Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Scepticism about the power of the Devil may have been gaining ground among some educated minds in England, as was indicated in 1695 by the publication of a translation of Balthasar Bekker's Die Betooverde Wereld (The World Bewitched). This voluminous study by a Dutch Calvinist clergyman used biblical exegesis to demonstrate that magic was a pagan or popish invention, and that the Devil had no real influence over humanity.126 In 1705, however, the physician John Beaumont launched a counterblast to such arguments, which he associated with “Young Wits, who are well opinioned of their Parts.” Beaumont published his own massive and highly learned treatise on diabolical spirits, or “Genii” as he called them.127 He was no theologian; in fact, he was a geologist, who had contributed articles on fossils and minerals to the Philosophical Transactions. He dedicated his book on witches to a former president of the Royal Society, Lord Carbery. While he accepted that the existence of spirits was conducive to belief in God, Beaumont did not depend on pious exhortations or questionable narratives to prove his point. His approach was very different from that of Joseph Glanvill.

  In response to Bekker, Beaumont compiled an enormous number of instances from classical literature, early Christian writers, European folklore, recent history and his own personal experiences, to show that spirits had been perceived by sight, hearing and the other senses. Such an approach was fully consistent with the empirical philosophy propounded by John Locke. Beaumont's carefully chosen examples were presented with plenty of analytical comment. They led him towards what he believed to be a rational and irrefutable conclusion:

  If there are Effects that cannot be produc'd by Bodies, there must necessarily be in the World other Beings than Bodies; and if among these prodigious Effects, there are some that do not carry men to God, and make them fall into Error and Illusion, it's a farther invincible Argument that we must acknowledge other Beings than the Being absolutely perfect and Bodies … we must admit created Spirits capable of amusing Men, and seducing them by Deceits.128

  The conjunction of natural causes with moral effects may jar with a modern reader's sensibilities, but it was hardly an unusual mixture for the period. The annual lectures on science and religion that were set up at London in the 1690s through the will of the late Robert Boyle often conveyed exactly the same point: namely, that the natural universe had an overriding moral purpose.129 Beaumont, however, saw no place at all for benevolent spirits. The Genii he described were always malign. For him, magic was the domain of demons, and those who thought otherwise were simply deluded.130

  Beaumont's views were not shared by that arbiter of politeness, The Spectator. In a July 1711 essay, Joseph Addison adopted what he presented as a “Neuter” position on the subject of witchcraft—except that neutrality, as Addison was well aware, was not really possible:

  When I hear the Relations that are made from all Parts of the World … I cannot forbear thinking that there is such an Intercourse and Commerce with Evil Spirits, as that which we express by the Name of Witchcraft. But when I consider that the ignorant and credulous Parts of the World abound most in these Relations, and that the Persons among us who are supposed to engage in such an Infernal Commerce are People of a weak Understanding and crazed Imagination, and at the same time reflect upon the many Impostures and Delusions of this Nature that have been detected in all Ages, I endeavour to suspend my Belief till I hear more certain Accounts than any which have yet come to my Knowledge … I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it.131

  Addison's “neutrality” was clearly no endorsement of Beaumont's work, or of the three recent editions of Saducismus Triumphatus. He ignored their assertion that the existence of witchcraft disproved materialism and atheism, although shortly after the Spectator article, Daniel Defoe would forcefully restate that opinion in his weekly Review.132

  Ultimately, according to The Spectator, the polite gentleman would be moved by reason and sentiment, rather than religious belief or scepticism, to reject the possibility of witchcraft. The imaginary reader of the Spectator essays, of course, was a moderate latitudinarian in religion, not a Dissenter like Defoe. Addison drove the case against witchcraft home, not by religious appeals, but by creating a fictional character, an old woman named Moll White who lived in a hovel, kept a cat and had often been reported to the local magistrates as a witch. “I hear there is scarce a Village in England that has not a Moll White in it,” Addison observed. “When an old Woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into a Witch … This frequently cuts off Charity from the greatest Objects of Compassion.” The old woman's pathetic physical and mental condition accounted for the charges made against her, and might even explain her confessing to witchcraft, from being “frighted at her self.”133

  Within a year of Addison's Spectator article, the argument over witchcraft had turned ferocious, due to the politically motivated debate over the case of Jane Wenham. She was an elderly, indigent woman living in the tiny village of Walkern in Hertfordshire. Insulted by a local farmer who suspected her of killing cattle and horses by witchcraft, she complained to a local justice of the peace and noted antiquarian, Sir Henry Chauncy, who allowed her to choose an arbitrator to settle the affair. Wenham selected the parish minister, Godfrey Gardiner, who ordered the farmer to pay her a shilling for defaming her character. Wenham unwisely refused this solution, however, and Gardiner subsequently became convinced that his teenage servant, Anne Thorne, who was behaving strangely, had been bewitched by the angry woman. After she confessed, a charge of witchcraft was brought against Wenham at the county assizes in March 1712. She was found guilty, but the judge, Sir John Powell, immediately reprieved her. Powell had merrily poked fun at the accusations in court—when told that Wenham was seen flying, he responded that there was no law against it.134 The case was rooted in local antagonisms, no doubt worsened by the economic depression that accompanied the War of the Spanish Succession. Twice-married and childless, Jane Wenham was aggressive, impoverished and fitted perfectly the stereotype of the infertile, “malevolent mother” that so frightened the defenders of religion.135 The situation became serious because it involved local dignitaries, including Chauncy's grandson Francis Bragge junior, who witnessed Anne Thorne's fits. Bragge, a Cambridge graduate who had read Saducismus Triumphatus carefully, saw the case as delivering a blow against atheism.

