The Magus of Freemasonry

What is alchemy? Through centuries of experience in the smithy and the jeweler’s fire, the intuition developed that metals were animated, living things, subject to change and transformation. Metals were seen directly, visibly, and invisibly to be affected by water, air, earth, and fire. In the larger astrological context, metals were deemed subject to the stars like everything else. But above all, they were subject to the will of the skilled operator. And nowhere were these technicians more skilled than in Egypt.

The Greek word for alchemy simply means “the Egyptian art,” from chemia, the black earth—the Greeks’ name for an Egypt whose black, fertile, muddy land was the result of the Nile’s annual inundation.

In ancient Egypt, operating with metals came under the patronage of the god Thoth, called Hermes after the Greek invasion of Egypt in 331 B.C. Hermes presided over the magick of transformation. The element mercury or mercurius (Latin form of the Greek Hermes) with its swift transformation from solid to liquid states symbolized the possibilities of change from one state to another. Metals were like minds; they could change and be changed.

As we describe someone lacking in knowledge as “dim” or “dense,” so metals in their lowest state were called “black” (nigredo). Comparing the rise in quality from dull blackness to the unique, refined, incorruptible state of gold was like glimpsing the ladder that could take man from earth and death to heaven and eternal life. Speculation on chemical transformation in the ancient world led to the conviction that the full transition to gold could be most easily effected if one had a quantity of the “stone” or “philosopher’s stone.” This “stone,” frequently understood to be a powder, served as a dynamic catalyst.

While alchemical writings offered “recipes” to “project” this mysterious and magickal substance, and much alchemical practice was concentrated on its generation or manifestation, its essential, paradoxical qualities remained mysterious. That mystery was—and still is—an enormous attraction.

The stone is always presented as something from without that is produced within that effects within and manifests without. You can write songs and poems about this riddle, but producing it would prove as elusive as is the manufacture of stable quantities of fusion energy today. That does not stop people from trying, and in terms of seventeenth-century knowledge, Ashmole’s profound interest in the subject was a vital component of the most farsighted, albeit suspected, science and philosophy.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that alchemy was all about finding the philosopher’s stone (philosopher, by the way, was simply another word for “alchemist”). The essence of the art was Change. That is why Hermes, the archetypal “quick-change” artist, was its psychopomp, or president.

The key to change rested in the principle that it was possible to separate “body” from “soul.” One only has to think of a common match or “lucifer” (as matches were first called) to get the idea. A spark produces the flame, the “visible” and intangible sign of soul. It rises upward, leaving the powdery remains of the “body.” Since bodily illnesses were frequently ascribed to weaknesses or disease in the soul, substances (“chemicals”) might be used to right imbalances by providing corresponding boosts or “elixirs” to the invisible soul-frame of the person.

Likewise, a person might be thought of as being representative of a metal, governed by a planet. The metal could become sick due to unfavorable planetary alignment. A balancing regimen of correspondingly good influences might help matters.

There was also a moral dimension. “Evil” or bad influences could be understood as part of an improving process. A potentially good metal could “suffer” much hard work in the process of bringing forth its hidden strength, like hot metal being hammered into shape, then plunged harshly into a “screaming” bath of cold water. The greater the potential, the more suffering one could expect.

The idea of necessary, even exalted, suffering (willingness to be acted upon) invited Christian alchemical images of crucifixion and resurrection. It is often wondered whether alchemy in Ashmole’s time was a physical practice or a form of spiritual psychology. It is clear that it was both.

Indeed, it is from both aspects (the laboratory and the oratory; the “ergon”—work—and the “parergon” or by-product) that the benefits of alchemy have come down to us today. Alchemical concepts suffuse medicine and psychology as well as chemistry. The drug industry was begun by alchemists, as was the alternative medicine school. In common parlance, we know what we mean when we say that a man has “nerves of steel” or a woman is an “iron lady” a determined person has “fire in the belly,” a kind one has a “heart of gold.” Jungian psychology is, to all intents and purposes, a form of alchemy, as Jung himself realized.¹

Alchemists at work in Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica libri XII… animantibus subterraneis liber… Basileae, Froben, 1556. (Ravenna, Biblioteca Classense; 50.9.l)

Oratory and Laboratory; Ergon (work) and Parergon (by-product), from Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-stauroticum, Daniel Mögling, Germany, 1618.

Nevertheless, it would be doing alchemy a great disservice to reduce its scope to what we have inherited as part of our understanding or what conforms to contemporary scientific knowledge. The same caveat may also be applied to Ashmole’s day.

As C. H. Josten asserted in his biography of Ashmole: “An evaluation of astrology and alchemy in terms of their usefulness to modern developments does by no means exhaust, or even touch upon, their significance as remnants of a lost spiritual discipline which, even in Ashmole’s time, may no longer have been fully understood by the adepti.”² Ashmole himself was aware of the loss of knowledge experienced by those honestly encountering alchemical knowledge. As he would write in the Prolegomena to his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum: “They are Mysteries Incommunicable to any but the Adepti, and those that have been Devoted even from their Cradles to serve and wait at this Altar.”

The adepti had observed that what occurred in metals had direct correspondence or analogy to the bodily and, above all, spiritual nature of man. It was then deduced that human beings too were part of a cosmic alchemy, and alchemy must therefore offer knowledge of the Creator’s essential power and creative method. The earthly operator experienced this dangerous power as a reflection or microcosm of the greater working, the macrocosm.

It was also understood that due to the fundamental nature of alchemical principles, alchemy should be employed in association with geometry (the word projection is shared by alchemists and geometers) and with mathematics, the science of quantity. Alchemy’s links with astrology were intrinsic. Alchemy was, as Ashmole would write in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an art favored by freemasons, among other craftsmen.

While it is clear that alchemy provided the experiential basis for chemistry in general, its strictly “scientific” reputation had long been sullied by its attraction to charlatans obsessed with the single exploit of getting gold from lead: that is, something for nothing. To add to the confusion and obscurity, alchemy also employed recipes whose expressive admixture of strange and often polyvalent symbols with quantities of known, tangible substances were used to conceal vital knowledge from the “profane.” Much time and money were wasted as a result.

However, throughout the early seventeenth century, the reputation of alchemy had steadily increased among private individuals with money to dispose on penetrating its mysteries, and stories abounded of successful transmutations. It is possible that the idea of mysteries within nature compensated for the loss of mystery in Protestant religion.

Alchemy was of particular interest to men who suffered from the effects of the fissures in religious life resulting from the Reformation. There was a subconscious hunger to recover the principle of unity behind all things. Among such men, and Ashmole was one of them, the spiritual potential of alchemy was as compelling as its physical possibilities, though Ash-mole may not have admitted such a distinction as absolute.

The spiritual potential of alchemical thought was increased as a result of the fact that since the age of the Egyptian alchemists in late antique times (first to fifth centuries A.D.), the processes had been expressed within the terminology and cosmic understanding of a Neoplatonic and Hermetic gnosis.

The gnostic idea that there is a divine “substance” (pneuma) hidden or occulted within the gross “body” of the potentially gnostic person chimed in very well with the alchemical art, and soon became practically inseparable from it, if, indeed, theory and practice had ever been separated. Readers who want to further explore the links among alchemy, gnostic thought, Free Masonry, and seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism may consult my book The Golden Builders.

