William Adams - Witch, Warlock, and Magician

This so-called ‘Book of St. Dunstan’ was one which Kelly professed to have bought from a Welsh innkeeper, who, it was alleged, had found it among the ruins of Glastonbury.

‘1588, February 8th. – Mr. E. K., at nine of the clok, afternone, sent for me to his laboratory over the gate to see how he distilled sericon, according as in tyme past and of late he heard of me out of Ripley. God lend his heart to all charity and virtue!

‘1588, August 24th. – Vidi divinam aquam demonstratione magnifici domini et amici mei incomparabilis D[omini] Ed. Kelii ante meridiem tertia hora.

‘1588, December 7th. – γρεατ φρενδκιρ προμισιδ φορ μανι, ανδ τυυο ουνκες φορ θε θινγ.’ 31 31 This Diary, written in a very small and illegible hand on the margins of old almanacs, was discovered by Mr. W. H. Black in the Ashmolean Library at Oxford.

The secrecy, the mystery, and the supernatural pretensions associated with the so-called occult sciences necessarily recommended them to the knave and the cheat as instruments of imposition. If some of the earlier professors of Hermeticism, the first seekers after the philosophical stone, were sincere in their convictions, and actuated by pure and lofty motives, it is certain that their successors were mostly dishonest adventurers, bent upon turning to their personal advantage the credulous weakness of their fellow-creatures. With some of these the chief object was money; others may have craved distinction and influence; others may have sought the gratification of passions more degrading even than avarice or ambition. At all events, alchemy became a synonym for fraud: a magician was accepted as, by right of his vocation, an impostor; and the poet and the dramatist pursued him with the whips of satire, invective, and ridicule, while the law prepared for him the penalties usually inflicted upon criminals. These penalties, it is true, he very frequently contrived to elude; in many instances, by the exercise of craft and cunning; in others, by the protection of powerful personages, to whom he had rendered questionable services; and again in others, because the agent of the law did not care to hunt him down so long as he forbore to bring upon himself the glare of publicity. Thus it came to pass that generation after generation saw the alchemist still practising his unwholesome trade, and probably he retained a good deal of his old notoriety down to as late a date as the beginning of the eighteenth century. It must be admitted, however, that his alchemical pursuits gradually sank into obscurity, and that it was more in the character of an astrologer, and as a manufacturer of love-potions and philtres, of charms and waxen images – not to say as a pimp and a bawd – that he looked for clients. In the Spectator

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Cf. Stahl, ‘Fundamenta Chimiæ,’ cap. ‘De Lapide Philosophorum’; and Kircher, ‘Mundus Subterraneus.’

Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baconis de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ et de Nullitate Magiæ.

Laches , oversight.

This patriotic sentiment would seem to show that the book was written or published about the time of the Spanish Armada.

Hermes Trismegistus (‘thrice great’), a fabulous Chaldean philosopher, to whom I have already made reference. The numerous writings which bear his name were really composed by the Egyptian Platonists; but the mediæval alchemists pretend to recognise in him the founder of their art. Gower, in his ‘Confessio Amantis,’ says:

The name of Hermes was chosen because of the supposed magical powers of the god of the caduceus.

That is, costard, or apple, mongers.

See Appendix to the present chapter, p. 58 Crystallomancy , divining by means of a crystal globe, mirror, or beryl. Of this science of prediction, Dr. Dee was the great English professor; but the reader will doubtless remember the story of the Earl of Surrey and his fair ‘Geraldine.’ Geomancy , divination by casting pebbles on the ground. Hydromancy , divination by water, in which the diviner showed the figure of an absent person. ‘In this you conjure the spirits into water; there they are constrained to show themselves, as Marcus Varro testifieth, when he writeth how he had seen a boy in the water, who announced to him in a hundred and fifty verses the end of the Mithridatic war.’ Oneiromancy , divination by dreams, is still credited by old women of both sexes. Absurdly baseless as it is, it found believers in the old time among men of culture and intellectual force. Archbishop Laud attached so much importance to his dreams that he frequently recorded them in his diary; and even Lord Bacon seems to have thought that a prophetic meaning was occasionally concealed in them. Onychomancy , or Onymancy , divination by means of the nails of an unpolluted boy. Pyromancy , divination by fire. ‘The wife of Cicero is said, when, after performing sacrifice, she saw a flame suddenly leap forth from the ashes, to have prophesied the consulship to her husband for the same year.’ Others resorted to the blaze of a torch of pitch, which was painted with certain colours. It was a good omen if the flame ran into a point; bad when it divided. A thin-tongued flame announced glory; if it went out, it signified danger; if it hissed, misfortune. Rabdomancy , divination by the rod or wand, is mentioned by Ezekiel. The use of a hazel-rod to trace the existence of water or of a seam of coal seems a survival of this practice. But enough of these follies: ‘Necro-, pyro-, geo-, hydro-, cheiro-, coscinomancy, With other vain and superstitious sciences.’ Tomkis, ‘Albumazar,’ ii. 3. .

The pentageron, or pentagramma, is a mystic figure produced by prolonging the sides of a regular pentagon till they intersect one another. It can be drawn without a break in the drawing, and, viewed from five sides, exhibits the form of the letter A (pent-alpha), or the figure of the fifth proposition in Euclid’s First Book.

From the Greek φόβος, fear; φόβητρα, bugbears.

Bad puns were evidently common on the stage before the days of Victorian burlesque.

So Shakespeare, ‘1 Hen. IV.,’ iii. Falstaff says: ‘I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head, or a memento house.’

So in the ‘Passionate Pilgrim’: