Solomon's Secret Arts Read Online Free

of learned men, compelled to live on the margins of respectability because of their religious or political disaffection with the Whig establishment, who preserved a strong attachment to occult thinking, which they were often shy to publicize. While they were wary of possession by spirits as promulgated by the French Prophets, they perceived the occult as a support to mystical religion. The most influential of them were John Byrom and William Law, both Nonjurors and Jacobites. Law would become central to the revival of the occult in the late eighteenth century, because he encouraged the republication of Jacob Boehme's writings.
    The four fat volumes of that work fell on newly fertile soil. By the 1760s and 1770s, Methodism had begun to spread a religion of the heart to wide audiences. Sentimental poetry and Gothic novels reintroduced readers to the strange and wonderful. Terror became a sentiment to be relished rather than avoided. Occult forms of Freemasonry flourished not only in France and Germany, but within English lodges as well. The groundwork for a revival of the occult was being laid. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this revival depended mainly on the middling ranks of society rather than the elite, although it attracted some well-connected figures like General Rainsford and was even tolerated by the celebrated Joseph Banks. For the most part, however, the occult revival was a phenomenon of urban middling culture. The booksellers of London noticed its commercial potential and did everything they could to exploit it, by reselling old works and publishing new ones. Conjuring shows and magic acts captivated a broad public. The occult revival produced a burst of publications in astrology, notably those of Ebenezer Sibly, as well as a renewal of alchemical experiments. A theological underpinning to these developments was provided by the writings of Swedenborg, who disdained magic but whose visionary theologyproved particularly appealing to those who fervently read Boehme or who practised alchemy. By the early 1790s, it looked as if occult thinking might become a respected feature of middling culture in England—although not in Scotland, where it was effectively resisted by the Moderate Presbyterian establishment and never took root.
    The occult revival was eventually undermined by political developments that branded it as radical, treasonable and (again) heterodox. The short-lived fad of magnetic healing, which mixed occult methods with quasi-scientific theory, began to subside when war with France broke out in 1793. The prophet Richard Brothers brought further suspicion on occult movements through his connection with the Freemasons of Avignon. By 1798, the occult lodges had been denounced as the fomenters of the French Revolution, an accusation that spread to include the whole Masonic fraternity. In these dire circumstances, William Blake began to write his prophetic poems, as a protest against the rule of “abstract reason” and a vindication of his own poetic conception of the occult. The long-standing, albeit awkward, relationship between occult thinking, on the one hand, and science and the Enlightenment, on the other, was rejected outright by Blake. In this respect, he stands at the beginning of an era of Romantic detachment from enlightened thought that would continue well into the nineteenth century.
    War with France delayed the next stage of development for occult thinking. After 1815, a younger generation of Romantic writers would emphasize novel and imaginative occult themes, often centred on acts of creation, as epitomized in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . The occult movements of the nineteenth century, especially Spiritualism and Theosophy, would build on this Romantic heritage. A conception of the occult as inimical to the rationalist project of Enlightenment would endure into the twentieth century. At the same time, the occult would experience ups and downs in commercial popularity, as older forms