  The Wenham affair might never have come to public attention if it had not been for Bragge, who wrote an account of the trial proceedings in order to refute “several Gentlemen who would not believe that there are any Witches since the time of our Saviour Christ, who came to destroy the Works of the Devil.”136 Bragge's pamphlet, which went through four editions, was published by the notorious Edmund Curll, known for his promotion of various scurrilous, seditious and salacious works. Curll must have felt that Bragge was on to a winning theme, because he brought out a sequel soon after, adding further details and evidence from an unconnected Irish witch trial of the 1660s.137 A challenger then appeared, in the form of a Whig newspaper, The Protestant Post-Boy. It replied to Bragge's account with a series of articles, partly plagiarized from John Wagstaffe's 1669 work, The Question of Witchcraft Debated. Collected in a pamphlet under the unequivocal title The Impossibility of Witchcraft, these articles concentrated heavily on the religious argument that God did not allow the Devil to carry out wicked deeds by supernatural means.138

  Predictably, the pamphlet was answered by Bragge in two further reiterations of the case against Jane Wenham, as well as by a writer using the initials “G.R.,” who rehearsed the scriptural basis of witchcraft.139 The sceptical side was then taken up by “a Physician in Hertfordshire,” who condemned belief in witches as “Priestcraft,” rejected the exorcism of evil spirits as “Popish Supersitition” and denied that anybody since Jesus Christ had been able to cure demoniacs by prayer.140 The only relatively impartial treatment of the subject came from the
pen of an anonymous author, later identified as the Reverend Henry Stebbing of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, a Tory divine. As to the existence of witches, he was “very inclinable to believe, there are such Persons in the World,” but he rejected the evidence against Wenham as based on prejudice.141

  The Wenham trial received more attention from the press than any previous case of witchcraft. Its details, however, were not particularly compelling, and the level of notice given to it had more to do with partisan politics than with the debate over diabolic influence. Within Parliament, the Tories were triumphant in 1712, and party backbenchers were pushing hard to limit the activities of religious Dissenters. Jane Wenham herself was accused of attending Dissenting meetings. The Whigs fought back by denouncing “priestcraft” and accusing their opponents of wanting to restore the Stuart Pretender. Wenham's prosecution by an “Ignorant” parish minister who accepted the “Popish Superstition” of exorcism was therefore politically combustible stuff.142

  Publicity, however, worked in favour of the Whigs. A full-scale debate in the London press over a particular instance of maleficium or malevolent magic was bound to turn many readers against the idea of witchcraft. Accusations in witch cases were usually constructed out of small-scale, personal tensions that looked petty or absurd when magnified by press coverage. Testimony about diabolic activity tended to be highly subjective, peppered with innuendo and seasoned with long-standing prejudices. None of this came off very well in the rhetorical world of printed discourse, which favoured an appearance of disinterest. In short, publicity tainted the Wenham case from the start, making it seem wrong-headed and even malevolent. Bragge's response was to provide more and more details, which proved a losing gambit. His antagonist John Roberts, printer of The Protestant Post-Boy and publisher of most of the anti-Bragge pamphlets, gleefully advertised works on both sides of the case, knowing that publicity was bound to strengthen his arguments, as well as to enrich him.

  As it turned out, Wenham would be the last person convicted of witchcraft in England. The last accusations were made in 1717. The laws against maleficia or using witchcraft to do harm would remain on the statute books until 1736, but they were a dead letter. While the attitudes of rural folk may not have altered, the disappearance of witchcraft prosecutions reflected a definite shift in English elite attitudes. It was not merely partisan, as it seems to have affected both Whig and Tory judges. Was belief in the existence of good and bad spirits similarly waning among the elite? The subject of spirits, unfortunately, was hardly mentioned at all in the Wenham controversy.

  Four years later, however, the last important debate about witchcraft in England closed the door firmly on the notion that there was a difference between the summoning of good and bad spirits. It was set off by Richard Boulton, a physician and medical writer.143 While Boulton was a Tory, he was not a party hack, and his Complete History of Magick, Sorcery and Witchcraft, published in two parts in 1715 and 1716, should not be regarded simply as a High Church reaction to the return of the Whig Party to power under George I. Boulton quoted with approval John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and he did not mention the Wenham case. The purpose of his Complete History was to encourage individual moral reflection, “to put us in Mind of the Delusions of Satan, and the ill Consequences that attend such who serve so bad a Master as the Devil,” not to encourage more witch prosecutions.144

