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thesis entitled

A DOCTOR'S LANGUAGE OF DEVOTION: THE
OCCULT SCIENCES IN THE WORKS OF SIR
THOMAS BROWNE

presented by
Paul J. McCarthy

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

PhoDo degree in EngliSh

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Major professor

Date October 1, 1974

 

0-7639

ABSTRACT
A DOCTOR'S LANGUAGE OF DEVOTION:

OCCULT SCIENCES IN THE WORKS OF SIR
THOMAS BROWNE

BY
Paul J. McCarthy

My initial examination of Sir Thomas Browne's attitude
toward occult studies revealed in his work an apparent contra-
diction: Browne seemed at times to embrace occult sciences
and at other times to condemn them. In an attempt to resolve
this contradiction, some scholars have argued that Browne was
devoted to occult sciences as a young man, but that he put
aside this youthful enthusiasm when he became a mature scientist.
But Browne published devotional works throughout his lifetime
which drew heavily upon the occult tradition. A systematic
analysis of Browne's use of the occult reveals that he is
neither ambivalent nor inconsistent. He speaks as a scientist
about this world and as an artist about the world beyond. As
a scientist, he consistently condemns both belief in occult
sciences and the inference of literal truth from occult language.
But as an artist, Browne turns to the vocabularies of alchemy,
astrology, the Cabala, numerology, and other abstruse studies
as one way of making intelligible to his readers the divine

reality glimpsed by him-through faith.

Browne‘s discrimination between scientific and metaphoric
truth can be seen clearly in a number of ways. For example,
even though Browne rejected much of what he read in Paracelsus,
he made use of Paracelsus' considerable medical innovations
and he drew upon Paracelsian writings as a source of figurative
language. Browne rejects alchemical claims for universal cures
as scientifically groundless, but he frequently borrows alchemical
language to express his deeply held religious beliefs. The
clearest example of Browne's use of the occult, however, is
found in his treatment of number symbolism. In a long chapter

in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne traces the history of

 

numerology and censures it as a source of literal truth. But
he employs the language of number mysticism throughout the
Garden 2: £1325 for artistic and religious ends.

Occult language cannot, as some have claimed, form a
true bridge between Browne's religion and science because he
clearly does not believe in the occult sciences. But from this
rich tradition Browne fashions a language of devotion which for
many of his contemporaries would seem to join his science and

religion.

A DOCTOR'S LANGUAGE OF DEVOTION: THE
OCCULT SCIENCES IN THE WORKS OF
SIR THOMAS BROWNE

BY

Paul J. McCarthy

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1974

y
,—

C>C0pyright by
PAUL JOSEPH McCARTHY

1974

FOR MARK AND MIRIAM MCCARTHY

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Professor Lawrence Babb for
encouragement and assistance at every stage in the prepa-
ration of this thesis. I am also grateful for the frank
and helpful suggestions of Professors William Whallon

and Howard Anderson.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER I BROWNE AND PARACELSUS . . . . . . . . . . 22
CHAPTER II BROWNE AND HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. . . . . . 69
CHAPTER III BROWNE AND NUMBER MYSTICISM . . . . . . . 106

CHAPTER IV BROWNE'S PERSONA AND THE LANGUAGE
OF OCCULT SCIENCES. . . . . . . . . . . . 160

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

iv

INTRODUCTION

I

In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, no sharp
distinctions had yet been drawn among religion, science, and
the occult or pseudo-sciences. Alchemists, to choose the
most widely recognized example, worked in the forerunner of
the modern chemical laboratory, yet their preparations depended
not on understanding the chemical operations of the metals
they worked with, but on religious assumptions about the
operation of the world, and they described laboratory reac-
tions in language interchangeable with religious ritual. By
the time Sir Thomas Browne published the first edition of

his scientific work Pseudodoxia Bpidemica, the lines between

 

science, religion, and occult sciences were beginning to be
firmly drawn, and despite occasional lapses, Browne is in
complete sympathy with the major movement of the Great
Instauration. He acknowledges that natural philosOphy cannot
progress as long as it remains wedded to religious explanations.
The worlds of science and religion can no longer be essentially
unified as they were for the early Renaissance scientist; the
religious scientist of the seventeenth century must live in

two worlds. As we shall see, this is not an opinion Browne
holds only late in life. He does not progressively develop
from an emotional young Christian devotee to a rational

1

scientist in his mature years. Both characteristics exist
simultaneously in his personality throughout his lifetime.

I shall argue in this thesis that Browne consistently
keeps his scientific observation and thinking free from
religious and pseudo-scientific or occult concepts; at the
same time, he makes frequent use of the language of pseudo-
scientific or occult studies in his devotional prose. Linguis-
tically, as well as intellectually, Browne lives in divided
worlds. Other scholars have argued that Browne found in
occult sciences a doctrinal justification for reconciling his
science and faith,1 but this could be true only if he believed
in the occult sciences and in the assumptions about the world
upon which those sciences rest. He does not. But in his
devotional prose Browne is seeking a symbolic, metaphoric
language, to express his deeply felt religious faith, his
intuition of the transcendent world. Several seventeenth-
century Christian writers had turned to the Bible and Christian
tradition for such a language and Browne too draws upon these
sources. In addition, he consciously adapts the vocabularies
of the pseudo-sciences, which he probably became acquainted
with through his continental medical studies, his wide reading,
and his personal friendships, to religious ends. This
language fulfills two functions in Browne's prose. First,

it provides in language accommodated to human understanding

 

1Harold Fisch, "The Scientist as Priest: A Note on
Robert Boyle's Natural Philosophy," Isis, 44 (1953), 252-265.

some intimation of the incomprehensible divine reality he
glimpses through his faith. The second function of occult
sciences grows out of Browne's desire not to appear as two
different men, one a scientist the other a Christian. Even
though occult language provides no real bridge between
Browne's science and faith because he does not believe in
occult sciences in themselves, the use of the occult lexicon
in his devotional prose supplies a device for keeping his
identity as a natural philosopher before his readers. Occult
language still has a "scientific" flavor for many of Browne's

contemporaries.

II
The only magic which concerns most readers of the prose
of Sir Thomas Browne is that which elegantly informs the

mystical passages of Religio Medici and The Garden 2: Cyrus

 

 

or the grave cadences of Hydriotaphia. But the scholar

 

attempting to explain the function of occult learning in
Browne's thought and prose style confronts a complex and
perplexing problem. Although scholars have not debated the
issue of the significance of occult studies in Browne with
the same fervor which has characterized their discussion of
whether or not Browne was a 'true scientist' or an antiquarian
enthusiast, a pious Christian or a religious skeptic, the
matter has been given some attention.

Two of the best early books on Browne note his apparent
interest in abtruse and esoteric studies though they do not

undertake a systematic analysis of that concern. William Dunn,

surveying the work of Browne, especially Religio Medici, notes

 

evidence of occult learning. "This was a territory in which
Browne was more or less at home and it will be impossible
to understand him without at least straying into the borders
of it."2 Dunn read with great interest the correspondence
between Browne and Elias Ashmole,3 in which Browne confesses
a life-long association with Arthur Dee, the son of the infa-
mous alchemist John Dee and offers to send what alchemical
documents he has in his possession for Ashmole to examine.
Dunn admits that he would gladly pursue the suggestions of
this letter, but the evidence appears to him to be too
inconclusive.4 Browne's correspondence with Ashmole will
engage our attention again in Chapter II of this thesis.
Egon Merton, who is chiefly concerned with the effect
of Browne's scientific studies on his artistic imagination,
discovers in Browne's use of occult studies a reflection of
the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, whose
scientists had already begun to make several important

discoveries, but still assigned occult causation to

 

2William P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study :3 Reli-
gious Philosophy(MinneapoIes, 1950), p. 82.

 

3The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes
(London, 1964), IV: 256. .AlI‘CitatiEns from Browne in this
thesis will be taken from Keynes' four-volume 1964 edition
of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, and will be referred to
'in the textfiby_Volume and page number.

 

 

 

 

4Dunn, p. 20.

many observable phenomena.S Merton finds Browne, like other
writers in the occult tradition, heavily indebted to assump-
tions based on correspondences between man and the rest of
creation.6 Browne's affection, and that of many of his
literary contemporaries, for the macro-microcosm conceit is

well known.

... but to call ourselves a Microcosme, or little
world, I thought it only a pleasant trope of
Rhetorick, till my nearer judgment and second
thoughts told me there was a real truth therein:
for first we are a rude masse, and in the ranke

of creatures, which only are, and have dull kind
of being, not yet privileged with life, or
preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life
of plants, the life of animals, the life of men,
and at last the life of Spirits, running on in

one mysterious nature those five kinds of
existences, which comprehend the creatures not

of the world, onely, but of the Universe (I, 44-45).

In a later survey of Sir Thomas Browne's reading, and a
collation of critical opinion on the books which are said

to have influenced him, Robert Cawley recognizes Browne's

familiarity with the writers of the occult pseudo-scientific

 

SBrowne employs the word occult in two senses. As a
scientist, he applies the term to physical qualities not
manifest to direct observation and to hidden or undiscovered
causes of observable phenomena. This sense could be applied
to Browne's discussion of magnetical "effluxions" (II, 90),
those "invisible paths" by which magnetic attraction was
described before modern physics. See also II, 85 and 121.
To the writer of devotional prose, the word occult refers to
those ancient and medieval reputed sciences believed to
involve the knowledge or use of agencies of a secret and
mysterious nature (as magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy,
etc.) Browne employs the language of these recondite
pseudo-sciences throughout his meditative prose.

6Egon Merton, Science and Imagination 12 Sir Thomas
Browne. (New York, 19495, p. 1437'

 

 

tradition: Ficino, Paracelsus, Agrippa, and the English
Paracelsian Robert Fludd.7 Cawley also calls attention to
an early book by Dewey K. Ziegler which emphasizes Browne's
debt to Neoplatonism and states that Hermetic philosophy
was on Browne's mind continually.8 Cawley could have added
the name of Robert Sencourt, who shares Ziegler's view of
Browne's attachment to occult studies. "Magic in each of its
three branches -- astrology, witchcraft, and hermetic physick,
and their mutual influence, provided Browne with congenial
matter for his studies."9

Most commentators, however, have not been eager to
engage in a systematic examination of the occult in Browne.
Harold Fisch, nonetheless unearths some useful information
in this regard while contrasting the work of Boyle and Browne.
By comparing passages from each of these writers, Fisch
convincingly demonstrates their debt to the Hermetic tradition.
"My concern here is with the metaphysical ground of Boyle's
PhiIOSOphy and whereas Bacon's Philosophy rests upon a clear
separation of the religious and utilitarian functions of
knowledge, (cf. Egggm_0rganum, Part I, Section 65), and a
boundless emphasis upon the latter made possible by this
dissociation, Boyle's Natural Philosophy, on the other hand,

owes its dynamism precisely to the integration of the two

 

7Robert Cawley and George Yost, Studies 12 Sir Thomas
Browne (Eugene, 1965), pp. 104-5.

8Ibid., p. 107.

 

9Robert Sencourt, Outflying Phi1050phy (London, 1924), p. 91.

 

functions, so that the pursuit of scientific, experimental
knowledge becomes, for him, itself an act of religious
devotion."10 Boyle's biographer M.S. Fisher has clearly
demonstrated, argues Fisch, Boyle's connection with the
rationalist philosophers of the later seventeenth century
such as Tillotson, Chillingsworth and the Cambridge Platonists,
but he has not been fully aware of Boyle's relationship to
writers in the Hermetic tradition including "such richly
ambiguous figures as Thomas Browne."11

Ross Garner, in his fine book on Henry Vaughan, contrasts
what he judges to be the dissimilarities in the quality and
emphasis of Hermetic phi1050phy in Browne and Vaughan, and
points the way to a full understanding of Browne's use of
the occult.

But Sir Thomas Browne perhaps represents the most

widely known seventeenth-century figure who drew

largely from Hermeticism. In Reli io Medici, for

example, occult notions are worked into the very

fabric of his thought and style -- which is not

to say, of course, that Browne was committed to

the occult sciences as a way of life, but only

that he may have found in Hermetic notions an apt

imagery. ...Occult science thus seems to afford

a great many opportunities for religious awe and a

great many images for the explanation of the

spiritual processes.

In a current biography of John Dee written and published

at the urging of Frances Yates, who has herself done much

 

10Fisch, p. 253.
111bid., p. 253.

12Ross Garner Henr Vaughan: Experience and Tradition.
(Chicago, 1959), pp: - .

 

to bring the significance of Renaissance Hermeticism to the
attention of modern scholars, Peter French speculates on the
possible importance of Browne's friendship with Arthur Dee,
and alludes to Browne's own absorption in the Hermetic arts:
"his fame (Arthur Dee'gf as a Hermetic Philosopher, like
his father's, reached the court of Russia, where he eventually
went to serve. Little is known of this son of Dee's; one
cannot help but wonder, however, how much he may have influ-
enced Browne, who was one of seventeenth-century England's
greatest literary exponents of the type of occult phiIOSOphy
in which both of the Bees were immersed."13
The most recent and far reaching discussion of occult
philosophy and its importance in the work of literary figures

such as Browne is undertaken by Wayne Shumaker in a book

titled The Occult Sciences 32 the Renaissance. We will pause

 

 

here for a detailed consideration of this book, which will
certainly become an influential and valuable source for
Renaissance scholars since it offers a lucid and succinct
explanation and synthesis of such unmanageable topics as
astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, black and white magic, and
Hermetic philosophy. It also argues an interpretation of
Browne's work which I do not share. Shumaker avers that he

has undertaken this project partially to discourage

 

13Peter J. French, John Dee: The World 2£.32_Elizabethan

 

 

Magus (London, 1972), p. II. __—

recrudescent occult enthusiasm in our own time by demonstrating
that, although enigmatic and imposing in appearance, occultism
is, after all, only inane nonsense.14 Few scholars would
deny this thesis, but in making his case Shumaker deals
severely with the analogical mode of thinking which underlies
the occult sciences;15 analogical thinking, Shumaker fails to
note, also underlies traditional Aristotelian metaphysics, upon
which scholastic philosOphy rests, which, in turn, furnishes
the phiIOSOphical structure for many Renaissance and seventeenth-
century writers including Browne.16 Shumaker's complete
rejection of reasoning by analogy leads him to confer supreme
value on rational empirical truth such as that embraced by
our age, and to measure the past including the Renaissance
against that standard. Thus early writers, such as Pico della
Mirandola, who attacked astrology get high grades from Shumaker
because their judgments have won acceptance.

As regards Browne, who gets more space than any other
literary figure discussed in the book, Shumaker must, of course

account for the magic element in his work. He manages this

 

14Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences 25 the Renaissance
(Berkeley, 1972), p. xvii.

 

15Ibid., p. 33. "For unlettered men the reasoning process
still consists largely of finding analogies." See also p. 161.

16Fisch, p. 257. "For Boyle, on the other hand, as for
Sir Thomas Browne, the natural world and the evidence of the
Scriptures were bound closely together by the law of analogy,
a factor which gave both their scientific and religious outlook
their distinctive character."

10

by stating that when he wrote Religio Medici Browne was immersed

 

in occult notions and hermetic analogies, and that he retained
his affection for at least one Hermetic image -- Hermes'

definition of God17 -- throughout his life; but that as Browne
grew older he became more of a "true scientist," eschewing the

intellectual stance that had produced Religio Medici, and

 

settled down to a life of experimentation and examination of

error, the results being recorded in Pseudodoxia Epidemica.18

 

Near the close of his analysis of Browne's work, Shumaker
pronounces him "rather strikingly anti-Hermetic."19

Anyone who knows Browne's work will be rightly wary
of an argument constructed in such absolute terms, since most
readers come away from Browne certain that he absolutely
abhors only two things, atheism and representative government.
I find fault with Shumaker's argument on at least two counts:
first, it places exaggerated emphasis on two of Browne's
works, suggesting that the first, Religio Medici, an enthu-
siastically mystical spiritual confession of the author's
youth, was supplanted by Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which Shumaker
regards as the work of a mature empirical scientist and
crusader against analogy, superstition, and adherence to
authority. My second quarrel grows out of the nature of

£§eudodoxia itself.

17See pages 16-17 of this chapter.
18Shumaker, p. 169.
191bid., p. 242.

11

Browne, it must be admitted, published Religio Medici

 

as a young man, and as Garner and others have observed, the book
does incorporate occult science into the very tissue of its

thought and style. Religio Medici, which appeared in an

 

authorized version in 1643, was Browne's first published work,

while Pseudodoxia Epidemica (usually referred to by the less

 

cumbersome title Vulgar Errors, a practice I shall follow

 

hereafter) appeared in several editions throughout Browne's

lifetime. ‘Vulgar Errors was first published in 1646 after

 

the public had consumed eight editions in English and Latin
of Religio Medici, whose author was now well known in England
and on the continent. A much revised and enlarged second

edition of Vulggr Errors was represented to the public in

 

1650; two more editions, which contained minor additions and
revisions, appeared in 1658 and 1669; the final edition with
further additions published in Browne's lifetime was issued

in 1672 and contained a statement by the author that readers
could expect no enlargements, the book being finally "compleat
and perfect" (II, vii-viii).

Shumaker's assertion that VUlgar Errors is a book of

 

"hardheaded observation" will be dealt with soon, but first

we should recall that Browne was publishing other works, at
least two of which are today more highly regarded than V2133:
Egggzg, at about the same time the 1658 edition of his scien-
tific work appeared. In a period between 1656 and 1659 --
scholars are divided on the exact dates --, eight years after

the emergence of the first enlarged edition of Vulgar Errors,

 

12

Browne produced two new works: The Garden 2: Cyrus, and Hydri-

 

otaphia. A_Letter tg_§ Friend is also believed to have been
written during this period, but it was not published until
1690.

Browne neglects scarcely any aspect of occult studies

in The Garden 2: Cyrus: there are hermetic allusions to light

 

and darkness (I, 218), a discussion of the Sephiroth (I, 224),

a reference to the "Hebrew mysteries and Cabalistical accounts"
linking the number five to generation (I, 222), and an allusion
to the "mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven" (I, 226).20

Hydriotaphia, in the final meditative chapter, employs

 

Hermetic imagery in some of Browne's most memorable lines:

"life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within
us" (I, 169, "a small fire sufficeth for life, great flames
seemed too little after death" (I, 169).21 Browne also mentions
"tutellary observators" (I, 165),22 and mingles alchemical

and mystical language to describe the triumphant Christian:

 

20The discussion of Browne's allusions to the Cabala and
to the system of the Sephiroth is dealt with in Chapter III,
pp. 29-320

leee Chapter II, pp. 20-30.

22Browne refers to these provincial spirits in Reli io,
Hydriotaphia, and the Garden. In Religio he writes, "Therefore
for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence, that I
could easily believe, that not onely whole Countries, but
particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.
It is not a new opinion of the Church of Rome, but an old
one of Pythagoras and Plato" (I, 42). Browne could have
added the spirits mentioned in the Corpus Hermeticum which he
is almost certainly aware of (See Chapter II). see Co us
Hermeticum, ed. A.D. Nock and A.J. Festugiére, Dieuxieme
Edition, 4 vols. (Paris, 1960), IV, p. 21.

 

 

13

"And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian
annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation,
the kisse of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into

the divine shadow they have already an handsome anticipation

of heaven..." (I, 170). Browne found this final description

so apt for the ultimate Christian experience that he repeated

it at the close of Christian Morals (I, 241), which Browne's

 

daughter Elizabeth Lyttelton called "the last work of our
Honoured and Learned Father," a work which bears the stamp of
occult expression not only at its close, but throughout. In
refers to the uroboros (I, 105),23 the hermetic symbol of
eternity. It can be seen then from this admittedly brief
survey of Browne's other works that he did not immediately
give over interest in occult science with the publication of

the first, or subsequent, editions of Vulgar Errors; to

 

align ourselves with Shumaker's judgment of Browne we must
ignore his greatest literary productions, which is too great
a price to pay.

My second disagreement with Shumaker concerns the nature
of Vulgar Errors itself. We must agree that the work does go
a long way in debunking many of the superstitious errors the
Renaissance had accepted as truth. And Vulgar Errors is
indeed Baconian in its identification of the greatest enemy
of knowledge: "The mortallest enemy unto Knowledge, and that

which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a

 

21"See Chapter II. n. 13.

14

peremptory adhesion unto Authority, and more especially,
the establishing of our beliefs upon the dictates of Anti-

quity" (II, 40). But Vulgar Errors is a long book and before

 

we have made our way through half of it, we find Browne very
ambivalent toward Antiquity and its authority. In Book III

of vulgar Errors, the book most often mined for a representative

 

sample of the whole, Browne examines the assertion that the
bite of a tarantula can be cured with the appropriate music.
"Some doubt many have of the Tarantula, or Poisonous Spider of
Calabria, and that magical cure of the bite therof by Musick.
But since we observe that many attest it from experience:
Since the learned Kircherus hath positively averred it; and
set down the songs and the tunes solumnely used for it; Since
some also affirm the Tarantula itself will dance upon certain
streaks, whereby they set their instruments against its
poison; we shall not at all question it" (11, 267). This
passage calls to mind Robert Burton, who made no secret of his
adhesion to authority. He admits having been skeptical
about his mother's use of a spider in an amulet as a cure for
ague, until he found, "rambling amongst authors," that
Dioscorides, Matthiolus, and Aldrovandus approved of it.24
On the question of the mutation of the sexes, Browne
adjoins the authority of Empedocles and Tiresias to those who

suggest that though there have been "few, or rather none which

 

 

24Robert Burton The Anatom of Melanchol d
____ 4y e . Holbrook
Jackson, 3 vols. (London, 1949), IIT'p. 250. ’

15

have emasculated or turned women, yet there have been very

many who from an esteem or reality of being Women have
infallibly proved Men. Some at the first point of their
menstruous eruptions, some in the day of their marriage,

others many years after: which occasioned diSputes at Law,

and contestations concerning a restore of the dowry" (II, 213-4).
His discussion makes it absolutely clear that Browne believes

in the occasional occurrence of "transexism," which is
"observable in Man," and that he does so on the basis of

learned authority. Browne continues by citing the "Paracelsians"
who have discovered the transmutation of One animal into

another, and he himself notes the transformations of cater-

pillars and silkworms, which, he has said in Religio Medici,

 

turned his "Philosophy to Divinity."

Browne's own stated method in Vulgar Errors, which

 

disavows authority while including it as one of the "three
Determinators of Truth," should lead us to question the clarity
of his thinking on this point. His discussion of the badger
provides another case familiar to many readers who know

Vulgar Errors only thrdugh excerpts in anthologies. He

finds it much easier to dismiss the error that this animal
"hath legs of one side shorter then of the other," because
neither Albertus Magnus nor Aldrovandus could believe it

(II, 170-1). If Browne ever measured the animal's legs, he
does not bother to include that information in his refutation.

