The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age

Frances Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134524402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the contribution made by Dame Frances Yates to the serious study of esotericism and the occult sciences. To her work can be attributed the contemporary understanding of the occult origins of much of Western scientific thinking, indeed of Western civilization itself. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age was her last book, and in it she condensed many aspects of her wide learning to present a clear, penetrating, and, above all, accessible survey of the occult movements of the Renaissance, highlighting the work of John Dee, Giordano Bruno, and other key esoteric figures. The book is invaluable in illuminating the relationship between occultism and Renaissance thought, which in turn had a profound impact on the rise of science in the seventeenth century. Stunningly written and highly engaging, Yates' masterpiece is a must-read for anyone interested in the occult tradition.

Part I

The Occult Philosophy in
Renaissance and Reformation

1
MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN CABALA:
THE ART OF RAMON LULL

In the illustration shown in Plate 1,¹ four men are seen sitting under a neat row of trees, neatly labelled. In the background is a rich countryside: in the foreground a refreshing stream flows from a fountain. The illustration is taken from an engraving in the eighteenth-century edition of the works of Ramon Lull, which is based on medieval tradition of Lull illustration. The lady whose horse wades in the stream is Intelligence; severe intellectual work is going on. The men so calmly seated in these pleasant surroundings are doing the Lullian Art.

In the lifetime of the Catalan philosopher and mystic, Ramon Lull (1232–c. 1316), the Iberian peninsula was the home of three great religious and philosophical traditions. Dominant was Christianity and the Catholic Church, but a large part of the country was still under the rule of the Moslem Arabs; and it was in Spain that the Jews of the Middle Ages had their strongest centre. In the world of Ramon Lull, the brilliant civilisation of the Spanish Moslems, with its mysticism, philosophy, art, and science, was close at hand; the Spanish Jews had intensively developed their philosophy, their science and medicine, and their mysticism, or Cabala. To Lull, the Catholic Christian, occurred the generous idea that an Art, based on principles which all three religious traditions held in common, would serve to bind all three together on a common philosophical, scientific, and mystical basis. The men under the trees in the picture represent a Gentile or pagan; a Jew; a Saracen or Moslem; and a Christian. The representatives of the three religions have been found by the Gentile doing the Lullian Art together, and perceiving their unity in the fountain of life or mystical truth.

The scientific principle held in common by Christians, Moslems, and Jews, and on which Lull based his Art, was the theory of the elements.² It is unnecessary to enter here into the historical origins of the elemental theory which was held by scientific men in Lull’s period as a universally valid assumption about nature. The theory assumed that everything in the natural world is composed of four elements—earth, water, air, fire. To these corresponded the elemental qualities—cold, moist, dry, hot. These formed different compounds, or different concords and contrasts, which could be exactly classified or graded. The elemental theory had its prolongation into the world of the stars, for the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac were held to have either predominantly cold, moist, dry, or hot influences. Though these elemental characteristics of the stars, and their connection with terrestrial elements, were derived from the teachings of astrology, the elemental theory was not in itself astrological, but might more properly be called an astral science.

The use of the Lullian Art as astral science can be studied in Lull’s Tractatus de astronomia (1297) in which he works out a theory and practice of astral medicine through calculating, by the Art, the grading of elemental qualities. This treatise is preceded by a diatribe ‘against astrology’, from which Lull scholars of the past used to deduce (without reading the treatise) that Lull had discarded the astrological world view. Careful reading of the treatise reveals that it describes an astral medicine, based on belief in elemental qualities in the seven planets and the twelve signs, and their connection with terrestrial elements. This is a scientific use of a universally held theory of astral correspondences. It is not astrology in the sense of horoscope-making with its assumption of astrological determinism which Lull is ‘against’. In fact it is a kind of scientific escape from such determinism. In almost exactly the same way, two hundred years later, Pico della Mirandola was to pronounce himself ‘against astrology’, ³ meaning that he was against astrological determinism whilst accepting those astral correspondences which underlie ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’ as he and Ficino understood it.

