The popularization of secrets in the late seventeenth century is exemplified by William Salmon's curious publication Polygraphice, five editions of which appeared between 1672 and 1685. Salmon, a medical doctor, vendor of patent medicines and author of an astrological almanac, was an experienced publicist, determined to reach a very wide audience. He consequently provided a remarkable variety of information on subjects that might have enticed any ambitious young man wanting to learn the mysteries of a trade, the secrets of medicine or the processes of alchemy. The fifth edition of his compendium was subtitled “The Arts of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning, Painting, Washing, Varnishing, Gilding, Colouring, Dying, Beautifying and Perfuming.” For good measure, Salmon added a section on chiromancy or palm reading, a translation of “The one hundred and twelve Chymical Arcanums of Petrus Johannes Faber,” and a collection of alchemical recipes “fitted for Vulgar Use, for curing most diseases incident to Humane Bodies.” Salmon flagrantly plagiarized Robert Boyle's research on colours, but he may not have imagined that anyone would notice, as he evidently did not think of his readers as connoisseurs of scientific tracts.81 The simple, didactic tone of his writing suggests that he was addressing himself to people who wanted straightforward information on practical subjects. Salmon's description of chiromancy lacks any hint of mystery whatsoever. Avoiding “long or abstruse” explanations, he suggests that the lines of the hand can be read like a book, without any ambiguities or doubts. An extended Cingulum Veneris, for example, “shows intemperance and lust in both Sexes, a base and bestial Life; a filthy Sodomite, who abuses himself with beasts.”82 One can only imagine what a young apprentice would have done with that information.
Chiromancy was supposed to be a Jewish mystical art, a secret cherished by the Kabbalists, but Salmon did not bother to explain its origins. Learned readers might well have been annoyed by his lack of scholarship. They sought after secrets of a more profound sort—decipherments of nature and Scripture, not the rudiments of palmistry. Yet the idea that a single text would unlock these mysteries for them, dispelling any philosophical doubts they might have about spirits and resolving the discrepancies between the natural world and God's word, was intoxicating to many.
In 1677, a book arrived that promised to fulfil those aspirations. Its title was Kabbala Denudata or Kabbala Unveiled, and it consisted of Latin versions of medieval Jewish mystical works, including the Zohar, along with rabbinical commentaries and contemporary articles by well-known scholars. The editor and translator was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, a German Lutheran alchemist and poet, who had studied the Kabbala with a rabbi in Amsterdam. He was described by a contemporary as “strange, but charming,” which is not a bad description of his book, either.83 The frontispiece to the first volume was indeed strange and charming: it showed a scantily clad woman running between parting waves towards a tall closet with an open door inscribed “PALATIUM ARCANORUM”—“THE PALACE OF SECRETS.” The initial two volumes, organized with a bewildering lack of consideration for the reader, contained various contributions by Henry More, Rosenroth and Francis Mercurius van Helmont, a noted alchemist whose father, J.B. van Helmont, had been one of the leading theorists of the art. Because the compilation was intended for an international audience of scholarly readers, the essays were in Latin.84 The great secrets of Jewish mysticism—God's hidden attributes, the divine character of Adam, the reality of spirits—were now available to every educated person, although not to the apprentices, amateur artists and medical quacks who might have purchased William Salmon's Polygraphice.
Kabbala Denudata was not designed for the vulgar public. It is an immensely complex work, and any attempt to sum it up in a few words will be inadequate. In broad terms, however, it can be understood as having three main purposes—three levels of secrets, as it were. The first and most obvious concerned the relationship between Christians and Jews. By drawing out the hitherto hidden parallels between Christianity and Jewish mysticism, Rosenroth and Van Helmont sought to encourage the conversion of the Jews, which was widely thought to be a harbinger of the end of time. As a result, they read the Christian Trinity into the Kabbalist Sephiroth or attributes of God, and interpreted Adam Kadmon, the cosmic figure who was central to the writings of the sixteenth-century rabbi Yitzchak Luria, as the Christian Messiah. “And precisely what with you is named Adam Kadmon, with us is called Christ,” notes the Christian philosopher conversing with a Jewish Kabbalist in the section titled “Adumbratio.”85 Thus, Christianity and its parent religion were happily reunited.
The reunion, however, took place on heterodox terrain. This was the second secret of Kabbala Denudata, one not easy for the uninitiated reader to comprehend, then or now. Rabbi Luria had imagined the souls or spirits of all living things to be contained in Adam Kadmon's body, which was composed of the traces of divine light. Through “the breaking of the vessels,” from which evil arose, the multiplicity of spirits had been forced out into the material world, but would eventually be reunited with the divine being through a process of restoration (tikkun). With his keen nose for heterodoxy, Henry More had quickly picked up on the problems inherent in the conflation of Adam Kadmon with Christ. Even before the publication of Kabbala Denudata, he had written to Rosenroth to register his objections. Pitting his own visionary experiences against those of the Jewish mystics, More claimed to have learned of their errors from a strange dream. In this, an eagle flew in at his window and, as More stroked its head, turned into a boy. When questioned, the boy asserted that he believed not in one God but in many. The irate More began to kick the impious boy, at which point he changed into a bee. On waking, More started to suspect that his visitor represented the Kabbala, and realized just how dangerous the secret of Jewish mysticism was. It amounted to pantheism, the doctrine that God was in everything, a heresy represented at that time by the writings of the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza.86
Today we might interpret More's dream differently. The eagle and boy might remind us of the story of Ganymede, and of a type of erotic desire with which More's mentor Plato would have been familiar. Whether or not More shared such feelings is less important than his evident ambivalence towards the figures in his dream. As with so many occult ideas, he was both drawn to and irritated by them. Of course, he was right to see heterodoxy hidden within Kabbala Denudata. It was indeed a dangerous book, no matter how strenuously its editors strove to deny it. Van Helmont vigorously countered the assertion that God's divine spirit was equivalent to the souls of his creatures, but he also conceded that there was not a very big difference between the two.87 In the end, spirits were made of the same divine essence as God, which meant that the deity must be everywhere, imprisoned in the material world. This had further implications that might shock any conforming Anglican. First, if God was in every spirit, then should they not be as eternal as He was? Since matter decayed, however, this meant that spirits must change bodies in order to persist over time. Second, did it make any sense that God would condemn and punish for all eternity that which was part of Himself? What Van Helmont really wanted to draw out of the Kabbala was not pantheism, but an equally heterodox doctrine to which the Neoplatonist More was far less hostile: namely, the transmigration of souls, which led to the assumption that all souls were to be saved.88
Van Helmont recognized “the Revolution of Human Souls” in the Kabbalist myth of the dispersal of spirits from Adam Kadmon's body. He hinted strongly at this in Kabbala Denudata, but only revealed his hand fully in a pamphlet published in 1685. In that work, Van Helmont defended the idea that “God is a God of Order, who hath created every living thing … to the end that by a never-ceasing Revolution it might be still renewed.” The soul moved towards perfection through up to a dozen transmigrations. Van Helmont did not shrink from the corollary, that every soul would eventually be redeemed and there would be no eternal punishment: “For is not every Creature of God Infinite?”89 Universal salvation was hardly a new idea, but Van Helmont would give it renewed inte
llectual vigour, to the horror of those who believed in eternal judgment. The prophetess Jane Lead was one of the few who agreed with him, although her key to secrets was personal revelation, not Jewish mysticism.
The third and deepest secret of Kabbala Denudata concerned alchemy. The first volume contained a Latin translation of the Aesch Mezereph or “Purifying Fire,” an allegorical treatise on metals dating from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It consists of a mixture of alchemical recipes, numerology and arcane pronouncements on biblical verses. Because the editors of Kabbala Denudata believed the Kabbala to be ancient, this virtually impenetrable text would take on a great deal of importance for alchemists. In 1714, it became one of the first parts of Rosenroth's collection to be rendered into English.90 The similarities between the Aesch Mezereph and the Corpus Hermeticum were duly noted by Rosenroth, who pointed out that that the Kabbala expressed the values of an original, “Oriental” philosophy, “just as is to be seen in Hermes Trismegistus.”91 This was not implausible, since the Kabbalists, who lived in western Europe, may have been influenced by the Hermetic writings, but Rosenroth meant to suggest a basic unity among ancient philosophers of the mysterious “Orient.” What he did not know was that ten centuries and the length of the Mediterranean separated the Jewish mystical texts from the works ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus.
Kabbala Denudata made a considerable splash, but it also exemplified a basic problem with the revelation of secrets: namely, they were most convincing to those already disposed to believe them. Through her reading of the collection, as well as her friendship with Van Helmont, Lady Anne Conway was convinced of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which became central to her own philosophical writings.92 On the other hand, while John Locke read Kabbala Denudata with care and took copious notes on it, he objected to the ambiguities of the language and gave the title “Doubts about the Oriental Philosophy” to his observations.93 Isaac Newton, an enemy to Gnostics and Neoplatonists, also read Kabbala Denudata, but rejected its portrayal of lesser spirits as sharing in God's substance. His long search for a “religion of Noah” that would counter Jewish mysticism can be viewed as a response to the book.94 Its ultimate significance for “the sons of Hermes” may also be doubted. It was simply too complex for the average alchemist. Van Helmont himself was not very successful in applying it to the spagyric art. Admittedly, some of the “Chymical Aphorisms” that he published in 1688 have a Kabbalistic ring to them. Alchemy, he wrote, “is a Science whereby the Beginnings, Causes, Properties and Passions of all the Metals, are radically known; that those which are imperfect, incompleat, mixt and corrupt, may be transmuted into true Gold.”95 This statement may have been inspired by the Lurian concept of the restoration of souls to perfect unity with God, but, then again, the language is not very different from that of traditional alchemical texts. As for the Aesch Mezereph, Van Helmont seems to have found its recipes and tables as indecipherable as they appear to readers today.
