Solomon's Secret Arts (35 page)

Unfortunately, after writing those first provocative sentences, Newton turned immediately to descriptive and mathematical questions concerning the Temple. We learn no more about what the reconfigured building meant. Newton was no more forthcoming in
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended
, the controversial work on which he spent the last years of his life, and which was posthumously published in 1728 by his literary executor, John Conduitt. The
Chronology
purportedly aimed at correcting the dates of events in the history of ancient pagan peoples by correlating them with astronomical as well as biblical occurrences. The key to Newton's dating system turned out to be the celestial sphere that guided the mythical Greek hero Jason and his Argonauts on their voyage in search of the Golden Fleece. Devised by the centaur Chiron (Newton does not explicate how his horsey half was physically possible), the sphere placed the cardinal points of the ecliptic, the apparent
path of the sun around the earth that forms the centre of the zodiac, in four celestial constellations. Because the precession of the equinoxes had shifted the location of the cardinal points at a fixed rate per year, it was possible, at least in theory, to calculate the date of the sailing of the Argo as 937
BCE
, or about forty-three years after the building at Jerusalem of the Temple of Solomon.
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The rest of the
Chronology
is a rambling disquisition, with chapters devoted to the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians. Newton pauses to consider “primitive religion”—the religion of Noah, partly maintained by the Jews, but debased elsewhere into paganism. He deals only with its moral principles, however, not with its theological precepts.
³⁵
A chapter of the
Chronology
is devoted to a description of the Temple of Solomon and to Newton's reading of the vision of Ezekiel. Again, it provides few surprises, only hinting at the possibility of prophetic insights.
³⁶
To a modern reader, the oddest feature of Newton's
Chronology
may be its assumption that the gods of Egyptian and Greek mythology were actual human beings, mostly kings or heroes. It is hard for us to grasp the point that underlies this: namely, that paganism was a
choice
, not an inheritance, for peoples who had decided to set aside true religion in favour of false deities and magical practices. The worst of them were apparently the Babylonians, who “were extremely addicted to Sorcery, Inchantments, Astrology and Divinations.”
³⁷
Even paganism, however, might retain some glimmer of truth, and “heathen” societies could excel in the worldly realm of the arts and sciences. The Edomites, conquered by David, were able “to carry to all places their Arts and Sciences, amongst which were their Navigation, Astronomy, and Letters, for in
Idumea
they had Constellations and Letters before the days of
Job
, who mentions them; and there
Moses
learnt to write the Law in a book.” Literacy and astronomy were closely related in Newton's mind. Later, the Argonauts set out on a similar “embassy to the nations,” carrying navigation as well as knowledge of the heavens.
³⁸

Newton's
Chronology
, which is hostile to magic and “Sorcery,” might not seem like much of an endorsement of occult thinking. Its argument nonetheless points towards a reclaiming of the occult. First, Newton gives intellectual validation to ancient astrology as the precursor to astronomy. While he does not justify the predictive power of astrology, he allows it to be an accurate way of reading time and motion, the foundations of science. As a means of mapping nature, moreover, astrology provided the pagan Greeks with a way to recognize divine intentions. Thus, a natural art allowed for supernatural insight. Second, by focusing his
Chronology
on the story of the Argonauts, Newton evokes one of the most widespread legends of alchemy. As Antoine Faivre has pointed out, it was a commonplace among alchemists that the pursuit of the Golden Fleece was an allegory of the quest for gold. Every detail of Jason's adventures was
connected to a stage in the spagyric process, and the Fleece itself was seen as a recipe. Two works that dealt with this theme—Michael Maier's
Arcana Arcanissima
and J.V. Andreæ's
Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz
—were cited by Newton in his alchemical notes. Another,
Aurei Velleris
by Guilielmus Mennes, was included in the collection
Theatrum Chemicum
, owned by Newton since 1669. He may also have read Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement's
Traittez du vray sel
, a favourite work among the Hartlib circle.
³⁹
Typically, Newton did not mention the alchemical significance of the voyage of the Argo in his
Chronology
, but by affirming that the ship carried science and the arts to the whole world, he implied that the spagyric quest was the beginning of knowledge and fulfilled a divine purpose.

