Ashmole was an unashamed, majestic magus, competent astrologer, humble alchemist, discerning publisher, proud Hermetic philosopher, co-founder of the Royal Society, national star, “Mighty Good Man” - and Free Mason. I hope something of his golden, timeless gift comes over in the third part of this book, which concentrates on Ashmole's commitments to 17th century Free Masonry, a subject which has only lately attracted the attention of academe. Things are changing. Sheffield University now has a Chair for the study of Freemasonry, currently held by Andrew Prescott.
To approach this initially mysterious subject through Ashmole's life was illuminating. Its conclusions will be of interest to serious freemasons, but equally startling, I hope, to non-masons. After all, when Ashmole was a ‘Free Mason’ (as he styled his masonic identity), there was no Grand Lodge with rules an inch thick to tell the brothers what to say and do. There was a bright, strange, oddly comforting, imaginative vernacular tradition, a tradition capable of all but silently saving elements of a kingdom from chaos. Would that it were again, perhaps. Some masonic historians deny any influence or presence of Hermetic ideas on freemasonry. Perhaps this is partly because others have been all too keen to pose imaginative conspiracy scapes over history, dragging in every conceivable occult legend and every twistable fact in order to stimulate their readers and, especially, their sales. This book takes the sober path, believing that historical reality, as far as we may discern it, is quite stimulating enough. In this spirit of sobriety, it is worthwhile to give some signal of a number of the conclusions to be found elucidated in Part Three.
Forms of Free Masonry existed without centralised control before the establishment of Grand Lodge by four London lodges in 1717. That this is the case is well known to historians of freemasonry. However, the special definition of Grand and later (1813) United Grand Lodge has to a large extent consisted in a general assumption that its establishment marks the organised foundation of speculative and non-operative freemasonry. That a lodge of non-operative or Accepted Free Masons existed (if only very briefly) in 1646 (the date of Ashmole's initiation) of course subtracts from the force of this assumption, but the key word at issue here is ‘speculative’. This term has become profoundly misleading from the historical point of view. As has been demonstrated by Professor David Stevenson (The Origins of Freemasonry : Scotland's Century 1590-1710. Cambridge. 1988), pre-1717 freemasonry already involved a symbolic, philosophical aspect which mitigates against the prejudice of seeing medieval craftsmen as simple, untutored souls, not much of a cut above the labourer in specialised knowledge.
Those varied masonic documents of the late 14th. and early 15th. centuries known collectively as the Old Charges clearly show that some English freemasons (at least) believed their craft to be linked to the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a name familiar to scholars throughout the middle ages from translations of attributed texts from the Arabic language, and a name therein linked to cosmic philosophy (scientia), alchemy, architecture and magic. According to Professor Stevenson : “The mention of Hermes Trismegistus, the stress on the development of the craft in Egypt, and the identification of masonry and geometry were taken over by the masons from the medieval background of knowledge inherited from the ancient world, but they took on new significance and importance during the Renaissance.” (The Origins of Freemasonry. p.24) This “new significance” was due to the elevation of the reputation of Hermes Trismegistus which followed on the first printed edition of the Pymander (or Corpus Hermeticum) in Treviso in 1471. Since Ashmole was by self-definition immersed in Hermetic studies (announcing himself to be the Mercuriophilus Anglicus), it is hardly surprising that he was fascinated by Free Masonry. Indeed, this confluence of Renaissance education and ancient craft freemasonry - coalescing about the figure of Hermes - may in part explain the attraction of gentlemen such as Ashmole (and his first wife's cousin, Col. Henry Mainwaring, who inherited a family-history littered with connections with late-medieval religious confraternities with which freemasons were associated) in becoming ‘Accepted’ Free Masons : that is, accepted, and not ‘speculative’ Free Masons.
Ashmole need only have looked at the ruins of the Cistercian houses at Croxden or Dieulacres in the Staffordshire moorlands - or simply gazed at the cathedral in which he sang as a boy (Lichfield) - to be filled with awe at the work of medieval freemasons. They were not ‘medieval’ to him. He was simply gazing at those religious structures which had survived the ravages of the English Reformation, and which were in his own time again under direct threat of demolition at the hands of radical Protestants.