The religious principle upon which Lull based his Art which was held by all three religious traditions, was the importance which Christian, Moslem, and Jew attached to the Divine Names or Attributes. The Attributes, or, as Lull prefers to call them, the Dignities of God on which the Art is based are Bonitos (Goodness), Magnitudo (Greatness), Eternitas (Eternity), Potestas (Power), Sapientia (Wisdom), Voluntas (Will), Virtus (Virtue or Strength), Veritas (Truth), Gloria (Glory). Religious Moslems, Jews, Christians, would all agree that God is good, great, eternal, powerful, wise, and so on. These Divine Dignities or Names, combined with elemental theory, gave Lull what he believed to be a universal religious and scientific basis for an Art so infallible that it could work on all levels of creation. And further – and this was its chief importance in Lull’s eyes – it was an Art which could prove the truth of the Christian Trinity to Moslems and Jews.

An extraordinary feature of Lullism is that it assigns a letter-notation to notions so exalted and abstract as the names, attributes, or dignities of God. The series of nine dignities, Bonitas, Magnitudo, and so on, listed above, become in the Art the nine letters BCDEFGHIK; the unmentioned A is the ineffable absolute. These letters Lull places on revolving concentric wheels, thus obtaining all possible combinations of them. And since the Goodness, Greatness, and so on of God are manifest on all levels of creation, he can ascend and descend with the figures of the Art throughout the universe, finding B to K and their relationships on every level. He finds them in the supercelestial sphere, on the level of the angels; in the celestial sphere, on the level of the stars; in man, on the human level; and below man, in animals, plants, and all the material creation. On these levels, the elemental theory comes into play; ABCD as the four elements works in conjunction with BCDEFGHIK. This relationship continues right up the ladder of creation to the stars, since there are forms of the elements in the stars. Above the stars, in the angelic sphere, the system is purified of all materiality; there are no contrasts and contraries as in the lower spheres; at this height all the contraries coincide, and the whole Art is seen to converge in proof that the highest divine essence is a Three.

This bald outline, though it may give some idea of the Art, is highly misleading in its simplicity. For the Art in its workings is immensely complex. It may have forms based on more than nine dignities. Its combinations of letter-notations almost suggest a kind of algebra. There is a kind of geometry involved, for the Art uses three figures, the triangle, the circle, and the square. The artist in moving up and down the levels of creation applies these figures on each level. The geometry is symbolical; the triangle symbolises the divine; the circle stands for the heavens (by which Lull always means the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac); the square symbolises the four elements.

The Aristotelian categories play a part in the Art which is said to work by a ‘natural’ logic, but the dominant philosophy is a kind of Platonism. Lull belongs into the tradition of medieval Christian Platonism, based primarily on Augustine; the Lullian dignities can nearly all be found listed as divine attributes in Augustine’s works. Like all medieval Platonists, Lull is also strongly influenced by the work on the celestial hierarchies of angels by Pseudo-Dionysius. The nearest parallel to his association of dignities or attributes with the elements is to be found in the De divisione naturae of the early Christian Platonist, John Scotus Erigena.⁴ Lull’s dignities have the creative capacity of Scotus’s primordial causes. Moslem forms of Platonic, or Neoplatonic, mysticism had also reached him. Yet perhaps the strongest influence on the formation of the Art was that of the Jewish Cabala.

It was in medieval Spain that Cabala reached a high point of development,⁵ and that climax coincides with the appearance of Lullism. The Zohar was written in Spain in about 1275. It was in 1274 that Lull had the vision on Mount Randa in which the two primary figures of the Art were revealed to him. There are many points of contact or resemblance between Cabalism and Lullism.

Spanish Cabala has as its bases the doctrine of the ten Sephi-roth and the doctrine of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sephiroth, as defined by G. Scholem, are ‘the ten names most common to God and in their entirety they form his one great Name’.⁶ The Sephiroth derive from the nameless ‘en-soph’; their names are Gloria, Sapientia, Veritas, Bonitas, Potestas, Virtus, Eternitas, Splendor, Fundamentum. The parallel with the nine Lullian Dignitates Dei derived from a nameless A is striking.

