The Magus of Freemasonry

In March 1604 the astronomer Kepler observed new stars in the constellations of Serpentarius and Cygnus. In the days when astronomy and astrology were inextricably linked, Kepler, like many a Continental astro-prophet, saw this epiphany of stellar magic as an intelligible sign from the Architect of the Universe.

Kepler himself predicted the onset of great political changes and the possible appearance of a new religious sect. Other men predicted nothing less than the inauguration of a New Age, even a golden age. It was, after all, widely believed that such an age would precede the final rolling up of the scroll of time and space. A final outpouring of divine and natural knowledge would be set before the intellectually hungry and the spiritually inquisitive. Men’s minds were moved to contemplate the end of the world—and the beginning of a new one.

As the leading minds of Europe pondered the significance of the stars, a letter was dispatched to Lichfield, Staffordshire, by senior courtiers of Queen Elizabeth I, now fast approaching her final year on earth.

The surviving superscription to the letter reads thus: “This letter was delivered to Mr Bayliffe Ashmole by John Swynfen, gent., att Tamworthe on Saturday the xiiii daye of October.”¹

Mr. Ashmole, Lichfield’s mayor, was unlikely to have been pleased with the letter’s contents. Senior members of the Queen’s court saw fit to petition the Corporation of Lichfield to surrender the lease to the ancient City’s Lordship and Manor to the thirteen-year-old son of the late Earl of Essex. The late Earl, once the Queen’s amorous and ambitious favorite, had pushed his suit too far, rebelled against her, and, in the end, lost his head completely.

In happier days, seven years before his appointment with the executioner’s ax, the Earl of Essex had received a gift from the Queen.

In 1548, Bishop Sampson of Lichfield had conveyed the manorial rights of Lichfield to the new City and Corporation; the lease, however, went to the Crown. In 1597, Queen Elizabeth granted this lease to Essex and his son for the duration of their lives. The lease entitled them to rents and services. Those rents and dues had been falling into the coffers of the Corporation. Bailiff Ashmole had no choice but to surrender the lease to provide income for the earl’s son.

This assignation of cash went against the grain; Lichfield had struggled long and hard for its partial independence from ecclesiastical control. For over half a century, the City had enjoyed county status, with its own sheriff and a Corporation of two bailiffs and twenty-four proud brethren. The Queen’s will, however, was the source of all liberties, and there was no brooking it.

By a strange weave of circumstance, the lives of the late Earl of Essex and his son would come to have peculiar reverberations on the lives of the Ashmoles of Women’s Cheaping, the little street beneath the tower of St. Mary’s in the town’s center.

Thomas Ashmole, the City’s senior bailiff and mayor, had two sons. Thomas Ashmole the younger was encouraged to follow in his father’s civic-minded footsteps. That left his brother Simon (born in 1589) to find a life for himself, a difficulty encountered by many second sons. In fact, Simon Ashmole had something in common with the late Earl of Essex, excepting of course the privilege of nobility that granted the earl the blade rather than the noose at his last breath.

The Ashmoles were of yeoman stock, the backbone of England. Nevertheless, like the earl, Simon was given to intemperate passions, sustained a profligate attitude to money, was foolishly optimistic (when not deeply depressed), and succumbed to the lure of overseas military campaigns in vain quests for personal advantage. Simon seems to have been one of those fatalistic men who always want to begin again but who never finish what they have started. He served under Essex’s command in the latter’s ill-fated expeditions to Ireland and the Low Countries.

Military campaigns of the ill-fated kind begin with promises and end in excuses. Essex’s military failures cast an immovable wedge between himself and the Queen he had claimed to adore.

In his twenty-eighth year, the twelfth year of the reign of Elizabeth’s successor James Stuart, Simon Ashmole fathered a son. His wife, Ann Ashmole (née Bowyer), would not experience motherhood again. May 23, 1617, would be a special day in her personal calendar of memories.

The baby’s christening took place at the church of St. Mary the Virgin, a few steps across Women’s Cheaping from the Ashmole family home. At the christening, something remarkable occurred. When the rector inquired as to what was to be the boy’s name, the baby’s godfather, Thomas Ottey (sacrist of the cathedral), received an instantaneous revelation. “Elias!” Ottey declared, would be the baby’s name. All present were taken aback. The boy was surely to be named after his father or grandfather; this was the long established custom for first sons.

