Solomon's Secret Arts (65 page)

The French Revolution shook Freemasonry to its foundations. As in America, the loyalties of Masons were divided according to politics and self-interest. Collectively, they neither supported nor opposed the events of 1789 and after in France. Individually, some took prominent roles in those events, but many more ultimately suffered as a result of them. The changing relationship of Masons to the revolutionary government can be observed in the case of the Avignon Society, which had effectively ceased to exist by 1795, just at the moment when, ironically, it became so notorious in England. The papal authorities at Avignon, convinced that all Masons were dangerous, had begun to clamp down on the lodge in 1791. At the end of that year, however, the territory of Avignon was annexed by the French Republic. Initially, the Brothers welcomed the revolutionary government, but in the dark days of the Terror several of them were arrested, including Pernety and Grabianka. Others fled the city. The lodge became inoperative.
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Richard Brothers's blessing did them no good.

To the conspiracy theorists proliferating in the aftermath of the shock of 1789, the divisions among Masons did not matter. These critics were aware that revolutionary demands had first arisen within clubs and associations that promoted enlightened values and the free exchange of ideas.
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Having little understanding of the diversity of beliefs and lack of political focus typical of Freemasonry, they imagined that the occult lodges had to be responsible for bringing down the French government. Such was the thesis famously proposed by the former Jesuit Augustin Barruel in his three-volume history of Jacobinism (1797–8), a work almost immediately translated into English. The Abbé Barruel entered into a detailed description of the Templar and higher-degree lodges in France, in order to demonstrate that they were committed to a single world government, which made them bitter opponents of national monarchies. “All classes, therefore, every code of [occult] Masonry,” he concluded, “Hermetic, Cabalistic or Martinists, and Eclectic [i.e. the Bavarian Illuminati], all and each forwarded the Revolution; and it little imported to the sect which struck the blow, provided ruin ensued.”
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Barruel was careful to separate the “occult Lodges” (or “
Arrières Loges
,” as he wrote in French), from the “common” lodges, and he advised his readers “not to confound English Masonry with the occult Lodges, which they have prudently rejected.”
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Living in exile in England, he was too tactful to pick a fight with the Grand Lodge, although he knew that the English also worked the higher and Templar degrees. His scandalized condemnation of Masonic ritual, however, amounted to a blanket condemnation of the myths and rituals of the Brotherhood. No Mason could read his treatise without taking some offence.

Barruel's work was published at almost the same time as
Proofs of a Conspiracy
by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, secretary of the Royal Society there and a close friend of Joseph Black. Robison argued for the existence of a conspiracy against religion and government led by the Freemasons, who longed to be “Citizens of the World.” The original benevolence of the English and Scottish Masons, he argued, had been perverted among the French and Germans by the infiltration of Jesuits and Jacobites, as well as by the “spirit of innovation.”
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The dreadful result was the Order of Illuminati. “Nothing is more clear than that the design of the Illuminati was to abolish Christianity,” Robison maintained, adding that they had an even more insidious sexual goal, since “we now see how effectual this would be for the corruption of the fair sex, a purpose which they eagerly wished to gain, that they might corrupt the men.” Of course, he believed that the Illuminati had actually grown stronger after their suppression in Bavaria, which led him to the same conclusion as Barruel: “That the Illuminati and other hidden Cosmo-political Societies had some influence in bringing about the French Revolution, or at least in accelerating it, can hardly
be doubted.”
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Robison ended his almost five-hundred-page demonstration with strident flourishes of British patriotism.

