Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Ebenezer followed in his brother's enterprising footsteps by setting up the British Directory Office, a publishing firm, in the printers’ quarter near St Paul's. From these premises, and from his house in Upper Titchfield Street, Sibly marketed his “Solar Tincture,” a universal medicine based on alchemical and astrological principles. Sibly was determined to connect his work with an expanding consumer market among the middling sort. To do this, he had to reject the assumption that the occult should be kept secret. As a result, almost everything in Sibly's writings is open, transparent, simplified, easy to grasp. For example, he put into print the supposedly terrifying (or, to sceptical readers, quite ridiculous) names of demons, derived from handwritten necromantic texts.48 Agrippa had done the same, but his audience consisted exclusively of learned readers. Sibly was writing for a broader, less erudite public that was ignorant of Latin and unfamiliar with previous occult writings. His big books also came out in instalments, a marketing ploy that appealed to readers of limited means who sought inexpensive sources of encyclopaedic knowledge.

  Sibly's endorsement of natural magic and spiritual cures was supposedly upheld by strictly empirical methods. His commercial bravado, therefore, did not undercut his embrace of science. He argued that astrology itself was “a Science which treats of the natural body of Heaven, after the same manner as Geology describes that of the Earth.” While his new science of “Uranology” rested on spiritual influence, sympathies and antipathies, we should not underestimate the extent to which Sibly's approach appeared scientific. His Medical Mirror contains numerous anatomical diagrams and discussions of the human reproductive system that are surprisingly accurate. Although he subscribed to the opinion that “the vegetative or procreative faculties of women are universally governed by the lunations of the moon,” most of his advice on childbirth was straightforward and sensible.49 He rejected “superstitious” notions, like the idea that a mother's imagination could confer physical characteristics on her unborn child.50 Sibly's edition of Culpeper's Herbal was enlivened by detailed descriptions of the symptoms of illness, including a section on venereal disease that is unjudgmental and unusually sympathetic to sufferers. Sibly was keen to flaunt his medical qualifications, and to cite current scientific writers like Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin or even Joseph Black, whose burning hostility to the occult has already been mentioned here. In The Key to Physic, Sibly even takes up controversial scientific positions, espousing a kind of atomism and criticizing the French naturalist Buffon for dismissing the idea of “sensitive plants.”51

  The Natural History was Sibly's primary scientific contribution. It relies heavily on the classifications of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, which are extended into the domain of animals and human beings. Here, Sibly adopts degrading ethnic aspects of scientific categorization. Africans are described as “crafty, indolent, and careless,” American Indians as “obstinate,” “Asiatics” as “grave, haughty and covetous,” while Europeans are “of gentle manners, acute in judgment, of quick invention, and governed by fixed laws.” By linking racial with moral characteristics, Sibly foreshadows later “scientific racism,” although he balances this with a Behmenist emphasis on the essential divinity of all humans.52 In racial matters, Sibly's science was apparently less humane than his mysticism.

  Sibly linked himself to the project of enlightenment in other ways as well. His Celestial Science was dedicated to the Brotherhood of Freemasons. Sibly had been a Freemason since his days in Portsmouth, and he helped to found a lodge in London in 1789. In dedicating his edition of Culpeper's Herbal to a well-known provincial grand master, Thomas Dunckerley, Sibly linked himself with one of the most influential men in the Brotherhood. He did not hesitate to use the language of enlightenment that was so much associated with the Freemasons in an international context. He hoped that “my Masonic Brethren” would find in his work “an ample store of Precepts, whereby the blessings of Health might be universally dispensed, and the happiness of Mankind more permanently secured; to promote which is the leading Feature of masonic Principles.” It is startling to note that, only a few pages after this eulogy to the rational improvement of humanity, Sibly opined “that there is indisputably an innate and occult virtue infused into all sublunary things, animal, vegetable, and mineral, by the action of the heavenly bodies.”53 Whether occult virtue promoted or stood in the way of human happiness was not explained. Clearly, however, the good doctor saw no clash between enlightened principles and occult explanations of nature.

