AULA LUCIS
fiat · lux

I n April of 1651, the thirty-year-old Welshman Thomas Vaughan released what he said would be his last “discourse,” titled Lumen de Lumine, or a New Magical Light. It was also to be the key to his first, published the previous year and the subject of a protracted debate.¹ Vaughan would continue to write books under the pseudonym Eugenius Philalethes (“well-born lover of truth”), but this new one would be unlike anything else he ever wrote. 

¶ It began as a dream vision in rhymed couplets, then switched to the “low Dialect” of prose as it told of his persona’s encounter with the nature goddess Thalia (“the flourishing one”), who guides him through the underground region where alchemists thought the various metals grew. She leaves him on the bank of a river—no doubt the River Usk in Vaughan’s native Breconshire—but not without “certain pieces of Gold” and “a paper folded like a Letter.” The paper turns out to be a “map” of the dream world through which she has guided him. Vaughan’s persona is reminded of a “letter” sent by the Rosicrucian Fraternity to prospective members. Then, after discussing the symbolism in the map and letter, Eugenius/Vaughan offers a series of comments on features of the map.

¶ Vaughan’s modern editors have sought analogies for the engraved map, designated the “Scholæ Magicæ Typus” (“Image of the School of Magic”), as well as the Rosicrucian document.² However, there are more immediate sources in German publications that followed the printing of the original Rosicrucian documents—the so-called manifestos—in the second decade of the seventeenth century.³ In this essay, I plan to identify and discuss a source for the image and another one for the letter, each of which asks readers to exercise their imaginations.

lumen de lumine and the school of magic

¶ Lumen de Lumine took its title from the Nicene creed. The “light of light” was commonly understood to be Christ, and Vaughan’s title page quoted the parallel lines in Genesis and the Gospel according to John: “God said Let there be Light” and “The Light shineth in the Darkness.”⁴ But he also took this light as part of a magical tradition that incorporated Christianity. He dedicated the book “To my Dear mother, the most famous University of Oxford,” which he saw as a “dispersed Body” of learning, no longer what it had been. Vaughan was part of that diaspora: Jesus College, Oxford, where his first biographer said he became a fellow,⁵ had been purged of members who did not recognize the authority of Parliament during a visitation of 1648—members who still supported the embattled king. Biographers also confirm that Vaughan was ordained priest in the Church of England and was given the living of his home parish in Wales, but he left the area after heavy royalist losses there and would soon lose the income from the parish and the adjacent farmland. With his religious, political, and intellectual convictions in question, Vaughan may well have attempted the sort of imaginative history the German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann⁶ and others have suggested. But did he?

¶ We find a suggestive answer in a book he published a few months earlier. After his first book on the power of God in the creation, which he had called “theomagica,”⁷ Vaughan wrote a history of magic “from Adam downwards,” concluding with his persona Eugenius Philalethes “as an usher to the train [procession], and one born out of due time.”⁸ He began by saying:

Following the lead of Agrippa and other apologists, Vaughan went on to note that “Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world.”¹⁰

“

The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.

¶ The light that conferred magical power to the natural philosopher was known as the lumen naturæ (“light of nature”). Paracelsus called this the “Licht des Menschen” (“people’s light”), possibly with reference to words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in heaven.”¹¹ The University of Oxford still has a coat of arms bearing the motto Dominus illuminatio meus (“the Lord is my light”)¹²; the University of Cambridge’s coat of arms also features light in its motto.¹³ Both universities were founded in the high Middle Ages, but preserved the tradition of taking and indeed reflecting light from both nature and God. In the seventeenth century, the Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote used the biblical statement “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD” to support the principles of right reason and natural law.¹⁴ In all these and many similar claims, light came to people outwardly through nature and inwardly from God; however, even the sun, moon, and stars that light the natural world were said to take their light from God. Moreover, this light allowed Christian writers to draw upon pagan traditions on the ground that it was also available as part of a natural religion. To support this view, early modern writers drew on St. Paul’s remark that “the invisible things of him [God] are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead, so that they [the pagans] are without excuse.”¹⁵

