Solomon's Secret Arts (44 page)

Roach devoted special attention to “the Divine Sophia or Wisdom,” explaining it as “the Bridal or
Virgin
Nature in God,” a kind of female version of the godhead, such as was postulated in Kabbalism.
⁸³
The exaltation of female
spirituality in Roach's published writings goes beyond the Behmenist theory of androgyny and reveals a remarkable sensitivity to female visionary experience. Perhaps the most unusual feature of
The Imperial Standard
, however, was the index, in which Roach defined the terms of Philadelphian philosophy. They included many alchemical expressions such as “Grand Arcanum” and “The Great Secret of the Chymical Philosopher for Transmutation or changing of grosser Metals into Gold, and for Universal Medicine.” Jacob Boehme's Theosophy was discussed as relating “to the First Cause of all Things and its Act upon … both the Invisible and Visible Creation.” One of the longest discussions was reserved for “
Magia
” in its natural, diabolical and divine forms. “
Natural Magic
… perform'd by the Agency of Middle Spirits residing in, or Regent of the Air or Elements,” was no more lawful than the “Operation of Wicked and Infernal Spirits,” or “
Diabolical Magic
,” according to Roach. On the other hand, he fully endorsed “Divine Magia … the Operation of God Himself by the agency of his Holy Spirit.”
⁸⁴
The message of the French Prophets blares forth in this last statement.

When Richard Roach died in August 1730, the Prophets were still active. Their last Prophetess, Hannah Wharton, made tours of London in 1730 and of Birmingham and Worcester in 1732, where she spoke in the voice of the Holy Spirit to audiences that included Nicolas Fatio and Francis Moult. The endless torrent of inspired words that fell from her mouth comprised, as she put it, “the Privileges of Wisdom to manifest the Liberty which is a Liberty from the Word, for the Word is in it and so the Liberty of the Word is the Liberty the Chosen are in.”
⁸⁵
It was a public exultation of the self as divine. This may be why it so disturbed John Wesley. At London in 1739, he visited a French Prophetess, a young woman of about twenty-five, who spoke for about ten minutes “as in the person of God, and mostly in Scripture words,” while her whole body went into “convulsive motion.” Wesley thought she must be “either hysterical or artificial.” Later in the same year, he condemned the French Prophets in a sermon.
⁸⁶
Some of Wesley's own Methodist listeners, of course, would undergo similar convulsions while hearing him preach. He never fully approved of this, but its persistence illustrates a significant consequence of the emotionally expressive, spontaneous mystical effusions of the early eighteenth century. Because the Prophets had led the way, the evangelical revival would be marked by a popular belief in spirits, and would never be fully under the control of the preachers.

Among the educated elite, it was not Wesley and his associates who most eagerly upheld the spiritual inheritance of the French Prophets: rather, it was a medical man. The celebrated Dr George Cheyne was sympathetic to mysticism in all its forms, and strove to reconcile its spiritual attractions with a contemporary understanding of physiology. The result was a powerful if not
always coherent combination of Newtonian science, Lockean philosophy and occult thought, a “natural supernaturalism.” Cheyne grew up among the Aberdonian mystics, and remained in close contact with them after moving to England, but he was less staid or traditional than they were. James Cunningham, the ill-fated Scottish prophet, confided spiritual secrets to him.
⁸⁷
Cheyne was educated in medicine at Edinburgh University under the Newtonian Archibald Pitcairne, a man described as a Jacobite, deist and believer in apparitions, who claimed to have been informed in a vision of the time of his own death.
⁸⁸
Given this background, Cheyne's interest in spirits is hardly surprising.

Cheyne's
Philosophical Principles of Religion: Natural and Revealed
was first published in 1705. After the rise and fall of the French Prophets, it was substantially revised and reissued. Virtually ignored by the intellectual establishment, the book was popular enough to go through a number of different editions. Its purpose was to apply Newtonian principles to the operations of the mind, including religious sentiments. Cheyne pompously organized the treatise into
Lemmatas
, Propositions, Corollaries and
Scholia
, just like Newton's
Principia Mathematica
. In the first part, which dealt with the body, Cheyne equated the term “Spirit” with “the nervous Juice,” carried along through the arteries with the blood and into the muscles. The mind acts on these “Animal Spirits” to bring about voluntary motion, while involuntary motion is created by “Mechanical Necessity.”
⁸⁹
While he did not discuss the French Prophets directly, Cheyne's theory might be used to explain their agitated convulsions as the action of a stronger spirit on a lesser one. In the second part, Cheyne defines “Spirit” as “an extended, penetrable, active, indivisible, intelligent Substance,” sharing nothing with Body, or matter, except extension. “The
Principle
of Action in Spiritual Subsistences,” Cheyne continues, “is, or ought to be, that essential one of REUNION with the
Origin
of their Being, impress'd on ev'ry Individual of this Rank of Creatures.”
⁹⁰
All Spirits, in other words, are aspects of the Supreme Spirit, towards which they move continually, hindered only by the existence of Body. Thus, the mystic's goal of union with God is inherent in the Newtonian law of attraction, by which the whole universe moves.