The alchemist has been spiritually resurrected into the golden state, raised above earth in a “new” body, leaving the earthly body below. From Jean-Jacques Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, Cologne, 1702. (Biblioteca dell’ Accademia dei Lincei, Rome; Verginelli-Rota n. 211)

There existed among the more intelligent practitioners of alchemy the idea that somehow alchemy had, in the past, been “badly handled.” Bad or corrupt men had been blinded by the lure of gold. But for those who looked beyond the nefarious activities of the “puffers” and “accursed gold-makers,” it was clear from the ancient alchemical authors that something Very Big indeed was implied within the “Great Work.”

“That which is above is like that which is below” intoned the ancient, antediluvian message of mystagogue Hermes Trismegistus. And what was the purpose of this divine cosmic analogy? Hermes’ “Smaragdine Table” (written on emerald in distant times) expressed it succinctly: “To work the miracle of the One Thing.”

The alchemical symbol for the sun.

Now consider Ashmole’s motto, Ex Uno Omnia: From the One, All. The possibilities encoded within the alchemical universe were as endless as the imagination and, it was deemed, long unexplored. If one were to come to grips with alchemy’s full potential, one would need to refine the manuscript tradition and, if possible, get back to the original insights and states of mind that initiated the alchemical quest in the first place. This kind of work was very much within Ashmole’s sphere of gifts, and very much in tune with his deepest needs and ideals.

In pursuit of these laudable aims, it was observed that as the metals needed to be transformed from within, then the artifex—the operator—would also need to become a more spiritual being, pleasing to God. After all, one was presuming to gather crumbs from the Grand Artifex’s table, or at least get a glimpse of His laboratory, His Oratory of Labor. The clamor of the world would need to be stilled so that the voice of divine inspiration could enlighten the artifex. Becoming a fully fledged magus meant rising on a path of holiness. In short, alchemy could produce a new kind of being and, thereby, a new kind of world. Ashmole was acutely, even painfully, aware of this.

Ashmole’s alchemical ideals were fully expressed on paper within a year of his marriage to Lady Mainwaring. In his introduction to Fasciculus Chemicus (“an alchemical posy”), published in 1650, he noted that in all alchemical writings “the Golden Thread of the Matter is so warily disposed, covertly concealed, and so broken off and disperst” that even “the best principled student” will not find “its scattered ends … unless the Father of Illuminations prompt, or lend an Angels hand to guide.” This illumination is “a Havn [sic] towards which many skilful Pilots have bent their course, yet few have reached it.” “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

The few who are by divine grace chosen to be the “Adepted Priests” “celebrating the ceremonies of so divine a Miracle” will be conspicuous for “a most virtuous life”; “being so qualified, they straightaway lay aside ambitious thoughts, and take up a retiredness; they dwell within their Root; and never care for flourishing upon the Stage of the World.” No “corrupt or sinister thoughts can grow up in them,” as the possession of the secret, which God will never suffer “to be revealed to any but those that can tell how to conceal a secret,” will free them from “the root of all evil”—namely, covetousness.

This was all a very tall order for Ashmole, who was undoubtedly ambitious and was not at all averse to flourishing on the stage of the world. The spirit was willing …

Furthermore, in spite of his marriage to Lady Mainwaring, Ashmole was still very much involved in the dramatic incidents of earthbound existence. As Ashmole and the Lady Mary were wed in Silverstreet on November 16, 1649, his astrologer friend George Wharton was languishing under parliamentarian lock and key. The president of the Council of State, John Bradshaw, wanted the royalist Wharton hanged. On November 22, Ashmole went to William Lilly to effect Wharton’s eventual release. This was accomplished through Lilly’s patron, Balstrode Whitelock (1605–75), one of the three commissioners of the Great Seal and a member of the Council of State.

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that Ashmole later claimed that worldly concerns (especially the legal tangles surrounding Lady Mainwaring’s disputed estate) kept him from a deeper involvement with the practical side of alchemy, his presence in Berkshire did yield substantial spiritual contacts.

The two most significant new stars on Ashmole’s horizon were the alchemist and inventor William Backhouse (1593–1662) and the Rev. Dr. John Pordage, rector of Bradfield (1605–81). The interests of both of these extraordinary men provided foci for engaging with the central concerns of Continental spiritual and esoteric-scientific thought.

Backhouse was a learned devotee of the Continental “Rosicrucian” movement, while the eccentric Pordage was one of the first Englishmen to seize upon the significance of the theosophical works of the German mystic Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) and write about them to great effect. Indeed, it seems somewhat extraordinary that Ashmole should find such contacts at the very moment he took up his lordship of the manor of Bradfield. Unfortunately, we only receive hints of what specifically took place between Ashmole and these men, but such as we do receive (especially concerning Backhouse) leaves us in no doubt that the confluence of these powerful interests—and minds—would shape and intensify Ashmole’s headlong quest for magickal enlightenment.

Dr. John Pordage, from Gottliche und Wahre Metaphysica, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1715.

The gnostic theosopher Jacob Bohme, the source of Pordage’s inspiration, from Edward Taylor’s Jacob Behmen’s Theosophick Philosophy Unfolded, London, 1691.

On May 20, 1650, Ashmole posed the horary question “Whether I shall ever have the Philosopher Stone, or whether the matter and fire I think of be true.”³ Ashmole needed spiritual guidance.

Five weeks later, he asked, “Whether I shall ever receive [h]urt or good from General Cromwell, while he is General.” It may be supposed that the response to this question would encourage him to abandon, at least temporarily, the worldly stage and devote himself to profound studies. Furthermore, the same month in which Ashmole pondered his chances under Cromwell’s rule saw him embark on a journey that would eventually change his life and grant him the fame on which his name now chiefly rests.

On June 15, 1650, Ashmole, his wife, and his beloved friend Dr. Thomas Wharton (a leading physician and discoverer of Wharton’s duct) paid a visit to John Tradescant the younger (1608–62) at South Lambeth. Tradescant, the famous antiquary and naturalist, had given over his home to extensive gardens of great botanical fascination and his house to a mighty collection of artifacts and natural curiosities from around the known world. His gardens and collections captivated Ash-mole’s attention and deeply stimulated his imagination.

Without the temptations of the old Stuart court and its satellites, the 1650s would see Elias Ashmole synthesize the full scope of his interests: alchemical, astrological, antiquarian, and natural-philosophical. He and other learned men of his day called this line of interest “Natural Magick,” of which he would write in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum; his words possibly showed the influence of Jacob Böhme via John Pordage.

According to Ashmole, Adam (the primal Man) was before his Fall “so absolute a philosopher” that he possessed “the true and pure knowledge of Nature (which is no other than what we call Natural Magick) in the highest degree of Perfection.”⁴ According to Josten, “Natural Magic as conceived by Ashmole is therefore, in modern terminology, Science.”⁵

Unlike the mystic—or gnostic—William Blake (who, born a century later, was also a reader of Bohme and of Pordage), Ashmole was more interested in the “true and perfect knowledge of Nature” contained in Adam’s breast than he was in Adam the Ancient Man and Gnostic Anthropos. Ashmole was never overwhelmed by mythology; his eye was shrewd, his imagination served. He was more inclined to look through the mystical to the material world than the reverse. This makes him a man of a new era as well as of the old: a herald—and an enigma.

