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 in Breconshire, he was the twin brother of the devotional poet Henry Vaughan, “the Silurist,” and the two were close all their lives. He studied at Jesus College, Oxford, took holy orders, and held the living of his home parish until he lost it in the upheavals of the Civil War years — after which alchemy, not the pulpit, became the center of his days.

His books appeared in a rush between 1650 and 1655: Anthroposophia Theomagica, Anima Magica Abscondita, Magia Adamica (whose section on the first matter is known as Coelum Terrae), Lumen de Lumine, and others. They are not technical recipe-books but philosophical manifestos, written in an ornate, allusive, often combative prose. What they argue, across their variations, is one conviction: that nature is everywhere alive, animated by a divine light or “central fire,” and that the alchemist’s work is to free that hidden spirit from the matter in which it sleeps. Vaughan read the Hermetic writings, the Neoplatonists, the Kabbalah as it reached him, and above all the chemical philosophy of Paracelsus and the Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont, weaving them into a picture in which physical and spiritual regeneration were a single process.

That picture drew a famous attack. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who shared many of Vaughan’s sources but recoiled from his enthusiasm, assailed him in print as “Alazonomastix Philalethes”; Vaughan answered in kind, and the exchange ran through several pamphlets. The quarrel marks a real fault line in the period — between a Platonism that wanted to stay rational and orderly and one willing to follow the magical implications all the way down.

A persistent confusion shadows his name. A separate alchemist wrote as Eirenaeus Philalethes, author of the widely read Ripley Reviv’d; the two pseudonyms were long conflated, and scholarship now identifies Eirenaeus with the New England chymist George Starkey rather than with Vaughan. The two should be kept apart.

Much of what is known of Vaughan’s later life comes from a private laboratory notebook, Aqua Vitae: Non Vitis, in which he recorded experiments carried out with his wife Rebecca, whose death he mourned in it with unguarded grief. He died in 1666, reportedly from the effects of mercury inhaled during an experiment — an end his readers have found hard to separate from the work. His writings were gathered and reissued in the nineteenth century by A. E. Waite, through whom they reached the occult revival; they are read now both as documents of seventeenth- century natural philosophy and as some of the most vivid English statements of the alchemical worldview just before that worldview came apart.

→ In the library: Waite — The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan (1888)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Nous · Jan Baptist Van Helmont