Marketing the Occult
Ultimately, magic depended on money. The commercial prosperity of late eighteenth-century England was indispensable to the occult revival. Much of that prosperity was generated in London, the financial and trading capital of a growing empire. The leading figures of the occult revival were able to exploit this commercial growth, earning a living from the occult in various ways: by publishing books, marketing medicines, giving astrological consultations or selling their ideas to patrons. Gradually, new economic opportunities arose for those who practised astrology, alchemy and magic.
To witness the occult rising again, we have only to examine the booksellers’ catalogues. Bookselling in the late eighteenth century was big business, encompassing publishing, retailing of original works, dealing in second-hand works and auctioneering. Since the days of William Cooper in the late seventeenth century, auctions had provided access to second-hand books. By the late 1760s, however, some booksellers were keeping second-hand titles in stock and advertising them. The largest booksellers in London operated out of extensive emporia or warehouses, issuing annual, biannual or quarterly catalogues that publicized their wares to a national audience, including bookshops.2 Sections on occult subjects appeared regularly in the catalogues of these big booksellers from the late 1760s onwards. For example, George Wagstaffe's “Matchless Collection of Scarce Books” listed works on “Astrology, Magic, Chiromancy,” as well as on “Magic, Witchcraft.”3 Occult books were often lumped together with those on scientific or medical subjects, under headings like “Alchemy, Astrology, Occult Philosophy, Mines, Witches and Witchcraft, Mathematicks, Natural History, Physick, &c.” Richard Dymott, the bookseller who came up with this all-encompassing title, clearly valued the trade in alchemical tracts, as he mentioned it on the front page of his 1770 and 1772 catalogues. His shop was in the Strand, opposite Somerset House, a central location for anyone who was seeking this kind of reading material.4
The book trade was booming in the 1780s, when its reigning monarch was James Lackington. Born in the West Country, Lackington had converted to Methodism as a young man, but after establishing himself as a bookseller in London, he drifted away from his evangelical faith. His first catalogue was issued in 1779, and by the mid-1780s he was selling 100,000 books a year, most of them remaindered or second-hand. Lackington seems an unlikely person to have been a retailer of occult items. In his celebrated Memoirs, which appeared in 1791, he heaped scorn on apparitions, devils and those “who suffer themselves to be made miserable by vain fears of preternatural occurrences.” Yet the prosperous bookseller hinted that he had once held such beliefs himself. Moreover, he continued to esteem someone who had held them throughout his life, his former business partner John Denis, whom he remembered fondly as “an HONEST man.” According to Lackington, Denis was a convinced devotee of Jacob Boehme and a follower of the vegetarian regime of Thomas Tryon. He also owned “the best collection of scarce, valuable, mystical and alchymical books, that ever was collected by one person.”5
The son of an oilman, John Denis was partner to Lackington for only two years before they broke up in 1780. Thereafter, Denis ran his own bookselling businesses in Fleet Street. As Lackington said, he was an avid collector of occult items. At a sale in Islington that took place in 1782, Denis purchased a number of manuscripts belonging to the Philadelphians, including a copy of Andreas Dionysius Freher's “Three Tables” drawn by his disciple J.D. Leuchter, a unique portrait of Freher by Leuchter and some extracts from Boehme's writings in Freher's hand. He bequeathed these rare finds to his son, John Denis the younger, who inherited the business after his father died in 1785 and later operated a bookstore in Middle Row, Holborn. He continued to publish catalogues into the early 1790s. They contained “several very curious Articles, particularly in the Occult Sciences,” according to the literary historian John Nichols.6
The elder Denis was doubtless responsible for including an occult book section in the first catalogue issued by his partner, Lackington, in 1779. It was never subsequently removed, in spite of the termination of their business relationship. We need not assume that Lackington retained any admiration for the occult, however. Commercial considerations, rather than personal beliefs, provide a sufficient explanation for the stock of occult books—between a hundred and 150 volumes—that he regularly advertised in his catalogues, under the catch-all title “Astrology, Alchemy, Palmistry, Magic, Witchcraft, Apparitions, Devils, &c.” The number of occult volumes listed in the catalogue increased to about 250 in the years just before Lackington's retirement in 1798, when his immense domed bookshop in Finsbury Square, called the Temple of the Muses, was taken over by his cousin George. In its 1800 catalogue, the new firm of Lackington and Allen listed no fewer than 260 items under a heading that included “magnetism” and “metals” as well as astrology, alchemy, palmistry, magic, witchcraft and apparitions.7
