Like Joseph Glanvill, for example, he was convinced that empirical verification of the reality of apparitions would provide an impregnable bulwark for Christian faith against sceptics: “they know … that if but one account of the intercourse of men with separate spirits be admitted, their whole castle in the air (Deism, Atheism, Materialism), falls to the ground.” Searching for such proof, Wesley copied into his journal for 1768 a long account by a young Methodist woman of Gateshead, Northumberland, Elizabeth Hobson, who claimed to have been able to see ghosts from an early age. Wesley must have been pleased by her affirmation that the dead displayed their own fate in the form of the illumination they carried about them: “I observed all little children, and many grown persons, had a bright, glorious light round them; but many had a gloomy, dismal light, and a dusky cloud over them.” The Methodist acceptance of the innocence of children is balanced in Hobson's testimony by harsh judgments reserved for adults. Later, she would have premonitions of the deaths of a wicked lodger and a beloved uncle, and would be visited by a drowned neighbour as well as by a brother lost at sea. Most of Hobson's stories, however, concerned nocturnal appearances by the ghost of her grandfather, who urged her to pursue the inheritance of his house in Durham. She describes him as “an exceeding wicked man,” and his spirit frequently pulled the bedclothes off her, allowing the interpretation that she feared being sexually molested by him. Wesley did not believe she could have invented it all. Samuel Johnson, who discussed the tale in London ten years later, was not so convinced, although he felt the question of ghosts remained “undecided.”68
Methodists around England followed Wesley's lead in championing those who reported supernatural occurrences, such as the Cock Lane ghost, the Lamb Inn bewitchment or the Yatton demoniac. The last of these cases involved George Lukins, a resident of Yatton in Somerset, who after collapsing during a drunken revel at Christmas 1769 began to experience hysterical fits. Believing himself to be bewitched, Lukins received treatment from several cunning folk, which did little good. Eventually, the fits subsided, but they returned in 1787, at which point he claimed to be possessed by seven devils. Only the prayers of seven ministers could cast them out. An Anglican vicar, Joseph Easterbrook, along with six local Methodist ministers, took up the challenge, and the devils duly fled from Lukins.69 A report in the Bristol Gazette, however, brought the matter to public attention, and Lukins was denounced as an impostor, first in a letter to the newspapers, then in a pamphlet authored by a local surgeon.
Although the Yatton demoniac would later be cited as evidence of Methodist credulity concerning supernatural happenings, the circumstances were complicated. No evidence was produced to show that Lukins was pretending; rather, he seems genuinely to have suffered from a disorder that made him speak and sing in the Devil's voice. A writer to the Bristol Gazette called it a “most singular case of perverted reason and bodily suffering,” which sounds accurate. Reverend Easterbrook, who was not a Methodist, defended Lukins from the charge of imposture, stating that his own “desire ha[d] been to investigate the Truth.”70 His sceptical antagonist the local surgeon, on the other hand, reached a high pitch of Nonconformist religious fervour in denouncing “this disgraceful ignorance,” imploring his readers to “[p]ull down the Hierarchy, suffer the heavenly Doctrines of the Gospel, as a burning and shining light, to illumine the inhabitants of this Isle!”71 One may wonder who the real enthusiast was in this debate.
Belief in spirits was widespread among the English populace, so the Methodist openness to instances of apparitions or bewitchment may reflect nothing more than the broad popular basis of the movement. Like the French Prophets, moreover, some evangelicals accepted spirit possession that was non-demonic. The most shocking examples of this were the followers of Ann Lee, the prophetess from Manchester whose visions gave rise to the Shaker movement. While it is hard to find any trace of traditional occult thinking among her admirers, they certainly saw benevolent spirits as operating within the world.72 Other evangelicals derived a similar conviction from more established occult sources. For them, it was not ghost stories or demoniacs that led towards “Mystical Divinity”—it was reading Jacob Boehme.