As a natural antiquarian, Ashmole must have felt deeply the need to understand the provenance of both these structures and their inherent symbolism. That we know so little of the freemasonry which existed about the monasteries of pre-Reformation England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland may reasonably be accounted for on the basis that so very, very little of the monastic libraries survived what Ashmole himself called the “Great Deluge” of the Dissolution of religious houses in the century before his birth. He, like John Dee and others who lived through the calamitous events of the British Reformation, was keenly aware of the destruction of primary evidence involved in the despoiling of the monastic libraries. This was one of the reasons that inspired him to be a collector. Ashmole did not collect for the sake of it; he was looking for something. What that ‘something’ was we get a hint of in Part Three.
So who are these ‘Golden Builders’? The title is taken from Blake's extraordinary poem and prophecy, Jerusalem (1804). Blake's ‘Golden Builders’ are building the city of Golgonooza, built from sacrifice of self (Golgotha) and the basic stuff and substance (ooze) that is visible life. From this confluence of the life-blood of man and the love of God that transcends self, the substantial city of Divine Imagination is built. This city has its citizens. Some few of them you can read about in this book. The author has found them to be excellent company in all conditions. I hope you find it likewise.
Tobias Churton
Lichfield July 2002
Part One
THE HERMETIC PHILOSOPHY
Chapter One
Hermes : Star of Alexandria
TAT : I will offer up the praise in my heart, as I pray to the end of the universe and the beginning of the beginning, to the object of man's quest, the immortal discovery, the begetter of life and truth, the sower of reason, the love of immortal life. No hidden word will be able to speak about thee, Lord. Therefore my mind wants to sing a hymn to you daily. I am the instrument of thy spirit. Mind is thy plectrum. And thy counsel plucks me. I see myself! I have received power from thee! For thy love has reached us. HERMES : Right, O my son.
(Hermetic Discourse on the Eighth & Ninth between Hermes and his pupil. 2nd cent. AD. From the Gnostic Library of Nag Hammadi).
As each new dawn raised the sun over Egypt, the victory of the light was celebrated; darkness departed and visible life returned. For Hermes, it was business as usual, for he was a god both of the night and the day, as content with the moon and the powers invisible as he was with the merchant and the sunlit groves of morning.
The cult of Hermes was already established in the Greek-speaking world before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and founded his city, Alexandria, in 331 BC. A century later, Greek settlers in that city had begun to apply the epithet megistos kai megistos theos megas to Hermes (roughly ‘great and great the great god’ Hermes). The settlers had doubtless derived this dignity from the epithet two times great, which, for as long as anyone could remember, had been applied to Hermes' Egyptian equivalent, the god Thoth. Thoth was a mega megastar : a popular god, the supreme master of trickery, magic, writing, the realm of the dead, the moon, medicine. The Graeco-Egyptian Thoth-Hermes stood - or flew - for the very spirit of inventiveness. Fleet of foot and quick of mind, Hermes was the divine messenger. A man who spoke with a message from the gods would be regarded as being in a sense possessed by Hermes. To be inspired by the powers of Hermes was to become Hermes. In this
condition, one could write in his name. The name of the game was communication.
Sometime between the first century BC and the end of the first century AD1, possibly under Jewish influence or perhaps to compete with other fashionable and venerated prophets and teachers, such as the long-since departed master-minds Zoroaster, Plato and Pythagoras, a new figure, Thrice Greatest Hermes (Hermes Trismegistos) began to appear in a series of knowledge-tracts. He appeared as an ancient patriarch of civilisation, a kind of relative of the exalted divinity, dwelling in a remote antiquity among the temples and pyramids of a pristine Egypt. Since many Greeks believed that their philosophy, especially in its spiritual aspect, derived in part from ancient Egypt, the ascendancy - or ‘rediscovery’ - of Hermes Trismegistos could be described as an astute enterprise by his literary progenitors. Having apparently overcome the test-of-time, the name Hermes could operate as a kind of intellectual designer-label.
