Solomon's Secret Arts (56 page)

Sibly's conceptions of the spirit world were derived from Jacob Boehme as well as from “the noble and learned Swedenbourg,” whose nativity chart was included in his first major compilation. To this mixture he added dashes of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism (especially the idea of a universal soul), along with thinly disguised bits of the notory or divinatory arts, mostly pinched from
Agrippa. Like Swedenborg, Sibly perceived man as a spirit, moving from worldly constraints towards an angelic state; like Boehme, he saw palpable signs of human divinity in the body as well as in the stars. He divided non-human spirits into three groups, a classification he seems to have invented himself. The first was “
astral spirits
, which belong to this outward world, and are compounded of the elemental quality, having their source from stars.” They transmitted astrological influence, offered up the treasures of the earth to alchemical adepts, and facilitated herbal, electrical or magnetic healing. This was an admission of a belief rarely discussed by astrologers: that the stars were inhabited by angels. The second group of spirits was infernal or diabolical, the source of black magic. The third group consisted of the ghosts or apparitions of dead people, which did not seem to have any innate moral qualities at all.
⁴⁵
By making room for ghosts among the three classes of spirits, Sibly was taking account of the widespread popular acceptance of apparitions, and gesturing towards the preconceptions of his readers. He did not try to make his views on ghosts consistent with Neoplatonic or Swedenborgian concepts of spirits; rather, he addressed the fears and somewhat muddled perceptions of ordinary Anglicans or Methodists of the middling sort.

Seeking an even larger audience for his work, Sibly moved to London soon after the publication of his
Celestial Science
. There he joined his younger brother, Manoah, who had set up in the capital during the late 1770s as an astrological publisher, teacher of Greek and Hebrew, and transcriber of legal proceedings. Manoah Sibly's astrological publications were reprints of classic works, including a collection of nativities by Placidus de Titus, the seventeenth-century Italian astrologer whose claim that the stars foretold the time of a person's death had been revived by John Partridge. For Manoah, these grim forecasts demonstrated “the infallibility of that science.”
⁴⁶
Manoah Sibly would later become a Swedenborgian minister and, curiously enough, head of the Chancery Office at the Bank of England. As a preacher, he seems to have avoided occult matters, unlike so many other Swedenborgians. His didactic and rather boring sermons, delivered before regular New Jerusalem congregations, did not so much as mention astrology.
⁴⁷
Whether the topic ever came up at the Bank of England is a matter of pure speculation.

Ebenezer followed in his brother's enterprising footsteps by setting up the British Directory Office, a publishing firm, in the printers’ quarter near St Paul's. From these premises, and from his house in Upper Titchfield Street, Sibly marketed his “Solar Tincture,” a universal medicine based on alchemical and astrological principles. Sibly was determined to connect his work with an expanding consumer market among the middling sort. To do this, he had to reject the assumption that the occult should be kept
secret
. As a result, almost
everything in Sibly's writings is open, transparent, simplified, easy to grasp. For example, he put into print the supposedly terrifying (or, to sceptical readers, quite ridiculous) names of demons, derived from handwritten necromantic texts.
⁴⁸
Agrippa had done the same, but his audience consisted exclusively of learned readers. Sibly was writing for a broader, less erudite public that was ignorant of Latin and unfamiliar with previous occult writings. His big books also came out in instalments, a marketing ploy that appealed to readers of limited means who sought inexpensive sources of encyclopaedic knowledge.

Sibly's endorsement of natural magic and spiritual cures was supposedly upheld by strictly empirical methods. His commercial bravado, therefore, did not undercut his embrace of science. He argued that astrology itself was “a Science which treats of the natural body of Heaven, after the same manner as Geology describes that of the Earth.” While his new science of “Uranology” rested on spiritual influence, sympathies and antipathies, we should not underestimate the extent to which Sibly's approach appeared scientific. His
Medical Mirror
contains numerous anatomical diagrams and discussions of the human reproductive system that are surprisingly accurate. Although he subscribed to the opinion that “the vegetative or procreative faculties of women are universally governed by the lunations of the moon,” most of his advice on childbirth was straightforward and sensible.
⁴⁹
He rejected “superstitious” notions, like the idea that a mother's imagination could confer physical characteristics on her unborn child.
⁵⁰
Sibly's edition of
Culpeper's Herbal
was enlivened by detailed descriptions of the symptoms of illness, including a section on venereal disease that is unjudgmental and unusually sympathetic to sufferers. Sibly was keen to flaunt his medical qualifications, and to cite current scientific writers like Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin or even Joseph Black, whose burning hostility to the occult has already been mentioned here. In
The Key to Physic
, Sibly even takes up controversial scientific positions, espousing a kind of atomism and criticizing the French naturalist Buffon for dismissing the idea of “sensitive plants.”
⁵¹

