Solomon's Secret Arts (28 page)

William Salmon was a brilliant publicist, but not much of a philosopher. In the alchemical field, expanding commercial potential tended to drive out ideas, particularly the occult philosophy that had been the foundation of alchemical writing in the late seventeenth century. It would be an oversimplification, of course, to suggest that the trade in medicines replaced speculative thinking, but it certainly redirected the focus of alchemical writings. One writer, using the pseudonym “Eyranaeus Philoctetes,” urged the public teaching of alchemy for the benefit of medicine. “Who would it
serve
, and what would it
merit
?” “Philoctetes” asked rhetorically, “If the
production
of their
Red Land
, and
Reduction
into Potability were
familiarly
taught, tho the
first water
, and its
Preparation
were
wholly concealed
. Would not the sick be helped, and the happy attainer of the
first water
be made early
serviceable
?”
³⁹
The author was unmoved by the goal that had captivated Newton, of “multiplying” a metal by introducing the “seed” or “sperm” of another metal. Instead, he praised the virtues of
“Virgin Mercury,” free of sulphur, which sounds more like a basis for medicines than an entrance to the Philosopher's Stone.

Those alchemists who sought for higher results than pills or tonics may have been losing heart. True adepts like Boyle or “Philalethes” had vanished, and who was to replace them? A pamphlet published by “Philadept” in 1698 proposed to remedy the situation through sweeping social reform. The author set forth a novel plan for a utopia based on communal labour, with the aim of achieving the goals of alchemy. “Philadept” admitted that he had never known a true adept, but remained convinced that “there are many reasons to believe there is such a thing” as the Philosopher's Stone. The promised benefits accruing from the work of adepts—riches, contentment and virtue, health and strength—were considerable, leading “Philadept” to wonder “why they do no more good than we generally see they do.”
⁴⁰
To encourage them to share the results of their experiments, sovereigns should oblige adepts to “live all in common, with regard to the possession of the goods of the Earth and inferior Offices,” in the manner of the ancient Spartans. In fact, he recommended a communal way of living for everyone. Once the social problems of the world were solved, adepts would reveal themselves. “It is certain,” the author maintained, “if there are Adepts in the World, God will never permit them to communicate themselves to any Nation except that People be reformed and become actually Righteous and Just.”
⁴¹

The pamphlet ended with a pathetic appeal for rich patrons to support the work of adepts in the present naughty world. According to “Philadept,” “the Honourable Mr.
B
.,” evidently Robert Boyle, had offered to do this for “Eirenaeus Philalethes,” but Boyle's inability to keep secrets had discouraged the great spagyrist from teaching him the mysteries of “the
White Elixir
.”
⁴²
“Philadept” heaped scorn on those wealthy men who might refuse to imitate Mr B. “What? Dost thou not consider the wretched condition the generality of Mankind is in, and how miserably they fare in this evil World, where men wickedly oppress and devoure one another? And wilt thou do nothing to attempt to relieve good part of them from the heavy Burthen they groan under? Hard-hearted Creatures!”
⁴³
“Philadept” seems to have been thinking of his own wretched condition, and his utopian vision degenerates into a self-serving rant.

Two years later, a second pamphlet by the same author extended the theme of social idealism by proposing that adepts should be “declared sacred” and “admitted to the share of Government.”
⁴⁴
The pamphlet also recommended the creation of a unicameral Senate, the institution of public examinations for access to higher education and putting the poor to work: “It is, then, visibly, horribly shameful to have Beggars in a Common-wealth.” Cities were to be rebuilt on a regular plan, “unnecessary Trades” abolished and a moral
reformation instituted. The last change would particularly affect women, who were to be required to wear handkerchiefs around their necks to prevent “obscenity and immodesty.”
⁴⁵
The underlying misogyny of the lonely male alchemist, clinging with almost monastic dedication to personal purity and resentful of the “frivolity” of women, endured to the end of the golden age, and beyond.

