1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  As the Wanli emperor grew increasingly estranged from the literati class, some scholars moved toward a form of Confucianism that was less inclined to tolerate alternate beliefs. In those last years of the Ming, society grew increasingly factionalized, and a sense of commonality was lost. Some scholars even moved away to join the troublesome new kingdom in Manchuria; in 1644, when the Manchus would overthrow the Ming and establish the Qing dynasty, Taoists would be subjected to increased suppression. But the cultivation of the individual through the practice of outer and inner alchemy would continue into modern times.

  The author of the Jing Ping Mei was not the only one to associate mysterious sexual practices with India. When Pietro della Valle, an early-seventeenth-century Italian traveler through the three great Islamic empires, departed Persia for India, he carried with him a most curious manuscript. Called The Kamarupa Seed Syllables, it was an Indian text that had been translated into Persian and copied out for him in the southern Persian city where he had spent several months discussing science and religion with Shi’ite scholars. According to della Valle, the manuscript concerned a practice centered around spiritual exercises related to “arts of divination, secrets of herbs, and other natural things, and also in magic and enchantments.” To della Valle these secrets amounted to “nothing else but correspondence with the Devil…. Sometimes they have carnal commerce with him, not believing, or at least not professing, that it is the Devil, but that there are certain immortal, spiritual, invisible women … whom they reverence as deities, and adore in many places with strange worship.”

  The title of the manuscript gives a clue about its nature. Kamarupa was an early kingdom in northeastern India that was thought to be the place of origin of the esoteric tradition known as Tantra. This tradition was strongest in remote regions of India where Hinduism had not fully established itself, and it probably represents a melding of ancient shamanistic and folk beliefs and practices with Hindusim. The second part of the title, the “seed syllables,” alludes to the recitation of mantras. Della Valle brought the manuscript back to Italy following his travels, and an heir donated it to the Vatican library, where it was forgotten until recently, when the scholar Carl W. Ernst examined it. Ernst described the work as “something like a large recipe-book for occultists” — at least, that is how it would have been perceived in the Islamic Persian context.

  The book is a treatise on yogic breathing and divination techniques centering around devotion to the cult of the Sixty-Four Yoginis (female followers of yoga), whose leader was the fierce Tantric goddess Kamakhya Devi. According to della Valle, “Whoever is occupied with the theory and practice of this they call a jogi and respect him greatly.” This branch of yoga tradition (called Kaula Tantra) was concerned with the purification and perfection of the body through devotion to the feminine principle. In contrast to the personal austerity and bodily denial of Indian ascetics, Tantric followers of the Sixty-Four Yoginis strove for the perfection of the body: if it could be made as immutable and incorruptible as a diamond, the result, in della Valle’s words, would “lengthen life and make one nearly immortal.” In some contexts devotees of Tantra were allowed to drink wine, eat meat, and indulge in sexual relations. As one Tantric text argues, “Donkeys and other animals wander about naked too. Does that make them yogins?”

  Physical movements and postures (asanas), gestures (mudras), and breathing disciplines (pranayama) were keys to the perfection of the body. Energy points within the body, known as chakras, were identified and made a focus of physical development. Mantras were recited and mandalas employed as objects of meditation. Some practitioners of Tantra engaged in sexual rituals whose goal was union between the male principle, represented by Siva, and the primordial creative female energy known as Shakti, after one of the names of his consort. In these rituals men typically sought to delay or deny ejaculation. The goal of union of male and female principles and retention of bodily fluids resembles the Taoist practice of inner alchemy, but possible paths of cross-influence are now nearly impossible to trace. The Kamarupa Seed Syllables, however, takes this practice another step. It claims to offer guidance for conjuring female spirits and then engaging in sexual relations with them. Perhaps this is best taken metaphorically.

  In India, as in China, devotees of sophisticated sexual techniques were often associated with alchemical explorations, as the combining of alchemical substances was likened to the sexual act. Use of such mixtures is what struck Marco Polo about the yogins he encountered. “These people make use of a very strange beverage,” he reported, “for they make a potion of sulfur and quicksilver mixed together, and this they drink every month. This, they say, gives them long life.” By the seventeenth century the perception of visitors had not much changed. A French traveler of that time, François Bernier, echoed Marco Polo’s words, calling yogins “strange people” who “know how to make gold and prepare mercury so admirably that one or two grains taken in the morning restore the body to perfect health and so fortify the stomach that it digests very well.” Such observations do not penetrate beyond outward appearances, as for centuries travelers in non-Muslim areas of India were intrigued by yogic practices without ever achieving much understanding of them.

  The Tantric Buddhist Deity Guhyasamaja in Union with His Consort Sparshavajri, seventeenth century. Tibet. Thangka, colors and gold on cotton, 58 × 76 cm. Rubin Museum of Art, New York, F1997.31.13.

  Aspects of Tantric traditions mixed with many South Asian religious currents. In its esoteric Buddhist form, it traveled to the Himalayas. Tantra emphasized the union of the male and female principles. In the visual arts of the Himalayas this took the form of a symbol known as yab-yum (“father-mother”) in which the male deity is shown in sexual union with his female consort.

  Alchemical theories would, in Lusatia (now Saxony), influence a twenty-five-year-old shoemaker who in 1600 would have a visionary experience. Sitting in his simple home, he was struck by a glint of sunlight reflecting off a dish. That flash of light penetrated his being and convinced him that he was seeing into the secret depths of nature. He rose and walked into the countryside. There, he later wrote, he

  saw the Being of all Beings, the Ground and the Abyss; also the birth of the Holy Trinity; the origin and first state of the world and of all creatures. I saw in myself the three worlds — the Divine or angelic world; the dark world, the original of Nature; and the external world, as a substance spoken forth out of the two spiritual worlds…. In my inner self I saw it well, as in a vast depth; for I saw right through as into a chaos where everything lay wrapped, but I could not unfold it. Yet from time to time it opened itself within me like a growing plant. For twelve years I carried it about within me, before I could bring it forth in any external form; till afterward it fell on me, like a bursting shower that kills where it lands as it will. Whatever I could bring into outwardness I wrote down. The work is none of mine; I am but the Lord’s instrument, with which He does what He will.

  The whole experience, he said, lasted about fifteen minutes. Jacob Boehme went back to his work as a shoemaker, his life outwardly little changed. Then, ten years later, he had a second experience, and around this time he began an attempt to put his thoughts into words. The result, a book that he called Morning Glow Ascending but that has become known by the name his followers gave it, Aurora, was completed in 1612.

  The book did not spring full-blown from the author’s fleeting mystical visions but built upon Lusatia’s complicated intellectual traditions. Near the end of 1616 Lutheran clergymen throughout Europe began informing their parishioners that 1617 would mark the centenary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, and would be a Year of Jubilee. But in the century since the beginning of the Reformation Lutheranism had become increasingly rigid and authoritarian, and dissident splinter religious groups had developed and won followers. Lusatia was a hotbed of such groups, including Anabaptists, Moravian Brethren, Crypto-Calvinists, and others. The Lutheran pastor in Boehme’s hometown of Gorlitz sympath
ized with some of these currents, and he led a study group called the Conventicle of God’s Real Servants, of which Boehme was said to be a member. The pastor got into hot water with Lutheran authorities, who accused him of being a Crypto-Calvinist, a Lutheran who believed the Calvinist doctrines of the Eucharist, such as that Christ’s body was present spiritually but not physically. (The same subject would get Kepler excommunicated.)

  In addition to such theological currents, there were other influences that affected Boehme. The mayor of Gorlitz was an acquaintance of both Kepler and Tycho Brahe, and he corresponded with a prominent kabbalist rabbi in Prague. One of Boehme’s key supporters was also a student of the kabbalah, and, like Christian Rosenkreutz, he had traveled to Arabia in search of Eastern wisdom. He was also an alchemist and a Paracelsian, and these traditions had many adherents in Gorlitz.

  Jacob Boehme at His Workbench, with the Tools of His Trade. Engraving from an early Dutch edition of his works.

  The isolation and concentration of the shoemaker as he works on his text are conveyed by this engraving reproduced in Andrew Weeks’s Boehme: An Intellectual Biography.

  “It is certainly not impossible that Boehme wrote his first book like this,” according to Weeks. “His writing has certain artisanlike qualities…. Refractory cogitations come up repeatedly, as if he were hammering out his ideas from a verbal material, widening, altering, and shaping them.”

  Prior to his first visionary experience, Boehme had accepted the idea that “the true heavens” of God were remote, miles and miles above the earth; afterward, having experienced the presence of God within himself and flowing like an electric current through the world, he felt certain that conception must have been wrong. He distinguished between the “inner birth” of the world beyond the visible and the “outer birth” of the visible world. Although not a scientist, he arrived at Copernicanism around the same time as Galileo. His approach, like Kepler’s initial attraction to the idea, was theological. For Boehme, God’s animating energy penetrated the universe. The glint of light of his first visionary experience was a glimpse of that solar energy. The traditional view of the universe as a series of interlocking spheres confined human beings, he felt, to the equivalent of the cellar of creation, and this did not conform to the sensation that he had experienced. Rather, the sun represented the omnipresent energy that Boehme, influenced by alchemy, called the salitter, and which he viewed as a kind of higher-level saltpeter — saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, was an ingredient in gunpowder and a substance much admired by alchemists.

