Solomon's Secret Arts (40 page)

Marginality is a relative concept that may not apply to all aspects of an individual's life. It did not mean insignificance or total lack of influence. The religious sect known as the French Prophets was small, but it made a considerable impression. The Nonjurors John Byrom and William Law or the architect John Wood of Bath cultivated their own circles of admirers. In some cases, marginal thinkers may have been closer to the mainstream of popular culture than their better-established rivals, especially in their views on spirits, ritual magic, alchemy and astrology. We should be cautious, however, about pressing such claims too far. The marginal writers considered in this chapter
were often just as disdainful of popular “superstition” as were the Newtonians. In addition, to make a valid comparison between popular beliefs and the ideas of more educated people, even those who may have been outside the intellectual establishment, content and significance have to be taken into account. This is not an easy task, as the following section explains.

Popular Belief under Scrutiny

What did the common people believe?
¹
We can convey a sense of what learned observers
thought
they believed, but such accounts were always coloured by strong biases. In addition, some first-hand material from the practitioners of popular magic has survived; we may debate whether or not it was typical. To discover what ordinary people generally thought about the occult, we have to make inferences on the basis of thin evidence. Testimony from members of the lower ranks of society about their own beliefs is seldom available. Nevertheless, the chronicles of John Cannon, considered in the last part of the section, allow a remarkable measure of insight into the mind of one rural connoisseur of occult matters.

Any interpretation of popular culture relating to the occult is bound to be heavily dependent on elite impressions. With monotonous predictability, these tended to condemn the occult beliefs of the common people as “superstition.” The Protestant ministers who were largely responsible for defining “superstition” equated it not with blind irrationality, but with the remains of paganism or Roman Catholicism.
²
Never simply descriptive, the term was a fizzing bomb to be hurled at one's enemies in a continuing cultural war. The assault troops in that war were the clerical commentators who compiled collections of material on the customs of the common people. The most famous of such collections was published in 1725 by Henry Bourne, an Anglican curate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, under the revealing title
Antiquitates Vulgares
, or “Vulgar Antiquities.” Bourne expressed his aim as the regulation of customs, and the abolition of “such only as are sinful and wicked.” He nonetheless objected to many of the attitudes or beliefs of the common people, because he linked them with pagan cults and “Popery.” “As to the opinions they hold,” he wrote, “they are almost all superstitious, being generally either the produce of Heathenism, or the Inventions of indolent
Monks
.”
³
The opinions that he described, of course, were selected precisely because they illustrated his central point.

Bourne's book is crammed with details concerning rituals like bowing towards altars (a bad thing, in his view, because “Popish”), well dressings (a more or less innocent thing) and twelfth-night ceremonies (very bad indeed, as they led to immorality and vice). Occult beliefs enter his discussion in
connection with “superstitions” pertaining to the spirits of the dead. Bourne was convinced that popular beliefs concerning spirits comprised, not just a set of false assumptions based on ignorance, but the remains of antiquated and discredited religious systems. For example, he insisted that to believe ghosts wandered about graveyards at night was to embrace a relic of the “Heathenism” that could be found in the writings of classical authors. While he could not deny that apparitions of blessed saints had frequently been seen at holy places, his explanation was that they were “not the Souls of the Saints themselves, but the good Angels appearing in their Likeness.”
⁴
Spirits really were moving about everywhere, but they were angels, not ghosts.

According to Bourne, the common people amused themselves in the evenings by recounting fanciful stories of apparitions. “Some of them have seen
Fairies
, some
Spirits
in the Shapes of
Cows
and
Dogs
and
Horses
; and some have even seen the
Devil
himself, with a
cloven Foot
. All of which, is either
Hearsay
or a
strong Imagination
.” The Devil might indeed be seen abroad in the world, affirmed Bourne, but fairies, hobgoblins and sprites were the detritus of paganism; they “wander'd in the Night of Ignorance and Error,” but “did really vanish at the Dawn of Truth and the Light of Knowledge.”
⁵
Truth and knowledge were spread by correct faith, which certainly countenanced the possibility of supernatural events. Bourne himself accepted that the Devil might have a physical presence and inhabit some haunted places. He consequently included in his text a version of the Roman Catholic exorcism ceremony, commenting that prayer would surely work better against the Devil than “such feeble Instruments as
Water
and
Herbs
and
Crucifixes
.” As for guardian angels, Bourne fully endorsed the popular belief in them, but opined “that it seems more consonant with Scripture, that we are attended by a Number of Angels, than by a particular
Tutelar Angel
.”
⁶