Ashmole’s immersion into the alchemical universe was balanced by interest in his seigneurial rights at Bradfield. On April 29, 1650, he inquired of the stars whether the wife of the rector, Mrs. Pordage, “had best sell her houses or keep them.”⁶ He seems to have gotten involved with Pordage family business (public and discreet). A month later he was giving astrological advice as to “Whether Mr. [blank] Por[da]g[e] shall have the Mr[s.] he affects.”⁷ This Mr. Pordage was probably Dr. John’s son, Samuel (1633–91?), unless, that is, one was to suspect the eccentric rector of adultery, in addition to a most extraordinary style of ministry.

That style was laid out for public disgust in A Most faithful relation of two wonderful passages which happened very lately … in the Parish of Bradfield in Berk-shire. Local gentleman Mr. William Foster observed the rector emerging from his church “bellowing like a Bull, saying that he was called and must be gon.”⁸

Going to the Pordage home, with which his wife was intimate, Foster was amazed to see “Mistress Pordich [sic] Clothed all in White Lawne, from the crown to the Head to the sole of the Foot, and a White rod in her hand.” She was hailed as a prophetess by those dancing country dances about her “making strange noyses.” Explaining that they were rejoicing “because they had over come the Devil,” Dr. Pordage then appeared “all in black Velvet” and pressed Foster and his wife to join in. Foster made his excuses, to Pordage’s disappointment, and the dancing went on around the parish “expecting when they shall be taken up to Heaven every hour.”⁹

Bradfield church today, just below the site of the old manor hall.

The interior of Bradfield church as it is today.

The porch of Bradfield church from which John Pordage emerged “bellowing like a Bull.”

What Ashmole thought of this premature manifestation of the spirit of 1969 is not recorded, nor whether he was in deep sympathy with the thoughts of Jacob Böhme, whose works appear to have freed Pordage and his family’s mind, certainly from conventional inhibition, and perhaps, at times, from reason too.

It is worth noting that gnostic movements tend to carry two moral extremes: strict asceticism (the body being an obstruction to the spirit) and sexual indulgence (love knows better than society; women are not property; the spirit should be free). Ashmole was not the ascetic type. Perhaps he was indulgent of a little discreet, free, holy love. He was certainly, like many cavaliers, tolerant of adultery. On May 19, 1650, he posed the horary question “Whether 3 [Mercurius] shall ever enjoy Mrs Martha Beale.”¹⁰ Whether or not he did, we do not know.

Dr. Pordage certainly encouraged a sense of liberty, perhaps license, in his verdant, richly endowed parish. He had been there since 1647 and many of the parishioners appear to have gotten used to a surprising new order of things. Pordage experimented with theology, followed his inner Christ, and communed with what he took to be the Holy Spirit and His angels. His ministry in some respects presaged a breakdown of order that accompanied the demise of the king and the dismemberment of his church.

During 1650, Ashmole went to Bradfield on at least seven occasions to obtain rents from tenants for himself and his wife. These attempts were frequently unsuccessful. By the end of March, Ashmole had heard that Humphrey Stafford had told the tenants to withhold rents from his mother and her new husband. In this matter, Humphrey Stafford and his brother Edward were aided and abetted by Lady Mainwaring’s brother, Sir Humphrey Forster, who conceived a great hatred for Ashmole. Ash-mole himself continually sought reconciliation in the family and was unafraid of confronting his enemies face-to-face.

On having his and his wife’s rights upheld in court after much legal antagonism, Ashmole held courts baron at Bradfield in January and March 1653 as lord of the manor. In spite of his friend Sir George Wharton’s help in raising rents, Ashmole’s courts, in the main, failed; the population of Bradfield mostly ignored him.

This experiment in Ashmolean squirearchy does not seem to have lasted long. One suspects that it began in seriousness, became a bit of a pose, then collapsed in boredom and suppressed embarrassment. The citizens had more to get excited about than the Staffordshire-born arriviste from London. There was utopian hope and excessive optimism in the air, as well as harsh government repression. Ashmole himself felt the tug of that solitary holiness of life that should characterize the devoted alchemist.

The day after wondering whether he could enjoy the comforts of Mrs. Martha Beale, he drew up a list of recipients of his first book, Fasciculus Chemicus. As well as putting Dr. John Pordage on his list, Ashmole, interestingly, added the name of the chief royalist in Lichfield, Sir Richard Dyott, chancellor of the County Palatine of Durham and Steward of Lichfield (d. March 8, 1659).

Fasciculus Chemicus was the first appearance—or disappearance—of Elias Ashmole in print. As readers will recall, the frontispiece showed his face obscured by his natal scheme. He also obscured his name. According to the frontispiece, the book was authored by one “James Hasolle.” This anagram of Elias Ashmole may have been observed as an alchemical and Rosicrucian convention; alchemical texts rarely carried the real names of their authors. In this case, the name was doubly pseudonymous. While “James Hasolle” contained Elias Ashmole, Fasciculus Chemicus contained the work of Arthur Dee (1579–1651), the son of Dr. John Dee (1524–1608), the famous Elizabethan astrologer and court scientist.

In spite of obscuring the author on the title page, the frontispiece is in fact a profound revelation of his, shall we say, astral identity. As Josten writes, the frontispiece “appears to proclaim that, as heavenly Mercury is among the Gods, metals, and planets, such is Elias Ashmole, alias Mercuriophilus Anglicus, on Earth.”¹¹

Ashmole wrote the introduction and translated Arthur Dee’s work, thinking the latter was dead. On discovering that this was not the case, that in fact Dee had only been abroad in Moscow—as the much respected physician to the czar—Ashmole wrote to him requesting permission to publish. Dee, now residing in Norwich, replied that he did not object to “James Hasolle’s” use of his work.

Friends of Ashmole met Dee in London but Elias missed his own opportunity, for Dee died the next year (1651). Dee left a son, Rowland, who was a merchant in London and who gave Ashmole a family pedigree in 1674 during a prolonged period of Dee-interest in Ashmole’s life.

Dr. John Dee (1524–1608), mathematician, astrologer, polymath, summoner of angels. The portrait, which belonged to Dee’s grandson Rowland, now hangs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The figure of John Dee was extraordinarily significant to Elias Ashmole. He saw depths of possibility and understanding within Dee’s life and work that almost nobody else in his time glimpsed. He seems to have seen Dee not only as his personal ideal (immensely learned, judicious, scientific, mystical, mathematical—and yet also holding high place in the state), but also as his prototype. That is to say, it appears that Ashmole saw himself as something of a fulfillment of Dee’s prophetic promise.

In order to get a glimpse of what this promise involved, one need only consult C. H. Josten’s excellent introduction to his translation of Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, a work that Ashmole also transcribed and which inspired him greatly.

It would seem, therefore, that the aim of the secret discipline which Dee wished to express, as well as to conceal, in his treatise was the elevation of certain chosen and most rare mortals to an existence transfigured by direct participation in astral and supracelestial influences, an existence in which they would be masters of Nature and free from the humbling limitations of ordinary life in the body. Those alchemists of his own time who were merely trying to produce gold, therefore, appeared to him as impostors and as the unworthy heirs of a doctrine whose essential parts were not only unknown to them, but also beyond their reach.