He likewise argues primarily from authority when, in another

(Q

'3 '~ll

16

place, he alleges that elephants have written whole sentences,
and have also spoken, and that dogs and cats speak to witches
(II, 161).

These few examples are cited not to deny that Browne
was a "true scientist" (many scholars have discussed at length
experiments which Browne performed that are irrefutably
scientific even in the present sense of that term) but to

demonstrate that Vulgar Errors provides very insubstantial

 

evidence that a young religious mystic had completely evolved
into an exclusively rational, empirical scientist.

It is also misleading to imply, as Shumaker does, that in
Vulgar Errors Browne entirely abandons references to his
occult studies. In his discussion of glowworms, Browne
muses on whether the light of animals is "Kin unto the light of
Heaven: whether the invisible flame of life received in a
convenient matter, may not become visible" (II, 263). In
this book of what Shumaker calls "hardheaded observation" he
refuses to "reject or condemn a sober and regulated astrology"
(II, 336). In his celebrated chapter on "Hieroglyphical
Pictures," Browne demonstrates that he still examines the
signatures and the alphabet of the Divine in nature, and still,

in his phrase from Religio Medici, sucks "Divinity from the

 

flowers of nature." Other examples of occult learning

exhibited in Vulgar Erro:§_will be examined in later chapters,

 

but these few should be sufficient to cast some doubt on

Shumaker's allegation that the "later Browne" is fundamentally

 

different from the author of Religio Medigi. We must look

17

elsewhere for an adequate eXplanation of Browne's use of
occult studies.

Not all modern writers on Browne wish that he be viewed
either as an empirical scientist, or as a devout physician
whose religion and science are consciously integrated.

James King, following the view of Dewey Ziegler, desires that
the doctor of Norwich be considered an unsuccessful oriental
mystic. "Browne employed his speculative or discursive
intellect not to create philosophical systems or to make
philosophical analyses, and not even (primarily) to solve
scientific or theological problems, but to induce in himself

a state of ecstasy through which an ultimately liberating,
unifying, and noetic experience might come."25 King concludes
his chapter by suggesting that although Browne had the proper
temperament to become a mystic, he lacked a proper master,

and failed to reach a transcendent state of mystical consci-
ousness because he succumbed to the temptation to dissipate
the power of his experiences by writing them down.26 For
Browne to have become a genuine mystic, according to King,

he should not have written at all. This is an Opinion certain
to be "studiously declined" by admirers of English prose,

but as vague and forced as King's argument is it does contain

an important truth about Browne: there are degrees of his

 

25James Roy King, Studies ig Six Seventeenth Century
Writers (Athens, Ohio, 1966), pp. 96-7.

25Ibid., p. 120.

 

18

being, aspects of his experience, that empirical science will
not satisfy. If by mysticism we mean belief in the possibility
of union with the Divine by means of ecstatic contemplation

or dependence upon spiritual intuition, or if we mean "direct

intuitive access to God... conceived as absconditus from

 

human reason,"27 Browne's prose evidences numerous passages
with a mystical flavor, and in these passages, as we shall
see, he repeatedly draws his language from occult studies.

A complete study of Browne's occult learning awaits a
number of scholarly investigators since no single study could
adequately handle every aspect of it.28 Browne's works include

discussion of or allusions to the Corpus Hermeticum and pseudo-

 

Hermetic documents, alchemy, numerology, the Cabala, astrology,
palmistry (Browne admits being skeptical about it, but recalls
that he has observed the life line in apes and moles II, 393),
witchcraft, and other subjects. This thesis will focus on the
most significant occult influences on Browne's work: astrology,
Corpgs Hermeticum, alchemy, and the particular variety of number

mysticism present in The Garden g£_Cyrus.

 

 

27Henry M. Pachter, Magic Into Science: The_Stggy gf_
Paracelsus (New York, 1951T, p. 328. Pacfifer states that mys-
ficism‘is originally a theological doctrine opposed to the method
of dialectic. The mystic claimed direct intuitive access to
God. "In the fifteenth century, however, some of the greatest
dialecticians nourished mystic ideas, notably Nicholas de Cusa,
whose theory of 'learned ignorance' and 'coincidence of the
opposites' became fruitful in the Renaissance age. From then
on, 'reason' and 'intuition' no longer were considered as
alternatives."

 

281 have avoided dealing with Browne's statements about
witchcraft, for example, because they are discussed sufficiently
in numerous works.

19

The tradition in which Browne works as a physician and
scientist includes much occult learning which corroborates
his faith by providing intellectual systems and language com-
patible, and in some cases interchangeable -- alchemical
jargon -- with the thought and language of orthodox Christian
religion. That Browne chose to make use of this tradition
should surprise no one, since it was current in the medical
schools he attended, and it offered a propitious means of arti-
culating a satisfying adult faith. The author of Religio Medici
professes and describes that faith early in the work (I, 11).

For the man of faith the seventeenth century posed two
sharply defined theories of science from which to choose.
In the old science, religion and natural philosophy are in-
separable, and natural events are often explained through
spiritual intervention. Later, Bacon and Descartes relegated
God to a discrete, remote region from which He directed an
increasingly mechanical creation; the other region, God's
creation, the domain of nature, became the subject of empirical
science. For Boyle and others, including Browne, who retain
their Christian faith but acknowledge that religious beliefs
cannot be mingled with truly scientific investigation, occult
sciences furnished a metaphoric language congenial to the
religious scientist.

Chapter I of this thesis will focus on Browne's
particular debt to Paracelsus, not because he is the major
figure in the occult tradition -- although this may very well

be true -- but because in his work we can observe a number

20

of ideas important in Renaissance occultism which are also
crucial to understanding the work of Sir Thomas Browne.

My second chapter will examine the way in which Browne's
work incorporates some of the themes and language of the 93:-

pus Hermeticum and the primary Hermetic art of alchemy.

 

First, Browne employs one of that tradition's chief themes:
the visible world is a manifestation of the invisible, which
is central to the Hermetic Pimander, and underlies Paracelsus'
and Browne's treatment of "signatures" and the Book of Nature.
Second, Browne is so fond of the Hermetic definition of God

-- God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose cir-
cumference is nowhere -- that he includes it in each of his
works. This definition, which first appears in the pseudo-

Hermetic Liber PhiIOSOphorum of the 12th century, was first

 

employed as Browne uses it by Nicholas of Cusa. Third,
Browne shares with John Dee and other Hermetists a character-
istic religious tolerance born of the belief that the Hermetic

corpus was a part of the prisca theologica, and, like

 

Hellenistic wisdom, foreshadowed the truth of Christianity.
My third chapter will analyze Browne's particular ‘
variety of numerology in his most thoroughly mystical work.
The entire Garden gf_§yyg§ can be summarized as a hieroglyph
of the Creator as he manifests himself through order, order
which is revealed by the ubiquity of the quincunx in the
creation. A comparison of Browne's apparently contradictory

statements on number mysticism in Vulgar Errors and in the

 

Garden gf_Cyrus provides the clearest example of the scientist's

21

censure of an occult science and of the devotional writer's
eagerness to embrace its language as a device in his art.
In my final chapter, I will focus on the persona we
encounter in Browne's meditative works. I have discovered
that Joan Webber's suggestions about Browne's timeless and
representative persona, or "cosmic personality," which

she arrives at by a rhetorical analysis of Religio Medici,

 

can be seen with equal clarity through an examination of
Browne's affinities with the occult tradition. Webber states,
"Where Burton sought to make himself cosmic by omnivorous
reading, Browne does it on the one hand by reference to physio-
logy, which was, after all, his business, and on the other
by means of introspection characteristic of his nature."29
Webber's concept of the "cosmic personality" helps us to
account for the numerous apparently contradictory statements
Browne makes about occult studies, and to comprehend the artistic
nature of Browne's use of occult language.

We now turn to Browne's early medical education and
to the probable source of his initiation into the occult

world.

 

29Joan Webber, The Eloguent "I" (Madison, 1968), p. 161.

CHAPTER I

BROWNE AND PARACELSUS

The fact that Renaissance England owes a great debt to
the thought of Paracelsus is a commonplace of the history of
ideas, and Browne's specific debt to him has also been commented
upon in passing by most scholars interested in Sir Thomas
Browne's ideas. This chapter examines the impact of the thought
of Paracelsus, one of the central figures of the occult tra-
dition, on Browne's own use of occult studies. Browne finds
in Paracelsus useful medical concepts and a language which he
adapts to his own supra-mundane expression. For Paracelsus,
analogy is the fundamental principle of all thought, scientific
or religious, a fact which is clear from his two principal
theories: the macrocosm-microcosm analogy and the doctrine
Of signatures. For Browne analogical thinking is absolutely
essential to religion and to the metaphysical approach that he
takes to his art, but he insists upon the necessity of logical
causal thinking in scientific investigation. Browne's attitude
towarxi Paracelsus then is ambivalent; he condemns the analogical
foundations of Paracelsus' medicine and at the same time employs

in his art a number of the very devices he condemns.

22

23

Fortunately, Browne was a self-aware and articulate physician,
and we therefore have a great deal of valuable commentary from
him on his medical studies and practice. In addition,
researchers have provided us with much helpful information on
medical training at Oxford during Browne's stay there, and
also at the three continental medical schools he attended.
Using both sources of evidence, I shall first briefly trace
Browne's medical education with particular emphasis on his
acquaintance with Paracelsus. Second, I shall examine
Browne's own commentary on Paracelsian ideas as those comments
appear in his published work and correspondence, and third,

I shall attempt to account for Browne's attitude toward
Paracelsus' variety of occult science.

Browne began what today would probably be called pre-
medical training at Oxford. Phyllis Allen describes the typical
Oxford medical student of Browne's day as possessing a very
dull intellectual, but stimulating social life.1 Most students
who completed a medical degree at Oxford merely retired to the
country without ever attempting to establish a medical practice.
Candidates serious about practicing medicine for their livelihood
often completed degrees at Oxford for the purpose of licensing,
but secured their practical education elsewhere. Anatomy
occupied only a minor position in the medical curriculum: only

three human anatomy lessons were scheduled by the university each

 

1Phyllis Allen, "Medical Education in the 17th Century,"
Journal 2: the History 2: Medicine, 1(1946), 121-6.

 

24

year, and most students did not attend these lessons. At the
anatomy lessons, the professor did not dissect or examine the
body himself, but rather read from Galen as a barber-surgeon
exposed or held up the various organs.

As one can quickly discern from Allen's description,
medical education at Oxford was scarcely compatible with the
serious intention or scholarly temperament of Sir Thomas

Browne. The young doctor who in Religio Medici confesses,

 

at age twenty-nine, that his manner is "austere, his behaviour
full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity" (I, 12),

could hardly have been satisfied with medical training

which elevated the social over the intellectual life.

Equally distressing to him, must have been the lack of
emphasis on the study of anatomy which later, as a practicing
physician, he recommends to Henry Power as one of the pillars.
of medical knowledge (IV, 255). Browne's Oxford training,
nonetheless, was not entirely without redeeming qualities,
since he undoubtedly received from the University a thorough
knowledge of Galen's work, which along with Harvey's treatise
on the circulation of the blood and the study of pharmacology,
Browne recommends to Henry Power as absolute necessities for
the practicing physician (IV, 255). Also, Browne met Thomas
Clayton at Oxford, who probably advised him to continue his

medical studies on the continent after completing his M.A.2

 

2Frank L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (Ann Arbor, 1962),

 

p. 41.

25

In the following passage Robert Burton paraphrases Dr. Clayton's
characterization of the ideal priest-physician. We will soon
have occasion to consider this concept in the discussion of
Paracelsus and Browne.

A good Divine either is or ought to be a good

physician at least, as our Saviour calls Himself,

and was indeed... They differ but in object, the

one of the body, the other of the soul, and use

divers medicines to cure: one amends animam per

corgus, the other cor us per animam, as our Regius

ro essor of Physic we 1 informed us in a learned

lecture of his not long since.3

If he had not already encountered Paracelsus' ideas in
England (which is unlikely),4 Browne certainly would have
studied them at Montpelier in France, probably the first

continental medicaf school he attended. At Montpelier,

Lazare Riviere, whose Praxis Medica Browne owned and recommended

 

to Henry Power (IV, 256), was an outspoken advocate of
Paracelsus in his university's continuing debate with the
University of Paris' more conservative faculty, which still
reverenced the work of Galen.5 In accord with belief in

Paracelsian chemical preparations, Montpelier also possessed

 

3Burton, Anatomy, 1, 37.

4Paul Kocher, "Paracelsan Medicine in England (ca. 1570-
1600)," Journal of the Histo of Medicine, 2(Autumn, 1947),
p. 475. Kocher Efates t at y I390 every well informed person
i? England cine to know something about Paracelsia? medicine.

so, Meyric Carre, Phases of T ou ht in England Ox ord,
1949), p. 210. Carre argues—That tfie "fifitings of Paracelsus
were avidly studied in England by scholars interested in the
secrets of nature."

SJeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne (New York, 1958),
pp. 63-80.

 

26

a splendid herbal garden for the preparation of drugs. Judging
from Browne's account of his own herbal garden, he obviously
considered such herbs an absolute medical necessity. The list
of herbs which Browne prepared in 1667 covers four pages of

the Miscellany Tracts (III, 397-400). Even though Browne
obviously follows the Paracelsian practice of preparation of
specific drugs for Specific illnesses, he deprecates Paracelsus'
suggestion that plants should be renamed for the diseases they
cure, stating that this is a "way more likely to multiply
Empericks then Herbalists" (II, 153) and is unlikely to make
any lasting contribution to the practice of medicine.

Browne probably did not encounter Paracelsian thought
at the University of Padua, the second medical school he attended.
But Browne's lifelong opinion that medical knowledge and practice
should rest on the foundation of anatomy (IV, 255) can be
traced to that university, where Harvey had studied Vesalian
medicine before him.

At Leyden, where Browne most likely received his medical
degree, Paracelsian medicine occupied a position of eminence in
the university's curriculum. Professors at Leyden were reportedly
drawn to the Paracelsian theory that many organic processes were
chemical, and disease or illness caused by organic malfunctions
were susceptible to cure by drugs prepared specifically
for those organs. At Leyden, Browne is believed by some to
have prepared his thesis on syphilis. Paracelsus was an

authority on syphilis, and he was famous for his preparations

27

of allegedly miraculous mercurial cures.6 Huntley argues,
almost convincingly, that the assertion that Browne prepared
his thesis, now lost, on syphilis rests upon slender evidence,7
but it is not difficult to demonstrate from Browne's extant
work that the subject of syphilis, and venereal disease

generally, continued to interest him throughout his life. In

Vulgar Errors, Browne isolates the supposed geographical origins

 

of venereal disease, and puzzles over why it should have ori-
ginated exclusively in the islands around America (II, 464).
Browne's correspondence is also dotted with references
to this disease. In a letter to his son Edward dated 1676,
Browne recommends a new book by de Blegny on the "French disease"
(IV, 63), and in 1679 he refers one of his own patients to
Edward because his own various attempts at a cure, which
included "mercuriall pills," had failed (IV, 107 and 116).
Specific references to Paracelsus appear in most of
Browne's works, and in others numerous ideas occur which can
be traced directly to him. These references, reflecting
Browne's general ambivalence toward Paracelsus, at times hold
him up to near ridicule, while at other times they appear to
express genuine admiration, as, for example, in the passage

below.

 

6Walter Pagel, Paracelsus (New York, 1958), p. 24.
7

 

Huntley, p. 68.

28

I could never passe that sentence of Paracelsus
without an asterisk or an annotation;TASCendens
constellatum multa revelat, uaerentibus magnaIia
naturae, i.e. Opera e1 , in.3

 

 

 

 

Thomas Browne was drawn, as it appears many seventeenth-
century physicians and scientists were, to the mystical,
religious quality of Paracelsus' natural philosophy. Walter
Pagel, who has examined the religious tone of Paracelsian
medicine and science in great detail states, "The new science
of Paracelsus knows only a single infinite universe. Therefore
it is dedicated to the perception of the divine in the individual
of the One in the multiplicity of his manifestations. It
leads to a new reality, to life. According to the doctrine
of Paracelsus, this science begins here below with experiments,
but it must be blessed by grace from above."9 Paracelsus'
science is intuitive and non-rational, it is grounded in his
faith in the Creator whose presence he discovers everywhere
in the cosmos, and he believes that the secrets of nature
are revealed by God to the pious investigator of nature.

Pagel continues:

 

 

8Sir Thomas Browne, Reli io Medici and Other Works,
ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, I964i, . 30I. 'Mhrtin argues that
this passage is often wrongly attributed to the De Ima inibus
of Paracelsus. A statement which closer to the sense of Browne's
appears in Philoso hia Sa ax, Paracelsus, Opera Omnia, 3 vols.
(Geneva, 1658!, II 528. 1 citations to the work of Paracelsus
in this thesis are taken from this edition. "Astrum ducit
hominem ad sublimem sapientiam, prudentiam, scientiam, ut
in lumine admirabilis fiat, atque mysteria miraculorum Dei
splendida et luculenta manifestentur."

9Walter Pagel, "Religious Motives in the Medical Biology
of the XVIIth Century," Bulletin of the Institute of the History
of Medicine, 3(Feb., 1935), IUD-1N

 

 

 

29

The combination of religious irrationalism and
vitalistic empiricism characteristic of the XVIIth
century originated in Paracelsus, in his refutation
of formal logic and reason as methods of natural
research, his mysticism and his realism. In all

the fundamental points of his doctrine religious
motives can be recognized: in his employment of
analogy like that of the macrocosm-microcosm, in his
theory of sympathy and antipathy, and in his rejection
of ancient humoralism in favor of his doctrine of seeds
and created entities ... These religious funda-
mentals are obvious in the predominance of spirit

and imagination as emanations of the universal logos
in things based upon the assumption that they, like
Christ, repreient the mediator between the One

and the Many. 0

In some of the ideas listed above, Browne clearly follows
Paracelsus, but even though his science often leads Browne to
rhapsodic meditations on the First Cause of Nature, his actual
scientific investigation, as we shall see, is neither irrational
nor fundamentally religious, but based upon formal logic and
rational observation.11 Browne, like Bacon before him, labels
as one of the chief causes of error the proclivity of the
unlearned to mingle religious, analogical truth with scientific
investigation. Browne clearly demonstrates this view in a
condemnation of one of the Christian superstitions, which he

compares with the doctrine of sympathies and antipathies of

 

10Pagel, "Religious Motives," pp. 119-20.

11As I have myself pointed out in the Introduction of
this thesis, Browne's science does not possess the consistency
of modern science and Browne often violates his own methodological
guidelines. He, for example, condemns authority as a test
of truth, but he turns to it again and again in Vulgar Errors.
One fact, however, which does distinguish Browne 5 scientific"
writing from his sacred prose is that the former is virtually
free of analogical, inferential thinking, while the latter
pursues every conceivable analogy to an g_altitudo.

30
Paracelsus, an idea which Browne disavows throughout his work.

Thus the Ass having a peculiar mark of a cross made

by a black list down his back, and another athwart,

or at right angles down his shoulders; common opinion

ascribes this figure unto a peculiar signation; since

that beast had the honour to bear our Saviour on

his back. Certainly this is a course more desperate

then Antipathies, Sympathies, or occult qualities;

wherein by a final and satisfactive discernment of
faith, we lay the last and particular effects upon

the first and general cause of all things (II, 475).

In Pagel's treatment of the religious motives of the
medical biology of the seventeenth century, he, in another
connection, refers to Sir Thomas Browne as an example of the
"via media" as regards occult study. In Pagel's view, Browne's
reconciliation of religion and science grows consistently out
of Paracelsus' world view, and, although I reject that Opinion
because it is based upon a metaphorical passage in Religio
Medici which Pagel takes literally,12 his term, "via media,"
seems to me useful. Browne is aware that in his own time
religion, magic, and science are not as yet absolutely
distinguished, the perplexities of science often being
"explained" by reference to hidden or occult qualities, or
religious causation. Even though the example quoted above

and many like it in Vulgar Errors demonstrate that Browne

 

carefully separates these three realms of experience, he avails
himself of their proximity in the minds of his readers when

he writes his sacred prose. His "via media" is thus an

 

12Pagel, "Religious Motives," p. 217.

31

attitude toward occult studies which allows him to employ

the metaphoric language in his imaginative prose without
committing himself to belief in the ideas themselves. Basil
Willey states that Browne is a man pleading for religion

in an age of science,13 and occult sciences provide Browne

with a mechanism for keeping one foot in the door of the church,
another in the door of the laboratory.

I shall now turn to an examination of what I judge to be
Browne's "via media" in dealing with the ideas of Paracelsus.
Browne unquestionably employs Paracelsian ideas in his science
and his art, but he is discriminating in what he accepts or
transforms and in what he rejects. In terms of science,
that discrimination proceeds largely upon Baconian scientific

principles. In Christian Morals, Browne closes one of his

 

most justly famous and eloquent passages in praise of the
scientific revolution then in progress with an equally well

known allusion to Paracelsian medicine.

And therefore, rather than to swell the leaves

of learning by fruitless Repetitions, to sing the
same Song in all Ages, nor adventure at Essays beyond
the attempt of others, many would be content that
some would write like Helmont or Paracelsus; and

be willing to endure the monstrosity of some
opinions, for divers singular notions requiting

such aberrations (I, 262).

Browne devotes space to the examination of both what is useful
in Paracelsus and to the monstrosities and aberrations. He

condemns several of the logical absurdities to which Paracelsus'

 

13Basil Willey, The Seventeenth CentugyBackggound
(Garden City, 1953; originaIIy 1935), p. 49.

 

32

uncritical method leads him. One such absurdity is Paracelsus'
belief in "non-Adamical men," those "middle natures betwixt men
and spirits" which Paracelsus named fairies, nymphs, and pigmies.
Browne's condemnation of this notion is unqualified, but the idea
nonetheless stimulates his imagination -- as bizarre ideas often
do -- and he muses that the immaterial soul could as easily
"exercise her faculties" in a pigmy "as in a Giant" (11, 305-6).
In Religio Medici, Browne alludes to another Paracelsian aber-
ration. He writes: "I am not of Paracelsus' minde that boldly
delivers a receipt to make a man without conjunction ..."
(I, 46-7). Here Browne condemns this extravagant extension
of the power of putrefaction, a theory which anticipates the
idea of test-tube babies by several centuries. Paracelsus'
formula follows:

The secret of how to make the "homunculus" was

known to the "Wunderleut" /Miracle Men7 of old who

were themselves begotten by the process. It shall

remain secret to the end of days, when everything

will be manifest. A recipe is given, however it

prescribes: let a man's semen putrefy in a sealed

vessel for 40 days at the highest possible tempera-

ture -- until some movement can be seen. It will then

resemble a human shape, but be transparent and with-

out a body. It now needs feeding daily with the

"arcanum" of human blood, for 40 weeks, after which

it will develop intolg real human child with all its
limbs, only smaller.

