The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince Page A
Authors: Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince
Tags: History, Retail, Non-Fiction, Gnostic Dementia, Fringe Science, Amazon.com, Science History, Occult History
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re-dating of the Hermetica against its devotees.
CHAPTER FIVE
SIGNS, SYMBOLS AND SILENCE
One might be forgiven for thinking that as the Age of Enlightenment moved inexorably towards the Age of Science, Hermeticism was, if not actually dead then pretty much moribund. But in fact, for the most part, it just continued in disguise. For obvious reasons of self-preservation after the polarization of the Thirty Years War, most thinkers who were inspired by the Renaissance occult tradition downplayed that fact, while quietly continuing on their path. Others, meanwhile, took little care to be circumspect, and astonishingly, got away with it. These two approaches – covert and overt – were respectively adopted by two of the seventeenth century’s most remarkable minds: Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz and Athanasius Kircher.
CHAPTER SIX
THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE
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 fellowtraveller 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:
The word Antilia I used because of a former society, that was really begun almost to the same purpose a little before the Bohemian wars. It was as it were a tessera of that society, used only by the members thereof. I never desired the interpretation of it. It was interrupted and destroyed by the following Bohemian and German wars. 7
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 projectedpansophic 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
CHAPTER FIVE
SIGNS, SYMBOLS AND SILENCE
One might be forgiven for thinking that as the Age of Enlightenment moved inexorably towards the Age of Science, Hermeticism was, if not actually dead then pretty much moribund. But in fact, for the most part, it just continued in disguise. For obvious reasons of self-preservation after the polarization of the Thirty Years War, most thinkers who were inspired by the Renaissance occult tradition downplayed that fact, while quietly continuing on their path. Others, meanwhile, took little care to be circumspect, and astonishingly, got away with it. These two approaches – covert and overt – were respectively adopted by two of the seventeenth century’s most remarkable minds: Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz and Athanasius Kircher.
CHAPTER SIX
THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE
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 fellowtraveller 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:
The word Antilia I used because of a former society, that was really begun almost to the same purpose a little before the Bohemian wars. It was as it were a tessera of that society, used only by the members thereof. I never desired the interpretation of it. It was interrupted and destroyed by the following Bohemian and German wars. 7
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 projectedpansophic 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
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