John Everard

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John Everard (c.1584–1641) was an English clergyman, preacher, and translator whose pulpit kept landing him in prison and whose private labour was the rendering of mystical and Hermetic texts into English. Cambridge-educated and a doctor of divinity, he spent much of his career in and out of custody — hauled before the Court of High Commission again and again, by his own count, for sermons that authority found seditious or heretical.

What he preached pulled in two directions at once. Some of the trouble was political: outspoken attacks on royal policy toward Spain, delivered in London parishes during the 1620s, made him an obvious target. The deeper offence was doctrinal. Everard moved in the mystical and spiritualist undercurrent of early Stuart religion, drawn to an inward, experiential Christianity that set the living encounter with God above outward form and law — a leaning his accusers read as antinomian, the heresy of holding the saved soul free from the moral law. Whether that label fits him exactly is disputed; he was certainly closer to the German and Rhineland mystics than to the established church around him.

His reading shows where his sympathies lay. He is credited with English versions of the Theologia Germanica, of work by Sebastian Franck and Nicholas of Cusa, and — most consequentially — of the Hermetic Pymander. Printed posthumously in 1650 as The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, it was the first complete English translation of that body of Greek Hermetic dialogues, and it carried the Hermetic image of God and cosmos to readers who had no Latin or Greek. His sermons were gathered after his death in Some Gospel-Treasures Opened (1653), a volume his admirers among the radical religious circles of the Interregnum took up.

The record of his life is thin and partly polemical, assembled from court proceedings and the prefaces of his own posthumous books. What survives clearly is the shape of a man who found the official religion of his day too small for what he had read, and who paid for saying so.

→ In the library: Everard — The Divine Pymander (1650)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosis · Arabic Hermetica