The authority of Hermes Trismegistos was employed to dignify two main classes of writing. Firstly, a coterie of practical and theoretical lore relating to talismanic magic, astrology, astrological medicine and, notably, alchemy, and secondly, philosophical writings in dialogue-form. These latter tracts were concerned with the nature of God, man, and the cosmos. A veritable elixir, Hermes Trismegistos had an answer for everything.
Those works of Hermes which have always enjoyed the highest authority among their literary peers constitute the philosophical Hermetica, grouped together some time between c.AD 250-1050 into a body of writings now known as the Corpus Hermeticum. These texts seem to demonstrate an impatience with traditional philosophical methods and meet a hunger for a rational philosophy which could serve an essentially spiritual need. Going, they hoped, ‘one better’ than the philosophical schools, the ‘ancient’ teaching of Hermes Trismegistos was presented in the Corpus Hermeticum not as philosophical postulates in the traditional Greek sense, but as authentic revelation : ancient revelation which could be experienced by the student's identifying himself with Father Hermes' own experience, so acquiring gnosis or experiential knowledge of the spirit, making the student aware of his mind as a living fact. The texts were to operate like the Thrice Great Hermes' magical shoes : ready-made to follow in the divine footsteps - all the way to the mystical One : the journey fully vouchsafed and endorsed by centuries of assumed tradition.
Once on a time, when I had begun to think about the things that are, and my thoughts had soared high aloft, while my bodily senses had been put under restraint by sleep, - yet not such sleep as that of men weighed down by fullness of food or by bodily weariness, - methought there came to me a Being of vast and boundless magnitude, who called me by my name, and said to me, ‘What do you wish to hear and see, and to learn and come to know by thought?’ ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am Poimandres, the sovereign nous [mind].’ ‘I would fain learn,’ said I, ‘the things that are, and understand their nature, and to know God. These,’ I said, ‘are the things of which I wish to hear.’ He answered, 'I know what you wish, for indeed I am with you everywhere; keep in mind all that you desire to learn, and I will teach you.” (Libellus I. Iff. The Poimandres).
The Hermetic tradition was both moderate and flexible, offering a tolerant philosophical religion, a religion of the (omnipresent) mind, a purified perception of God, the cosmos, and the self, and much positive encouragement for the spiritual seeker, all of which the student could take anywhere. In modern parlance, much of the philosophy exposed in the tracts was ‘psychedelic’, that is to say, soul-expanding. The Hermetic experience was cosmopolitan, yet rooted in the dream of a romantic antiquity : the perfect intellectual and syncretistic cult for an Empire groping for new (and old) certainties. The Hermetic writings brought gnosis to those (perhaps youthful) pagans in search of a thoughtful and spiritual salvation from the world. For it was to Hermes, the texts informed the reader, that there had once come the ‘giants’ of a mythical past, in their youth, for instruction and initiation into the authentic, pristine cosmic philosophy. Their names were given as Tat, (King) Ammon and Asklepios. The understanding reader was invited to join the august host of that spiritual élite who had, they were led to believe, benefited from the master's authentic voice - the voice of “the authentic Nous [Mind]”- for century on imagined century.
TAT : O holy Gnosis, by thee am I illumined, and through thee do I sing praise to the noetic Light. …I rejoice in joy of mind; rejoice with me all ye Powers. .O. God, thou art the Father; O Lord, thou art Mind. HERMES : I rejoice, my son, that you are like to bring forth fruit. Out of the Truth will spring up in you the immortal generation of virtue; for by the working of mind you have come to know yourself and our Father. (Libellus XIII.18. 21.22a)
The setting of Hermetic philosophical discourse is mostly one of teacher and pupil, and both Garth Fowden and Jean-Pierre Mahé2 are convinced that this setting mirrors the situation in which the philosophical Hermetica were actually employed. That is to say that there may have existed in Egypt from about the late first century AD, schools of Hermetic discourse which aimed to take pupils to a direct experience of gnosis, combined with liturgical hymns and prayers. What inner voyager could fail to be, at least in part, seduced by the voice of a conception so abstract and timeless as the omnipresent and omniscient Mind?
