Solomon's Secret Arts (58 page)

The impression given by Bacstrom's manuscripts, therefore, is not that of a recluse working in isolation, but of a sociable man who toiled away at alchemy with the help of many acquaintances and associates. His relationship with written sources was similarly engaged and interactive. He read medieval and early-modern alchemical texts with reverence, awe and excitement, but he never ceased trying to understand them in the context of his philosophical ideas. He did not simply follow recipes: he interpreted them. Bacstrom's own theories were expressed in a set of “Aphorisms” that he wrote down in 1797. They amounted to a Neoplatonic vision of the universe, in which all souls and spirits are part of an
anima mundi
created by God. The omnipresent Soul of the World takes visible form only in fire, but it can become material in “the Stone, or Medicine of the Philosophers.” The “Magnet” used to attract the stone is man or, more specifically, “the Dust or
red earth
of Man,” which seems to mean either urine or semen, “that precious fluid, wherein dwells the Universal Spirit.” From this point, Bacstrom turned to the practical methods of multiplying medicines, including electricity, which will “introduce the Electrical Universal principle, or the Universal Spirit of Nature into the subject by motion.”
⁸⁹
The influence of Dr Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of magnetic healing is evident here.

Bacstrom maintained an interest in contemporary science, even if he did not think much of it. He was concerned, for example, to hear from Miss Ford
in November 1808 about a recent newspaper article referring to a lecture at the Royal Society given by Humphry Davy, the greatest public experimenter. It related to the isolation of elements, including metals, from alkaline earth samples through electrolysis. The article suggested that this experiment made possible the
creation
of metals and might give new heart to alchemists, although, as Bacstrom disapprovingly observed, “Modern Chemists exclude themselves for ever by their unbelief and Mockery, and their Experiments will never cause them to discover
that Truth
, which was better known 2000 Years ago, than at present.”
⁹⁰
Was there a note of resentment against Alexander Tilloch in this peevish comment? Bacstrom did not mention that Davy's presentation—the Royal Society's Bakerian Lecture for 1808—had been printed in Tilloch's
Philosophical Magazine
, with the effusive praise of the editor. Within two years, Davy had taken on a youthful assistant in his experiments at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday, future discoverer of electromagnetism. Like Tilloch, Faraday was a Sandemanian who had worked in the printing trade. As members of the same tiny London congregation, the two men must have known one another.
⁹¹
Perhaps Tilloch was moving away from Bacstrom's old-fashioned alchemy, towards the new promise of Davy's modern chemistry, with young Faraday going before him. Whatever the case, nothing more is known about Tilloch's alchemical pursuits after 1808.

As for Bacstrom, to the very end he looked to the past, even if he remained aware of a threatening present. Considering his wide experience of the world and his encounters with imperialism, slavery, the mistreatment of native peoples and global conflict, one might have imagined that his alchemy would be shaped by contemporary political and social problems. In fact, it was almost completely detached from them. This does not mean that alchemy was for him mere escapism, because it required a lot of hard work and provided him with a living. Still, his alchemical quest was unquestionably a romance, a beautiful dream of knowledge, riches and power that remained eternally unfulfilled. He separated this dream from the harsh realities of poverty and exploitation that surrounded him, although of course it was at least in part a reaction to them too. While Bacstrom saw the “great work” as eternal and unchanging, his passionate, uncompromising, wholly transparent and largely self-directed approach to it could only have thrived in the late eighteenth century. The Enlightenment made Sigismund Bacstrom possible, even if he never acknowledged its impact on him.

The last dated entry in Bacstrom's manuscripts is for 8 November 1808. It concerns a conversation with Mr Ford, who believed Humphry Davy's experiments showed the way forward for alchemy. Bacstrom remained unconvinced, asserting that, “against all the Barkers and Deriders, the Truth of
the blessed Stone of the earliest Antiquity will stand firm like a Rock, as long as the Earth will endure.”
⁹²
To the end, he asserted an intellectual freedom to look back towards verities that were immutable. For the aged voyager, the rock still stood firm.

