Solomon's Secret Arts (54 page)

The sad affair of James Price happened at the historical moment when the British colonies in America were being lost and the nation faced defeat at the hands of France. The sense of apprehension at being overtaken by the French in scientific as well as military terms is evident in the correspondence of Joseph Banks. Price had capitalized on it. The noblemen who had observed his experiments were all Whigs and reluctant supporters of peace; they may have seen his processes as a way of salvaging the reputation of Britain through a single remarkable scientific coup. As for Banks, he was a beleaguered president, and in 1782 was marshalling his forces for a fight against the Royal Society's
foreign secretary—none other than Charles Hutton, the compiler of almanacs. To win the struggle, Banks had to play his cards carefully. He remained duly cautious about Price, giving the young man ample opportunity to prove himself.

Young though he was, Price knew the game he was playing. By including an account of an experiment by Robert Boyle in the first edition of his pamphlet, he established a direct link with the only member of the Royal Society who had ever had the temerity to publish a paper on alchemy in the
Philosophical Transactions
. Price vaguely acknowledged the resemblance of his work to “passages in ancient chemical writers,” without acknowledging that the red and white powders were celebrated among students of the spagyric art.
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He was also aware that no alchemist had ever fully described the powders, which were usually ascribed to a mysterious friend or benefactor. In short, Price exploited an understanding of alchemy that was already in the minds of his audience. Few of his critics explicitly denied that alchemy was possible; they merely doubted Price's results. It was only in the aftermath of the affair that Joseph Black could look back on it as a final repudiation of alchemy.

Price's story can be compared to the claims of the electrochemists Marvin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 to have discovered “cold fission.” In both cases, the announcement of experimental success commanded broad media attention, in part because it addressed current anxieties—the failure of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986 had caused public disillusionment with nuclear science. The scientific community demanded further proof, but did not rule out the validity of the claims until it proved impossible to replicate the experiments. That this would be the case with nuclear fission may not be surprising. That it applied in 1782–3 to work on alchemy suggests that the attitude of scientists towards the occult philosophies of the past may have been more ambivalent than is usually recognized. Ambivalence particularly characterized the behaviour of Banks, who will appear repeatedly in this chapter, not as a symbol of enlightened science, but as a colleague and patron of some of the most remarkable occult thinkers in late eighteenth-century England.
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The following sections deal with a number of these individuals. We will begin with a comparison of two men with very different occult inclinations: the Swedenborgian clergyman John Clowes and the Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor. They represent not just the diversity of approaches to occult traditions, but also the wide scope of responses to the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections deal with the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, the alchemist Sigismund Bacstrom and the occult Freemasons, concluding with the career of the great international charlatan Count Cagliostro. The activities of these individuals illustrate a
tangled and shifting relationship between enlightened discourse and occult thinking. The result may not have been a steroid-driven “Super-Enlightenment,” but it was certainly a dynamic exchange. Shockingly, the occult even began to seem respectable, although insufficiently so to save James Price from exposure and suicide, or Count Cagliostro from humiliation and exile.

The Mystic and the Pagan

The occult revival was not a unified phenomenon. It encompassed too many different points of view for that to be the case. Even within a relatively well-defined group like the Swedenborgians, deep divisions existed on the most fundamental issues, such as eternal punishment. As occult thinking in this period was often personal and individualistic, it might be wondered whether its revival had any intellectual coherence at all. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that the same issues that had perplexed occult thinkers in the past gave their successors a certain unity of direction in the late eighteenth century. One of those issues was the role of spirits in the natural world.

Two contrasting figures serve as examples of occult thinking on spirits. John Clowes, born in 1743, was the rector of St John's Church in Manchester, which had been founded by John Byrom's son, Edward. Clowes was among a tiny number of Anglican clergymen who adopted the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. He refused to support the move towards an independent Swedenborgian Church, however, and remained a practising minister of the Church of England. Famed for his piety, Clowes was deeply conservative in politics.
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Living in a part of England that was marked by profound economic, social and religious changes, by the dramatic growth of the cotton industry and a sudden rise in population, Clowes rejected the path taken by Ralph Mather, who preached the doctrines of Swedenborg to labouring folk in the open air and supported the rights of textile-workers.
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Instead, Clowes cultivated the life of a reclusive mystic. Thomas de Quincey, the future essayist and opium-eater, as a boy knew Clowes well and called him “holy, visionary, apostolic, he could not be treated disrespectfully … Assuredly, Mr. Clowes was no trifler, but lived habitually a life of power, though in a world of religious mysticism and apocalyptic visions.”
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Never married, Clowes was petrified of attractive women, and kept around his house images of St John the Baptist, whose saintly features he apparently resembled.

He was no occult enthusiast. He probably never read a line of Paracelsus and would have considered Agrippa diabolical. In fact, he took a dim view of non-religious literature in general. In his manuscript autobiography, Clowes draws attention to his early education at the Salford school directed by the
Reverend John Clayton, an ardent Jacobite. There, he notes with approval, “the young Mind, being instructed in the
Doctrines of the Gospel
, was less exposed to the Danger resulting from the perusal of
Heathen Literature
, & from the
perplexities
&
Impurities of Heathen Mythology
.”
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Could a less enlightened statement be imagined? The young Clowes's reading list was indeed very religious, although hardly orthodox. It included the mystics William Law, Madame Guyon and Pierre Poiret, the Neoplatonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme and, most surprisingly, Jane Lead. No wonder Clowes gravitated towards Swedenborg. One morning, he awoke to a feeling of “most delightful Harmony in the Interior of his Mind,” which he interpreted as an awareness of “a
Divine Glory
, surpassing all Description … in close Connection with that
Divinum Humanum
, or
Divine Humanity
” that he had recognized in Swedenborg's works.
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This amounts to a Behmenist reading of the baron, who saw himself as specially gifted with insight into the spiritual world but was not always generous in dispensing the visionary benefits of “Divine Humanity” to all.