  When he explained them directly, as opposed to hinting at them in passages that might well be paraphrases of the work of others, Sibly's social views tended to be reformist. His Swedenborgian religious beliefs, for example, led him to oppose slavery, no matter what he wrote elsewhere about race. “Since, then, that we are all derived from one common parent,” he wrote, “is it not barbarous and inhuman, to make perpetual slaves of our fellow-creatures, merely because they differ from us in colour, and are less informed in the arts and subtilties of life?”54 While this statement is doubtless ambiguous (was temporary slavery acceptable?) and somewhat condescending, it would have put him at odds with many of his former neighbours in Bristol, where the slave trade provided a large part of mercantile profits. Sibly could also be broad-minded on issues of gender. Although he presents gender differences as absolute, based on astrology (men were “solar,” women “lunar”) as well as physiology, this did not prevent him from arguing, like Jacob Boehme, that Adam was both male and female, a concept that had implications for gender equality. Sibly praised the “admirable structure” of the female body, and condemned “the confinement of females,” recommending exercise and outdoor activities for women. Unlike other members of the all-male medical profession, he embraced the experiential knowledge of midwives and herbalists.55

  Ebenezer Sibly's writings brought the secret world of the magical adept before the public gaze, where it took on the sheen of empirical or scientific validity. A key to his success was, paradoxically enough, his appearance of honesty. Sibly may have been an enthusiastic self-promoter who made unbelievable claims, but he was not a con man. His tone was earnest and direct, devoid of allegory or allusion. In his transparency, his preoccupation with science and his desire to classify the whole world in easily understood categories, Sibly was a typical writer of the Enlightenment. Still, we should not place his encyclopaedias of the occult alongside the writings of Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. What differentiated Sibly from them was his reinvention of older traditions of magical and mystical thought, and his rejection of whatever challenged them, which he referred to as “abstract reason.” Even as he sought to make occult forces visible, he insisted that their operations were hidden, and that even their natural effects “were infinitely beyond our knowledge and comprehension.”56 “Secondary causes” in nature were spiritual phenomena that could not be analysed or even classified. Transparency, in other words, had its limits within the science of Uranology.

  Sibly was unusual in attempting to reconcile the astrologer's art with enlightened science, and to separate it from ritual magic. Most of his colleagues were unembarrassed by magical practices. An unidentified astrologer living in the Midlands in the 1760s and 1770s kept a notebook entitled “Theomagia” (shades of John Heydon) that contained not only the nativities of his customers, but also various spells for practical purposes, such as one “to secure a House from theft” by writing talismanic signs and numbers on a piece of paper and burying it. The notebook also includes ritual incantations for summoning spirits. Similarly, the self-styled “Magus” Francis Barrett would later endorse the use of images, seals and talismans that “derive Virtue from the Celestial Bodies.”57 Even Sibly's best-known pupil, John Parkins, who may also have studied with Barrett, relied on selling magical charms. Parkins, a cunning-man from Lincolnshire, marketed “holy consecrated philosophical lamens, pentacles, papers, writings, amulets, telesmes, &c.,” which he advertised in a series of publications that appeared
in the early nineteenth century.58 The anti-magical reforms of John Gadbury and John Partridge had obviously not touched all those who aspired to read the heavens. What might have earned a powerful rebuke from those long-dead masters of the celestial art passed without much notice in the popularized, frenetically commercial astrology of a later age. In a sense, enlightened tolerance had made the public sphere safer for the magical talismans of Barrett or Parkins.

  Some astrologers avoided magic because they were religiously orthodox. After Sibly, the most influential astrological writer of the time was John Worsdale, author of Genethliacal Astrology (1798). A devout Protestant, Worsdale equated Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Joseph, thought Moses had learned astrology from the Egyptians and argued that the celestial science was no more diabolical than studying “the occult principles of the magnet.”59 Worsdale categorically asserted that there was “no such thing as Chance in Nature.” He shared none of Sibly's confidence in the innate divinity of human beings, or his fascination with the spirit world.60 Worsdale's piously Christian theory of astrology, based on Ptolemaic rather than Copernican principles, was summed up in a poetic preface to his main work:

  With strong and occult Force, the Pow'rs above,

  Subject the wandering Stars, which always move

  By HIS Decree; from whom they all receive

  Those immense Virtues which they daily give.