¶ The light of nature is at the center of Thalia’s map of the world through which she led Vaughan’s dreamer (see Fig. 1). It lights up the world where a blindfolded seeker of truth is standing, while he is turned away from it toward the “Regio phantastica” (“Phantastic region” or “Region of fancy”) where dangerous griffins threaten anyone looking for the “Mons Magorum Invisibilis” (“Invisible mountain of the magicians”).¹⁶ Vaughan understands magic as his favorite author Henricus Cornelius Agrippa defined it, in his three books of occult philosophy, to be the hidden or occult sciences that could guide one in the three worlds of God’s creation: alchemy in the natural world, astrology in the celestial world, and cabala—a Christianized version of Hebrew Kabbalah—in the supercelestial or angelical world.¹⁷ It was usually called magia naturalis (“natural magic”) or philosophia naturalis (“natural philosophy”). The term scientia naturalis (“natural science”) was used less frequently in medieval and early modern times. In days when Aristotle was still the authority in university debates, students would proceed quickly from his physics to his metaphysics. The very structure of books on scientific matters like chemistry was basically deductive. Roger Bacon’s well known Speculum Alchemiæ (“Mirror of Alchemy”) began with definitions and principles and then moved on to “accidents” (i.e., accidentals).¹⁸ One of Vaughan’s favorite books of alchemy, the Testamentum falsely ascribed to Ramon Lull—no doubt because relying heavily on his mnemonics—had two parts, labelled Theorica and Practica (“theoretical” and “practical”).¹⁹ When Vaughan wrote about alchemical matters, he spent most of his effort on the theory and certainly wrote best on this part of the subject. Though he is often called a “spiritual alchemist,”²⁰ he might better be termed a “theoretical alchemist,” which is to say, a writer who helps readers imagine the work of alchemy.

Fig. 1: “Image of the school of magic” from Thomas Vaughan, Lumen de Lumine.

¶ Concerning the light of nature, Vaughan writes:

This light is life itself, rather like the élan vitale of Bergson.²¹ For Vaughan, it corresponds to the sun in the “great world” or macrocosm and to the “continual coction ... or boiling” in the human body or microcosm; and just as Bergson’s vital force is responsible for evolution, Vaughan’s inner light is the agent of transmutation, both in humans and in the things of nature.

¶ The magical school of Thalia’s map is, first of all, the school of nature. “As for the Mysteries of my School,” she tells Eugenius, “thou hast the Liberty to peruse them all, there is not any thing here, but I will gladly reveal it to thee.” It is not free from deceptions, he later explains as he reflects on her map. “It is true,” he writes, “that no man enters the Magical School but he wanders first in this Region of Chimeras”—the “Regio phantastica” on the map. We have still to identify the third figure in this central vignette, between the upper vignette of the mountain at the bottom one with the child. The winged figure to the reader’s left of the candle holds a sword in its right hand and a string in its left hand. It is later identified as the “Guide” one needs to find the mountain of the magicians, which is said to be invisible. Vaughan also calls it “the Angel or Genius of the place. In one hand he bears a sword, to keep off the Contentious and unworthy: in the other a Clew [ball] of Thread to lead in the Humble, and Harmless.”

“

As for the Mysteries of my School, thou hast the Liberty to peruse them all, there is not anything here but I will gladly reveal it to thee.

¶ The map or “Emblematical Type” of Thalia’s “Sanctuary” and school was produced for publication as an engraving by Robert Vaughan, whose name appears in the lower right-hand corner. Almost nothing is known of this Vaughan, who may have been a relative; he also engraved the title page for a book of poems by Vaughan’s twin brother, registered a few days after Lumen de Lumine. He is regarded as one of the best portrait engravers of the early seventeenth century, and produced the engravings for the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652).²² The volume’s wealthy editor, Elias Ashmole, kept the records of his instructions to the engraver, which show that Robert Vaughan was used to taking directions and being given older drawings as guides—all of which leads one to assume that Vaughan gave instructions for the map of Thalia’s school.