 

14This paraphrase appears in Pagel, Paracelsus, p. 117.
Two references in the Opera Omnia to the homunéfilus follow:
"Origo quid spermatis est: per maximam enim digentem, quae
in ventre equino sit, generatur homunculus, similis ei per
omnia, corpore et sanguine, principibus membris, a uo
produit" (II, 63). Also, "Ut autem id fiat, hoc me o procendum
est: Sperma viri per se in cucurbita siggillata putrefiat
summa putrifactione ventris equini per quadraginta dies, aut
tandiu donec incipiat vivere et moueti ac agitari, quod facile
videre tamen pellucidum it sine corpore" (II, 86).

 

 

33

Browne humorously rejects Paracelsus' alchemical
boast that he had discovered the Elixir of Life.

It is folly to find out remedies that are not

recoverable under a thousand years; or propose

the prolonging of life by that which the

twentieth generation may never behold. More

veniable is a dependance upon the Philosopher's

stone, potable gold, or any of those Arcana's

whereby Paracelsus that died himself at fourty-

seven, gloried that he could make other men

immortal (II, 197).

Browne treats more seriously the probably mistaken
belief that Paracelsus died from taking one of his own
mineral preparations. "And in the same sense shall we only
allow a Diamond to be poison; and whereby as some relate
Paracelsus himself was poisoned" (II, 125). In this passage
Browne condemns the administration of even beneficial minerals
in "gross and angular Powders."

In reading Browne's treatment of these "monstrosities"
of Paracelsian thought we can understand why historians of
medicine have referred to Paracelsian medical innovations as
a mixed blessing. On the one hand Paracelsus insisted that
physicians be consummate natural philosophers, that they
experiment and prepare specific medical drugs for specific
organic malfunctions, and that medical practice be based on
a first hand knowledge of anatomy; whereas, on the other
hand, his intuitive and non-rational methods make the belief
that he died by his own hand from ingesting ground diamonds

not totally unthinkable. Paul Kocher states that medical

practice grounded in animistic, Cabalistic, and Neoplatonic

34

thought and encouraged by Paracelsus' example, produced
countless quacks and charlatans who must have killed a con-
siderable number of people with their uncontrolled medicines.15
Browne delivers a vituperative condemnation of "Saltimbancoes,

Quackslavers, and Charlatans" (II, 30) in Vulgar Errors, while

 

he bestows high praise, in a letter to Dr. Samuel Bave, on
Dr. Rant, who appears to have incorporated the beneficent
qualities of the Paracelsian tradition while avoiding its
very real dangers. Browne says of Rant "no one has such
competence in disease and has explored the nature and cause
of disease more deeply, and has moreover prescribed safe and
specific remedies against disease" (IV, 243).

Browne's attitude toward the "singular notions" of
Paracelsus, the beneficial qualities of his thought, can be
best understood in the light of Allen Debus' explanation of
the compromise position taken by most English physicians in
regard to Paracelsian medicine. "They readily accepted those
of the new remedies which proved their worth, but very few of.
them concerned themselves with the deeper and more occult
aspects of Paracelsian thought."16 Browne's compromise,
his "via media," is of a different sort since he does find
a place for the "deeper and more occult" aspects of
Paracelsianism in his art though not in his medical practice.

Before turning to his artistic use of Paracelsian thought,

 

15Kocher, "Paracelsan Medicine," pp. 479-80.
16
p. 80.

Allen Debus, The English Paracelsians (London, 1965),

 

35

however, we will investigate Browne's use of ideas borrowed
from Paracelsus in his own scientific investigation, which
he scrupulously separates from occult and religious influence.

One of the principal contributions of Paracelsian medi-
cine, which can be partially accounted for by the macrocosm-
microcosm analogy, was Paracelsus' belief that the "greater"
and "lesser" worlds operated on identical chemical principles.
Debus explains:

First, chemistry formed the basis of_an understanding

of the macrocosm as a whole. They LalchemistsT felt

that the universe was chemically created and fhat

it continues to operate in a chemical fashion ...

Second, the Paracelsians turned their chemical key

towards an understanding of the human body -- an

approach they believed valid since they maintained

that our bodies, which are in close correspondence

with the macrocosm, must also operate chemically.

Bodily functions and diseases were pictured as

chemical malfunctions which chemically prepared

medicines would counteract and cure.
But Paracelsus' discovery of medical preparations was not based
entirely on his 1 priori assumption of the macrocosm-microcosm
analogy; many of his attempts at specific cures grew out of his
first hand observation of disease. We have mentioned earlier
Paracelsus' work with venereal disease. He also directly
observed several bronchial and pulmonary illnesses which afflict

18

men who work in mines. It was the near epidemic proportions

 

17rbid., p. 4.

18Pagel, Paracelsus, p. 102, n. 268. Browne
demonstrates an—interest in mines and miners in his corres-
pondence. See, IV, 41 and IV, 15, 16.

 

36

of diseases such as syphilis and the entire family of fatal
illnesses to which mine workers were subject that accounted
for much of the Renaissance dissatisfaction with Greek medicine,
since many of the diseases current in the Renaissance and
seventeenth century were unknown to Hippocrates and Galen.
Though he is skeptical of Paracelsus' metaphysical flights,
Browne accepts his empirical recommendations concerning such
diseases. In a letter to Henry Power he advises a concise
summary of the virtues of Paracelsian medicine without its
aberrations. Browne stresses the importance of chemical
preparations, and the thorough knowledge of disease both
through familiarity with the authorities on disease and
through direct observation. He closes his letter to Power
with a succinct Latin maxim: secretum medicorum est judicium
(IV, 256), advice which Power apparently kept with him since
he went on to distinguish himself as a physician and a
scientific investigator.19
Another of Paracelsus' medical innovations which grew
out of his cosmic thought was his correct assumption that the

causes of disease can often be traced to the infirmity of

specific organs.

 

19T.Cowles, "Dr. Henry Power Disciple of Sir Thomas Browne,"
Isis, XX (1933-4), 344-366.

37

Disease and its cause, then, must be referred to

a seat, and the cause found in a chemical substance --
a mineral 'element' -- well defined by its counter-
part in the greater world. In other words pathology,
must be based on the 'anatomia elementata' which

is concerned with the distribution of minerals in

the outside world ... Paracelsus' attention given

to organs grows out of the principal article of

his faith -- his conviction 8f the parallelism
between man and the cosmos.2

It is clear from a number of Browne's letters that he,
as a physician, looks upon disease as confined to specific
organs, and that his administration of medical drugs is

21 But in his medical practice

based upon that assumption.
Browne rejects the notion that man's organs answer to their
various counterparts in the macrocosm, or that any cure can
be based upon such a correspondence. In a passage from
Vulgar Errors, Browne denounces the error that man's body is
magnetic, which, like Paracelsus' theory of organic pathology,
is based upon the analogical microcosmic conceit. Browne
removes the sting from his deprecation with a scatological
joke, which closes the passage.

It is improbable and something singular what some

conceive, ... that the body of man is magnetical,

and being placed in a Boat, the Vessel will never

rest untill the head respecteth the North... This

Opinion confirmed would much advance the Micro-

cosmical conceit, and commend the Geography of

Paracelsus, who according to the cardinal points
of the World, divideth the body of man; and there-

 

 

20Pagel, Pgracelsus, p. 136-7.

21See IV, 27-232. In Browne's correspondence with his
son, Edward, also a physician, he discusses a number of diseases
for which he mentions the specific cures.

38

fore working upon human ordure, and by long prepa-.
ration rendering it odiferous, he terms it Zibeta
Occidentalis, Western Civet; making the face the
East but the posteriours the America or Western
part of his Microcosm (II, 106).

 

While reading this denunciation of Paracelsian geographical
analogy, the reader familiar with Browne's work will perhaps
recall just how pervasively that geography -- the macrocosm-
microcosm conceit -- occurs in his artistic prose.

Still another example of Browne's scientific application
of Paracelsian thought is provided by his study of color

indicators in Vulgar Errors. He praises and censures the

 

chemists who had, on the basis of the three-principled
theory with which Paracelsus had replaced the four Galenic
humors, admirably explained odor and taste, but had inadequately
accounted for color.

The Chymists have laudably reduced their causes

unto Sal, Sulphur, and Mercury; and had they made

it out so well in this, as in the objects of smell

and tast, their endeavors had been more acceptable:

For whereas they refer Sapor unto Salt, and Odor

unto Sulphur, they vary much concerning colour;t

some reducing it unto Mercury, some Sulphur; others

unto Salt (II, 460).

Allen Debus, who has studied closely Browne's analysis of
color indicaters in Vulgar Errors states that it, along with

other evidence,22 indicates that Browne was well acquainted

with Paracelsian scientific theory. Browne's own attempt

 

22Allen Debus, "Sir Thomas Browne and the Study of Color
Indicators," Ambix, 10 (1962), 29-36. My discussion follows
this article cIosely.

39

to discover which of the three elements, or which of the
elements in combination, causes color begins with a hypothesis:
though "Sulphur seem to carry the master-stroak, yet Salt may
have a strong co-operation (II, 460).

Since Browne's discussion of this problem occurs in
his digression concerning blackness, his two part explanation
focuses on reactions which produce that color. In the first
part of the explanation he observes that all combustible bodies
contain an inflammable substance, which is Sulphur. This
chemical, when exposed to a flame, when "torrified and sindged,"
turns black, as, for example, in the residue which remains
in chimneys. From this and numerous other examples (II, 475-6),
Browne concludes that Sulphur is one essential cause for the
blackness of bodies. But he adds complexities to this simple
explanation involving the effects of Vitriol on an oak-gall
fluid. "The second way whereby bodies become black, is an
Atramentous condition or mixture, that is a vitriolate or
copperose quality conjoyning with a terrestrious and astringent

humidity; for so is Atramentum Scripgorium, or writing Ink

 

commonly made by copperose cast upon a decoction or infusion
of galls" (II, 477). Browne has now satisfied himself that
Salts also play a part in causing blackness, but he presses

for a more complete explanation. He finds that "not only

is Vitriol -- and therefOre specifically the iron part of it --
the cause of blackness, but that salts generally play a part

in the colours of substances. To support this contention

he lists a variety of observations, among them that spirits

of salt (hydrochloric acid) turn blue paper to an orient red,

40

and Tartar or vitriol turns an infusion of violets to a delight-
ful crimson."

Debus concludes his article with high praise for Browne's
experiment. "While Sir Thomas Browne was not primarily
interested in the search for chemical indicators, this
study represents a significant addition to the seventeenth-
century body of chemical information -- not only in regard to
this specific test as an indicator, but also as a clearly writ-
ten study of chemical reaction. Finally, one might point to
this description as a most interesting use of the three
principle theory as a stimulus to chemical investigation."

It should be added that this experiment proceeds from beginning
to end with no discussion of occult qualities, sympathies

or antipathies, no suggestion that celestial emanations play

any part in darkening of oak gall; the experiment relies

wholly on careful and controlled observation. Even though the
experiment is grounded in Paracelsian theory, it seems closer in
spirit to Boyle.

In his meditative prose, Sir Thomas Browne confronts
a different array of problems from those posed by his scientific
investigation and medical practice. Browne's spiritual confes-
sions articulate his deeply held and emotionally experienced
Christian faith, which his age apparently felt was at odds
with the profession of medicine. The opening of Religio
Medici contains a well known allusion to the idea that all

physicians were atheists:

41

For my religion, though there be severall
circumstances that might persuade the

world I have none at all, as the generall
scandall of my profesSion, the indifferency
of my behaviour, and discourse in matters
of Religion, neither violently defending
one, nor with the common ardour of conten-
tion opposing another; yet in despight
herof I dare, without usurpation, assume

the honourable stile of a Christian (I, 11).

Paul Kocher aptly traces this accusation leveled at

physicians and he attributes it to a number of causes. One

was, of course, the dependence of medicine on the pagan

Greeks, especially Galen, who was singled out for his notable

lack of spirituality.23 Furthermore, Elizabethans often

linked medicine with sorcery, or black magic.24 Browne

does little to allay this suspicion when in Religio Medici

he cites the devil as a legitimate source of knowledge for

"For this I do honour my own profession and embrace the

 

23Kocher, "Paracelsan Medicine," p. 452.

24Kocher, Science and Religion, p. 243-5.

 

42

counsell even of the Devill himself: had he read such a
Lecture in Paradise as hee did at Delphos, we had better
known our selves, nor had we stood in feare to know him"

(I, 21).25 The popular belief that physicians depended upon
judicial astrology in the treatment of diseases was added

to the allegations against doctors.26 Later I shall briefly
analyze Browne's astrology.

Physicians who, like Browne, showed respect for Paracelsus
might be suspected of atheism. Paracelsus was attacked by
Erastus and others for his "heresies" and "cloudy theosophies";
still others associated Paracelsian doctrines with witchcraft
and irreligious magic. Although Paracelsus' arcane terms could
easily have led the uninitiated to this latter conclusion,
nothing could be further from the truth. It was Galen, not

Paracelsus, who had removed religious devotion from medical

 

25A good deal has been written on Browne's belief in
witchcraft, but I have read nothing which convinces me that
we are to take such passages as the one quoted here literally.
It is true that Browne testified at a trial that he believed
in witches possessed by devils, but from a devout seventeenth-
century Christian we could hardly expect different testimony.
There can be little doubt that there are Christians who today
believe in possession by Satan, and Roman Catholic priests
still receive the power to exorcise at ordination. In the
passage quoted here the point is self-knowledge, not possession.
Similarly when Browne writes about the oracle of Apollo, whom
he identifies with the devil, he does so to point out that
man should depend on his own intelligence and industry rather
than on delphic pronouncements. "Smarter curiosities would
have been at the great Elixir, the Flux and Reflux of the Sea,
with other noble obscurities in Nature; but probably all in
vain: in matters cognoscible and framed for our disquisition,
our Industry must be our Oracle, Reason our Apollo" (III, 102).

26Kocher, Science and Religion, p. 245.

43

considerations; Paracelsus, on the other hand, imported
"supernaturalism and mystical allegory more intimately into
the science of medicine than had ever been the case before."27

But Paracelsus had many defenders, who, though like
Browne they were embarrassed by his excesses, realized that
Paracelsus' religious faith, like his compassion for the sick,
was sincere. Thomas Tymme, the translator of Duchesne's

The Practice gf Chymicall and Hermeticall Physicke, 1605,

 

provides a typical opinion. Tymme, a cleric, was drawn
to Paracelsian medicine because of its connection with religion.
In the foreward to his translation of Duchesne, Tymme states
that medical knowledge Should be as widely diffused as possible.
even among laymen, as a source of religious edification.28
Tymme here correctly understands Paracelsian thought, since
Paracelsus, following Ficino, believed that the physician
performed a priest-like function. According to Pagel,

Ficino considered it the "foremost act of charity to maintain
a man in sound mind and healthy body."29 The work of the
religious physician is thus an exemplum of Christian love,
and many passages in Browne's religious prose can be traced

to this idea.

 

27Kocher, "Paracelsan Medicine," p. 479.

28Debus, English Paracelsians, p. 88.

 

29Pagel, Paracelsus, p. 222-3.

 

44

The notion of the priest-physician affords Browne
a number of opportunities both to artistically illustrate the
devotion of physicians, and also to introduce Paracelsian
material which he is compelled to reject from his science,
but which allows him to express his faith more forcefully.

In Religio Medici, Browne is very much in the tradition

 

of the priest-physican when he states that he cannot go to
cure someone's body without thinking of the person's soul (I,
79). He links the physician directly to Christ in another
passage which ends with a quotation from Matthew: "He went
about Galilee healing all manner of Diseases" (I, 103).

The following passage indicates that it is charity and
sympathy with the suffering of his patient to the point of
identification with him, rather than greed, which motivates

the Doctor of Norwich.30

I feele not in me those sordid, and unChristian
desires of my profession, I doe not secretly
implore and wish for Plagues, rejoyce at Famines,
revolve Ephemerides, and Almanacs, in expectation
of malignant Aspects, fatall conjunctions, and
Eclipses: I rejoyce not at unwholsome Springs,
nor unseasonable Winters; my Prayers go with the
Husbandmans; I desire everything in its proper
season, that neither men nor the times bee out

of temper. Let mee be sicke my selfe, if often
times the malady of my patient be not a disease unto
me. I desire rather to cure his infirmities than
my owne necessities (I, 84-5).

 

30For a similar sentiment in the work of Paracelsus see
Opera Omnia, II, 203.

 

45

The fact that Browne is not gladdened by the misfortunes of

his patients is borne out time and again in his correspon-
dence,31 where he exhibits the compassion for humanity which
many commentators argue was also characteristic of Paracelsus.32

In still another passage from Religio Medici, Browne

 

cites anatomy as a possible object of divine meditation. "In
our study of Anatomy there is a masse of mysterious PhiIOSOphy,
such as reduced the very Heathens to Divinitie ..." (I, 47).
In a letter to his son Edward dated 1676, Browne recommends
a poem by Thomas Tenison, then Archbishop of Canterbury, which
is dedicated to Browne, and which illustrates "God's wisdome
and providence from Anatome" (IV, 57).

Before leaving this discussion of the priest-physician
we can profitably ask how closely Browne's writing reflects
the ideal set forth in the writing of Paracelsus. It appears
clear, after examining a representative sample of what Browne has
to say in this regard, that he does in fact employ and
artistically transform this idea in defense of his profession.
But the positions of Paracelsus and Browne are not identical.
Paracelsus assumes that the pious physician can depend upon
the beneficent assistance of the Creator whose power is every-
where, poised to be harnessed and employed for the good of man.

‘ Browne, on the other hand, confines himself to the metaphorical

 

313cc especially IV, 116-7, 168, 200, 202.

32Pagel, Paracelsus, p. 22. Also, Pachter, pp. 200
and 301.

 

46

connection between a healer of bodies and a healer of souls.
When he mentions the "Amulets, Spells, Sigils and Incantations"
-- all devices for commanding celestial influences -- which

appear in the Archidoxis of Paracelsus (I, 103-III, 270),

 

he clearly gives no credence to them. In fact, Browne's
position differs little from that which Kocher advances as

the norm for physicians in the English Renaissance. Most
physicians, avers Kocher, were genuinely religious men who,
while they probably believed in the possibility of divine
intervention, conducted their practices as if such intervention
did not exist.33 For Paracelsus, whose entire epistemology

is fundamentally religious, the ideal of the priest-physician
comes close to defining the man, while Browne makes use of the
ideal artistically, but proceeds upon scientific principles

as a physician.

Another fundamental principle in Paracelsian thought
which Browne modifies for his artistic ends is the macrocosm-
microcosm analogy. George Conger, who has studied the history
of this idea, upon which a number of occult sciences (including
astrology and alchemy) rest, points out an apparent contradic-
tion in Browne's attitude toward this analogy. He states that
Browne apparently embraces the idea without reservation in

Religio Medici (I, 44), condemns it in Vulgar Errors (II, 106),

 

 

and employs it extensively in the Garden ef_Cyrus.34

 

33Kocher, Science and Religion, p. 261.

 

34George Conger, Theories of the Macrocosmos and Micro-
cosmos in the History 2: PfiiIosopfiy, 2nd ed} (New York, I967),
pp. 65-67

 

 

 

47

My position, as it will be developed here, is that while
excluding the analogy from his science, Browne makes use of
it, and of the occult sciences closely related to it,

as metaphor in his sacred prose.

Conger traces the notion of the macrocosm-microcosm to
antiquity. It becomes important for our consideration, however,
because it makes its appearance in the Hermetic corpus.

Conger asserts that the idea appears in the Hermetic Pimander.

The conceit also appears in the pseudo-Hermetic Emerald Table,

 

which succinctly summarizes some of the principal ideas and

themes of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Emerald Table was used

 

 

by the alchemists as their theoretical bible. One of the
earliest statements in that work -- "that which is beneath
is like that which is above"35 -- is an allusion to the
macrocosm-microcosm analogy. Although it is probable that

Browne was familiar with Corpus Hermeticum, most of his

 

references to Hermetic literature can be adequately accounted
for on the basis of his familiarity with the work of Paracelsus.
Debus asserts that many seventeenth century Englishmen attributed

to Hermes esoteric and occult ideas which appear in Paracelsus.36

 

 

35Kurt Seligmann, The History of Ma ic (New York, 1948),
pp. 128-9. Browne quotes the Smarangna TaBula in Christian
Morals (I, 260) and in the Miscellany Tracts (III? 290).
Shumaker, p. 243, argues that even though Browne alludes to
the Emerald Table directly, it is with a skepticism characteris-
tic of His later work. It seems to me that Browne quotes the
passage -- Verum, certe verum, atque verissimum est -- as a
striking contrast to the circumspect spirit he‘bEIIeves the
scientific investigator should assume.

 

 

 

36Debus, English Paracelsians, p. 96.

 

48

In Chapter II of this thesis, I shall attempt to determine
Browne's debt to the Hermetic writings; at this point, I shall
discuss only his use of the macrocosm-microcosm analogy.

In the writing of Paracelsus, the importance of this
analogy reached its highest point in the history of ideas.
Conger says of the frequency of the idea in Paracelsus' work:
"The term 'microcosmos' or its equivalent is used by Paracelsus
more often than by any other writer -- perhaps as much as
by all the writers up to his time taken together."37 Paracelsus
was perhaps the originator of the word "macrocosmos." The
mere frequency of the appearance of this idea is hardly the
important point, but rather the broad application, medical
and moral, which Paracelsus found for this notion. Paracelsus
positioned the belief that man is a microcosm at the center of
his medical theory in an attempt to ground his medicine in great
cosmic principles.38

Specific references to the macrOcosm-microcosm analogy
appear far more frequently in Browne's work than Conger's
brief discussion of Browne would seem to indicate. It
explicitly appears or is implied in each of his works. But for
the Doctor of Norwich, the microcosm-macrocosm analogy is not
a suitable tool for scientific investigation, which proceeds
from the observance of causes in nature, and not from analogies.

When Browne suggests the absolute necessities of medical practice

 

37Conger, p. 57.
38Ihid., p. 59.

49

to Henry Power, he chooses not to include the application of
this idea among those necessities. In that same letter,
Browne extravagantly praises Harvey's discovery of the cir-
culation of the blood, a discovery Browne "prefers to
Columbus," but he includes no references to the fact that
Harvey's discovery might be related to the microcosm-
macrocosm conceit.39 Browne's attitude toward this analogy
seems to me very close to Bacon's, who condemned not the notion,
but the practice of taking it literally.40 As Huntley
correctly points out, Browne acknowledges that the truth of
the analogy cannot be grasped by the senses. Its truth is
emblematic rather than literal; it affords a recognition,
explanation, or confirmation of something already believed;
and it can be comprehended only by the understanding. A few
examples from Browne's work will make this point clear.

One of Paracelsus' most Striking uses of this analogy
can be found in his comparison of the macrocosm to the womb
of our mothers.41 Browne, following Paracelsus, who saw in
the womb a symbol of the unification of the greater and lesser
worlds because the womb contains prOpertieS of both worlds,

states in Religio Medici:

 

 

39Debus, English Paracelsians, p. 32.

