The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Weeks later, after returning home, I hired my college student daughter to transcribe my interviews with Peter Dawkins. When my proposed due date came and went, I called to check on her progress. “This is really hard,” she told me. I was preparing to remind Grace that I’d paid her in advance and really needed this done when she added, “He sounds so cultured and intelligent, like a perfect English gentleman inviting you to tea. I’ll be enjoying just listening to the sound of his voice when I realize that he is saying some really crazy stuff.”

  I was nowhere near calling Dawkins crazy, but I did know what she meant. Over the course of a couple of phone conversations and the on-camera Skype interview with the man that the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged, I found that he sounded exactly as I would have imagined a Cambridge-educated architect—which is what he had been as a young man. Things had begun to change, Dawkins told me, in 1973, shortly after he took a job in Edinburgh and married his wife, Sarah, when he met a woman associated with the Francis Bacon Society. It was about three weeks later that he had “an extraordinary dream” in which he encountered “the soul who is Francis Bacon, you might call him the master soul, and he literally told me, ‘Right, so now we begin our work together.’”

  There almost certainly were academics who would claim to know as much about the historical Francis Bacon as Dawkins did, but none who even approached the level of research he’d done into the esoteric Bacon. An astonishing amount of it was rooted in written records that had sat on dusty shelves for centuries, some of them Bacon’s own unpublished writings, Dawkins told me. The story they told was of an Englishman who had been selected at a young age as the leader of a group that was known by many names, the best known being the Knights of the Golden Helmet. “It was only later on that they called themselves Rosicrucians, the fraternity of the golden rosy cross,” Dawkins said.

  They were men dedicated to the construction of a golden age, Dawkins went on, and their project had been ongoing since long before Bacon was born. “It was a whole line of wisdom traditions that had been carried by secret societies across Europe from the East for many years. They had kept it fairly quiet, something held among themselves, until the supernova of 1604, which they took to be a sign they should announce their existence publicly.”

  That 1604 event is better known today as Kepler’s supernova, for the great astronomer who tracked it. This explosion of a giant star only twenty thousand light-years away from Earth was visible even in daylight for three weeks. At night it was far brighter than any other star in the sky, nearly as bright as the moon. There has not been a supernova in our galaxy since, so one can imagine the impact on the people of Earth as they observed it more than four hundred years ago.

  It certainly had a great effect on the Invisibles, as the group called themselves, who began preparing to make themselves known with a series of letters that were posted and published under the authorship of one who was first known as Frater C. R. C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz or Christian of the Rosy Cross. The letters first appeared in Germany but the real center of the group was in England, the home of the man who had been chosen years earlier to lead the Order of the Rosy Cross, Sir Francis Bacon. “They had selected him—found him, is more like it—around 1570,” Dawkins said, which would have made Bacon nine years old at the time.

  The men who would follow him at first mentored and instructed him, Dawkins said. Probably the most influential of these had been John Dee. Several of the Baconians I had spoken to or corresponded with previously had mentioned Dee, and I noticed that he was the subject of more articles published by the Francis Bacon Society than anyone other than Bacon himself. All I really knew about Dee was that he had been a famous mathematician of the Elizabethan era, but I was about to find out he was far more than that. Studying Dee’s life, even more than Bacon’s, drove home what a different place the world was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how differently people thought of knowledge.

  Dee certainly had been a mathematician. At twenty he was lecturing on Euclid in Paris. He studied with and befriended the two greatest cartographers of his time, Mercator and Ortelius, and turned down a position as Reader at Oxford in his middle twenties to devote himself to his writing, which included the “Mathematical Preface” to the English translation of Euclid’s Elements that would itself become an enduring work.

  While Dee believed that numbers were the basis of all things, he placed that belief squarely within the nexus of religion, philosophy, and esoteric science known as the hermetic tradition and viewed math as a means of accessing divine power and ancient wisdom. While he served for years as Queen Elizabeth’s main scientific adviser, the Queen seems to have valued him more as her astrologer; Elizabeth actually allowed Dee to select an auspicious date for her coronation. Astronomy and astrology were essentially one science in the post-Renaissance world Dee inhabited, and in fact he made no real distinction between his studies of mathematics, cartography, navigation, and philosophy on the one hand, and his deep interest in hermetic magic, divination, and spirit summoning on the other. All were the processes by which one arrived at the “pure verities” that underlay all of creation.

  Even as Dee became Elizabeth’s main adviser on England’s voyages of discovery, personally trained and prepared navigation charts for many of England’s greatest explorers, including Raleigh and Drake, designed the British navy, coined the phrase the “British Empire,” and invented the term “Britannica” to describe it, he was at least as deeply invested in his practices of conjuring and alchemy. The latter he considered the supreme science, aiming as it did for the creation of the so-called philosopher’s stone that would heal mankind physically and spiritually and, Dee hoped, bring forth the unified world religion that would recombine not only the Protestant and Catholic churches, but the great wisdom of the ancients.