¶ One possible source is an engraving of the alchemical “conjunction” prepared by the Paracelsian physician Stephan Michelspacher during the rush of Rosicrucian publications in the second decade of the seventeenth century (Fig. 2). An early attempt to demonstrate the combination of magical arts favored by Agrippa and other predecessors of the newly announced Rosicrucian fraternity, the book featured an allegorical representation of the alchemical wedding or conjunction in the third of its four full-page engravings.²³ The work takes place in an explicitly alchemical mountain on which the deities representing the seven metals stand, with Mercury at the top; inside of which the royal couple sit; and up to which steps have been carved in the rock and labeled with names traditionally given to the seven stages of the alchemical work. In the foreground there are two human figures, one blindfolded and extending his arms in the universal sign of bewilderment, the other following nature as he hastens after a rabbit headed into a hole under the mountain.²⁴

Fig. 2: “Conjunction” from Stephan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur (1615; Augsburg: Johann Weh, 1654).

¶ Here we might pause to address the question of the blindfold. Was it not a common feature of initiations into secret societies? Doesn’t Tamino wear a blind-fold when he enters the pseudo-Masonic temple in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791)?²⁵ This seems to be an eighteenth-century development.²⁶ There were Masonic groups in England and Scotland in the seventeenth century; Elias Ashmole was initiated into one in 1646, and Vaughan’s patron, Sir Robert Moray, into another in 1641. However, the earliest known instructions for the ceremony of initiation make no mention of a blindfold. Instead, the candidate is first to be “frighted with 1000 ridiculous postures and grimaces” and then to enter the assembled company making “a ridiculous bow” and a sign he has been shown.²⁷ As I read the two engravings, the earlier one of the conjunction seems to suggest that the seven steps of the alchemical work are not the path to be taken, rather the steps following nature into the underworld. The later one of the school of magic suggests meanwhile that the magic mountain cannot be seen with the naked eye because it is invisible.

¶ The bottom vignette, inside the circle formed by an ouroboros or winged serpent biting its tail, seems to be original with Vaughan. The Latin words above the vignette, “Thesaurus Incantatus” (“Unsung treasure”) indicate that it contains the riches of Thalia’s “mineral Region.” The words within the circle, “Non nisi parvulis” (“Only as little ones”) encapsulate a saying of Jesus: “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”²⁸ In a subsequent commentary, Vaughan remarks that the winged serpent is “the Green Dragon, or the Magician’s Mercury, involving in itself a Treasure of Gold and Pearl”; that the string or “River of Pearl” is “the stone of the Philosophers”; and that the child sitting on the pearls represents the sort of person who will be admitted to the treasury of the earth: “Innocent, and very humble: not impudent proud raunters, nor covetous uncharitable misers.”²⁹

¶ Before we can think of Michelspacher’s engraving as a source for Vaughan’s engraver, we must ask how a solitary reader in London—no longer connected to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which he celebrated in a poem prefixed to Lumen de Lumine—could have seen a book printed decades earlier in a foreign country. It seems likely that Vaughan had access to the finest library of Rosicrucian materials in England: the library amassed over several decades by the late Dr. Robert Fludd (1574–1637). Fludd had written one of the first defenses of the Rosicrucian movement,³⁰ and his nephew and godson Lewin Fludd, who was also a trained physician, took possession of his books. Vaughan’s Anglo-American friend Robert Child visited the library and borrowed books that he may have shared with others.³¹ He may have also borrowed manuscripts, including the English translation of the Rosicrucian manifestos for which Vaughan was persuaded to prepare an introduction.³²

¶ The first detailed study of Michelspacher’s book emphasizes its concern with “the Tincture of the Alchemists,” a transformative substance promoted in Paracelsian medicine.³³ Vaughan referred to the “Tincture” nine times in Lumen de Lumine and five times in the preface to the translated Rosicrucian manifestos. In a late discourse, published several years after the English manifestos, he wrote: “It is the advice of the Brothers of R: C: that those who would be Proficient in this Art [alchemy], should study the elements and their operations before they seek after the Tinctures of Metals.”³⁴ It seems no big surprise that Vaughan would choose for his first commentary on the dream vision and its map a Rosicrucian document that discusses the tincture that the guide would give to the successful initiate.³⁵ The first Rosicrucian manifesto made explicit reference to Paracelsus, and the medical ideas in subsequent Rosicrucian writings are implicitly Paracelsian, when not explicitly so. In the Archidoxes or “principal teachings” that Paracelsus distributed to his followers, he called the tincture an arcanum, or secret, that “induces health.” He added, “The tincture tinges the good and the evil, the dense and the subtle. None, otherwise, does this perfect its operations on the body so as to transmute corrupt and ill-disposed complexions into sound ones, just like that tincture which makes Luna [silver] out of Mercury.”³⁶ This is the end of Paracelsian medicine: to improve human bodies as alchemy improved metallic ones.

