Robert Fludd

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Robert Fludd was an English physician and Paracelsian natural philosopher whose enormous, lavishly engraved books set out to describe the whole of creation as a single system, in which God, the cosmos, and the human body answered to one another point for point. Trained at Oxford and admitted to the Royal College of Physicians, he practised medicine in London with success while pouring his fortune into the most ambitious occult publishing project of his age.

His central work, the History of the Two Worlds — the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of man — appeared in folio volumes from a press in the German Rhineland between 1617 and the 1620s. Their fame rests partly on the images: diagrams of the divine descent into matter, of light and darkness contending in the act of creation, of the human being strung like an instrument between earth and heaven. Fludd worked from a frankly Hermetic and Neoplatonic inheritance, treating the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus as ancient theology and reading the world as a hierarchy of correspondences that astrology, alchemy, and music all expressed in their own keys.

He is remembered above all as the first prominent English voice to defend the Rosicrucians. When the anonymous manifestos announcing a hidden brotherhood of sages swept Europe in the 1610s, Fludd wrote apologies for them — not, he insisted, as a member, but as one who held their wisdom genuine. Whether any such brotherhood existed at all remains unsettled; Fludd’s defence helped fix the Rosicrucian legend in the learned imagination regardless.

His convictions drew him into the open controversies that mark the period when the old correspondential cosmos was giving way to the new mechanical one. He disputed with Johannes Kepler, who answered that Fludd dealt in symbols where he, Kepler, dealt in measurable quantities — a clean statement of the parting of ways between mathematical astronomy and the analogical world-picture. He exchanged still sharper polemics with the Catholic figures Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi over the place of magic and the world-soul. Scholarship has long read these quarrels as a hinge: Fludd standing, articulate and unembarrassed, for a vision of nature that the seventeenth century was in the act of setting aside.

How far Fludd was an experimenter and how far a system-builder is still debated. He described instruments and weather-glasses, and some historians count him among the early students of barometric and thermometric effects; others see the apparatus as illustration for a metaphysics decided in advance. What is not in question is the scale of the attempt. Few writers have tried so completely to draw God, the stars, and the body into one diagram. The engravings have outlasted the cosmology they were drawn to prove.

→ Related: Alchemy · Astrology · Giordano Bruno · Henry More · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism