London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry, lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations. Occult London rediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman, to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London's literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London's most resonant occult locations.
Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city.
London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry, lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations. Occult London rediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman, to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London's literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London's most resonant occult locations.
Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city.
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Overview
London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry, lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations. Occult London rediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman, to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London's literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London's most resonant occult locations.
Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842439494 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oldcastle Books |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2008 |
| Series: | Pocket Essential Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Merlin Coverley is the author of seven books: London Writing, Psychogeography, Occult London, Utopia, The Art of Wandering, South and Hauntology. He lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
Occult London
By Merlin Coverley
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2008 Merlin CoverleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-904048-88-6
CHAPTER 1
The Occult in Elizabethan London
The Elizabethan world was populated, not only by tough sea-men, hard-headed politicians, serious theologians. It was a world of spirits, good and bad, fairies, demons, witches, ghosts, conjurors.
Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age
Elizabethan London was the boom-town of Europe. Occupying roughly the same area as today's financial heartland, the City, London more than doubled in population during Elizabeth's long rein (1558–1603), dwarfing its domestic rivals, Bristol and Norwich, and soon becoming the largest and most congested city in Europe. The Elizabethan city was walled on three sides and open to the Thames on its southern perimeter. These walls were gated in the North at Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, with the Tower to the East and the prisons of Ludgate and Newgate to the West. The Thames, London's busiest thoroughfare, was spanned only by a single bridge, whose gatehouse tower was adorned with the heads of executed traitors. On the Surrey side, the borough of Southwark, with its famous playhouses and 'stews' or brothels, soon became home to those seeking refuge from the jurisdiction of the City. This was a city of sharp contrasts, as extreme wealth and abject poverty stood side by side and disease-ridden slums soon gave way to pockets of rural tranquillity. But, transcending these differences in status, the average Londoner was united by a belief in, and an observance of, the rituals and practices of occult power.
The format of such occult beliefs varied widely, from the practical application of folk-medicine on the one hand, to the arcane formulae of the astrologer on the other. But it was the medieval Catholic Church that provided the most widely accessible and officially sanctioned form of ritualistic magic; confession and absolution, conjuration and consecration, exorcism and healing all offered an outlet, to rich and poor, to assuage the trials of everyday life. And, of course, it was exactly such an outlet that was to be challenged by the Reformation as the newly established Church of England 'almost literally took the magic out of Christianity'. Elizabeth was to annul the brief return to Catholicism espoused by her predecessor, Mary, and, in formally adopting this alternative brand of Christianity, she was to deny access to these magical resources. What had previously been interpreted literally was now to become symbolic as the emphasis moved from the miraculous to the mundane; prayer and unceasing effort were now the order of the day.
Predictably enough, this official version had little to offer the mass of Londoners who were seeking to escape the deprivations of their everyday existence rather than attempting to mend their ways and, in the absence of an institution able to provide such relief, alternatives were sought elsewhere. With no shortage of men and women willing to fulfil such a role, Elizabethan London soon became home to an emerging class of occult professionals, variously termed 'cunning men', 'wise women', 'blessers', 'charmers', 'conjurors', 'sorcerers', and, of course, 'witches'.
Dr John Dee (1527–1608)
Dr John Dee is a complex figure whose extraordinary life exemplifies the contradictory role of the occult in the London of his day. Dee is, as Frances Yates proclaimed, the true Renaissance Man, his abilities as an alchemist and conjuror of angels offset by concrete achievements in both mathematics and science and tempered by a fervent sense of patriotism and devout Christian beliefs.
Like his fellow Londoner, Simon Forman, Dee was a prolific diarist whose records have been preserved, largely thanks to the antiquary Elias Ashmole, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is here that one may find the horoscope of Dee's birth, which took place on 13 July 1527 and which is marked by the latitude of 51 degrees and 32 seconds north of the equator, the approximate latitude of London. It is probable that Dee was born in the City where his father was employed as a textile merchant. In 1542, at the age of 15, Dee entered Cambridge University and, having demonstrated a precocious ability in mathematics and astronomy, he became a fellow of Trinity College in 1547. For the next few years, Dee travelled widely on the Continent, studying alongside the cartographer Gerard Mercator in Louvain, before returning to London in 1553. By this time Dee's father, who had prospered during the property boom in London following the dissolution of the monasteries, was now caught up in the anti-protestant backlash that accompanied Queen Mary's reign. Dee was forced to fend for himself and soon he too came under suspicion and was arrested in 1555, possibly as a result of compiling a horoscope for Mary's sister, Elizabeth. During this period, magic and science were judged as largely indistinguishable and horoscopes were illegal, amounting to a form of illicit surveillance. In his biography of Dee, Benjamin Woolley has described the inter-relationship between magic and science in Dee's work:
Thus, at the heart of Dee's science lay what has come to be called 'natural' (as opposed to supernatural) magic. When God created the universe itself, an act that Dee accepted to be beyond scientific understanding, He let loose a divine force which causes the planets to turn, the Sun to rise and the Moon to wax and wane. Magic, as Dee saw it, is the human ability to tap into this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology.