“Philadept” sounds at times like the utopian socialist Robert Owen, but he was actually a voice from the past. His mixture of social reform with moral regeneration is reminiscent of the radical sectarians of the 1650s. The personal patronage that he craved was drying up under a new cultural regime in which writers and artists competed for a public audience. “Philadept” had little sympathy with the expansive and exploitative commercial society that was spreading its influence all around him. He strikes an interesting contrast with Daniel Defoe, a moderate Dissenter who was an enthusiastic exponent of speculative ventures or “Projects,” especially those that were concerned with practical innovations or new scientific discoveries. In 1697, Defoe had published an
Essay on Projects
, in which he compared the investment opportunities of his own age to the building of Noah's Ark or even the Tower of Babel (he regarded it as a well-intentioned failure). A project, according to Defoe, was “a vast Undertaking, too big to be manag'd, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing,” but which might sometimes bring about both “
Public Good
, and
Private Advantage
.”
⁴⁶
His definition might apply to alchemy as well. “Projection” bore a well-known alchemical meaning, relating to the “multiplication” of metals endorsed by the 1689 Parliamentary Act. In Defoe's pamphlet, investment in projects represents a new and more acceptable alchemy, free from the religiously suspect implications of the old.

No wonder “Philadept” sounded such a glum tone, reaching at times a note of desperation. The old style of alchemical projection was simply going out of fashion, replaced by schemes for enriching oneself that had nothing to do with the attainment of a higher state of being. “Philadept” could have cited as an example of this decline the celebrated writer Richard Steele, author of
The Tatler
, who under the direction of a reputed adept carried out a series of alchemical experiments between 1697 and 1702. By his own admission, Steele was seeking a “Chymical Medicine for Poverty,” not enlightenment, but he soon renounced the spagyric art as “a plain Illusion of some evil Spirit.”
⁴⁷
“He wanted to rise faster than he did,” scoffed the satirist Delarivier Manley, whose lover John Tilly, governor of the Fleet prison, had helped to finance Steele's expensive efforts. According to Manley, the “secret in nature” that Steele sought “was never yet purchased, if purchased at all, but with great charge and experience.”
⁴⁸
While her mocking tone was quite different from his, Manley's
views were not so far removed from those of “Philadept.” In his anxiety-filled writings, the despairing alchemist made a last appeal for a total revolution of society. Evidently, the promise of 1689, when Parliament called on every devotee of the art to work for the common good, was far from being realized. Instead, alchemy had become a path to riches for some, a huge disappointment for others.

At this moment of supreme doubt came a renewed literary attack. Alchemy still offered fair game to the satirists of the early eighteenth century. The most subtle of them was Jonathan Swift, who landed some choice blows on the alchemists in
A Tale of a Tub
and
The Battle of the Books
, published together in 1704. He derided Thomas Vaughan's
Anthroposophia Theomagia
as “a Piece of the most unintelligible Fustian, that, perhaps, was ever publish'd in any Language.” Paracelsus, like other “great Introducers of new Schemes in Philosophy,” was listed among “Persons Crazed, or out of their Wits.” Swift proposed that “wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be
fruitful
in the Proportion they are
dark
; And therefore, the
true illuminated
(that is to say, the Darkest of all) have met with … numberless Commentators.” Next to “
true illuminated
” appears a note: “A Name of the
Rosycrucians
.” Swift mischievously counselled the brothers of the Rosy Cross to “pray fervently for sixty three Mornings, with a Lively Faith, and then transpose certain Letters and syllables according to Prescription … they will certainly reveal into a full Receit of the
Opus Magnus
.” Swift also made merciless fun of the Kabbalists. “I have couched a very profound Mystery in the Number of Os multiply'd by Seven, and divided by Nine,” he informed them knowingly.
⁴⁹

Alchemists had been mocked before, but Swift's satirical jabs were particularly sharp. Only half-crazed dreamers and poorly educated dupes would accept such “Fustian” as occult philosophy, he said. Swift associated the alchemists with religious enthusiasm and magic, just as Ben Jonson, Samuel Butler and other earlier satirists had, but he went further in implying that reason itself scoffed at such outlandish new ideas, which had no basis in classical learning or worldly experience. Swift was a Tory, but his message was designed to appeal to the whole English elite. If they wanted to leave the strife of the seventeenth century behind them, they must abandon the “crazed” modern systems that had inspired it.

