The Magus of Freemasonry

We do not know whether it was concern for Ashmole’s state of mind that encouraged a member or members of his acquired family to point him in the direction of Free Masonry. Whatever the exact circumstances, the sight of the two returning soldiers, fresh from Warrington and united in fraternity, must have warmed the heart of old Peter Mainwaring at Smallwood. The first Civil War was over and many prayed for brotherhood to be restored among all Englishmen once more.

In spite of the fact that Ashmole’s natural state subsisted in a posture of warm, if wary, self-confidence, the task of finding a wife and rebuilding his fortune would nonetheless require all the faith, energy, and wit he could muster. Reinvigorated, it would appear, by his discreet experience of Free Masonry, Ashmole elected to return to London, regardless of the fact that he was a known royalist captain and, as such, an object of suspicion in the capital.

“About 12 o’clock my cousin Manwaring [Colonel Henry Mainwaring, Ashmole’s masonic Brother] lent me three l [pounds] and Manwaring gave his word for a horse for me.”¹ On October 15, Ashmole saddled up his new mare at Congleton and began his journey to London, his body wrapped in a striking red cloak he had had sent up from Worcester.

Ashmole had been in London for less than three weeks when he met a man destined to become one of his closest friends. On November 20—a Friday evening (one might imagine they were at a tavern)—Jonas Moore (1617–79; knighted 1663), a royalist mathematician, introduced Ashmole to William Lilly, an ardent Roundhead (chiefly on religious grounds). The combination of talents seems strange at first sight. Jonas Moore would become mathematics tutor to the duke of York the following year; Lilly would serve the cause of Parliament—a commitment that would on subsequent occasions enrage Ashmole. What did they have in common?

C. H. Josten speculated that it might have been Free Masonry that sealed these new associations. “Perhaps,” wrote Josten in his biography of Ashmole, “his newly acquired masonic connections had influenced Ashmole’s decision [to return to London]. Certainly on his return to London, his circle of friends soon included many new acquaintances among astrologers, mathematicians, and physicians whose mystical leanings might have predisposed them to membership of speculative lodges, yet it is not known of any of them that they belonged to the craft.”²

Such absence of knowledge would hardly be surprising. Only a handful of names could be summoned from the surviving records of seventeenth-century England and attached with confidence to a concern with Free Masonry. Ashmole was most unusual in his commitment to preserving records; his personal record of initiation is unique. However, even that brief record was in cipher, not intended for public consumption, at least in his lifetime.

The dynamic of Masonry required the full observation of the classic Hermetic posture, a firm finger against the lips: He who speaks, does not know. The key is in the mind. Such peace has passed the understanding of those disposed to suspect Masonry of secret wickedness.

Critics apt to condemn the Craft might pause to consider that if membership of Free Masonry aroused suspicion among the ignorant, many in the seventeenth century regarded interest in astrology and the now respectable mathematics as positively culpable. Mathematical figures suggested magical pacts with incomprehensible, unseen forces. Numbers were magical; manipulation thereof was fraught with potential trespass on the territory and governance of angels.

According to Josten, “To many orthodox minds the study of mathematics and astrology, which to all intents and purposes still were but two aspects of one discipline, savoured of heresy and atheism, a suspicion which might easily have fostered the formation of mathematicians’ lodges or other secret societies, yet no evidence supporting such a conjecture is known.”³ No evidence is known, but Josten did not withdraw the conjecture.

Sir Jonas Moore would, like Ashmole fourteen years later, become a Fellow of the Royal Society, a pioneering exoteric institution of science. Before the Royal Society, men of scientific talent tended to gather about the precincts of Gresham College.

Founded in 1597 by City Mercer and royal agent Sir Thomas Gresham (who also founded the Royal Exchange), Gresham College was housed in his mansion in Bishopsgate until 1768. Originally, there were seven endowed chairs: Divinity, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Physic (medicine), Law, and Rhetoric. The college provided accommodation for the early life of the Royal Society.