The Natural History
was Sibly's primary scientific contribution. It relies heavily on the classifications of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, which are extended into the domain of animals and human beings. Here, Sibly adopts degrading ethnic aspects of scientific categorization. Africans are described as “crafty, indolent, and careless,” American Indians as “obstinate,” “Asiatics” as “grave, haughty and covetous,” while Europeans are “of gentle manners, acute in judgment, of quick invention, and governed by fixed laws.” By linking racial with moral characteristics, Sibly foreshadows later “scientific racism,” although he balances this with a Behmenist emphasis on the essential divinity of all humans.
⁵²
In racial matters, Sibly's science was apparently less humane than his mysticism.

Sibly linked himself to the project of enlightenment in other ways as well. His
Celestial Science
was dedicated to the Brotherhood of Freemasons. Sibly had been a Freemason since his days in Portsmouth, and he helped to found a lodge in London in 1789. In dedicating his edition of
Culpeper's Herbal
to a well-known provincial grand master, Thomas Dunckerley, Sibly linked himself with one of the most influential men in the Brotherhood. He did not hesitate to use the language of enlightenment that was so much associated with the Freemasons in an international context. He hoped that “my Masonic Brethren” would find in his work “an ample store of Precepts, whereby the blessings of Health might be universally dispensed, and the happiness of Mankind more permanently secured; to promote which is the leading Feature of masonic Principles.” It is startling to note that, only a few pages after this eulogy to the rational improvement of humanity, Sibly opined “that there is indisputably an innate and occult virtue infused into all sublunary things, animal, vegetable, and mineral, by the action of the heavenly bodies.”
⁵³
Whether occult virtue promoted or stood in the way of human happiness was not explained. Clearly, however, the good doctor saw no clash between enlightened principles and occult explanations of nature.

When he explained them directly, as opposed to hinting at them in passages that might well be paraphrases of the work of others, Sibly's social views tended to be reformist. His Swedenborgian religious beliefs, for example, led him to oppose slavery, no matter what he wrote elsewhere about race. “Since, then, that we are all derived from one common parent,” he wrote, “is it not barbarous and inhuman, to make perpetual slaves of our fellow-creatures, merely because they differ from us in colour, and are less informed in the arts and subtilties of life?”
⁵⁴
While this statement is doubtless ambiguous (was temporary slavery acceptable?) and somewhat condescending, it would have put him at odds with many of his former neighbours in Bristol, where the slave trade provided a large part of mercantile profits. Sibly could also be broad-minded on issues of gender. Although he presents gender differences as absolute, based on astrology (men were “solar,” women “lunar”) as well as physiology, this did not prevent him from arguing, like Jacob Boehme, that Adam was both male and female, a concept that had implications for gender equality. Sibly praised the “admirable structure” of the female body, and condemned “the confinement of females,” recommending exercise and outdoor activities for women. Unlike other members of the all-male medical profession, he embraced the experiential knowledge of midwives and herbalists.
⁵⁵

Ebenezer Sibly's writings brought the secret world of the magical adept before the public gaze, where it took on the sheen of empirical or scientific validity. A key to his success was, paradoxically enough, his appearance of
honesty. Sibly may have been an enthusiastic self-promoter who made unbelievable claims, but he was not a con man. His tone was earnest and direct, devoid of allegory or allusion. In his transparency, his preoccupation with science and his desire to classify the whole world in easily understood categories, Sibly was a typical writer of the Enlightenment. Still, we should not place his encyclopaedias of the occult alongside the writings of Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. What differentiated Sibly from them was his reinvention of older traditions of magical and mystical thought, and his rejection of whatever challenged them, which he referred to as “abstract reason.” Even as he sought to make occult forces visible, he insisted that their operations were hidden, and that even their natural effects “were infinitely beyond our knowledge and comprehension.”
⁵⁶
“Secondary causes” in nature were spiritual phenomena that could not be analysed or even classified. Transparency, in other words, had its limits within the science of Uranology.

