Solomon's Secret Arts (18 page)

The Amateur: Samuel Jeake of Rye

The field of astrology was dominated by professionals concentrated in the English capital. The exceptions included the Scottish almanac-makers and the Wing family, who lived at North Luffenham and later Pickworth in Rutland. The anonymous compilers of the Cambridge almanacs probably resided in East Anglia, where the relatively flat terrain made it easier to observe the stars. Sir George Wharton worked at Oxford in the 1640s, and later lived at Enfield in Middlesex. Because of the importance of electional astrology to overseas merchants and sea captains, who had to choose propitious dates to set sail on voyages, it is likely that professional astrologers could also be found in seaports like Bristol and Plymouth.

Unlike alchemy, however, astrology was not a widespread amateur pursuit or hobby. The reasons for this are not hard to grasp. To calculate the actual movements of stars and planets demanded a high level of mathematical expertise. To draw up and interpret charts based on published information was easier—one could use a variety of ephemerides as well as the instructions on chart-making found in Lilly's
Christian Astrology
—but it remained a difficult, time-consuming and potentially rather dull exercise. As a result, few amateurs attempted it, and those who did often had professional reasons for doing so. They included doctors like Joseph Blagrave, who specialized in astrological diagnoses, and sea captains like Jeremy Roche. The latter was an officer of the Royal Navy who drew up elections for the ships on which he sailed, inserting them in journals of his voyages from 1665 to 1692. A devotee of John Gadbury, Roche helpfully appended to his first journal a section on drawing up elections. With surprising candour, he admitted that he could not “absolutely affirm” their veracity, since “I can produce not many experiments to prove it.” Nevertheless, he sought to demonstrate that “all actions, designs and affairs” relating to his naval adventures were “attended or followed with successes suitable to such influences as the configuration of the Heavens and aspects of the Stars and Planets did then dispense.”
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He obviously wanted others to read his observations, which were beautifully illustrated with charts and charming drawings.

Among those who practised astrology purely for their own edification or pleasure during the Restoration period, two figures are very well known: Elias Ashmole and Samuel Jeake the younger. The publication of Ashmole's autobiographical writings and of Jeake's diary, however, may have obscured
how exceptional these two men were as serious astrological hobbyists. While they were certainly not unique, their remarkable devotion to the astral art set them apart, as did their burning desire to make their hobby both credible and respectable. They had certain traits in common. Both were men of the middling sort whose origins lay in provincial towns: Lichfield in Staffordshire and Rye in Sussex, respectively. Neither was born into the intellectual establishment, although Ashmole gradually worked his way into it. Proximity to the booksellers of the capital was important to both of them, as they depended on printed sources of astrological knowledge. Both felt personally oppressed by the political tumults and religious upheavals of their times; both sought to understand what was happening to them and their country through the stars. The restless ambition of the Oxford lawyer was matched in many ways by the indefatigable enterprise of the Rye merchant.

In other important ways, however, they were very different. Ashmole was a royalist and Anglican whose cultivation of status and respectability masked a passion to uncover the secrets of ritual magic. Like his hero William Lilly, he was obsessed with horary predictions. Jeake was a republican and Nonconformist who had no yearning for social success. He seems never to have drawn up horary charts, restricting himself to natural astrology, genitures and elections. If Ashmole looked back to the golden age of astrology in the first half of the seventeenth century, Jeake wanted to rethink the art. Sharing the scientific views of Whig astrologers like John Partridge, he tested astrology by controlled experiments, but remained an entrenched opponent of the Copernican system. The most important difference between Ashmole and Jeake, however, may have been in their relationship to their fathers. Ashmole's was a saddler by trade, who, according to his son, “through ill Husbandry, became a great Enimy to himselfe, and poor Family.”
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His son acknowledged no debt to him. Jeake's father, by contrast, was an admired patriarch and the chief influence on his life. To some extent, astrology was a way for the younger Jeake to justify the opinions of his beloved sire, a man who embodied the radical sectarianism of the Commonwealth period.