  This could have been written a century earlier. On the other hand, Worsdale viewed astrology as a progressive science, as the final lines of his poem attest:

  In Spite of Censure, SCIENCE will advance;

  Tho’ ART has no such FOE as IGNORANCE.61

  He even used the common Enlightenment comparison of the universe to “a Watch made up of small Wheels, one within another.”62 While his interpretation of occult philosophy was constrained by conventional piety and never as scientifically inclined as that of Sibly, Worsdale was not entirely at odds with the enlightened spirit of his times.

  Who read these works on astrology and occult science? And what did they make of them? Lacking much direct evidence, we have to rely on internal clues. Sibly, Barrett, Parkins and Worsdale may have appealed to two types of readers, one general, the other more exclusive. The first type was a Protestant of the middling or labouring ranks, male or female, probably influenced by evangelicalism, who accepted that the supernatural really operated in this world. Literate, but outside the orthodox influence of academic learning, such a person might already be familiar with Culpeper's Herbal or with astrological almanacs, and might buy one of Sibly's works for its medical information, or Genethliacal Astrology for its handy guidance on reading the stars. Readers of this type were numerous enough to keep Sibly's compendia in print for decades. In industrial Lancashire as late as the 1860s, his medical-astrological books outsold “all other works on the same subjects put together.”63 The second, more exclusive type of reader was a person genuinely intrigued by the occult, perhaps a Swedenborgian or a member of one of the occult intellectual circles that sprang up in late eighteenth-century England. The painter Richard Cosway, for example, owned at least two of Sibly's works.64 Although these individuals were far fewer in number than the first type of reader, they were enthusiastic consumers of publications like those of Barrett. Through their own activities and writings, they sent further shock waves of renewed life into the hitherto-moribund body of occult philosophy. The galvanizing effect of the occult revival was even successful in reviving alchemy, a subject that, like Uranology, deserves to be drawn out of the shadows and into a critical historical light.

  The Alchemist: Sigismund Bacstrom

  There can be little debate about the most important alchemist operating in England in the late eighteenth century. His handwritten notes and copies of older alchemical works are strewn throughout great library collections in the English-speaking world, from Glasgow to Los Angeles. Yet we are not certain in what country he was born. His name was Sigismund Bacstrom, which sounds Swedish. So thought the Prussian publicist J.W. von Archenholz, who edited a German version of Bacstrom's only published article in 1802, calling him “an Englishman of Swedish origin.”65 Beyond the name, however, no evidence can be found of a Swedish connection—he wrote in English, German and Dutch, and he used the Dutch digraph “ij” for “y.” Bacstrom described his father as the possessor of “great medicinal Arcana” relating to “the quintEssences of Metalls, Minerals, Vegetable and Animal Substances,” which suggests that he was both a physician and an alchemist.66 Born in 1743, young Sigismund studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Strasbourg. This unusual institution had both a Lutheran and a Jesuit college, and it is not clear which one Bacstrom attended, although he seems to have been a Protestant later in life.67 He made three sea voyages as a surgeon on Dutch ships between 1763 and 1770. Between these journeys, he resided at Amsterdam.