The marketing of occult books has to be kept in perspective. They represented only 0.5 per cent of Lackington's thirty thousand-volume catalogue of 1784; by the early nineteenth century, moreover, the firm was advertising over 800,000 volumes, so the percentage of occult books actually declined, although the number increased. Works on occult subjects were usually rare and not available in multiple copies. In addition, the Lackingtons, like their competitors, listed under the general heading of “Astrology, Alchemy, Etc.” items that were not, strictly speaking, occult, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or Vannoccio Biringuccio's Pyrotechnia, a treatise on metals in which alchemy was mocked. The significance of such listings had little to do with the proportion of the items that actually dealt positively with the subject, however. The chief effect of giving separate space in a catalogue to occult books was the same in 1780 as it would be today: namely, it conferred intellectual authority on the discipline. To list works on astrology, alchemy, etc under their own, distinct heading was to suggest that they deserved the same status as works on law or religion or history. Whether sceptics were inclined to accept this inference is irrelevant; it counted in the minds of those who bought such books, which is all that mattered. Moreover, in typical Enlightenment fashion, the creation of a category altered the definition of what should be included in that category. By lumping works on occult philosophy, science and magical practice together, Lackington and his bookselling colleagues were suggesting that they could all be understood as part of the same thing: namely, “the occult.”
Because the sale of used books was normally anonymous, it is difficult to trace those who purchased them. Library auction catalogues, however, can provide some information on the biggest collectors. One of them was Richard Cosway, a fashionable painter of miniatures whose occult fixations will be mentioned in subsequent chapters. After suffering a series of strokes, Cosway sold his extensive library by auction in 1821, shortly before his death. The third day of the auction was devoted to “Books on Magic, Witchcraft, &c.,” and comprised 366 separate printed volumes (not including almanacs) along with manuscripts and engravings. Cosway's collection included a wide array of tracts on alchemy, astrology and ritual magic, from Agrippa and the Notory Art of Solomon to more recent German publications. Among the occult manuscripts were eight folio volumes by Freher, bound in green vellum.8 Some items had cost the extravagant Cosway a good deal of money. In 1781, he purchased for £26.5s. 0d. a manuscript concerning the “Cabalistic Principles” of the human figure, ascribed to the painter Piers Paul Rubens. In fact, it was a commentary on Freher's “Three Tables.” Cosway must have liked it, as he kept it until his death, after which it was auctioned off at a sale in Paris.9 Even more costly was a manuscript showing sixty-seven emblems from a seventeenth-century work, Coronatio Naturae. It was advertised for 200 guineas in the Morning Herald newspaper in November 1797, and no prospective buyer was to see it without first laying down 10s. 6d. Alexander Tilloch, the wealthy alchemist who ultimately purchased it, called the work “very sound Hermetical Philosophy,” but added sadly that “no light can be obtained
from it for Practice.”10
There was certainly money to be made from the occult, and not just in the second-hand book or manuscript trade. Its commercial potential was also seen in the publication of new books, which were often actually reissues of older works, like the 1784 edition of John Aubrey's Miscellanies on Fatality, Omens, Dreams, Apparitions, Voices, Impulses, Knockings, Invisible Blows, Magic, Transportation in the Air, Visions in a Beril, Etc., or the 1786 edition of John Whalley's Ptolemy Quadripartite, an astrological treatise first published in 1701. Nocturnal Revels, or Universal Interpreter of Dreams and Visions (1789) gave no indication of being a version of a treatise that had originally appeared in 1706–7. New works also appealed to the public, especially those that gave access to practical aspects of the occult, such as Dreams and Moles (c. 1780), whose title speaks for its bizarre content. This handy guide to interpreting dreams as well as the shapes of pesky skin blemishes was published by Thomas Sabine of Shoe Lane, Holborn, who seems to have specialized in short, instructive works on subjects like fortune-telling.11 Ebenezer Sibly, a celebrated astrologer and medical writer whose impact on the occult revival will be discussed in the next chapter, was the author of numerous works that appeared in the Lackingtons catalogues.
