Vaughan was a virtual one-man alchemical-magical industry in the early 1650s, and it is not surprising that Samuel Hartlib wanted to harness his protean energy. From reading Magia Adamica, Hartlib became convinced that Vaughan knew the formula of the “Menstruum Universale” or universal medicine. The German polymath had been alerted to the work of “this ingenious young man” by his friend Robert Child. It turned out that Child, Vaughan and another former royalist officer, Thomas Henshaw, had formed, probably at Oxford, an alchemical club modelled on the “College” or “Christian Learned Society” described by the German Rosicrucian writer J.V. Andreæ. It was to his fellow club members, those “truly reborn Brothers of the Rosy Cross,” that Vaughan dedicated his first published work.66
The little club is of some importance, because it represents the only group of self-styled seventeenth-century English Rosicrucians about which anything is known. Although the Rosicrucian Brotherhood had started out as a high-minded prank dreamed up by Andreæ and some friends, intellectuals throughout Europe took it very seriously, and the joke took on a life of its own.67 A supposed haven of fraternal tolerance, the mythical Brotherhood represented a kind of collective wish fulfilment for educated minds struggling through troubled times. They pictured the secretive Rosicrucians as possessors of universal or “Pansophic” knowledge, the same lofty intellectual target that Samuel Hartlib's circle aspired to hit. Some enthusiastic Rosicrucian publicists, like the German writer who called himself “Theophilus Schweighardt,” happily included magic in their fanciful visions of “Pansophia.”68 Vaughan was clearly a true believer, as he wrote an admiring preface to a 1653 edition of the Fame and Confession by “Christian Rosenkreuz,” the fictional founder of the Brotherhood. Like most would-be Rosicrucians, however, Vaughan ignored Rosenkreuz's inconvenient dislike of practical alchemy. The Welsh clergyman was also careful to deny his membership in the Brotherhood (a disclaimer that was required of all true Brothers), although he admitted, rather archly, that he knew their “Doctrine.”69
Vaughan's club lends a touch of credibility to the much-disputed theory concerning Rosicrucian influence on the Royal Society. Thomas Henshaw, the swashbuckling Cavalier to whom Vaughan dedicated Magia Adamica, calling him “my best of Friends,” became a founding member of the Society. So did Vaughan's protector Sir Robert Moray, who was called by Anthony Wood “a great patron of the Rosie-Crucians.” Nevertheless, Vaughan himself was never a Fellow, and none of the other founders can be connected with Rosicrucianism (which was in any case a highly amorphous phenomenon). At most, it can be said that the Royal Society attracted some members, like Henshaw and Moray, who shared a Rosicrucian disposition.70
For his part, Thomas Vaughan had no doubt that Rosicrucianism was favourable to magic, a word that appears in the titles of his first three books. He did not define the term in his first treatise, which is the most obscure and rambling of his works, and may have been intended for a select audience. In Magia Adamica, however, he starts out with this statement: “That I should professe Magic in this Discourse, and Justifie the Professors of it withall, is Impietie with Many, but Religion with Mee.” Ashmole would have been horrified. Vaughan makes magic into a personal religion, in opposition to that of the “Many,” meaning the godly Protestants then in control of the state. He continues: “It is a Conscience I have learnt from Authors greater than my Self, and Scriptures greater than both.” These “Scriptures” are the works of other magical writers like Agrippa, as well as portions of the Bible on which magical interpretations could be placed. Vaughan then comes to the point: “Magic is nothing else but the Wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the Creature.”71 More succinctly than his master Agrippa, Vaughan sums up here both the natural and the supernatural character of magical knowledge. For him, magic is not based on Aristotelian observation of manifest qualities; rather, it is divine wisdom, relating both to nature itself and to the supernatural purposes of creation. It is “revealed and planted” by God, meaning that science or experimentation can only uncover, by divine grace, the secrets that were once known to Adam and that are hinted at in Scripture.
