Thomas Vaughan

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Thomas Vaughan was a Welsh clergyman, alchemist, and writer on natural magic who, under the pen name Eugenius Philalethes, produced in the early 1650s a short and intense body of work defending a living, spirit-filled cosmos against the mechanical philosophy then rising around him. Born in 1621 at Newton-by-Usk in Brecknockshire, on the upper Usk in the old country of the Silures, he was the twin brother of the devotional poet Henry Vaughan, “the Silurist,” and the two were close all their lives — the poet and the magus turning the same Welsh landscape and the same Hermetic reading to different ends. Thomas matriculated at Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, took his degree, entered holy orders, and was installed as rector of his home parish of Llansantffraed — St Bridget’s by the Usk — holding the living until the upheavals of the Civil War carried it away. He had taken the king’s side: he served, and was reckoned to have borne arms, in the royalist cause, and in 1650 the parliamentary commissioners for the propagation of the Gospel in Wales ejected him from his cure, the formal charges mixing his royalism with intemperance and absence from the parish. The pulpit gone, alchemy — not preaching — became the center of his days.

The rush of 1650–1655

His books appeared in a rush. Anthroposophia Theomagica and Anima Magica Abscondita came out together in 1650, the second dedicated to the courtier and fellow alchemist Thomas Henshaw; Magia Adamica followed the same year, arguing the descent of magic from Adam and appending the section on the first matter known as Coelum Terrae — “the magician’s heavenly chaos.” Then came Lumen de Lumine (1651), Aula Lucis (1652), and Euphrates (1655). They are not technical recipe-books but philosophical manifestos, written in an ornate, allusive, often combative prose shot through with a sense of the world as a sealed book waiting to be opened. Latin tags, scriptural cadence, and sudden bursts of invective sit alongside passages of real lyric power; the man who wrote them could be both a careful reader of the schools and a brawler in print.

What they argue, across their variations, is one conviction: that nature is everywhere alive, animated by a divine light or central fire descending from God through the heavens into matter, and that the alchemist’s work is to learn that descent and trace it back to its source — to free the hidden spirit from the matter in which it sleeps. The first matter, in this reading, is no inert substrate but a “heavenly chaos,” a sperm-water charged with the world’s formative power, the bottom rung of an unbroken ladder running from the uncreated light down into the densest body. To work upon it is to work upon oneself; the descent of spirit into matter at creation and its return through the alchemical art are the same motion read in two directions. Physical and spiritual regeneration, for Vaughan, were not parallel processes but a single one — which is why his pages move without warning from the bench and the furnace to prayer, and why he insists the universe is intelligible only to one who has been changed enough to read it. Alchemy and magic, on this account, are not arts of profit but disciplines of that change, a conviction that places him close to the contemplative claims of the Hermetic books he admired and far from the gold-makers he despised.

Sources of the doctrine

Vaughan read widely and named his masters often. Behind him stood Hermes Trismegistus and the Greek dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum as they had reached the Latin West through Ficino; the Neoplatonists, whose emanating Nous and descending hypostases supplied the architecture of his living cosmos; and the Kabbalah in the Christianized form it had taken since Pico. He drew on the Renaissance magic of Cornelius Agrippa and, above all, on the chemical philosophy of Paracelsus and the Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont, from whom he took the conviction that nature works through seeds and a vital spirit rather than through the dead collisions of mechanism. His standpoint belongs to the same Florentine lineage of prisca theologia — the belief in a single ancient wisdom older than the philosophers — that fed Robert Fludd a generation before him, though Vaughan was the more violent and less systematic mind of the two. He wove these strands into a picture, never a system, in which the magician’s task was to cooperate with a nature already straining toward its own perfection.

The English Rosicrucian

He was also the period’s most committed English partisan of the Rosicrucian manifestos. In 1652 he issued, through the radical London printer Giles Calvert, the first English translation of the Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis — the anonymous German tracts that a generation earlier, printed at Kassel in 1614 and 1615, had announced a secret brotherhood of physicians and reformers gathered around the figure of Christian Rosenkreutz. The volume, The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R: C: Commonly, of the Rosie Cross, rendered the manifestos most likely from the combined German printings and prefixed Vaughan’s own preface and address to the reader; his hand is confined to that framing matter, but it is unmistakable. The preface treats the fraternity as real and its promise as worth defending, setting the Rosicrucian call for a general reformation against the scorn it had drawn in England. The translation appeared at the high tide of Interregnum projecting, in the orbit of Samuel Hartlib’s pansophist circle, and it became the textual base for almost every later Anglophone edition of the manifestos until the late twentieth century. Vaughan thus stands at the head of Rosicrucianism in English, the conduit through which Johann Valentin Andreae’s Württemberg tracts entered the language.

The quarrel with Henry More

That whole picture drew a famous attack. Henry More, of Christ’s College, Cambridge — the most metaphysically adventurous of the Cambridge Platonists, who shared many of Vaughan’s sources but recoiled from his enthusiasm — assailed the two 1650 treatises in print, writing as “Alazonomastix Philalethes,” the boast-whipper, in his Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica, and Anima Magica Abscondita (1650). Vaughan answered in kind with The Man-Mouse Taken in a Trap (1650); More returned with The Second Lash of Alazonomastix (1651); and Vaughan had the last word in The Second Wash, or the Moore Scour’d Once More (1651). The exchange was savage and personal, and it did much to fix Vaughan’s later reputation as a hot-headed obscurantist. But the quarrel marked a real fault line. More wanted a Platonism that stayed rational and orderly, a “Spirit of Nature” that mediated God’s action on matter without dissolving the boundaries of sober divinity; the Cambridge circle was even then defending an incorporeal, living cosmos against Hobbes and the new mechanists, and saw in Vaughan an ally whose excesses would discredit the cause. Vaughan was willing to follow the magical implications of a living nature all the way down. The two were fighting over how far the same conviction could be pressed before it became disreputable.

The persistent confusion

A persistent confusion shadows his name. A separate and equally anonymous alchemist wrote as Eirenaeus Philalethes, author of the widely read Ripley Reviv’d and the most influential laboratory writer of the later seventeenth century; the two pen names — Eugenius and Eirenaeus, both lovers of truth — were long conflated, and Newton among others copied “Philalethes” without distinguishing them. Scholarship now identifies Eirenaeus with the New England chymist George Starkey, who emigrated from Harvard to London and moved in the same Hartlib circle as Vaughan, rather than with Vaughan himself. The two must be kept apart: Vaughan the manifesto-writer of a living cosmos, Starkey the precise and secretive operator whose recipes Boyle and Newton mined for decades.

Later life, death, and recovery

Much of what is known of Vaughan’s later life comes from a private laboratory notebook, Aqua Vitae: Non Vitis (British Library, Sloane MS 1741), in which he recorded experiments carried out from about 1651 with his wife Rebecca, whom he married around the year of his ejection and who worked beside him at the furnace — a genuine collaborator, not a footnote. He mourned her death in 1658 in the notebook with unguarded grief, marking the anniversaries and the very hours. The notebook also corrects the caricature of Vaughan as a merely spiritual allegorist: its pages are full of careful, dated, hands-on chemical work. After the Restoration he found a patron in Sir Robert Moray, a founding fellow of the new Royal Society and a fellow seeker after the secret fire, and it was in Moray’s company, having fled the London plague, that Vaughan died early in 1666 at the rectory of Albury in Oxfordshire — reportedly from the effects of mercury inhaled or spilled during an experiment, an end his readers have found hard to separate from the work.

The texts and their recovery

The early treatises were gathered and reissued in the nineteenth century by A. E. Waite, whose The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan (1888) reprinted the first four tracts and carried them, through Waite’s own occult milieu, into the Hermetic revival of the Golden Dawn era. The modern scholarly recovery rests on Alan Rudrum’s The Works of Thomas Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), the first critical edition of the whole corpus, and on Donald R. Dickson’s edition and translation of the laboratory notebook, Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s Aqua Vitae: Non Vitis (2001), which re-established Vaughan as a working chymist as much as a visionary. His 1652 manifesto translation survives in early scans and in a keyboarded transcription of the original printing (EEBO-TCP); the 1650 Magia Adamica, with its Coelum Terrae, is freely readable in facsimile (Internet Archive), as is Anima Magica Abscondita (Internet Archive). The documentary record places him among the alchemical writers absorbed by the later seventeenth century even as the worldview he defended was passing: his work is read now both as a document of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and as some of the most vivid English statements of the alchemical vision of a living cosmos — set down just before that vision came apart under the pressure of the mechanical philosophy he had set himself against.

→ In the library: Waite — The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan (1888) · Ripley Reviv'd and Other Tracts of Philalethes and Vaughan (1678)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Nous · Jan Baptist Van Helmont · Emanation · Corpus Hermeticum · Kabbalah · Alchemy · Cornelius Agrippa · Paracelsus · Rosicrucianism · Henry More · Platonism · Marsilio Ficino · Renaissance Magic · Robert Fludd · Cambridge Platonism · Johann Valentin Andreae