Robison's book went into five editions within a year. Having eventually read Barruel, he appended a postscript to the second edition, noting with satisfaction of the Jesuit writer that “he confirms all that I have said of the
Enlighteners
.”
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Robison went on to echo Barruel in exempting British Masons from his attacks (which he had not done in the original text), although he argued that they did not really understand the subversive meaning of their own rituals. They owed this happy naivety, Robison claimed, to the British character: “As the good sense and sound judgment of Britons have preserved them from the absurd follies of Transmutation, of Ghost-raising, and of Magic, so their honest hearts and innate good dispositions have made them detest and reject the mad projects and impious doctrines of Cosmopolites, Epicurists, and Atheists.”
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Whether or not Robison realized the incorrectness of the first part of this statement is irrelevant. He was arguing here more as a Scotsman than as a Briton. By equating Britishness with an anti-occult viewpoint, Robison vindicated not only the scientific basis but also the religious and political reasoning of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Such attacks were not ignored by occult Freemasons in Britain. Hugh Percy, the duke of Northumberland, who only recently had been poring over a tablet containing “some of the highest & most secret Mysteries of the Order,” sent to him by “one of the Magi,” was duly alarmed by Barruel's book.
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In January 1799, he complained to General Rainsford that “the Abbé Barruel is too severe,” although he recognized that the “three Degrees of Old Masonry, are exempt from the severest Charges,” and were “only a kind of Ground Work to all the Wickedness & Blasphemy of the other higher Degrees,” by which “Atheism, & Rebellion, & every other smaller Crime is taught & practised.” If Barruel had “unjustly accused the Fraternity,” it was in targeting these higher degrees. “As far as I have gone,” Percy added, with admirable equanimity, “I confess I see no Grounds for his Assertions, but apparent Injustice, but as the Portuguese say,
veremos
[we will see].”
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Evidently, Percy was unsure about the public reaction to Barruel's attacks—or the government reaction for that matter. The last page of his letter is missing, and Rainsford may have destroyed it for fear that its contents could bring unwanted attention from the authorities. After all, a war was raging and everybody knew that the government was opening correspondence and searching for evidence of subversion. It is difficult to say whether Rainsford had anything to worry about, but in any case the outcome of Barruel's onslaught among English Masons was fairly clear. The influence of the occult lodges waned in the early nineteenth century, to the point of their being labelled “un-English” by some Masonic historians. The higher degrees,
as has been seen, were already being brought under control. In 1813, when the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Lodge of Antients were finally reunited, the degree system became uniform throughout England, and an era of ritual experimentation was closed.
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The Masonic writer William Preston responded to Barruel and Robison by denying any connection between English Masonry and the Illuminati, but few dared to defend the occult lodges.
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One lonely champion was the Irish lawyer, patriot and Parliamentarian Francis Dobbs, a vocal opponent (on Scriptural grounds) of the Act of Union with Great Britain. In 1800, he published at Dublin and London a book of prophecy that bears some resemblance to the outpourings of Richard Brothers. Dobbs regarded the Avignon Society as having “an intercourse with good spirits,” although he condemned the Illuminati for being influenced by evil spirits and “preparing the way for the Antichrist.” He recalled a meeting in London with thirty members of the Avignon Society, probably in 1786 when Grabianka was visiting the British capital. Sharing a prophetic dream with them, he found that three of those present had experienced the same vision, which could only have happened “by supernatural means.”
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Dobbs's attempt to separate the benign, occult Masons of Avignon from the diabolical, rationalist Masons of Bavaria may not have been very convincing to educated British or Irish readers, who had been led by Barruel and Robison to view all foreign Freemasons with equal horror.

Barruel had not spared the Swedenborgians from complicity in the French Revolution, since so many occult lodges (including that of Avignon) had looked to Swedenborg as a spiritual guide. This prompted the Reverend John Clowes—working, as he assured the publisher Robert Hindmarsh, under direct angelic inspiration—to take up his pen in an attempt to refute the Abbé's unfair aspersions. Clowes indignantly countered Barruel by maintaining that Swedenborg was a convinced monarchist, and “by shewing that his ideas of
liberty, equality, reason and the rights of man
were not such as were propagated by the
occult lodges
.”
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On the contrary, if Swedenborg occasionally mentioned such concepts, they referred to spiritual rather than political states of being. Of course, it is difficult to grasp how they could fail to have political implications too, since the spiritual and material worlds were so closely intertwined in Swedenborg's mind. Clowes was offering a narrow and restrictive interpretation of the baron's highly adaptable ways of thinking. It was an interpretation that would delight the founders of the New Jerusalem Church, who were seeking to escape from the glare of public disapproval.

Clowes's conservative rewriting of Swedenborg would not play so well among other admirers of the baron, notably William Blake. Unlike those former advocates of occult thinking who were moving worriedly towards
loyalism in the 1790s, Blake stuck stubbornly to more dangerous visionary opinions. His visions reflected the survival of a politically engaged reading of occult sources. As an artist, Blake was unique. In his combination of the radical and the occult, however, he was not alone.