Whereas Royal Society rules discouraged discussion of spiritual and religious subjects—unfurling an early banner for the utilitarian principle—meetings and discussion at Gresham College could openly entertain such as might interest its denizens.

On Valentine’s Day 1647, Ashmole sought a response from the stars as to whether he should “go to the Feast of Mathematicians at Gresham Colledge.”⁴ Two days later, “The Mathematical Feast was [held] at the White heart in the old Baily, where I dyned.”⁵ Perhaps it was at the same tavern where he first met Lilly; perhaps it was the site of a lodge.

A serious interest in mathematics would have put Ashmole on the “underground” or unspoken avant-garde of London intellectual society. Ashmole’s long climb to high intellectual and social respectability had begun; it would not be a tale of overnight success.

Readers may recall Ashmole’s first encounter with the attractive power of a certain Mrs. March in Brasenose College Library while he was studying at Oxford. The lady had reentered Ashmole’s life, and on December 31, 1646, she informed Ashmole that she would entertain no other suitor but he: until, that is, she should hear from a preferred Frenchman, Mr. Lollies. If there was a grave accent on that final e, Ashmole omitted it; he owed nothing to his rival. He was particularly “stuck on” Mrs. March, to be sure, but there were other eligible widows who had also taken a fancy to Captain Ashmole (retd.).

On November 18, Ashmole first records seeing Mrs. Wall, inquiring of the stars in no-nonsense fashion “whether I shall have her or not.”⁶ A fortnight later he was asking the same question with regard to Mrs. Mary Coachman.

On December 3, between 10 p.m. and midnight, Ashmole “discoursed with Mrs Wall in her bedchamber where still all her discourse beat upon her fear that she would marry not to pl[ease] her friends.”⁷

On January 1, 1647, Mrs. March wishes Ashmole had only made his suit sooner. “Upon my request to her for a kiss, she then gave it to me for a New Year’s gift, and told me that if she did not infinitely love me, she would have been sparing in her assurance to me.”⁸ Mrs. March was having her cake and eating it; so was Elias Ashmole.

At 1:15 p.m. the next day, he consulted the stars as to “whether Mr Lollies or myself shall have Mrs March.”⁹ She had gotten under his skin. That night, he had a dream: “I dreamed that Mr Lilly had assured me, he would procure me Mrs March by his art.”¹⁰ This art must have been a particular magick art, such as a sigil, talisman, or charm made to attract the opposite sex. Did the God-fearing William Lilly call the spirits to his service? It may be supposed that he did.

Advice to Young Gentlemen, a broadsheet ballad of the period.

The heady mix of sex and magick seems to have quite overtaken all other interests in this Sturm und Drang period of Ashmole’s life. On January 5, whether by occult means or not, Mrs. March warmed further in the astrologer’s direction: “I had this day divers kisses from her and she lent me her picture to wear next day to my heart. She then put her hand into bed to me and protested she had never done so much since her husband [Francis March] died, and she told me she hoped that I was confident there was nothing she could afford me but I might command it, and the consummatum est was not passed with the other, and bade me still hope.”¹¹

Twelve days passed. “This day she lay in bed, and I was with her all the day. In the morning I felt her breasts and belly, and in the afternoon lay by her with my hand on her breast while she seemed to sleep, and stole kisses while she lay so.”¹²

Was Ashmole’s interest in Mrs. March entirely sexual? Mrs. March owned a profitable brew house. Ashmole reckoned it an income until Parliament decided on the degree of his “compounding” (fine) for having taken up arms against it—or until such time as he might be ready to return to his legal practice. He was living, we may say, by his wits.

On January 30, he drew up a “figure” to ascertain whether Mrs. Anne Corbet (of an ancient Shropshire family) “shall marry the gentleman she now loves.”¹³ Did Ashmole take money for astrological readings? We have no record of money changing hands for this purpose but ladies may have chosen to grant him favors other than kisses and portraits of themselves.

