Solomon's Secret Arts (52 page)

Interest in alchemy had certainly waned in mid-eighteenth-century England, but it never entirely disappeared. The 1740s, a decade marked by war and political upheavals, produced a brief flurry of fresh interest in it. A recent German anthology of alchemical texts was translated and published in 1744 under the title
Hermippus Redivivus
. It was reprinted five times in three separate editions, the last version appearing in the same year as Wright's painting.
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The republication of another German work on alchemy,
An Apology for the Hermetic Sciences
, prompted a review in a fashionable magazine,
The Museum
, in 1747. The reviewer—probably the sentimental poet and physician Mark Akenside—admitted that the book was “very well calculated to possess the minds of young students with a high opinion of this Art, and to soften if not obliterate the Prejudices which Men of riper Years and more mature Judgment, have unwarily entertained against the Hermetic science.”
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Evidently, Newtonianism had not killed off alchemy entirely, although its occasional infusions of life came mainly from Germany.

Joseph Wright's papers point to the involvement of his friend the surveyor and artist Peter Perez Burdett in the creation of “The Alchymist.” An ink-and-wash study for the painting exists on the back of a letter from Burdett. While he confessed himself “a stranger” to the subject matter, Wright's friend was clearly interested in the painting.
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Burdett is the figure shown taking notes in Wright's famous “Orrery” painting. The older man standing next to him is Washington Shirley, Earl Ferrers, a Freemason who served as grand master of the Grand Lodge in 1762–4. Burdett lived with the earl and was doubtless also a Freemason. His interest in an image of alchemy may therefore be seen as part of a long tradition within the Craft. It may have had a more commercial motivation as well. A clue to this aspect of the painting's origins is provided by a trip made in 1771 by the celebrated Chevalier d'Eon, an eccentric French nobleman who habitually dressed as a woman and who also resided with Earl Ferrers. He accompanied the mentally unstable Ludwig IX, landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, on a visit to Burdett and Wright's home town of Derby, but they left the next day for Liverpool, where the two Englishmen had recently moved.
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These eccentric foreigners, both Freemasons, may have been seeking Wright's painting. Was the landgrave, famously besotted by alchemy, the intended purchaser? If so, he did not actually buy it, as it remained in Wright's studio until the painter's death.

Burdett's possible connections with German Freemasonry do not end there. Three years later, he travelled to Karlsruhe to become surveyor to the margrave, Karl Friedrich of Baden-Durlach, an enlightened ruler and dedicated Freemason who was brother-in-law to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt.
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Burdett described Baden in a letter to his friend Benjamin Franklin as “this delicious philosophical retreat,” inviting the American scientist to join him there. In 1777, despite his reservations about American independence, Burdett recommended to Franklin the services of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian officer who would reform the drill and tactics of the fledgling American patriot army. The baron was an enthusiastic Freemason, who later joined two New York lodges and had a third named after him. Franklin, of course, was one of the most prominent Masons in the colonies.
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These are circumstantial links, but they suggest that “The Alchymist” may have had Masonic origins. Such an interpretation would make sense of the three figures in the picture, who are of different ages and may represent the degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason. The arched ceiling overhead would stand for the fourth or Royal Arch degree, while within the paned windows can be recognized the outline of Masonic tools, a compass and plumb line. The alchemist's discovery may illuminate even higher degrees.
⁹²
Wright had already painted a canvas entitled “The Philosopher by Lamp Light”
that contains three figures, including two searching youths and an older philosopher contemplating human remains (the telltale signs of Hiram's murder). This strange work may have served as an early version of “The Alchymist.” Another painting, showing “Miravan, a Young Nobleman of Ingria [
sic
: Izra], Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors,” was executed by Wright in 1772. Based on an obscure Orientalist tale, it depicts a scene reminiscent of the discovery of Hiram's tomb. Wright called it “a favourite picture,” and although he never sold it, he was confident enough of its success to have an engraving made of it.
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The purpose of this detailed investigation is not to uncover the secrets of Wright's paintings, fascinating though they may be, but to point out that links between English and continental Freemasonry were more active than has often been supposed. The tendency to divide late eighteenth-century Masonry into “rational” English or Scottish varieties and “occult” continental strains is misleading, because the two intermingled more often, and with fewer constraints, than is usually realized.
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Contacts with France, Germany, the Dutch Republic and Sweden brought English and Scottish Freemasons into close relationships with representatives of continental European Masonry. Some British Masons became members of foreign lodges, and brought the ideas of French or German Masonry back to England and Scotland. Conversely, the continental movements were deeply indebted to British influence, and some esoteric strains of Masonry may have begun in Britain. It was a Scot, Andrew Michael Ramsay, called Chevalier Ramsay after his induction into the Order of St Lazare of Jerusalem, who set off the whole chain of inventive fantasy that would lead to Strict Observance, the Avignon Rite and other manifestations of occult Freemasonry. Although esoteric degrees may have existed before his famous “Discours,” any discussion of the subject must begin with this remarkable Scotsman.