Cheyne's
magnum opus
was reviled by the Newtonians, casting him into depression and overeating. The immense reputation that he enjoyed among the British public in the 1720s and 1730s rested, not on his philosophy, but on his writings about his dietary regime, by which he succeeded in reducing his own gargantuan bulk to manageable size. These works were informed by his theory of spirits, although of course one did not have to be a mystic to appreciate them. What was not generally recognized was the extent to which the famous diet-doctor justified mystical union as a force of nature. Cheyne provided mystics with physiological arguments that few of them had been willing to
think through for themselves. He linked religious experience with nervous impulses, unfocused sentiments and unconscious desires—in short, with what would later become the science of psychology.

Rediscovering Boehme: Byrom and Law

Ensconced in fashionable Bath, Dr Cheyne knew everybody who was anybody, or so it seemed. Late in 1741, he wrote a letter to a poet and master of shorthand, John Byrom of Manchester, whose character had been praised by his friend Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. Cheyne wanted to ask Byrom's opinion concerning a recent work by a French follower of Madame Guyon and Jacob Boehme, Charles Hector de St George Marsay. The diet-doctor also attempted, without success, to solicit a further opinion on Marsay from Byrom's close friend the Reverend William Law. Cheyne admitted that Marsay's “discoveries about the states and glory of the invisible world and the future purification of lapsed intelligences, human and angelical,” caused him some intellectual difficulties. Nevertheless, he continued to praise “this wonderful author,” whose works he had recommended to his close friend Dr David Hartley, the bearer of Cheyne's second letter to Byrom.
⁹¹

In this correspondence we catch a glimpse of the nerve centre of English mysticism in the mid-eighteenth century. All the main players are here: the celebrated Dr Cheyne, promoter of mental health and vegetarian diets; the brilliant David Hartley, whose later writings on mind and sensation would surpass in fame Cheyne's own work; and the two Nonjurors John Byrom and William Law, the first of them a spiritual seeker, the second already known as the caustic opponent of dry religious rationalism. Add to them the energetic countess of Huntingdon, not a mystic herself but friendly towards them, and later to give her name to a denomination of Methodists. All of these men and women appeared to be well connected, prosperous and influential members of the social elite. We have come a long way from the French Prophets.

Yet the marginality of the mystics persisted into the mid-eighteenth century. Cheyne was famous but worried that his spiritual cravings were not quite respectable. The Methodist countess was an outsider in aristocratic circles. Hartley, who had reservations about the Thirty-Nine Articles, took up medicine because he could not become a clergyman.
⁹²
Byrom and Law refused to recognize the Hanoverians as lawful monarchs, which made them ineligible for any office in Church or State. Byrom was actually removed from the governing body of the Royal Society in 1727 when he opposed an address to George II.
⁹³
Law lost a fellowship at Cambridge in 1713 for making a public speech that was interpreted as rank Jacobitism—at that point, even Byrom thought him “a vain,
conceited fellow.”
⁹⁴
These men and women were not among the favoured few of Whig society, which may be why they were less reluctant to delve into the occult philosophies of the past.

The learned mystics were forerunners of a major cultural shift, away from the scientific rationalism of the Newtonians, towards a revaluation of feeling, sentiment and emotion. Among its other precursors was John Hutchinson, a former estate steward, fossil collector and self-educated “natural philosopher,” who began publishing attacks on Newtonianism in the 1720s. In
Moses's Principia
, Hutchinson used the favourite alchemical trope of the spirit of God moving on the waters to explain the origin of “an invisible, penetrating, powerful, created Agent, which he [God] stiles Spirit.” According to Hutchinson, the natural world was sustained by Spirit, not by gravity. Moreover, the original Hebrew language was informed by Spirit, “and so conveyed perfect Ideas of the Things by the Words.”
⁹⁵
In the 1730s, Hutchinson began to identify the Hebrew letters with angels or cherubim, who actually inhabited the original, unaccented script. Modern Jews, however, were “Apostates” who had polluted their religion with concepts of natural magic, and their language with accent marks (which served as vowels). Hutchinson's own writings are so poorly composed as to be almost indecipherable. Both Stukeley and Warburton, who detested his rambling notions, called them “Cabalistic.”
⁹⁶
Nonetheless, “Hutchinsonianism” eventually came to describe critics of rationalism in the Church of England, who subscribed to Hutchinson's elevation of Spirit, even if they rarely noticed the angels staring out at them from the pages of the Hebrew Bible.