Samuel Jeake the elder was a Rye lawyer, accomplished mathematician, historian of the Cinque Ports and ardent puritan. He also served as town clerk of Rye until the Restoration, when he resigned rather than serve under the new monarch. He then became the leader of a congregation of religious Dissenters.
⁹³
Following the advice of one of his own sermons, that “the Saints must remove their stations from the Tents of ungodly men,” Jeake senior had no further involvement in town government for the next thirty years, until his death in 1690.
⁹⁴
His religion was an eclectic mixture, combining anti-Catholicism with the fierce independence of an Anabaptist and an emphasis on personal
revelation that verged on Quakerism. A voracious reader, the elder Jeake aquired and catalogued a remarkable library of more than two thousand volumes later inherited by his son. It included four works by Paracelsus, ten volumes of Nicholas Culpeper's astrological and medical writings, Elias Ashmole's edition of
Collectanea Chymica
, Robert Fludd's
Mosaic Philosophy
, four volumes by John Gadbury, two tracts by Christopher Heydon and three by William Lilly, among many others that dealt with alchemical or astrological subjects.
⁹⁵
The collection was largely purchased through London booksellers, among them Obadiah Blagrave, the leading publisher of expensive astrological treatises.
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Evidently, Jeake the elder was well versed in the occult philosophies of the period, although his voluminous correspondence provides few direct clues as to how he reconciled them with his religious views. The younger Jeake was educated by his father to pursue both a public business career and a life of private study. From an early age, he was heavily influenced by the supernatural. He remembered hearing about a “Prodigy,” a vision of Jesus Christ becoming king, in 1663, at the age of eleven. Although he was not sure whether it was true or false, it “was the first occasion of my Conversion, & serious thoughts about my future condition.”
⁹⁷
By the age of fourteen, he had read a number of books on medicine and natural history, as well as Agrippa's
De Occulta Philosophia
.
⁹⁸
This last work does not appear in his father's library catalogue, but it has to be assumed that Jeake senior knew and approved of his teenage son's exposure to this notorious text. What effect it had on the young man is difficult to say. He did not mention it in the list of books that he had read by the age of fifteen, and his understanding of astrology does not seem to have been influenced by Agrippa's obsession with the role of spirits. Still, the younger Jeake remained a believer in the everyday power of supernatural forces that were not strictly biblical. For example, he recorded in his diary an incident that took place in June 1671, when two bed-staffs seemed to shift position during the night due to “the ridiculous and trifling actions of some of the meanest rank among the Infernal Spirits.”
⁹⁹

Soon after his first reading of Agrippa, Jeake's father began to instruct him in the study of the heavens. The “astrological diary” that the younger Jeake drew up later in life notes the following for 25 June 1667: “About noon I began to learn Astrology.”
¹⁰⁰
In the summer of 1670, he drew up more than 150 nativities. Most of them were for his friends and neighbours in Rye, although some bore the names of the children of royalty, among then the duke of Monmouth.
¹⁰¹
These were exercises to make him more proficient in the astrological art. At the same time, Jeake junior was engaged in writing a treatise on astrology entitled
Diaposon: The Harmony of the Signes of Heaven
. Its
frontispiece was a “Hieroglyphick” depicting his own descent from the symbols of Jupiter and Venus, which he associated with his father and mother. It also included his own nativity and the horoscope for the moment of his conception, an odd subject for a teenager to contemplate.
¹⁰²
Evidently, astrology provided the younger Jeake with a language by which to define and express his personal identity, especially his devotion to his father. His past, present and future were, in a sense, contained in a bundle of astral signs, which his god-like father had taught him how to read.