Ramsay should be regarded as a mystic who opened the door to the occult, but did not walk through it himself. An adherent of Scottish Quietism, he was unconventional enough to write to a friend in 1709 that “I shall embrace you at meeting with all the freedom of a Philadelphian.” After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Ramsay briefly served as tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart at Rome, but the Pretender James III thought him “a madd man,” and he soon left again for Paris.
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Among his forms of madness was a conviction that “the great Men of all Times, and of all Places, have the same Ideas of the Divinity, and of Morality.”
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This was the enlightened lesson taught to a young Persian prince in Ramsay's masterpiece,
The Travels of Cyrus
, which appeared in French and English in 1727. Prince Cyrus voyages around the ancient world in search of wisdom, meeting great men of his time, including Pythagoras and
the prophet Daniel, both of whom turn out to be mystics. At the work's culmination, Cyrus frees the Jews from bondage and sponsors the rebuilding of Solomon's Temple. The liberation of the Jews by Cyrus became the central myth in the Royal Arch degree of Masonry. The book was an instant sensation, in spite of critics denouncing it as deist, a charge Ramsay vehemently denied. As a result of his fame, Ramsay was invited to England in 1729, where he was initiated into the Grand Lodge and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Ramsay's biggest impact on European Freemasonry came through his “Discourse,” written in 1736 and published, in an altered version, the following year. In it, Ramsay calls the world “a great Republic” in which the Masons attempt “to revive and spread those ancient maxims, fixed in the nature of man.” They form “a spiritual nation” that will bind those of diverse backgrounds into a new people, cemented “by the bonds of virtue and of science.”
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What more enlightened sentiments could be imagined? Ramsay affirmed the origins of Freemasonry in the ancient mysteries, “the famous celebrations of Ceres at Eleusis … as well as those of Isis in Egypt, of Minerva at Athens, of Urania among the Phoenicians and of Diana in Scythia.”
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It was his references to “our ancestors, the Crusaders,” however, that drew the most attention. During the Crusades, he maintained, “several Princes, Lords and Citizens … engaged themselves by oath to use their talents and their goods to bring architecture back to its primitive institution.” This led to a union of the Masonic order with the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. Kings and nobles returning from the Crusades duly set up Masonic lodges in their own countries, starting with the Kilwinning lodge of Scotland, founded in 1286.
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Ramsay's “Discours” was designed to welcome men of all social ranks into Freemasonry, but it had the effect of enticing French and German noblemen to join what was now seen as a distinguished fraternity with the pedigree of a knightly order. Although Ramsay had said nothing about adding further degrees or rituals, aristocratic European Masons were eager to distinguish themselves from the common herd by adding to Freemasonry a dazzling variety of new grades. This was already happening in England and Scotland, in circles that were not necessarily aristocratic. The shadowy existence in London of a Masonic order of “Scotch H[ere]d[o]m, or Ancient and Honorable Order of K[ilwin]n[in]g” can be traced through newspaper advertisements dating back as far as 1743. William Mitchell, a Scot living in the Dutch Republic, received a patent from an English grand master in 1750 allowing him to form a lodge of Heredom in The Hague. The original five Heredom lodges, located in and around London, were probably Jacobite associations, within which the exiled Stuarts were regarded as hereditary grand masters. They initiated Masons into mysterious “higher” degrees that conferred priestly or knightly
status—the term “Heredom” or “Harodim” may refer to a Temple priest, and masters of the order claimed the title “Sir.”
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A Scottish version of the rite, known as the “Royal Order” and including both a Heredom and a “Rosy Cross” degree, is known from the 1750s, although it may well have preceded the English lodges.