  The Gorlitz pastor whose study group Boehme may have been a part of, and who had been accused of Crypto-Calvinism, had died by the time Boehme wrote Aurora, and he had been replaced with a hardliner (who, ironically, was himself said to be a Philippist, a follower of Luther’s colleague Philipp Melanchthon, a lineage also accused of Crypto-Calvinism). In 1613 the new pastor obtained a copy of Boehme’s book. Accused of holding unorthodox views, Boehme was imprisoned, and his master copy of Aurora was seized. The pastor denounced him as a heretic in a Sunday sermon. He was released after promising to desist from writing. He sold his shop in town and took up work as a traveling yarn goods salesman. This brought him into contact with persons of influence in Prague and other towns. Perhaps in 1616, during this period of wandering, he was working out the complicated theosophical vision that he would record, at the urging of his widening circle of literati friends, in his second book, which he completed in 1618–1619. With increased patronage he then began a new phase of intense writing, producing several dense works between then and his death in 1624. Probably the best-known of these is the Signatura Rerum, written in the early 1620s. Though largely a rehash of his earlier books, it popularized the idea of the “signature” in which “each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to the form.” In other words, each microcosm reflects echoing correspondences extending up to the highest macrocosm, and these correspondences manifest themselves in such things as a characteristic shape or color, which give a clue to the object’s secret essence.

  In his many books Boehme elaborated a complicated theory of the universe that involved seven source-spirits, three divine principles, and other arcane constructions. But it was his persona as an outsider, a shoemaker mystic who experienced God’s all-infusing energy directly through nature rather than through the mediation of the church, that was ultimately most influential, rather than the details of his actual philosophy. Blake, Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Hegel were among many who were profoundly affected by him. Robert Browning contrasted Boehme as a “poet of things” with mere philosophers of thoughts. “Boehme’s book and all,” he wrote, “Buries us with a glory, young once more, / Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.” Stephen Daedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses thinks to himself, “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” And Kenneth Rexroth, in the title poem of his third book of poetry, The Signature of All Things, begins and ends with these verses, which capture something of Boehme’s own visionary experience:

  My head and shoulders, and my book

  In the cool shade, and my body

  Stretched bathing in the sun, I lie

  Reading beside the waterfall —

  Boehme’s ‘Signature of All Things.’

  …

  I went out on my cabin porch,

  And looked up through the black forest

  At the swaying islands of stars.

  Suddenly I saw at my feet,

  Spread on the floor of night, ingots

  Of quivering phosphorescence,

  And all about were scattered chips

  Of pale cold light that was alive.

  In 1621, in the midst of the Thirty Years War, Jacob Boehme was feverishly setting down his vision of God’s presence; The Signature of All Things would appear the following year. Meanwhile, just over 350 miles to the southwest, the accused witch Katharina Kepler was being subjected to psychological torture. Kepler had prevented his mother from being physically tortured through the implied threat of reprisal from his influential friends, and through generally making himself a pain to all concerned. The court scribe at one point set into the record, “The accused appeared in court, accompanied, alas, by her son, Johannes Kepler, mathematician.” The defense’s 128-page Act of Conclusion was mainly written by Kepler. The case was presided over by the Tübingen Faculty of Law. The faculty decided that the mildest form of torture should decide the old woman’s fate. This involved the executioner confronting the accused, presenting his instruments one by one, and describing, persumably with disturbing relish, the exact methods in which they were used and their effects on the victim. Whatever satisfaction the executioner obtained from this charade, however, there would be little satisfaction for Katharina’s accusers. The same stubbornness that kept her son pursuing twenty years of calculations to determine the orbit of Mars, the stubborness that had seen her follow after her husband’s army for many hundreds of miles to bring him home, remained strong in her. The provost reported that

  I led her to the usual place of torture and showed her the executioner and his instruments, and reminded her earnestly of the necessity of telling the truth, and of the great grief and pain awaiting her. Regardless, however, of all earnest admonitions and reminders, she refused to admit and confess to witchcraft as charged, indicating that one should do with her as one liked, and that even if one artery after another were to be torn from her body, she would have nothing to confess; whereafter she fell on her knees and said a paternoster, and demanded that God should make a sign if she were a witch or a monster or ever had anything to do with witchcraft. She was willing to die, she said; God would reveal the truth after her death, and the injustice and violence done to her.

  Katharina was freed, but others accused of witchcraft, lacking her resources, were not so lucky. In January 1616, the same month that Kepler wrote his initial letter in defense of his mother, a large number of women in Spa de Ban, in the Walloon region of what is now Belgium
, were accused of witchcraft. The sorcery was manifested in illnesses and deaths of children and livestock, failed pregnancies, and other misfortunes. Fourteen persons were found guilty; at least ten were executed (the other four may not have survived their torture in order to be executed). All were women.

  Women accounted for somewhere around three-quarters of all witchcraft accusations. Of those accused, women were more likely to be convicted, and of those convicted women were more likely to be executed. To a large extent this was the result of their relative lack of power. Particularly if the woman was widowed, she might lack male relatives available or willing to defend her. Despite notable exceptions, by and large victims of witchcraft trials tended to be among the poorer, less educated, and more remotely located of citizens.

  Witches’ Sabbat, 1613, by Jan Ziarnko. Engraving from Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de L’inconstance des Mauvais Nnges (Paris: Nicolas Buon). Division of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.