This definition was more theologically sophisticated than Agrippa's or Ashmole's. Vaughan's magical writings, in fact, are far more concerned with divine things than are theirs, and are generally free of the bits and pieces of popular lore that litter the works of many previous magical writers. We cannot be certain where Vaughan derived his theological conceptions from, but one of his sources may have been the German Lutheran shoemaker and “Theosophist” Jacob Boehme. As will be seen, Boehme's writings were a constant inspiration to occult thinkers for the next 150 years and more. A marginal reference in Magia Adamica cites a translation of Boehme that had recently been issued by Vaughan's publisher, Humphrey Blunden.72 Vaughan also used the Behmenist term “Theosophy” in the preface to Anthroposophia Theomagica. There, in a diatribe against accepted views of nature, Vaughan opposes the “vomit of Aristotle” to “the Ancient, reall Theosophie of the Hebrewes and Egyptians.” The Oxford English Dictionary refers to this passage as the first use of “Theosophy” in English. Actually, an English translation of Boehme's “Theosophicall Letter” had been published a year earlier by Giles Calvert, Samuel Hartlib's publisher and the bookseller for whom Thomas Vaughan wrote his preface to the Fame and Confession.73 Vaughan may well have borrowed the word “Theosophie” from Boehme, as he did the notion of a threefold division of creation into elementary, celestial and spiritual principles, and the assumption of an “Angelicall, or rationall spirit,” inherent in man but hidden since the Fall of Adam.74 Like Boehme, Vaughan saw human beings as perfectible through a process of redemption that is best described as an alchemical quest.
Vaughan, however, was not a strict Behmenist. He did not use “Theosophy” in the same way as the pious shoemaker, who would never have applied it to pagan Egyptians. Vaughan's sense of the term, in fact, is closer to the writings of the magical-alchemical writer Heinrich Khunrath, who was much admired by Samuel Hartlib. Khunrath used “Theosophy” to mean the highest type of sacred knowledge, above “physical” and “hyperphysical” magic.75 Moreover, although many of Vaughan's scriptural references are the same as Boehme's, the two writers did not always interpret them in the same way. For example, both were fascinated by the account in Genesis 1:1 of how “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Both related “the Spirit” or “breath” of God to the Holy Spirit, and interpreted “the waters” as the primitive chaos referred to by Hermes Trismegistus. For Boehme, however, this primal act of creation gave rise to the “divine Wisdom” or “Sophia,” a kind of female counterpart to God, who arose from the primitive chaos. Vaughan does not mention Sophia. Instead, he implies that the Spirit moving on the waters is an allegorical foreshadowing of the alchemical separation of the supreme matter from the chaos of the world, an interpretation that may have been derived from Robert Fludd.76 The difference between Boehme and Vaughan, in fact, is fundamental. Boehme used alchemy, with some misgivings, as a key to Scripture. Vaughan, by contrast, saw Scripture as a key to alchemy.
Vaughan adapted from Agrippa, Khunrath and other German writers an alchemical interpretation of the Kabbala. Its source was not the Kabbala itself, which was inaccessible to almost all Christian readers, but the Kabbalistic researches of the early sixteenth-century humanist Johannes Reuchlin. Vaughan confidently asserted “that the learning of the Jewes, I mean their Cabala, was Chimicall, and ended in true Physicall performance.” At the same time, Vaughan was careful to acknowledge the mysticism of the Kabbalist writers: that is, their desire to make contact with God. This was summed up for him in the image of Jacob's ladder, “the greatest Mysterie in the Cabala.” Jacob's vision of a ladder ascending to heaven, with angels climbing up and down it, meant that any man, with the help of spirits, might ascend to the divine. Vaughan identified this process with a kind of trance, “the Death of the Kiss, of which I must not speake one Syllable.”77 His reluctance to write more on the
subject was, to some extent, a marketing ploy, meant to suggest that he possessed deeper wisdom than he was willing to impart; but he clearly believed in what he wrote. He was eager to embrace the truth of mystical experience, whether Kabbalist or Behmenist, although the spiritual message of mysticism was never as interesting to him as was its contribution to the “true Physicall performance” of alchemy.
