Solomon's Secret Arts (17 page)

He seems to have come from a distinguished gentry family, although his followers made outrageous claims that he was descended from an improbable Roman, Caesar Heydon, and from a nonexistent king of Hungary. If we can believe the less exalted genealogical information found in his works, then he was the grandson of Sir Christopher Heydon, a noted gentleman astrologer of the early seventeenth century, and the son of a lieutenant-general of the ordnance to Charles I. It is unlikely that he commanded troops in the Civil War (he was too young), or that he travelled to Egypt and Persia, as one admirer maintained. He began writing in the mid-1650s, just as he was settling down to the mundane life of an attorney at Clifford's Inn. Like other ambitious young men, he picked up astrology as a lucrative hobby, and married the widow of a leading practitioner of the art, Nicholas Culpeper. From the first, he used the stars unwisely, by meddling in politics. As early as 1658, he announced in print that only a Rosicrucian (presumably like himself) could have predicted Charles I's death, adding ominously, “and now others, are so written.”
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His willingness to forecast the deaths of rulers landed Heydon in prison on two occasions, once under the Protectorate and again under Charles II. The second forecast was made in 1667 for the duke of Buckingham, one of the most conniving politicians at the Restoration court and Heydon's chief patron. Samuel Pepys was informed that Buckingham “hath been endeavouring to have the King's nativity calculated, which was done, and the fellow now in the Tower about it—which itself hath heretofore … been held treason, and people died for it.”
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Heydon was not put to death; instead, he found time between bouts of confinement to write bulky tomes on “Rosie-Crucian Physick,” alchemical philosophy, magic, numerology and cosmology.
⁷¹

Heydon's name first appeared in print in 1655, as the author of a long, dull visionary poem dedicated to Henry Cromwell, the Protector's younger son.
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Soon after, he jumped on the Rosicrucian bandwagon. Although he maintained that he was not a member of the Brotherhood (as any true Brother would have been obliged to do), he nonetheless seemed to have access to all of their supposed secrets, in particular their medical remedies. He defined a Rosicrucian as “a partaker of Divine things, and a companion of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal Angels.” Heydon apparently knew two of them, residents of the West Country, Mr Walfoord and Mr T. Williams, both of whom
had miraculous powers: “they walk in the Air; they frustrate the Malicious aspect of Witches; they cure all diseases.” The second characteristic was important, because a Rosicrucian might otherwise be taken for a witch. The resemblance between Heydon's exalted Brothers of the Rosy Cross and the
benandanti
of Friuli, supernatural witch-fighters who have been investigated by Carlo Ginzburg, is striking, but it is doubtless due to a common store of western European magical lore rather than to any familiarity on Heydon's part with Venetian Inquisitorial records.
⁷³
In any case, Heydon was not overly knowledgeable about the literature of Rosicrucianism. Nevertheless, he billed himself as the only reliable source on the subject, dismissing Thomas Vaughan, who had translated Christian Rosenkreuz's
Testament
, as “swift and rash.”
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Writers who offer to reveal secrets to the public, but are not able to deliver on the promise, must either then further raise the stakes of the game or risk losing their audience. After the Restoration, Heydon chose the first option. He dedicated a book on Rosicrucian “Axiomata” to James, duke of York, and filled it with geomantic figures, used for summoning angels. This ceremonial activity, usually derived from the
Little Key of Solomon
, had excited aficionados of the occult from John Dee to Elias Ashmole, and was particularly fascinating to an older generation of astrologers, who saw it as an exalted manifestation of their art. According to Heydon, in order to master the “Naturall Magic, in which we believe King
Solomon
excelled,” one simply had to cast a
telesme
or sigil engraved with the angel's name and assorted numerological information, and the angel would appear “like a man sitting on a chair, holding a balance in his hand.” It was as simple as that. “Angels may be as frequently converst with as Devills by the direction and help of the Figure before,” the Astromagus cheerfully announced.
⁷⁵