By 1801, the firm of Lackington and Allen felt confident enough about the commercial prospects of the occult to advertise its own compendium under the provocative title The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer. Its author was Francis Barrett, “F.R.C.” [i.e. “Frater Rosae Crucis,” or Rosicrucian Brother], “Professor of Chemistry, natural and occult Philosophy, the Cabala, &c., &c.” Barrett would subsequently gain celebrity as a balloonist, although the failure of one of his early efforts led The Times to comment that “he does not seem to possess a sufficient knowledge of chemistry to inflate his balloon properly.” He later made a short ascent before an estimated ten thousand people at Swansea. Unfortunately, he was less intrepid as a writer than as an aeronaut. The Magus was almost wholly unoriginal, except in the inclusion of absurd pictures of the faces of demons. Sections of it were plagiarized from Cornelius Agrippa. Nonetheless, its uncritical descriptions of alchemy, astrology and “Cabalistical” or ceremonial magic had a considerable influence on nineteenth-century occult movements, and the book doubtless proved a good investment for Lackington and Allen.12 Sibly and Barrett were, quite literally, names to conjure with in the late Georgian period.
Sibly, who specialized in the serial publication of massive encyclopaedic tomes, was an assiduous marketer of his own wares. For sixpence, readers could purchase a weekly instalment of one of his medical compendia, such as Culpeper's English Physician; and Complete Herbal, a reworking of the seventeenth-century medical classic. The complete volume, an expensive item that cost £1.11s. 6d. in boards (that is, unbound), had gone through fourteen editions by 1813. Sibly's shorter gynaecological tract, entitled The Medical Mirror or Treatise on the Impregnation of the Human Female, reached six editions by 1814. Before he died in 1799 at the age of forty-seven, Sibly wrote two further big quasi-scientific books: A Key to Physic, and the Occult Sciences (five editions by 1814) and An Universal System of Natural History, which classified and described the plants and animals of the world with the exuberance (or, perhaps, the aggressive cultural imperialism) typical of the Enlightenment. In his marketing strategies, Sibly targeted a family audience that regarded such works as a sound investment because they could be used for practical medical purposes as well as for edification and entertainment. He advertised Culpeper's English Physician as “WHAT NO FAMILY SHOULD BE WITHOUT,” and tried to establish its significance by maintaining that “all attempts to cry down this interesting Book, have been defeated. The Act of Parliament, by which the Work was at first suppressed, under an idea that it discovered secrets dangerous to be known, has been since repealed.”13 Who could resist a book that might reveal “secrets dangerous to be known”? (The Act cannot be traced.) Equally impressive was the medical degree that Sibly fixed to his name, from the “Royal College of Physicians,” Aberdeen (which is to say that it was purchased from King's College, Aberdeen, before 1787 when an actual medical exam was instituted).14
Like so many astrologers and alchemists before him, Sibly sold his own patent medicines, but his advertising leaflets carried the commercialization of the occult to new levels. The hype that he issued to publicize his “Solar and Lunar Tinctures” showed a keen sense of how to exploit the intellectual pretensions and insecurities of his readers. The Solar Tincture, which could even be taken “for the RESTORATION of LIFE, in CASES OF SUDDEN DEATH,” was explained in the following quasi-scientific fashion:
The researches made by Dr. SIBLY, into philosophical and chemical enquiries; his long and laborious application to the study of second causes, which are the hidden result, or spiritual operations of nature in all her works; the chymical analysation of medical plants, herbs and minerals; a contemplation of the human structure, with the principles of life and death; a minute investigation of the ancient and modern practice of physic; of hereditary, accidental, and acquired, diseases; and the dreadful consequences of a mistaken or misguided treatment of them; are the sources from whence this medicine is recommended to the notice of a candid and discerning public.15
Such passages remind us that the widening sphere of eighteenth-century discourse was not inherently rational, however much emphasis it may have placed on making subjects sound reasonable.16 Sibly presents himself here as an empiricist, because he values “experience” over “abstract reasoning.” After all, he had analysed the chemicals and seen their effects in practical trials. His endorsement of magic was apparently upheld by strict methods of inquiry. What more did members of the public need to convince them that his Solar Tincture could conquer death?