  This was a point of view that made sense to the people of the era, among whom Dee’s reputation as a magician rivaled his status as a scholar. It was widely believed among the British populace that the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had been aided if not accomplished by the hex Dee put on the enemy fleet. In the Baconian version of Dee, much of which Peter Dawkins repeated to me, he was eventually persecuted for his hermetic practices to the point of being driven out of England. Dee was in fact brought before the Star Chamber in 1555 on a charge of “calculating” the horoscopes of both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and this charge eventually expanded into one of treason. He was acquitted, however.

  It was his yearning for a deeper and more unified knowledge that seems to have compelled Dee’s departure from England and Elizabeth’s court. Discouraged by the Queen’s refusal to adopt his heliocentric calendar and the blame she seemed to cast his way for the failure of North American explorations, he plunged ever more deeply into the metaphysical and supernatural, attempting to communicate with angels through a crystal ball he called a scryer. It was during this period that Dee met a young man called Edward Talbot, whose real surname, Kelley, had been abandoned in order to distance himself from a conviction for “coinage,” the production of false coins, equivalent at the time to forgery. Kelley was, to Dee’s mind (and in the Baconian tradition), the greatest alchemist of his age. The two men, almost thirty years apart in age, together with their wives began a tour of the Continent that lasted six years, along the way staging “spiritual conferences” for royal families in much of eastern and central Europe.

  I noticed that the Baconian articles about Dee always left out the fact that Kelley had convinced him, on the instructions of the angel Uriel, that the two of them should share all of their possessions, including their wives. The stress this produced eventually sent Dee back to England, where he discovered that his personal library, the largest in the entire country, had been ransacked, and that many books were stolen, along with his most prized instruments. The country he came back to was now looking askance at occult practices, which forced Dee to beco
me more covert. Queen Elizabeth did make him warden of Christ’s College in Manchester. It was a position he held to the end of his life in either 1608 or 1609, but in all historical records he is described as impoverished and miserable during these last years.

  Peter Dawkins told me this was not entirely accurate; Dee had taken on the role of instructing those who were about to take the Rosicrucian movement public, including and especially the chosen leader: Francis Bacon. The goal was to “raise the consciousness of people by using the arts and sciences,” Dawkins said, “so as to bring them to an understanding of what Bacon called ‘the summary law,’ which is the law of love, how to practice love in every single situation.” But this had to be done under a veil of secrecy and with the aim of speaking ultimately to people of a more enlightened age. Bacon’s junior associate Robert Fludd, for instance, was relatively forthright about his interest in the occult, publicly exchanging arguments with Johannes Kepler on the merits of the hermetic versus the strictly scientific approach to knowledge. Fludd even wrote a defense of the Rosicrucian movement, but he never admitted to being part of it for fear of the consequences, as Dawkins had it.

  I admit I became a bit restive as Dawkins went on to describe how Bacon and “his good pens” (among them Ben Jonson) had created the Shakespeare plays as part of the great Rosicrucian project, but I was so fascinated by the overarching story that I simply kept silent until Dawkins had moved on to the subject of the sky and land zodiacs that Bacon and his circle had created in order to bring about the marriage of the heavens and the Earth they envisioned. This was what ultimately linked Bacon to Oak Island, as Dawkins had it.

  The sky and land zodiacs had all been calculated in connection to the constellation that was most commonly known as the Northern Cross, which was itself only a part of the larger constellation known as Cygnus (the swan), Dawkins explained. The triangle formed by the bright star Deneb and two others was the key to this calculation and was referred to repeatedly in the alchemical texts of the Elizabethan era, as they were in the works from Egypt, India, and Sufi Islam from which those had emerged. Much of what he had learned about all of this came from a woman named Betty McKaig, Dawkins said. I was impressed immediately by the admiring, almost reverent, way Peter spoke of her.

  “I’ve never heard of Betty McKaig,” I admitted.

  “You should have,” Dawkins told me. “She’s an important part of the Oak Island story.”

  McKaig was working as a freelance journalist in California in the early 1970s, when she was hired by a famous surgeon to ghostwrite his autobiography. She went to live in the physician’s home while working on the book, and while there she became fascinated by the two enormous collections that filled much of his library. One was made up of works—many rare—by and about Francis Bacon. The other consisted of texts that chronicled the history and practice of alchemy and other hermetic arts. “When she started to look at what he knew, in order to write his biography, she got enthralled herself,” Dawkins explained. “She became so absorbed that this was the total focus of her research, and then the doctor died.” Before his death, however, the physician had bequeathed his Bacon and alchemy collections to McKaig, “who carried on [with] all the research and became convinced that many of the alchemical texts that were written under the name ‘Philalethes’ had actually been authored or inspired by Francis Bacon.”

  The history of alchemy, McKaig found, was far richer and stranger than she had imagined. The roots of the tree that had produced Philalethes stretched in three directions, into Taoist China, dharmic India, and a more complex network that was threaded over time from hermetic Egypt to Platonic Greece to Sufi Islam and ultimately into medieval Europe. The sciences of medicine, chemistry, and metallurgy all had emerged either from or alongside alchemy. The first alchemist in recorded history, McKaig was pleased to discover, had been a woman, one known only as Mary the Jewess, who had lived in the great melting pot of the age, Alexandria, Egypt, during the late second and early third centuries. Modern science credits Mary with nearly all of the early advancements in the processes of heating and distillation. The Jewess’s most remarkable and enduring achievement, though, was her discovery of hydrochloric acid. She had emerged from a hermetic tradition whose origins were largely lost in the mists of time, mostly due to the order that the Roman dictator Emperor Diocletian had given right around the end of the third century that all alchemy texts should be burned.

  What is still known is that while alchemy in China was focused on healing and the creation of medicines (both acupuncture and moxibustion have their roots in Chinese alchemy), the alchemy of India had been closely associated with the development of metallurgy. The use of mercury in alchemical processes, for example, first appeared in the Arthashastra in the late third century and in various Buddhist texts that were written between the second and fifth centuries. The conquests of Alexander the Great were likely what made the connection between the Eastern and Western traditions of alchemy.

  However it happened, the Western tradition’s incorporation of the Eastern tradition had produced the next major figure in its development, the Sufi Jabir ibn Hayyan (better known in Europe by his Latinized name Geberus) who had set up a laboratory where he introduced scientific methodology and controlled experimentation into alchemy and in the process earned a reputation as the father of modern chemistry. He was also, at least in part, responsible for the reputation alchemy acquired as a dark art: Jabir’s stated goal was what he called takwin, the artificial creation of life, up to and including human life.

  Jabir’s work was introduced to Europe in 1144 when Robert of Chester translated the Arabic work Book of the Composition of Alchemy. As it began to be practiced in Europe, what in Chinese alchemy had been a search for the so-called grand elixir of immortality and in India was the aim of producing a gold so pure that touching it would perfect a man’s soul, the West made into a quest for the philosopher’s stone.

  The alchemy of Europe was at once material and spiritual, McKaig discovered in her reading. Given the reputation alchemy had acquired as something either fraudulent or satanic, it was fascinating to discover that in thirteenth-century Europe the three most notable students of alchemy had been the Franciscan Roger Bacon, the Dominican Albertus Magnus, and the latter’s student, Thomas Aquinas. It was not until the fourteenth century that the practice of alchemy began to leak outside the confines of the church, and that process sped up in the fifteenth century, when the Italian Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum (along with the works of Plato) into Latin. This set the stage for the first two major European alchemists, born just seven years apart, the German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) and the Swiss Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493–1541).

  Agrippa was the mystic, whose opus De Occulta Philosophia attempted the fusion of kabbalah, hermeticism, and alchemy into something very like a religion. Paracelsus was less interested in the occult and in the manufacture of precious metals, focusing instead on the creation of medicines.

  John Dee followed Agrippa’s tradition. For all his accomplishments in mathematics, cartography, astronomy, cryptography, and navigation, by far the best known and most widely read of Dee’s works during his own lifetime was his 1564 work on alchemy, Monas Hieroglyphica. In it, Dee had been the first to describe alchemy as a kind of terrestrial astronomy, coining the axiom: “As above, so below.”

  “And of course Betty McKaig discovered that it was John Dee who had been Francis Bacon’s instructor in the art and science of alchemy,” Dawkins told me.

  Historians have had little to say about Bacon’s involvement with and practice of alchemy. As Dawkins had it, this was because Sir Francis had kept it well hidden during his lifetime. “But through this doctor’s collection, Betty had access to materials that aren’t commonly known,” he explained. “She found that his practice of alchemy, in the manner described by John Dee, was at the center of Francis Bacon’s work.”

  Bacon’s connection to the flowering of Engli
sh alchemy in the seventeenth century has not gone entirely unrecognized. Lauren Kassell, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, named Bacon as one of the three principals responsible for that occurrence. Though started by John Dee, English alchemy was “codified by Francis Bacon in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and implemented by Samuel Hartlib in the 1650s.”

  In the histories I read, Hartlib was regarded as the most significant figure in English alchemy after John Dee and the one who did the most to take it mainstream. The “Hartlibean improvers,” as Kassell called them, had made alchemy the basis of a grand scheme for the combined investigation of nature’s secrets and the reform of society. Hartlib’s circle was a precursor to the formation of the Royal Society, and the man himself openly and repeatedly acknowledged Bacon as his inspiration. In fact, he had modeled his vision of the Royal Society on the research institute Bacon had called Salomon’s House in his great work New Atlantis. Two of the Royal Society’s earliest fellows, Robert Boyle and Elias Ashmole—”both Baconians,” as Dawkins, through McKaig, had it—were proponents of alchemy who openly stated their belief that the philosopher’s stone might be used for, among other things, communicating with angels.

  Alchemy’s ascendance in Britain, however, was also its downfall. More and more alleged practitioners of the recondite science were selling their services to kings and queens, lords and ladies. Many of them were con men or stage magicians, like Betruger, whose combination of sleight of hand and swindling had resulted in a public trial by the Holy Roman Empire. Those who preferred to be called scientists began to distance themselves from the practice, and the pressure to do so only increased as science and materialism began to merge. As early as 1720 chemists began to insist on a firm distinction between themselves and alchemists, and by the 1740s alchemy was almost totally associated with gold making and the various flimflammers that claimed they could accomplish it.