In 1558, Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne, entering London to a rapturous reception less than a week after Mary's death. Dee was now in the clear and it was he who was instructed to use his astrological skills to choose an auspicious date for her coronation. He chose 15 June 1559 and, from a position of shame and suspicion, Dee was now elevated to the role of 'intelligencer', an Elizabethan term describing 'a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy'. For the next five years there is no historical record of Dee's activities although it is probable that he used this time in a study of the Cabbala, simply translated as 'tradition', which is the ancient form of Hebrew mysticism combining words and numbers to reveal the hidden language of God. In 1564 Dee published his most famous occult work, the Monas Hieroglyphica, in which he identifies the ultimate symbol of occult knowledge.
By the 1560s, Dee had settled eight miles downstream of London in what was then the village of Mortlake. It was here, in his mother's cottage, that he set about establishing one of the largest libraries in Europe. Dee's Mortlake home gradually came to be perceived as a centre for magical activity. Many notable figures came to pay their respects to Dee and to witness his extraordinary collection of occult books and devices. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth herself is known to have visited Dee on at least two occasions and, in 1577, Dee presented Elizabeth with his magnum opus, the four-volume General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, described by Woolley as 'one of the earliest authoritative statements of the idea of a British Empire'. Whilst ignored at the time and overlooked ever since, Dee's geopolitical blockbuster has proved remarkably astute and his key prescription that an enlarged navy could provide England with the security to realise her imperial ambitions was, of course, to be proven accurate.
However, Dee's political concerns were soon to give way to the notorious occult practices by which he was to be remembered. For many years Dee had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish contact with the spirit world. But, in 1582, Dee was to record his first successful contact using his speculum or 'scrying' mirror of polished obsidian (now on display in the British Museum). A scryer was a spirit medium and Dee would often employ such figures on his behalf. It was his fateful meeting with such a figure, the forger and conman extraordinaire, Edward Kelley, in 1582 that allowed Dee's desire to commune with angels to be finally satisfied. Kelley seems to have had Dee under his sway from the outset and Dee was soon persuaded of Kelley's unique ability as a medium. By the following year, Dee, Kelley and their entire families left Mortlake for the Continent, embarking on a bizarre six-year occult odyssey that would lead ultimately to their installation as alchemists at the court of the Holy Roman Empire Rudolf II in Prague. Little is known about the purpose behind this visit and whether it was conducted primarily for occult or for political motives. But this period has since become the stuff of legend, as the credulous Dee and his unscrupulous sidekick crossed Europe in a series of unlikely episodes. Needless to say, this relationship ended badly and Dee returned to England in 1589 without Kelley, but not before Kelley had persuaded Dee of the magical necessity for him to sleep with his long-suffering wife.
As Frances Yates was to write, Dee's return to England marks the last and least happy period of his life: 'After Dee's activities abroad, he received no reward on his return home, and was never adequately rewarded for his outstanding contribution to the greatness of Elizabethan England. Semi-banishment, ill-success and poverty were to be his fate ...' Returning to Mortlake, Dee found his cottage in ruins, his library ransacked and his occult equipment destroyed. Aged 62, his friends dead, the court unrecognisable, he was now isolated and in poverty. He remained in London, determined to restore his fortunes, but this proved futile. Now a figure of mistrust, he was blamed by many Londoners for the outbreak of the plague in the early 1590s. Finally, in 1597, he was appointed to the position of warden to Christ's College in Manchester, and he remained there in semi-exile for the next ten years before returning to London. He died there in 1608 and was buried in Mortlake.
After his death, Dee's reputation moved swiftly downhill and he was largely dismissed from the official histories of the Elizabethan era. However, as Woolley notes, 'the one place where Dee's reputation thrived was in the world of modern mysticism'. Indeed, Dee has since been cited as the founder of the Rosicrucian movement, was seen as the English Nostrodamus in the nineteenth century and was adopted by the Golden Dawn at the start of the twentieth. More recently, however, it was the publication of Frances Yates' The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age in 1979 that led to a reassessment of Dee's position in the light of Yates' argument that it was Dee's marriage of magic and science as a 'Christian Cabalist' that provided the dominant philosophy of the Elizabethan age. Elsewhere, Dee lives on through a parallel existence in print and on film. From Gustav Meyrink's The Angel from the West Window to Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee, in which Dee is transported from Mortlake to Clerkenwell, and on through Derek Jarman's Jubilee, Dee has been repeatedly resurrected. If Yates returned Dee to his rightful position within Elizabethan history, however, he has today become emblematic of London history and has taken on an iconic role within London psychogeography. With his appealing blend of the occult and the political, allied to his work as a cartographer, Dee appears to satisfy many of the requirements of contemporary psychogeography and its search for lines of resonance through London's occult past. Indeed, one may ask whether Dee is not in fact the first psychogeographer. Through Dee, Mortlake has become a stop on the psychogeographical London circuit and Iain Sinclair has placed Dee within a visionary London tradition: 'Blake at Lambeth, Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternate universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.'