The religious unorthodoxy of Vaughan's writings was more obvious to his contemporaries than it is to us today. He was brought up in an Anglican Church that was increasingly polarized between alternative visions of salvation: the Calvinist, based on the utter dependence of a degraded humanity on the freely bestowed grace of God; and the Arminian, by which good works were the necessary signs of grace.78 Vaughan essentially turned his back on both, in favour of a religion based neither on Scripture nor on good works, but on a theory of nature. In this respect, he resembled some of the religious radicals of the time, like the Digger Gerrard Winstanley or the early Quakers, who perceived salvation as inherent in humanity and therefore available to all. This resemblance explains why his antagonist Henry More labelled “Theomagy” as a form of religious enthusiasm.79 Unlike other religious radicals, however, Vaughan did not look inwards for redemption; rather, he sought the “seed” of human divinity in the basic structure of the universe.
Vaughan's first published treatise begins by posing the central Christian question of the consequences of the Fall of Man, but it represents the Fall as a matter of physical inheritance that can somehow be remedied by discovering the meaning of nature:
When I found out this Trueth, That Man in his Originall was a Branch planted in God and that there was a continual Influxe from the Stock to the Sion [i.e. Scion], I was much troubl'd at his Corruptions … But when I was told he had tasted of an other Tree, my admiration was quickly off, it being my chiefe care to reduce him to his first Simplicitie, and separate his Mixtures of Good and Evill … In this Perplexity I studied severall Arts, and rambl'd over all those Inventions which the folly of man call'd Sciences; But these Indeavours sorting not to my purpose, I quitted this Booke-businesse, and thought it a better course to study Nature then Opinion.80
Thus, Vaughan begins his search for the divine “seed” from which a corrupt humanity and a degraded world have sprung. Out of that “seed” he hopes to regenerate both an “Angelicall” humanity and the Philosopher's Stone. Vaughan borrowed the “seminal” theory from the influential Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius.81 By interpreting it as the divine seed in Adam, however, Vaughan opens redemption to everyone, which puts him at odds with the Calvinist restriction of salvation to “the elect.” On the other hand, the “seminal” theory does not leave much room for the sacraments and ceremonies of the Church, which would have been crucial for an Arminian. By contrast, the poetry of Vaughan's twin brother, Henry, Hermetically tinged but not fully soaked in the occult, manifests a greater concern about preserving traditional religious practices.82
Thomas Vaughan's alchemical theology can be interpreted as a way to escape from the destructive religious debates of his day, which had brought down the Church and the king. Should we also interpret his position as scientific, because it was based on a theory of nature? His philosophical vision was always fixed on alchemical results. He may in fact have felt increasing pressure from his fellow Rosicrucians to come up with specific alchemical recipes to back up his theories. Vaughan's later treatises (especially Lumen de Lumine, Aula Lucis and Euphrates) were much more explicit than his earlier ones in casting light (a frequently used image) on the fiery path to the Philosopher's Stone. While his alchemical concepts were rarely experimental, he clearly practised alchemy as well as theorizing about it. He was sued in 1661 by a man named Edward Bolnest who claimed to have loaned him £250 on the understanding “that he could in three monthes tyme at the furthest gett obtayne or make the Philosophers stone.” Vaughan's works are also peppered with curious scientific arguments, such as his rejection of the concept of atoms. The emphasis on the central role of fire in Euphrates owes less to Agrippa or the Kabbala than it does to the experimental alchemy of the Flemish chemist J.B. van Helmont.83