  Satan's delusions, according to Boulton, included magic, both ritual and popular. Two sorts of persons, he maintained, were attracted to magic, “viz. learned and unlearned; and [there were] two Methods also of exciting them to this forbidden Curiosity, viz. the Devil's School and his Rudiments.” The Devil's School began where natural causes ended. Those who sought further knowledge were often “apt to advance too high; and where lawful Arts and Sciences fail of giving them Satisfaction, they are apt to apply themselves to the black and unlawful Science of Magick.” Boulton knew a lot about the circles and conjurations found in works like the Little Key of Solomon, but he considered them to be “forbidden Fruits” that made practitioners into slaves of the Devil. As for “the Devil's Rudiments” or unlearned magic, it consisted of “such unlawful Charms, which old Women often make use of to produce Effects without natural Causes.” The professional contempt of a medical man for the homeopathic cures of village wise women is palpable here. Boulton further condemned judicial astrology, chiromancy or palm reading and fortune-telling, “which are unfit to be practiced amongst Christians.”145 Witchcraft was no worse than magic, except that its practitioners knew they were truckling with the Devil. Witches, according to Boulton, had access to four types of evil spirits. The first were “Lemures or Spectra, which sometimes appear in the Form of dead Persons”—a mere trick, “since it is not possible the Souls of the Defunct should return.” The second were spirits “such as haunt and follow several persons,” while the third, “Incubi and Succubi,” enter into human bodies. Finally, there were “Fayries,” no longer innocent, whose king and queen made court with “those who were Brothers and Sisters of the Art of Witchcraft.”146

  The Whig clergyman Francis Hutchinson's Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft is often regarded as a reply to Boulton, but in fact he had thought of publishing it as early as 1706. He had been dissuaded by the archbishop of Canterbury, who felt it would have a bad effect on the proposed union with Scotland—probably an accurate observation.147 When it appeared in 1718, Hutchinson's work marked a turning point for mainstream Anglican argument about witchcraft. While he did not deny the existence of spirits, he asserted that it was both unlawful and impossible to contact them: “tho’ the sober Belief of good and bad Spirits is an essential Part of every good Christian's Faith, yet imaginary Communications with them, have been the Spring both of the worst corruptions of Religion, and the greatest Perversions of Justice.” Books that dealt with witchcraft—he counted twenty-seven of them since 1660—simply promoted superstitious beliefs among the vulgar. “These books and Narratives are in Tradesmen's Shops, and Farmer's Houses, and are read with great Eagerness, and are continually levening the Minds of the Youth, who delight in such Subjects.”148 Hutchinson used narratives, including that of Jane Wenham, to disprove the notion that witches made compacts with the Devil, or could do harm through supernatural powers. Flushed with patriotism, Hutchinson connected “true Judgment” regarding witchcraft with “modern Improvements of natural and experimental Philosophy,” in which Great Britain led the world.149

  It took four years for Boulton to reply with an impassioned vindication of his Complete History, which Hutchinson had not explicitly mentioned. Making a point-by-point reply to his presumed foe, Boulton accused the Whig cleric of trying to make “Party-Business of believing what the Scripture declares for Truth,” as well as of “excusing and extenuating the Sin of Witchcraft.”150 The last part of Boulton's book included a long section on how immaterial substances could affect material ones, a subject on which he again cited John Locke. In fact, he overstated the differences between himself and Hutchinson. Both regarded spirits as real, and condemned attempts to communicate with them. For Hutchinson, the goal of such efforts was impossible, while for Boulton they would inevitably lead to bad results. The main distinction between the two writers was their view of the reality of witchcraft. As no witches were being prosecuted in England at the time, the dispute was not as significant as Boulton implied.

  No third voice appeared in the controversy, to propose, with John Webster, that witches might not be real, but benevolent spirits were, and could do good things for humanity. An intellectual pathway that had been open in the Restoration period was now closed. Until the late eighteenth century, nobody would again make a serious argument in print to the effect that the summoning of spirits was both possible and lawful. Witches would no longer hang in England and, after 1727, they would no longer burn in Scotland, but the devotees of occult thinking, whether learned or unlearned, had become intellectual outcasts. They had no more place in Hutchinson's �
��modern” universe than they had in Boulton's pious cosmology. Yet they persisted in the shadows for the next half-century, and in the end they came back out into the light, in altered form.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Newtonian Magi

  ANATHEMATIZED BY the orthodox, deprecated by the polite, the occult was fading by 1715. Yet remarkably, a small number of influential men within the English intellectual elite still longed, if not to resuscitate it, then at least to appropriate it in ways that were compatible with natural philosophy. They were Newtonians, and the period after 1715 was their age of glory. Although the revered scientist lived only until 1727, Sir Isaac's disciples would dominate scientific and philosophical discourse until the 1760s.1 Whigs to a man, they had lofty aspirations, hoping to reshape the entire British cultural landscape to accord with their master's genius. As Newton was himself reticent and occasionally enigmatic about the wider implications of his work, his followers were relatively free to interpret what it all meant, and they went about it with gusto. They questioned prodigies or wonders, derided popular “superstitions” and scorned magical explanations—or, at least, in some contexts they did.2