Solomon's Secret Arts (31 page)

The Spirits Withdraw

John Partridge's insistence that any attempt to communicate with spirits amounted to imposture was unusual only because it came from a practising astrologer. It was an attitude typical of the post-revolutionary period, when Neoplatonism gave way to empirical philosophies. Talking with spirits, a long-established fixture of ritual magic, or cavorting with creatures like fairies were simply too outlandish for most educated people, although few were prepared to deny the existence of spirits altogether. The outcome of this emerging consensus was that witch accusations finally became unacceptable, although not until the issue had been hashed out in a final partisan debate.

The Neoplatonists were mocked in Swift's
A Tale of a Tub
as seekers after wind. Cunningly, he called them “Learned
Aeolists
,” from the ruler of the winds in Greek mythology.
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Henry More, their chief spokesman, had died in 1687, and his role as the leading English philosopher of the age had passed to John Locke. In his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, Locke did not deny the existence of spirits, to whom he attributed motion and active power over matter. He argued, however, that human understanding could have no knowledge of them, beyond what was derived from observing one's own soul: “the mind getting, only by reflecting on its own operations, those simple ideas which it attributes to spirits, it hath or can have no other notion of spirit but by attributing all those operations it finds within itself to a sort of beings, without consideration of matter.”
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If nothing could be learned about spirits through sense impressions, then evidently no ritual magician or Neoplatonic philosopher could communicate directly with them. Indeed, Locke wrote, “what we hope to know of separate spirits in this world, we must, I think, expect only from revelation.”
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This was not so much a refutation of More as a sad admission that nothing about spirits could be learned from his philosophy.

Ritual magicians would not have been affected by such arguments, but the proof of their survival in the post-revolutionary period is limited. A letter of 1703 from Arthur Bedford, minister of Temple Church in Bristol, recounts the story of Thomas Perks of Mangotsfield, a gunsmith's son, twenty years old and “extremely well skilled in Mathematical and Astronomical Studies,” including astrology, who had summoned up “little maidens, about a foot and a half high,” with the aid of a magical book. Bedford was certain these fairy-folk were demons. Later, Perks stood at a crossway with a “Virgin Parchment” and called
up spirits. Unfortunately, “they appeared faster than he desired, and in most dismal shapes, like serpents, lions, bears, &c. hissing and roaring, and attempting to throw spears and balls of fire at him, which did very much affright him.” He became ill and never recovered.
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This tragic tale, which was published in Bristol in 1704, shows that ordinary people were quite capable of using learned sources of ritual magic. Among the educated elite, however, a taste for ritual magic had to be kept deeply hidden. A conjuring manual appears in the collection of George Ballard, numismatist of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a university bedell—did he use it to curse recalcitrant undergraduates? The Nonjuring clergyman Richard Rawlinson owned a rare book of incantations to summon angels for “Friendly Society and Verball Commers.” Doubtless the property of a professional magician, it contains the names of several clients.
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The most extensive set of magical texts from these years is a manuscript collection ascribed to “Dr. Rudd,” purportedly transcribed between 1699 and 1714 by “Peter Smart Master of Arts.” The manuscripts formed part of the collection of the Tory politician Edward Harley, 2nd earl of Oxford. They constitute an occult smorgasbord, including various “Rosie Crucian” writings, works on geomancy or conjuring by figures, a treatise on the talismans made by Persian magi and a tract entitled “Of the Miraculous Descensions and Ascensions of Spirits as Verified by a Practical Examination of Principles in the Great World.”
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Several of these are in fact copies of works published in the late seventeenth century, including sections plagiarized from Thomas Vaughan's writings and parts of Casaubon's edition of Dr Dee's experiments with spirits.
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Incongruously, one of the manuscript volumes contains a transcription of a standard book of grammar and orthography. The only work in the collection that might be original (although this remains questionable) is on evil spirits or “Goetia.” Ostensibly part of the
Lemegeton
or
Little Key of Solomon
, it contains “all the names, Orders and Offices of all the Spirits Salomon ever conversed with.”
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The existence of an actual “Dr. Rudd” seems doubtful. He resembles the magical “Rosy Crucians” invented by John Heydon. As for “Peter Smart M.A.,” he cannot be identified with any certainty either. The name was shared by a puritan preacher of the mid-seventeenth century, as well as by the father of the poet Christopher Smart, but whether the ritual magician had any connection with them is unknown. In a note that he later crossed out, Smart claimed to have received one of Dr Dee's manuscripts from John Gadbury in 1686, but this seems unlikely as Gadbury was hostile to ritual magic.
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If true, it suggests that Smart was an astrologer or medical practitioner. The most likely explanation for these manuscripts is that they were created in order to impress a customer. Because he falsely ascribed works to “Dr. Rudd” that had been published by
others, Smart might be regarded as a charlatan, but he was also showing good business sense. As a composite of previous magicians, the learned figure of “Dr. Rudd” proved persuasive enough to cause the earl of Oxford to purchase the Smart manuscripts, and he has continued to convince readers of his otherworldly wisdom down to the present.