Knowledge of the original pagan setting in which the texts were composed disappeared with the growth of Christianity in Egypt during the third century. From that time on, it would seem that the Hermetica represented a literary, spiritual path, divorced from the social and educational milieu of first and second century Alexandria. Anybody who could get hold of the texts could become a pupil of Hermes, or at least use his name and logia to endorse their own philosophical and religious ‘products’. The texts simply became part of the corpus of ancient authorities in matters of antique spiritual and magical knowledge - and, as with all antiques, Hermes Trismegistos' reputation would grow again in direct proportion to the rarity of the texts which bore his name.
It was no great surprise to scholars of Gnosticism, such as Professor Hans Jonas, when our earliest manuscripts of the philosophical Hermetica, including a Prayer of Thanksgiving, were found among the documents of the now famous Nag Hammadi Library of ‘Gnostic Gospels’, buried in Upper Egypt by enthusiasts of Christian gnosis in the mid to late 4th Century. Jonas had long held that the Hermetica should be seen as integral to the phenomenon of Gnostic religion. Even Christian Gnostics had found these pagan writings congenial, and perhaps inspiring in the task of creating new gnostic documents. After all, if, as S. John's Gospel declared, Christ was the divine Logos -the creative mind or ‘Word’ of God, then it was a simple matter for Christian enthusiasts of the gnosis - particularly in Alexandria - to reach the conclusion that the Christian ‘Word’ and the Hermetic ‘Nous’ were at the very least, similar in substance3.
The Vision of Hermes
What is the principal message of the philosophical Hermetica? Firstly, the texts announce to the reader that in order to be saved from the ebb, flow, flux and corruption of material life, it is necessary to have perfectly pure vision. The stress is always on the state of mind of the pupil; the climax of spiritual growth is always accompanied by astonishingly increased powers of perception, breaking through from material to spiritual vision. The Hermetic teaching is to enable the pupil to see aright, and to ‘see aright’ is to have acquired what Catholic doctrine calls a ‘sacramental vision’ of the created order : the world manifests a visible experience which is the expression of far greater and more profound powers invisible to the organic eye but which are seizable by the enlightened eye of the mind - called the nous, a Greek word which can mean either ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’.
While there is ‘good news’ for the Hermetic student within the tracts, the discourses are quite unlike the canonical gospels (with which the tracts perhaps competed), existing in a remote, yet ‘clear’ and timeless zone. There are no parables; there are repeated assertions of fundamental spiritual pri
nciples. There are no miracles; the cosmos is revealed as a continual miracle. There is no coercion; the pupil is free to choose the way of flesh or the way of nous. There is ultimately no master; the pupil must learn to become his own master. There is no end; it is an eternal life - the life of the aeons - which springs from the source of ‘the All’ (Pan).
The primary principle which the student of the texts is enjoined to understand is to “know thyself”. What is the essential nature of man? The Hermetic doctrine is unequivocal :
Man is a great miracle, O Asklepios, honour and reverence to such a being! Because he takes in the nature of a god as if he were himself a god; he has familiarity with the demon-kind, knowing that he issues from the same origin; he despises this part of his nature which is but human, because he puts his hope in the divinity of the other part. O what a privileged blend makes up the nature of man! He is united to the gods because he has the divinity pertaining to gods; the part of himself which is of the earth he despises in himself; all those other living things which he knows himself to be tied in the virtue of the celestial plan, he binds them by the tie of love. He raises his sights towards heaven. Such therefore is his privileged role as intermediary, loving the beings who are inferior to him and is loved by those above him. He takes the earth as his own, he blends himself with the elements by the speed of thought, by the sharpness of mind he descends to the depths of the sea. Everything is accessible to him; heaven is not too high for him, for he measures it as if it were in his grasp by his ingenuity. What sight the spirit shows to him, no mist of the air can obscure; the earth is never so dense as to impede his work; the immensity of the sea's depths do not trouble his plunging view. He is at the same time everything as he is everywhere. (Asclepius 6a. ff).
The Golden Builders Page 2