In the weave of Ashmole’s difficult love life (is there any other kind?), Mrs. Mary Coachman reappeared, this time in a dream. “This morning between 6: and 7: [February 11, 1647] I dreamed that being with Mrs Mary Coachman, I pressed her to marry her, and she consented, and went to dress her[self], but I repented myself and knew not how to get off being we were to be married [s/c] as soon as she was dressed.”¹⁴

The day after he attended the aforementioned Mathematicians’ Feast at Gresham College, a new interest appeared. On February 15, Ashmole consulted his art to ascertain “whether my Lady Mainwaring bestow these favors to me out of an end to marry me.”¹⁵ Ashmole’s involvement with Lady Mainwaring would be most fateful—for good and ill—in Ashmole’s life.

In a sense, she appears as though magickally summoned or evoked from out of the tapestry of London society, to play the wished-for role in Ashmole’s life of wife and provider of fortune. One imagines Ashmole’s large eyes surveying each lady in turn with the question, “Is it she? Or, is it she?” He seemed to know that someone would heed his inner call; the universe answers the yearning soul. His expectation may have made him somewhat incautious.

As to what favors Lady Mainwaring bestowed, it was most likely money: an investment for a suitable and agreeable husband. Widows could—and indeed had to—pay their own “dowry,” as it were. They could not, after all, bring virginity to the altar—though Lady Mainwaring could certainly offer plenty of experience. As things transpired, she brought what we would now call a good deal of “past baggage” as well.

Mary Mainwaring was the only daughter of Sir William Forster, K.B., of Aldermaston, Berkshire. Born on December 28, 1597, she was just under fifty at the time she and Elias began their courtship. She had been married three times and widowed thrice. On November 1, 1611, she married Sir Edward Stafford of Bradfield. This was to be the most significant marriage in terms of its ramifications in Ashmole’s life. She bore Sir Edward five children. At his death in November 1623, Sir Edward’s legacy included the advowson of the rectory and parish church of Bradfield in Berkshire, as well as the manor house there and sundry lands. Visitors to Bradfield may still be struck by the extensive manor’s great beauty.

The last remains of Bradfield Manor (photo courtesy of Bradfield College).

Part of Bradfield College, Berkshire, on the site of Bradfield Manor, incorporating elements of the original stonework.

A view of the park, Englefield Hall, adjacent to the manor of Bradfield.

Mary’s next husband, John Hamlyn, died on November 1, 1633. The widow then married Sir Thomas Mainwaring in July 1634. He was distantly related to Ashmole’s in-laws. Mainwaring, a lawyer of the Inner Temple, was Recorder of Reading (east of Bradfield) and one of the Masters in Chancery. He died in July 1646.

That the lady was a Mainwaring, like his first wife, might have appeared particularly significant to Ashmole. There were a number of other attractions. William Lilly described Lady Ashmole as “very handsome, of a goodly structure, Low, merry, and cheerfull, but accidentally very much Saturnine [that is, occasionally melancholic].”¹⁶

Before the death of her third husband, Mary had demised her jointure lands at Bradfield (held until her death and then to revert to the Staf-fords) to her eldest son from her first marriage, Edward Stafford, for fifty years at a rent. This arrangement in due course generated a lawsuit between the lady and her son. By 1647, Edward Stafford’s rent was in arrears—to the tune of £602, sixteen shillings—a considerable sum. In fact, Lady Mainwaring was in such straits as to have to pawn her rings; Ashmole was concerned for her. On February 24, 1647, he posed the horary question as to “whether the Lady Mainwaring shall get the better in her suit with her son Stafford.”¹⁷

An hour after seeking celestial assurance, Ashmole posed another question, at four in the afternoon, “whether the profession the Lady Mainwaring made to 3 [Mercurius—the symbol Ashmole used for himself] be real, and whether it will be best for him to accept her favours to go into the county [of Berkshire] with her.”¹⁸

