Elias Ashmole

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Elias Ashmole was an English antiquary, astrologer, and student of alchemy whose career spans the strange interval when the same man could collect ancient manuscripts, cast horoscopes, herald the arms of the crown, and sit among the founders of the Royal Society without anyone finding the combination odd. Born in Lichfield in 1617, the son of a saddler, he rose through the upheavals of the English Civil War as a royalist, trained in law at the Middle Temple, and after the Restoration secured a comfortable post as Windsor Herald — an officer of arms in the College of Arms, charged with the genealogy, precedence, and ceremony of the nobility. The offices were not a disguise worn over the occult studies; for Ashmole they were one continuous labor. Heraldry, the casting of figures, the chemistry of metals, and the recovery of old books all answered to a single conviction: that knowledge worth having had been laid down by earlier ages and needed gathering before it scattered.

A life assembled out of the war

The Civil War made and unmade him. When Parliament’s armies overran the Midlands he attached himself to the royalist cause, holding a commission and a minor ordnance post in the king’s garrison at Oxford in the mid-1640s — and it was Oxford, the besieged wartime capital of Charles I, that first put him among mathematicians, astrologers, and natural philosophers. He married three times, each marriage a turn of his fortunes: a first wife who died young; then Mary, Lady Mainwaring, a wealthy widow whose relations dragged him through years of Chancery litigation; and finally Elizabeth, daughter of the antiquary Sir William Dugdale, a union that bound him into the learned world of English record-scholarship. The defeat of the king sent men of his kind inward and backward — out of public affairs and into the libraries, the cabinets, and the laboratories where a royalist of antiquarian temper could wait out the Interregnum. Ashmole used the years exactly so. His most consequential esoteric work belongs to the 1650s, the decade of his political eclipse.

The book that fixed his name to alchemy

His lasting place in the history of esoteric thought rests on a book. In 1652 he published the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, subtitled as a collection of the poetical pieces of the famous English philosophers who had written the hermetic mysteries in their own ancient language — a large anthology of English alchemical poetry gathered from medieval and Tudor manuscripts and printed, with his own running annotations, in a single folio. Into it he copied George Ripley’s Compound of Alchymie with its set of nested circular diagrams, Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchimy, and verse running back through Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, John Dastin, Thomas Charnock, William Bloomfield, and the Elizabethan scryer Edward Kelley — along with a piece by John Dee, whose manuscripts Ashmole pursued and partly preserved. Much of this poetry survives only because Ashmole troubled to transcribe and print it; the Theatrum is the principal monument of English verse alchemy and the deliberate answer to the great Continental Latin collections — Zetzner’s Theatrum Chemicum of Strasbourg above all — that had fixed the alchemical canon everywhere except England.

The annotations and the long Prolegomena are where Ashmole declares himself. He read alchemy not as fraud but as a hidden philosophy, a wisdom the old adepts had veiled in deliberate obscurity, in fable and figure and broken syntax, so that the worthy might find it and the unworthy stumble past. The English poets, on his reading, belonged to one company with the ancient sages and with Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary author behind the Corpus Hermeticum and the named patron of the whole art — for to write of the “hermetique mysteries” was to claim a descent from that source. He signed himself, in the volume, Mercuriophilus Anglicus, the English lover of Mercury, planting the planetary metal at the center of his self-presentation. A second work, The Way to Bliss (1658), edited an earlier English treatise on the elixir and the prolonging of life, and carried the same argument forward: that the great medicine was real, that the philosophers had told the truth in cipher. Two years earlier, in 1650, he had already entered the field under cover, translating from Latin into English the Fasciculus Chemicus of Arthur Dee — son of John Dee, and physician to the Tsar at Moscow — and publishing it under the anagram James Hasolle. He sought Arthur Dee’s leave only afterward.

Whether Ashmole himself ever worked at the furnace is unclear; the surviving record shows a compiler, an editor, and a patron of the art more than a practitioner of it. What it shows unmistakably is a man who placed himself in a lineage. In 1651 the Berkshire alchemist William Backhouse took Ashmole as his adopted son in the art — the conventional bond by which an adept passed his secrets to an heir — and on his deathbed, Ashmole recorded, told him in plain words the matter of the philosophers’ stone. The transmission, whatever it amounted to, mattered enormously to Ashmole’s sense of who he was: not a dabbler but a son of the tradition, charged to keep and hand on what he had received.

The tradition he understood himself to inherit was the whole Renaissance fabric of esotericism: the alchemy of the Latin Middle Ages as it had reached England, the medical chemistry of Paracelsus and his followers, the natural magic that ran from Roger Bacon — the thirteenth-century friar whose alchemical and optical works Ashmole prized, and whom the Theatrum honors — down through John Dee to the cosmic harmonics of Robert Fludd, the English Paracelsian and Rosicrucian apologist of the previous generation. It was the milieu in which the Rosicrucian manifestos of the 1610s had circulated, and in which the figure of the hidden brotherhood of adepts, keepers of a wisdom both ancient and Christian, had taken hold of the English imagination; Ashmole copied out the manifestos and once drafted a letter petitioning the unseen Rosicrucian fraternity to admit him. A celebrated strand of twentieth-century scholarship, associated above all with Frances Yates, made Ashmole a link in a continuous Protestant-Hermetic current running from those manifestos through Dee and Fludd into the speculative Masonry of the next century; later historians of occultism have eroded the strong form of that thesis, separating the strands Yates braided together, but Ashmole’s own papers leave no doubt that he saw himself standing inside exactly such a current, gathering its scattered English remains into one keeping.

