Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (17 page)

And yet, withal … William Schupbach, after cataloguing a raft of similar such objections in his erudite contribution to the
Origins
volume, concludes that “Against these negative judgments must be set the actions of creators of cabinets such as Casabona, van Heurn, du-Molinet and Francke, whose desire for certain knowledge was not so consuming as to kill their appreciation of the old, the fragmentary, and the enigmatic” (p. 178).

15.
“… as the essence of knowing.”

Or, in a similar vein, consider Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed” (Einstein,
Ideas and Opinions
; New York: Crown, 1954; p. 11).

Incidentally, the name of Feynman's son Carl is to be found among those gracing the list of patrons of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

16.
 … premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.

In his book
Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium
(Kingston: McPherson & Co., 1991), the art critic Thomas McEvilley develops the notion of the periodic recurrence of the postmodern, or rather the theory that modernist and postmodernist tendencies have actually been following one upon the other throughout history. In this context, for example, he uncovers a striking set of affinities between our own postmodernist ethos and that of the Alexandrian/Hellenistic age (see pp. 98 ff.).

I suppose, in thinking about the MJT, we might similarly speak of the periodic recurrence of the premodern. Or are the two types of recurrences (of the postmodern and the premodern) in fact the same thing? (One might note, in this context, the way in which so much of the premodern thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries likewise derived, as we will presently be seeing, from hermetic and occult traditions first codified in the Alexandrian/Hellenistic and early Christian periods.)

17.
 … drowned in her own pond.

The account of the affair by Martin Welch, included in the
Tradescant's Rarities
volume, goes to considerable lengths to cast Ashmole himself as the aggrieved party, with Hester supposedly being the one who behaved erratically and dishonorably. To hear Welch tell it (with
almost overheated rhetorical intensity), any other version would “stretch our credulity to its limits.”

18.
 … for that wonder's domestication and standardization.
)

Astrology, alchemy, witchcraft trials, the occult, and the hermetic in general … The appearance of Mr. Ashmole in our brief survey highlights another source, besides the discovery of the New World, feeding the wonder sensibility that animated so much of the intellectual life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and particularly its profusion of wonder-cabinets. The awakening of wonder also drew on a recovery, as it were, of the Old World, and in particular the resurrection of various Alexandrine/Hellenistic and early Christian doctrines regarding the nature of the universe and the human capacity for free agency within that universe that had been banished as rabidly heretical ever since the time of Augustine. Frances Yates famously traced the sixteenth-century upwelling of such long-suppressed motifs in her seminal
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(University of Chicago Press, 1964). In particular she analyzed the impact upon all sorts of humanist masters during this period of the rediscovery of the so-called
Corpus Hermeticum
, a second-century-
A.D
. compendium of treatises codifying several convergent strains of Neoplatonist and Gnostic numerological and astral magics that these sixteenth-century masters initially mistook to be the work of a single, primordial Egyptian magus, a contemporary of Abraham's, named Hermes Trismegistus (or Hermes the Thrice-Great), who in turn was in some mysterious
way identified with the Greek god Hermes himself. It's easy to see how such humanists as Giordano Bruno would have been drawn to a set of doctrines that seemed to predate all the religious schisms that had in the meantime so bloodily erupted everywhere around them. (For refusing to renounce his allegiance to such open-ended investigations, Bruno was himself burned at the stake in 1600.)

And then, of course, there was the parallel resurgence, during this same period and among many of the same people, of interest in the twinned disciplines of astrology and alchemy. The first chapter in William Brock's recent
Norton History of Chemistry
(New York: Norton, 1992) is entitled “On the Nature of the Universe and the Hermetic Museum.” (Not coincidentally, one of the main elements deployed in alchemical practice, quicksilver, had since late Hellenistic times been known as Mercury—the Roman name for the Greek god Hermes, and the same name astrologists had affixed to the planet at a similarly early date.) In fact, chemistry as we now know it gradually began to emerge from out of the strange obsessive labors of the alchemical magi.

Time and again, students of seventeenth-century intellectual history (who have to be having some of the most fun of anyone in Academe) find themselves wending their way back into this strange material (their entire field is one vast cabinet of curiosities). Allison Coudert, for example, recounts the story of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698), whose father, the Belgian Jan Baptista van Helmont, was one of the most significant figures in the early history of modern chemistry (he rates
five full pages in Brock's book). The son's birth “occurred shortly after his father, a very good chemist and not one to be easily fooled, claims to have transmuted eight ounces of base metal into gold. This unusual event may explain the infant's unusual name, Mercury, redolent as it was with alchemical associations.” (See Coudert's essay in
The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
[ed. Ronald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin; Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991; p. 84].) Mercury van Helmont in turn grew into one of the foremost Christian popularizers of such Hebrew Kabbalistic texts as the Zohar. He also happened to be close friends with Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Coudert makes a strong case for the Kabbalistic roots of both Leibniz's monadology and his calculus (his explorations, that is, of the infinite and the infinitesimal).