In relation to occult matters, Bourne's analysis of popular antiquities reveals more about the author than it does about the common people in and around Newcastle. On the subject of spirits, he adopted neither a rationalist nor a sceptical stance, but rather an orthodox one, mixing a heavy dose of conventional Protestantism with a dash of seventeenth-century Neoplatonism. Ultimately, he sought to replace a “superstitious” interpretation of spirits with a doctrinally acceptable one. We may doubt, of course, whether the beliefs of ordinary Northumbrians in 1725 were actually so close to those of the ancient Britons as Bourne suggested, or whether they adhered to them with the consistent level of credulity that he implied. We can also fault him for ignoring printed sources that might have had an impact on folklore, like the ghost stories that had appeared in popular ballads and chapbooks since the late seventeenth century.
⁷

Bourne's attempt to transform popular beliefs into Christian orthodoxy had been undertaken for decades in the Scottish Highlands by clerical observers of second sight. The fairies that had so perplexed Robert Kirk, however, ceased to play a part in these accounts. In 1707, a new collection of cases documenting second sight was posthumously published by the Episcopal dean of the Isles (the Inner Hebrides), the Reverend John Frazer. Having witnessed several instances of visions, Frazer accepted their veracity, but suggested that they might be due either to prior impressions made on the optic nerve or to angels. “Let us therefore Consider,” he proposed, “that an evil Angel, being permitted thereunto, can muster in our Brain the Latent intentional Species of external absent Objects, and can present the same to the Fancy in the methods best fitting his purpose.”
⁸
Preoccupied with such explanations, Frazer paid scant attention to the beliefs involved in the cases he described. One old woman of Tiree who had second sight “freely confessed that her Father upon his Death-Bed taught her a Charm composed of Barbarous Words, and some untelligible [
sic
] terms,” which would result in the projection of images on the wall.
⁹
How close this charm may have been to ritual magic is impossible to determine, as Frazer neglected to record its details.

Clerical writers consistently underplayed the actual content of “superstitions” in order to condemn their pagan or “papist” origins. Equally they ignored the role of print culture in shaping beliefs. A more nuanced, albeit condemnatory, approach was provided by the celebrated writer Daniel Defoe in three works published in quick succession in 1726–7:
The Political History of the Devil
,
The History and Reality of Apparitions
and
A System of Magick
. Defoe wrote them because he knew they would sell. By this time, he was bereft of important political patrons and dependent on book sales in order to maintain his family. In his novels and other writings, he had frequently courted a broad audience of the middling sort of people—those whose status lay between the great landed families and the labouring poor. His works did reach their targeted readers, as they generally made money and went into multiple editions.
The Political History of the Devil
was a minor hit in this respect, appearing in five editions by 1754 and being reprinted several more times before the end of the century. No doubt many of its readers were, like the author, religious Dissenters, for whom the Devil held a special fascination. Defoe's later works on apparitions and magic also sold briskly, judging by the number of editions that appeared before 1760.
¹⁰