Against Pharaoh: Mary Pratt

The private views of those who were interested in the occult are difficult to penetrate, but we have been granted extraordinary insight into the mind of one female Behmenist who shared many things with William Blake. Her name was Mary Pratt, and she was hardly an influential figure in late eighteenth century society. She left to posterity only a short pamphlet on magnetic healing, referred to above, and a few rapturous letters on mystical union with God. Her other writings and drawings were destroyed after her death.
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She was nonetheless important, and not only because she drew from many of the same sources as Blake. Pratt's mysticism arose from a particularly trying set of female experiences. Her hardships, while hardly typical, were common among women who aspired to break out of a contemporary mould of femininity. This did not make Pratt a proto-feminist, like Mary Wollstonecraft. Rather, she espoused a feminized path to mysticism that depended on the occult. It was more subjective than ideological, but its implications were shocking to those who knew her.

Mary Pratt's social milieu was very different from the artisanal world of William Blake. Her family lived in comfortable circumstances in a fashionable district of London. Born Mary Moule around 1740, she was married in June 1760 to Jonathan Pratt at St Mary's Church, Marylebone Road. Her husband was a distant relative of chief justice Sir Charles Pratt, who later became Lord Camden. A son, named for his father, was born to the Pratts in November 1763, and christened at St Mary's. Two daughters would follow. Mary's husband was a liveryman or fully enroled member of the Haberdasher's Company, but in a tradesman's directory for 1790 his occupation was listed as “bricklayer, plaisterer and slater,” and his wife described him as a builder. By 1776, the family was living at 41 Great Portland Street, near where the Adam brothers would soon lay out the very grand Portland Place. As the area gentrified, the Pratts acquired a famous neighbour, James Boswell, who purchased number 47 in 1790 and died there five years later. Boswell's literary friend William Seward resided next door to the Pratts at number 40, and another friend, the Irish poet John Courtenay, rented “a neat little house” around the corner. Jonathan Pratt was a man of enough property to be chosen as a juror for the Middlesex sessions in 1790.
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If Mary Pratt enjoyed a privileged social standing, she was still far enough below the position of a gentleman's wife to have to devote more time to
housewifery than to leisure.
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As she put it, her husband's business “calls for my attendance at home, where my domestic avocations occupy me wholly.” It was not a happy household. Mrs Pratt complained that she had “a persecuting husband and an ungodly infamous son, who is allowed plenty of money, while I am dealt with like Hagar the Ismaelite—kept without a shilling.”
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On account of her religious visions, she had been imprisoned by her relatives in a private madhouse for six weeks: “I have been in prison, for the cause, and have been stript of all things for the Lord's sake … from thence My Beloved the Lord Jehovah set me free: and I adore him for it.”
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In retelling the story, she fashioned it to reflect tales of Christian martyrdom, rather than to protest the victimization of her gender, but it can only remind modern readers of the legal powerlessness of married women in the face of their husbands’ authority.

Jonathan Pratt was a Swedenborgian and a member of the New Jerusalem Church. He was also a contributor to the
New Magazine of Knowledge Concerning Heaven and Hell
, a monthly Swedenborgian publication that appeared in 1790–1. Several letters were addressed to the
New Magazine
by an anonymous writer titling himself “Ignoramus.” A marginal notation in a copy owned by the British historian E.P. Thompson identified “Ignoramus” as none other than Jonathan Pratt.
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His contributions began with two letters arguing that astrology should be taken seriously, as an example of the influence of spirits on matter. The moon, in particular, might affect the brain, “as to modify the rational influx of the soul, into the disordered ideas of a madman's ravings.”
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Was he thinking of his wife, Mary? “Ignoramus's” letters then shifted to the deeper topic of the nature of evil, which he interpreted as the loss of man's original divinity. He confirmed that Jacob Boehme “is no despicable author on that head, although I must freely acknowledge that I do not fully comprehend him.”
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In August 1791, “Ignoramus” entered into a controversy with Benedict Chastanier regarding universal restitution or salvation for all. Sticking to the more conventional view, “Ignoramus” concluded that “till the will is changed from evil to good, misery must be the consequence.”
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If he rejected universalism, “Ignoramus” nonetheless believed that Christ was not God, although he contained the divine within his humanity. He opined that, just as Christ inherited divine nature from his Father and corporeal nature from his mother, so too “the form of a man's soul being from the father, remains to eternity, but the form induced from the mother may be put off, and is put off as to gross corporeity by all.”
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This disparaging comment on mothers was “Ignoramus's” last major contribution to the journal.