One reader, to be sure, did not see anything scientific in Vaughan. “The Fundamentals of Science,” the Cambridge philosopher Henry More wrote, “should be certain, plain, reall and perspicuous to reason; not muddy and imaginary as all your discourse is.” More's formulation of science was taken straight out of the rationalist philosophy of René Descartes. He was evidently scandalized by Vaughan's characterization of the great Frenchman's views as “Whymzies.”84 In a spirited response to More, the “Theomagus” thundered back with renewed hostility to Descartes, in spite of their shared dislike of Aristotelianism. The Frenchman, Vaughan implied, was no better than an atomist or materialist.85 Not surprisingly, More returned to the fray with a “Second Lash” against “Eugenius Philalethes,” in which he upheld Cartesian philosophy as “indeed a fine neat subtill Thing.” He scorned Vaughan's ignorance of the sciences, from human biology to astronomy: “Thou art so Magical, thou knowst none of these sober and usefull mysteries of Nature.” More went further in asserting that the Bible was not a scientific text (“Scripture speaks according to the outward appearance of things to sense”), the same view that had landed Galileo in trouble with the Papal Inquisition two decades previously. These Cartesian opinions, however, were mitigated by two further, somewhat paradoxical attitudes: first, More's insistent defence of Aristotle as a natural philosopher; second, his underlying Neoplatonism, which revealed itself in frequent citations of Plotinus and Ficino.86
The More-Vaughan debate was not a straightforward confrontation between science and magic; rather, as More himself recognized, it was a battle between truth based on conventional philosophies and truth based on personal revelation. More connected the fantastical views of his adversary with the rise of religious sectarianism. He labelled Vaughan a doctrinal “Independent” and lamented that “innumerable swarms of Sects rise in all the world. For Falsehood and Imagination is infinite; but Truth is one.”87 Five years later, eschewing ad hominem assaults, More penned a final riposte to the “Theomagus” and issued a general condemnation of “this distemper of Fantastrie and Enthusiasme.” He meant religious enthusiasm, a source of dread among orthodox Protestants in an era when Fifth Monarchists, Baptists and Quakers seemed to be popping up everywhere. More noted acidly that “it is the enormous strength of imagination … that thus peremptorily engages a man to believe a lie.”88
More was right about the source of his opponents’ certainty. Ultimately, Thomas Vaughan's writings are meant to be revelations of nature, not scientific or philosophical observations. They are obsessive and urgent rather than systematic or contemplative. They assault the reader with a bewildering stream of references and connections, rather than empirical proofs. Vaughan's theories cannot be verified against an objective, outside world, because they encompass the whole universe in a web of inferences. Their logical completeness or self-referentiality is what makes them “true.” Gradually, we realize that Vaughan's imagination is operating on the world like the mind of God, giving it structure and meaning. The seed of creation turns out to be the creativity of the author. Vaughan maintains this astonishing intellectual conceit with a furious energy that makes him the most entertaining, as well as the most brilliant, of magical writers of the 1650s.
In spite of Henry More's furious repudiations, Vaughan was a serious philosopher as well as an active alchemist. Along with Ashmole, Robert Turner, George Starkey, William Salmon, George Thor and others, he kept the intellectual discussion of alchemy alive in the late seventeenth century. It was not so much a dialogue as a group conversation, an “Office of Address” to use Samuel Hartlib's term, in which everybody expressed an opinion and the end of the exercise was never reached. For the most part, no matter what their philosophy or method, members of the alchemical community addressed each other without accusations or recriminations, which was unusual in an age of bitte
r controversy. Some opinions were more inclined to magic than others, but nothing was explicitly ruled out or denied, just as nothing was given the full sanction of authority. Alchemy was not a source of fixed truths, but a dynamic, evolving, inspiring dialogue—not a modern science, with strict rules of verifiability, but not a formless, pre-modern fantasy either. It was an art, whose beauty and usefulness depended on the skill of the artist as much as on the precise combination of materials.
The public face of that art was determined by printers and booksellers as much as by writers. Perhaps the most important alchemical bookseller of the late seventeenth century was William Cooper, who was also a practising alchemist. The main promoter of the works of “Eirenaeus Philalethes,” Cooper had a hand in almost every aspect of contemporary alchemy. His publications illustrate how seemingly contradictory approaches—supernatural magic and empirical science—could blend together in the “great work.”
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