Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  The expedition took a bad turn when it reached Nootka Sound, where its commander, Captain William Brown, allowed his men to rob and kill Haida Indians. Bacstrom became disgusted with the captain's violent conduct. Watercolour sketches that he made of Haida chiefs and their families testify to his sympathetic attitude towards them. He opted to jump ship, seeking shelter at the Spanish military settlement. Bacstrom's ultimate intention, however, was to return to Britain, which he attempted first on a Newcastle brig, then on an American ship with French owners that was impounded at Macao by the British, and finally on an ex-East Indiaman with an English captain and a mixed foreign crew. A mutiny on the last of these ships led to Bacstrom's confinement for six months on the French island of Mauritius in 1794.76

  It was here, in the “Pineapple Canton,” that he met the comte de Chazal, who initiated him into the “Société de la R[ose]. Croix,” an occult Masonic fraternity that was probably an offshoot of the Chapter of Clermont. Formed around 1740 (although its members claimed that it had originated in 1490), these Rosy Crucians had some remarkable rules according to the various admission certificates found in Bacstrom's papers. Dedicated to “the great work”—namely, alchemy—membership in the Society was to be kept secret. Each initiate was to instruct “one or two persons at most in our Secret Knowledge.” Amazingly, “as there is no distinction of Sexes in the Spiritual world … our Society does not exclude a worthy woman from being initiated.” Although the Society was avowedly Christian and recommended charity to the poor, the initiate who found the secret to making gold was not to donate any money towards the building of churches, chapels or hospitals, “as there are already a sufficient number of such public buildings and institutions.” Nor was he or she to “aid or assist or Support with Gold or Silver any Government King or Sovereign (except by paying taxes),” instead leaving public affairs “to the Government of God.”77 The disillusionment of a French aristocrat who had just witnessed the revolution in his own country might be read into these words, although it is possible of course that Bacstrom himself composed them.

  Bacstrom finally left Mauritius on an American ship, but an attempt to reach Britain failed when the vessel in which he was travelling was blown by gales to the Virgin Islands. There a kindly British governor befriended him, and paid for his passage back to London, which he reached in July 1795. Having had plenty of time on board various ships to think about occult matters, he came home with his head full of ideas, which he set down in a treatise. This included, among other things, “the curious Scientific Allegories in the Old Testament,” and Bacstrom hoped to publish it by subscription. He solicited Banks once again, found thirteen other supporters for the scheme and was even received at the Masonic Lodge of Antients no. 10, “with a View to get Subscribers at the Lodges.”78 In spite of this brief burst of salesmanship, however, it does not seem that the book was ever published.

  By 1797, Bacstrom was employed again as an alchemist, but his new patron was more interested in old-fashioned gold-making than in occult philosophy. He was Alexander Tilloch, a Scottish printer resident for the past decade in London. Having invented a process for stereotyping or printing by letterpress plates rather than moveable type, Tilloch had become a very wealthy man. He spent his money on the purchase of a newspaper, The Star, as well as on a scientific journal, The Philosophical Magazine, which he founded in 1798 “to diffuse Philosophical Knowledge among every Class of Society.”79 Bacstrom's only published article appeared in this periodical. Tilloch was the perfect model of a practical, enlightened businessman of the late eighteenth century, but two details set him apart. First, he was a member of a small Calvinist Church, the Sandemanians, who held to a narrow interpretation of faith that depended on correct judgment; second, he was a committed devotee of the occult sciences.

  Both points were duly noted in an obituary that appeared soon after Tilloch's death in 1826. After praising a study of the Apocalypse on which Tilloch had laboured for forty years, the author described his religious views as “what in general estimation would be deemed somewhat singular.” With evident embarrassment, the obituarist admitted of his subject that “the occult sciences, in early life, at one time attracted much of his attention,” but claimed that “it was not long that he wandered in those visionary regions.” Still, “judicial astrology he was never disposed to treat with sovereign contempt.”80 In fact, Tilloch's interest in alchemy lasted until at least 1808, when he was almost fifty years old. Bacstrom initiated him into the Rosy Cross Society, and copied out for him a stunning variety of alchemical tracts.81 Tilloch was an attentive reader and did not hesitate to make cutting comments on the errors and enthusiastic expressions of other alchemists, including Bacstrom. “These remarks are more fanciful than solid,” he noted drily on one recipe, painstakingly reconstructed from a private conversation and transcribed by the assiduous doctor (a title Bacstrom now freely used, although he may not have had an M.D.). Regarding another process, the hard-nosed Tilloch writes: “In the work before us there is no small share of sophistry.”82 As might be imagined, Tilloch was more concerned with how to achieve the goal of alchemy and less fascinated than Bacstrom with obscure philosophical points.