Spiritual communication remained alluring to those who held mystical views of religion. Foremost among them were the followers of the visionary Jane Lead. She had been rediscovered in 1692, living in a home for retired gentlewomen, by a physician named Francis Lee, a former fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, who had been deprived of his academic sinecure because he refused to swear oaths to William and Mary. This made him a Nonjuror, although he was not strongly inclined towards the Jacobite political sentiments that usually went along with the title. Lee was a religious seeker, and he found spiritual truth in Lead's prophetic visions. Along with his friend the clergyman Richard Roach, rector of Hackney, Lee organized the Philadelphian Society, whose name was derived from an early Christian church. Alchemists used the term to describe the gold-making utopia of their dreams. The Philadelphian Society held regular meetings in London, at first using Mrs Lead's house as well as that of Mrs Anne Bathurst near Gray's Inn Road, before, as more listeners began to attend, expanding to two further meetings, one of them at Hungerford Market near Charing Cross.
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Like the Quakers, the Philadelphians accepted the doctrine of the “inner light” in every human being, and they believed in universal salvation. They were quickly labelled sectarians. Henry Dodwell, an eminent theologian who had also refused the oaths, and who happened to know Lee's brother, wrote to him in 1697, deploring his lapse into “enthusiasm.” Dodwell observed that Jane Lead's teachings consisted “of the old Platonick mystical divinity, of all the modern enthusiasts, of JACOB BEHME, of the judicial astrologers, of the magical oracles, of the alchymists, of which too many are in English, but not ordinarily to be met with.” Lee denied these allegations, and was particularly concerned to stress his mentor's “estrangedness from whatever savours of the pretended angelical art, the
Ars Paulina
, or the Key of Solomon.”
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He was not being entirely honest. While there is no reason to believe that Jane Lead was influenced by the
Little Key of Solomon
, there can be no doubt that she had been communicating with spirits. As recorded in her spiritual diary, which was published in the 1690s, these conversations often happened in natural settings, as she was thinking of divine things. Her first vision of the “Virgin Wisdom” came in 1670, when she was visiting the country house of a friend, “often frequenting lonely Walks in a Grove or Woods; contemplating the happy state of the Angelical World; and how desirous I was to have my
Conversation there.” All of a sudden, “there came upon me an overshadowing bright Cloud, and in the midst of it the Figure of a Woman, most richly adorned with transparent Gold, her Hair hanging down, and her Face as the terrible Crystal for brightness, but her countenance was sweet and mild.”
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Most of Lead's subsequent insights came from a disembodied voice, but she had no doubt that she was speaking with a spirit. Lee, who edited Lead's journal, appended to it his learned view that spirits were to be discerned by “Internal Sensation” and that “Spiritual Things are spiritually discerned, felt, and received.”
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Yet Lead felt them physically and witnessed them visually in natural settings, reflecting a less erudite, more immediate approach to the spirit world, one shaped by her own experience.