 

4023 Sapienta Veterum, XIII, pp. 147-8. The Works of
Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and’Douins
Heath, 15‘voIs. (Boston, 1890).

 

 

. 41Opera Omnia, I, 99. "Sic se ergo Microcosmos seu
m1nor mundusThabet, in suo corpore contines omnia mineralia
mundi. Ad quod consequi scitote, quod corpus medicinam
suam ex mundo conquirat is enim ipsumet est."

 

50

Some Divines count Adam 30 years old at his
creation, because they suppose him created in
the perfect age and stature of man; and surely
wee are all out of the computation of our age,
and every man is some moneths elder than hee
bethinkes him; for we live, move, have a being,
and are subject to the actions of the elements,
and the malice of diseases in that other world,
the truest Microcosme, the wombe of our mother;
for besides that generall and common existence
wee are conceived to hold in our Chaos, and
whilst wee Sleepe within the bosome of our
causes, wee enjoy a being and life in three
distinct worlds, wherein we receive most
manifest graduations (I, 50).

Paracelsus makes a number of specific connections between the
objects of nature and their mother earth and the fetus in its
prenatal environment. The seed is nourished by the earth as
the fetus is cared for by the uterus. The plants sprout
roots which attract nutriment from the earth; in the fetus,
vessels attach themselves to the nourishing uterine wall,

and so on. Browne closes the section in which the passage
above appears with an illustration of the way in which man
passes birth-like, through the various states of his being,
from vegetable grossness like the earth's to a state of pure
spirit.

Browne returns to this analogy in Hydriotaphia, but

 

again his use of the conceit is literary rather than medical
or scientific. Browne's artistic imagination is excited by
the visual similarity of the burial urn and the womb, and
by the intellectual paradox it forces upon him. "But the
common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last

bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity,

51

while we lay in the nether part of the Earth, and inward
vault of our Microcosme" (I, 148).

Browne, in another passage, finds the analogy a fit
vehicle for the metaphoric suggestion that our ignorance
of the totally spiritual life in heaven parallels the fetal
ignorance of physical life. "A Dialogue between two Infants
in the womb concerning the state of this world, might
handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof
methinkes we yet discourse in Platoes denne, and are but
Embryon PhiIOSOphers" (I, 162). It is likewise metaphorical
truth Browne concerns himself with when he uses the conceit
as an analogy for self discovery:

Wee carry with us the wonders, we seeke without

us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us;

we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature,

which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium,

what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse
volume (I, 24).

 

And:

Whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or
little world, I finde my selfe something more than
the great. There is something of Divinity in us,
something that was before the Elements, and owes
no homage unto the Sun (I, 87).

Browne also emplOys the analogy for an artistic end when he

insists in a witty paradox in Religio Medici that God cannot

 

destroy the world entirely because man, who is the little world,
will endure (I, 86).
The idea of the macrocosm-microcosm is directly related

to occult sciences in Browne by a passage in Christian Morals

 

52

which links it with astrology. I quote the opening lines of
a passage which will be quoted at length later in the chapter.
Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus,
with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or
Venus guilty of thy Follies. Think not to
fasten thy imperfections on the Stars, and so
despairingly conceive thy self under a fatality
of being evil. Calculate thine own Orb or
Microcosmical Circumference (I, 274).
The proximity of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy and astrology
in Paracelsus and Browne is not accidental since, as Cassirer
points out, the two realities are inextricably fused. "The
astrological vision of the world had always been bound to
the idea of the microcosm. Indeed, astrology seemed to be
nothing other than the simple consequence and carrying out
of that idea."42
In discussing Browne's astrology, Huntley argues that
Browne "was concerned, more or less seriously, with the stars

that presided over his birth"43

throughout his lifetime.
Huntley's discussion suggests that Browne took astrology

rather seriously for he believes many of Browne's comments on
astrology refer to Thomas Browne the man as well as the persona
who speaks in the devotional prose. Huntley ends his treatment
of Browne's astrology with the judgment that he was "Born

so unlucky a horoscope ifhat hef looked upon each day of his

 

42Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos 12 the
Philosophy 2: the Renaissance (New York, 1963), p. 10.

 

 

 

43Huntley, p. 2.

53

life as a special gift of Providence that stayed his destiny."44
Don Cameron Allen expresses the same view in his study of
Renaissance astrology when he asserts that "Sir Thomas Browne
was half converted to the essential tenets of astrology..."45
Browne corresponds with two known astrologers, William
Lilly and Elias Ashmole, which suggests some interest in the
subject (IV, 292-8). In a letter to his son Edward he laments
the imprisonment of astrologer John Gadbury, recalling that '
it is a capital crime to cast the king's horoscope (IV, 137).
The attitude toward astrology which emerges from Browne's

published works is hard to define. In Vulgar Errors, he

 

unequivocally denounces astrologers, placing them in the
infamous company of "Fortune-tellers, Juglers, and the like
incantory Imposters" who daily and professedly "delude"
scores of men (II, 30). Browne, like Paracelsus, objects not
to the idea that stars can influence men's lives, but to the
notion that celestial influence is so deterministic that a
man's destiny can be predicted. Browne goes on:
Astrologers ... who having won [men'ST'belief unto
principles wherof they make great dofibt themselves,
have made them believe that arbitrary events below,
have necessary causes above; whereupon their
credulities assent unto any Prognosticks, consi-
dering the independency of their causes, and con-

tingency in their Events, are only in the prescience
of God (II, 30).

 

44Ibid., p. 3.

45Don Cameron Allen, The Star Crossed Renaissance
(New York, 1966), p. 145.

 

54

If the writer of these words did foretell events, as Whitefoot,
Browne's earliest biographer, suggests,46 it would be a strange
contradiction indeed. Browne's works, as far as I can discover,
contain only one prediction, and that one, the future location
of the Panama Canal (11, 457), is more the result of Browne's
geographical acumen than his intimate knowledge of the zodiak.

In Vulgar Errors, he objects to the otherwise worthy inquiry

 

of Cabalism on the ground that some of its adherents claim
to be able to predict future events (11, 483).

Despite Browne's condemnations of astrologers, he
manages to incorporate the language of the occult art into
several passages in his works. Some of these examples are,
in my view, only illustrative; others serve as a vehicle
for the expression of Browne's faith. Among the examples of
mere illustration, I would place Browne's references to
his astrological relationship with Saturn. "At my Nativity,
my ascendant was the watery signe of Scorpius; I was borne
in the Planetary houre of Saturne, and I think I have peece
of the Leaden Planet in me" (I, 88). This sentence appears
in a discussion on sleep and waking, and it illustrates through
the specific astrological association with Saturn, Browne's

morosity which, as he says early in Religio Medici, is his

 

 

46Works 2f Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Simon Wilkin (London,
1890), pp. xxx-xxxxi. Whitefoot's remarks are quoted in Samuel
Johnson's Life of Browne, which Wilkin chooses to reprint
supplemented with the material Johnson omitted from his brief
quotation.

 

55

normal state while awake. Browne goes on to say that despite
this lack of "mirth" and his inability "to galliardize of
company," in his Sleep he can "compose a whole comedy, behold
the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh [Himself7 awake at
the conceits thereof" (1, 88). The allusion to astrology
underlines the point of this passage: that men are often
radically different in states of sleeping and waking. Similar
examples of the illustrative employment of astrology occur
when, for example, in a discussion of his age he states,

"If there be any truth in Astrology, I may outlive a Jubilee
LA Jewish equivalent for fifty yearg7" (I, 52), and when in
the Garden gf_§y£g§ it provides still another example for the
mystical consideration of the number five (I, 224).

Browne's ethical and religious use of astrology develops
logically out of the Paracelsian attitude toward it. Cassirer
states that the new cosmos outlined by Cusa, whom Paracelsus
follows, makes the Ficinian explanation of celestial emanation
untenable. "The idea of the world organism is here expanded
in such a way that every element in the world may with equal
right be considered the central point of the universe. The
hitherto one-sided relationship of dependence between the
lower and higher world now takes on more and more the form of
a relationship of pure correlation."47 Cassirer notes that
the Paracelsian school still leans heavily on astrology,

but in this newly modified sense, "we recognize that the tight

 

47Cassirer, p. 110-11.

S6

circle of naturalistic astrological thought is being penetrated
by a new and fundamentally foreign idea. The purely causal
mode of observation becomes teleological. And through this
transformation, all definitions of relationship between the
macrocosm and the microcosm receive, in a sense, a new accent,
even though their content may remain the same. The ethical
self-consciousness of a man opposes the astrological motif of
destiny."

All of the following examples of Browne's astrology
take into account this substitution of ethical self-consciousness
for the notion of destiny. The lengthy passage which follows
makes the point that man should make virtuous choices to over-
come any malevolent influence. Browne stresses here the non-
deterministic nature of celestial influences whether they be
for good or for evil. Finally, Browne presents a witty astro-
logical argument to refute the central allegation against it.

Let celestial aspects admonish and advertise, not

conclude and determine thy ways. For since good

and bad Stars moralize not our Actions, and neither

excuse or commend, acquit or condemn our Good or

Bad Deeds at the present or last Bar, since some

are Astrologically well diSposed who are morally

highly vicious; not celestial Figures, but Virtuous

Schemes, must denominate and state our Actions...

Whatever Influences, Impulsions, or Inclinations

there be from the Lights above, it were a piece

of wisdom to make one of those Wise men who over-

rule their Stars, and with their own Militia con-

tend with the Host of Heaven (I, 275).

If, as Kocher states, the most forceful argument

against astrology derives from a denial of freewill,48 Browne

 

48Kocher,/Science and Religion, p. 201.

 

S7

is certainly in no doctrinal difficulty here.

The passage from Vulgar Errors which follows is Similar

 

in tone to the one above. Again Browne acknowledges the influ-
ence of the stars, but asserts the ascendency of the human

will over their influence.

Nor do we hereby reject or condemn a sober and
regulated Astrology; we hold there is more truth
therein than in Astrologers; in some more than
many allow, yet in none so much as some pretend.
We deny not the influence of the stars, but
often suspect the due application thereof; ...
There is in wise men a power beyond the Stars
(II, 336).

Browne's passage is remarkably similar to one Pachter

attributes to Paracelsus.

Man is superior to the stars if he lives in the
power of superior wisdom. Such a person, being
master over heaven and earth, by means of his will,
is a magus, and magic is not sorcery but supreme
wisdom.

Browne shares with Paracelsus the belief in the
ability of men of militant virtue to overcome malign influence
through the strength of their reason and will. These final
examples demonstrate Browne's use of astrology in the

expression of his religious devotion.

We need not labor so many arguments to confute
judiciall Astrology; for if there be a truth
therein, it doth not injure Divinity; if to be
born under Mercury disposeth us to be witty,
under Jupiter to be wealthy, I doe not owe a
knee unto these, but unto that mercifull hand
that hath disposed and ordered my indifferent
and uncertaine nativity unto such benevolous
aspects (1, 29).

58

And:

I say, every man hath a double Horosc0pe, one of
his humanity, his birth; another of his Christian-
ity his baptisme, and from this doe I compute or
calculate my Nativitie; not reckoning those Horae
combustae, and odde dayes, or esteeming mys MIT
any thing, before I was my Saviours, and inrolled
in the Register of Christ (I, 55).

 

In addition to his reliance upon Paracelsus for the
macrocosm-microcosm conceit and a concomitant ethical inter-
pretation of astrology, Browne also borrows the doctrine of
signatures from Paracelsus. Like Paracelsus, Browne believed
that the Creator revealed his real presence in nature
through visible Signs. He finds in every natural phenomenon
a revelation of the power and glory of God and a Sign which
exposes the inner nature of the phenomenon. Browne prefers
the term "hieroglyph" for these external signs, but he‘
incorporates what Paracelsus has to say about signatures and
he also draws into his consideration the traditional associa-
tions initiated Renaissance readers attached to these
Egyptian characters.49

For Paracelsus, the primarily medical notion of

signatures has the characteristic theological underpinnings.

"The search for the visible 'seals' and forces in Nature

will thus, however indirectly, lead to truth -- in contrast

 

49The Renaissance view of hieroglyphs is summarized
by both Gordon K. Chalmers, "Hieroglyphs and Sir Thomas Browne,"
Virginia anrterlyrReview, XI (1935), 547- -560, and Liselotte
eckmann, "Renaissance Hieroglyphics," Comparative Literature,
IX, No. 1 (Winter, 1957), 308- 321.

 

59

to more human speculation. For there is more 'Knowledge'
('wissen und erkentniss') in that which God has created
than there is in human reasoning. Thus we recognize God
in his creation which is the greater world and in whom all
its parts are represented."so Careful scrutiny of vegetable
creation, however, reveals not only the signature of the
Creator but also His -- as the Divine Physician -- direction
for finding specific medical cures. "A herb reveals by a
certain configuration or colour of its leaves, flowers or
roots an affinity with a certain star, organ, or disease."51
Affinities with certain stars is an important part of this
scheme since each of the planets has a corresponding metalic
counterpart used in chemical cures, and some diseases are
believed to respond to the astrological influence of one or
another of the planets.

Browne, of course, broadly employs the doctrine of
signatures -- he uses the term "hieroglyphs" -- in his works.

Many readers of Religio Medici may recall the notion of the

 

visible signs of the invisible God in Nature as one of the most

enduring impressions left by that work. One example of this

 

soPagel, Paracelsus, p. 56. See Opera Omnia, I, 283.
"Vos ergo Medici Si prdBiet frugi esse vultis, strenue id
annitimini: nec, quemadmodum sues in agro rapa versant, sic
vos hominem tracteris, ad Dei similitudinem effectum: sed eo
modo integritate ambulate, sicut Deus Medicum in suo libro
instituit."

511bid., p. 148. See Opera Omnia, r 284. "Exemplum:
Euphragia formam ac imaginem--signatura--oculorum in se habet.
Unde sit, ut assumpes in membrum suum se sistat, et in ipsam
formam eius membri, ita ut Eufragia integer ac totus oculus
fiat... Membra universa hominis suam omnino similem formam ha-
bent in rebus crescentibus, in lapidibus, in metallis, in
minerabilius etc.

 

 

60

Renaissance commonplace that God reveals himself in the Book
of Nature appears below in an abbreviated allusion to Browne's
"devout and learned admiration."

These are Contemplations Metaphysicall; my humble

speculations have another Method, and are content

to trace and discover those impressions hee hath

left on his creatures, and the obvious effects of

nature (I, 22).

Unlike Paracelsus, however, and consistent with his own
general attitude toward occult studies, Browne scrupulously
excludes the doctrine of signatures from his scientific
investigations. Browne never argues that anything can be
newly discovered or explained by means of hieroglyphs. As
Chalmers so aptly puts it in his study of Browne's treatment
of hieroglyphs: "To interpret symbols with any accuracy,
one must first understand the limitations of the metaphor,
Browne thought, distinguish between cause and analogy, and
be content never to seek anything wholly new by means of a
hieroglyph, for a metaphor does not compel the mind to accept
a necessary conclusion; its truth is merely recognized."SZ

As symbols, hieroglyphs afforded Browne numberless
opportunities for recognition of the Creator through apparently
"scientific" observation. In the Garden 9f.gyyg§, where
Browne unearths the mystical inscription of the quincunx from
virtually every part of the creation, other mystical messages

in nature command his attention as well.

 

52Chalmers, p. 557.

61

Studious Observators may discover more analogies
in the orderly book of nature, and cannot escape
the Elegancy of her hand in other correspondencies.
The Figures of nails and crucifying appurtenances,
are but precariously made out in the Granadilla

or flower of Christ's passion: And we despair to
behold in these parts that handsome draught of
the crucifixion in the fruit of the Barbado Pine
... Some finde Hebrew, Arabick, Greek, and Latine
Characters in Plants; In a common one among us

we seem to reade Aiaia, Viviu, Lilil (I, 206-7).

 

Browne's preference for the term "hieroglyph," rather
than "Signature," draws into his theme of visible manifesta-
tions of the Creator the mystical associations Renaissance
men assigned to things Egyptian. As symbols, hieroglyphs
were believed to have the advantage of being immediately
apprehensible to the initiate. As Liselotte Dieckmann puts
it: "These symbols were thought to represent ideas rather
than letters or sounds, and the ideas were considered to be
the secret wisdom preserved by the priests which only the ini-
tiated could decipher."53 This is precisely the way in which
Browne understands and presents his conception of hieroglyphs

in his essay on that subject in Vulgar Errors.

Certainly of all men that suffered from the con-
fusion of Babel, the Aegyptians found the best
evasion; for, though words were confounded, they
invented a language of things, and spake unto

each other by common notions in Nature. Whereby
they discoursed in silence, and were intuitively
understood from the theory of their Expresses.

For they assumed the shapes of animals common unto
all eyes; and by their conjunctions and compositions
were able to communicate their conceptions, unto
any that coapprehended the Syntaxis of their
Natures (II, 379).

 

53Dieckmann, p. 308.

inf-

62

But Browne closes this discussion with his characteristic
warning that hieroglyphs, although laudable symbols containing
metaphoric truth, are also the source of numerous "vulgar"

errors because they are often taken literally.

Thus began the descriptions of Griphins,
Basilisks, Phoenix, and many more; which
Emblematists and Heralds have entertained
with significations answering their insti-
tutions; Hieroglyphically adding Martegres,
Wiverenes, Lion fishes, with divers others.
Pieces of good and allowable invention
unto the prudent Spectator, but are lookt
on by vulgar eyes as literal truths, or
absurd impossibilities; whereas indeed,
they are commendable inventions, and of
laudable significations (II, 380).

Thus the "prudent spectator," equipped with the understanding
of the type of truth hieroglyphs yield, can learn much from
them, and their general extended association as signatures.
In the example which follows, Browne fuses the study of
manifestations of the Creator in Nature with related, but
more esoteric signature-reading, finally associating the

entire discussion with the Egyptians.

I hold moreover that there is a Phytognomy,

or Physiognomy, not onely of men, but of Plants,
and Vegetables; and in every one of them, some
outward figures, which hang as signes or bushes
of their inward formes. The finger of God hath
set an inscription upon all his workes, not
graphicall or composed of Letters but of their
several formes, constitutions, parts, and
operations, which aptly joyned together make one
word that doth expresse their natures. By these
letters God cals the Starres by their names,

and by this Alphabet Adam assigned to every
creature a name peculiar to its Nature. Now
there are besides those Characters in our faces,
certaine mysticall lines and figures in our hands,

63

which I dare not call meere dashes, strokes,

a la volee, or at randome, because deliniated
Fy—E'penc1ll, that never workes in vaine; ...

I beleeve the Egyptians, who were neerer addicted
to those abstruse and mysticall sciences, had

a knowledge therein, ... (I, 72-3).

 

Browne's particular attitude toward hieroglyphs can
be more clearly focused through a comparison with the
founder of Egyptology, Athanasius Kircher, a prolific writer

54 Kircher's

on hieroglyphs whom Browne praises repeatedly.
mistaken notions about hieroglyphs grew out of his acceptance
of the mystical Neoplatonic world. Erik Iversen, who

reSpectS Kircher in spite of his obvious errors, says of

him: "From the Renaissance Kircher had inherited the con-
ceptions of a God-centered universe, dominated by a timeless
emanation of divine truth, pervading it as an elementary
dynamic force. The supreme and final manifestation of this
truth was in Kircher's opinion the revelations of Christianity,
but it was immanent in all existing religions and philosophic
systems as well, and the philosophy of the Egyptians, such

as it had inspired a Plato and a Pythagoras, was its highest

pre-Christian manifestation."55 Iversen's allusion here is

to the notion of prisca theologia which argues that all reli-

 

gions which antedate Christianity prophetically foreshadow it.

 

54See 11, 62, 191, 267; III, 249, 303. Browne alludes
only to Kircher's learning and says nothing of his often
“remarked upon credulity.

55
Erik Iversen, TheM My of Egypt and its Hieroglyph_s
(Copenhagen, 1961),p . 94.

 

64

The idea assumes the mistaken Ficinian chronology which placed
Hermetic Philosophy -- believed to contain the truths of
mystical Egyptian philos0phy and religion -- before all

other religions, including the Hebrew. In addition, Kircher
believed that Hermes Trismegistus was the inventor of
hieroglyphs,56 which contained within themselves secrets of
the operation of the Neoplatonic world.

Browne often avails himself of Kircher's examples, in
his devotional prose, but he does so with restraint. Thus,
in the Garden 21.923223 when he repeats Kircher's assertions
that invisible spirits move from the celestial spheres,
through the earth, under the earth and back to the celestial
spheres again following an X-shaped path, he does so without
absolutely endorsing the idea -- "And if Aegyptian Philosophy
may obtain" -- and without the direct connection that Kircher

makes with the Spiritus Mundi (I, 220).57 Recalling Chalmers'

 

suggestion quoted earlier, we can see that Browne believes
that the limitation of metaphor ends with recognition, not
explanation, which involves the knowledge of direct causation.
Browne appears satisfied that his reference to celestial
emanation adumbrates a Reality outside the bounds of human
knowledge; such a Reality can be glimpsed, but not, as

Kircher is striving to do, explained.

 

56Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradi-
tion (New York, 1969), p. 402.

 

 

S7Athanasius Kircher, Obiliscus Pamphilius (Rome, 1650),
p. 385.

 

 

65

A second reference which Browne borrows from Kircher

is that of the handled-crosses (cruces‘ansatae).58 Browne's

 

use of this figure, which is identical to the astrological Sign
of Venus, artistically fuses the Christian cross with the
Hermetic circle which is "the nature of God" (I, 204). As
Chapter III of this thesis argues in detail, Browne makes
extended use of the symbolic associations of this and other
geometrical images, but Browne's purpose remains essentially
artistic. He disavows Kircher's extended discussion of the
handled cross as a talisman for making celestial influence
the servant of mankind,59 just as he rejects similar
Paracelsian suggestions. For Kircher, like Paracelsus, the
lines which divide religion, magic, and science, as this illus-
tration demonstrates, are extremely vague if they exist at
all. With his insistence on two types of truth, however,
Browne manages to make distinctions between rational,
scientific truth, and shadowed symbolic truth at the eXpense
of neither his science, nor his religion and art.

I have discovered only one instance in all of Browne's
writing in which he apparently abandons the distinction

between literal and metaphoric truth. In Religio Medici,

 

Browne writes:

 

58L. C. Martin, p. 352. Crosses with handles. For hand:
handles see OED.

59Kircher, Oedipus Ae' pticus (Rome, 1652), p. 439. "Crux
ansata... amuletum contra acversas potestates omnium effica-
sissimum... indicat praeterea processum animae mundi per omnia
mundi membra."

 

 

 

66

A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes, to a
contemplative and schoole Philosopher seemes
utterly destroyed, and the forme to have taken
his leave for ever: But to a sensible Artist
the formes are not perished, but withdrawne
into their incombustible part, where they lie
secure from the action of that devouring element.
This is made good by experience, which can

from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and
from its cinders recall it into its stalk and
leaves againe (I, 59).