Heydon followed up this exercise with a series of volumes that drew on alchemy, astrology, numerology and ritual magic to compose a complex cosmology. These had grand titles, often including Greek words:
The Harmony of the World
(1662);
The Holy Guide, Leading the Way to Unite Art and Nature
(1662);
Theomagia, or The Temple of Wisdom
(1663); a second edition of
The Wise-Man's Crown
, including new materials (three volumes, 1664–5); and
Elhavareuna or The English Physitians Tutor
(1665). As if all this were not enough, he wrote a staunchly monarchist treatise on government, entitled
The Idea of the Law Charactered from Moses to King Charles
, which he published in the year of the Restoration, as well as a Rosicrucian argument in favour of Christianity,
Psontonphancia
(1664). His works had a number of different publishers, which suggests that he was an author much in demand. Judging by the dedications and endorsements that he proudly attached to his writings, he also had influential friends. These included Prince Rupert, the duke of
Ormonde and the earl of Oxford, not to mention a host of alchemical and occult writers, from George Starkey to Robert Turner.
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We may wonder whether all of these encomia were genuine, or all of the dedications well received, but Heydon was certainly known to Ormonde and Buckingham, and for a few years in the early 1660s, he was a darling of the reading public.

Heydon's works are mostly compilations of occult knowledge, bits and pieces that do not add up to much of a system, except in his own vibrant imagination. Unlike Thomas Vaughan, he was content to repeat the ideas of others (sometimes in their own words), rather than to reimagine the universe himself. He remained obsessed with the Rosicrucians, who took on increasingly bizarre features in his writings. In
Theomagia
, he describes how “the
Rosie Crucian
Priests shave their heads, and wear no hair upon them … they not only refuse to eat most part of pulse, and of flesh meats, Mutton and Pork, for that sheep and swine breed much excrement, but also upon their daies of sanctification and expiatory solemnities, they will not allow any Salt to be eaten with their viands.” Heydon was here evoking the image of an Egyptian priesthood dedicated to the myth of the sister and brother “Beata” (Nature) and “Eugenius,” who resemble Isis and Osiris.
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Such passages might seem like pure fancy, but decades later they would be paralleled in the lore of Freemasonry. The conviction that occult secrets ultimately originated with the mysterious Egyptians was hardly original, of course, but Heydon's elaborations may have been picked up by later promoters of secret societies.

In most respects, Heydon was a traditionalist who sought to defend occult practices and concepts that were commonly held, especially by astrologers. For example, he was determined to vindicate the use of magical figures, sigils and
telesmes
. He argued—without offering any evidence—that they originated in the figures of cherubim and seraphim that were employed by the ancient magi of Persia.
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The Rosicucrians, naturally enough, employed “Telesmaticall Images” for all their magical purposes: “by them the dead are raised to life, by them they alter [,] change and amend bodies, cure the deseased prolong Life … by these Arts they know all things and resolve all manner of questions present or to come.”
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As for alchemy, Heydon provided much heat and little light. Although he constantly hinted that the Rosicrucians had knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone, because they had access to universal medicines, he gave no indication of how they had arrived at it, which probably reflected his own ignorance of alchemical practice. He even condemned “the ungodly and accursed Gold-making, which has gotten so much the upper hand.”
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In fact, Heydon could barely raise the subject of alchemy without falling back on sigils or figures.

Like Lilly and other astrologers, Heydon believed that the planets were guided by angels, but he was willing to admit the point openly, and he suggested
that angelic influences could be controlled by human beings. Thus, astrology and ritual magic might be combined. Heydon gave these angelic influences the remarkable name of “Genii,” which he must have derived from occult literature, possibly Agrippa. To know the name of the Genius that presided over one's own destiny was to gain great power. This required drawing up a nativity and projecting a larger figure from it, based on the shape of a pentacle. As Heydon explained, somewhat obscurely, “to find the name of my
Genius
, I look in the places of the fire
Hylegiaus
, and making projection always from the beginning of
Aries
, & the Letters being found out, and being joined together according to the degree ascending, make the name of my genius
Malhitiriel
, who
had upon Earth familiarity with Elias
.”
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The human body also had Genii—not just one, but three of them, whose names could be discovered through a combination of astrology, geomancy and “Cabala” that was unique to Heydon.