  Tilloch did not maintain his partner in luxury. By 1804, Bacstrom was living in Albion Street, a new development south of Commercial Road in the East End of London. He complained to Tilloch that the location of his “hut” was “excessively dirty” and “inaccessible without boots.” One experiment “filled our 3 rooms with poisonous vapours, so that we had nearly been all 3—Mrs. B, myself and Alexsen [his assistant]—been suffocated if I had not quickly thrown open all the Windows.”83 As this shows, he did not labour alone, however. While in Tilloch's employ, he had at least three assistants—S.M. Belisario, Mr Hawkins and the unfortunate Captain Alexsen, who almost asphyxiated him. He also records numerous conversations with other local adepts, including Mr R. Ford, Mr Lentz who had lived in New York, Mr Hands and his friend Mr Clerck.84 Bacstrom knew Ebenezer Sibly, who provided him with transcriptions of alchemical manuscripts and letters between 1789 and 1792. He did not think much of the astrologer's scholarship, as he pointed out a “blunder” in dating one manuscript and a “barbarous translation” in another. Bacstrom also owned three handwritten astrological treatises by Sibly, dating from 1795, which may have been given to him by Tilloch.85 Unlike his patron, however, he never showed much interest in astrology.

  Bacstrom's work depended heavily on processes that had been relayed to him verbally by others. He spent enormous time and effort trying to interpret the recipe confided by John Yardley, a glover and silversmith in Worcester, in a letter of 1716 to Mr Garden, silversmith of London. In 1787–9, Bacstrom made several visits to the Goldsmiths Almshouses in Hackney, where Garden's septuagenarian son lived—having “spent foolishly and without judgment 40,000£ upon the great Secret.” The younger Garden insisted that his father had been able to make gold, but Bacstrom still had a number of questions about Yardley's process, which were apparently never resolved.86 Even more elusive was the recipe of Dr Dippelius, conveyed to Bacstrom by his friend Abraham Gommée, supposedly an alderman of Amsterdam, whose father (allegedly burgemeester of the city) had often seen Dippelius transmute mercury into gold. Bacstrom mislaid the paper on which he wrote the recipe, and did not find it again for twenty years.87 He also exchanged notes on alchemy with his “good friend Baron von Rosenheim,” a Viennese aristocrat. For years, Bacstrom laboured in vain to reconstruct the lead-based process of Frederic Lafontaine of Chelsea. This well-connected individual was the son of George I's court painter at Hanover, brother to the court painter at Brunswick (a Freemason, who depicted himself in a series of portraits of members of the local lodge) and uncle of the popular novelist August Lafontaine. As late as 1804, Bacstrom interviewed Mrs Van Hest, a widow living in the Dutch Almshouses near Finsbury Square, whose father, a minister at Ziericksee, had been questioned many years before on suspicion of witchcraft after making various experiments with plants.8
8

  The impression given by Bacstrom's manuscripts, therefore, is not that of a recluse working in isolation, but of a sociable man who toiled away at alchemy with the help of many acquaintances and associates. His relationship with written sources was similarly engaged and interactive. He read medieval and early-modern alchemical texts with reverence, awe and excitement, but he never ceased trying to understand them in the context of his philosophical ideas. He did not simply follow recipes: he interpreted them. Bacstrom's own theories were expressed in a set of “Aphorisms” that he wrote down in 1797. They amounted to a Neoplatonic vision of the universe, in which all souls and spirits are part of an anima mundi created by God. The omnipresent Soul of the World takes visible form only in fire, but it can become material in “the Stone, or Medicine of the Philosophers.” The “Magnet” used to attract the stone is man or, more specifically, “the Dust or red earth of Man,” which seems to mean either urine or semen, “that precious fluid, wherein dwells the Universal Spirit.” From this point, Bacstrom turned to the practical methods of multiplying medicines, including electricity, which will “introduce the Electrical Universal principle, or the Universal Spirit of Nature into the subject by motion.”89 The influence of Dr Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of magnetic healing is evident here.