Ashmole’s birthplace, Breadmarket Street, Lichfield, formerly Women’s Cheaping.

Plaque above Ashmole’s birthplace.

Rear of Ashmole’s birthplace.

There is something almost biblical about this account of Elias Ashmole’s first appearance on the great stage of the world. The name of the child upstaged the local family tradition; his identity-to-be came from “on high.” That the name issued from the lips of a clergyman surely added weight to the unexpected cry. No one demurred. Elias would be the boy’s Christian name.

One wonders whether Elias’s father was present at the baptism. Was this a little silent triumph for the long-suffering mother? At least now she would only have to cope with one Simon Ashmole. And who could say? Perhaps her little son might be a spiritual prize to render the pains worthwhile.

“Elias” was not simply another name that would smell as sweet. Elias, better known to the scripture-read of today as Elijah, held a fascination for the religious thinkers of Ashmole’s time. Elijah had been a star of apocalyptic narratives and prophecies for at least 1,600 years. Elias was the “expected” or coming one.

Prophecies circulated throughout Europe to the effect that “Elias Artista” would return to earth to inaugurate a pre-messianic age of natural revelation. New arts and sciences would achieve their perfection under the aegis of the one who had last departed the world in a fiery chariot. Returning in glory, he would initiate a fresh blazing of cosmic light. This new spiritual fire would inspire the faithful of earth before the final consummation of terrestrial history.

When Christ himself asked his disciples who people thought he really was, they answered: “Some say Elias” (Mark 8:28).

Such a weight of expectation is a great deal to place upon the tender, if broad, shoulders of a baby boy. Godfather Ottey’s utterance came as no less a surprise to him as it did to the baptismal assembly; Ashmole later described the phenomenon as “a more than ordinary impulse of the Spirit.” If Thomas Ottey was unaware as to why he should be the sponsor of the boy child’s new name, Elias himself would come to understand the import of his name very well. C. H. Josten writes of Elias Artista as “a great alchemist who would reform and renew the world by his art.”² Such knowledge, however, Ashmole kept to himself. From the very start, Elias Ashmole’s extraordinary life would grow about a mystery.

Ashmole’s correspondent Anthony Wood (1632–95), writing about the alumni of Oxford after Elias’s death, declared Ashmole to be “the greatest virtuoso and curioso that ever was known or read of in England before his time. Uxor Solis took up its habitation in his breast, and in his bosom the great God did abundantly store up the treasures of all sorts of wisdom and knowledge.”³ “Uxor Solis” refers to Luna, or Minerva: the goddess presiding over the arts and sciences. She, Wood declared, was within him.

Was Simon Ashmole, son of the forceful and outspoken pillar of Lichfield governance, a wife-beater, an abuser of those in his care? We cannot be sure. Elias Ashmole’s friend the astrologer William Lilly (1602–81) would leave to posterity an interesting account—all too brief—of Elias’s parents.

Simon Ashmole was “very melancholy,” a man “not of many words, or not much uxorious.” He was, according to Lilly, “of a strong temper, apt to be angry or malcontented, passionate and violent.” Lilly adds that Simon was “subject unto many misfortunes during his life.”⁴

Elias Ashmole’s own account of his father makes a telling complement to Lilly’s account (which itself must have been based on his friend’s recollections). His father, he admits, was “an honest faire conditioned man, and kind to others; yet through ill husbandry became a great enemy to himself and poor family.”⁵

Elias Ashmole’s birthplace, Breadmarket Street, Lichfield—remains of the seventeenth-century structure. The house was in Ashmole’s possession at that time. The panel hangs above a fireplace on the first floor, dated 1666.

The description suggests a troubled man with the body of a bruiser. A picture emerges of what we would now call a “damaged” child who had craved a father’s love and approval. But does it portray Elias or his father?

Simon Ashmole’s brother inherited the civic responsibilities that the successful Thomas Senior had garnered from the Corporation. The two Thomases held the office of bailiff “no less than seven times,” as Howard Clayton informs us in his book on Lichfield in the Civil War, Loyal and Ancient City. Clayton also provides a glimpse of the outspoken character of the Ashmole family, of yeoman stock but now established in the city as saddlers (only the well-off rode horses). The leather trade was important to the Lichfield economy; the Saddlers’ Company claimed to have been founded in the reign of Edward I.