On March 1 Ashmole took the plunge and proposed marriage. He “received a faire answer though no condescention [final decision].”¹⁹

Meanwhile, though not in his matrimonial sights, Mrs. March was still occupying a hearth rug amid the fires of his subconscious. Two days after his proposal, he had a dream: “In the morning I dreamt that 3 [Mercurius] put his hand into Mrs March’s placket [“a slit at the top of a skirt or petticoat for convenience of putting on or off,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary] and then to her next petticoat and then to her third petticoat and then to her smock, and then pulled it up, and with very little struggling felt her bare cun[?] and see[ing] that it was so easy to be done prayed her to let him lie with her which she consented to, and then he went with her hand by to find out a private place to do it, but could find none, and did not do it, though she was willing, and he vexed.”²⁰

I should take his inability to locate his desire precisely as a sign of guilt, as well as obvious frustration.

On March 5, Lady Mainwaring called Ashmole “my dearest friend.” Writing again in the third person, “He answered he would wear that epithet in his heart as long as he lived. She said that he might do.”²¹ Mary Mainwaring was putting Elias Ashmole through his paces.

Ashmole’s use of the third person to describe his amorous activities suggests that he was not deeply comfortable with the very intimate nature of what he—the supposed cavalier—was involved with. One might think he was projecting a persona and transferring responsibility for his actions thereby. Otherwise, his reticence may have been conventional when dealing with sexual matters.

There is another intriguing possibility, that Mercurius (soon to be paradoxically revealed as the “faceless” cartoon of Mercuriophilus Anglicus in his first book) was a kind of resonant caricature of himself. Mercurius operated in the world as a secret actor but one whose invisible Self was yet hidden, even perhaps, from himself.

It is not unusual in serious occult thinking to distinguish between the essential Self (the “daemon” belonging to a spiritual world) and the actor “self” (ego) rooted in the world of action and thereby attached to it. Of course the genius of “Mercurius” (whose symbol is a symbol of a name) is that “he,” being the transformative principle itself, may not only “fly” (with winged head and feet) between the two worlds, but also alchemically join them.

The Ash and the Mole are of the earth but are happily joined to the higher Mercurius who could echo Salvador Dali’s famous phrase with respect to surrealism: “L’Hermetisme? C’est moi!” The cheeky Mercurius who attempts to unravel the ladies’ garments in search of a secret that mere Ash-mole cannot grasp is at once a projected self, a gamester, and at the same time the active will (or true will) of the hidden Self. As troubadour Raimon de Miraval sang of the love god in the twelfth century: “He must accomplish His desires!”

Ashmole’s spiritual life in this period was in a state of alchemical flux. Ashmole knew, it seems to this author, that it was all leading somewhere, but his conscious mind was not altogether sure where. There is a lesson for our own times here: we put too much trust in the opacity of consciousness. Hurried speakers try in frenetic rap to reflect precisely what they see and think at the time. We receive a deceptive reflection, a surface, but no depth; we skate on thin ice, dismissing the interior voice.

The unease between the poverty of Ashmole’s consciousness and the wealth of his unconscious led naturally to disquiet. He suffered conscious twinges of guilt and anxiety. “Not I, but another,” he might have apologized, was leading him on. In fact, he had little to worry about. A conventional courtship with Lady Mainwaring was in progress, the aim of which was to acquire a new social base and income boost, as well as to heal his lonely heart—and yet he was still unsure what was his best course. Only five days after Lady Mainwaring called Elias “my dearest friend,” Ashmole was speculating whether he (3) “shall have Mrs Marth[a] Hook.”²²

He also had acute money worries. Careful to acquire funds and careful to share them as conscience dictated, he was nonetheless prone to great anxiety should the prospect of losing them occur; he was not cavalier with his pocket. His upbringing had, not surprisingly, scarred him with the tremor of insecurity. These fears were doubtless extreme at times, but he believed sincerely that he could heal his nervous fears by acquiring wealth and position from without (fame would come from within). We are, not infrequently, as others treat us, but the fear of poverty, born in childhood, is with us forever.