The politics of Rye in the late 1670s and early 1680s placed the Jeakes at the centre of a bitter and furious factional confrontation. The national struggle between Whigs and Tories was played out in the small town as a battle between radical Dissenters and moderates for control of the corporation. The Jeakes were the spiritual leaders of the radical party, although they were careful not to present themselves as its political standard-bearers.
¹⁰³
In the end, the radicals lost, and loyal adherents of the Church of England began to harass, fine and imprison Dissenters. The elder Jeake was obliged to leave Rye for London late in 1682, where he remained until the summer of 1687. His son later recalled a dream that he had had around November 1678, at the beginning of these events, in which his future troubles may have been foretold. He had seen a pale sun surrounded by “horsemen & their horses, all in Confusion; tramping upon one another; some riding, some overthrown.” Around them were the twelve signs of the zodiac, “all perfect only that of Pisces defective.” In interpreting this dream, Jeake emphasized its personal connotations, giving himself a central position: “I was signified by the Sun because he was Lord of the ascendant in my Nativity.” The paleness of the sun “portended that I should never be in any Place of Honor or Authority over others.” The horsemen were his enemies, seeking to destroy him, while the defective sign of Pisces was his father, who “should receive some prejudice & be partly separated from me; but not totally, nor for ever.”
¹⁰⁴

Jeake's reading of this dream in personal rather than political terms was not due to concern over possible repercussions, as he was writing in the 1690s, after his enemies had been overthrown in the Glorious Revolution. Rather, it reflects his constant tendency to relate astrology to his inner self—a self that was highly restrained, rather depressive and apparently lacking in emotional outlets. He was by his own account prone to bouts of “excessive Melancholy,” which made him “pass some whole nights without sleep.”
¹⁰⁵
His conversations with himself through astrology were ways of coming to terms with his emotions as well as the events of his life. His father was always an important part of these conversations; his mother played a very minor role. As for the younger Jeake's wife, Elizabeth Hartshorne, whom he married in 1680 when she was just thirteen years old, she barely figured at all in his astrological musings.

As he matured, Jeake may have begun to harbour feelings of competitiveness with his father. Above all, he wanted to vindicate the art of astrology in terms that his father would not have recognized: namely, as an experimental science. Following his father's return to Rye, Jeake began an ambitious attempt to achieve this goal. For a full year, from 5 July 1687 to 5 July 1688, he kept daily notes on every significant occurrence in his life, from King James II's alteration of corporations to allow “the putting in of Whigs & dissenters,” to attacks of melancholy “by reason of the disappointments about wooll,” to his being “stung under the left knee with an Humble bee.” His stated purpose was to vindicate astrology from the accusation that “her Prognostiques are not deprehended [
sic
] to have equal Certitude with those of other Arts.” He therefore set out to examine “a Large Exemplification of such Experimental impressions, as being formed by their genuine Astral causes.” In his role as “Experimenter,” he was to “deveste himselfe entirely of all his prejudices & prepossessions; either in specificating the Effects of Directions, or in imagining great Successes in his proper Themes.” He must renounce both “Tradition” and “a passionate & inordinate self Love; whereby all things are drawn violently to signify such preconceptions as the mind had fancied to it self.” After all, a self-interested mind, “failing of her desired effect, becomes fill'd at last with a continued Scepticism, if not a total renunciation of the credit of every Aphorism.”
¹⁰⁶

The denial of self-interest is particularly interesting, since the main object of Jeake's astrology was to know himself better. His treatise begins, somewhat paradoxically, with a list of facts about himself entitled “The Native's Condition at the Revolution.” It includes an admission that his “Complexion” was “Choleric Melancholy.” His friends, who presumably comprised the readers of the treatise, were “few, but firme,” while his enemies included “The Magistrates of the Place, Customehouse officers, & Debauchees.” He mentions his father and his mother-in-law, his wife, one child and two servants as the members of his family, but nothing more is said about them. Once we have met the man, we are introduced to his method. Jeake explains that, in calculating the daily directions of ascendant planets, he will employ the theories of the French astrologer Jean-Baptiste Morin, as laid out in
Astrologia Gallica
(1661).
¹⁰⁷
In short, this was not to be his father's astrology. On the contrary, his treatise would propound to its readers a new, experimental philosophy, worthy of the name science and equal to any in certitude.