In several expository pamphlets, Clowes confronted head-on the question of direct contact with spirits, which for many was the most problematic aspect of Swedenborgian theology. He stuck to the idea that everyone had access to the unseen world. In a 1788 tract, Clowes put the following words into the mouth of a supporter of the baron:

This did not mean that every human being was on the same spiritual level. Clowes shared Swedenborg's belief that spirits were differentiated by the degree of love that they manifested in their worldly lives. The afterlife simply eternalized the earthly condition of the human spirit—it was a continuation of the essential state of a spirit, rather than a simple punishment. Clowes preached to his flock at Manchester that “your immortal spirits and their INTERNAL FORMS are in a continual state of change, either to a greater and more infernal deformity, or to a higher and more angelic state of BEAUTY and loveliness.”
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Although the term “INTERNAL FORMS” suggests Neoplatonism, for Clowes not even the forms of spirits were fixed; they matured or became degraded over time. Nonetheless, everyone had constant access to them. In a letter of 1799 to
the Swedenborgian printer Robert Hindmarsh, Clowes expressed a belief that many of his sermons were “dictated throughout by spirits, when I have chanced to awake in the course of the night.”
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This went far beyond the cautious theories of More and Cudworth.

Clowes's thinking was certainly mystical, but what made it occult? The answer lies in his approach, not to spiritual experience, but to nature. Mystical thinking focused on the individual's relationship to God; occult thinking sought to bring supernatural power or understanding to bear on nature. In this sense, occult thinking was always a counterpart to natural philosophy or science, even among mystics in the age of the Enlightenment. For all his disdain for “Heathen” literature and secular philosophies, Clowes never turned his back on the natural world. He particularly praised Swedenborg for giving a spiritual account of nature:

Clowes referred to Swedenborg's theology as “heavenly Science.”
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He was delighted to meet, among the Swedenborgians in London, the mathematical instrument-maker George Adams junior, author of a series of lectures on experimental philosophy that were intended to counter the “destructive ideas of the atheists of France” by vindicating “a DIVINE MIND or WISDOM that hath wrought with a view to certain
ends
.”
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Clowes wanted to grasp that divine wisdom. He actually wrote a book on natural science, supposedly dictated to him by spirits. According to his own account, while riding between York and Hull, “a Book appeared to be presented to his mental eye for perusal entitled
a Work on Science
… During his Ride, he had an Opportunity of reading the Book attentively through, from Beginning to End.” Happily, he was able to write down the chapter titles, and the contents came back to him over the next few years.
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Thomas Taylor the Platonist seems the diametrical opposite of Clowes in a number of ways. Born into a Dissenting family in 1758, he was at first intended for the ministry, but his fondness for mathematics, Latin and Greek led him in different directions. He eloped at a young age, causing his wife's family virtually
to disinherit her. Taylor was obliged to seek employment, first as a school usher, then as a bank clerk. Keen to make a mark on the world, he designed a “perpetual lamp,” supposedly based on ancient designs, which he demonstrated at the Freemason's Tavern. The whole scenario was a cliché of the Enlightenment—an eternal light revealed to the public in a house of Masonic brotherhood—but, unfortunately, the lamp exploded. The incident brought Taylor to public attention nonetheless, and he soon found a patron, the businessman William Meredith, who was willing to support his scholarly endeavours. These included translations of the Platonist philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry, a version of the “Hymns of Orpheus” with a preliminary discourse on Orphic philosophy, and an essay on the mystery cults.
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Few contemporary writers could be more distant from the mystic Clowes than Taylor, who became known as “the Pagan.” While it may not be true that he sacrificed a bull to Zeus in his suburban home, Taylor did come to despise Christian priests, whose characters he described as “consummate arrogance united with a profound ignorance of antient wisdom and blended with matchless hypocrisy and fraud.”
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Clowes would have been horrified.

Taylor was not writing for saints. His audience consisted of sophisticated lovers of antiquity, which they appreciated for its distinctly non-Christian side. The fascination of the English elite with classical art had never been greater than in the 1780s. The Grand Tour to Europe had become a standard element in the education of the well-born and wealthy, and Rome was no longer out of bounds for young Protestant tourists. Ample supplies of money allowed them to buy heaps of classical statuary, cameos, gems, vases—often faked or restored by Roman dealers, but highly desirable nonetheless as status symbols and indicators of educated taste. The Society of Dilettanti, formed in 1732, became the leading club for aristocratic collectors, admirers and promoters of classical art. Connected from the first with Freemasonry and tinged with libertinism, the Dilettanti were drawn towards interpretations of antique art that emphasized the Eleusinian mysteries, symbolic representations of myth and, above all, sex. They were guided by the works of Pierre François Hugues, who called himself the baron d'Hancarville, and who edited a series of lavishly illustrated volumes on Greek vase painting.
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In a lengthy treatise on Greek art published in 1785, Hancarville argued for a universal system of symbolic representation, diffused through Egypt, Persia, India and Japan as well as the Greco-Roman world. The basic message of this symbolic system, as preserved in the rites of the mystery cults, was the generative power of the supreme deity: in short, divine sex.
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