Today Dee's influence extends beyond his London home and he appears to have become caught up in a psychogeographical tug of war, as Manchester, no doubt eager to supplement its more modest occult history, seeks to claim him for its own. In 1996, the Manchester Area Psychogeographic gathered to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Dee's exile to Manchester, ambitiously proclaiming their intention to levitate the Corn Exchange. 'What's the latter-day importance of Dee living in Manchester?', they asked, and, instead of the obvious answer, they replied:
Dee and Manchester form a focal point in the invention and realization of everything we have to live through and deal with: mechanization, post-industrialisation, the simulacra of "nationhood" and "the state". To enter Dee's world of Jacobean Manchester can initiate a deconstruction of now.
Of course, the final word must go to London, Dee's home for most of his life. The London Psychogeographical Association, in their largely overlooked piece, 'Nazi Occultists Seize Omphalos', return Dee to his rightful position at the centre of the city and the British Empire that he did so much to inaugurate:
Many people believe that Greenwich is in fact the Omphalos – or spiritual centre – of the British Empire. However, those with a deeper understanding of Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of land divination, will recognise that the actual Omphalos must be on the Isle of Dogs, protected by water on all sides. Those who visit the Mudchute – a piece of park mysteriously built as an exact replica of an ancient hill fort – will find a special staircase leading to a cobbled circle. This is the Omphalos, the spiritual centre, where the Magus John Dee conjured up the British Empire in the presence of Christopher Marlowe, four hundred years ago this year. However, using the leyline for such evil purposes necessitated the sacrifice of a human life. A psychic attack on Christopher Marlowe and his friends in a Deptford pub led to a brawl in which the famous playwright died.
Dr Simon Forman (1552–1611)
In terms of his occult reputation, Dr Simon Forman is something of a poor relation to Dr Dee and has received little of the posthumous fame accorded to his sometime rival. Although the two men inhabited the same city for much of the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, it appears that their lives in no way intersected. For while Dee was to become the most renowned astrologer and scientist of his day (in Elizabethan times these two terms were barely distinguishable) and was at one time patronised by the Queen herself, Forman was the outsider who struggled to establish himself in his adopted city and was later to achieve a posthumous and largely unwarranted notoriety.
Thankfully, through his pioneering use of medical notes as well as his diaries and an autobiography of his early years, the details of his life and experiences in London have been preserved and are held by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Forman was born on 31 December 1552 in Quidhampton in Wiltshire and was educated sporadically both there and in neighbouring Salisbury before spending a year at Oxford University. His time in Oxford, however, appears to have been spent largely as a servant rather than as a student and his attempts to gain an education were repeatedly hampered by his humble origins and the need to support himself financially. For many years, he was apprenticed to a local merchant trading in herbal medicines, and it was during this time that he developed his knowledge of such remedies. After an itinerant period in which he held several jobs and spent the first of several spells in gaol for acting as an unlicensed physician, Forman made his first visit to London in 1580. This initial entry into the city has been described by Forman's biographer, Judith Cook:
The approach to the City from the south and west was through countryside; fields and orchards reached as far as the outskirts of Lambeth and Southwark, then suddenly the traveller was plunged into the sprawl of Bankside. For the newly arrived Simon it was neither its stink and bustle nor the wonders of the great buildings across the river that he first thought worthy of note, but the fact that immediately on arrival he was solicited by 'a cozening quean [slut]' pretending to be his sister. He stoutly refused her advances, though it must have been the last time he ever turned down such an offer.
As an innocent abroad on the streets of the Elizabethan city, Forman would have faced a bewildering and dangerous environment and he soon retreated outside the (then) city to Greenwich, where he was briefly employed as a carpenter. Indeed, this soon became a pattern. Brief forays into the city were followed by prolonged returns to his native Wiltshire. These early years, as Forman struggled to acquire the necessary knowledge of medicine and astrology and to establish himself as a physician, are recorded in his autobiography, written in around 1600. But the first truly noteworthy year for Forman was 1582 when, after an unusually abstemious period of 29 years, he finally lost his virginity. From then on Forman appears to have made up for lost time and he records in meticulous detail his astonishing series of sexual conquests in which, writing in code, he appears to have managed to 'halek' almost every woman he came across. An entry for February 1583, for example, reads: 'I did halek cum (with) two women ... we went to London and lay there until we had spent all.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Occult London by Merlin Coverley. Copyright © 2008 Merlin Coverley. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 9
Chapter 1 The Occult in Elizabethan London 15
Dr John Dee
Dr Simon Forman
Witches and Witchcraft
The Mary Glover Case
Chapter 2 'The Capitol of Darknesse': London in the Eighteenth Century 35
Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Rebuilding of London
Emanuel Swedenborg
Rabbi Folk: 'The Ba'al Shem of London'
William Blake and the New Jerusalem
Chapter 3 The Victorian City, the Fin de Siècle and After 60
Spring-Heeled Jack
Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Aleister Crowley
Dion Fortune
Chapter 4 Twentieth-Century London and the Occult Revival 92
Ley Lines and Earthstars
The Highgate Vampire
Psychogeography and the Occult Revival
Chapter 5 Unreal City: A Gazetteer of Occult London 113
Appendix I Occult London in Literature 164
Appendix II The Occult Bookshops of London 167
Further Reading 175
Websites 184
Index 186