The Forbidden Universe (21 page)

After the collapse of Rosicrucian dreams in Bohemia and Germany and the eruption of the Thirty Years’ War that engulfed Europe for a generation, Hermetic hopes for the great reform of society focused on England, which had remained largely uninvolved with the war, if only because Charles I’s expedition of the late 1620s had been ignominiously defeated. And when he ran out of funds for another such venture, it was the issue of how to raise money for the army that deeply divided the English.

The ensuing Civil War between the king and Parliament convulsed the country from 1641 until 1649, and ended with the public beheading of Charles I in London and the
foundation
of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The years of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate under Cromwell’s personal rule, although largely miserable (Christmas was cancelled, for example), were relatively stable.

But before England endured its own upheavals, a number of scholarly refugees who cherished the Rosicrucian dream arrived. England quickly became the repository of the Hermetic reform movement.

The Hermetic tradition had by no means died out in the country. In 1654 John Webster – a Puritan Parliamentary chaplain, astonishingly – wrote a tract proposing that the
universities should base their teaching on ‘the philosophy of Hermes revived by the Paracelsian school’
¹
– in other words, Rosicrucianism. He mentioned the Fraternity of the Rose Cross and strongly recommended John Dee’s mathematical works, as well as those of Robert Fludd.

Another important vehicle for the Hermetic tradition in England was a group of philosophers centred on Christ’s College, Cambridge, known some what misleadingly as the Cambridge Platonists, who were most active in the middle of the seventeenth century. They took the founding philosophy of the Renaissance and blended it with
contemporary
currents of thought, but at their core was the
philosophia perennis
of Marsilio Ficino – whose heart was Hermetic through and through.
²
One of their most
prominent
members, Henry More, wrote that his thinking derived from ‘the Platonick Writers, Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus himself, Mercurius Trismegistus and the Mystical Divines’.
³

Given that list it would be just as accurate, if not more so, to describe this group as the Cambridge Hermeticists, although most historians are content to maintain their bias away from the Hermetica and towards the Greeks. The Cambridge group was in effect the direct continuation of the Florentine Academy of Ficino, the brotherhood of Hermeticists that drove the Renaissance. As historians J. Edward McGuire and Piyo Rattansi demonstrated in the 1960s, the Cambridge Platonists mainly derived their philosophy from the
Corpus Hermeticum
via Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In a 1973 essay on the Cambridge Platonists, Rattansi wrote that: ‘It is now clear that the
Neo-Platonism
of Ficino and Pico was deeply intertwined with the magical doctrines of the
Corpus Hermeticum
and the later Neo-Platonists.’
⁴

The Cambridge Platonists accepted Isaac Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetica, but did not acknowledge that this invalidated the philosophy. Henry More regarded only
those parts that reflected Christian teaching as ‘fraud and corruption in the interests of Christianity’,
⁵
and the rest as genuinely ancient. So, ironically, in More’s view, in looking for the original, true theology, the
prisca theologia
, we should pay most attention to those aspects of the Hermetica that are the
least
Christian.

The philosopher regarded as the leader of the group, Ralph Cudworth, while accepting that significant parts of the Hermetica were Christian forgeries, challenged Casaubon’s logic. Why did proving some of the Hermetic books to be fraudulent mean that all of them must be? He also argued that if the aim of the forgers had been to build a path into the Church for Egyptian pagans, it would have made more sense to either have adapted genuine books of Hermes or incorporate the major themes of Egyptian thinking into their fakes. So, in Cudworth’s view, enough of the underlying philosophy and cosmology remained to draw valid conclusions. And as we will see, his was very close to the current historical position.

Among the distinguished refugees from the Continent, a key figure was the Polish polymath Samuel Hartlib (1600–62): Hermeticist, Paracelcist, promoter of Dee’s mathematical and geometrical works and an astrologer. With his Europe-wide circle of correspondents and contacts he was an ‘intelligencer’, a sort of one-man clearing house for information. He was a devoted networker in the interests of dissemination of all knowledge, from the intellectually obscure to the political – rather like Gian Vincenzo Pinelli in Padua during Bruno’s day.

Hartlib was clearly a Rosicrucian. He worked to found a ‘pansophic college’ – an institution for the study of
all-embracing
wisdom, the acquisition of knowledge and its use for the betterment of society. Together with fellow
traveller John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), a Czech scholar who also took refuge, briefly, in England, he proposed setting up a Collegium Lucis, or College of Light, for the advancement of learning, but primarily to train up a body of ‘teachers of mankind’.
⁶

Apart from being influenced by Andreae and the ideal of a learned society working for the advancement of humanity, he took the name for his projected movement, ‘Antilia’, from Andreae’s utopian work
Christianopolis
, which uses the word as a reference to an inner group within his perfect society. Presumably inspired by this was the utopian tale Hartlib wrote, a short pamphlet entitled
A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria
(1641). However, his Rosicrucian connection is made most explicit in his letter he wrote to one of his chief correspondents, John Worthington (1618–71), Master of Jesus College, Cambridge – and one of the Cambridge Platonists:

A tessera is a piece of a mosaic, but as the word was also used in ancient Rome to refer to a ticket, voucher or token, Hartlib seems to be hinting that ‘Antilia’ was the code name Rosicrucians used to recognize each other. This kind of knowledge implies he was himself a member. Yet another clue lies in the fact that his patron was Elizabeth of Bohemia who, as we have seen, together with her husband was the focus of intense Rosicrucian support.

Try as he might, Hartlib failed to get his projected
pansophic college off the ground, writing despairingly to Worthington in October 1660: ‘We were wont to call the desirable Society by the name of Antilia, and sometimes by the name of Macaria, but name and thing is as good as vanished.’
⁸
Like many other academics and intellectuals who had flourished under the Commonwealth, he had probably simply lost favour at the restoration of the monarchy.