  By the time he came to London in 1771, Bacstrom was apparently fluent in English. Hoping to take part in James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific, he addressed a letter to the naturalist Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Cook's first voyage in 1768–71. Pleading his impoverished state, Bacstrom assured Banks of his sailing experience and his ability to trap live birds. In a separate letter, probably written to Banks's associate the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, Bacstrom suggested that participation in the expedition might “intitle me to more Respect and Encouragement, either here or in Germanij, than any merit of mine own may deserve!”68 Impressed by his eagerness, Banks engaged him at a generous salary of £100 per year. Soon after, however, Banks withdrew in anger from the Cook expedition, due to disputes over his accommodation, and decided to make a trip with Solander to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands instead. Bacstrom served as secretary to the two celebrated naturalists on this excursion. He later made copies of the notes Solander had taken on the plants of New Zealand, illustrating them with his own watercolours. As Solander was a leading disciple of Carl Linnaeus, whose system of taxonomy he adopted, this would have introduced Bacstrom to the latest methods in botany.69

  Bacstrom was not commercially minded. A skilled copyist, translator and illustrator, he always depended on wealthy patrons for support. After leaving the service of Banks and Solander in 1775, he attached himself for four years to Captain William Kent, a collector of plant specimens. Between 1780 and 1786, Bacstrom took to the sea again, making four northern voyages to the whale fisheries as a surgeon on merchant ships. Although he found that his captains had “little or no education” and complained about his treatment at their hands, he made use of his experience to write an account of a voyage to the Arctic island of Spitzbergen.70 Exasperated by the living conditions on whaling ships, Bacstrom turned to the slave trade. He made two personally disastrous expeditions, first to the West African coast and then to Jamaica. On the second voyage, he suffered an attack of blindness, as a result of “an epidemical Distemper, which was among our Slaves.” Bacstrom never stated any moral opposition to slavery, but he admitted that he had no wish to engage in further slaving expeditions.71

  Following his return to England, he wrote again to Banks, offering “to assist a Gentleman to do chemical Experiments … I do not mean the Lapis Philosophorum seu potius Insanorum [Stone of the Philosophers or rather of the insane].” This may have been a private joke; it certainly did not signify a distaste for alchemy. Having tried in vain to obtain patronage from Hugh Percy, 2nd duke of Northumberland, “a Lover of Chemical Philosophy,” Bacstrom suggested an introduction to Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian Mason” and alchemist who was visiting England. Banks apparently made some efforts on his behalf, but none proved successful, and Bacstrom considered engaging himself on an expedition to New Holland (Australia), to seek specimens for botanical collectors as well as to search for gold, diamonds and precious stones. He promised Banks that he would keep his discoveries “sub Sigillo Harpocratis [under the seal of Harpocrates, Egyptian god of silence], for my Employers only.”72

  At this low point in his care
er, Bacstrom was fortunate enough to find a protector—Edward Shute, another “Lover of Chymical Experiments,” who gave him an allowance of £150 a year and set him up in a laboratory in the appropriately named Paradise Row, Marylebone, where he was to make medicines. Shute lived in the Inner Temple (although he was not a barrister) and apparently had an interest in Dr Norris's Antinomial Drops, a patent medicine, as a letter of endorsement from him appeared in printed advertisements for that nostrum.73 By 1789, however, Bacstrom's patron was dead. He and his wife were now reduced to selling their own clothes, and he again begged Banks for support. General Charles Rainsford, a dedicated alchemist who happened to be a distant cousin of Banks, had proposed that a subscription might be raised for Bacstrom among “his chemical friends.” Banks contributed five guineas, while the instrument designer and alchemist Peter Woulfe sent another two, but Rainsford did not keep his promise to gather more money.74

  Happily, Bacstrom was soon after engaged to serve on an expedition to the Pacific, to discover “valuable druggs or natural products.” It was funded by the shipowner Theophilus Pritzler, who had visited Bacstrom's laboratory, and William Curtis, a banker, Member of Parliament for the City of London and supporter of the government of William Pitt the younger. The expedition may have had the unstated goal of challenging Spanish territorial claims to the fur-trading area around Nootka Sound on the northwest coast of North America. A naval expedition had been sent out in spring 1791 under the command of Captain George Vancouver, with the intention of settling the Nootka question in favour of British interests. The flotilla of three merchant ships sent out by Curtis and his associates later that year may have been designed to bolster Vancouver's bargaining position with the Spanish, although it was certainly also planned as a scientific voyage. Banks offered to pay Bacstrom for specimens, “sixpence for each species of which there is either flowers or fruits & a shilling when there are both.”75