By the time Elias was six, his grandfather Thomas Ashmole had been sheriff, junior bailiff, and twice senior bailiff (mayor). He was what one might today call a “Big Noise” in the little city. He was also a member of the Company of Corvisors (shoemakers) of Lichfield, and their surviving records reveal how on May 8, 1626 (Elias was eight at the time), Thomas Ashmole was fined a shilling by John Warde, probably the company master, apparently for failure to attend meetings. Thomas did not take this forfeiture lying down. Rather, the record informs us, he “did abuse the said John Warde at the Hall done in the open street, and called him a Cobbling Clown.” For this outburst Ashmole was fined a further three shillings and four pence.

Whether the possessor of this fiery temperament was Elias’s grandfather or uncle is impossible to ascertain. It could probably have been either of them; one receives a vivid picture of a proud and independent-spirited family.

While the two Ashmoles were influential in local politics, it does not seem difficult to understand why Elias’s father spent so much time away with English armies. Presumably there was only so much room for fighting in Lichfield. Was Simon Ashmole seeking his own heroic scenario? Perhaps he was tired of boxing with his brother’s shadow. One cannot tell whether he joined the troops “to forget” or to be remembered with glory. A melancholic temperament such as his doubtless entertained both possibilities. One certainly senses the frustrated destiny of the unfulfilled life, the son who might have wondered what use he was to any but himself.

As the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote in 1929 when considering the life of Ashmole’s alchemical predecessor Paracelsus (1493–1541), “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment and especially upon children, than the life which its parents have not lived.”⁶

Views of the cellar, the attic, and a window in Ashmole’s birthplace.

It is to be suspected that Elias, painfully aware of his father’s deep-seated miseries, would come first to recognize the importance of a secure social setting for ambition, and second to fire up his own ambition to justify the unexplored potential hidden within the father’s melancholy. He may have been unconsciously driven to “put right” his father’s failure. Does not the Son usually have to justify the doubted Father?

Ashmole was aware that his father was “kind to others” but immediately states that “ill husbandry” led him to be a great enemy not only to himself but also to his “poor family.” How many nights of tears lay behind this summary statement? A great enemy …

Add to this Lilly’s account of the “violent and passionate man” who made poor and probably hasty judgments, and it seems reasonable to assume that young Elias would have suffered eruptions from silence manifested perhaps in beatings and harsh and regrettable—if not regretted—words.

Ashmole, the sensitive, artistic child, born of a mother of noble ancestry, must have wondered about the depths of the human personality and the hidden springs of motivation. His interest in such matters was lifelong and was reflected in his love of astrology, his unique dream records (according to Jung, who studied them), and his many sociable virtues.

Elias Ashmole was also deeply concerned with transcendence and the path to the gate of transcendence that is knowledge. He took his forward drive from his family’s characteristics but prevented these strengths from becoming weaknesses by superimposing the balancing virtues of concentration, tolerance, discretion, good humor, and mindfulness.

From both parents came honesty and a directness that would serve him well. From the depths of himself, perhaps recovered through unspeakable, deep personal pain, came the light of gnosis, the desire for transcendence and the essence of mystical alchemy: the taking up of the dark matter and its transformation into light.

For all his faults, Simon Ashmole the bellicose, the sad adventurer, had married well. Ann Bowyer was, according to her son, a “discrete [sic], sober, provident woman [her husband being none of these], and with great patience endured many afflictions. Her parents had given her good breeding, and she was excellent at her needle; which (my father being improvident) stood her in good stead [Lichfield was home to dozens of tailors]. She was competently read in Divinity, History and Poetry, and was continually instilling into my Eares, such Religion and Moral Precepts as my younger yeares were capable of. Nor did she ever fail to correct my faults, alwaies adding sharp reproofs and good Lectures to boot.”⁷ Clearly, Ann Ashmole was determined that no one could later sigh, “Like father, like son.”