the rosicrucian letter and its source

¶ No sooner did Vaughan’s narrator awake from his dream tour of “the invisible Guiana” with its “mountains of the Moon” than he thought of a document from his eclectic reading.³⁷ “The Access and Pilgrimage to this place, with the Difficulties which attend them, are faithfully and magisterially described by the Brothers of R. C.” He then offered a Latin text which he called “A Letter from the Brothers of R. C. Concerning the Invisible, Magical Mountain, and the Treasure therein Contained.” He considered it sufficiently important that, he wrote, “I shall, for the satisfaction of the ordinary Reader, put it into English.”

¶ The letter starts with the statement that everyone has a natural desire for riches that would make one feel such “dominion” over things as God intended for man in the creation story (Genesis 1:26). Although people wish for rewards without the requisite work, the world has reached the last age (“ultimo sæculo”) when all shall be revealed to the worthy (Matthew 10:26). They must, however, make the arduous and dangerous journey to a certain mountain guarded by the devil. They must travel there on a long dark night, presumably in the spirit rather than the body, and must find a guide (Latin “conductor”) to lead and protect them—indeed, to find them first of all and take them to the mountain’s location “in the Midst of the Earth, or Center of the world which is both small and Great,” which is to say, at the heart of the individual seeker as well as the physical creation as understood in the geocentric cosmology. Then at sunrise, the “great Treasure” will be visible: “The Chiefest thing in it, and the most perfect, is a certain exalted Tincture with which the world (if it served God and were worthy of such Gifts) might be tinged and turn’d into most pure Gold.” But first the tincture will serve to rejuvenate the seeker:

However, the tincture must not be abused, or else it will be lost irrecoverably.³⁸

¶ Vaughan’s first modern editor, Arthur Edward Waite, cited a letter that Robert Fludd traced back to one addressed to a candidate in Danzig (modern-day Gdańsk). Pious in tone, the letter opened with a paraphrase of biblical texts: “Ascendamus ad montem rationabilum, & ædificemus domum Sapientiæ” (“let us ascend the mountain of reason and build the house of Wisdom”).³⁹ Waite found an English version, “quaintly translated in a manuscript of the seventeenth century.”⁴⁰ The aspirant was urged:

Waite considered this document “much inferior” to Vaughan’s; however, he noted that little early Rosicrucian literature was available in English libraries, and he did not read German himself.⁴² Some years later, Alan Rudrum found a variant Latin translation of what he assumed was the original German text.⁴³ However, it seems possible that an original Latin translation reached Vaughan in a manuscript or printed book. For one of the two German versions first printed in 1617 had a title-page note informing readers that it was “first written in the Latin language, but then translated into German” (“Erstlich in Lateinisch Sprach beschrieben ... Jetzo aber verdeutscht”).⁴⁴ The translator and supposed author was a German physician named Georg Molther,⁴⁵ and what little we know about him suggests a strong association with the culture from which the Rosicrucian materials first appeared.

¶ A native of Grünberg in Hesse, Georg Molther (1588‒1660) attended medical classes at the University of Marburg an der Lahn, also in Hesse, from 1608 or 1609 until 1613, when he received his medical degree.⁴⁶ He was a classmate of the alchemist Johann Daniel Mylius, with whom he participated in public disputations in 1614. He became the city physician of the Hessian town of Wetzlar in 1616. The duke or Graf of Hesse—Moritz, who was called “the learned”—was the son of the university’s founder, and he made a point of finding professors of medicine who followed the teachings of Paracelsus. Moritz took an early interest in the Rosicrucian writings, and the first manifesto was printed by his court printer in Kassel, four years after the first printed reply to the circulating manuscript.⁴⁷

“

Enter, enter into ye glory of God and thy own salvation, ye gates and School of Philosophical Love, in which is taught everlasting charity and fraternal love.