Because she used no magical operations to communicate with spirits, Lead's visions did not amount to ritual magic. Her follower Richard Roach, on the other hand, interacted with spirits in more deliberate ways. As he informed Lead, he began experimenting with visions as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, where

Later, he did break through. On the anniversary of King Charles II's restoration in 1699, a day celebrated by Jacobites throughout the kingdom, “I had the Spirit of Solomon with me w
^th
his Name at his first Approach given Articulately as I usually have upon the Apulse [
sic
] of any Good Spirit & sometimes also of Bad or Indifferent.” On other occasions, he was visited by the spirits of Francis Lee, Jane Lead and Anne Bathurst, all of whom were still alive.
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Roach kept a spiritual diary, which eventually passed into the hands of his friend Richard Rawlinson. It might reveal much about his use of ceremonial magic and his lively intercourse with spirits were it not written partly in a mysterious shorthand, partly in an undecipherable script. One wonders, for example, what he talked about on the last day of 1706 with “K[ing]. Gabricius & Queen Beia the Centrall magicall K. & Qu.”
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The king and queen sound like fairies, creatures that often provided access to the spririt world. Roach may have known about the research that had been carried out in Scotland on fairies, because his friend Francis Lee was connected with the Nonjuring Episcopalian mystics of Aberdeen. One of them was James Garden, former professor of theology at the University of Aberdeen.
He corresponded with John Aubrey in the 1690s about second sight, which was said to be gained “by converse with those demons, we call Fairies.”
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A more positive description of fairies was offered by the Reverend Robert Kirk, Episcopal minister of Aberfoyle, a parish in the woodland glen known as the Trossachs, north of Glasgow. Kirk's manuscript account,
The Secret Commonwealth
, contains considerable detail on “the Lychnobious people, Their nature, constitutions, actions, apparel, Language, Armour and Religion; with the quality of those Amphibious Seers, that correspond with them.”
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Their bodies, according to Kirk, are “somewhat of the nature of a condens'd cloud, and best seen in twilight.” As they move from one subterranean house to another, “[t]heir Chamaeleon-like bodies swim in the air, neer the Earth with bagg and bagadge. And at such revolution of time, Seers or men of the second sight (Females being but seldom so qualified) have verie terrifying encounters with them.” They live in tribal societies, with “Aristocratical Rulers and Laws, but no discernible Religion, Love or Devotion towards God the Blessed Maker of all.”
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Although they cause mischief and steal children, the fairies are not really demonic. They are reminiscent of Africans or North American Indians, a primitive, impious and not entirely human folk who proved the value of Christianity and civilization.

Fairies had another characteristic in common with the native peoples of Africa or the Americas: they were a source of wealth. Kirk mentioned “Fayrie hills” full of treasure that had been found in the Highlands. Further to the south, Goodwin Wharton was still searching after 1688 for the gold of the “lowlanders” or fairies living in southeast England. Like his brother, the Whig leader Thomas, Baron Wharton, Goodwin had prospered from the Glorious Revolution, gaining a seat in Parliament and appointment as a Lord of the Admiralty. With the help of the seer Mary Parish, he continued to hunt for the treasure of the lowlanders, which Parish now reported to be buried at the gate of the ruined castle at Southampton. Although the lowlanders threw small purses of gold into Goodwin's coach to keep up his enthusiasm, he was never able to find their trove. Nevertheless, he learned a great deal from Parish about their hierarchical society, ruled by a king and queen, just as in Richard Roach's vision. Apparently, their religion was a version of Catholicism, headed by a sort of fairy pope.
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For those who claimed second sight, fairies were alarming. According to Kirk, the novice seer perceived them as “a multitude of Wight's like furious hardy men flocking to him hastily from all quarters.” Fear might “strick him breathless and speechless,” but the experienced visionary, “defending the Lawfulness of his skill, forbids such horrour.” Seeing the future was hardly pleasant. James Garden reported that all his informants told him that second
sight was “troublsome, and they would gladly be freed from it; but cannot.”
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The role of the seer was similar to that of the
benandanti
of Friuli, who flew through the air one night a year to fight against witches in an effort to save the crops from their destructive wrath. It was not a pleasant job, but for the good of the community, somebody had to do it.
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