In a similar vein, John Maynard Keynes, of all people, startled a Cambridge audience in 1946 with his contention that “Newton [1642–1727] was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance less than 10,000 years ago.” Keynes went on to note how, in terms of alchemy and other such esoteric practices, during the first
phase of his intellectual life, “Newton was clearly an unbridled addict,” and this “during the very years when he was composing the
Principia!
” Keynes, who had examined hundreds of pages of Newton's own records on his esoteric investigations (preserved in the Cambridge archives), concluded: “It is utterly impossible to deny that [they are] wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to [them]” (from “Newton, the Man” in Keynes,
Essays in Biography
[New York: Norton, 1963; pp. 311, 318–19]). Of course, in his later years Newton left such divagations behind, turning to posterity the rigorously scientific face by which he is so much better known; he never allowed those alchemical papers to be published or even reviewed during his lifetime. But nor did he ever order them destroyed.

The alchemist of Cambridge
(
illustration credit nts.6
)

All of these various arcane doctrines and practices shared certain premises of relevance to the
Wunderkammer
sensibility, to begin with an innate (and distinctly new—or, anyway, renewed) belief in the fundamental perfectibility of man, his ability to transcend Adam's fallen destiny on his own (without necessarily having to rely on Christ's intervention), or at any rate the ability of the individual initiate, the particular magus, to do so. Yes, to be sure, the alchemist, for instance, was trying to transmute base metals into gold, but this was always seen as occurring in tandem with, and metaphorical of, transformations he was attempting to enact on his own person. In working on these material elements, he was working on the spiritual elements within himself as well, work that in turn might eventually have stupendous implications
for the world at large. (Think of David Wilson's own experience of revelation and mission in this context.) All of these labors transpired within the context of a Neoplatonist view of the universe (in Coudert's characterization) “as a great chain of being in which planets, men, animals, vegetables, minerals, and metals are linked together in complex hierarchies of correspondences,” a view which “encouraged the belief that every existing thing is in some measure a symbol, or reflection, of something else,” with each of them in turn containing to some degree an emanation of the divine unity which overarched them all (p. 92).

Hence the impulse to collect and catalogue and explore everything—and hence the proliferation of interest in wonder-cabinets. Kircher, for instance, took to filling his Jesuit Museum in Rome with examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs, convinced that they had been invented by Hermes Trismegistus himself and feverishly intent on cracking their secret code (see Yates, p. 417). As for Ashmole, Yates convincingly suggests that his own intellectual genealogy wends back to Bruno's visit to Oxford in 1583–84, during which this “Hermetic magician of the most extreme type” preached his new philosophy, grounded in its Egyptian revelation. Some two generations later, she goes on to note, Ashmole became England's “first known Freemason” (p. 415) and as such a secret initiate in a similar set of supposedly Egyptian-derived mysteries.

19.
 … things that were “Strang.”

In addition, such letters testify to a wealth of human responses—notable among them, petulant envy—that,
alas, are far from strange. When the Danish cabinetman Ole Worm's son, Willum, visited the Ark in 1658 and subsequently wrote his father to tell him about the experience, Ole wrote back, concerning Tradescant the Elder, “I have heard that he was an Idiot.” (Quoted in
Tradescant's Rarities
, p. 21, n. 17.)

The cabinetman of Copenhagen
(
illustration credit nts.6
)

20.
 … any stray pilgrims from the Jurassic.

Nor were these unique instances of such microminiaturist art. In fact, it turns out there was a veritable craze for the microminiature during the sixteenth century, so much so that many of the
Wunderkammer
cognoscenti of our own day, such as several of the contributors to the
Origins
volume, are given to ho-humming the occasional “obligatory cherry stone” they're forced to include among their own various inventories (p. 154).

The Tradescants' collection alone included such other feats as “a nest of 52 wooden cups turned within each other as thin as paper,” a cherrystone containing a dozen wooden spoons and another inscribed with the faces of “88 emperors,” and a “Halfe a Hasle-nut with 70 pieces of householdstuffe in it” (
Tradescant's Rarities
, p. 93).

In part, this fascination was but a microminiature rendition of the
Wunderkammer
passion itself—the world in a cabinet as recalibrated in terms of the roomful in a
nutshell. Such an analogy was rendered virtually explicit on the Tradescants' own family tombstone, upon which a poet celebrated,
inter alia
,