Reading the Theosopher had become much easier due to the publication in 1764 of a two-volume edition of his writings initiated by William Law. This work firmly established Boehme's reputation as an occult philosopher. The first volume contained an anonymous address “to the Earnest Lovers of Wisdom” that underlined Boehme's relationship, not to Christianity, but to ancient pagan wisdom. It was actually written by the lawyer John Sparrow for his 1661 translation of Boehme's Forty Questions of the Soul, and it placed the Teutonic Theosopher in the company of alchemists, magicians, Hermeticists and Neoplatonists. Boehme's writings, according to Sparrow, “reach into the deepest Mysteries of Nature, and lead to the attaining of the highest powerful natural Wisdom, such as was among the Philosophers Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato and other deep Men, both ancient and modern, conversant in the Mysteries of Nature.” They brought together the astrological, alchemical and magical wisdom of the past:
These Principles lead to the attaining such Wisdom as was taught in Egypt, in all which Learning Moses had Skill, to the Wisdom which was taught in Babylon among the Caldeans, Astrologians, and Wisemen or Magi, among whom Daniel was educated … The Ground and Principles in his Writings lead to the attaining the Wisdom of the East, which Solomon had … Such Wisdom as this sees and knows all Mysteries, speaks all Tongues of Men and Angels, that Tongue which Adam named all the Creatures by in Paradise, it can also do all Miracles … That which seems different in the Writings of the profound magical, mystical, chemic Philosophers, from that which we find in others, may be reconciled, by considering what this Author teaches.73
Any late eighteenth-century reader who was new to these works would have been introduced to them as the pure essence of occult philosophy.
When a third volume appeared in 1772, it added a new dimension to Behmenist thought by reproducing the graphic figures that Law had copied from Freher and J.D. Leuchtner. These included the “Three Tables” with multiple folding parts, “The True Principles of All Things,” “The Tree of the Soul” and more than a dozen others.74 They would become the most recognizable summations of Behmenist doctrine, and were frequently reproduced. Because several of the diagrams resembled celestial charts and contained zodiacal signs, they gave the impression that Boehme was a kind of spiritual astrologer. In fact, while he occasionally used astrological terms, they occurred far less commonly in his works than references to alchemy.
The effects of reading this highly occult edition of Boehme were in some souls immediate and electric. One of those most excited by it was a Lancashire Methodist named Ralph Mather, who sometimes accompanied John Wesley on his travels. In February 1774, a worried Wesley recorded in his journal that “I had much conversation with Ralph Mather, a devoted young man, but almost driven out of his senses by Mystic Divinity. If he escapes out of this specious snare of the devil he will be an instrument of much good.” Two weeks later, however, Wesley declared himself “grieved to find that Ralph Mather's falling into Mysticism and Quakerism.”75 Soon after, Mather became a correspondent of the artist Henry Brooke, to whom he sent in November 1775 a remarkable account of “Spiritual Persons” whom he had met around England and Northern Ireland. Under the entry for his home town of Leigh in Lancashire, Mather noted the following: “Near this town Wm. Crompton, farmer; and in it, R. Darwell and young Geo. Darwell, and J. Marsh, poor people, love J. Behmen and W. Law.” No doubt his own activities had something to do with the remarkable appeal of Theosophy among the common folk of Leigh. Boehme and Law were also “favorite authors” of an unnamed person in Birmingham. Mather further mentioned on his list the Reverend John Fletcher of Madeley, Shropshire, the Swiss-born cleric whom Wesley regarded as his successor; Francis Okely, Moravian minister of Northampton, who published a life of Boehme in 1780; Thomas Mills, printer of Bristol; and the Owen si
sters, schoolteachers at Publow near Bristol. Mills was Ebenezer Sibly's first publisher and later owned a collection of Freher's manuscripts.76
Within a few years, Mather had moved far beyond the views of a “tender Methodist.” Like Behmenists before him, he lost his belief in hell and thought that God was in all things—the same spiritual pantheism that Warburton had denounced in William Law. Mather's friend Henry Brooke was scandalized by such heterodoxy.77 By this time, Mather had more worldly concerns as well. He had become the advocate in London for the spinners and weavers of Bolton, which lies about nine miles from his home town. In 1780, he co-authored his first known published work, an appeal to Parliament to alleviate the plight of the cotton-spinners of Lancashire, whose living conditions had worsened as a result of the introduction of machine-spinning during the American War of Independence. The pamphlet proposed a tax on machinery that would allow hand-spinners to compete with the big manufacturers.78 Mather's social conscience did not mean that he had given up on spirituality—he was already contemplating emigration to the American colonies “on some search of religious Souls among the Dunkards”: that is, the German Baptists of western Virginia.79