Its doors finally opened, the palace of Kabbalistic secrets became a home to heterodoxy and the scene of furious controversy. Kabbala Denudata did not initiate a new age for the Christian Kabbala; rather, it ended a fruitful period of speculation, which now gave way to criticism and disillusionment. The magical aura of the Kabbala among its Christian admirers began to dissipate once its principles were known. While it continued to intrigue philosophers like Leibniz, it lost much of its conjuring power in popular literature—at least until the late eighteenth century, when its theological principles had again been largely forgotten. In an embarrassing demonstration of its newly contested status, the Kabbala was even satirized. The original French version of this satire by the Abbé de Villars had appeared in 1670, but it was translated and reprinted at London ten years later, evidently in response to Kabbala Denudata. The Count of Gabalis: or The Extravagant Mysteries of the Cabalists Exposed was a subtle parody of occult philosophy. A sceptical young man is visited by a German Kabbalist count who advises him to renounce sexual relations with women and confine his lusts to sylphs, nymphs and “Gnomides.” He eventually reveals the secret that Plato and other philosophers were the offspring of unions between men and spirits. Although very funny, the book has deceived gullible readers up to the present into thinking that it is intended as a serious work of occult thought—the Internet is littered with their comments. Of course, the subtitle gives the game away.96
The anonymous printer of The Count of Gabalis exposed another secret on the title page, by designating himself as “Printer to the Cabalistical Society of the Sages, at the Signe of the Rosy-Crusian.” No such organization had sponsored the appearance of Kabbala Denudata, and none arose from its publication. Nevertheless, to understand the nature of secrets in the late seventeenth century, we have to consider the lure of secret societies. Men of learning continued to hope that secrets could be passed down from teacher to pupil, like the arts and mysteries of a skilled craft. A secret society based on initiation into such mysteries might preserve them forever. This atavistic vision of occult philosophy as a kind of underground activity, passed down over generations, was in part a reaction to the “vulgarization” of learning through print culture. It was a socially exclusive and gendered vision: only educated men of acceptable character and learning were allowed to participate in the transmission of wisdom.
The willingness to believe in the existence of such groups had sparked the Rosicrucian episode of the early seventeenth century, the effects of which lingered for generations. It also led Robert Boyle into one of the strangest experiences of his career. In 1677, Boyle met a French alchemist, Georges Pierre des Clozets, who introduced him to an international society known as “the Asterism.”97 Boyle was named to a vacant seat in the organization by the “Patriarch of Antioch,” a man whom Pierre called his “great master” and who bore the office of chancellor in this “most powerful and most magnanimous Cabalistic Society of the Sons of Wisdom.”98 Through Pierre, the patriarch asked Boyle to send him various items, including cannons, telescopes, microscopes and chemical apparatus. For his part, Georges Pierre sent Boyle alchemical recipes and reports about the activities of members of the society, including the creation by one of them of a homunculus or miniature human being. Pierre also periodically requested sums of money to cover his expenses. Alas, it was all too good to be true. In September 1678, Boyle learned from a friend of Pierre that he had not been using the money to travel, and instead had been living at Caen with his pregnant girlfriend.99 “The Asterism” turned out to be an ingenious hoax, so elaborate that Pierre had even gone to the trouble of placing advertisements in Dutch and French newspapers announcing the election of the “Patriarch of Antioch.” Boyle was probably not his only victim. Interestingly, only a month after Pierre's fabrications were revealed to him, Boyle received a copy of Kabbala Denudata.100 From “the Asterism,” he turned to a book whose secrets were less exclusive but equally mysterious.
Georges Pierre's secret society resembled the Rosicrucians, but its elaborate titles and Near Eastern orbit gave it the aura of a Crusading order of the Middle Ages. In a sense, “the Asterism” was what many learned men in the late seventeenth century would have liked the Brotherhood of Freemasons to be: an organization that spread occult secrets, not by publicity, but through initiation. The early history of the Masons is notoriously difficult to untangle, but they were descended from active lodges or professional meeting places of medieval stonemasons, who possessed elaborate constitutions and “charges” that spun fantastic myths out of biblical stories, for instance, about the building of the Temple of Jerusalem. In 1598–9, the master of works for King James VI of Scotland, William Schaw, issued new statutes for the Scottish lodges that included tests in the art of memory, a method of symbolically reconstructing knowledge that was associated with occult philosophy.101 From that point on, the humble lodges of stonemasons began to gain a reputation among the learned as privileged and closed spaces where secrets were imparted through strange rituals. The first known no
n-operative or “speculative” Freemason was none other than Robert Moray, the Scottish alchemist. He was admitted at Edinburgh in 1641, along with Alexander Hamilton, commander of artillery for the Covenanting army then fighting against King Charles I. Moray later enjoyed affixing his “mason mark” to letters, either as a seal or a drawing—it consisted of a pentacle, the five-sided star associated with ritual magic and familiar to readers of the Clavicula Salomonis.102 Elias Ashmole, who joined a lodge at Warrington, Lancashire, in 1646, was the first English Mason to record his initiation.103 Given the known interests of Moray and Ashmole, there would seem to be little doubt that their attraction to Freemasonry was related to the promise of learning secrets about occult philosophy or science.
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