The Occult Freemasons

Sigismond Bacstrom had little regard for regular Freemasons. “I have found them a set of Trifflers [
sic
],” he complained in the late 1790s, “not a hair better than any other men, perfectly ignorant of Natural Knowledge, for which reason I do not intend to visit their Lodges any more during the remainder of my Life.”
⁹³
Above all, they were ignorant of “the Allegory of
King Solomon's Navigation to Ophir
and
King Hiram's Ships
,” which according to Bacstrom paralleled the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Both voyages revealed the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. Through his knowledge of alchemy, King Hermes (or Chiram) of the Phoenicians, mistakenly identified as Hiram the architect by the Freemasons, provided the gold that built the Temple of Solomon. Here was the hidden message of Newton's
Chronology
; but the secret was revealed only to the mysterious Rosy Crucians, not to their benighted brethren in the Masonic lodges.
⁹⁴

Every occult branch of Freemasonry in the late eighteenth century claimed to have secrets similar to those bestowed upon Bacstrom by the Rosy Crucians. They were passed on by initiation into the higher degrees devised after 1740. Masonic secrets might be expressed in the language of alchemy, but they tended towards spiritual enlightenment rather than gold-making. The nature of that enlightenment was often a combination of Behmenist, Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas, labelled as “Swedenborgianism.” The history of international Freemasonry in the last two decades of the eighteenth century therefore offers a fascinating Europe-wide perspective on the relationship between occult thinking and the Enlightenment. Among the “higher-grade” Freemasons, occult philosophy and science reached a level of respectability that they had never before enjoyed in Britain. This would soon prove problematic, however, because it opened the door to all sorts of impostures and social dangers.

The Knight Templar degrees that were thriving in German, French and other European lodges in the 1770s and 1780s had English and Scottish counterparts as early as the 1740s. In 1783, the successful attempt of Peter Lambert de Lintot, master of the London Lodge of Perfect Observance, to obtain a charter from the Grand Lodge of Scotland for a Rite of Seven Degrees, including Templar grades, marked a new phase in the development of occult Freemasonry in Britain. The Rite comprised three “Lights” or groups of secrets:
the first (“the Law of Moses”) was connected with the building of the Temple of Solomon; the second (“the Law of Christ”) had to do with the Templar Order and the Crusades; the third (“Nature”) focused on the suppression of the Templars by the papacy and on “the Natural Religion,” which largely consisted of alchemy. The initiate was to learn about the four elements, “the fluid of the sun that gives life to any thing in being” and the place of the soul in nature. He would then proceed to “Physic, Metaphysiq, Philosophy and Moral,” as well as to “the knowledge of the salts of Hermess [i.e. Hermes],” before reaching “the real Philosophical Stone by mathematics, astrology and all the Sciences that proves the real existence of the Eternal being.”
⁹⁵
That the Scottish Grand Lodge did not blink at endorsing this scheme for Hermetic instruction suggests that the existing Heredom rites may not have been far removed from it. The Scots Masons may also have been impressed by the inclusion among the members of Lambert de Lintot's lodge of the duke of Brunswick and the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, both admitted
in absentia
. It was not until 1788 that the Perfect Observance lodge began initiating English and Irish Brothers. They were mostly men of the middling sort, including a sergeant-major in the Coldstream Guards, an attorney, a button-maker, a victualler and a medical doctor, although the Irish earl of Antrim, protector of the Grand Lodge of Antients, was also initiated.
⁹⁶

Lambert de Lintot represented his interpretation of Templar Masonry in six engravings. The simplest two, “Free Masons at Work” and “Free-Masonry Crown'd,” show winged cherubs using the tools of the Craft on a symbolic diagram of the heavens and admiring an elaborate tracing board. The diagram, loaded with triangles and numbers, resembles the illustrations to Jacob Boehme's
Works
. The tracing board, representing the Rite of Seven Degrees, displays traditional Masonic symbols as well as alchemical signs. A print of 1787, entitled “Grand Elect,” was dedicated to the duke of Cumberland, George III's wayward brother, who was patron of the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons and master of the Grand Lodge. A fourth print, “Night,” shows “A Bonfire before the Ruins of H.R.D.M. [HARODIM] Castle,” and commemorates the foundation of the Royal Cumberland Freemasons’ School in 1788, a charitable institution for the daughters of indigent members of the Craft. The two last prints, dating from 1789, are the most complicated. In “Foundation of the Royal Order of the Free Masons in Palestine A.M. 4037,” Lambert de Lintot depicted the murder of Hiram by three apprentices and the scattering of his other apprentices, who brought the message of Masonry to the world. The final engraving was a stunningly elaborate symbolic chart, depicting the grades of the Rite of Seven Degrees on “cubical stones.” King Baldwin of Jerusalem appears as the founder of the Order of Harodim (a myth that persists in the
so-called Baldwin Rite); next to him are the symbols of the Rose Croix degree. The alchemical aspects of the third “Light” are depicted in a square showing “CHAOS OPEN,” along with geometrical shapes, numbers and the inscription “LUX EX TENEBRAS.” At the top of the chart appears a bearded King Solomon, who resembles the royal personification of gold in many alchemical texts—this became the floor-cloth design for the Knights of the East and West.
⁹⁷