In the mid-1780s, Mather became a follower of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. With his friend Joseph Whittingham Salmon, a former Methodist preacher, he went on missionary expeditions to London, Salisbury, Liverpool, Manchester and Norwich, preaching the new dispensation. He clearly encountered much criticism of his behaviour, which inspired him to publish a short tract on “backbiting and detraction” in 1786. Mather became one of the founding members of the New Jerusalem Church, a formal Swedenborgian denomination, which declared its separate status in December 1788. He later served the Church as an ordained minister in Liverpool.80 He moved to the United States in 1792, settling at Germantown near Philadelphia, where he founded a Swedenborgian congregation. Mather played a role in encouraging Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest tobacco planters in Virginia and a convert to Swedenborgianism, to free 452 of his slaves—the largest voluntary manumission in North American history. After 1799, Mather was pastor of the Baltimore congregation where Carter worshipped.81
Because he never wrote down anything about them, the role of the occult in Mather's religious opinions is hard to judge. Nevertheless, the two biggest influences on him seem to have been the recent edition of Boehme and the writings of Swedenborg. The first was presented as a collection of occult texts; the second particularly attracted those already familiar with occult thinking. Mather's passage from Methodism to Swedenborgianism via Behmenism was not unique. James Lackington noted after Wesley's death in 1791 that “the Swedenborgians, or New Jerusalemists, are gaining ground very fast: many of the methodists are already gone over to their party; many more will now, undoubtedly, follow.”82 He was not entirely wrong about this, although he overstated the case. Swedenborg's doctrines would attract many of those who have already been named in this chapter, including Ebenezer Sibly, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and the irrepressible occult Freemason Antoine-Joseph Pernety. For those obsessed with “Mystic Divinity,” Swedenborg was indeed a godsend.
The Swedish baron, born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, lived much of his life in England, and experienced his “vocational visions” in London in 1744–5. Prior to that time, he had been known as a geologist, a physiologist and a pioneer of atomic theory: in short, a paragon of the Enlightenment. His scientific writings, however, rejected mechanistic explanations and identified primal energy as the motivating force of an organic universe. He also longed for an intuitive knowledge that would provide insight into the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. By the 1740s, he was recording dreams in which he conversed with angels. Sadly, the charming story that he was dining at a London inn when an angel sitting in the corner of the room told him not to think so much about food is apocryphal, but he did begin to experience daytime visions in the mid-1740s, which led him to formulate new religious ideas. He upheld an absolute human freedom maintained by divine love, the existence of multiple heavens and hells, conjugal relations among the souls of the departed and the presence of alien beings on other planets, who were kind enough to visit him in order to explain themselves. Although he drew freely on Neoplatonism, observing a material world infused by benign spirits, Swedenborg claimed never to have read Boehme. Remaining a member of the Lutheran Church until he died in London in 1772, Swedenborg had no intention of founding a separate denomination to uphold his doctrines.83
Swedenborg's writings, which only gradually appeared in print, are best regarded as a collection of visionary insights from which his early supporters, most of them fixated on their own spiritual journeys, drew messages that suited their personal objectives. Only after the foundation of the New Jerusalem Church did this spiritual liberty begin to diminish, although the tendency for followers to make their own interpretations was never fully extinguished. Early Swedenborgians might therefore differ fundamentally from “the Assessor,” as he was called, on specific matters. A good example is the issue of magic, which Swedenborg associated with Satanic devices or the false religion of the Egyptians, and whose practices he absolutely rejected as “profane abuses of the divine order.”84 His followers, however, were often drawn to magic, both natural and supernatural, because they tended to mix extraneous elements, like Behmenism, with Swedenborg's teachings. In their minds at least, there was no essential contradiction between the baron's scientific inclinations and astrology, alchemy or even necromancy.