  Bacstrom maintained an interest in contemporary science, even if he did not think much of it. He was concerned, for example, to hear from Miss Ford in November 1808 about a recent newspaper article referring to a lecture at the Royal Society given by Humphry Davy, the greatest public experimenter. It related to the isolation of elements, including metals, from alkaline earth samples through electrolysis. The article suggested that this experiment made possible the creation of metals and might give new heart to alchemists, although, as Bacstrom disapprovingly observed, “Modern Chemists exclude themselves for ever by their unbelief and Mockery, and their Experiments will never cause them to discover that Truth, which was better known 2000 Years ago, than at present.”90 Was there a note of resentment against Alexander Tilloch in this peevish comment? Bacstrom did not mention that Davy's presentation—the Royal Society's Bakerian Lecture for 1808—had been printed in Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine, with the effusive praise of the editor. Within two years, Davy had taken on a youthful assistant in his experiments at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday, future discoverer of electromagnetism. Like Tilloch, Faraday was a Sandemanian who had worked in the printing trade. As members of the same tiny London congregation, the two men must have known one another.91 Perhaps Tilloch was moving away from Bacstrom's old-fashioned alchemy, towards the new promise of Davy's modern chemistry, with young Faraday going before him. Whatever the case, nothing more is known about Tilloch's alchemical pursuits after 1808.

  As for Bacstrom, to the very end he looked to the past, even if he remained aware of a threatening present. Considering his wide experience of the world and his encounters with imperialism, slavery, the mistreatment of native peoples and global conflict, one might have imagined that his alchemy would be shaped by contemporary political and social problems. In fact, it was almost completely detached from them. This does not mean that alchemy was for him mere escapism, because it required a lot of hard work and provided him with a living. Still, his alchemical quest was unquestionably a romance, a beautiful dream of knowledge, riches and power that remained eternally unfulfilled. He separated this dream from the harsh realities of poverty and exploitation that surrounded him, although of course it was at least in part a reaction to them too. While Bacstrom saw the “great work” as eternal and unchanging, his passionate, uncompromising, wholly transparent and largely self-directed approach to it could only have thrived in the late eighteenth century. The Enlightenment made Sigismund Bacstrom possible, even if he never acknowledged its impact on him.

  The last dated entry in Bacstrom's manuscripts is for 8 November 1808. It concerns a conversation with Mr Ford, who believed Humphry Davy's experiments showed the way forward for alchemy. Bacstrom remained unconvinced, asserting that, “against all the Barkers and Deriders, the Truth of the blessed Stone of the earliest Antiquity will stand firm like a Rock, as long as the Earth will endure.”92 To the end, he asserted an intellectual freedom to look back towards verities that were immutable. For the aged voyager, the rock still stood firm.

  The Occult Freemasons

  Sigismond Bacstrom had little regard for regular Freemasons. “I have found them a set of Trifflers [sic],” he complained in the late 1790s, “not a hair better than any other men, perfectly ignorant of Natural Knowledge, for which reason I do not intend to visit their Lodges any more during the remainder of my Life.”93 Above all, they were ignorant of “the Allegory of King Solomon's Navigation to Ophir and King Hiram's Ships,” which according to Bacstrom paralleled the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Both voyages revealed the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. Through his knowledge of alchemy, King Hermes (or Chiram) of the Phoenicians, mistakenly identified as Hiram the architect by the Freemasons, provided the gold that built the Temple of Solomon. Here was the hidden message of Newton's Chronology; but the secret was revealed only to the mysterious Rosy Crucians, not to their benighted brethren in the Masonic lodges.94

  Every occult branch of Freemasonry in the late eighteenth century claimed to have secrets similar to those bestowed upon Bacstrom by the Rosy Crucians. They were passed on by initiation into the higher degrees devised after 1740. Masonic secrets might be expressed in the language of alchemy, but they tended towards spiritual enlightenment rather than gold-making. The nature of that enlightenment was often a combination of Behmenist, Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas, labelled as “Swedenborgianism.” The history of international Freemasonry in the last two decades of the eighteenth century therefore offers a fascinating Europe-wide perspective on the relationship between occult thinking and the Enlightenment. Among the “higher-grade” Freemasons, occult philosophy and science reached a level of respectability that they had never before enjoyed in Britain. This would soon prove problematic, however, because it opened the door to all sorts of impostures and social dangers.