With occult philosophy under such withering attack, it is no wonder that alchemists chose to pursue their art in private, and in conditions of secrecy. One of them was Robert Kellum, whose alchemical papers from 1702 to 1721 survive in the collection of the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane. Details about Kellum's life are uncertain, but he wrote under a pseudonym, “J.D.,” that also appears on a pamphlet of 1724, protesting a Parliamentary Bill that restricted
the sale of medicines by apothecaries and “Chymists.”
⁵⁰
Kellum's papers include many medicinal recipes and prescriptions, but he also wrote about various aspects of occult philosophy, including astrology and dreams. One of his female patients dreamed “that Nature like a Woman came to her Naked only in flannel.” The visitor then produced a “most poysonnous Creature,” with a yellow body and black and blue feathered wings, but no head. Nature informed the woman that if Kellum “knewe of the Use of this Creature, then I [i.e. Kellum] shou'd have or had all things in the World.”
⁵¹
Here was the eternal dream of the alchemists, of using supernatural power to take control of nature—but with a dangerous twist. The secrets of nature turned out to be poisonous.

Secrets were held to be just as politically dangerous in the decades after the Glorious Revolution as they had been under Charles II. The plots and conspiracies of the post-revolutionary era, however, were those of Jacobites, not of republicans. The supporters of the exiled James II and his son strove incessantly to undermine, subvert and overthrow the regime of William and Mary and their successors.
⁵²
The post-revolutionary regime was understandably averse to secrecy, which threatened its existence. That hostility carried over into the behavioural norms of its supporters. The Whig social commentator Joseph Addison urged readers of his journal,
The Spectator
, to cultivate openness of character as a mark of good breeding and education. He praised “Discretion,” but condemned the low, secretive trait of “Cunning,” which “makes a Man incapable of bringing about even those Events which he might have done, had he passed only for a plain Man.”
⁵³

Addison, along with his collaborator Richard Steele, helped to shape a post-revolutionary culture of polite manners and moderate religious principles that was compatible with commercial growth. Alchemy, with its veiled heterodoxy and radical social aspirations, was at odds with that culture. As a result, it went into a period of intellectual torpor or decline. Yet it was not discredited or refuted by science. The most direct assault on alchemy during this period was a religious one, made by, of all people, Thomas Tryon, the Behmenist astrologer and advocate of herbal remedies. He stated categorically that “the changing of Forms is forbidden by God's hand,” denied that anybody had ever isolated “the Seed of a Metal,” and described universal medicines as “altogether impossible, and as much to oppose the unalterable law of God.”
⁵⁴
Tryon had many admirers, but his outright condemnation of alchemy was not typical. The spagyric art was more often quietly laughed at as a waste of time or passed over in silence than countered by argument. It entered the new century in a diminished state, although not a condition of ignominy. It had, after all, stimulated a whole medicinal industry, and parts of it were integrated into university science
curricula, within a discipline that was increasingly called “chymistry.”
⁵⁵
The art was not dead and, like the “Philosophical Mercury,” it might rise again.

Astrology Falls from the Heavens

Astrology, already highly commercialized, was less at odds with British culture after the Glorious Revolution. Measured by the number of almanacs published between 1689 and 1715, the celestial art does not appear to have declined at all. This ignores their actual content, however, which by the early 1690s was overwhelmingly tame, repetitive and dull. The Stationers’ Company continued to hold a monopoly on their production and sale, and was more determined than ever to keep their writers from putting anything controversial in print.
⁵⁶
Overall, there is little reason to disagree with the assessment of historian Bernard Capp, who wrote that, by 1720, the almanac “lacked the vitality and individuality of many of its Tudor and Stuart forebears.”
⁵⁷
The decline in content began to set in after the Glorious Revolution, when only two almanac writers devoted much attention to the principles of their art: John Partridge and John Gadbury. They were engaged in a bitter conflict with one another over the significance of astrology, which in the end damaged its already shaky intellectual foundations.