Ashmole would have read this passage with alacrity. Like Friedrich Nietzsche over two centuries later, he was taken up in the vision of nothing less than the appearance of a new kind of being. This vision drove him from deep within himself. He expected to see in his lifetime a profound renewal and illumination of esoteric science (Natural Magick) in tune with the original Rosicrucian and Paracelsian prophecies of revelation of natural secrets before “the last light.”

In his optimism he differed from John Dee himself, who implied in his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) that spiritual illumination was on the wane, as the world sank into new barbarism and a darker age. Furthermore, as Josten notes in his introduction:

In another dark passage, which alludes to the philosophers’ mercury and its replacement by the Sun, i.e., gold, Dee asserts that this operation (which is the final stage in the transmutation of metals) can no longer be performed in the present age, as it was in the past performed by some great experts, unless indeed one let the work be governed by a certain soul which has been severed from its body by the art of controlling the fire (ars pyronomica), a work very difficult and fraught with dangers because of the fiery and sulphurous fumes which it occasions.

This passage defies complete and certain interpretation, but indicates beyond doubt that, in Dee’s view, the chances of alchemical success in the external world are diminishing as that world, by progressing in time, descends into spiritually darker ages, and that any palpable success in the transmutation of metals may, if at all, be hoped for only after the successful completion of a most unusual and dangerous work. If one assumes that the soul, which in this dangerous adventure is to be separated from its body, is the human soul (or part thereof), then the ars pyronomica by which the work is to be performed must be primarily spiritual alchemy, the very astronomia inferior of which the monad is Dee’s chosen symbol.¹²

Was there any likelihood of Ashmole’s fulfilling Dee’s somewhat tortuous conditions? Ashmole was certainly ambitious in matter and spirit, but had God fitted him for the task? As the English herald of a new age, what would he have to know? On July 13, 1650, he asks, “Whether I shall ever attain to the knowledge of making such a glass as Paracel[sus]: makes mention of in his 5[th] book, p. 143.”¹³

The passage from Paracelsus’s Archidoxa referred to by Ashmole concerns the making of three magick specula in metal. The first was so as to render visible the images of all men and animals past and present. The second was to gain access to all things spoken and written in the past—and why. The third was to become intimate with all secret things that were ever written down. The specula were to be made specifically for the nativity of the individual who desired to use them. With intelligence like this, would there be any need for intelligence?

Five days later, Ashmole employed magick for a more mundane purpose. He made magick sigils during a conjunction of Saturn and Mars for the purpose of driving out flies, fleas, and caterpillars. “The Figures of the Caterpillars and Flyes Fleas and Toades, were all made in full proportion, in litle, and cast off in Lead. Without [magickal] Characters.”¹⁴ This is the earliest reference to Ashmole casting sigils. One might think he would be above such activities. Would he not soon write in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum that the teachings of magick should not offend “the Eares of the most Pious”? “[F]or here” declares Ashmole, piously, “is no incantations, no Words, no Circles, no Charms, no other fragments of invented Fopperies nor needs there any; Nature (with whom free Magicians deal) can work without them, she finds Matter, and they Art, to help and assist Her, and here’s All.”¹⁵ He was of course writing in a period of witch trials, so it paid to be discreet.

Nevertheless, “James Hasolle” was not so guarded in his Prolegomena to Fasciculus Chemicus: “Characters, Charms, or Spells” are “low and inferior assistants … yet these have their several powers, if judiciously and warily disposed and handled.”

Ashmole was nothing if not judicious, and he was always wary. On October 19, he made an astrological figure to ascertain “Whether good to let Dr. Por[da]g[e] go to dwell in my house at Bradfield.”¹⁶ This wariness presumably coincided with the publication of the exposure of Pordage’s spiritist ministry and the beginnings of investigations into his activities. Pordage would not leave his Bradfield ministry until 1654, though he continued to be the largest renter of property there.

By the end of 1650, Ashmole had already embarked on his next major project: a collection of the works of English alchemical authors, long since unavailable, and many never seen before in print. The Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum would become Isaac Newton’s most heavily consulted alchemical text when he came to search for the single divine principle through a thorough working of alchemical experiments. It is now believed that without the imaginative stimulus of alchemy, Newton may never have reached the summits of his mathematical and natural philosophical genius. Ashmole deserves some long overdue credit here.

On December 7 Ashmole completed transcribing manuscripts by a favorite alchemical author, Sir George Ripley (c. 1415–90?), a canon of Bridlington monastery and an official in the service of King Edward IV. Ripley’s pupil was Thomas Norton, author of the Ordinall of Alchemy, also to be included in Ashmole’s Theatrum.

Studying the significance of the monastic tradition in providing a home for alchemical and related studies made Ashmole even more acutely aware of the damage wrought by the Reformation and its seismic aftereffects (through one of which he was living) and the need for preservation and antiquarian exactitude.

Ashmole began to wonder if some remnant of alchemical expertise had not been hidden away in the monastic grounds before Henry VIII’s despoilers arrived for demolition duties. On February 19, 1651, he posed the question “Whether there is any of the medicine [philosopher’s stone] hid in the abbey of Reading which is now pulling down and in what part and whether I shall find it.”

Page from Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652). The engraving shows the Alchemist giving instruction to his “Son,” heir to his knowledge.

Ashmole’s mind was filled with alchemy. On February 16, 1651, he noted the transcription of another alchemical text, A Naturall Chymicall Symbol Or a short confession of Henry Kunwrath [Heinrich Khunrath, d. 1603] of Lipsicke [Leipzig], Doctor of Physick, dated December 12, 1597, and a poem by the same, dated December 23, 1597. The poem is entitled A philosophical short song of the incorporating of the Spirit of the Lord in Salt. (Salt is frequently a symbol for the material body in alchemy.)

It is possible that the title of his English alchemical compendium (the Theatrum) was based on the title of Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, published in 1595 and reprinted many times).

During 1651, Ashmole obtained a large collection of books, including alchemical texts by the following authors: Democritus Abderita, Trismosinus, Artephius, Basilus Valentinus, Michael Maier, Heinrich Khunrath, Petrus Arlensis, Camillus Leonardus, Alphidius, and Jean Dastin. Ashmole noted how he found some of them in books and manuscripts from the libraries of William Backhouse, Dr. [Levin?] Flood, and D[avid] Ramsey. He also obtained other books on precious stones, Kabbalah, and Etruscan antiquities.

Ashmole first met Dr. Flood on a visit to Maidstone with Dr. Childe, “the Phisitian,” on March 7, 1651.¹⁷ Dr. Robert Childe must have been a man of great note in British esoteric circles at the time, for no less a work than J. Freake’s 1651 translation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy was dedicated to him—and in what terms!

Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, dedicated to Dr. Robert Childe.

“See it is not in vain” writes Freake of Dr. Childe, “that you have compassed Sea and Land, for thereby you have made a Proselyte, not of another, but of your self, by being converted from vulgar, and irrational incredulities to the rational embracing of the sublime, Hermeticall, and Theomagicall truths. You are skilled in the one as if Hermes had been your Tutor; have insight in the other, as if Agrippa your Master.”

Ashmole was finding himself in most excellent company for his purposes. Freake’s translation of Agrippa was one of the main publications of the 1650s Hermetic “blitz” that made that decade possibly the richest donor of literary crops in the history of British Hermetism. It was certainly the decade wherein British Rosicrucianism came out of the woodwork—and we find Elias Ashmole at center stage.