A third aspect of Newton's rewriting of the occult concerns the ancient mysteries, which were soon to be closely associated with the rituals of Freemasonry. No proof exists of Newton's membership in a lodge, despite the Masonic affiliations of many of his disciples. Admittedly, the Temple plan inserted in the
Chronology
marks the Holy of Holies with a “G,” which to the initiated Mason meant “Geometry” as well as God—but Conduitt or the printer may have inserted this. More suggestive is Newton's description of the origins of ancient mysteries. With blithe assurance, he asserts that in 1007
BCE
, or eight years after the founding of Solomon's Temple, “
Ceres
a woman of Sicily, in seeking her daughter who was stolen, comes into
Attica
, and there teaches the Greeks to sow corn; for which Benefaction she was Deified after death.” The Eleusinian mysteries were initiated in her honour.
⁴⁰
Here, Newton recounts the myth of Ceres (Demeter) and Proserpine (Persephone), whose rescue from the underworld was a template for the Masonic raising of an initiate from symbolic death. He adds that temple building began in Greece soon after, indicating that the pagan mysteries and the Temple of Solomon were parts of the same divine plan. Newton further asserts that Orpheus, an Argonaut and composer of mystic hymns in praise of the planets, was responsible for the deification of the Egyptian king Bacchus. Both Orpheus and Bacchus were celebrated in mystery cults. Orpheus was beloved by Neoplatonists and astrologers, including Ficino; his music, which charmed wild beasts, is the model for the magic flute of Mozart's Masonic opera.
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We should not assume from this evidence that Newton was a Freemason or that in old age he had adopted the Neoplatonism of his Cambridge colleague Henry More. The claim of Freemasonry to be heir to the mystery cults was no secret, and Newton may have been aware of it even if he was not initiated. As with astrology and alchemy, he imposed a strictly historical interpretation on the mystery cults. Yet their ultimate purpose, like that of astrology and alchemy, surpassed nature and reflected intentions of God that were more perfectly embodied in the construction of the Temple. Apparently, the spread of science
and the arts would preserve and eventually restore “primitive religion,” so that the meaning of the Temple would at last be known. For the octogenarian Newton, obsessed by prophecy, science and the arts were not merely the ornaments of civilized manners or politeness; rather, they revealed universal truths. The
Chronology
was a final attempt to comprehend those truths, and a parting gesture towards a bygone era of anguished religious searching. Throughout his last work, Newton returned to aspects of occult philosophy, not to vindicate them, but to tease the divine plan out of them. His disciples would pick up on that approach, and for the next thirty years would keep both the Temple and the ancient gods at the centre of their intellectual universe.

William Stukeley, Arch-Druid

Newton's complex relationship with occult thinking was shared by his biographer and apologist William Stukeley. Known today for careful measurement of the ancient stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury, Stukeley has been praised as a pioneering antiquarian and the originator of modern British archaeology. His insistence that the Druids were the builders of these prehistoric structures was, until recently, dismissed by scholars as either an honest mistake or a curious personal aberration of no great importance; it is now understood as a long-standing preoccupation. His private diaries and unpublished papers further testify to Stukeley's passionate attachment to astrology, his peculiar zodiacal approach to classical mythology and his evolving conception of the Neoplatonic
anima mundi
or Soul of the World.
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As a result, Stukeley has begun to emerge as a far more interesting and complicated intellectual figure than anyone had previously imagined. His borrowings from occult science and philosophy, however, have never been fully discussed—and, without doubt, he would not have wished them to be.

Stukeley's diary is an indispensable key to the development of his thinking. He first kept a diary in 1720–6, when he lived in London and was friendly with Newton. He took it up again in 1730, when he was forty-three years old and had just been ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England. His friends were shocked by Stukeley's decision to enter the clergy. Until then, he had been known as a Cambridge-trained medical doctor who had published a learned study of the diseases of the spleen. His antiquarian pursuits had already led him to publish
Itinerarium Curiosum
, a series of papers on “Remarkable Curiositys in Nature or Art,” and to make a survey of Stonehenge, but so far these were peripheral interests. Stukeley was also extremely sociable. He had become a leading figure in the Royal Society, as well as a founder of both the Antiquarian Society and the Society of Roman Knights, dedicated to the study
of classical antiquities. Since January 1721, he had been an active Freemason. He joined that brotherhood, as he later explained in an autobiographical memoir, “suspecting it to be the remains of the mysterys of the antients.”
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After his marriage in 1728, however, Stukeley changed the whole direction of his career by taking holy orders and moving to a living at Stamford in his native county of Lincolnshire.

From 1730 until 1765, Stukeley wrote his daily observations into almanacs—not the newfangled type of almanac, full of mathematical puzzles, but the old-fashioned kind, with prognostications, astronomical tables and essays on celestial happenings.
⁴⁴
The almanacs bought by Stukeley, such as Edmund Weaver's
British Telescope
, accepted the heliocentric order of the universe, which now reigned supreme. Weaver proudly defended the astronomer royal Edmond Halley's astronomical tables against accusations of inaccuracy made by a rival almanac-maker, Tycho Wing.
⁴⁵
Stukeley was well acquainted with Weaver, who lived not far away, at Freiston near Grantham. After Weaver's death in 1748, Stukeley eulogized him as “a very uncommon genius … much esteem'd by Mr. Martin Folkes,” president of the Society of Antiquaries.
⁴⁶
In 1730, Weaver had dropped in on Stukeley, accompanied by none other than his antagonist Tycho Wing, which suggests that their quarrel in print was somewhat artificial. The Wing family, settled in the county of Rutland, had been compiling almanacs since 1641, and the industrious Tycho (named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe) wrote those of Henry Coley, Francis More and Thomas Andrews as well as his own. If he was no admirer of Halley, at least Wing had declared his allegiance to the theories of Sir Isaac Newton.
⁴⁷

Stukeley's enthusiasm for astrology emerged from his close relationship with Weaver and Wing. It runs through thirty-five volumes of his diaries. At first, it appears in cryptic comments referring to the deaths of local people at the rising of the moon, or the timing of his wife's monthly periods.
⁴⁸
Early in 1735, Stukeley purchased an astrological manuscript of the Restoration period, to which he appended his own nativity, calculated by Tycho Wing. He included some revealing notes in his own hand. Stukeley confessed, “I am a stranger to Astrology & therefore cannot pretend to say any thing for or against it,” but he had nonetheless observed that the twelve signs of the zodiac governed “the menstrual flux of women.” While “no one of sense can think the stars irresistibly domineer over him & his actions … yet I see no absurdity in admitting, they may in some degree prefigure the events which generally flow from a combination of many causes & incidents.” He concluded that “there possibly may be somewhat in the Art, more than the generality of the learned now allow.”
⁴⁹
Wing had already gained his confidence by forecasting a bad year for
Stukeley, as well as a major inundation in Germany. Impressed, Stukeley wrote, “I cannot but admire at M
^r
Wyngs prognostic.”
⁵⁰

Always eager to make a mark in a new field, Stukeley soon began working on his own astrological theory. By February 1737, he had completed “my planetary scheme called Eimarmene or a project of rational Astrology,” which he never published.
Heimarmene
is a Greek term that can mean fate or destiny, but for the Neoplatonists it denoted “the justice-dealing activity of god” or the divine response to human acts.
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Stukeley was apparently trying to reconcile astrology with Christian ideas of providence. More celestial excitement was to follow. About a year later, the diary records a conversation with Wing in which the astrologer imparted to Stukeley an idea that proved highly significant in his subsequent work: “M
^r
Wyng says the minute & degree of Signs which now by astrologers is called respectively the exaltation of the planets, was the real aphelion point of the planets about 50 years before the deluge in one certain year. wh[ich] he takes to be noble monuments of antiquity, being the result of the observation of some antidiluvian astronomer.”
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A planet is “exalted” when placed in a zodiacal constellation that is considered favourable to it, while the aphelion is the point at which it is farthest from the sun. Wing's clever notion resembled Newton's attempt to fix the date of the Argo from the zodiacal position of the cardinal points of the ecliptic. The zodiac, however, related in Wing's view to a much earlier period, the time
before
the Flood: that is, when the original form of religion was still practised around the world. Stukeley had discussed ancient chronology with Newton before his death. Now he had the means to reconstruct through astrology what had always eluded the great scientist: the
prisca theologia
or original religion itself.
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