Although he shared and voiced many of their own preoccupations, other astrologers were as hostile to the “Astromagus” as he was to them. Elias Ashmole was infuriated when Heydon published a poorly edited version of an alchemical poem,
The Way to Bliss
, that Ashmole himself was preparing for print.
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In turn, Heydon attacked Ashmole's friend William Lilly as “
a Labouror or Ditchers Son, by education a Taylor
” and “
a Lying Sycophanticall Knave
.”
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Churlishly, he lumped his wife's late husband, Nicholas Culpeper, in with Thomas Vaughan and “other
Pretenders
” who were “
too young and childish
” to penetrate Rosicrucian mysteries.
⁸⁴
Heydon turned against John Gadbury in 1664, writing of him to William Lilly, whose good opinion he sought to gain, as “[t]he scorpean that studies Mischiefe.”
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He also cited a grandiose list of writers and thinkers who “will testifie for me,” including Moses, Enoch, Hermes Trismegistus, Francis Bacon, Robert Fludd (whose theory of the relationship of planets to music he pilfered), Marsilius Ficino, Henry More, René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. It would be hard to imagine a writer who was further removed intellectually from the last three than Heydon.
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He presented no evidence of having read any of them. How familiar he was with Paracelsus is unclear, but he did not hesitate to lampoon the German doctor's “new, odd, cross, and unheard names,” or to condemn his iatrochemical remedies. He actually accused the medical writer George Thomson, a friend of the alchemist George Starkey, of plagiarizing him in a pamphlet that recommended chemical medicines to counter the 1665 London plague. The charge was patently false, but in defending Galenic medicine and the anti-Paracelsian position of the Royal College of Physicians, Heydon revealed himself to be a medical as well as an astrological traditionalist.
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The novelty of the “Heydonian Philosophy” consisted in its revelation of secrets about which other astrologers were guarded or silent. He continually
hinted that further Rosicrucian mysteries remained to be broadcast. The creation of earth and water, he confided to his readers in 1665, “is a very great secret, neither is it lawfull to publish it expressly, & as the Nature of the thing requires, but in the
Magicall work
it is to be seen, and I have been an eye
witnesse
of it my self.”
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By that date he had reached the height of his success. His printed portraits show that he was a lavish dresser with plenty of money to spend on expensive clothes. He addressed readers from “our Virgin Pallace in Hermupolis,” which sounds grand, whatever it might have meant. Around 1670, however, Heydon disappeared. No record of his death has come to light; perhaps he just dissolved into the ether. Although a few of his writings appear on William Cooper's lists of chemical publications in the early 1670s, they were hardly mentioned after that. The “Astromagus” vanished without trace.

For all his pomposity, self-promotion and pretensions to learning, John Heydon was important. His brief success shows that astrology was not inevitably bound on a path of accommodation with contemporary science. It might have pursued a different course, towards cultivating an audience among those who wanted to unveil the secrets of nature without engaging in the bothersome experimental rigour of Boyle or Newton. Heydon was not an enemy to experimental science: he simply offered a quicker and easier method of achieving the same ends. He fearlessly put into print all the magical ideas that other astrologers were hesitant to publicize. While he added his own strange Rosicrucian spin on many of them, this can only have enhanced his appeal to those who were impressed by the idea of a society that already held the secrets of the universe—unlike the Royal Society, whose progress towards ultimate revelation was slow and painful.

The alternative astrology represented by the “Astromagus” depended heavily on the protection of patrons at court such as like the duke of Buckingham. While he was a successful writer, Heydon could easily have run foul of the religious authorities. In fact, he was allegedly attacked in a sermon at St Paul's in May 1664, delivered before the lord mayor, in which a preacher “aspersed me with Atheism.”
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But for the protection afforded him by his social superiors, he might have been a prime target for clerical criticism on account of the occult extravagances of his thinking. The possibility of a confrontation was averted by his disappearance from public view in 1670, at the height of his fame. Whatever its cause, it preserved his reputation for later readers, who sometimes held a surprising admiration for “Heydonian philosophy.” A marginal comment from around 1817, found in a copy of
Theomagia
in the British Library, expressed wonderment at how “the learned John heydon after having brought this science to great perfection hath been much abusd there in, but w[h]o Ever will Examin the science Candidly will find it upon the Baises of
truth and honesty.”
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Apparently, 150 years of scientific revolution had made little impression on this reader.