But a month later came the first meeting of what was to become the Royal Society. And it seems that, wherever the initial idea came from, there was an attempt to use it to achieve the ‘Antilian’ dream.

The train of events that led to the foundation of the Royal Society is more complicated and more esoteric than many modern writers would have us believe. Despite the restrictions of the ongoing Civil War, it began in London in 1645 with an informal meeting of scholars who set out to explore new ideas in natural philosophy – as science was then called. In what was almost certainly no coincidence, the two prime movers were in the retinue of the exiled Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, Frederick and Elizabeth’s son. The two were Charles Louis’ secretary, Theodore Haak, and his chaplain, John Wilkins. Charles Louis had been invited to live in London by Parliament, whose cause he backed. All very odd for the son of a Stuart – especially given that he was the nephew of the king who Parliament was fighting against.

John Wilkins – the future Bishop of Chester, inventor of the metric system and something of an oddball for a Church of England chaplain – was really the driving force behind the formation of the Royal Society. At the age of forty-two, the highly ambitious Wilkins married Cromwell’s
sixty-three-year-old
widowed sister, presumably a move that did nothing to prevent his inexorable rise. He also wrote a defence of Copernicanism in 1641 (
Discourse Concerning a
New Planet
), and more creatively, a flight of fancy with the self-explanatory title,
The Discovery of a World in the Moone
(1638). His attempt to introduce a new universal language to be used by natural philosophers instead of Latin was terminally halted when his entire print run was lost in the Great Fire of London.

In his hugely popular book
Mathematicall Magick
,
published
in 1648, Wilkins specifically references the
Fama Fraternitatis
. His book was based – as he freely
acknowledged
– on mathematical works by Dee and Fludd and even declared that he took the title from Cornelius Agrippa.

It was at this juncture that the now-famous references to an ‘Invisible College’ appeared. These were in letters written in 1646 and 1647 by one of the most eminent founders of the Royal Society, the chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91) – credited with turning alchemy into chemistry – who alluded to a gathering of scholars and philosophers of which he was a part and which called itself by this mysterious name.

Not only was the intriguing term ‘invisible’ used in the Rosicrucian manifestos, but it carried clear echoes of the mysterious, even sinister, ‘College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross’, otherwise known as the ‘Invisibles’ in Paris. Boyle’s comments were almost certainly a kind of Rosicrucian in-joke.

Many writers have seen a connection between this enigmatic group and the founding members of the Royal Society, and hinted at the existence of an anonymous behind-the-scenes cabal. But maybe too much mystery has been read into these connections since the group Boyle refers to is relatively easy to identify. Historian Margery Purver, in
Royal Society: Concept and Creation
(1967), shows that the Invisible College was the circle centred on Hartlib.

The references to the Invisible College appeared in letters
that the young Boyle wrote to Hartlib and make the connection between Hartlib and the activities of the college very explicit. On 8 May 1647 he wrote: ‘You interest yourself so much in the Invisible College, and that whole society is so concerned in all the accidents of your life …’
⁹
In other correspondence from around the same time, Boyle calls Hartlib the ‘midwife and nurse’ of the college.
¹⁰

The Invisible College was Hartlib’s Antilia, or more accurately the group of learned men he hoped would become Antilia. Considering this in combination with the ‘invisible’ clue suggests that it is essentially a Rosicrucian brotherhood. However, this doesn’t mean the connection with the Royal Society is nonexistent: Hartlib hovers in the background during its inception and at least initially it embodied his Rosicrucian ideals. And significantly, Boyle was one of the most active founder members.

As John Gribbin points out in
The Fellowship
(2005), the Royal Society was the result of two groups coming together. The first was a group that had met informally in John Wilkins’ rooms at Wadham College, Oxford, from 1648 and throughout the years of the Commonwealth and which included Boyle and Christopher Wren. The second
consisted
of royalists with an interest in natural philosophy returning from exile with the Restoration in 1660. The two groups met when attending a series of open lectures at Gresham College in London.

At a meeting on 28 November 1660 a group of twelve natural philosophers and enthusiastic amateurs – including Boyle, Wilkins and Wren and led by William, Viscount Brouncker – decided to form a society for promoting the emerging ‘experimental philosophy’, or what we now know as the scientific method, using experiment to test hypotheses. They took as their motto ‘
Nullius in verba
’,
literally ‘on the word of no one’, but ‘take no one’s word for it’ certainly has a more modern ring.

The new society was particularly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English courtier, lawyer and philosopher. His major work is the 1605 book
The Advancement of Learning
, which, as its title suggests, surveyed the state of scholarship in his day and proposed ways in which natural philosophers might extend their knowledge. He argued for a methodical and systematically organized approach to investigating the natural world, and also called for a united international ‘fraternity in learning and illumination’.
¹¹

Historians long regarded Bacon as the archetypal voice of reason, a beacon of light in an age of superstition, but in 1957 the Italian historian Paolo Rossi’s
Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science
challenged this long-held view. From closely examining Bacon’s life and work, Rossi showed that he was as much a devotee of the Hermetic tradition as the other thinkers we have so far discussed. Rossi notes in particular the ‘influence of the hermetic doctrine’ on Bacon’s ideas on the nature of metals.
¹²
He also, according to Rossi, firmly believed in the
anima mundi
. Basically the great man was another passionate disciple of the Renaissance occult philosophy (although he wanted to reform that, too). He included natural magic, astrology and, particularly, alchemy, within his fields of knowledge. He was just careful not to draw attention to them.