The Political History of the Devil
is often ironic in its treatment, and many scholars have longed to see in it some sceptical purpose. Alas, they long in vain. The main intention of the work is to determine when the Devil is actually operating in the world, and when he is being blamed for things that are really
the fault of human beings. Defoe never questions the reality of Satan, who is envisaged as a spirit, not as a physical being. The author affirms that “the
Devil
is really and
bona fide
in a great many of our honest weak-headed friends, when they themselves know nothing of the matter.” Underhand and devious, Satan's aim is “that he may get all his Business carried on by the Instrumentality of Fools … and that he may have all his Work done in such a Manner as that he may seem to have no Hand in it.”
¹¹
In pagan times the Devil worked mainly through omens and auguries, but in the present his minions are witches and magicians, to whom he has given the power “to walk invisible, to fly in the Air, ride upon Broom-sticks, and other Wooden Gear, to interpret Dreams … to raise Storms, sell Winds, bring up Spirits, disturb the Dead, and torment the living.” These powers turn out to be illusory. Through them, however, the Devil has “engross'd all the Wise-Men of the East,” including the famous Magi, as well as magicians and astrologers.
¹²

Nothing in Defoe's
Political History of the Devil
is unorthodox from a contemporary Protestant point of view. The work affirms the omnipotence of God and strikes a blow against popular “superstition,” such as belief in the Devil's cloven hoof. Occult philosophy is continually ridiculed. The same themes are visited again in
The History and Reality of Apparitions
. Here, too, Defoe debunks many popular tales of ghosts and visions, reducing them to psychological reactions, but insists that some apparitions are real and that they represent good or evil spirits. This subject finally brings Defoe to the edge of unorthodoxy, and the threshold of occult thinking. Not wanting to cross it, he avoids any extended discussion of spirits and instead instructs the reader not to fear them:

Having arrived at what might be regarded as the crux of his argument, Defoe refuses to commit himself to
any
particular theory of spirits. After all, as he put it in an earlier discussion of angels, “we are not writing Divinity.”
¹⁴

A System of Magick
completes Defoe's three-pronged assault on the occult. The title is deliberately misleading: Defoe recognized that many would purchase the book hoping to find in it “a Book of Rules for Instruction in the
Practice.” Instead, it contains a history of “the Black Art,” from antiquity to the present. In ancient Egypt, Persia and Babylon, according to Defoe, a magician was “a
Mathematician
, a Man of Science … a Kind of walking Dictionary to other People.” Magicians “studied Nature … made Observations from the Motions of the Stars and other Heavenly Bodies … and were Masters of
perhaps a little
experimental Philosophy.”
¹⁵
Over time, however, this admirable system of natural magic degenerated into diabolism, initially among the Egyptians, who were “ridiculously Superstitious” and “soon mixt their Religion and their Magick together, their Philosophy and their Idolatry were made assistant to the general Fraud.” Satan, of course, facilitated this change by “subtily insinuating Dreams into the Heads of Princes and Great Men, and then by like Dreams communicating to his Correspondents … This was a particular Favour done in Aid of those
Magicians
, who were more than ordinarily in his good Graces.” From this devilish distortion of original magic arose what Defoe calls “the Black Art,” whose practitioners include “the Diviner and Soothsayer, the judicial Astrologer and Conjurer, the Inchanter and Charmer, the Witch and the Wizard, the Necromancer and Dealer with a Familiar Spirit.”
¹⁶

The Devil ultimately proved himself to be a deceiver. The magicians of the present age, though in league with Satan, have no power to perform any supernatural acts. They have become mere tricksters. Defoe gives as his example of a modern magician one Dr Boreman, a cunning-man who lived near Maidstone in Kent. Described as a gentleman by his neighbours, Boreman lived in a house with a servant and enjoyed a considerable reputation for detection of lost items, giving advice to lovers, fighting the influence of witches and performing various other kinds of magic. Boreman denied that he used “unlawful Arts” or that he was in contact with a familiar, a sure sign of a witch.
¹⁷
Defoe remained convinced nonetheless that the doctor “must have had some unlawful Conversation with such Spririts or such Beings as I should still call Devils.” Boreman had apparently written many books, copies of which Defoe had not managed to obtain. Nonetheless, he compared them to those of “the right famous Enthusiast
Jacob Behemen
,” the German Theosopher, who is described as “a Kind of Visionist … His Writings are either Magick or Enthusiastick, or both.” One of Boreman's manuscripts was even entitled “177 Theosophick Questions.”
¹⁸
This leaves the reader puzzled: could such a learned cunning-man actually be in league with the Devil?