Sibly certainly belonged among those marketers of ineffective remedies whom Roy Porter has labelled “quacks,” but he was not necessarily a charlatan.17 To read his books alongside his advertising claims can only lead one to conclude that he believed in what he was doing, and that his stupendous assertions were based on real conviction. The same might not be said of other patent-medicine pedlars, most of whom were neither astrologers nor spagyrists, even if their potions and pills sounded alchemical. John Ching was an apothecary of Cheapside and maker of “Worm-destroying LOZENGES, for Fits, Pains in the stomach, Pains in the Head or Side, and for Pale, Languid and Emaciated Appearances in young Persons.” Like many iatrochemical remedies, Ching's Lozenges contained mercury and were poisonous. After they killed one young man at Hull in 1803, the victim's grieving father, a printer by trade, published a pamphlet denouncing them.18 Attacks on quackery were not uncommon, but in spite of them the late eighteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the number of patent medicines, which were heavily marketed through advertising. Dr Samuel Solomon of Liverpool claimed to have spent £5,000 a year on publicizing his highly successful “Balm of Gilead,” a large bottle of which cost as much as a guinea. His tireless self-promotion rested on claims that he had solved age-old mysteries. The “Balm of Gilead,” designed to cure nervous disorders and “Female complaints,” was “extracted from the SEED of GOLD, which our alchymists and philosophers have so long sought after in vain.”19 Solomon presented himself as a scientist, but the appeal of his advertising undoubtedly rested on the notion that he had found the Philosopher's Stone.
The use of advertising for specifically occult purposes was also widespread, a point underlined by the editor of a collection of London handbills from the 1770s and 1780s. “That the occult science called white magic, and the study of astrology, flourishes among us, is evident,” observed the anonymous compiler. The collection included an advertisement for W. Lacy of Bartlett Buildings, Holborn, who offered “ASTRONOMICAL and ASTROLOGICAL Demonstrations” for ladies and gentlemen, including the drawing-up of nativities. Lacy would show “how and at what time any animal or plant is under the celestial rays, which is sufficient to convince unbelievers that astrology is not a vain opinion (as some think).” An inven
tor as well as a seer, Lacy had already announced his “new invented astronomical machines” in the St. James's Chronicle, a newspaper for the elite. More traditional in her approach was “Mrs. Corbyn from Germany,” who “undertakes to answer all lawful questions in Astrology, in a very particular manner.” From nine in the morning to nine at night, she was available at her home in Stanhope Street, Clare Market, where she would “give an account of absent persons either by sea or land.” Clearly, her customers included the wives and sweethearts of military and naval personnel. Far more impressive international credentials were presented by Mrs Edwards, who “in Hungary, Russia, China, and Tartary, has studied the abstruse and occult sciences, under the most learned SAGES, AUGURS, ASTRONOMERS and SOOTHSAYERS.” She was willing to advise ladies on “all ADMISSIBLE QUESTIONS IN ASTROLOGY” from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., at 22 Crown Court, Russell Street, near the seedy but popular Covent Garden market.20
The use of advertising demonstrates that these astrologers did not simply depend on neighbourhood connections or verbal recommendations in order to raise business. None of them was linked to an almanac or had been apprenticed to a famous astrologer. Two of them were women. These facts provide a contrast with the previous century, when the astrologers whose names appeared in print advertisements were almost without exception men, and most were almanac compilers. No self-respecting English astrologer of the seventeenth century, moreover, would have claimed to have studied abroad (especially in Catholic lands), and they were more likely to design talismans than machines. The celestial science was becoming more cosmopolitan as well as more competitive and up to date in its publicity.
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