Solomon's Secret Arts (36 page)

Stukeley became convinced that the symbols used to identify the signs of the zodiac were themselves of antediluvian origin, and related to pristine religious practices. Although his diary presents this insight as a pure “discovery,” it was almost certainly derived from a well-known source book of seventeenth-century occult learning: the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's massive treatise
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
(
The Egyptian Oedipus
). In an amazing display of imaginative reconstruction, Kircher here revealed the mathematical, astrological, alchemical and magical practices of the Egyptians. His main evidence was his own symbolic reading of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Kircher argued that hieroglyphs were invented by the original alchemist, Hermes Trismegistus, to express the true patriarchal religion. The zodiacal signs, according to Kircher, made use of the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian deities, and therefore continued to display elements of the
prisca theologia
, in spite of the debasement of worship in Egypt through idolatry.
⁵⁴
Stukeley's thinking was similar but, typically, he gave the Jesuit writer no credit.

Stukeley's reconstruction of the zodiac led him to examine the sign for Cancer, which he thought resembled the two pigeons that were Adam's first sacrifice to God. He maintained that the pigeons stood for the
anima mundi
or Soul of the World, a Neoplatonic concept that also runs through
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
. Stukeley's diary entry on this subject included a long reverie about the sacrifices of pigeons at the summer solstice in patriarchal times, the meaning of the feast of Pentecost and the connection between the zodiac and parts of the body, an old trope of astrological medicine. The sacrifice of birds, specifically doves, would recur later in Stukeley's work, notably in
Palæographia Britannica
(1752), where he connects it with Mithraic altars found in Britain.
⁵⁵
As with Newton's use of the myth of the Golden Fleece, we may wonder whether this attempt to recapture the symbolism of the primordial religion was mixed up with the intellectual residue of alchemy. “The doves of Diana” was a particularly difficult stage in the alchemical process, involving pure silver. Described in
Secrets Reveal'd
by the celebrated “Philalethes,” it had caused Newton much difficulty in his experiments of the mid-1690s, and it puzzled would-be adepts as late as 1714.
⁵⁶
Stukeley had made chemical experiments while at Cambridge, and he remained interested in the topic—his diary for March 1737, for example, records tests made by the Dutch chemist Herman Boerhaave on gold and mercury.
⁵⁷
He would certainly have understood the alchemical significance of sacrificing doves, but, for him, they did not belong to Diana. He identified the Cancer sign with her brother Apollo.

Astrology became increasingly central to Stukeley's interpretation of the
prisca theologia
. In 1741, he wrote of the signs of the zodiac as “pictures in the original & antediluvian sphere,” a position from which he never wavered. Three years later, he presented his patron the duke of Montagu, former grand master of the Grand Lodge, with a pamphlet he had written on Adam's sacrifice of the two pigeons, along with a drawing of the constellation of “Engonasis the serpent” (Engonasis, identified with Hercules, is under attack from Draco, the serpent or dragon). He was still working on the meaning of the zodiac in 1750, when “I found out, that originally, the sign Gemini II was the altar, whereto ENOCH heinochus brought his offering of the kids … this is not understood by astronomers.”
⁵⁸
As Enoch spoke with God and was the purported author of a lost book of Scripture, this was a mighty discovery, although, as with all his zodiacal insights, Stukeley presented no evidence whatever of how he had arrived at it. At some point, probably in the 1750s, he came to believe that the zodiacal signs represented both the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the jewels of the breastplate worn by Aaron, the first high priest. In turn, the jewels mirrored the colours of the Shekhinah, the dwelling place of God in the Tabernacle. Because the term Shekhinah was feminine in the original Hebrew, it stood for
the female attributes of the godhead, which Stukeley recognized in pagan goddesses like Isis and Diana. Even in the early 1720s, he had believed that the statues of Isis at Ammon and of Diana at Ephesus were the oldest images of gods in the world. By the 1750s, he was certain that these depictions of female divinity were in fact images of the one patriarchal deity, the God of Noah, another idea he may have lifted from Kircher.
⁵⁹

To see pagan goddesses as forms of the Hebrew God was doctrinally questionable, and should have been accompanied by a denunciation of “heathen” errors. Stukeley, however, did not spill much ink chastising the pagans, which may indicate an attraction to the heterodox notion, shared by the Neoplatonist Pico, that all religions
remained
essentially one, in spite of their decline from patriarchal purity. If this was what Stukeley really thought, he never spelled it out. The stated intention of his astrological theory was to deliver a mortal blow to the atheism and scepticism that he saw all around him. His anxiety over these issues became especially acute after he moved back to London in 1747.