  The Knight Templar degrees that were thriving in German, French and other European lodges in the 1770s and 1780s had English and Scottish counterparts as early as the 1740s. In 1783, the successful attempt of Peter Lambert de Lintot, master of the London Lodge of Perfect Observance, to obtain a charter from the Grand Lodge of Scotland for a Rite of Seven Degrees, including Templar grades, marked a new phase in the development of occult Freemasonry in Britain. The Rite comprised three “Lights” or groups of secrets: the first (“the Law of Moses”) was connected with the building of the Temple of Solomon; the second (“the Law of Christ”) had to do with the Templar Order and the Crusades; the third (“Nature”) focused on the suppression of the Templars by the papacy and on “the Natural Religion,” which largely consisted of alchemy. The initiate was to learn about the four elements, “the fluid of the sun that gives life to any thing in being” and the place of the soul in nature. He would then proceed to “Physic, Metaphysiq, Philosophy and Moral,” as well as to “the knowledge of the salts of Hermess [i.e. Hermes],” before reaching “the real Philosophical Stone by mathematics, astrology and all the Sciences that proves the real existence of the Eternal being.”95 That the Scottish Grand Lodge did not blink at endorsing this scheme for Hermetic instruction suggests that the existing Heredom rites may not have been far removed from it. The Scots Masons may also have been impressed by the inclusion among the members of Lambert de Lintot's lodge of the duke of Brunswick and the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, both admitted in absentia. It was not until 1788 that the Perfect Observance lodge began initiating English and Irish Brothers. They were mostly men of the middling sort, including a sergeant-major in the Coldstream Guards, an attorney, a button-maker, a victualler and a medical doctor, although the Irish earl of Antrim, protector of the Grand Lodge of Antients, was also initiated.96

  Lambert de Lintot represented his interpretat
ion of Templar Masonry in six engravings. The simplest two, “Free Masons at Work” and “Free-Masonry Crown'd,” show winged cherubs using the tools of the Craft on a symbolic diagram of the heavens and admiring an elaborate tracing board. The diagram, loaded with triangles and numbers, resembles the illustrations to Jacob Boehme's Works. The tracing board, representing the Rite of Seven Degrees, displays traditional Masonic symbols as well as alchemical signs. A print of 1787, entitled “Grand Elect,” was dedicated to the duke of Cumberland, George III's wayward brother, who was patron of the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons and master of the Grand Lodge. A fourth print, “Night,” shows “A Bonfire before the Ruins of H.R.D.M. [HARODIM] Castle,” and commemorates the foundation of the Royal Cumberland Freemasons’ School in 1788, a charitable institution for the daughters of indigent members of the Craft. The two last prints, dating from 1789, are the most complicated. In “Foundation of the Royal Order of the Free Masons in Palestine A.M. 4037,” Lambert de Lintot depicted the murder of Hiram by three apprentices and the scattering of his other apprentices, who brought the message of Masonry to the world. The final engraving was a stunningly elaborate symbolic chart, depicting the grades of the Rite of Seven Degrees on “cubical stones.” King Baldwin of Jerusalem appears as the founder of the Order of Harodim (a myth that persists in the so-called Baldwin Rite); next to him are the symbols of the Rose Croix degree. The alchemical aspects of the third “Light” are depicted in a square showing “CHAOS OPEN,” along with geometrical shapes, numbers and the inscription “LUX EX TENEBRAS.” At the top of the chart appears a bearded King Solomon, who resembles the royal personification of gold in many alchemical texts—this became the floor-cloth design for the Knights of the East and West.97