Swedenborgian principles had a powerful impact on the development of European Freemasonry. In 1800, Ralph Mather travelled from Philadelphia to Paris, where he met Benedict Chastanier, a French-speaking Swedenborgian and long-time resident of London. Chastanier advocated the creation of a specifically Swedenborgian type of Masonry that would include the study of occult science. What the two men discussed in Paris is unknown.85 Mather may not have shared Chastanier's enthusiasms, but few Swedenborgians would have been ignorant of recent occult developments in Masonry, which should be considered as another of the underlying causes of the English occult revival.
Occult Freemasonry
In 1771, the artist Joseph Wright of Derby painted an alchemist kneeling in pious supplication before a glowing retort. The figure gestures under a vaulted ceiling, amid the collected paraphernalia of a laboratory, with two admiring assistants behind him and a glowing moon shining through a window. The laborious title Wright gave to this painting was “The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and Prays For the Successful Conclusion of his Operation, As Was the Custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers.” It is one of the few positive depictions of an alchemist in European art. A tradition of painting alchemists as hopeless dreamers, bent on a ruinous quest, had begun in the southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century, and was carried on by Dutch painters like Adrian van Ostade, David Teniers and Jan Steen. Other than illustrations to spagyric texts, no precedent existed for a triumphant portrayal of the search for the Philosopher's Stone. Yet Wright's painting was executed at a time when English alchemy was considered to be moribund, which explains the reference to “Ancient Chymical Astrologers” in its title. Besides, the painter is more generally associated with works—“The Air Pump,” “The Orrery”—that illustrate the spread of Newtonian science. Why on earth would he want to glorify an alchemist?
Interest in alchemy had certainly waned in mid-eighteenth-century England, but it never entirely disappeared. The 1740s, a decade marked by war and political upheavals, produced a brief flurry of fresh interest in it. A recent German anthology of alchemical texts was translated and published in 1744 under the title Hermippus Redivivus. It was reprinted five times in three separate editions, the last version appearing in the same year as Wright's painting.86 The republication of another German work on alchemy, An Apology for the Hermetic Sciences, prompted a review in a fashionable magazine, The Museum, in 1747. The reviewer—probably the sentimental poet and ph
ysician Mark Akenside—admitted that the book was “very well calculated to possess the minds of young students with a high opinion of this Art, and to soften if not obliterate the Prejudices which Men of riper Years and more mature Judgment, have unwarily entertained against the Hermetic science.”87 Evidently, Newtonianism had not killed off alchemy entirely, although its occasional infusions of life came mainly from Germany.
Joseph Wright's papers point to the involvement of his friend the surveyor and artist Peter Perez Burdett in the creation of “The Alchymist.” An ink-and-wash study for the painting exists on the back of a letter from Burdett. While he confessed himself “a stranger” to the subject matter, Wright's friend was clearly interested in the painting.88 Burdett is the figure shown taking notes in Wright's famous “Orrery” painting. The older man standing next to him is Washington Shirley, Earl Ferrers, a Freemason who served as grand master of the Grand Lodge in 1762–4. Burdett lived with the earl and was doubtless also a Freemason. His interest in an image of alchemy may therefore be seen as part of a long tradition within the Craft. It may have had a more commercial motivation as well. A clue to this aspect of the painting's origins is provided by a trip made in 1771 by the celebrated Chevalier d'Eon, an eccentric French nobleman who habitually dressed as a woman and who also resided with Earl Ferrers. He accompanied the mentally unstable Ludwig IX, landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, on a visit to Burdett and Wright's home town of Derby, but they left the next day for Liverpool, where the two Englishmen had recently moved.89 These eccentric foreigners, both Freemasons, may have been seeking Wright's painting. Was the landgrave, famously besotted by alchemy, the intended purchaser? If so, he did not actually buy it, as it remained in Wright's studio until the painter's death.
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