The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet also contain, for the Cabalist, the Name or Names, of God. They are the creative language of God and in contemplating them the Cabalist is contemplating both God himself and his creation. The thirteenth-century Spanish Jew, Abraham Abulafia,⁷ developed a complex technique of meditation through combining Hebrew letters in endless series of permutations and combinations.

Thus the two salient characteristics of the Lullian Art, its basis in the Names or Dignities, and its techniques of letter combination, are both also characteristics of Cabala. Yet there are profound differences, above all the basic fact that the Names in Cabala are in Hebrew, the letters which it combines are Hebrew letters; in the Lullian Art the Names are in Latin and the letters it combines are the ordinary letters of the Latin alphabet. Lullism may be said to be a Cabalist type of method but used without Hebrew. It is thus debarred from those insights into the linguistic mysteries which the Cabalist believed to be hidden in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Nevertheless, if it is possible to speak of a Christian Cabalist method used without Hebrew, then it may be claimed that Lullism is the medieval form of Christian Cabala.⁸ Certainly it is like later Christian Cabala in its missionary aim, its aim of proving the Trinity to Moslems and Jews and thereby converting them to Christianity.

The rigorous method of the Lullian Art is deployed against a background suffused in poetic and romantic charm, the world of medieval Spain. The Lullian hermit wanders through allegorical forests,⁹ the trees of which symbolise all the subjects of the Art, neatly categorised and arranged for the Lullist to use in his operations. These operations have not only scientific but also moral value through the use of analogy and allegory which permeates the Art. Thus the concords and contrasts of the elements are allegorised on the ‘moral’ trees of the Art as concords and contrasts between virtues and vices. The Lullian artist as Lull saw him had not only mastered a universal science; he had learned an ethical and contemplative method through which he might mount on the ladder of creation to the highest heights. Not only that, he was also a poet singing mystical love songs with all the charm of a troubadour; and a knight instructed in astral science and ethics in relation to the code of chivalry.¹⁰

As the inventor of a method which was to have an immense influence throughout Europe for centuries, Lull is an extremely important figure. Lullism is a precursor of scientific method. Lullian astral medicine developed into Pseudo-Lullian alchemy. The great figures of Renaissance Neoplatonism include Lullism in their interests, and naturally so since Lullism was the precursor of their ways of thinking.

And from the point of view of history of religion and of religious toleration, surely we admire Lull’s vision in taking advantage of the unique concentration of Christian, Moslem, and Jewish traditions in his world for putting forward a common ground between them in an Art, which, though it envisaged conversion rather than toleration, was certainly, in its efforts at understanding, vastly superior to the methods to be used later in Spain for the establishment of religious unity.

The glorious reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1474–1504) saw the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile through their marriage, and the rapid advance in power of the unified kingdom through their energetic government. Determined on establishing total religious unity within the Iberian peninsula, the two Catholic sovereigns initiated the war against the Moors which ended triumphantly with the conquest of Granada in 1492. In the same year, 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain; in 1505 the conquered Moors were also expelled. Thus two whole populations, embodying two great civilisations, were cut adrift from their homeland to wander as exiles. Through the tightening up of the Inquisition in Spain, particularly severe against Jews and Moors, return to what had been their native land for so many centuries was impossible. Spain, like France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, became and remained ‘toute Catholique’.

Thus, as so often, Europe took a wrong turning and wasted the spiritual resources which might have been used constructively. For of all the countries of Europe, Spain was the best placed for making a liberal approach to the three great closely related religions. Ramon Lull had realised this in his peculiar way when he strove to construct a method based on Divine Names and elemental theory. Though, for him, the Art was not a construction but a revelation from on high shown to him in the vision on Mount Randa.

The old view of the origins of the so-called Renaissance held that the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 was a starting-point. Recent generations of scholars have weakened that view, through exploration of many other influences and particularly through demonstrating the importance of surviving medieval traditions in the so-called Renaissance. Yet there re...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
• PART II: THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE
• PART III: THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY AND ROSICRUCIANISM AND PURITANISM: THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES