Simon Forman

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Simon Forman was an English astrologer, physician, and practitioner of natural magic who built a large and contentious practice in late-Elizabethan and early Jacobean London. He is remembered less for any doctrine he advanced than for what he left behind: thousands of pages of casebooks, dream records, and working notes, which together form one of the richest windows surviving on how magic, medicine, and astrology were actually done, day by day, in the period.

Born in Wiltshire in 1552 to modest circumstances, Forman was largely self-taught, piecing together a learning in astrology, alchemy, and physic from books and from his own practice. By the 1590s he was casting horoscopes for a broad London clientele — answering the standard questions of judicial astrology, whether a voyage would prosper, a marriage hold, a missing object be found, a sickness end in recovery or death — and prescribing remedies on the same astrological basis. His clients ranged from servants to gentry, and his notes record their names, complaints, and circumstances with a candor that has made the casebooks invaluable to social historians. They also record his own life in unusual detail, including a private shorthand for his sexual encounters.

His practice ran into sustained conflict with the College of Physicians, which prosecuted him repeatedly for treating patients without its license; Forman, for his part, held that his results spoke for themselves, and eventually secured a medical degree from Cambridge that the College never fully accepted. The quarrel is part of what the casebooks document so well: the contested ground, in this period, between licensed learned medicine and the astrologer-physician who worked outside it.

Forman pursued alchemy and the study of magic alongside his consultations, copying and composing manuscripts on the subjects, though how far he practiced ritual magic as opposed to collecting it remains debated. After his death in 1611 his reputation darkened: his name was drawn into the sensational Overbury poisoning trials of 1615, when love-magic and charms associated with him were linked to Frances Howard, fixing him in popular memory as a sinister conjuror.

Much of what is known rests on the survival of his papers, which passed to the antiquary Elias Ashmole and are now at the Bodleian Library; modern scholarship has read them not as the relics of a charlatan but as evidence of a coherent, if unorthodox, working world. One incidental detail has given Forman a second afterlife: among his notes are eyewitness accounts of plays he saw performed in London around 1611, including works of Shakespeare — making the astrologer, by accident, one of the earliest recorded members of a London theatre audience.

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