Ann’s married life must have been a continual struggle to offset the downward trajectory of her ill-destined husband. In this she was remarkably successful, instilling in her son the requirement of life that to get on in the world meant getting on with those who have made a profitable peace with the world, while at the same time keeping one’s own counsel, being discreet and plain to oneself. One can hardly doubt that Elias’s mother would have shielded the boy from his father’s worst outbursts, inevitably aggravated by financial hardship combined with darker, deeper undertones.

“She was,” said Elias after her death from plague in July 1646, “much esteemed by persons of Note with whom she was acquainted, she lived in much friendship among her Neighbours, and left a good name behind her. In fine, she was truly Religious and Virtuous.”⁸ Each line of this brief encomium is telling in some significant way of the tensions that manifest themselves in the dynamic thrust of Elias Ashmole’s life.

Elias would make it his business to get on with the world as he found it, but almost always on his own terms. It took him a long time to find out precisely what those “terms” consisted of, but one feels in his development contrary thrusts deep in his being.

When that fascinating man C. H. Josten wrote the established biography of Ashmole for the Oxford University Press in 1966, he sought to express Elias Ashmole’s greatness not in the terms of Ashmole’s contemporary reputation (great attainments of knowledge and intellect) but otherwise.

Interior of Ashmole’s birthplace. The panel dates from Ashmole’s lifetime and is on the second floor of the building.

For Josten, Ashmole’s greatness lay in the manner in which his life expressed, contained, and found strength from an essential inner duality: how he made himself lord and master of his own inner house. This was the sole authentic “heroic scenario” permissible to Josten’s academic contemporaries in a post-Freudian world: “The quiet pleasures of contemplation and of lonely study, which were at no time foreign to his nature, became gradually the more powerful motive of his conduct. Thus, while gaining the secure position and the eminence for which he had longed in his youth, he did not rise as high in the world as he might have done had he been less an Hermetic philosopher and more a man of the earthly plane.”⁹

Perhaps Ashmole had seen a little too much of the earthly plane in his childhood and youth. But Josten was fully aware of the power of Ash-mole’s ambition, even though that ambition had something mysteriously and distinctively unearthly about it. “The mystical urge,” writes Josten, “was never strong enough to make him entirely abandon the bustle of the world. Thus he vacillated between the ideals of magus, savant, and man of the world, and if the tension produced by the sustained coexistence in one person of seemingly incompatible qualities and desires is the secret of a powerful personality, then we hold here probably the key to Ashmole’s greatness among his contemporaries.”¹⁰

Maybe this is the key, not to his contemporaries’ appreciation of him, but to ours. Perhaps Ashmole’s life and character now represent a vital model for our own times. Within his story may be discerned a demonstration of how to reconcile the miserable facts of the lower life (for which we now have an almost impenetrable wall of evidence) with the spiritual aspiration of the awakened human mind—that is, an indication of how to reconcile our need for reality and our need for the transcendence of that reality. Ashmole’s life is in a sense a case of, and for, the alchemical, spiritual life.

But before Ashmole was a Hermetic philosopher dedicated to the raising of earth to heaven, he was already an antiquarian. In order to find the source of this urge we may look not only to his inner investigation of personal identity (inevitable given his father’s distance from him), but also to Lichfield itself and, again, to his beloved, stern, and thoroughly sensible mother. Ann Ashmole was what the downstairs staff of Edwardian fictions would call “a Real Lady.”

The Ann Bowyer, daughter of Anthony Bowyer, citizen, and draper of Coventry, who married Simon the saddler of Lichfield was a descendant of Richard the Forester, the Hunter, the Crooked Oak. According to the Domesday record of 1086, Ricardus Forestarius, vel Venator, vel Chenelware held Biddulph, Knypersley, and Biddulph Moor from the king. These estates were all to be found in the moorlands of Staffordshire, some thirty and more miles north of Lichfield. The wild moorlands bordering on Cheshire were home to the county’s most powerful lords.

The Forester’s son was Ormus (the Elm) le Guidon (the standard bearer), married to the daughter of the Norman sheriff of Stafford. Ormus was possibly a Templar knight. From the issue of his children—Robert, Edward, Thomasin, Alured, and Sir Thomas Bidulf—we can trace half a millennium of landed Staffordshire life. From their marriages were joined the genealogies of the de Audleys, the de Knypersleys, the de Verdons, the de Gresleys, the Mainwarings, the Bidulfs, the de Venables—and the Bowyers, who joined a line that stretched back to Ormus le Guidon’s son Alured de Knypersley.