It might be argued that Ashmole should have had absolute confidence in the spectacular gift of his interiority, his extraordinary feel for the reality and prodigious depth of his inner life, his daemonic intelligence. He should, in short, have kissed good-bye the world and its values and donned the mantle of the poor scholar or alchemical gypsy, guided solely by his soul’s light, like a Joachim Morsius or a Heinrich Khunrath, who stalked the secret places of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Europe.

We must, however, put a brake on all this elevated mystical idealism and recall that which latter-day troubadour John Lennon sang shortly before his murder: “It’s your mother, man! Don’t forget your mother; she what bore you in the back bedroom!”²³

One should never forget the presence of the departed Ann Ash-mole. She had taught him well and hard about the real demands of life. There were two sides to every question: two pillars, as the Free Masons believed, to hold up the celestial universe. The world in its clamor and folly required attendance. Elias would have to do better than his father. And he had a secret self to do his bidding. Mercurius was at work in the world, separating and binding together, weaving a magickal life by the power of the caduceus and silence.

Above—or, perhaps, below—all, Ashmole’s eyes could look up to see a blade of Damocles hovering over his long, ruddy brown hair, pressuring his powerful will with the threat of disaster. As a royalist captain and man of some (limited) means, he was in the sights of the government’s “compounding and sequestration” program.

Lesser royalists (like Ashmole) might, if they were fortunate, be fined one sixth of their estate. Adding to the humiliation was a form of “self assessment”; tax is always taxing. Those summoned to undergo what the government called “compounding” (the state can always come up with a novel euphemism for theft) had perforce to attend Goldsmiths Hall and declare their income and property. In order to avoid ruinous sequestration, those called could opt for a “mercy of the state,” conditional on the royalists’ swearing the “Negative Oath,” that never again would they bear arms against Parliament. Having stolen “rights” by force, Parliament now proceeded to dispose them. Having fashioned the laws, it could call itself just.

For some reason, Ashmole did not want Lady Mainwaring to know of his fate, whatever it might be, at the hands of the compounders. On March 12, 1647, he wrote: “13 hours after noon, whether the business I project concerning my compounding will be carried privately without the Lady Mainwaring’s knowledge of my end in it.”²⁴ One should recall that Ashmole was a lawyer and had an influential parliamentarian friend in astrologer William Lilly.

On March 30, 1647, at 10:15 a.m., Ashmole “took the Negative Oath” to free his property from the threat of sequestration.²⁵ This painful act must nonetheless have brought considerable personal relief.

Ashmole’s courtship proceeded regardless. April 1, 1647: “2 hours after noon upon discourses with the Lady Mainwaring, she told me that no wife should love me better than she did, and taxing her that she concealed herself from me she said she had so opened herself that she had really hid nothing from me, but before a 12 month came about, she would see if she could get anything that would cross her love, or make her not to love me so well.”²⁶

Perhaps it was Ashmole’s gathering attendance to worldly matters that made him wonder, on June 22, “whether 3 [Mercurius] shall ever attain to a perfection in magick or astrology.”²⁷ Note that word, perfection. He was on his way. While Ashmole dreamed of becoming the complete magus, the government was busy consigning the adoration of the Magi and all that Christmas then contained to the refuse heap of superstition. The feasts of Christ’s Nativity (as Christmas was then called) were abolished by order of Parliament on June 8: a fine business for midsummer, one might think. Also abolished were Easter, Whitsuntide, and other feasts “heretofore superstitiously used and observed.”

On Christmas Day 1647, Ashmole would write an elegy, “Upon the neglect of celebrating Christmas.”²⁸ The hotheads have not disappeared from English life.