Lambert de Lintot died in the 1790s, leaving an impressive collection of Masonic manuscripts, drawings and jewels. An inventory of these materials is found among the papers of General Charles Rainsford, the commander-in-chief of occult Masonry in late eighteenth-century England.
⁹⁸
A professional soldier who had witnessed the battles of Fontenoy and Culloden, Rainsford became equerry to George III's brother the duke of Gloucester, with whose patronage he gained a seat in the House of Commons. His friendship with Hugh Percy, 2nd duke of Northumberland, a fellow military officer, led to further Parliamentary service, although the general was not an active politician. The height of Rainsford's military career came in 1776–8, when he was the commissary responsible for moving German troops through the Dutch Republic to the Americas to serve in the War of Independence. The German prince on whom he most relied during this process, Frederick II of Hesse-Cassel, was later initiated into Lambert de Lintot's Perfect Observance lodge, as was the son and heir of Charles, duke of Brunswick, who had also provided soldiers for the expedition. This may not have been a coincidence, since Rainsford clearly knew the lodge's master. After 1778, promotions fell rapidly on Rainsford's head: he became governor of Chester Castle, aide-de-camp to King George III, organizer of the military camps established during the Gordon Riots and commander of the garrison of Gibraltar. He served for decades as deputy lieutenant of the Tower of London, and was buried there after his death in 1809.
⁹⁹

Towards the end of his career, Rainsford proudly recorded his progress through the ranks of the army, his Fellowship in the Royal Society, and his membership of the Society of Antiquaries, the Society for Making Discoveries in Africa and the Society for Helping the Poor, along with a bewildering number of Masonic societies: the Rosy Crucians, the Grand Orient at Paris, Pernety's Order of Illuminati of Avignon and the Grand Lodge of England, among others. He was inspector of Masonic lodges “universally” and “Member of 32 Elevations to 7th Degree exclusive,” meaning he had been initiated into Lambert de Lintot's Rite.
¹⁰⁰
Rainsford also noted his membership of the Exegetical Society of Stockholm, a quasi-Masonic organization founded for the propagation of Swedenborgian doctrines. Its most prominent member was Charles, duke of Södermania, brother of King Gustav III, grand master of the
Strict Observance Rite and later himself to become monarch of Sweden.
¹⁰¹
Rainsford did not record some of the more curious stages in this triumphant progress to enlightenment: how in 1756, for example, he had copied out manuscripts supposedly belonging to John Dee on the conjuration of spirits and the names of angels, then added thirty years later anecdotes about the astrological healer Dr Richard Napier that showed how he was assisted by spirits. Rainsford had encountered more conventional sources of wisdom as well. While travelling through Germany with the duke of Gloucester in 1770, the unmarried Rainsford became enamoured of a woman he called “charming lovable Jeanette,” a Jewish Berliner. He asked her to recommend him to “the great Mendelssohn the Philosopher so celebrated and enlightened … of whom I would very much like to be the Pupil.”
¹⁰²
He meant Moses Mendelssohn, the renowned scholar of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. What if Rainsford had become his devotee? Would astrology and magic have figured so largely in his mental framework?

Although Rainsford's correspondence and papers have not survived in their entirety, what is left of them shows that he was in touch with Freemasons throughout Europe. He answered questions about the antiquity of the Craft from the “Écharpes Blanches” (White Sashes) of Paris (probably a branch of the Élus Coens), received Count Grabianka, grand master of the Avignon Masons, when he visited England in 1786, and kept himself informed about the “
Society of Illuminés
,” headed by King Frederick William II of Prussia, who “pretend to supernatural Powers, and of bringing Those that are Dead or Alive to whatever Place they chuse to call them.”
¹⁰³
He was equally involved with international Swedenborgianism, receiving reports of the spread of the baron's works in White Russia and reading bitter complaints from Benedict Chastanier about a New Jerusalem Church minister who was “rather a Minister of Belial than a Servant of J.C.”
¹⁰⁴
Rainsford combined these pursuits with a passion for occult philosophy. A correspondent at Harwich sent him news of his investigations at Algiers into “Cabalistic Magic” and Rosicrucianism. Another forwarded a prophecy received from Hanover, whose author had “intended to write and to publish something about Hyeroglyphics, but was prevented by his death.
¹⁰⁵
Ebenezer Sibly gave him a copy of “The Tables of Rotalo,” a series of compass-like wheels by which the future could be foretold according to the “Science” of “Cabala.” The user was assured that “[f]rom this work Cagliostro learnt his surprising feats.” Sibly claimed that he had paid 300 guineas to copy the work, which sounds dubious. “My Brother the Minister”—that is, Manoah Sibly—carried the strange treatise over to Rainsford's house. Like the general, Ebenezer Sibly was a member of the Order of Harodim. An invitation to a 1796 chapter meeting addressed to the astrologer can be found among Rainsford's papers.
¹⁰⁶