Ann Ashmole had no reason to be reticent about her family history where her son was concerned. All about the growing boy hung the ethos of the ancient, the hallowed, and the mysterious. For the rest of his life Ashmole would collect genealogies. Streams of history, both above and underground, fascinated him. He liked to trace phenomena to their source. His instincts were preservative, comprehensive, and particular; detail mattered. He cared about things that went missing, things hidden, things that were losing their temporal grip on posterity; he drew with great skill many hundreds of pictures of English monuments and preserved dozens of inscriptions that would otherwise be lost to us. Thanks to the preservation motive he did so much to encourage, these works are themselves preserved at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Ashmole keenly felt the impact of history’s march—and mankind’s ignorance—that obliterated, or tried to obliterate, its inheritance. Has this country gained any more than Esau for bartering its soul for the “mess of pottage” that is short-term gain?

Perhaps it was the stories of ancient lineages told him by his clear-thinking mother that gave Elias the insight that we are all part of a tree, that “now” is no time at all: everything that is has already been. We are the passing faces of an unfolding; all is contained in the seed. Its working out is time itself: the effects of fate, chance, and providence. His motto was Ex Uno Omnia: from the One, All.

Ashmole would have borne an informed contempt for the “modern” or its twisted offspring, the “postmodern.” Rather, we are all part of a living tree whose roots feed us vital sap from the past. That a thing was past did not mean that it had ceased to be; rather, the present and the future were utterly contingent upon the life that flowed through all time. The folly of man was to forget the reality that all that has been, is. “It” is in our eyes, our ears, our homes, our dreams, our aspirations, our blood. The memory required jerking from time to time—that was a task for the antiquarian. Nothing is dead unless it has been killed.

Ashmole would come to look at the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1534–c. 1540), for example, in the worst possible light. What had been hailed in its day as the clearing away of old and bad—and sometimes very bad—habits, a vital modernization of the state’s relationship with religion, even the rationalization of care, was for Ashmole nothing less than “the Great Deluge.”

Ruins of Croxden Abbey, Staffordshire moorlands.

View of Staffordshire-Cheshire border looking northwest from the summit of Bosley Cloud.

He referred to an event as terrific, mythic, and epoch-blasting as the Great Flood itself, the wiping away of all but what was preserved in the Ark. So was not Noah the first antiquarian, both ante-and postdiluvian? And was not the Ark that floated above the waves of change and catastrophe a kind of museum? And was not Elias Ashmole to be a new helmsman entrusted with the history of all that was noble, true, real, and of good repute?

Taking on this task was not simply a matter of philosophical principle. The monasteries had preserved the knowledge of the nation. It is estimated that the Dissolution led to the destruction of 98 percent of the books and manuscripts of England. Hitler himself never managed such a conflagration of knowledge. Ashmole’s hero, the magus John Dee (1527–1608), had petitioned Queen Mary to establish a national library to preserve what was left; the request was ignored. A state of national burglary went hand in hand with the Reformation. Ashmole would distinguish himself as one who saved what he could.

How could Ashmole not look kindly upon the monasteries, with their deep, practical ties to the families of nobility and to the poor and humble, the hungry and haunted, whose brightest and benighted sons sought refuge there? Ashmole knew of the monasteries’ connections with British alchemy, cosmology, medicine, botany, philosophy, art, and architecture. The monasteries were a vital conduit to the past.

Three great monasteries had once dominated the Staffordshire moorlands: Croxden, Hilton, and Dieulacres, their chartularies witnessed and guaranteed by the de Verdons, the de Audleys, and the Mainwarings, respectively. They preserved records, monuments, and reputations; there was no great need for “antiquarians” so long as they stood and breathed.

Between the demise of one set of institutions (the monasteries) and the birth of others (such as the Royal Society), there was work for ideological freelancers. Ashmole was one of them—and he would play his part in establishing new institutions to link the past with the present, to reunite the Many to the One. Ashmole was trying to show the way back to the way forward.

Young Elias did not need to travel to the moorlands to find his soul’s mirror. All about him, in Lichfield, lay the keys to England’s extraordinary heritage.