Hutchinson viewed nature through an occult lens that recognized spirits as active in the physical world. The separation between natural and supernatural virtually disappears. This became a distinctive feature of English mystical thought in the mid-eighteenth century. While ordinary people, like the French Prophets, might experience a sudden, inexplicable possession by spirits, the clergymen and doctors who kept mysticism alive in the mid-eighteenth century sought to promote spiritual regeneration by examining the operations of spirit in nature. Like the Newtonians, they appropriated aspects of occult thinking, although they did not openly recommend occult practices. John Byrom and William Law were the most important figures in this learned mysticism. Law was never at ease with the role. He criticized Madame Bourignon as “peevish” and “fretful,” opined that Madame Guyon was “more prudent than Mrs. Bourignon, yet [got] carried away,” and complained “that the Philadelphians, Dr. Lee, &c., were strange people.”
⁹⁷
On the other hand, his friend Byrom, who was not ordained, was seldom able to restrain himself from embracing “the wonderful.” He had a boundless appetite for spiritual experience of all varieties, as well as for occult philosophy.

Byrom's taste for the occult can be judged by the catalogue of books in his library. Even if we do not know exactly
how
he read them, they present a clear picture of his interests. As might be expected, he had many works by Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon and Jacob Boehme, as well as Pordage's
Theologia Mystica
and Roach's
Imperial Standard
. He was an equally voracious reader of magical works. Chetham's Library in Manchester contains a sixteenth-century
Tractatus de Nigromatia
or treatise on necromancy that once belonged to him. It includes pentacles, Chaldean scripts and invocations to the “Queen of the Pharies.” Byrom owned works both by and belonging to John Dee, which betokens an extraordinary interest in the Elizabethan magus. On the other hand, he purchased Balthasar Bekker's
The World Bewitched
as early as 1722, so he would have been aware of the objections to occult thinking, even if he disagreed with them.
⁹⁸
Perhaps the most striking aspect of his collection from an occult point of view is the considerable number of works relating to alchemy, among them the
Divine Pimander
, Ashmole's
Way to Bliss
, the works of Roger Bacon and Paracelsus, a tract by Sendivogius and a number of German works on the Hermetic art. Alongside
Magia Adamica
and the
Man-Mouse
, the catalogue lists two copies of Thomas Vaughan's edition of the
Fama et Confessio
of the Rosicrucians. Some of the books are annotated, and Byrom's copy of Artephius's
Secret Booke of the Blessed Stone
, in the testy words of the catalogue editor, is “crowded with cabalistic figures and observations in the numeric writing of some devotee of the Rosy Cross.”
⁹⁹

Byrom's journals, which he wrote in a shorthand of his own devising, mainly during his regular sojourns in London, give us further clues to his attitudes. They frequently refer to meetings of the “Cabala Club,” a group that Byrom attended from 1723, the year before his election to the Royal Society, until around 1730. It met at the Sun tavern in St Paul's Churchyard, and later at the King's Head in Holborn. The members included Martin Ffolkes, who introduced Byrom to the club, Sir Hans Sloane, George Graham, clockmaker and inventor of the mercury pendulum, and Benjamin Hoadly, physician, playwright and son to a Whig bishop. All were Fellows of the Royal Society, which Sloane and Ffolkes served as successive presidents. Aside from topics of the day like education or the unlawfulness of the theatre (on which Law had written a pamphlet), the Cabala Club discussed “the art of memory,” “petrified towns in Muscovy,” and “the miracles which Moses wrought in Egypt, and how the magicians could do the like,” suggesting that this illustrious assembly was a forum for subjects not usually discussed in the Royal Society, some of them having occult significance.
¹⁰⁰
Ffolkes, a close friend of Stukeley, was grand master of a lodge of Freemasons that met upstairs at the Sun tavern. When Sloane offered to take Byrom to it, the latter-replied, “I said I would, and come
back if there was anything I did not like, and then he bid me sit down.” By 1730, however, the name of “Mr. John Byram” appears in a list of members of the Swan tavern lodge in Long Acre.
¹⁰¹