In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research, flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of inspiration.
The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.
It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did, ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein, kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy, that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel, deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty court of every landgrave and elector.
Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed. Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested, therefore, on the knowledge of the intellectual vinculum (the divine potency inherent in certain words), the astral (the favourable conjunction of the planets), and the elementary (the sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, et hoc genus omne.[[212]]
CHAPTER IV.
For I am siker that there be sciences,
By which men maken divers apparences,
Swiche as thise subtil tregetoures play.
For oft at festes have I well herd say,
That tregetoures, within an halle large,