From then until his death in 1765, Stukeley lived in Bloomsbury as minister of the church of St George the Martyr, a living bestowed upon him by the duke of Montagu. In the last phase of his life, his attachment to astrology waxed stronger, but he began to realize that he would not be successful in promoting it. He frequented the Royal Society, where he was periodically annoyed by the refusal to allow papers on astrology to be read. He supported a proposal, brought by the Jewish naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa, that “the Society had not acted judiciously, in rejecting all papers relating to longitude, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, philosophers stone & the like. tho’ those matters probably will never be discover'd: yet ‘tis notorious, such pursuits have brought forth many useful discoverys in medicine, mechanics, mathematics.” Stukeley was furious when the proposal was not adopted, complaining that governance of the Society had fallen into the hands of “a coffee-house junto, & those generally very young members, who never gave any entertainment to us.” He feared that the Society was on the wane, along with “learning in general,” due to the present spirit of licentiousness and irreligion. Later that year, he presented a book on the history of astronomy to the Society. This led him to write a long critique of Newton's
Chronology
, which he faulted for dating the voyage of the Argo three hundred years too late. He also tried to persuade the Fellows to print a paper he had read to the Royal Society on an ancient eclipse predicted by Thales of Miletus, but “the infidel part of the Council” rejected it.
⁶⁰

In 1762, at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was president, Stukeley refuted an author who “fancys” that the zodiac was of Egyptian origin, by “vindicating it to the Patriarchal times.”
⁶¹
This episode may have prompted him to argue, in an essay on cosmogony published in 1763, that
the zodiacal signs were “a part of the most antient manner of writing, not unlikely to be that of ADAM.”
⁶²
If this was the case, then Adam, not Hermes Trismegistus, was the inventor of hieroglyphics, and the sacred language of the first man could be seen in the zodiacal symbols found in any common almanac. Stukeley's failure to convince others that he was right can be taken as a final rejection of his astrological theories.

By then, of course, Stukeley had become famous for his depictions of the ancient British guardians of patriarchal religion: the Druids, priests of Celtic Britain in pre-Roman times. He had announced his findings about them in two important published studies of the architecture of Stonehenge (1740) and Avebury (1743).
⁶³
Ascribing these structures to the Druids had both a religious and a patriotic intention. Stukeley portrayed the Druids, not as pagans who practised human sacrifice, but as pillars of patriarchal religion. Furthermore, as he informed the princess of Wales in 1754, “the ch[urch] of England is exactly parallel to it [patriarchal religion], & in every particular,” which was why he perceived the Druids as forebears of the modern Anglican clergy.
⁶⁴
His close personal identification with them even led him to adopt a fictitious ancient British name, “Chyndonax,” and to organize his friends into a Druidic society, for which he composed elaborate rites. Stukeley took a fierce national pride in the greatness of the Druids. He told the princess of Wales, in answer to her question as to why he never travelled abroad, “that I lov'd my own country, & that there was curiosity & antiquity enough at home to entertain any genius.”
⁶⁵
The country in which he sought out curiosity and antiquity was England; apparently, he never visited Scotland or Ireland. For him, patriarchal religion survived in no Church other than the Anglican.

Stukeley did not “discover” the Druids. Since the Glorious Revolution, they had frequently been depicted by historians and antiquarians as a powerful clerical caste, similar to the clergymen of the Church of England but with even greater political authority. Writers on Druidism were indebted to the Abbé Pezron's glorification of the Celts as a mighty people whose kings, warriors and sages provided the models for ancient Greek gods and heroes.
⁶⁶
Drawing on this theory, the Welsh cleric Henry Rowlands, in a 1723 book on the antiquities of Anglesey, exalted the Druids as possessors of “the Patriarchal
Cabala
,” in which “the
ante Diluvian
Knowledge in all its Branches was carefully preserv'd.” Their “
Cabalistick Traditions
” included the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, doctrines associated with the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Rowlands had no doubt that Pythagoras had learned these principles from the Druids.
⁶⁷
Even more extraordinary was their natural philosophy, which Rowlands held to be “Corpuscularian … more agreeable with the
Sydonian
[i.e. Phoenician] Philosophy, which was plainly Atomical.” Rowlands was referring here to the
philosophy of Thales and Pythagoras, both of whom were said to have been of Phoenician ancestry, but the term “Corpuscularian” was derived from Robert Boyle's writings.
⁶⁸
Evidently, the Druids were not just priestly guardians of the
prisca theologia
; they were far ahead of their time in scientific thought as well.

Rowlands wanted to boost Welsh national pride through lauding the wisdom and “civility” of the Druids, but in theological terms their “
Cabalistick Traditions
” harked back to the heterodoxy of
Kabbala Denudata
. Like Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, the Druids accepted a doctrine of transmigration that pointed unmistakably towards universal salvation. The thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church flatly rejected such a possibility. High Churchman he may have been, but Rowlands did not seem willing to admit that the patriarchal religion might be in error on this point. Transmigration led him to the brink of heterodoxy, even if he was careful not to be seen tumbling into the abyss.

The theologically wayward Rowlands has usually been seen as an arch-traditionalist compared to John Toland, the famous deist and anticlerical writer whose
Account of the Druids
appeared posthumously in 1726. Yet Toland added surprisingly little to the account of Druidism given by his Welsh predecessor. To be sure, he was far less flattering in his depiction of the Druids, for whom he had no more respect than he had for the clergy of his own day. Relying on evidence from his native Ireland, Toland excoriated the Druids as a “Heathen Priesthood” dedicated “to beget Ignorance and an Implicite disposition in the People.”
⁶⁹
Yet he did admire one Druid: Abaris, a native of the Hebrides according to Toland, who reputedly studied sciences alongside Pythagoras. As to who taught whom the doctrine of transmigration, Toland was uncertain, and it did not seem to matter to him.
⁷⁰

Strikingly, William Stukeley's book-length studies of the Druidic “temples” of Stonehenge and Avebury (or Abury, as Stukeley called it) do not mention the transmigration of souls at all.
Stonehenge
insists that “the Druids were of Abraham's religion intirely, at least in the earliest times, and worshipp'd the supreme Being in the same manner as he did.”
Abury
deals only briefly with Abaris, who is introduced as a student of Pythagoras, not as his teacher. As to who was responsible for thinking up transmigration, Stukeley studiously avoids the issue.
⁷¹
No hints of heterodoxy mar his account; on the contrary, he was so determined to prove that the patriarchal religion of the Druids was acceptable to a conventional Anglican of the eighteenth century that he even turned them into Trinitarians. The circle, snake and wings that he observed in the plan of the temple at Avebury supposedly represented the Father, Son and Holy Spirit or
anima mundi
.
⁷²
Just as he had buried Newton's Arianism, so Stukeley also buried the paganism of the Druids.

On the surface, Stukeley's theories about Stonehenge and Avebury may be orthodox, but they reveal a fantastical chain of alchemical as well as astrological allusions. Athanasius Kircher provided him with a wellspring of ideas and, for once, Stukeley acknowledged drawing from it. The all-important winged snake that he discerned at Avebury was by his own account derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph discussed by Kircher: a snake hanging from a circle with wings. The Jesuit writer beheld in this strange configuration a “symbol of the arcane mysteries,” by which he meant the mysteries of the essence of God, not simply the Holy Trinity. “By the circle,” Kircher wrote, “is signified the pure form of divinity, the eternal and immense God, abstracted from all base matter; by the serpent, the second form of divinity … or the Word of God … by the wings fixed on the globe, the third form of divinity, the Spirit pervading everything, is aptly expressed.” In his chapter on Egyptian astrology, Kircher placed this Trinitarian design, which he calls the
Tetragrammaton
or sacred name of God, at the centre of a graphic depiction of the zodiac.
⁷³
Stukeley could scarcely have missed it.