¶ The town of Wetzlar is situated some sixty kilometers northwest of Frankfurt, which gave the young physician ready access to the famous book market there. In a pamphlet dated 1615 and prepared in time for the 1616 market, Molther told of a man who called himself a Rosicrucian when he passed through the town. Molther was sufficiently intrigued to seek him out and wrote that he found the man “knowledgable about all the secrets of nature” (“omnia Naturæ consiliorum poterat videri particeps”).⁴⁸ He subsequently published a report on the message given to aspiring candidates by this supposed Rosicrucian, identified only as E. D. F. O. C. R.—i.e., E. D. Frater Ordinis Crucæ Roseæ or E. D. Brother of the Order of the Christian Red Cross.⁴⁹ Modern scholars tend to dismiss the work as a literary hoax, noting that no real brother would reveal his identity under the rule of secrecy announced in the first manifesto; thus anyone professing to be a brother would be an obvious fraud. However, the early commentator Michael Maier, who wrote a book on the rules of the order, took the story as a true one, presumably because he believed that the years of imposed secrecy had ended with the publication of the first manifesto. He included news from Wetzlar in his major account of the fraternity.⁵⁰

¶ Molther’s small book, which runs to only thirteen printed pages, contains almost the whole of Vaughan’s letter; only the last three pages are omitted from Lumen de Lumine. The English translation has been reprinted, sometimes as Vaughan’s original composition⁵¹ and usually with deep regard for the message. One author likens Vaughan’s letter to “that type of teaching and inspiration that occurs to us in dreams.”⁵²

the other mysteries

¶ After translating the letter, Vaughan continues his commentary on the map or “Magical Emblem” that Thalia gave the dreamer. With commentary on the upper vignette of the mountain behind him—for Thalia has identified the Mountains of the Moon as the source of mercurial waters—he turns to the central vignette with the blindfolded man about to enter the realm of fantasy. He makes it clear that this man differs significantly from the possible model in Michelspacher’s emblem. He is not contrasted with the man who follows nature in the form of a rabbit. Instead, he is representative of all men. “It is true,” Vaughan writes, “that no man enters the Magical School but [unless] he wanders first in this Region of Chimæras, for the Inquiries we make before we attain to Experimental Truths, are most of them erroneous.” The “Fantastic Region” is the source of all error, “the true Original Seminary [seed bed] of all Sects and their dissentions.” There is no avoiding it unless one finds the “Angel or Genius of the place,” who carries a sword to repel the unworthy and a string to lead the humble seeker after truth.⁵³

¶ Vaughan identifies the light of nature at the center of the middle vignette with the candle of God.⁵⁴ Thus it belongs on an altar, as shown in the engraving. It burns brightly in a dark place, as the whole of the central vignette should be understood. It corresponds to the sun in the physical world, and it resembles the light inside each living thing, though obscured by matter. Underneath the altar is the ouroboros or, as Vaughan specifies, the true mercury of alchemists, along with a treasure of pearl and gold. This treasure is not strictly symbolic, Vaughan assures the reader; it is “neither dream nor fancy but a known, demonstrable, practical Truth.”

¶ His survey of the symbolic “counter-world” completed, Vaughan moves on to the “other Mysteries” Thalia taught him underground. He does so in what seems their “Natural Harmonical Order.” He starts with the first matter or prima materia and moves on through the stages of the alchemical work to what he calls “The Regeneration, Ascent, and Glorification.” This is followed by the projection of the ultimate matter or philosophers’ stone onto everyday matter, which he calls “The Descent, and Metempsychosis.” The discussion in these eleven sections takes up more than half the book, but our focus remains the engraved image and what it says about the progression from sense perception to fantasy, imagination and vision. It seems that significant sense perceptions are stored in memory, to be sorted by reason and judgment, while the less ordinary ones are stored with the imagination and fantasy from which dreams are made. Vision occurs on a higher plane than that of reason, judgment, and memory, in what Vaughan terms “the Fire-world” where one “sees what is both invisible and incredible to the common Man.” The entrance to this world is through what Paracelsus calls the Aquaster (“star water”), which Jung identified with the unconscious.⁵⁵ The imagination then takes on a double quality: passive daydreaming and what Jung called “active imagination,” which is very close to vision, though it comes from the god within. This is the imagination that Paracelsus called “the star in man” and identified with the astral body.

¶ Vaughan ends with a set of ten “magical aphorisms” (“Aphorismi Magici”). They are closer to the concerns of his first tracts, which treated the biblical creation in terms of the Pythagorean tetractys, reaching from unity through duality to trinity and quaternity. Waite has called them “a kind of chaotic Kabalism, designed to set forth the successive manifestation of created things.”⁵⁶ They may have their origin in Gerard Dorn’s “Physics of Trithemius,” with its interest in the Monad, Binarius, etc.⁵⁷ They have been mistaken, quite deliberately it seems, for a “Rosicrucian Creed.”⁵⁸ And here we may note that Vaughan had his detractors as well as his followers, those who thought his books full of nonsense instead of mystery.

conclusion

¶ Four months after Lumen de Lumine appeared in the bookstalls, Thomas Vaughan married the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Rebecca Vaughan seems to have brought no other dowry than her maiden Bible and a book of devotions. The couple took lodgings on the north end of Gray’s Inn Lane (now Road) and devoted much of their time to chemical operations. During their time together, he wrote two other essays: the introduction to the first English edition of the Rosicrucian manifestos, first printed in 1614 and 1615,⁵⁹ and a last book on alchemy, in which he confessed his early errors and gave his mature views about the transmutation of metals.⁶⁰ After Rebecca died, Vaughan found work as a chemical operator for the first president of the Royal Society, Sir Robert Moray. He died in February 1666, leaving his books and papers to Moray.

¶ The Dutch scholar Wouter J. Hannegraaff devotes a full chapter of his book Esotericism in the Academy to the role of imagination in the formation of esoteric traditions. He even includes a section on the literary imagination as it shaped counter histories of Rosicrucianism, positive in the Comte de Gabalis while negative in the nearly contemporary Histoire d’imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oefle.⁶¹

¶ What began as the story of a traveler in a previous century, as told in the first Rosicrucian manifesto, set a model for the way that “invisible colleges” of like-minded naturalists would be envisioned.⁶² Vaughan contributed to the development of a Rosicrucian tradition in England, answering needs that he and others felt amid what his first biographer called “the unsettledness of the times.”⁶³

¶ Like Cornelius Agrippa, for whose work he expressed a deep appreciation, Vaughan identified a real difference between fantasy and imagination. Those who seek to understand the whole of God’s creation must try to understand what St. Paul termed “the invisible things” of God, the invisibilia. They must seek this knowledge through “the things that are made,” the quæ facta sunt (Romans 1:20).⁶⁴ That is to say, they must investigate the invisible world, where their first efforts will necessarily involve fantasy and confusion as they wander without the benefit of eyesight. If the light is to be made “visibly manifest”—manifeste visibilis in Agrippa’s phrase—they must amend their ways of living and thinking to become as little children, open to all the wonders of creation. But that is not enough. Each must also find a guide, which may be an angel or spiritual messenger. For the journey is to be made by the soul rather than the body. Vaughan uses the words “soul” and “anima” repeatedly in the comments that follow the dreamer’s map and the Rosicrucian letter, and one would not be wrong to speak of the journey as involving what some psychologists call “soul-work.”⁶⁵

¶ In the material from Vaughan’s Lumine de Lumine on which this essay has focused, the engraved “image of the school of magic” may be said to represent the vision given to the dreaming Eugenius Philalethes in the “mineral region” underground. That world, in turn, may be said to be illuminated by the same divine imagination that informed the revelations in the Hermetic texts of antiquity, the Corpus Hermeticum translated by Marsilio Ficino during the Italian Renaissance of the Cinquecento. However, that light is blocked from ordinary adult consciousness by the symbolic blindfold imposed by ‘original sin’ (cf. John Temple's essay The Fall that wasn't). To see the light, the blindfolded man must first wander in the region of phantasms or fantasies, which the dreamer in Vaughan’s allegory has been told are “empty imaginary whimsies, for abstractions are so many fantastic suppositions.” The Rosicrucian letter builds on this trinity of fantasy, imagination, and revelation principally by expanding on the biblical theme “There is Nothing covered [hidden], that shall not be revealed” (Matthew 10:26; cf. Luke 12:2).

¶ The Rosicrucian messages assume that the world has reached its “last Age,” when all secrets shall be made known.⁶⁶ This assumption was associated with the biblical promise, in the final chapter of the Christian Old Testament, “Behold I send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD” (Malachi 4:5). The letter itself denounces the fantasy of gold-making as an end in itself, while it helps the reader imagine the life-changing vision to be had by the seeker of truth who is guided by prayer and angelic assistance to a vision on the mountaintop.

¶ In this essay, I have tried to read Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine in the way that he read a favorite author like Cornelius Agrippa: imaginatively, as a late-comer to his chosen tradition. In saying this, I think of Vaughan’s comment in his most strictly historical discourse. Without claiming to be an antiquarian or anything more than an eager reader in the well-stocked library of the friend to whom he dedicated the text, Vaughan said he saw himself as “an usher to the train, and one born out of due time”⁶⁷—that is, as an attendant to the procession he was introducing, from Moses and Hermes Trismegistus down to Agrippa and authors of his own century.

¶ Vaughan’s tradition could be challenged on historical grounds—for example, with the re-dating of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus in remote antiquity to the early Christian era.⁶⁸ But that does not keep it from being Vaughan’s tradition or, in the useful term of Schmidt-Biggemann, his “counter-world”⁶⁹ as well as a product of the historical imagination. When one studies a counter-world on its own terms, one has a certain privilege. I could say with the German historian and folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert, that in my contact with Vaughan and his Rosicrucian sources “I have been allowed to experience magic as truth” (“ich habe Magie als Wahrheit spüren dürfen”).⁷⁰ Vaughan insisted that he —or at least his alter-ego Eugenius Philalethes, the nobly-born lover of truth—was obliged to tell the truth. He thought that magic was a higher truth: “the Wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the Creature.”⁷¹ He asked, however, to be judged by the integrity of his conception, a world view or counter-world that later generations of English speakers would come to regard as imaginative rather than imaginary.

— thomas willard

This essay has been adapted from a paper titled “Fantasy, Imagination, and Vision in Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine,” published in Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time (De Gruyter, 2020), with kind permission of the author and the publisher.

Show footnotes.

thomas willard is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Thomas Vaughan and the Rosicrucian Revival in Britain, 1649–1666 (Leiden and Boston, 2023) and the editor of Jean d‘Espagnet's ‘Summary of Physics Restored’ (Enchyridion Physicæ Restitutæ) with Arcanum (New York, 1999; London, 2018).

¶ He wrote an Introduction to the 400th-anniversary edition of Jean d‘Espagnet's Hermetic Arcanum, published in 2023. Most recently, he has been the co-editor of the forthcoming 4th volume in the Mysterium Hermeticum series, Thomas Vaughan's Aula Lucis (published together with Lumen de Lumine), to which he has contributed an Introduction and a Commentary on the “Magical Aphorisms of Eugenius Philalethes.” This title can be pre-ordered below.

Related Books:

A New Magical Light of Thomas Vaughan

1st January, 2025

¶ One possible source is an engraving of the alchemical “conjunction” prepared by the Paracelsian physician Stephan Michelspacher during the rush of Rosicrucian publications in the second decade of the seventeenth century (Fig. 2). An early attempt to demonstrate the combination of magical arts favored by Agrippa and other predecessors of the newly announced Rosicrucian fraternity, the book featured an allegorical representation of the alchemical wedding or conjunction in the third of its four full-page engravings.²³ The work takes place in an explicitly alchemical mountain on which the deities representing the seven metals stand, with Mercury at the top; inside of which the royal couple sit; and up to which steps have been carved in the rock and labeled with names traditionally given to the seven stages of the alchemical work. In the foreground there are two human figures, one blindfolded and extending his arms in the universal sign of bewilderment, the other following nature as he hastens after a rabbit headed into a hole under the mountain.²⁴

Show footnotes.