Stars, lodges, and the company of the curious

Astrology occupied him as much as alchemy. He moved in the circle of William Lilly, the most famous astrologer of the age, whose almanacs sold in the tens of thousands through the war years; he kept careful note of the planetary configurations under which he undertook things, and he helped sustain the astrology of his day as an organized pursuit, joining the revived Society of Astrologers that met for a yearly feast in London. His diaries are among the period’s most quoted documents for the history of these arts, and one entry above all has carried his name far beyond them. On 16 October 1646, in the midst of the war, Ashmole noted that he had been made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, in the company of his kinsman Colonel Henry Mainwaring — the earliest first-hand record of a speculative Masonic initiation in England, in a lodge with no working stonemasons among its members. He returned to the subject decades later, in 1682, with a note of attending a lodge at Masons’ Hall in London. What those ceremonies actually involved, and how far they resembled the later institution of Freemasonry, the brief diary lines do not say; their value is precisely that they are dated, sober, and contemporary, the bedrock on which the documentary history of the Craft in England begins.

He was the gentleman virtuoso entire — the type, half-vanished now, who collected because the world was a single legible cabinet and everything in it bore reading. Coins and medals, ancient and modern; books and manuscripts; antiquities, seals, natural curiosities; the regalia of chivalry. He hunted the manuscripts of John Dee with particular care, making fair copies of the angelic diaries and acquiring the papers that carried Dee’s name down to later readers — an act of preservation that fused his antiquarian instinct with his hermetic loyalties, for in saving Dee’s record he was saving the documentary trace of the English magus he most resembled. In 1672 he produced his monument of antiquarian scholarship, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, a vast illustrated history of England’s premier order of knighthood, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar and dedicated to Charles II — a work that wedded his herald’s office to his collector’s patience and that earned him a lasting authority on the ceremonial of the crown. When the Royal Society received its charter in the early 1660s he was among the founding fellows, sitting easily between the new experimental philosophy and the old hermetic learning that the Society’s official rhetoric was beginning to disown. He belongs to the last English generation for which there was no contradiction in the seat: the same curiosity that drew a man to the air-pump and the microscope had drawn him, a few years earlier, to the furnace and the figure of the star.

The collection that became the Ashmolean

The pivot of his afterlife was another man’s cabinet. John Tradescant the Younger, gardener and naturalist of South Lambeth, kept with his father the most famous collection of rarities in England — the museum that Londoners called the Ark, cataloged in 1656 as the Musaeum Tradescantianum, a catalog Ashmole helped see into print. In 1659 Tradescant signed a deed of gift conveying the whole collection to Ashmole; after Tradescant’s death his widow Hester disputed it, and Ashmole pressed the matter in Chancery until the collection, and the credit, fell to him. The acquisition was the more total because in January 1679 a fire in his Middle Temple chambers destroyed a great part of his own gatherings — some nine thousand coins and medals, with books, prints, and antiquities — so that what he finally gave away was weighted toward the Tradescants’ rarities more than he had first intended, a fact that has sharpened the long charge that he took an outsized share of the credit for what others had assembled.

In 1677 he gave the collection to the University of Oxford, on the condition that it build a house to hold it. The university raised a hall on Broad Street, and the Ashmolean opened in 1683 — reckoned the first purpose-built public museum in Britain, a building meant from the start to admit the curious rather than serve a court or a college alone. Its first keeper, the naturalist Robert Plot, had a chemical laboratory in the basement, so that the new public museum was also, in its first form, a working institution of the very natural philosophy in which Ashmole had spent his life. The bequest fixed his name to an institution that long outlived the astrology and alchemy he practiced, and that has carried it, unbroken, for more than three centuries.

Scholarship and the texts

The indispensable foundation for any study of Ashmole is C. H. Josten’s Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), a five-volume edition of roughly two thousand pages that prints the diaries, the correspondence, and the surrounding documents with a biographical introduction; it remains the cornerstone of the field and the source for the dating of the Warrington note. The University of Oxford’s Early Modern Letters Online catalogs Ashmole’s correspondence within the Bodleian’s Ashmole manuscripts. Vittoria Feola’s Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity (Paris: Blanchard, 2012) recovers him as an antiquary first, reading his alchemy, his heraldry, and his museum as facets of a single project of preserving and transmitting old knowledge. On the Theatrum specifically, the textual and pictorial program of the 1652 folio is treated in the scholarship on Ashmole and the pursuit of alchemy published in The Antiquaries Journal, and the Prolegomena is anthologized, in extract, in Stanton Linden’s Alchemy Reader. The 1652 folio itself is fully digitized and freely readable — title page, diagrams, and emblems — at the Science History Institute, which makes plain, page by page, the kind of veiled English verse Ashmole set out to rescue.

That work of rescue is the heart of it. The medieval and Tudor poets of the Theatrum would be, for the most part, names in a manuscript catalog and nothing more had Ashmole not gathered, glossed, and printed them; the Tradescants’ rarities would have scattered through a dozen sale-rooms; the king’s order of chivalry would lack its first full history. He spent a long, comfortable, acquisitive life in the conviction that the old wisdom was true and worth the keeping, and he kept it — in the folio, in the cabinet, in the dated lines of the diary — against an age already learning to sort heraldry from chemistry and chemistry from magic into the separate rooms his own work refused to build.

→ Related: Paracelsus · Roger Bacon · John Dee · William Lilly · Alchemy · Astrology · Freemasonry · Rosicrucianism · Royal Society · Robert Fludd · Hermes Trismegistus · Corpus Hermeticum · Esotericism · Occultism · Latin Medieval Alchemy