His links to the movement were ingenious. For example, on March 21, 1651, a fortnight after his trip to Maidstone with Dr. Childe, Ash-mole received the grant of an imprimatur for his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. The document was signed by John Booker and by Philip Stephens. Booker, one of two licensers of mathematical books since 1643, was himself an astrologer and a friend of Ashmole. Booker also contributed verses to Freake’s Agrippa publication, condemning those who failed to see the depth and lasting value of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy: “They are indeed mysterious, rare and rich, And far transcend the ordinary pitch.”¹⁸

For good measure, the encomium on the magus Agrippa was penned by one of the deepest of the British Rosicrucian philosophers, Thomas Vaughan (1622–66), publisher of the first English printing of the Fame and Confession of the Rosy Cross Fraternity (1652).

On April 3, 1651, at half past midnight, “Mr : Will : Backhouse of Swallowfield in Com. Berks, caused me to call him Father thence forward.”¹⁹ This was, according to Josten, “an alchemical initiation,” an example of the “Hermetic adoption” discussed by Ashmole himself in the pages of his Theatrum.²⁰

The relationship of “father” to “son” may well be in imitation of the traditional relationship between Hermes Trismegistus and his pupils Asclepius, Tat, and Ammon. Ashmole was clearly seeking spiritual initiation. As Pico della Mirandola asserted in his epoch-marking Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), the mystic doctrines had always been passed on “from mind to mind, through the medium of speech.” Deeply impressed by Backhouse’s service to him, Ashmole wrote a poem dedicated to my “worthily honour’d William Backhouse Esquire Upon his adopting me to be his Son.”

The poem goes on to emphasize that it is alchemy’s power to transmute the man rather than the metal that has led him to offer his fate over to what he calls the “Hermetick Tribe.” He asks the stars to give:

What do we know of this Backhouse who chose Elias Ashmole to be his spiritual son and heir, giving the “Mole” new eyes and the “Ash” fresh leaves?

William Backhouse (1593–1662), a younger son of Samuel Backhouse Esq. (1582–1626) of Swallowfield Park in Berkshire, entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner in 1610, at the age of seventeen. Leaving without a degree (as was not uncommon for gentlemen in those days), he devoted his time to occult studies and became a renowned alchemist, “Rosicrucian,” and astrologer.

Backhouse’s eldest brother, Sir John Backhouse, K.B., died on October 9, 1649, aged sixty-six. William Backhouse succeeded him as the owner of Swallowfield Park. Among the properties bequeathed him by his brother, William inherited what Samuel Hartlib, the great enthusiast for “Rosicrucian”-style Baconian reform, described as “one of the best Thermometers or Weather-glasses which also K[ing].Charles saw and was mightily pleased with it. Hee hath also a long Gallery wherein are all manner of Inventions and Rarities.”²²

William Backhouse was also a collector of mechanical marvels and, by the way, inventor of the Way wiser, a kind of pedometer for attachment to a coach by means of which the distance traveled could be determined.

Swallowfield church.

Swallowfield Park, Berkshire, today—more a haven for anglers than for alchemists.

Backhouse married Anne, the daughter of Brian Richards of Hartley Westpall, Hampshire, by whom he had two sons (who predeceased him) and a daughter, Flower. Flower first married William Bishop (d. 1661) of South Warnborough, Hampshire. Her second husband was her father’s kinsman Sir William Backhouse, Bart. (1641–69). Her third husband was Henry Hyde (1638–1709), the second Earl of Clarendon, who rebuilt Swallowfield Park in a style admirable to this day.

On October 22, 1685, Ashmole’s acquaintance, the famous diarist John Evelyn, accompanied Lady Clarendon to her house in Swallowfield. Evelyn’s description of Swallowfield Park gives some idea of the joy that must have entered Ashmole’s heart when he rode or strode through the park to his spiritual father’s house:

This house is after the antient building of honourable gentlemens’ houses when they kept up antient hospitality, but the gardens and waters as elegant as ’tis possible to make a flat (site) by art and industry and no mean experience, my lady being so extraordinarily skilled in the flowery part and my lord in diligence of planting so that I have hardly seen a seat which shows more tokens of it than what is to be found here, not only in the delicious and rarest fruits of a garden, but in those innumerable timber trees in the grounds about the seat to the greatest ornament and benefit of the place.

There is one orchard of 1000 golden and other cider pippins, walks and groves of elms, limes, oaks and other trees. The garden is so beset with all manner of sweet shrubs that it perfumes the air. The distribution of the quarters, walks and parterres is also excellent.

The nurseries, kitchen garden full of the most desirable plants, two very noble Orangeries well furnished, but above all the canal and fishponds, the one fed with a white, the other with a black running water, fed by a quick and swift river, so well and plentifully stored with fish, that for pike, carp, bream and tench, I never saw anything approaching it.

We had at every meal carp and pike of size fit for the table of a Prince, and what added to the delight was to see the hundreds taken by the drag out of which, the cook standing by, we pointed out what most we had a mind to, and had carp that would have been worth at London twenty shillings a-piece.

The waters are flagged about with Calamus aromaticus, with which my lady has hung a closet that retains the smell very perfectly. There is also a certain sweet willow and other exotics, also a fine bowling green, meadow, pasture and wood. In a word all that can render a country seat delightful. There is besides a well furnished library in the house.²³

Ashmole left no record of the carp, but he did make excellent use of the library.

Dying at Swallowfield on May 30, 1662, Backhouse left a number of manuscripts: The pleasant Founteine of Knowledge: first written in French 1413, by John de la Founteine of Valencia in Henault, translated into English verse in 1644; a translation of Planctus Nature: The Complaint of Nature against the Erroneous Alchymist, by John de Mehung; The Golden Fleece, or the Flower of Treasures, in which is succinctly and methodically handled the stone of the philosophers, his excellent effectes and admirable vertues; and, the better to attaine to the originall and true meanes of perfection, inriched with figures representing the proper colours to lyfe as they successively appere in the pratise of this blessed worke. By that great philosopher, Solomon Trismosin, Master to Paracelsus—a translation from the French. We have already observed Ashmole collecting a work by Trismosin, presumably from Backhouse’s library. He should have been in seventh heaven in the company of one such as Backhouse, the confluence of their mutual interests being so remarkable.

According to his Ephemerides, Hartlib inquired of William Petty concerning Backhouse.²⁴ This was the William Petty who frequented John Wilkins’s rooms at Wadham College, Oxford, between 1648 and 1651, at which meetings the core idea of the Royal Society was established (according to Sprat’s official history of the society).

Petty described Backhouse to Hartlib as “an Elixir man,” and it is difficult to tell whether this designation for an alchemist dedicated to finding the “Elixir of Life” had any pejorative meaning attached to it. One intuits here that Ashmole was not a member of the core group whose associations fostered the Royal Society but was of great interest to at least some of them.

One thing Ashmole certainly had in common with Samuel Hartlib and a number of his friends was an appreciation of those mythic, secret hiero-phants of alchemical transformation, the fantastic Fraternity of the Rosy Cross (see my book The Golden Builders for a thorough account).