English and Scottish Masonry, in other words, was moving towards Ramsay's vision of Christian and hierarchical knighthood just as surely as was French or German Masonry—and, apparently, more rapidly. To be sure, the most astonishing system of Masonic novelty was created outside Britain. This was Strict Observance, concocted around 1754 by the Lusatian nobleman Karl, Baron Hund, a counsellor to the king of Poland. His initiation into a French Jacobite lodge in the early 1740s led Hund to conclude that the Stuart Pretender was the hidden grand master of the whole Masonic Brotherhood. He also reckoned that the Freemasons were descended from the Knights Templar, suppressed by the papacy and the French crown for heresy and necromancy in the early fourteenth century, rather than from the Knights of St John, as Ramsay had suggested. The connection of the Templars with ritual magic was particularly exciting to many German Masons. Hund managed to convince a 1767 Convent of German Masons to adopt Strict Observance, and it remained dominant among lodges in German-speaking lands until it was debunked at the Convent of Wilhelmsbad in 1782. Even after that debacle, the system retained supporters. Throughout its existence, however, Strict Observance had to compete with a number of other rites, including a priestly system that was supported by the ruling family of Sweden and the Order of the Golden or Rosy Cross, which flourished at the Prussian court. The fervent preoccupation with alchemy that accompanied all of these rites was endemic to German Masonry and probably owed little to the inventions of Baron Hund.
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In France as well, new versions of Freemasonry appeared that were resolutely Christian and aristocratic. They included the Chapter of Clermont, a Jacobite organization founded in 1754, which had higher “Temple” grades, and the Ordre des Chevaliers Maçons Elus-Coëns de l'Univers, founded around 1760 by the mysterious Martinez de Pasqually, who became known for his fixation with the supernatural. Several of these movements came from southern France, where the authority of the official Grand Orient lodge seems to have been weak. The most innovative of them, from an occult point of view, was the Scots Philosophic Rite of Avignon, initiated by the Abbé Pernety, a runaway Benedictine monk who had served as librarian to Frederick II of Prussia.
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Pernety was best known for compiling a dictionary of mythic and Hermetic terms, which was essentially a guide to alchemy.
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Not surprisingly, his lodge would become known for its occult practices. In 1784, Benedict
Chastanier presented a plan for an occult Swedenborgian rite to a Parisian convent of Freemasons. Although it was not adopted, the assembled Brothers declared that the occult sciences “had a striking relationship with Masonic usages, documents, ceremonies, rites and other materials.”
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None of these movements or trends established itself securely in England or Scotland, but they did have an influence on prominent British Masonic figures. Among them was the printer William Preston, perhaps the most important historian of English Masonry of the late eighteenth century. Born in Edinburgh, Preston had been apprenticed to Thomas Ruddiman, the Jacobite grammarian and printer. He had later been employed in London by another Scot, William Strahan, the king's printer, whose presses he superintended. Preston was initiated in 1763 into a Scots lodge of Antients in the English capital, but he soon joined the Moderns of the Grand Lodge of England.
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He became famous among Freemasons for an address that he gave at a Grand Gala in 1772, published as
Illustrations of Masonry
. In a second edition three years later, he added considerable amounts of material pertaining to Masonic history. Preston claimed that Masonry was a “progressive science” based on the study of the liberal arts. At the same time, the rites of the Craft corresponded with those of the ancient Egyptians and Druids, as well as with the philosophy of Pythagoras. He affirmed that the grand master of the Knights Templar had supervised the Masons under Henry II, and that they continued under the patronage of the Templars until the end of the twelfth century.
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The combination of Newtonianism with ideas derived from occult Masonry was typical of Preston's eclectic viewpoint.