Mania was entering Ashmole’s own, usually painstaking deliberations. Two days after waiting on the king at Caversham Lodge (near Reading), he awoke on the morning of July 11 with the thought that he might “have Dol [Dorothy Mainwaring, his first wife’s younger sister] live with me as my wife.”²⁹

Something seems to have been trying to get a message through to Ashmole that marrying the Lady Mainwaring might yet be attended by some inconveniences. As if to give horrific form to such immaterial fears, Ashmole became victim of an attempted murder.

Ashmole had moved into Berkshire to help sort out the Lady Mainwaring’s legal and family problems, renting rooms at the house of Mr. Antipas Charington at Englefield, close to Bradfield. He first visited Bradfield House, where Edward Stafford was living, on May 26, in an attempt both to reconcile the family and insist on the payment of rent for Edward’s mother’s welfare. The Staffords simply regarded Ashmole as a gold digger and worthless interloper.

Ashmole was still at Charington’s on July 30 when it happened: “About 2 H: PM … Mr Humfry Stafford, the Lady Mainwaring’s second son (suspecting I should marry his Mother) broke into my Chamber and had like to have kild me, but Christ: Smith witheld him by force, … in regard it was thought I was neere death, and knew no body. God be blessed for this deliverance.”³⁰ Ashmole was ill with fever at the time and it cannot have assisted his recovery to discover that all about him sided with Humphrey Stafford.

Mania was in the air. In January 1648, Ashmole noted how his king was finally deprived of all liberty. He consulted his friend William Lilly’s book of predictions, England’s Propheticall Merline (1644). In Lilly’s entry for January 30, 1649, stood the prophetic words: “Woe is me, a very great man comes to an untimely end: a rot of sheep and men. Is any Nobleman beheaded? What if may be? Justice took place.”

Ashmole’s relations with Lilly were strained, most likely for political reasons. On January 5, 1648, he paid an evening call on Lilly: “I delivered to Mr Lilly Picatrix and was reconciled to him.”³¹

Picatrix (also known as The Aim of the Sage) was a powerful compendium of magick. Emanating from the Sabians of Harran, it had appeared in Spain in the eleventh century before being translated into Latin in 1256. It gave a complete theory and guide to the making of talismans, set in the context of Hermetic and Neoplatonist philosophy. The book showed the essence of “sympathetic magick” as the art of attracting spiritus into materia through the construction of appropriate talismans.

Did Ashmole require a magickal service of Lilly? The rapprochement did not last. On March 14, Ashmole’s other close friend, royalist astrologer George Wharton, was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate. Ash-mole suspected that Lilly the parliamentarian astrologer was implicated in this attack on his astrological and political rival. Astro-politics had begun, and Ashmole closely observed the storm.

On March 31, Ashmole again plied his suit with Lady Mainwaring. “Lady Mainwaring told me that she could wish she were married to me.”³² Ashmole could glimpse the prize: emotional and financial security. On May 22, Lady Mainwaring sealed Ashmole a lease for the “Parkes at Bradfield.” The next day, Ashmole was thirty-one, and wrote of his “pleasant Hermitage.”³³ The choice of the word hermitage is telling. He clearly intended to devote his life—now that his “nasty” material struggle seemed over—to a study of alchemy, a study he knew required great solitude and single-minded devotion. Bradfield, at first sight, should have been perfect for the task.

On July 8, we have the first definite date to indicate Ashmole’s immersion into the great and not so great alchemical authors. One Nicholas Bowden of Reading gave him a book on the philosopher’s stone and “The Supercelestiall, Celestiall, and Terrestrial Divine Lights of Nature.”³⁴

On January 30, 1649, for a few terrible seconds, the course of English history stopped, then spurted out and splashed onto a Whitehall scaffold amid the groans of the onlookers. King Charles I was martyred; England had become a republic.

Eleven months later, on November 22, at a date “elected” by astrological means, Elias Ashmole and Lady Mainwaring were married at Silverstreet, London. If he thought his troubles were over, he was wrong.

A contemporary illustration of the king’s martyrdom at the Banqueting House, Whitehall.