Briefly, the Fraternity of the Rose Cross first appeared in manuscript c. 1610. A brilliant and profound satire, the work of Tübingen writer and theologian Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), the Fama Fraternitatis (the Fame of the Fraternity) promised the revelation of a new age of scientific and spiritual understanding based on the profoundest wisdom from the East. All this could become a reality, the Fama implied, should the wise of Europe awake to the need for cooperation, openness, and the highest spiritual virtue.

Illustration showing the mythic Collegium Fraternitatis—the House of the Holy Spirit—from Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum by Daniel Mögling (1618).

The first printed edition of the Fama Fraternitatis, Cassel, 1614.

J. V. Andreae (1586–1654), creator of the virtual Rose Cross Fraternity. Note the family coat of arms: a cross with four red roses.

The fraternity’s influence would blow away the old world of corruption and scientific incompetence once and for all; men would come together and share the discoveries that God, “the Father of Lights,” would reveal to them. Printed in 1614, the Fama appeared as a clarion call for every farsighted person of learning and Hermetic-Christian idealism to enter the ranks of the invisible fraternity—invisible, that is, to the blind eyes of the world.

Intended, it seems, as a “virtual fraternity”—membership was by consciousness only (the fraternity would “know” who was with and who against)—it also attracted a large number of cranks to the point that its author withdrew his support from the clamor. However, in England, the Rosicrucian furor arrived rather late, in dribs and drabs, in the form of the covert interest of Paracelsian scholars, physicians, and antiquarians. The Rosicrucian promise smoldered in fitful starts, encouraged by foreign visitors such as Comenius and the Pole Samuel Hartlib.

In Britain, the “Rosicrucian” excitement was channeled and restrained, but no less potent in the long term for that. British aficionados of the Rose Cross mythology tended to be of the view that the Rose Cross Brotherhood did in fact exist somewhere, somehow, across the Channel, though “good form” prevented one from daring to contact such an august body. Proper form was to associate oneself with its work by an inner commitment to spiritual magick or science. In Britain, the “virtual fraternity” concept worked very well, without much of the bitter aftertaste that afflicted the Continental movement.

Ashmole seems to have concerned himself quite a lot about trying to get authentic knowledge of the Rosicrucians, for it is from about this period that we also get a note, mostly written in cipher from Ash-mole’s Bodleian papers, offering this surprising snippet: “The Fratres RC : live about Strasburg : 7 miles from thence in a mon[a]st[e]ry.”²⁵ The name “Doctor Molton” is written in the margin of the manuscript, a little above the note, so one may think this snippet came from this (unknown) person. The top of the page is inscribed “Notes out of Dr. Child’s book.” Clearly Ashmole had not wasted his trip to Maidstone with “Doctor Child the Phisitian” in March 1651.

Ashmole almost certainly believed that the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross actually existed in some form or other. In the Bodleian Library’s Ashmole manuscript collection there exists, appended to a hand-written copy of the Fama Fraternitatis, a fervent petition to “the most illuminated Brothers of the Rose Cross” that he, Elias Ashmole, might be admitted to their fraternity.²⁶ The original English translation from which the copy of the Fama was taken lies elsewhere in Ashmole’s papers.²⁷ W. H. Black’s Catalogue of the Ashmole Manuscripts (1845) notes that the original was “written in an early 17th century hand … certainly not later than the reign of Charles I.”²⁸ The original copy of the Fama is different from that which Vaughan published (under the name Eugenius Philalethes) in 1652, and may have been in the possession of Backhouse.

The first English printed version of the Fama, translated by Thomas Vaughan (1652).

Professor Frances Yates believed Ashmole’s Latin address, headed Fratribus Rosae Crucis illuminatissimis, was an entirely private “pious exercise,” a kind of prayer. He was aware that the convention for approaching the fraternity was to understand that the Brothers of the Rose Cross could detect the true will of the aspirant without themselves seeing any written petition. Unfortunately, we do not know for sure the date of this petition, but it would seem to belong to the early 1650s, and it would be reasonable to suggest that Backhouse encouraged the petition.

Certainly by the time his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum was published in 1652, Ashmole was familiar with the contents of the Fama and those who encouraged it, such as Count Michael Maier (1568–1622).

On January 26, 1652, Ashmole recorded how “the first of my Theat: Chem: Brit: was sold to the Earle of Pembroke.”²⁹ Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, product of a brilliant research inquiry into the English alchemical tradition, claimed his experience of the field had never passed the stage of speculative inquiry. Spending so much time with Backhouse, he can hardly have been entirely without experience in the matter. It may be that he was trying to avoid violation of his privacy or an attack such as that organized through a mob against Dr. John Dee’s library while Dee was on the Continent (September 23, 1583).

Ashmole was fully aware of the treatment England afforded to her alchemists as a rule, and used a story from the Fama as an example in his Prolegomena:

Our English Philosophers generally, (like Prophets) have received little honour … in their owne Countrey : nor have they done any mighty workes amongst us, except in covertly administering their Medicine to a few sick, and healing them … Thus did I.O. (one of the first foure Fellowes of the Fratres R.C.) in curing the Earle of Norfolke of the Leprosie… . But in parts abroad they have found more noble Reception, and the world greedy of obteyning their workes; nay, (rather than want the sight thereof) contented to view them through a Translation, though never so imperfect. Witnesse what Maierus [Michael Maier] … and many others have done; the first of which came out of Germanie, to live in England; purposely that he might so understand our English Tongue, as to translate Norton’s Ordinall into Latin verse, which most judiciously and learnedly he did: Yet (to our shame be it spoken) his Entertainment was too coarse for so deserving a scholar.³⁰

Ashmole may have wanted to know whether John Dee—a man with whom he clearly identified—was a member of the fraternity. Shortly after the publication of the Theatrum, a Mr. Townesend wrote to Ashmole to inform him that Dee “is acknowledged for one of ye Brotherhood of ye R. CR by one of that Fraternity, who calleth himself Philip Zeiglerus, Francus.”³¹ Whether or not Ashmole considered this information credible is unknown. We can be fairly certain, however. Ziegler was a German nutcase who declared himself to be the “King of the Rosicrucians” in the 1620s.

Philipp Ziegler, Antinarnoldus et Antinagelius … o.O.,o.D., 1622 (Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam).

Ashmole was certainly fired up sufficiently to want to undertake an even deeper and more expansive study of the alchemical tradition. He hoped for a volume to succeed the Theatrum. However, as he would maintain in his preface to The Way to Bliss (1658), his studies thereto “received most unfortunate Interruptions, from the Commencement of several vexatious suits against me.” These came from Sir Humphrey Forster, Ashmole’s brother-in-law, and concerned the tenure of Bradfield. Ashmole had to withdraw himself to some extent from profundities, since “She” [Hermetic Philosophy, or Wisdom] requires “a serene Minde, quiet Thoughts, unwearied Endeavours, indeed the whole Man.”

Nevertheless, the studies continued. A month after selling his first copy of the Theatrum, he “began to learne Hebrew, of Rabby Solomon Frank.”³² Ashmole was clearly interested in the tradition of Jewish gnosis known as Kabbalah, or Cabala, or Qabalah (the Arabic spelling). The idea was that while Moses received an exoteric tradition on Sinai (the Law), he also received an esoteric tradition that was handed down by word-of-mouth and mind to mind. Hence the word kabbalah refers to that which has been received. Rabbi Solomon Frank was one of the earliest members of the Sephardic community in London that met at a synagogue in Creechurch Lane.