Browne makes it clear that this "occular and visible" type

of the "resurrection" is effected through God's invisible
power. He has stated as a literal truth an idea which he
would ordinarily regard as metaphoric -- an idea which the
senses could not accept, but which would be true to the eyes
of the understanding. Dr. Henry Power, Browne's indefatigable

young correspondent, apparently finds this the most striking

passage in Religio Medigi, since he writes Browne at least two

 

letters asking for the source of the information about
this experiment (IV, 258). Power states that he finds the
notion "obscurely and imperfectly" in Quercitan -- Joseph
Duchesne, the French Paracelsist. L.C. Martin suggests that
Helmont is the source of the idea, but I have found it in
Paracelsus and Cardan,60 both likely sources.

We can be certain from Power's first letter that
Browne has once allowed Power's inquiries -- in a third,
earlier letter -- about the revivification of the plant

to go unanswered (IV, 258), and no reply by Browne to Power's

 

60Jerome Cardan, The First Book of Jerome Cardan's

De_Subtilitate, trans. With the Latin F? MyrtIe Cass inIliam-
sport, 1934), p. 83.

 

67

second letter has been discovered. William Dunn suggests
that Browne, who usually handles the mystical material he
employs in his writing with considerable artistic restraint,
has allowed himself in the passage just quoted to rashly

follow Paracelsus.61

Dunn's explanation appears to me to be
correct since this one apparently literal example appears at
the close of a series of other illustrations which are ob-
viously metaphoric in intent. Browne perhaps feels that he
has significantly qualified the statement with the words
"to a sensible Artist," but his phrase "made good by experi-
ence" justifies Power's confusion. If Browne's answer to
Power is ever discovered, it will probably contain some
restatement of his position on the distinction between meta-
phoric and literal, scientific truth, and perhaps a mildly
embarrassed apology for succumbing to a confusion which he says
elsewhere is unique to "vulgar heads": the failure to
discriminate between literal and metaphoric truth. In Vulgar
Errors Browne condemns the "vulgar" more than once for their
literal understanding of the Phoenix legend, but in his pas-
sage on the revivification of plants Browne is himself guilty
of an identical confusion. He merely substitutes, in his
error, a resurrected plant for the mythical bird of Arabia.
Browne's scientific debt to Paracelsus is great, but
it is a debt he shares with most other physicians in the seven-

teenth century. Far more interesting is his debt for those

occult notions which Browne transforms into effective metaphors

 

61Dunn, p. 23.

68

in his art. Still another rich source of metaphor from
which he draws is the Hermetic literature and the Hermetic

art -- alchemy --, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER II

BROWNE AND HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

As a man of genuine scientific interests, Browne
realized no less than Francis Bacon that science had to rid
itself of religious interference in order to proceed with the
"noble Elucatation of Truth" (I, 262), with the establishment
of the enterprise soon to become modern science. We have
observed that Browne the physician and investigator of nature
maintained his science largely free from religious influence.
At the same time he insisted that rightly understanding the
demonstrable relationships among phenomena in nature could
evoke in the rational investigator of creation a sense of
wonder about and admiration for the Creator. Browne's remarks
on the loadstone provide one of many possible examples:

Other Discourses there might be made of the Load-

stone: as Moral, Mystical, Theological; and some

have handsomely done them; as Ambrose, Austine,

Gulielmus Parisienses, and many more, but these

fall under no Rule, and are as boundless as men's

inventions. And though honest minds do glorifie

God hereby; yet do they most powerfully magnifie

him, and are to be looked on with another eye,

who not from postulated or precarious inferences,

entreat a courteous assent; but from experiments

and undeniable effects, enforce the wonder of its
Maker (11, ll6-7).

69

70

Browne here as elsewhere is reluctant to condemn men of genu-
ine devotion who think they are serving religion by assigning
mystical properties to natural objects, but he maintains that
God receives the highest praise from those who truly comprehend
natural phenomena.

On the other hand, Browne, the writer of devotional
prose who best commands the attention of modern readers, must
unite the two worlds that the scientist must insist upon
separating. He sought to ally his religion and science in
a way which would neither render his science false by grounding
it, as Paracelsus had, in g_priori religious principles, nor
remove the study of nature so entirely from the realm of
faith that science would appear alien to belief in God. I
shall argue in this chapter that through the incorporation in
his devotional prose of borrowings from alchemy and perhaps

the Corpus Hermeticum, Browne managed to construct a meta-

 

phoric bridge between his religion and science. I shall
begin the discussion with Browne's debt to alchemy because it
is an unambiguous one, and will conclude with Browne's

possible reliance upon the Coypus Hermeticum. Before turning

 

to alchemy, however, it will be necessary to clarify some of
the cloudy terminology which surrounds this subject, and to
establish the terms upon which the present discussion will
proceed.

Anyone acquainted with the critical commentary on
hermeticism, a general category of esoteric studies which

includes alchemy, knows that it is hopelessly confusing. The

71

confusion is directly bound up with the shifting definitions
of the terms "hermeticism," "hermetism," and "hermetical
philosopher" and "philosophy." For example, when Margaret
Heideman argues that the opening images of the Garden 2f
nygg (I, 179) and a later allusion to the color green

(I, 217) are hermetic, she is referring to images drawn from
alchemical sources.1 When Dewey Ziegler states that "Hermetic
philosophy could form a doctrinal basis for Browne's method

of relating his observation of nature and God,"2 he is

presumably establishing Browne's debt to the Cogpus Hermeticum,3

 

a body of speculative philosophic treatises ascribed to Hermes
Trismegistus. In E. C. Pettet's treatment of hermetic

philosophy in Henry Vaughan -- most of Pettet's remarks on

alchemy can be app1ied with equal force to Browne -- he mines

his examples solely from alchemical texts.4 Wayne Shumaker acknow-
ledges Browne's interest in alchemy, but limits his examina-

tion of Browne's work to the influence of the Corpus Hermeticum

 

alone, when it is by no means clear that the terms "hermetic"

 

1Margaret A. Heideman, "H driota hia and the Garden
of Cyrus: A Paradox and a Cosmic Vision," University 3:
Taranto Quarterly, XIX (April, 1950), 241.

 

 

zZiegler, p. 30.

3The discussion of the Corpus Hermeticum, including the
edition of these works referred to in this chipter, begins
on page 19.

 

4E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light (Cambridge, 1960),
pp. 71°85.

 

72

or "hermetical" as Browne employs them, refer specifically to
that body of writing; on the contrary, Browne's borrowings
from genuinely alchemical sources appear to far outstrip

those from the Corpus Hermeticum itself.S

 

If rigidly maintained, the terms "hermetism," if applied

solely to the Coypus Hermeticum, and "hermeticism," if reserved

 

for esoteric systems generally, would seem to remove the
present confusion, but what then is a hermetic philosopher,
or hermetic -- or hermetical, Browne's usual preference --
philosophy? In most scholarship- these two terms are syno-
nymous with alchemy and the alchemist. How then does one
treat those who like Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Kircher are

deeply influenced by the Coypus Hermeticum? They should

 

obviously not be called hermetic phiIOSOphers because this
would confuse them with alchemical adepts.
For the purpose of this chapter the ill-defined term

hermeticism will be avoided completely since the only

 

esoteric system which is really pertinent here is alchemy.
I shall first attempt to eluCidate Browne's use of alchemy
as a metaphoric bridge between his science and faith, and
second I shall examine the relationship of Browne's possible

borrowings from the Corpps Hermeticum to his thinking.

 

 

SBrowne never quotes, as far as I have been able to
discover, the body of documents called the Corpus Hermeticum
by modern scholars (Cf. note 35).

73

I

Many studies of alchemy and its impact on modern Science
and literature, especially Renaissance literature, are available
today. E. J. Holmyard's book is especially useful because
in it he summarizes the conclusions of early scholars of Chinese,
Egyptian, and Islamic alchemy along with his own study of this
religio-pseudo-science in the West. After calling attention
to the deep interest of Sir Thomas Browne in alchemy,6 Holmyard

provides a lengthy description of its twofold nature.

Alchemy is of a twofold nature, an outward or
exoteric and a hidden or esoteric. Exoteric al-
chemy is concerned with attempts to prepare a
substance, the philosopher's stone, or simply

the Stone, endowed with the power of transmuting the
base metals lead, tin, copper, iron, and mercury
into the precious metals gold and silver. The
Stone was also sometimes known as the Elixir or
Tincture, and was credited not only with the

flower of transmutation but with that of prolonging
uman life indefinitely. The belief that it could
be obtained only by divine grace and favour led

to the development of esoteric or mystical alchemy,
and this gradually develOped into a devotional
system where the mundane transmutation of metals
became merely symbolic of the transformation of
sinful man into a perfect being through prayer and
submission to the will of God.

Shumaker objects to the concept of esoteric or mystical alchemy
on the grounds that it is not a separate reality, but merely
"a more highly metaphorical and imaginative style which was

encouraged among especially literate and reflective writers,

both by the tradition of veiled utterance and by a tendency

 

6E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy (Baltimore, 1968), p. 15.

71bid., p. 16.

74

to draw parallels between changes imposed upon the laboratory
materials and such Christian ceremonies or mysteries as bap-

tism, marriage, resurrection, and transfiguration,"8

However,
Holmyard's distinction has the advantage of accounting for
writers like Browne who, as far as we can discover, never
attempted to produce gold, but who employ the mystical-
scientific language of alchemy in their work. And in spite

of Shumaker's objection, some students of alchemy, including
Mircea Eliade, argue that this division between exoteric and
esoteric alchemy inevitably develops when the assumptions about
matter upon which alchemy is based begin to break down.

"Alchemy posed as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came

into its own when substances had shed their sacred attributes."9
Browne is writing at precisely the point in the history of
European alchemy when matter is shedding its sacred attributes.
One finds in the seventeenth century on the one hand the
fledgling science of chemistry, and, on the other, a richly

suggestive language which describes chemical reactions and

the deepest religious emotions in interchangeable phraseology.

 

8Shumaker, p. 170.

9Mircea Eliade, The For e and the Crucible, trans.
Stephen Corrin (New York, , p. 9.

 

75

Browne's familiarity with exoteric and his use of esoteric

10 In two letters

alchemy is not difficult to document.
to Elias Ashmole, Browne reveals his acquaintance with the
alchemical gpg§_through his friendship with Arthur Dee.

Browne's first letter to Ashmole dated 25 January 1658

says of Arthur Dee: "he was a persevering student of

Hermetical phiIOSOphy and had noe small encouragement,

having seen projection made; and with the highest asseverations
he confirmed unto his death, that hee had ocularly, undeceavably,
and frequently beheld it in Bohemia" (IV, 293). The impact

the testimony of this "familiar friend" must have had on
Browne's imagination is not difficult to envision. It does

not seem extravagant to conjecture that Browne discussed this
subject often with Arthur Dee, who lived in Norwich and who
studied alchemical documents all of his life. "Dr. Arthur Dee
was a young man when he saw this projection made in Bohemia,

butt he was so inflamed therwith that he fell early upon the
studio and read not much all his life but bookes of that sub-
ject" (IV, 297). A number of the documents which occupied

Dee throughout his life, Browne possessed (IV, 294) and later

entrusted to Ashmole, probably during the preparation of his

 

loBrowne speaks knowledgeably about the steps of the al-

chemical 0 us in his discussion of Roger Bacon's famous projection
(II, 538- , which was dramatized by Robert Greene in his play
'The.Honorable Historic of Frier Bacon and Frier Bon a . In
.addition, in the‘Iist of_documents Browne sent to Ashmole

(IV, 294), one which provides a formula for "shortning of the
great work" is included. This it seems would indicate Browne's
knowledge of the large amount of time normally required for
the performance of the traditional steps in preparation of
the Philosopher's Stone. For an annotated description of those
Steps see Shumaker, pp. 171-1, or Holmyard pp. 17-l9.

 

 

76

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, a verse anthology containing

 

the work of several English writers on alchemy.

Although Browne never professes belief in Arthur Dee's
story, the manner in which he reports it leaves no doubt about
Dee's sincerity: "I have often heard him affirme, and sometimes
with oaths, that hee had seen projection made and transmutation
of pewter dishes and flagons into sylver, which the goldsmiths
at Prague bought of them, and that count Rosenberg played
at Quaits with sylver Quaits made by projection" (IV, 297).

There were certainly men in England who had far less
reliable evidence for their belief in alchemy than the testi-
mony of a close friend, but Browne never wholly commits him-
self to belief in projection. He seems unable to hold the
unquestioning belief in universal correspondence which allowed
alchemists to understand the purification of metals and the
regeneration of the physical and spiritual health of men to
be literally identical processes.11 It should not be for-
gotten that even though Browne was an artist whom the idea of
universal analogy would appeal to, he was also a physician
faced daily with illnesses for which medicines prepared on
the basis of such analogies proved useless. It is the physician-
scientist who, although he will not wholly exclude the pos-
sibility of the Philosopher's Stone and an Elixir of Life,

attacks those who spend their lives in an apparently futile

 

11Walter Pagel, "Paracelsus and the Neoplatonic and
Gnostic Tradition," Ambix, 8 (1960), 129-30.

77

search for such universal cures. "It is folly," he has

said, "to find out remedies that are not recoverable under

a thousand years; or prOpose the prolonging of life by that
which the twentieth generation may never behold" (II, 197).12

In an earlier book of Vulgar Errors, Browne includes

 

a more forceful condemnation of the alchemists for holding

out a false hope of the eventual discovery of a panacea.

I wish herein the Chymists had been more sparing:
who overmagnifying their preparations, inveigle

the curiosity of many, and delude the security of
most. For if experiments would answer their
encomiums, the stone and Quartane Agues were not
opprobrious unto Physitians: we might contemn that
first and most uncomfortable Aphorism of Hippo-
crates, for surely that Art were soon attained,
that hath so general remedies; and life could not
be Short, were there such to prolong it (II, 52).

Many commentators on Browne have described his soaring
lyrical imagination, but another side of the man which

emerges unambiguously from his works is the practical, hard-

headed physician who faces a daily medical practice in which

 

12In a discussion of the Oracle of Apollo which appears
in the Miscellany Tracts (III, 102), Browne suggests that
Philostratus could have demanded the secret of the great
Elixir from the ghost of Achilles. But the passage indicates
no real interest in the Elixir itself; it is rather employed
by Browne as an illustration that men should use their reason
and industry instead of depending upon oracles.

78

not only the "Stone and Quartane Agues," but also infant
mortality13 and a host of other recalcitrant medical problems
-- such as smallpox (IV, 200, 202) -- fail to respond to the
general remedies alluded to above. Alchemy may indeed provide
a propitious language for the expression of religious senti-
ment, but Browne never regards alchemy as a source of
miraculous cures without derision.

Despite these condemnations of exoteric alchemy, Browne
makes extensive use of alchemical language in his meditative
prose, and there is perhaps no other British writer in the
seventeenth century, except Jonson and Donne, who blends
alchemical material into his work so effectively. Browne's
utilization of alchemical diction as a source of figurative
language follows his general use of occult sciences as a
metaphoric means of expressing, and allowing his readers to
experience, the emotional immediacy of the Divine Reality

confirmed intuitively by his faith. In their discussion of

 

13Browne writes in A Letter to a Friend, "Nothing is more
common with Infants than fo dye on—fhe day of their Nativity,
to behold the worldly Hours and but the Fractions thereof; and
even to perish before their Nativity in the hidden World of
the Womb, and before their good Angel is conceived to undertake
them" (I, 105). This reflection on infant mortality leads
Browne to consider those who die on their birthdays, as he
himself was destined to do: "That the first day should make
the last, that the Tail of the Snake Should return into its
Mbuth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon
the day of their Nativity, is indeed a remarkable Coincidence
..." (I, 105). The image Browne refers to here is the
alchemical uroboros, which appears as Browne describes it in
countless alchemical texts as a symbol of the completion of
the great work, and, figuratively, as a symbol of perfection.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London,
1953), presents a nimber of_var15d representations of the
uroboros; see also the frontispiece of The Works gf_Thomas
Vaughan, ed. Arthur E. Waite (London, 19I9).

 

 

79

figurative language, Warren and Wellek explain the mystical
image in a way which is particularly appropriate for the
alchemical imagery of Sir Thomas Browne. "The [mysticalf
image is a symbol effected by a Spiritual state; it is an
expressive image not a causative image, and it is not neces-
sary to the state: the spiritual state can express itself

in other symbols."14 To be sure, Browne's faith expresses
itself in other symbols, but his partial reliance on alchemical
language possesses distinct advantages. Not only are the
languages of alchemy and Christian ritual and mysteries
interchangeable, but seventeenth-century readers were aware
that the true adept -- not scoundrels like those portrayed in

the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and The Alchemist -- was traditionally

 

 

a man of sincere religious faith.

Thus the Opus [geld makin 7 of the alchemist is
dedicated to such redemptlon as the perfection
of metals will afford. To be successful the
process in the furnace must be accompanied by a
corresponding purification of the worker.
This archetypal religious scientist expresses himself in
words which at once convey the laboratory procedures of his
art, and his own religious beliefs. Browne could scarcely

have chosen a better vehicle for uniting his religion and

science.

 

14Austen Warren and Rene Wellek, Theory gf Literature,
3rd. ed. (New York, 1965), p. 205.

15Pagel, "Paracelsus and the Neoplatonic and Gnostic,"
pp. 129-30.

 

80

In her study of mysticism Evelyn Underhill cites the
work of Sir Thomas Browne as representative of mystical
alchemy. "The Norwich Physician himself, deeply read in the
Hermetic Science idlchemy7, has declared to us his own
certainty concerning the true inward business of the work
in few but lovely words. In them is contained the true
mystery of man's eternal and interior quest of the 'Hidden
treasure that desires to be found.”16 Underhill then quotes

Religio Medici: "Do but extract from the corpulency of

 

bodies, or resolve things beyond their first Matter, and

you discover the habitation of Angels: which, if I call

it the ubiquitary and omnipresent Essence of God, I hOpe

I shall not offend divinity" (I, 45). Just as the alchemist
hoped to bring base metals through a series of separations

and purifications to their potential perfection as gold, the
spiritual alchemist hoped to discover the potential perfection
within himself. Underhill continues, for man "yet bears
within himself, if we can find it, the spark or seed of

absolute perfection: the 'tincture' which makes gold."17

 

l6Evelyn Underhill, sticism (New York, 1948),
pp. 142-3. See also, Edgar 1n , a an Mysteries ig_the
Renaissance (Middlesex, 1967), pp. -5.

 

 

1"’Underhill, p. 142. Browne calls attention to this
symbolic quality of gold in a brief epigram which ap ears in
his commonplace book. In a two line dedication whic pre-
cedes the epigram, he alludes to "the occult and inside of
his Gold." The poem itself reads:

Persian gold I wish for you, and the finest Alexandrian
And Imperial gold I wish you too;

But look Beyond the image to the inside of the metal,
Nor let your treasure-chest be richer than your mind
(III, 279).

Qty,

81

Or as it is expressed in another place in Religio Medici:

 

"The smattering I have [in the knowledge7 of the PhiloSOpher'S
stone, (which is something more then the perfect exaltation

of gold) hath taught me a great deale of Divinity, and instructed
my beliefe, how that imortall spirit and incorruptible substance
of my soule lye obscure, and Sleepe a while within this house

of flesh" (I, 50). As a physician Browne was compelled to

be skeptical about the power of the Philosopher's stone to
produce an Elixir of immortality, but as an instructive

metaphor for his spiritual, immortal soul he embraces the

idea.

By drawing freely on the esoteric alchemical tradition,
Browne has no difficulty linking his religious thought with
his concurrent scientific speculation. In the passage from
Religio which follows, Browne echoes the Paracelsians, who
looked on the Creation as a process of alchemical separation;
alchemy is sometimes called the Spagyric art, or the art of
separation of the base from the perfect.

As at the creation, of the world all the dis-

tinct species that we behold, lay involved in

one masse, till the fruitfull voyce of God

separated this united multitude into its

several species: so at the last day, when these

corrupted reliques Shall be scattered in the

wildernesse of formes, and seems to have forgot

their proper habits, God by a powerfull voyce

shall command them backe into their proper

shapes, and call them out by their single

individuals (1, 58-9).

Allen Debus remarks in one of his studies of the history

of modern chemistry that when one reads the chemical works

82

written before 1650, one is struck with how modern the
laboratory practices appear to be, but the substructure upon
which these practices rest is Hermetic (alchemical), Pythag-
orean, and Neoplatonic thought.18 Alchemical thought
incorporates the biblical because even scientists like

Van Helmont, who rejected much of the mystical in chemistry
and who denounced the macrocosm-microcosm analogy as a basis
for knowing and healing man, insist that Genesis may be
safely relied on as a source of physical truth.19 As we
have seen, Browne is somewhat ambivalent about the microcosm-
macrocosm conceit, but nowhere does he offer Genesis as a
scientific document. He does, however, avail himself of the
alchemists' interpretation of the creation as a divine
separation to account for the division of Prime Matter into
distinct species and the return to individual essences at
the Last Judgment.

In an earlier passage from Religio Medici, which deals

 

with the presence of the Holy Spirit in man, Browne turns to

Genesis, in language reminiscent of alchemical allegories:

However, I am sure there is a common Spirit that
playes within us, yet makes no part of us, and
that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintil-
lation of that noble and mighty Essence, which is
the life and radicall heat of spirits, and those

 

 

 

18Allen Debus, Alchem and Chemistry in_the Seventeenth
Century (Los Angeles, 1966), p. 10.

19Debus, The Chemical Dream of the Renaissance (Cam-
bridge, 1968), p. 21.

 

 

83

essences that know not the vertue of the Sunne;

a fire quite contrary to the fire of Hell: This

is that gentle heate that brooded on the waters,
and in six dayes hatched the world; this is that
irradiation that dispells the mists of Hell, the
clouds of horrour, feare, sorrow, and despaire;

and preserves the region of the mind in serenity:
whoever feels not the warme gale and gentle ven-
tilation of this Spirit, (though I feele his pulse)
I dare not say he lives (I, 42).

Even though the life sustaining flame and the brooding dove
are Renaissance commonplaces, they also have some specific
significations for alchemists. First, as regards the vital

flame, Walter Pagel isolates three types of fire to be found

in alchemical documents and the Corpus Hermeticum, one of

 

which appears in Browne's passage. Alchemists describe three
types of fire: the "sophic" or the fire of the stars, the
invisible fire in the soul that nourishes and confers life,
and finally, ordinary destructive fire.20 The image of an
invisible life-sustaining flame which is antithetical to the
punitive fire of hell had a permanent hold on Browne's imagi-
nation, and that image will be examined at length later in

the analysis of the influence of the Corpus Hermeticum on

 

Browne's work. Browne's reference to the flame as a "gentle

heate" also has an alchemical analogue in the heat applied

in the first stages of alchemical projection.21
Second, Browne's image of the Holy Spirit in the shape

of a brooding dove, which he partially accounts for by his

 

20Pagel, "Paracelsus, Neoplatonic and Gnostic," p. 150.