Sibly was unusual in attempting to reconcile the astrologer's art with enlightened science, and to separate it from ritual magic. Most of his colleagues were unembarrassed by magical practices. An unidentified astrologer living in the Midlands in the 1760s and 1770s kept a notebook entitled “Theomagia” (shades of John Heydon) that contained not only the nativities of his customers, but also various spells for practical purposes, such as one “to secure a House from theft” by writing talismanic signs and numbers on a piece of paper and burying it. The notebook also includes ritual incantations for summoning spirits. Similarly, the self-styled “Magus” Francis Barrett would later endorse the use of images, seals and talismans that “derive Virtue from the Celestial Bodies.”
⁵⁷
Even Sibly's best-known pupil, John Parkins, who may also have studied with Barrett, relied on selling magical charms. Parkins, a cunning-man from Lincolnshire, marketed “
holy consecrated philosophical lamens, pentacles, papers, writings, amulets, telesmes
, &c.,” which he advertised in a series of publications that appeared in the early nineteenth century.
⁵⁸
The anti-magical reforms of John Gadbury and John Partridge had obviously not touched all those who aspired to read the heavens. What might have earned a powerful rebuke from those long-dead masters of the celestial art passed without much notice in the popularized, frenetically commercial astrology of a later age. In a sense, enlightened tolerance had made the public sphere safer for the magical talismans of Barrett or Parkins.

Some astrologers avoided magic because they were religiously orthodox. After Sibly, the most influential astrological writer of the time was John Worsdale, author of
Genethliacal Astrology
(1798). A devout Protestant, Worsdale equated Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Joseph, thought Moses had learned astrology from the Egyptians and argued that the celestial
science was no more diabolical than studying “the occult principles of the magnet.”
⁵⁹
Worsdale categorically asserted that there was “no such thing as
Chance
in Nature.” He shared none of Sibly's confidence in the innate divinity of human beings, or his fascination with the spirit world.
⁶⁰
Worsdale's piously Christian theory of astrology, based on Ptolemaic rather than Copernican principles, was summed up in a poetic preface to his main work:

This could have been written a century earlier. On the other hand, Worsdale viewed astrology as a progressive science, as the final lines of his poem attest:

He even used the common Enlightenment comparison of the universe to “a Watch made up of small Wheels, one within another.”
⁶²
While his interpretation of occult philosophy was constrained by conventional piety and never as scientifically inclined as that of Sibly, Worsdale was not entirely at odds with the enlightened spirit of his times.

Who read these works on astrology and occult science? And what did they make of them? Lacking much direct evidence, we have to rely on internal clues. Sibly, Barrett, Parkins and Worsdale may have appealed to two types of readers, one general, the other more exclusive. The first type was a Protestant of the middling or labouring ranks, male or female, probably influenced by evangelicalism, who accepted that the supernatural really operated in this world. Literate, but outside the orthodox influence of academic learning, such a person might already be familiar with Culpeper's
Herbal
or with astrological almanacs, and might buy one of Sibly's works for its medical information, or
Genethliacal Astrology
for its handy guidance on reading the stars. Readers of this type were numerous enough to keep Sibly's compendia in print for decades. In industrial Lancashire as late as the 1860s, his medical-astrological books outsold “all other works on the same subjects put together.”
⁶³
The second, more exclusive type of reader was a person genuinely intrigued by the occult, perhaps a Swedenborgian or a member of one of the occult intellectual circles that sprang up in late eighteenth-century England. The painter Richard Cosway, for example, owned at least two of Sibly's works.
⁶⁴
Although these individuals were
far fewer in number than the first type of reader, they were enthusiastic consumers of publications like those of Barrett. Through their own activities and writings, they sent further shock waves of renewed life into the hitherto-moribund body of occult philosophy. The galvanizing effect of the occult revival was even successful in reviving alchemy, a subject that, like Uranology, deserves to be drawn out of the shadows and into a critical historical light.