On March 10, Ashmole recorded how “This morning my Father Backhouse opened himselfe very freely, touching the great Secret.”³³ As if smelling something interesting going on, 11 a.m., June 14, 1652: “Doctor Wilkins and Mr Wren came to visit me at Blackfriars. This was the first tyme I saw the Doctor.”³⁴ Both men were active members of the core group that, according to Sprat’s official history, went on to form the Royal Society.

John Wilkins, DD (1614–72), warden of Wadham College and according to John Evelyn a collector of “artificial, mathematical and magical curiosities,” had previously been chaplain to Prince Rupert’s brother, Charles Louis, Prince Elector of the Palatine. The prince’s son, Charles, would become one of Ashmole’s greatest admirers.

The Sefer Yezirah or Book of Creation, a classic of Jewish gnosis. Sefer Yezirah id est Liber Iezirah qui Abrahamo Patriarchae adscribitur,… Trans. Joannes Stephanus Rittangelius (1606–52), Amsterdam, 1642.

Artis Kabbalisticae, sive Sapientiae divinae Academia; in novem classes amicissima cum brevitate, tum claritate digesta. Pierre Morestel (c. 1575–1658), Melchiorem Mondiere, Paris, 1621. (Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam)

Wilkins, in his Mathematical Magick (1648), based on Dee’s Mathematical Preface (1570), gives an example of “mathematical magick” in his reference to an underground lamp, comparing it to the lamp “seen in the sepulchre of Francis Rosicrosse, as is more largely expressed in the Confession of that Fraternity.” “Francis” is an error made presumably by misreading a manuscript copy of the Fama and Confession; he takes fra., meaning frater, as “Francis.”

“Mr. Wren” was of course Christopher Wren (1631–1723), whose chief interests were biology and optics. At this time, Wren was a fellow commoner of Wadham. Royalists Ashmole and Wren would enjoy years of mutual respect, sealed by their common interests in science and the Order of the Garter.

Ashmole’s reputation as a walking encyclopedia and man to be consulted and respected grew tremendously quickly after publication of the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. In 1653, Richard Sanders dedicated his book Physiognomie, And Chiromancie, Metoposcopie, The Symmetrical Proportions of Signal Moles of the Body &c. to “the Truly and Vertuously Noble Universally Learned Mycaenas (My Much Honoured Friend) Elias Ashmole Esquire.” The letter of dedication praises Ashmole as “a real mercurial Encyclopaedia.”

As veneration for mathematics was a central element of British Rosicrucian interest and of burgeoning scientific enthusiasm, it is noteworthy to reproduce a poem on Numbers, written by Ashmole in 1653 and sent to “my vallued Friend Mr : Noah Bridges”:

And by Materiall Things, still upward rise / To th’height of Immateriallities. On May 13, 1653, Ashmole at last became privy to the “Great Secret”: “My father Backhouse lying sick in Fleetestreete over against St: Dunstans Church, and not knowing whether he should live or dye, about eleven a clock, told me in Silables the True Matter of the Philosophers Stone : which he bequeathed to me as a Legacy.”³⁶

A clue to understanding what Ashmole meant when he referred to “silables” may be obtained from consulting an anonymous seventeenth-or early-eighteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.³⁷ A chapter titled “Sillabes Chimiques” concerns certain syllables derived from seven hieroglyphic signs placed at the start of the chapter to form “un mot significatif ou un caractère universel.” And that, dear reader, is about the only clue available; Ashmole never revealed, so far as we know, the Great Secret. Though I should say, if the aim was to transform not the metal but the man, then the secret may be discerned in Ashmole’s wonderful life, should one’s eyes be opened to it.

We have had cause to refer to the attention shown by Samuel Hartlib in William Backhouse. Hartlib, a synthesizer of Rosicrucian scientific interest, followed Ashmole’s emergence with enthusiasm. Ashmole and Hartlib appear to have first corresponded in about 1656. In reply to an inquiry into his current activities, Ashmole stressed the antiquarian side of his engagements. He informed Hartlib of his plans to execute an antiquarian work on Lichfield and Coventry for a book by his friend William Dugdale (1605–86).

Sir William Dugdale of Blyth Hall, Warwickshire, as depicted on the frontispiece of his Antiquities of Warwickshire.

Dugdale, of Blyth Hall, Warwickshire, would eventually produce the classic two-volume Antiquities of that county. He would become a close friend of Ashmole and, eventually, his father-in-law. Research notes for the Lichfield and Coventry project abound in Ashmole’s papers, but as with a number of his ambitious projects, the task was never completed.

Further evidence of Hartlib’s interest both in Ashmole’s literary activities and in the Rosicrucians comes from his letter of July 20, 1659, to Dr. John Worthington, DD (1618–71), master of Jesus College, Cambridge: “I hear that Mr Ashmole hath published the orders of the Rosie Crucians & Adepti. Can you tell me what esteem it bears?” Perhaps Hartlib was confusing Ashmole’s alchemical work of the previous year, The Way to Bliss, with the anonymous 1656 English translation of Michael Maier’s Themis Aurea. Maier’s version of the rules and regulations of the Rose Cross Fraternity, published originally in Frankfurt in 1618, was abstracted from the Fama and Confessio, the first two so-called Rosicrucian Manifestos.

English translation of Michael Maier’s Themis Aurea, 1656.

The translation was probably the work of Nathaniel and Thomas Hodges (only initials appear in the text—a common convention in alchemical and particularly Rosicrucian material). The Laws of the Fraternitie R:C: was dedicated to Ashmole, described not only as “The onely Philosopher in the present age, but as a Golden Candlestick for the holding forth of that Lucerna Dei [lamp of God] to the sons of men by the light whereof the most reclused Mysteries, both naturall and divine, may in some measure … be discovered.” This is high praise indeed and one wonders whether it had been earned purely on the grounds of his having published the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum in 1652.

One suspects that there was at least one group of Rosicrucian-enthusiasts somewhere who had somehow latched onto Ashmole as a candidate for bringing the Rosicrucian wisdom to light, and that others who had a more settled interest in the Rosicrucian Manifestos (such as Hartlib) were wondering what was going on.

Timothy and John Gadbury’s Astronomicall Tables First invented by George Hartgill was also addressed to Elias Ashmole, commending him in a phrase redolent of Free Masonry “to the safeguard of the Great Architect of Heaven and Earth.”³⁸ It is extremely interesting that John Gadbury takes this opportunity to admonish Ashmole from the “taint” of Rosicrucianism. Clearly somebody was attacking Ashmole for his magical pursuits—or getting too close to them.

According to John Gadbury, Anthony Wood, a friendly correspondent with Ashmole in his latter years, said after his death that Ashmole was “accounted a great Rosy Crucian.”³⁹ If this was said, and it probably was during his lifetime, Ashmole would surely have been embarrassed to say the least. He may have put it about his contacts that he was nothing of the sort, attempting to deflect any thought of contact between himself and the fraternity. Gadbury also wrote, “[N]o man was further from fost’ring such Follies.” By the time of Ashmole’s death, the word had long since acquired connotations of religious anarchy and general subversive battiness. It was used in this sense in Samuel Butler’s (1612–80) popular Hudibras, written in 1662 after the Restoration, to damn the thinking behind Cromwell’s government.