21Holmyard, p. 17.

84

marginal quotation of the vulgate rendering of Genesis 1,
which includes the Latin word incubat, is also a common-
place of alchemical literature, although these notions are
not confined to alchemical writings. Thomas Vaughan utilizes

the image in his Magia Adamica when he writes: "...the

 

Holy Spirit, moving upon the chaos with action some divines
compare to the incubation of a hen upon her eggs, did to-
gether with his heat consummate other manifold influences to

n22

the matter. And, in a more familiar example, Henry Vaughan

draws on the same image in the "Waterfall":
Unless that Spirit lead his mind,

Which first upon thy face did move

And hatch'd all with his quickening love.23

Scholarly commentary indicates the close connection of this
image with the alchemical operation. Pettet notes that the
alchemists often alluded to the process which produced their
stone as hatching.24 Holmyard calls attention to the analogy
made by alchemists between the image of the brooding dove and
the alchemical 'pelican,‘ or still, the device in which the
various laboratory procedures were accomplished. "Thus an
oval or sphaericall glass vessel which could be hermetically

sealed was commonly referred to as the 'philosophers egg,'

 

22Thomas Vaughan, Works, p. 130.

23The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd. ed.
(London;—r963), p5‘538.

24Pettet, p. 74.

 

85

and that not merely because of its shape but with a vague

reference to the egg out of which the universe was hatched."2S

Carl Jung, in his studies of alchemy, compounds this image
with that of the Phoenix. "Out of the egg -- symbolized by

the round cooking-vessel -- will rise the eagle or phoenix,

26

the liberated soul..." Browne is well aware of the signi-

ficance of the Phoenix legend when he examines it in Vulgar

Errors:

Some have written mystically, as Paracelsus in
his Book ngAzoth, or 23 lin o and linea vitae;
and as several Hermetical ilosophers, in-
volving therein the secret of their Elixir and
enigmatically expressing the nature of their
great work (II, 193-4).

 

The traditional use of the Phoenix as an emblem of
the resurrection of Christ links it with the "exhaltation,"
or resurrection step, in the alchemical process. "Christ

said, 'Yf I exalted be,/ Then shall I draw all thyngs unto

 

stolmyard, p. 155.

26Jung, p. 193. See also H. J. Sheppard, "Egg Symbolism
in Alchemy," Ambix, VI (1958), 141: "The PhiloSOpher's Egg
of alchemy becomes a symbol of the primordial chaos out of which
the living world emerged."

86

me.’ The Wife [Mercury7 and Man LSulphur7 must be 'con-
tumulate' (interred, buried) and afterwards 'revyvyd by the
Spyryts of Lyfe.'"27 This example demonstrates how inex-
tricably religious language and laboratory procedure are
intertwined in alchemy, and the rich associations which
underlie Browne's passage.

In the continuation of a passage quoted earlier in
which Browne attempts to comprehend exactly how the body
and soul will be reunited at the Last Judgment, he returns
to the language of alchemy and perhaps to the specific step
in the alchemical work referred to above. "I have often
beheld as a miracle that artificiall resurrection and re-
vivification of Mercury, how being mortified into a thousand
shapes, it assumes again its owne, and returns to its
numericall selfe" (I, 59). The words "mortified," and
"resurrection," while being, of course, associated with
Christian experience and mysteries, also have their analogues
in the alchemical project. "Mortify" had been a part of the
alchemical lexicon from at least the Medieval period. The

alchemist in Chaucer's Canon's Yoeman's Tale says "this

 

quick-silver wol I mortifye." Under the alchemical defini-

 

27George Ripley, The Compound of Alch ie, 1471, Quoted
in Shumaker, p. 172. Browne possessEE a num er of works by
Ripley (IV, 294), but apparently not this one. Lynn Thorndike
includes a similar quotation from the conclusion of an alchemi-
cal work written by John Thornborough, 1621: "...of the exal-
tation of the stone which transforms the imperfect bodies of
metals into perfection and has reference to the blessed day
of resurrection and the glorius state of the saints of heaven."

Lynn Thorndike. A Histo of Ma ic and Experimental Science
VIII vols. (New York, 195;):_VII, p.—IFZ. ’

 

 

87

tion for mortify, the Oxford English Dictionary provides

 

the following example: "The Chymists say a thing is Mor-
tify'd when its outward form is altered or destroyed, as
particularly when Mercury, or any other Metal is dissolved
in an acid Menstruum."z8 H. J. Sheppard describes the speci-
fic Operations Browne alludes to with a sketch of their
development out of Hellenistic alchemy.

In Hellenistic alchemy it must have been re-

cognized that there was a symbolic likeness to the

experiences of a participant in the rituals of

the ancient mystery religions; the neophyte

witnessed a ritual suffering, death and resur-

rection of the god, which in later Christian sym-

bolism, was transferred to the passion, death and

resurrection of Christ. In the alchemical 0 us

the initial application of heat represented the

passion and resulted in mortification...resur-

rection...followed a baptism which 8n the alchemi-

cal plane corresponded to washing.2
Browne uses the word "artificial" in his description because
his primary image depends not upon a true alchemical "mor-
tification," but upon an image familiar to anyone with even
limited chemical experience. Any reader who has observed a
portion of mercury fragment and recombine will readily under-
stand the passage. For the reader, however, who knows the
alchemical operation and its religious analogues, the mean-
ing of the passage is greatly enriched. Mortification sug-

gests movement through a symbolic death -- suffering, puri-

 

 

28The Com act Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford, I973), pp. 1854-5. _3. Harris. ’Lexicon’TéEhn.
I. S. V. Mortifie, 1704.

 

29Sheppard, p. 147.

88

fication -- as preparation for the glory of the Last
Judgment which in context is Browne's subject.

This notion of the progress from death to glory stimu-
lates Browne to return again to an alchemical metaphor in

Religio Medici. After advancing an example from his natural

 

philosophy, the metamorphosis of the silkworm, an instance
of another way in which Browne bridges the two worlds of
science and faith, he suggests that he has adopted his own

alchemical description of death.

I have therefore forsaken those strict defini-
tions of death, by privation of life, extinc-
tion of natural heate, separation etc., and have
framed one in a hermeticall way unto mine own
fancie: est mutatio ua perficitur nobile illud
extractum-Mitrocosmi; or to mee that consider
things in a naturall and experimental way, man
seemes to be but a digestion, or a preparative
way unto that last Elixar which lies imprisoned
in the chaines of flesh" (I, 50-1).

 

 

This passage restates the idea that death is part of a ritual
process which purifies the soul (nobile illud extractum

Microcosmi), the religious parallel of the alchemistis quest

 

to bring metal through a series of purifications to its des-
tined perfection as gold. Browne asserts that he is consi-
dering this question in "a natural and experimental way,"
illustrating that he, like others who had adopted the spirit-
ual allegories of alchemy, was drawn to the "scientific"

quality of the work.30

 

30Sencourt, p. 147. Alchemy "fascinated Donne by
appearing to be both scientific and religious."

89

Browne echoes the alchemical definition of death in a

mystical meditation near the close of Hydriotaphia and in an

 

identical passage in Christian Morals in which he mingles

 

several phrases drawn from the mystics31 with language from
alchemy in an attempt to express the ultimate joys of
Christian experience:

And if any have been so happy as truly to

understand Christian annihilation, extasis,

exolution, liquefaction, transformation,

gustation of God, and ingression into the

divine shadow, they have already had an

handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory

of the world is surely over, and the earth

in ashes unto them (I, 170, 290).
Several words in this sentence have alchemical meanings, and
the sense of the passage incorporates and extends Browne's
alchemical definition of death.32 The words "extasis," an
extreme dilation, and "exolution," the process of loosening
or freeing the spirit, are descriptions of the symbolic
death which precedes the coming to be of the stone. A defi-
nition of "liquefaction" occurs in Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy,
which Browne owned (IV, 294). In the above meditation it is

employed figuratively to suggest the melting through religious

ardor which frees the spirit. Donne uses the term in the

 

 

31Sir Thomas Browne, Reli io Medici and Other Works, ed.
L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1964), p. 338.

32The persistence of this idea, and Browne's inclination
to express it in language similar to that in Reli io Medici
provides one of many counter arguments against Shumaker's
assertation (p. 242) that the mysterious is either "muted or
absent" in the later works.

90

same way in his Sermon XXVI: "Till thou feele in the selfe
... a liquefaction, a colliquation, a melting."33 "Gustation
of God"34 can be directly related to Browne's earlier sug-
gestion that "man seems but a digestion, or a preparative

way unto that last Elixar." As Browne struggles to express
the ineffable Christian experience -- union with Christ --

he discovers in the mystical-scientific language of alchemy
an apt vehicle for the presentation of that thought.

Browne's Garden 2£.EXIE§.15 his most mystical work, and
the one in which he draws most consistently on the occult
sciences. It is not surprising then that we discover allu-
sions to esoteric alchemy in the work. Margaret Heideman
calls attention to the Hermetic androgyne which appears in
the first paragraph of the Garden and to the importance of

alchemy as one aspect of a three-part analogy which blends

 

33John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R.
Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. lU_vols. (Berkeley, 1953),
Vol. 4, p. 70.

 

 

34If the word "gustation" (the act or faculty of tasting)
has an alchemical meaning, I have not uncovered it. The sense
of the entire passage seems to suggest a loss of personal iden-
tity (Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquifaction,
transformation) and absorption by God (gustation of God,
ingression into the divine shadow). This idea is, of course,
everywhere in St. Paul who counsels the faithful to give up
their identities to become other Christs. Underhill defends
the appropriateness of taste as a symbol for union with God
in her Practical Mysticism (New York, 1943), pp. 4-5.
"Becauséfihe has surrendered himself to it, 'united' with it,
the patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject
of his art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a
manner which is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the
looker-on. Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive
sympathy more or less intense, is far more accurately suggested
by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing and
sight."

 

91

classical, biblical, and alchemical allusions. "The image of
the Roman Fire-God giving arrows to the God of the Sun and
the Goddess of the Moon dissolves into the Genesis account of
the creation of sun and moon while providing in the sequence
another aspect of the theme, for Apollo and Diana are as well

the Hermetic Androgyne. Sub-currents of this triple analogy

parallel the discursive part of the work..."35

Alchemists associated the androgyne with their conception

of the creation as a process of separation.

As originally created the primal Adam -- who repre-
sented in himself the cosmic whole -- had a non-
physical body and was androgyne; but his fall
plunged him into the gross material world of
separated and conflicting physical and sexual
elements, in which each individual part attempts to be
self-sufficient. The cosmic movement of descent

into division is matched, however, by the comple-
mentary movement of return to the source. This
transformation of the physical back to the spiritual,
and the simultaneous return of separates into unity,
was made possible for man by Christ, the God-man;
correspondingly, in the realm of metallic nature,

the inherent tendency to return to the one origin

is expedited by the Philosopher's Stone, the prin-
ciple of transformation and unification which it

is the task of the alchemist to disengage and purify.

The circular pattern described here is, as we shall see in
Chapter III of this thesis, the basic structure of the

Garden 2: Cyrus, which views the multiplicity of nature

through the unifying symbols of the quincunx and the circle.

 

35Heideman, p. 241.

36M. H. Abrahms, Natural Supernaturalism (New York,
1971), Pp. 158-90

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92

Another subtle allusion from alchemy in the Garden 2f
Eyygg stems from the alchemist's reverence for the color green.
"Of all colors, it was the colour Green which, in the vege-
table world at least, was of utmost importance to the
alchemists; if the creative spirit had descended into the
mineral world in the form of Mercury it had descended into the
vegetable world in the form of greeness."37 As evidence for
this assertion Harold Fisch quotes Browne's friend Arthur Dee

in his Preface £g_Chymical Collections, 1650. "For when he

 

inspired in things created, the Generation of the world...he
gave also a certain Springing and Budding that is greenness
of strength... and that Greenness they called Nature."38

In the Garden 2: nyg§, Browne's treatment of "green-
ness" characteristically links his science and religion by
appearing in what can perhaps best be called a discussion of
mystical botany, which eventually gives way to a second symbol
important to the alchemists and Browne: light as the visible
manifestation of the hidden God. As in all of Browne's bor-
rowings from occult science, the point of greatest interest
for the student of literature is the manner in which he
transforms prosaic material--the work of writers like Arthur

Dee, for example-- into his own poetic prose.

 

37Harold Fisch, "Alchemy and English Literature," Pro-
ceedings gf_the Leeds PhilosOphical and Literary Society, p. 134,

38

 

Ibid., p. 134.

93

And therefore providence hath arched and paved the
great house of the world, with colours of
mediocrity, that is, blew and green, above and
below the sight, moderately terminating in the
acies of the eye... And this is also agreeable
unto water it self, the alimental vehicle of
plants, which first altereth into this colour;
And containing many vegetable seminalities re-
vealeth their seeds by greennesse...Nor are only
dark and green colors, but shades and shadows
contrived through the great volume of nature...
(I, 217).

As Browne turns from the color green to fix his attention on
shadows, his imagination flies to another powerfully evocative

symbol in "the volume of nature."

Darknesse and light hold interchangeable domin-
ions, and alternately rule the seminal state of
things. Light unto Pluto is darknesse unto

Ju iter. Legions of seminall Idea's lye in their
second Chaos and Orcus of Hipocrates; till put-
ting on the habits of their forms, they shew
themselves upon the stage of the world, and
open dominion of Jove... Light that makes things
seen, makes some things invisible:...The Sunne
it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light
but the shadow of God (I, 218).

 

In this passage, Browne returns to the "threefold analogy"
he introduces at the opening of the work. The Christian
God, the classical pantheon, and the imagery of alchemy all
come together in this consummate meditation.

Browne does not overburden his prose with what is
really a technical, unpoetic, and highly specialized language.
Judged by the sheer number of references, alchemical symbolism
would not appear to be of great significance in Browne's work,
but the paucity of material does not diminish its importance

as a vehicle for expressing deeply felt religious emotion in

94

language which joins religious sentiment with Browne's
science. In addition to this reconciliation of science and
religion, alchemical allusions lend a more intense mystical
quality to Browne's otherwise rational, somewhat tepid
religious expression. As an example, the following passage

which appears in the first chapter of Hydriotaphia not only

 

implies the suffering involved in the soul's purification, but
also anticipates that same soul's glory, a glory of union
with Christ which, as we have observed, Browne also describes
in alchemical language in his final chapter.

Some apprehended a purifying virtue in fire,

refining the grosser commixture, and firing

out the Aethereall particles so deeply immersed

in it (I, 137).

II

Browne's debt to mystical alchemy is clear, but in

my investigation of Browne's work, I have found that it is

far more difficult to establish any direct debt to the

Corpus Hermeticum.

 

The documents themselves, which bear no direct rela-
tionship to occult studies such as alchemy despite its
traditional designation as the hermetic art, are titled the

Corpus Hermeticum. This collection of treatises contains

 

 

three separate works: a group of dialogues often referred to
collectively by the title of the first dialogue, Pimander;

the Ascelepius; and the Stobean extracts, named for the man

 

who collected them. All of the works, which are contained

in four volumes in the FestugiEre-Nock edition, are written

95

in Greek with the exception of the Ascelepius, which is in
39

 

Latin. The question of who wrote the documents collected

under the title the Corpus Hermeticum continues to be debated,

 

but Shumaker summarizes the current opinion.

The Corpus, the A5celepius, and the Stobean
extracts -- surVIVing fragments, no doubt, of a
larger body of such writings by a variety of
authors -- are thus products of a late Egyp-
tian gnosticism which, by a pious fraud
fathered its documents upon Hermes to give
them prestige...The reigning philosophical
doctrine in Egypt, as elsewhere, was a late
Platonism. Plato, who was believed to have
studied in Egypt for thirteen years, had
derived his doctrines from Pythagoras --
perhaps at one remove through Philolaus; and
Pythagoras, in turn was known to have studied
in schools attached to Egyptian temples.40

 

From Ficino, who translated the Greek Corpus into Latin,
through much of the Renaissance, this body of writing was
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who now appears to be a
mythical composite of the Egyptian secretary of Osiris, who
alledgedly invented writing (hieroglyphics), and the Greek
Hermes, who among other honors was the god of eloquence and
oratory. The writings of Hermes were believed to antedate Moses

and to prophetically foretell both Judaism and Christianity.41

 

39Cor us Hermeticum, ed. A. D. Nock and A. J. FestugiEre,
Dieuxieme Baition, 4 vols. (Paris, 1960). This authoritative
edition of the Cor us provides a page by page French transla-
tion of the Greek and Latin text. All quotations in this
thesis are taken from the Nock-Festugiere edition.

 

40Shumaker, p. 207.

41French, p. 68. French notes that Tertullian, whose
influence on Browne is apparent in Reli io Medici, viewed the
Hermes of the Corpus as a prophet of Christianity.

96

This notion was very appealing to Renaissance thinkers fond
of finding parallels between ancient paganism and
Christianity. Browne appears to accept this idea in the

following passage from Religio Medici:

 

...and truely for those first chapters of Gene-

sis, I must confesse a great deale of obscurity,

though Divines have to the power of humane reason

endeavoured to make all goe in a literall meaning;

yet those allegoricall interpretations are also

probable, and perhaps the mysticall method of

Moses bred up in the Hieroglyphicall Schooles of

the Egyptians (I, 45).

The idea that the Corpus Hermeticum is a repository of
ancient Egyptian theology (which the Renaissance mind would
inevitably connect with mysticism) was refuted by the great
sixteenth-century classical scholar Issac Casaubon, who
first placed the works in the second century A.D.42 Casau-
bon argued that the Corpus could not be attributed to an
ancient Egyptian because it contained a composite of late
Greek and early Christian thought which was greatly influenced
by the work of Plato and his students, and by St. John's
Gospel.43 Casaubon published his findings in the final year

of his life, 1614, well before Browne's first published work.

 

42It is now believed that Casaubon dated the works about
one hundred years too early and that they were actually com-
posed between the latter half of the second and the end of
the third century A.D. This fact, however, does not diminish
the importance of his discovery.

43Shumaker, p. 207.

97

Could a scholar of Browne's quality and breadth have
overlooked such a discovery? Although he discusses Casaubon's
findings nowhere in his published works, he does possess
books by Issac Casaubon,44 who gained a reputation at two of
the continental schools Browne attended: Montpelier and Ley-
den. In addition, Browne quotes Casaubon's less distinguished

son Meric in Hydriotaphia (I, 151), and in his correspondence

 

with Ashmole, Browne refers directly to Meric's A_Veritable

 

and Faithful Relation p£_what Passed Between John Dee and

 

 

 

Certain Spirits, 1653 (IV, 296).

 

In my view, Browne, like Kircher, whose influence
pervades Browne's work, knew Casaubon's commentary on

the Corpps Hermeticum, but ignored it.45 As a repository of

 

deep religious feeling, and as a source of metaphoric language
compatible with Browne's other occult borrowings, the Corpus

Hermeticum is undiminished by Casaubon's discovery. Also,

 

for the Renaissance, Hermes Trismegistus had become far more
than the author of this body of speculative philOSOphy; he
was the reputed author of a number of other mystical and
alchemical documents, and Browne does not appear to discrimi-
nate between the author of the Corpus and these apocryphal

writings.

 

 

 

44Catalogue pf the Libraries pf the Learned Sir Thomas
Browne an r. ward—Brownejhis Son, IVTOJII, p. 9. Ilhave
used a photographic reproduction from the University of Michi-
gan Library.

 

4
sYates, p. 402.

98

Shumaker's inquiry into the possible influence of the

Corpus Hermeticum upon English Literature offers a number of

 

sound reasons for separating the Corpus from the study of
occult sciences, including alchemy, the so-called hermetic
art, but I find no convincing evidence in Browne's writings
that he maintained such a distinction himself. Shumaker

is at one point surprised that Browne speaks of the author

of the Ascelepius as an astrologer and alchemist,46 but when

 

Browne's references to Hermes are viewed as a whole the attri-
bution is not puzzling. Like many other Renaissance writers,
Browne appears to accept as genuine numerous esoteric works
ascribed to Hermes by authors hoping to attach more prestige

to their work.. For example, Browne attributes the geometrical
definition of God to Hermes Trismegistus, but that description,
"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circum-

ference is nowhere," does not appear in the Corpus Hermeticum.47

 

Browne also accepts Hermes as the author of the Emerald Table,

 

which the alchemists viewed as a sacred document surpassed
in authority by the Scriptures alone.48 Although the succinct

phrases of the Emerald Table echo some of the ideas expressed

 

in the Corpps Hermeticum, no direct relationship between the

 

 

 

46Shumaker, p. 244.

47Browne's fondness for this figure is well known. The
exact source of the metaphor is unknown, but it first appeared
ascribed to Hermes in the pseudo-Hermetic Liber XXIV Philoso-

phorum of the twelfth century. See Huntley p. 109.

48Shumaker, pp. 179-80; Holmyard, pp. 97-100.

‘ I

I;

99

works can be demonstrated. Browne refers directly to the

first statement of the Emerald Table in suggesting that

 

scientific investigators seek out the truth skeptically, and
without unquestioned assumptions. "To begin or continue our

works like Trismegistus of old, Verum, certe verum, atque

 

verissimum est, would sound arrogantly unto present Ears

 

in this strict enquiring Age, wherein, for the most part,
Probably, and Perhaps, will hardly serve to mollify the
Spirit of Captious Contradictors" (I, 260, also III, 290).
There are several passages in Browne's works which might be

indebted to the Corpus Hermeticum, but in general these use

 

 

language which Browne could have found in alchemical writings

such as the Emerald Table. In Religio Medici Browne asserts:

 

 

"The severe Schooles shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy
of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the
invisible" (I, 21). He is perhaps relying here upon a

statement from the Ascelepius concerning the visible and
4

 

invisible God, 9 but he is more likely referring to the

second statement of the Emerald Table: "What is below is

 

like that which is above, and what is above is like that
which is below..."50

The notion that nature is a visible manifestation of
God is at least as old as Plato, but in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries it became the justification of pious

 

49Corpus Hermeticum, II, 304-5.

 

50Shumaker, p. 179.

100

scientists for their investigations of nature. Browne
advances this role of the scientist, as an interpreter of the
signs of the Creator in his creation, as a primary responsi-

bility. His words from Religio Medici are well known.

 

The wisedome of God receives small honour

from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about,
and with a grosse rusticity admire his workes;
those highly magnifie him whose judicious
enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research
of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout
and learned admiration (I, 22).

A number of works inspired by alchemical documents such

as the Emerald Table contain such statements. I quote from

 

Thomas Tymme as an example because his expression of this

notion is remarkably like one in Browne's own prose.

