Solomon's Secret Arts (14 page)

Ultimately, however, not even the learned Goad, the only astrologer for whom Flamsteed had any respect, could wholly mask the religious and intellectual problems that plagued astrology, and were to steer its uncertain future. Was it compatible with Christian theology, particularly with doctrines like the omniscience of God and the responsibility of individual human beings for their own behaviour? Did it have a scientific foundation, or was it just an elaborate form of self-deception? Finally—and this was a question that astrologers tended to ask themselves—was it a purely practical art, without much theory, mystery or magic to it? Did it have anything original to contribute to occult philosophy or was it simply designed to satisfy the “superstitious Vulgar,” as Flamsteed claimed?
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The second section of this chapter will discuss how the community of professional astrologers tackled such questions, and how their responses changed over time. The final sections concentrate on two figures who characterize contrasting approaches to astrology: the ambitious plagiarist John Heydon, self-styled “Astromagus,” and the earnest, pious amateur Samuel Jeake of Rye.

Before we deal with astrology as a subject for learned discussion, however, we have to understand it as a thriving and expanding business. The steady commercialization of astrology would have profound consequences for its development as an intellectual discipline—or, perhaps more accurately, for its failure to develop as an intellectual discipline. While it would be misleading to argue that astrology was ruined by financial success, its focus was increasingly fixed on competition between popular astrologers rather than on serious study. Commercialization also contributed to a lessening of astrology's scholarly acceptability and the fraying of its connections with formal learning. As a result, the silver age would not last.

The Business of Astrology

Astrologers made money in two ways: first, as consultants to individuals who wanted to have a particular question answered, a specific problem solved, or the meaning of the present or the future revealed; and second, as the authors of
books, pamphlets and almanacs. For most professional astrologers, the profits of the art lay in consultancy. This usually involved “judicial” rather than “natural” astrology: that is, giving answers to precise questions about individuals, rather than foretelling the weather or the general course of events. Judicial astrology in turn was divided into three main branches: genethliacal, horary and electional. The first involved the casting of a geniture or nativity, a birth chart with the client's name and birth date written on a diamond-shaped space in the middle, while the stars and planets that influenced the exact time of birth were inscribed on twelve triangles that surrounded the edges. A nativity could be interpreted in order to explain the present circumstances of the client, to predict what might happen in the future or to diagnose disease. Horary astrology answered specific questions posed by the client through a mapping of the heavens at precisely the moment at which the question was asked. Because the responses depended on vague “spiritual forces,” horary queries were particularly suspect to those who identified astrology with black magic or derided it as superstitious nonsense. Electional astrology worked backwards, in a sense, by setting up a propitious hypothetical chart for the initiation of an action, like marriage or travel or a business deal, then determining the time that best fitted such a configuration.
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An astrologer might follow up a consultancy by offering to sell the client a medicinal cure, like Nicholas Culpeper's
Aurum Potabile
(edible gold), “a rare Cordiall, and Universall Medicine,” which his widow, Alice, after his death in 1654, called “the TRUE LEGACY, which he left me.”
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Culpeper was known for his herbal remedies, but other astrologers associated themselves with the new metallic or iatrochemical medicines. In the late 1680s, Lancelot Coelson marketed his
Elixir Proprietaris
as “the great Antidote of the ancient Philosophers,
Van Helmont, Paracelsus
, and
Crollius
.” He sold it for a shilling a bottle.
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Astrologers also provided their clients with sigils, charms or talismans inscribed with zodiacal and planetary signs. They were supposed to confer good fortune or ward off evil by concentrating the beneficial aura of particular celestial bodies. The trade in sigils, however, was controversial, as it bore the taint of diabolic magic. One of the few published references to the use of a sigil in this period concerns a 1664 case of demonic possession, in which the astrologer Richard Saunders was consulted.
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No astrologer openly discussed the sale of sigils, although it was undoubtedly a widespread practice. Elias Ashmole cast his own sigils, and by the late 1670s was making them for a friend. William Lilly was impressed that Ashmole, “though a Gentleman and so educated … can ingraue, and cast medals or Sigills or any other the like curiositys.”
¹⁹
Of course, Lilly must have made and sold many of them himself among his astonishingly large crowd of clients.

Lilly owed his considerable fortune to consultations. His voluminous consultancy records for 1644–66, along with those of John Booker for 1656–65, have survived among Ashmole's collection of manuscripts. While Lilly's casebooks are not complete—only horary figures are contained in them—they reveal that he saw more than two thousand clients a year. Unfortunately, Booker's meticulous records of horary figures and nativities were kept in indecipherable shorthand, but Keith Thomas counted about a thousand cases a year, reaching an astonishing total of 16,500 for the whole period. As Lilly apparently charged the average client half a crown, and those of high rank far more, he was making a very good living (at least £500
per annum
) out of horary consultations alone. Unfortunately, he did not identify his clients in the surviving casebooks of the 1650s and 1660s, so nothing much can be said about their social backgrounds. Booker at least recorded the names of his customers, showing that men and women were about equally represented.
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The horary questions posed to Lilly usually concerned missing people and things, or decisions that had to be taken by the client. Women tended to ask about future marriage prospects (one who faced a choice between “a black haird man” and “a fair haird man” was told “fair will wynn”) or difficulties with their boyfriends. One customer wanted to know whether he would “obtain the Philosophers stones.”
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More typically, Lilly gave advice on medical ailments, marital complaints, sea voyages and various states of mind. Much of what he told his customers was based on common sense and experience rather than any supernatural insight.

Judging by the rapidity with which Lilly dealt with clients, horary astrology was a fast and relatively easy process. By contrast, calculating genitures or nativities often required considerable work, and they were probably the most expensive figures drawn up by astrologers. The nativities of famous people were often used as advertising, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the astrologer's art to less exalted clients. Richard Edlyn, for example, drew up genitures for Charles II, his brothers James, duke of York, and Henry, duke of Gloucester, who died shortly after the Restoration. Other famous men whose nativities were calculated by Edlyn included the French scholar and astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (“Peireskius” in Edlyn's spelling), the anti-Trinitarian theologian Faustus Socinus and the Anglican martyr Archbishop Laud. He noted on the nativity of William of Orange (later King William III of Great Britain): “There was born in November 1650 A child who will subvert the Laws of that Countrey; saith Mr Lilly in one off his Almanackes.” This was the sort of prediction that might really impress a potential client, as it evidently did the antiquarian William Stukeley, the owner of this manuscript in the eighteenth century. Edlyn was also willing to draw up a nativity for an inanimate object, “His Maj.
^ties
Great ship the Royall Charles 1st [
sic
—in fact, it was the
Charles II] Lansht [i.e. launched] March 1667.” The subject of this figure was a replacement for the
Royal Charles
, the enormous vessel that had carried the king to England in 1660 and was captured by the Dutch in the Medway in June 1667.
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Plotting the ship's geniture must have been designed as a confidence-boosting exercise after the demoralizing loss of its predecessor.

Clients visited astrologers, Keith Thomas suggests, because “they hoped to lessen their own anxiety.” Lacking more effective means of resolving issues or addressing problems, they consulted those who claimed to be able to read certainty in the stars. Thomas also points out, however, that astrology provided “a coherent and comprehensive system of thought,” as well as “that greater freedom which comes from self-knowledge.”
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These aspects of astrology's appeal were important. Because we do not really know how clients reacted to astrological advice, it is hard to say whether or not their anxiety was substantially lessened by it, but at least they were given solutions and explanations that rested on an impressive body of learning and on a fairly strict methodology. As a way of reading the universe, and of interpreting one's life or situation within that universe, astrology made as much sense to seventeenth-century minds as any other natural system. Of course, its plausibility rested on the internal logic and consistency of its operations. A corpus of learned professionals, trained in seminaries of astrological learning and employed mainly by the elite, might have kept up the coherence of such a system for a long time, as was the case in China or India, but astrologers in England and Scotland received little systematic training in their art, and were motivated as much by commercial as by intellectual factors. They had to cater to a broad audience that wanted to be awed and entertained as well as comforted. To maintain the intellectual plausibility of astrology in such a competitive universe required careful calculation indeed.

By the 1650s, the ruling planet in the astrological universe was the almanac. These little books, full of information both useful and arcane, vastly increased the public profile of astrology, and expanded its commercial possibilities.
²⁴
To be sure, few astrologers made much money from writing them. The main profits from the sale of almanacs went to the Stationers’ Company, which since 1603 had possessed a monopoly on printing them. Cyprian Blagden estimated that the normal payment for authors was £2, although the Company records for 1664 show that Vincent Wing was given £7, Richard Saunders £10 and John Booker £12, while William Lilly, quite exceptionally, received £48. Reportedly, by an arrangement of 1658, Lilly was to have £60 if sales of his almanac reached twenty thousand copies. These sums paid to Lilly were equivalent to the income of a skilled labourer. They added up to only a small proportion, however, of the yearly value of almanacs delivered to the Company's treasurer, which averaged
around £2,500.
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Blagden demonstrated that the Company was clearing up to £1,500 per annum in profit from almanacs by the late seventeenth century.
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The Stationers were aware how important almanacs were to them financially, which explains why they made Obadiah Blagrave, publisher of astrological and occult works, their treasurer in the mid-1680s.

While the financial proceeds to the Company were certainly healthy, they do not express the full impact of almanacs, which involved a large number of printers and publishers. Each year, between twenty and thirty different almanacs were printed as books, others as individual sheets, at London, Cambridge and Oxford. The Stationers jealously guarded their monopoly, and pursued any interlopers who pirated editions. Scotland was beyond the Company's purview, however, and legitimate independent almanacs appeared there throughout the seventeenth century. The simply titled
Almanack, or New Prognostication
, printed by John Forbes at Aberdeen, was selling as many as fifty thousand copies annually in the late 1670s. Not surprisingly, Forbes soon faced competition from the printers of Edinburgh.
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In 1683,
Edinburgh's True Almanack
, compiled by the mathematician James Paterson, began to appear in the Scottish capital. Within a year, Paterson had to obtain legal protection from the Scottish Privy Council against the making of unlicensed copies of his work.
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How many English book almanacs were printed by the Stationers’ Company in the late seventeenth century? The quantity was staggering: never fewer than 280,000 copies, and at times more than 400,000. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the number of copies sold did not equal the number of readers. Some people bought multiple almanacs, while a few possessed expensive bound volumes consisting of a dozen almanacs or more. Unlike pamphlets or newspapers, almanacs were designed for a single user, not for being shared by several readers or read aloud to an audience. As a result, the total number of printed copies was certainly greater than the number of purchasers or users. We have no way of knowing the exact ratio of copies to purchasers, but as the vast majority of people probably bought only one almanac, a multiplier of 1.5 might provide a rough estimate. We could guess, therefore, at 190,000 to 300,000 English purchasers of legally printed book almanacs every year (plus an incalculable number of purchasers of pirated, illegal or imported almanacs), which would place these little volumes among the biggest sellers of any books printed in the seventeenth century.
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The peak of almanac production came during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, when public anxiety over a possible Catholic overthrow of the government ran high among zealous Protestants, known as Whigs. Their opponents, called Tories, suspected Whigs and Dissenting Protestants of planning to establish a republic. Tories rallied to King Charles and his Catholic brother,
James, and upheld the Church of England against its critics.
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Henry Coley predicted for 1680 that there would be “great reason to fear a general Dissatisfaction and Uneasiness amongst the People in general; also much Treachery and secret Plotting and Heart-burning one against another.”
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It seems incredible that anybody needed the stars to tell them that, but at least it alerted the public to continuing instability. Coley was staunchly loyal to the king, and might be considered a Tory, along with Saunders, Andrews and several other prominent almanac writers.
Poor Robin's Almanac
, of which 20,000–25,000 copies were printed every year during the Exclusion Crisis, was vehemently abusive towards Protestant Dissenters. In fact, jeering attacks on “Rumpers” and “Saints” constituted its only line of jest. The almanac written by John Gadbury, who was imprisoned for complicity in the alleged Catholic conspiracy known as the “Meal Tub Plot,” and twice burned in effigy by Whig demonstrators, also sold briskly during the Crisis, when 18,000–20,000 copies were printed every year.
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