned either way, and serve as well for the cure as for the hurt and have power for the most part to dissolve their own spell” (6.735). Only a more complex artificer, Prometheus, has the means to redeem the mechanical arts, and then only because his story – as told in Bacon’s longest chapter by far – depends upon divine intervention.
To get to this point Bacon brings into the well‐known story some esoteric shards. He has Prometheus make men and steal fire from the gods. Zeus punishes the thief for multiple offenses. But then Bacon makes much of a peripheral Promethean story about mankind’s rejection of the initial gift of fire and the benefactor. He finds high virtue in the relatively obscure account of Zeus giving mankind eternal youth in return for their willingness to indict Prometheus. And he features the relatively minor fact of mankind’s losing that gift after conveying it on the back of an ass. These details are crucial to his critique and defense of world‐changing inventions. They emphasize the importance of not seizing such advantages for ambitious gain or spite. They must not be used without recognition that they are somehow gifts from beyond. Mankind is so deluded by desires for the fruits of inventions that the only means for at least wise men to rise above their self‐undoing idolatries (their “evil genius” [6.749]) is help from a higher source.
In this story the help comes from the intervention of Hercules, who slays the eagle tormenting the bound Prometheus. But we miss Bacon’s point if we do not appreciate the importance he attaches to another obscure branch of the story. Hercules seems to come out of nowhere, born by an exceedingly frail craft (a god‐given teacup, says Bacon, picking up on a line we find in Apollodorus) to reach Mount Caucasus and kill the ravening bird. In this turn of events Bacon finds a key to the kingdom of the new sciences. Hercules has succeeded in using what the Wisdom of the Ancients elsewhere calls the “abstruse and out of the way” methods that are most characteristic of the new learning. In his resolute paddling of his exceedingly delicate, radically humbling, god‐given vessel, he shows indispensable “fortitude and constancy of mind,” thereby restoring the promise of eternal youth.
Bacon sees no blasphemous contradiction in the fulfillment of this revised Promethean ambition because – as he hints by using a quote from Seneca – God has given mankind the natural world for the wise to search out its mysteries (6.752). With the right kind of humility and vision, and with resolutely patient reading and experimentation, one can begin to see order in the flux. Wisdom can be found in nature as it is in Solomon’s Proverbs: not only as taking satisfaction in mastery of conventional moral sayings, but as an ordeal of gnomic fragments that humbles the ambitious or fanciful interpreter until he can pursue a new kind of learning.
In the mythography Bacon assembles upon these principles, we see the opening of a chasm between the “vulgar” and the “wise,” one that has important consequences for the birth of new sciences and the applications of their metamorphic powers to both the human and natural worlds. In his own way, Bacon has taken on the role of a myth‐mastering Homer or Aeschylus after all – though in a manner that radically separates his audience into two groups: casual readers (whom he tends to call the vulgar), and the wise or potentially wise (the sons of science) who might see beneath the work’s mutable surface, connect its significant shards, and begin the work of transforming the mutable world. With the separation of audiences comes, as we have seen, a tendency for the sciences of nature to trump traditional imaginings and understandings of humankind. When we go back to the biblical text, however, Solomon’s verses lead in a different direction:
[Wisdom] crieth upon the highest places of the city,
Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him,
Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.
Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.
(Proverbs 9.3–6, KJV)
Should it matter that Bacon makes a more systematic division than Solomon’s? Solomon sees fools and wise men too. Natural science’s predominance over the traditional arts and disciplines is the proverbial wisdom of modernity, as is at least the putative dominance of scientific elites. Why worry in the end about the human things if the natural world can be mastered for humanity’s good? Writing out of the past, Bacon sounds a warning in response to such modern questions, even as he promotes his new dispensation. When the dangers of Promethean overreaching so thoroughly mingle with the promise of eternal youth, must we conclude that the path of the new sciences is obviously superior to that of the Ancients? These are questions that Bacon’s The Wisdom of the Ancients treats with notable caution and respect, and they remain before us in the modern age.
For a suggestive treatment of these topics in the context of hermetic speculation and practice, see the suggestive and wide‐ranging treatments by Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1968) and the work of Frances Yates, particularly Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964). Charles Lemmi’s The Classic Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (1969) provides a useful if elementary introduction to Bacon’s appropriation of mythological material. Specialized discussions can be found in Barbara Carman Garner’s “Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes and the Mythological Tradition” (1970) and Silvia Alejandra Manzo’s “Holy Writ, Mythology, and the Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Principle of the Constancy of Matter” (1999), and Rhodri Lewis’s “Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth” (2010). In Francis Bacon: from Magic to Science (1968), Paolo Rossi makes a science‐oriented reading of Bacon’s use of mythology that contrasts with my approach. A particularly interesting attempt to rehabilitate Bacon’s Proteus as a paradigm for the work of enlightened modern science can be found in Peter Pesic’s “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature” (1999). The best introduction to Bacon’s work overall is Brian Vickers’s Francis Bacon (1978). My own book, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (1989), connects Bacon’s use of mythology to his larger project for mastering the world of appearances.