Ashmole never claimed to be a Rosicrucian. Perhaps Gadbury was to keep Ashmole’s reputation clear of the kind of exploitative pseudo-Rosicrucianism that had been in vogue in Germany up to the late 1620s. Furthermore, the Jesuits had consistently held that Rosicrucians were in truth witches out to subvert the planetary order, and this kind of scare may have been prevalent in England at the time.

C. H. Josten makes the point that Ashmole must have been skeptical about the Rosicrucians, and offers a cipher note on Robert Fludd’s apology for the Rose Cross, Summum Bonum (1629), as evidence for this.⁴⁰ All Ashmole says is, “Robt. Flud in his apology for the Brethren of the Rosie Cross hath gone very far herein,” which is not particularly conclusive.

The truth seems to be that Ashmole, bemused by the whole subject, could not deny his spiritual identification with the aims of the fraternity as set out in the Fama but could find no hard evidence for its actuality—and Ashmole liked his evidence. Nevertheless, he knew that the kind of studies he was pursuing was in tune with the outlook of the Fama and in that sense he doubtless felt some kind of inner kinship. He may have asked himself at some stage about his own motivations and wondered if he was not himself guided by an unseen hand. He would also have discerned from the Fama’s contents that with regard to membership of the order it was a working principle that “those who know, do not say.”

Ashmole may even have thought that the brotherhood’s activities had hardly begun, and may have imagined that there was yet a place for him, if indeed he was not already a movement catalyst. In 1652 he had predicted that a “fiery trigon” of Saturn and Jupiter in 1663 would see the appearance of the “more pregnant and famous philosophers”—and in the jargon of the time, philosopher (lover of wisdom) could mean anything in the fields of natural science, theology, alchemy, and magick. It was certainly a designation he was happy to apply to the Fraternity of the Rose Cross in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, published in the same year as his prediction. The “famous philosophers” would “Illustrate, Enlarge & Refine the Arts like the tried Gold.” ⁴¹

The reference to “tried Gold” finds Ashmole moving in the same prophetic waters as inspired the first Rosicrucian manifestos in the first place—namely, the second book of Esdras: “Then shall they be known, my chosen, and they shall be tried as the gold in the fire.”

The real problem at the heart of the issue of Ashmole’s relationship to the imaginary Rose Cross Fraternity is that the word Rosicrucian had, by at least the end of the 1650s, come to have two widely divergent meanings. There were inner and outer meanings to the term. There was one meaning for enthusiasts of the esoteric ideal and quite another for those who saw the word as a general adjective for untrammeled popular idealism and fake magick. This situation mirrored to some extent what had already taken place on the Continent some forty years earlier.

For example, in the Restoration comedy Characters by Samuel Butler, we hear how “the Brethren of the Rosy Cross” “bring all Things into Confusion, which among them is the greatest Order.” Butler identified Cromwell’s now defunct government with that of the Brethren, identifying Rosicrucians with Republicanism. Butler used the word in a similar style to that of today when opponents of the government refer to the “loony left.” He was saying that the government had been hijacked by a cabal of foolish, devilish, utopian “enthusiasts”: wild “new age travellers” squatting in the heart of government, dictating policy. This is all very much in the line of Meric Casaubon’s massive attack on John Dee and the “illuminati.”

In 1659, Casaubon published juicy details of John Dee’s angelic communications that had taken place in the 1580s, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His Strange Relation of what passed for some years between Dr John Dee and some spirits passed through Britain like a satanic enema. Dr. Dee and his alchemical caravan of magi had uncorked the bottle. The crazy genii had been set free. Thus, the Civil War was a result of untrameled “enthusiasm”—a breakdown of order led by those arrogant and quixotic enough to suppose themselves masters of a new one.

In Butler’s Hudibras, Hudibras (a Presbyterian) and Ralpho (an Independent) set out to reform society. An astrologer, “Sidrophel the Rosy-crucian,” is consulted—a possible swipe at Ashmole’s friend, the parliamentarian astrologer, William Lilly.

Well, certainly Ashmole was, as Gadbury maintained, as far “from fostr’ing such follies” as could be imagined. Rosicrucian in the 1650s was becoming a philosophical brand name; fratres R.C. was perhaps the first occult logo. Witness John Heydon’s sometimes ludicrous popularizations, The Wise Man’s Crown, his Holy Guide (based on New Atlantis, 1662), A Rosie Crucian Physick, and Voyage to the land of the Rosicrucians. The word Rosicrucian had become a lick-yer-lips, never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-magic, unique selling point to the quick-on-the-buck publisher. Real sympathizers knew better than to parade the name about on cure-all self-healing recipe rags.

By way of contrast, Ashmole finished writing the preface to The Way to Bliss on April 16, 1658. He received the text of this anonymous alchemical work from William Backhouse. The publication also included suspected heretic Doctor Everard’s transcript and notes. John Everard, DD (1575?-1650?), made the first printed English translation of The Divine Pymander, published in 1650. The Pymander contained the first four books of the Corpus Hermeticum, anciently attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. This was a key text in the 1650s Hermetic book blitz.

The purpose of The Way to Bliss was, Ashmole declared, nothing less than “to prove the Possibility of such a thing as the PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.” In spite of the evident ambition revealed in its preface, the book landed Ashmole in yet more controversy, as is frequently the case with genuinely occult publications.

John Heydon (b. 1629) was a doctor who claimed to have had unique access to the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, counting himself among its number and publishing popularized versions of what he considered its secrets: a hodgepodge of Paracelsian-style homebrews. Ashmole considered him “an Ignoramus and a Cheate.” Heydon called himself, after Vaughan perhaps, Eugenius Theodidactus (the noble or well-born teacher of God).

Ashmole asserted that The Way to Bliss was used to make Heydon’s two works, The Wise Man’s Crown and the Rosie-Crucian Physick, and that in so doing Heydon had “nefariously robb’d and despoiled” the honor of the anonymous author. Keen to have the last word—sales depended on it—John Heydon replied to Ashmole in the preface to The Idea of the Law, alleging that it was his “three first books” that were by “Elias Ashmole Esq. made publick, imperfect and rudely Deficient, calling it The way to bliss: In my true copy of which there are four books, all wearing the same title, except the last, which is called, The Rosie Crucian Axiomata … ” This item appeared shortly after The Idea of the Law in London in 1660.

In case anyone missed the point that he was offended by Ashmole’s accusation, Heydon warned “all Learned men [was he thinking of men like Wilkins, Petty, and Hartlib, who were considering Ashmole for one of their number?] to take heed of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, published by Elias Ashmole Esq, and such kind of books as these; for the enemy never resteth, but soweth his weeds till a stronger one doth root it out.”⁴²

A casual reading of Heydon’s works (which were to include in 1660 and 1662, respectively, The Voyage to the Land of the Rosicrucians— which linked Bacon’s New Atlantis to the Fraternity R. C.—and The Holy Guide) does nothing to enhance a reputation made by himself.

The 1650s were a sad, mad, bad, and crazy decade—for Ashmole as for many others. Yet they were also a period of intense spiritual searching and profound research in which a number of key figures took divine angler Izaak Walton’s advice to their hearts: Resist all temptation to join the clamor and confusion; contemplate the waters, see how they pass and take all before them. Go fishing.