The Almighty Creatour of the Heavens and Earth,
(Christian Reader), hath set before our eyes two
most principal Bookes: The one of Nature, the
other of his written Word... The wisdome of Natures
booke men commonly call Naturall Philosophie, which
serveth to allure to the contemplation of that
great and incomprehensible God, that wee might
glorifie him in the greatnesse of his work. 1

And from one of Browne's most frequently quoted passages:

Thus there are two bookes from whence I collect my
Divinity; besides that written one of God, another
of his servant Nature, that universall and publik
Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all
(I, 24-25).

 

51Quoted by Debus, Alchemy and Chemistry, pp. 8-9.
French (p. 67) notes that the inscriptiOn of the famous
image of Hermes in Sienna refers to the created world as a
second God.

 

101

Browne would not have had to know the Corpus Hermeticum to

 

 

have written this passage. It is a commonplace of Para-
celsian and alchemical literature,52 and Browne may have
found it expressed in any number of chemical documents.

Integrated with the theme of the visible world, the
Book of Nature, as a picture of the invisible is the belief
that the Sun is the visible God. Even a writer of the true
scientific stature of Copernicus quotes Hermes as saying
that the sun is the visible deity.

In the center of all rests the sun. For who

would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple

in another or better‘place than this wherefrom

it can illuminate everything at the same time?

As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call

it the lantern; others the mind and still others

the pilot of ghe world. Trismegistus calls it a
visible god.5

In Vulgar Errors Browne alludes to this idea in his argument

 

against the superstition that the sun dances each Easter.

The passage is reminiscent of others in Browne where the qual-
ity of his imagination, akin to that of the metaphysical poets,
is stimulated by the contrasting worlds of light and darkness.
He begins his discussion by declaring that he would willingly
believe in this event as a miraculous demonstration of the
resurrection of Christ, but he, as a scientist, must confess

that this idea contains no scientifically verifiable, rather

 

52Debus, p. 9 g£_passim.

53Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions pf the Heavenl
Spheres, trans. Charles Halli? (Chicago, 1952), pp. 526-7.

 

102

only "Tropical," truth:

And if metaphorical expressions go so far, we

may be bold to affirm, not only that one Sun

danced, but two arose that day: That light appeared
at his nativity, and darkness at his death, and yet

a light at both; for even darkness was a light

unto the Gentiles, illuminated by that obscurity.
That 'twas the first time the Sun set above the
Horizon; that although there were darkness above

the earth, there was light beneath it, nor dare

we say that hell was dark if he were in it (11, 390).

Browne owes, it seems to me, one probable specific debt

to the Corpus Hermeticum either at first or second hand.

 

 

Both his mystical metaphor for the presence of God as a vital
flame within man, and his association of God with light --

lux est umbra Dei -- appear again and again in the Corpus

 

 

Hermeticum, although the association of God and light is

 

centuries old and appears in countless works outside the

Hermetic tradition. In a passage from Vulgar Errors praising

 

the superiority of Egyptian metaphors because they are less
likely to be taken literally, Browne turns to this example

of figurative language which is perfectly compatible with his
borrowings from alchemy: "And so perhaps because it is predi-
cated of God, that he is a consuming fire, he may be harmlessly
described by a flaming representation" (11, 389). This symbol

appears so often in the Corpus Hermeticum that it is reasonable

 

to assume Browne is either familiar with the Corpus itself or
with writers like Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Kircher who are
deeply indebted to those writings.

The identification of God and Light occurs at the out-

set and throughout the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Opening

 

103

pages of the Pimander this identification is made for the

first time.

Alors Poimandres: 'As-tu compris ce que cette
vision signifie?‘ -- Et moi: 'Je le saurai, d' -
je. -- 'Cette lumiere', dit-il, 'c'est moi, N695
ton Dieu, celui qui existe avant la nature humide
qui est apparue hors de l'obscurite. Quant au

Verbe lumineux issu du Nous, c'est 1e fils de Dieu.54

In a later passage it is suggested that the essence of God

can be grasped best by men through an analogy with the sun.

Car il est celui de qui les bonnes energies
péhEtrent non seulement dans le ciel et 1'air,
mais aussi sur la terre jusqu' au gouffre le plus
profond et a 1'abime . D'autre part, 5 'i1 existe
aussi quelque substance intelli ible, elle est

le volume du Soleil, et la lumigre du Soleil pour-
rait Gtre dite 1e receptacle de cette substance...
Quant a la vue du Soleil, elle n 'est pas affaire
de conjecture, mais 1e rayon visuel lui- méme
enveloppe de son eclat le plus brillant le monde
entier, et la partie qui est au- -dessus et celle
qui est au- -dessous: car 1e Soleil est etabli au
milieu du monde, portant le monde comme une cou-
ronne, et, tel un bon conducteur, il a assure
2;’equilibre du char du monde et se l'est attache a
lui- m€me de peur qu '§1 ne soit emporte en une
course desordonnee.5

In the Ascelepius, it is suggested that just as the sun

 

enlightens the earth, God enters the minds of pious men.

...neque enim omnes, sed pauci, quorum ita mens est,
ut tanti beneficii capax esse possit; ut enim sole
mundus, ita mens humana iste clarescit umine et

ea amplius; nam sol quidquid inluminat.

 

S4Corpus Hermeticum, I, p. 8.

 

551bid., II p. 234.

561bid., II, p. 317.

104

Some of Browne's most intensely moving passages are
inspired by the figure of God as an invisible fire: "The
Breath of God that is the truest consuming flame" (I, 56).
We are tempted at times to believe that Browne understands
this as a literal rather than symbolic truth. Even in his

scientific work Vulgar Errors, Browne is strongly inclined

 

to assert that the visible presence of God can be literally
observed in animal light. The following quotation appears

in Browne's discussion of the glowworm.

Now whether the light of animals, which do

not occasionally shine from contingent causes,

be of Kin unto the light of Heaven; whether

the invisible flame of life received in a con-
venient matter, may not become visible, and

the diffused aetherial light make little Stars

by conglobation in idoneous parts of the com o-
situm: whether also it may not have some original
in the seed and spirit analogous unto the Element
of Stars, whereof some glympse is observable in the
little refulgent humor, at the first attempts of
formation: Philosophy may yet enquire (II, 263).

Yet later in the same work, when Browne is discussing various
attempts to represent the invisible God, he clearly labels the

"flaming representation" a metaphor:

...and so perhaps because it is metaphorically
predicated of God that he is a consuming fire,
he may be harmlessly described by a flaming rep-
resentation. Yet if, as some will have it, all
mediocrity of folly is foolish, and because an
unrequitable evil may be ensue, an indifferent
convenience must be omitted, we shall not urge
such representments; we could spare the holy
Lamb for the picture of our Saviour, and the
Dove or fiery Tongues to represent the holy
Ghost (II, 389).

 

105

This passage clarifies Browne's attitude toward this,
for him, compelling metaphor. It is compatible with the
consistent distinction Browne makes between scientific and

metaphoric truth. Browne can, in Hydriotaphia, call attention

 

to the Greek's fear of drowning because it would extinguish
the invisible flame which allowed them to exist in the after

life (I, 138), but he indicates no belief in the literal [—
possibility of this notion.

Browne may not be relying directly on the Corpus f"

 

Hermeticum when he writes in Hydriotaphia that "Life is a

 

 

pure flame and we live by an invisible Sun within us" (I, 169),
but the idea that this flame represents God's, perhaps here
Christ's (Sun-Son) life-sustaining presence in us, "the fire
and scintillation" (I, 42), certainly appears in the Corpus.57

Whether Browne borrows this metaphor from the Corpus Herme-

 

ticum itself or from the language of the mystical alchemists
is of small moment, since in either case God's presence in
man is brought home to the reader with emotional immediacy in

a symbol which links Browne's science and religion.

 

57Ibid., 1, p. 8.

CHAPTER III

BROWNE AND NUMBER MYSTICISM

In 1658, Browne published, in a single volume, two Lfi
literary works: Hydriotaphia and The Garden 9: Cyrus, and

 

 

an emended and enlarged third edition of Vulgar Errors. In Ft

 

 

an unusually lengthy chapter on the belief in The Great

Climacterical Year in Vulgar Errors (II, 306-323), first

 

published in 1646, and in The Garden 22 Cyrus Browne includes

 

virtually all that he has to say on the subject of numerology.1

The Garden 3: Cyrus, as we shall see, comes close to arguing

 

a Pythagorean numerological position through Browne's
rhetorical manipulation of the number five and the quincuncial
figure. With this in mind, it is with some surprise that we
read Browne's essay on the Climacterical year, which in logical
and stylistically straightforward prose unambiguously

denounces numerology and the superstitious premises on which

it rests. In this chapter, I shall examine this apparent
contradiction and argue that, although Browne clearly does

not believe in numerology, he artistically employs the

 

1Browne's statements on harmony, which will be examined
later in this chapter, are confined to Religio Medici. There
are also a few scattered references to numerology in other
discussions in Vulgar Errors.

 

 

106

107

numerological tradition in the Garden pr Cyrus to synthesize
Hermetic-Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian, scientific, and
abstruse learning in an effort to symbolically limn out the

order of creation and the orderly Creator of the world.

I

The word climacterical, in Browne's as in our own
time, denotes a specific and dramatic physical change in the
life of a human being, puberty or menopause for example. It
is clear in Browne's chapter on the climacterical year, how-
ever, that he employs the word in a much narrower sense to
describe the fatal year, the year of one's death. "For
the daies of men are usually cast up by Septenaries, and every
seventh year conceived to carry some altering character with
it either in the temper of body, mind, or both. But among all
other three are most remarkable, that is, 7 times 7 or fourty-
nine, 9 times 9 or eighty one, and 7 times 9 or the year of
Sixty three; which is conceived to carry with it the most
considerable fatality..." (II, 307).

In a temperate study of numerology and its impact on
English literature, Christopher Butler traces some of the
traditional numerological associations attached to the numbers
seven and nine. Seven, as a number of examples in Browne's
chapter on the climacterical year illustrate, was associated
with the body and the mutable world. "Nine is the number of

the mind, the spheres, the angelic hierarchies, and of

 

108

heaven itself."2 As Browne's statement quoted above indicates,
both seven squared and nine squared were regarded as climac-
tericals, but, Butler asserts, of the three pairs of numbers
nine times seven was the most important because seven and nine
were corporal and spiritual respectively and as such were
thought to have the power to determine crucial stages of

3

human life.

In Vulgar Errors, after a brief enumeration of the most

 

illustrious figures in the numerological tradition, Pythagoras
"who seemed to have played the leading part" (II, 307), Plato
and Philo the Jew, Browne attacks numerological superstition
in a variety of ways. First, not only have the numbers seven
and nine been invested by antiquity with occult powers, but
"most of the other digits have been as mystically applauded"
(II, 308). Browne, indicating his familiarity with this
abstruse study, discusses the Pythagoreans' affection for the
number four. Six, he states, has much credited to it, and
also ten because it contains within itself "even, odd, long,
plain, quadrate, and cubical numbers" (II, 308). Browne

adds that both Barbarians and the Greeks, including Aristotle,

believed the number ten to be a governing principle in nature.4

 

2Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism (London, 1970),
p. 145.

3

 

Ibid., p. 145.

4Browne omits here the traditional designation of ten as
the perfect number, although it may perhaps be implied in his
discussion of that number.

109

Simon Wilkin, Browne's most distinguished early editor,S

finds it "not a little singular"6 that the author of the
Garden pr Cyrus should omit the number five from this passage.
As we shall observe later, this is not the only passage in

this chapter from Vulgar Errors where the reader familiar

 

with the Garden gr Cyrus and its companion piece Hydriotaphia

 

becomes conscious of a discrepancy in the attitudes expressed
in these works.

Browne next turns his attention to those numbers not
believed to be grounded in nature, but commended from
"artificial, casual, or fabulous foundations" (II, 308).7
A catalogue of examples including the Nine Muses, the Seven
Wonders of the World, the Seven Gates of Thebes, the Seven

Stars in Ursa Minor, and many more follows.

 

Next, Browne considers numbers which are extolled "from
foundations and principles, false or dubious" (II, 309).
Under this heading, Browne includes the belief that women
are menstruant and men pubescent at twice seven though
physicians know that the occurrence of either physical event

cannot be rigidly fixed, that the Nile has seven heads

 

5Geoffrey Keynes judges Wilkin's edition of Browne
"one of the best edited books in the English language" (I, viii).

6The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Simon Wilkin, 3
vols. (London, 1899),I, p. 247, n. 4.

7Browne states that, because the numbers one through
ten were understood not only by the learned Greeks but
also by the barbarians, they seemed to be "grounded in nature"
rather than learned (II, 308).

 

 

110

though there have been sometimes more and at other times
less than seven,8 that there are seven planets, or "errant
Stars," when observation proves there are more,9 that there
were seven wise men in Greece when some authorities cite
more, others fewer (II, 309-11).

Finally, Browne traces numerous errors to the meta-
phoric language of Holy Scripture. Here Browne argues, as

he does consistently in Vulgar Errors, that many essentially

 

allegorical expressions have been taken literally by the
"vulgar," and that they are as such the source of numberless
papular errors. Browne singles out two examples to refute:
first, the belief that the Jubilee (Jewish term for a fifty
year period) can be understood as the first climacterical --
seven squared or forty-nine years: and, second, that the

New Testament genealogy of Christ can be summed up in fourteen

 

8In his example of the heads of the Nile, Browne's
parenthetical statement, as "we have made manifest elsewhere,"
alludes to a more complete discussion of the same subject else-
where in Vulgar Errors (II, 448-9). The discussion summarizes
the debateby geographers about whether there were "7 heads of
the Nyle" or more. In a passage about the Sperma Ceti whale
in the Garden of Cyrus (I, 206), Browne refers the reader to
his more thorohgh treatment of the whale in Vulgar Errors. I
find these examples of cross referencing interesting‘because
they demonstrate that Browne has his remarks on a specific
subject in other works, or in a different place in the same
work, in mind as he writes. This fact is important to my
analysis of certain lines in the Garden of Cyrus and H drio-
ta hia which apparently contradict BrownETs more "scientific"
opinion in his essay on the Great Climacterical Year.

9"In that there are just 7 Planets or errant Stars in the
lower orbs of Heaven, but it is now demonstrable unto sense,
that there are many more; as Galileo hath declared, that is,
two more in the orb Saturn, and no less than four more in the
sphere of Jupiter" (II, 309).

 

 

 

111

generations or twice seven. Browne denies the former instance
by appealing to authorities who fix the fiftieth year as

the actual year of the Jubilee; he refutes the latter by
calling attention to some remarkable omissions in the

fourteen generations of the genealogy of Christ.

Browne closes this chapter by tracing the commentary
on the climacterical from antiquity to the Renaissance, finding
each authority's testimony interesting but fundamentally
groundless. Browne remarks that few people are sixty-three
when they think themselves sixty-three anyway because they
neglect to take into account the nine months that they have
spent in the womb, and, in the case of the ancients, they
have computed their ages on the basis of variable systems of
time measurement. The notion then that men die more often
in their sixty-third year when exposed to "strict account
and critical examen of reason" is found to be without
foundation (II, 323).

Browne's polemic against belief in the Great Climac-
terical Year, and his critical evaluation of the actual function
of numbers is discriminating-and precise. "True it is, that
God made all things in number, weight, and measure, yet nothing
by them or through the efficacy of either" (II, 314).

Following a distinction between numerology and mathematics
made by E. T. Bell, a mathematician who has written a readable

10

popular account of numerology, we shall, it seems to me,

 

10E. T. Bell, Numerolo (Baltimore, 1933). My dis-
cussion relies heavily on hell's explanation, pp. 71-144.

112

agree that in the above quotation Browne's understanding of
the function of number is consistent with modern scientific
usage. Browne accepts the assumption that all physical re-
ality can be described mathematically. Bell avers that numbers
operate in mathematical theories which serve as "convenient
maps" for attempting to provide an explanation for as much

as possible of the scientific terrain. They are "convenient"
because they can be discarded whenever they are found to
inadequately describe the phenomena under consideration. The
numerologist, on the other hand, extrapolates on the evidence
of one map -- one mathematical theory -- and proposes his
description as an explanation of all reality. Pythagoras

did precisely this when, inspired by his mathematical
discovery -- musical intervals --, "he soared to the blue
heaven of metaphysical mysticism." This latter description
of numerology is as applicable to the author of the Garden
2£.§ZEE§ as Bell's explanation of the true foundation of
mathematical theory is to Browne's position in his chapter

on the Great Climacterical Year. In the Garden gf_gyrp§,
however, Browne moves from the discovery of the quincunx

to the realm of metaphysical speculation: "But the five-
leaved flowers are commonly disposed circularly about the
Stylus; according to the higher Geometry of nature" (I, 201);
"And some resemblance there is of this order in the Egges of
some Butterflies and moths, as they stick upon leaves, and
other substances; which ... do neatly declare how nature

Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things" (I, 203);

113

the Hebrew number five "is also one of the Numbers that makes
up the mysticall Name of God, which consisting of Letters
denoting all of the sphaericall Numbers, ten, five, and six;
Emphatically sets forth the notion of Trismegistus, and that
intelligible Sphere which is the Nature of God" (I, 223); "All
things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they
begin again; according to the ordainer of order and the mys-
ticall Mathematics of the City of Heaven" (I, 226). In the
Garden 2£.EZ£E§» Browne ascends from his catalogue of fives
and the figure of the quincunx to a symbolic representation
of all reality based upon number. Thus, after reading

Browne's treatment of number mysticism in Vulgar ErrorsL

 

we cannot avoid being struck by the apparently contradictory

nature of these statements from Hydriotaphia and the Garden.

 

As I have suggested earlier, other lines from Hydrio-
taphia and the Garden pr_Cyrus are echoed as Browne inveighs
against the climacterical superstition. In the second

paragraph of his discussion in Vulgar Errors, Browne writes

 

that number "though wonderful in itself, and sufficiently
magnifiable from its demonstrable affections, hath yet
received adjections from the multiplying conceits of men,
and stands laden with additions which its equity will not
admit" (I, 307). Surely Browne must realize that he has
himself added considerably to these "adjections" through
his own use of "multiplying conceits" in the Garden pr
erpg. Later in his discussion of the climacterical year,

Browne condemns Philo, the learned Jew, for his "divers pages

114

in summing up everything which might advantage this number"
(II, 307). This by the author who, as Coleridge accurately
reported, overlooked few examples of fives or quincunxes in
his scrutiny of the universe.11

We should again recall that, at the same time Browne

is publishing The Garden 22 Cyrus and Hydriotaphia, he is

 

 

also seeing the third edition of vulgar Errors through the

 

press. The central section of Browne's discussion of the
Great Climacterical Year examines the relationship between
time and number. Browne argues that time, which is merely
the numerical description of motion, like number, in itself
causes nothing. "So do we unjustly assign the power of
Action even unto Time itself; nor do they speak properly

who say that Time consumeth all things" (II, 314). Although
the exact phrase, "Time consumeth all things," does not

appear in Hydriotaphia, numerous synonyms of that phrase do

 

appear. A few examples follow: "Time which antiquates
Antiquities" (I, 164), "Time hath spared the Epitaph of
Adrians horse, confounded that of himself" (I, 167), "There
is no antidote against the Qprpm_of time, which temporally
considereth all things" (I, 166). Could Browne have expected

readers of his essay on the climacterical year to overlook

such apparently contradictory statements in his meditative

 

ll . .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Colerid e: Selected Poetry
and Prose, ed. Elisabeth Schneider (New gork, 1966), 4 .

 

115

works? This and similar contradictions in Browne,12 not all

 

12Although it is outside the subject matter of this
chapter, a similar paradox occurs in Browne's attitude toward
senescense, or the gradual decay of the world. Along with
Donne's "First Anniversary," Browne's Hydriotaphia is the
most lengthy and well known literary discussion of this belief.
Kocher discusses the theory of the gradual decay of the world
at length in his study Science and Religion in Elizabethan
En land (San Mariano, 1953). Kodher notes thht fhis doctrine,
as far as he can discover, is confined almost exclusively to
literary works. The conception of decay was that "The universe
was running down and man with it. Therefore man of the present
might inherit the scientific and other achievements of their
forefathers but could not hOpe to equal them" -- p. 82. From
several expressions of this idea in the final chapter of Hydrio-
taphia I choose the following representative example: "Tis
too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world
are acted, our time may be too short for our designes. To
extend our memories by Monuments whose death we dayly pray
for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our
expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contra-
diction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained
in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from
such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining
particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts
of the next world ..." (I, 166). In Religio Medici Browne speaks
of the world "whose solid and well composed substance must not
expect the duration and period of its constitution; when all
things are compleated in it, its age is accomplished, and the
last and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six
thousand" (I, 53). And also, in A Letter to a Friend: "And
surely, he that hath taken the trhe attitudh'hf Things and
rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age..." (I, 112).
In Vulgar Errors, Browne flatly contradicts all of the above
statements: ’"NOw according unto these Chronologists, the
prophecy of Elias the Rabbin, so much in request with the Jews,
and in some credit also with Christians, that the world should
last but six thousand years; unto these I say, it hath been
long and out of memory disproved..." (II, 404). Even in Reli-
gig Medici, Browne can denounce the theory of world decay when
it does not suit his artistic purpose. "I do believe the world
drawes near its end, yet it is neither old nor decayed, nor will
it perish upon the ruines of its own principles" (I, 56). I
have traced Browne's attitude toward senescense because it
appears to closely parallel his stance toward the macrocosm-
microcosm conceit, his use of the doctrine of signatures, his
attitude toward astrology and the Cabala, alchemy, and
numerology. As a scientist, Browne assumes a very rational,
analytical attitude toward esoteric and occult learning, but
at the same time he avails himself of its rich resources of
metaphor in his sacred prose. See also I, 57, 132, 279-80, 289,
where in each case Browne embraces the idea of world decay.

 

 

 

 

 

I.” .'

b-

116

of which pertain to occult sciences, partially explain why
some critics have been able to argue that Browne is a rational
scientist, others that he is a meditative mystic who only
casually includes science in his religious prose.

It is true that Browne is both a scientist and a medi-
tative Christian. But he understands the dangers both of
total reliance on scientific method and of uninhibited mys-
tical speculation -- of too great a reliance either on the

senses or on the understanding. The chapter in vulgar Errors

 

concerning numerology opens with a caveat:

Certainly the eyes of the understanding, and

those of the sense are differently deceived

in their greatest objects; the sense appre-

hending them in lesser magnitudes then their

dimensions require; so it beholdeth the Sun

the Stars, and the Earth it self. But the

understanding quite otherwise: for that

ascribeth unto many things far larger horizons

then their due circumscriptions require: and'

receiveth them with amplifications which their

reality will not admit (II, 306).
Browne's entire chapter on the Great Climacterical Year
attacks one specific numerological superstition, and numerology
generally as a debility of the understanding. To contend with
this variety of error, Browne counsels demetaphorization, and
strict observance of effective causation. If no causal con-
nection can be demonstrated between the combination of
numbers seven and nine and the death of men, the belief should
be abandoned.

In Vulgar Errors, Browne rarely speaks of the weakness

of the faculty of the sense apart from the general statement

117

which is part of the quotation above. Since the senses com-
prehend objects "in lesser magnitude than their dimensions
require" it becomes the burden of Browne's meditative prose

to restore the wonder and mystery to reality which science
must methodically ignore. It is as an artist then that Browne
turns to the numerological tradition in his attempt to sketch
the cosmos as a splendidly varied, but ordered adumbration of

the ultimate Reality.

II

The passage quoted from Christian Morals which follows

 

might be considered justification of the often noticed

extravagence of the Garden pr Cyrus.

Created natures allow of swelling Hyperboles;
nothing can be said Hyperbolically of God, nor
will his Attributes admit expressions above
their own Exuperances, Trismegistus his Circle,
whose center is everywhere, and circumference
no where, was no Hyperbole. Words cannot ex-
ceed, where they cannot express enough (I, 272).

In his chapter on the Great Climacterical Year, Browne
has necessarily assailed "adjections" and hyperbole, but in

The Garden pr Cyrus he is working with a subject which calls

 

for the full excercise of his hyperbolical powers; he can
properly engross himself in the mystery. Near the close of
his dedicatory letter to Nicholas Bacon which prefaces Th3
Garden gr Cyrpp, Browne asserts: "Nullum sine venia placuisse
eloguium, no eloquence pleases without indulgence" (I, 177).
In that same letter Browne likewise warns that "in this Garden

Discourse we range into extraneous things, and many parts of

118

Art and Nature, we follow herein the example of old and new
Plantations" (I, 176). Browne's statements here remind

Bacon, and the reader, that the role of the artist is markedly
different from that of the scientist, who distinguishes
literal truth from its metaphorical significations. The
artist employs every tool of his rhetorical art in an

attempt to "reach the portal of Divinity" (I, 272). As Browne

demonstrates in Vulgar Errors, scientific investigation requires

 

methodological attention to causal relationships in nature,
while sacred prose invites an unfettered imagination. Browne's
art adumbrates an ineffable reality that his faith intuitively

assures him exists. The Garden pr Cyrus and Browne's other

 

meditative prose can be viewed as an adjustment for the short-
comings of scientific knowledge, which apprehends objects
"in lesser magnitudes than their dimensions require" (II, 306).
Light is more than a physical phenomenon; it is the "Shadow
of God" (I, 218). The great mysteries of religion do not
yield themselves to scientific methods; they are understood
rather in adumbrations (I, 218).

In his dedicatory letter, Browne describes a garden
as "the Epitome of the earth" (I, 176), and as suchit should
reflect the diversity of the earth, containing "Trees, Aviaries,
Fish Ponds, and all variety of animals" (I, 176). The word
"Epitome," which Browne uses to denote "an abstract," links

this work to his discussion in Religio Medici of the Book

 

of Nature, and nature for Browne is not only varied, but ordered

as well. Browne supplies that order, in the Garden gr Cyrus,

119

through number, but is Browne's use of number the same thing
as numerology? If we turn to scholarship for an answer to

this question we are largely disappointed. The Garden pr Cyrus

 

receives less critical attention than any of Browne's major
artistic prose pieces, and the subject of its numerology has
been virtually ignored. Douglas Bush states that most modern
readers of the work "skip to the last page and surrender
LfiithourT comprehension to the hypnotic climax of 'inexcusable
Pythagorisme.'"13 Frank Huntley comments briefly on the
numerological aspect of the Garden in his book on Browne,

but his two references are confusing. The first suggests that
Browne's Garden reflects a Platonic progression from the
lowest or artificially contrived objects which have a quincuncial
14

form to the highest archetypal quincunx in the mind of God..

He later argues that "The two essays, The Garden pr_Cyrus and

 

Hydriotaphia, form a Platonic dichotomy: two parts opposed

 

yet conjoined, with a rising from the lower or elemental

Urn Burial (death) to the higher or celestial Garden pr_Cyrus,

 

the 'numerical character' of reality (life)."15 In this
second statement, Huntley, I think unwittingly, pronounces

Browne a numerologist.

 

 

 

13 Douglas Bush, En lish Literature in the Earlier
Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1962): p. 354.

 

14Huntley, p. 208.
151bid., p. 209.

120

Recent scholarship has produced a number of books and
articles on numerology and its relationship to the literature
of the Renaissance,16 but Browne is scarcely mentioned in
these discussions. The most influential scholar of numerology
writing today is Maren Sofie Rdstvig who does discuss Browne
briefly. She approaches the Garden 2:.EXZEE with a diffi-
dence uncharacteristic of her studies of poetry. She asserts
that "both the contents and the form of the Garden pr gyrpg
reveal a familiarity with the science of numbers and its
literary application."17 She also suggests, as does Huntley,18
that Browne structurally emphasizes his discovery of number-
less examples of the quincunx, by constructing his essay in
five chapters. Both critics would certainly agree that these

observations in themselves do little to help us understand

the Garden pr Cyrus better.

 

16Books and articles by those doing numerological, or
as it is also called, arithmological criticism, include:
Maren Sofie Rdstvig, The Hidden Sense and Other Esppys, New York:
Humanities Pre-s, 1963; also,*"RenaIESance Numerolbgy:
Acrostics or Criticism." Essa s in Criticism, XVI No 1
(Jan., 1966), 6-22; Alastair Fowldh, S ensefhand the Numbers
of Time (London, 1964); A. Kent Hieatt, Short—Tide§’EndIess
Mdnument (New York, 1960). Those who attack this method of
EEholarship: C.C. Brown, "The Mere Numbers of Henry More's
Cabala," Studies in En lish Literature, 10 (Winter, 1967),
143-153; Dhuglas 55:5, "Calculus Racked Him," SEL, VII
(Winter, 1967), 194; Richard J. Shoeck, "Recenf—Studies in
English Renaissance," SEL, X (Winter, 1970), 215-50.

 

 

 

 

17Rdstvig, Hidden Sense, p. 16.

 

18Huntley, pp. 206-7.

121

Christopher Butler's recent study of number symbolism,
cited earlier, provides a much more helpful discussion of
the numerological tradition generally, and a very brief
examination of Browne's relationship to that tradition.19
Butler really takes no definite point of view on the function
of number symbolism in Browne, but he is instead satisfied
to explain one or two of Browne's numerological allusions.

But Butler's examination of the variety of uses to which
number symbolism was put before and during the RenaiSsance,
prepares the ground for a close study of the number symbolism
which informs the Garden pr_gyrg§.

In the remainder of this chapter I will attempt to
place this work in the numerological tradition, and will argue
that in numerology, as in his employment of occult sciences
generally, Browne witholds his belief and puts these studies
to his own artistic ends. I shall examine Browne's scientific
digression in Chapter III of the Garden, relating it to the
dominant mode of number symbolism, and, finally, I shall argue
that Browne employs number symbolism in combination with the
rhetorical techniques of amplification and repetition to
unify not only the disparate subject matter, but also the
imagery of the work.

To begin, it will be necessary to sketch some of the

fundamental concepts of numerology as they developed in the

 

19Butler, pp. 122-128.

122

schools of Pythagoras. The material which follows relies
heavily on Butler's and Bell's summaries of the Pythagorean
philosophy. I shall not repeat their discussions, but
summarize, noting, when possible, illustrations of these
ideas in Browne's works.

Much of what we know of Pythagorean ideas comes to
us from other writers, such as Aristotle, who were not always
sympathetic to Pythagorean numerological notions. Still
Aristotle lays before us clearly and succinctly some of the
principal tenets of Pythagorean theory. "The Pythagoreans
were the first to take up mathematics and thought its
principles were the principles of all things ... since,
then, all other things in their whole nature seemed modeled
on numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the
whole of nature, they supposed the elements of number to be
the elements of all things."20 Pythagoras, as he is presented
here, reveals a genuinely philosophical, specifically meta-
physical, speculative concern: the attempt to reduce all
existence to a single common denominator, number. Thus
number is for Pythagoras, as Butler suggests, the "arch-
synthesizer of cosmological knowledge."21

Pythagoreans visualized numbers in geometrical forms,

either in triangles or squares. The discussion of squares

 

20Aristotle, Metaphysica, A.5985b (Ross, vol. VIII),
Quoted in Butler, p. 1.

21Butler, p. 2. The following discussion adheres
closely to Butler's exposition on pages 1-5.

 

123

can be foregone for our purposes since, in dealing with the
quincunx, Browne is almost exclusively concerned with
triangular numbers. Butler refers to this visualization
of numbers in geometrical forms as the structural properties
of numbers.
For instance, we may find that there are certain
number-series which can be fitted into geometrical
shapes. We can easily construct a progression of
numbers, which when laid out as dots, are seen to

be "triangular" in nature. Thus:

1 3 6 10

and so on.

Butler goes on to say that "for these thinkers l was a point,
2 (points) gave extension (the line), and 3 (points) could
enclose a triangle, the first plane figure visible to the
sense, and thus the first real number. Extending this
reasoning to solid figures was a later development. "By
treating numbers geometrically, and by taking their geomet-
rical properties as the properties of solids, that is as
having extension, having a surface, and being of three
dimensions, it was then possible to forget about this
intermediate step which is merely reasoning by analogy, and
to say physical objects ygrg_numbers."

Browne demonstrates this geometric view of physical
objects again and again in the Garden pf erpg. In the

following example, he begins with the physical object and

their

 

 

 

 

124

works back to its essential geometrical form: "Now if for

this order we affect coniferous and tapering trees, particularly
the Cypresse, which grows in a conicall figure; we have found

a Tree not only of great Ornament, but in its essentials of
affinity to this order. A solid Rhombus being made by the

conversion of two Equicrurall Cones, as Archimedes hath

 

defined" (1, 215). Browne's purpose here is, of course, not
identical with the Pythagorean, since the point of the passage
is not that the solid figure can be described geometrically --
although Browne's statement assumes that fact -- but that the
conversion of the two cones resembles the fundamental figure
of Browne's work. He offers a more abstract illustration of
that same figure at the close of his discussion of ivy.
"Whilest every inclosure makes a Rhombus, the figures obliquely
taken Rhomboides, the Intervals bounded with parallel lines,-
and each intersection built upon a square, affording two
Triangles or pyramids vertically conjoyned; which in the
strict Quincunciall order doe oppositely make accute and

blunt angles" (I, 214).22 There is clearly no attempt to move

 

22Browne's details are sketchy and his description some-
what obscure. I think that the visual representation below,
which is a duplication (in part) of Browne's drawing of the
quincuncial order, illustrates the figure Browne has in mind.

 

125

from these two examples of the quincunx to the assertion
that geometric form orders the world, but the accumulation
of examples does, as we shall see, invite the reader to draw
that conclusion.

Pythagoras' principal discovery, however, was not
that solid figures could be understood geometrically, but
that there are "mathematical ratios involved in harmonical

relationships."

He [Pythagorag7'was not concerned with harmony

in our sense of simultaneously sounded notes in
chords, or polyphony, but with those intervals
which were most important in tuning of the

Greek musical scales or modes. The Pythagoreans
were so impressed by their harmonic discoveries,
that they believed they had come across the basic
laws of the universe. The very simplicity of the
ratios 1:2 the diapason, 3:2 the fifth or diapente,
4:3 the fourth or diatesseron, and 8:9 the tone,
their containment within the all important and
powerful decad, which brought all things back to
the unity they reverenced (l+2+3+4- 10), ...

must have helped to convince them of this.

They generalized their knowledge of the rela-
tionship between music and numbers, and made

it the basis of any true knowledge of the soul,
and of the 'cosmos.‘

From the discovery of harmonical relationships grew
the famous belief in the music of the spheres which Browne,
as many Renaissance writers had done, comments upon.
Butler, citing only Religio Medici, avers that Browne, in
a qualified way, embraced the idea of music of the spheres;

in that work he eloquently does so, connecting his comments

on celestial harmony with those on harmony generally.

rt:

126

I can looke a whole day with delight upon a

handsome picture, though it be but of a Horse.

It is my temper, and I like it the better, to

affect all harmony; and sure there is musicke

even in beauty ... For there is musicke where-

ever there is harmony, order or proportion; and

thus far we may maintain the musicke of the

spheares; for those well ordered motions,

and regular paces, though they give no sound

unto the eare, yet to the understanding they

strike a note most full of harmony (I, 184).

If we recall for a moment Browne's distinction between
the powers of the sense and the understanding in his chapter
on the Great Climacterical Year, the phrase "yet to the under-
standing" quoted above is interesting since it indicates that
the music of the spheres can only be apprehended by that
faculty of the mind which graSps metaphoric, symbolic reality.
Even though we cannot hope to actually hear supernal harmony,
something of the divine can even be detected in tavern music
which inspires Browne to deep devotion and "profound contem-
plation of the first Composer" (I, 84). Browne's description
of the power of musical harmony on his being ends in a semi-
mystical experience: "it unties the ligaments of my frame,
takes me out of myself, and by degrees mee thinkes resolves
me into Heaven" (I, 84).

Having concluded that the cosmos is numerically
ordered, the Pythagoreans state, and Plato follows them in
this, that the soul which contemplates the cosmos must also
be harmonical. "This soul itself is harmony ... But the main

point is that here again the musical analogy, the

undeniable effect of music upon the mind of the hearer, was,

127

not surprisingly, generalized to describe the effects on
the mind of contemplation of order in physical phenomena,
which later were themselves believed to proceed according

to musical laws."23

Browne significantly qualifies his
acceptance of this Pythagorean belief. "I will not say with
213329 the Soule is an Harmony, but harmonicall, and hath
its nearest sympathy unto musicke" (I, 84). Thus as an
analogy, through the faculty of the understanding, Browne
can embrace Pythagoras' and Plato's belief in a musically
ordered soul in man.

Because of the reverence with which the Pythagoreans
held number, they began to endow particular numbers with
symbolic qualities. We should again recall Browne's chapter
on the Great Climacterical Year because that superstition
can be traced ultimately to this Pythagorean practice. In
the Garden pr Eyrpg Browne apparently includes at least
three such symbolic extensions of number: five as the number
of justice, five as the number of generation, and five as a
circular number. This last example is symbolic because for
Browne this quality of the number five makes it a spherical
number; thus Browne associates it with the Hermetic definition
of God and the Platonic description of the soul.

The Pythagoreans regarded the number four as the tradi-

tional number of justice because "justice essentially involved

 

23Butler, p. 7.

128

a reciprocal relationship between persons, and the reci-
procity was embodied in a square number."24 Browne, since

his treatise is on the number five, wittily calls it the number
of justice, "as justly dividing between the digits, and hanging
in the centre of Nine, described by the square numeration,
which angularly divided will make the decussated number"

(I, 221). In a marginal note, Browne presents the figure

which he has in mind: three rows of three dots one on t0p

of another. The central dot of the figure, or the fifth, not
only justly divides the nine, but it, in addition, serves as
the point of decussation. Butler suggests that Browne may

have two numerological traditions confused, the Pythagorean

and the Hebrew, in his unique suggestion (it is not, however,
unique since five is proposed as the number of justice by
Agrippa, whom Browne knows well)25 of five as the number con-
nected with justice. For the Hebrews five was the number

of justice because the Jewish law was contained in the

Pentateuch.26

In my view, however, this example serves as

an illustration of the way in which Browne employs numerology
throughout the work, that is, as a device to synthesize and
unify the disparate religious traditions in the work. Here

Browne, through this ingenious adjustment, fuses the Greek

 

24Ibid., p. 7.

25Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult
Philosophy, trans. by John French (Lendon, 165T), II, p. 188.

 

 

26Butler, p. 126.

129

and Hebrew numerological traditions and at the same time
connects both with the fundamental geometric figure of the
Garden pr_gyrg§. And this discussion is immediately preceded
by two paragraphs which underline the importance of this
figure to the Egyptians and to Plato, who revolved X in a
circle as symbolic representation of the movement of the soul
(I, 223).

In the final chapter of the Garden pr_§yrp§_Browne
identifies five as a circular number which when "multiplied
in itself, will return into its own denomination, and bring
up the reare of the account" (I, 223); in other words, all
numbers whose final digit is 5, when multiplied by five
will produce a number whose final digit is five. Browne
cites additional spherical numbers, including ten which, from
a different geometrical point of view is also the decussated
figure. Finally, Browne calls attention to the visual
similarity between circular numbers and the Hermetic "Sphere
which is the Nature of God" (I, 223).

To continue, in his "mystical" consideration of the
quincunx and the number five, Browne draws on the association
of that number with human generation. "The same Number in the
Hebrew mysteries and Cabalistical accounts was the character
of Generation; declared by the letter He, the fifth in their
alphabet" (I, 222). He goes on to comment upon the Cabalis-
tical account of Abraham in relation to this number, but
we will examine that discussion, and Cabalism generally,

later in this chapter. In another place Browne labels five

130

as the Conjugall number, which ancient Numerists made out by
two and three the first parity and imparity, the active and
passive digits, the materiall and formall principles in genera-

tive societies" (1, 222). In Book II of Occult Philosophy,

 

Agrippa provides a full numerological explanation for this
notion.27 In the combination of the numbers three and two,
three is the perfect, masculine number and two is evil and
feminine. Agrippa, apparently alluding to St. Jerome's
exegesis of Genesis designates two as an evil number because
God failed to say "and it was good" on the second day of
creation.28 Browne presents a witty rejoinder to this
argument for a Scriptural basis for numerology. "For in

the third or masculine day, the same is twice repeated; and

a double benediction inclosed both Creations, whereof the one
in some part was but an accomplishment of the other" (I, 223).
The Pythagoreans considered five the number of Wedlock,29
since it combined two, the number of discord, confusion, mis-
fortune, and uncleaness, with three, the number of masculine
power, goodness and rectitude.3O Here again we see Browne

artistically manipulating two numerological traditions,

both of which view number in an essentially symbolic way,

 

27Agrippa, pp. 177-8.
281219., p. 177.
29rb_1d_., p. 177.
3011151., p. 188.

131

in order "to recall to mind essentially non-mathematical
objects, properties, or processes."31 Again we should

remind ourselves that in viewing human, moral, and spiritual
realities as number, the Pythagoreans were attempting a
philosophical synthesis of experience which was fundamentally
numerical. Browne's Garden pr_gyrp§_attempts a parallel, l:
but not identical, artistic synthesis. It is unified by
the number five and a particular geometrical extension

of that number. (

 

Thus far it has been demonstrated that Browne
borrows freely from the numerological tradition, but we still
have not squarely faced the question of whether or not he
himself was writing as a numerologist in the Garden 9£.9XIB§3
In what follows, I shall cite two brief definitions of numero-
logy advanced by Butler and Bell and will then apply them to
representative passages from the Garden. Butler's defini-
tion of numerology is clear: "The Pythagoreans, instead of
saying that things could be conveniently described by means
of number, took the ontological leap into saying that they
ygrg essentially number."32 Browne argues in his chapter on
the Great Climacterical that things can be "conVeniently
described by means of number"; whether or not he takes the
"ontological leap" and believes that things grg_fundamentally

number is the point at issue.

 

31Butler, p. 8.

32Ibid., p. 10.

132

Bell's definition of a numerologist is consistent with
Butler's definition of numerology: "The touchstone is belief,
in the fullest sense of the word, theological, mystical or
other. Whoever believes mathematical theories to be anything
more than convenient maps that may be radically revised or
torn up at any moment is a numerologist. A scientific worker
who holds no such belief is a scientist."33 Later Bell la
asserts that the dream of many modern physical scientists

of encompassing all scientific studies -- electromagnatism, {4

 

gravitation, radiation, in fact all physical phenomena in

one mathematical theory would be numerological if it went one
step farther -- a step which Pythagoras undoubtedly took --

and included all of human experience in the equation as well.34
Since both Butler's and Bell's concepts of numerology rest
on belief, our task is complicated because we are examining
an artistic language which may or may not represent the
author's enduring beliefs. Browne's often noted inconsis-

tency muddies the question further. After all, it is Thomas

Browne, who in Religio Medici wishes that men could procreate

 

like trees, who also demonstrates not the slightest squeamish-

3S

ness in his discussion of sex in Vulgar Errors, and who

 

 

33E. T. Bell, p. 77.
34Ibid., p. 145.
35Both of Browne's references are humorous (11, 502-527).

The first examines opium as an aphrodisiac, the second examines
the possibility of a woman conceiving "in a bath."

133

fathered twelve children. By contrasting Browne's use of
number in the Garden 3: Cyrus with what, it seems to me, we
can safely assume are his candid beliefs about number in the

Vulgar Errors, we can arrive at a satisfactory answer to

 

this question.

Near the opening of Chapter II of the Garden pr Cyrus,
Browne laments the loss of ancient chess boards, which
presumably evidenced the decussated figure.

In Chesse-boards and Tables, we yet finde

Pyramids and Squares, I wish we had their

true and ancient description, farre dif-

ferent from ours, or the Chet mat of the

Persians, which might continue some elegant

remarkables, as being an invention as High

Hermes the Secretary of Osyris, figuring

the whole world, the motion of the Planets,

with Eclipses of the Sunne and Moon (I, 189).

This passage at first appears to be an excellent example

of numerology, of extrapolation from the geometric figures

on a chess board to an explanation of "the whole world."

But Browne clearly says, not that the board would explain,

but that it would "figure" the whole world, and although

his comparision is extravagant, it is not numerological.
Browne is still in the realm of analogy or metaphor; he does
not suggest that the fundamental figure of the chess board and
"the motion of the Planets, Eclipses of the Sunne and Moon"
are essentially identical.

In his consideration of the occurrence of the number

five and the quincunx in nature, Browne again tempts us to

see him ascending from the evidence of this order in natural

134

creation to the metaphysical suggestion that this order
indicates the basic numerical character Of all reality. "But
five-leaved flowers are commonly disposed circularly about
the Sryrps, according to the higher Geometry of nature..."
(I, 201). But Browne's nature, which "deleighteth to work,
even in low and doubtful vegetations" (I, 193), is still the
second cause, still subject to the "ordainer Of order and the
Mysticall Mathematics Of the City of Heaven" (I, 226).

Even Browne's highly conjectural and somewhat vague
suggestion that the quincuncial figure exists in the mind
Of man "whereby Things entering upon the intellect by a
pyramid from without, and thence into the memory by another
from within" (I, 219), ends not in metaphysical speculation,
but in the humorous suggestion that the quincunxes Of some
brains are askew. This statement appears at the close of a
long discussion Of vision and Browne is conjecturing here about
the possibility of other sensory data entering the brain in
a decussated pattern analogous to that Of the Optic nerves.
"Whether the intellectual and phantasticall lines be not thus
rightly disposed, but magnified, diminished, distorted, and
ill placed in the Mathematics of some brains, whereby the
irregular apprehensions Of things, perverted notions, con-
ceptions, and incurable hallucinations, were not unpleasant
speculation" (1, 219-20).

Several passages in the Garden 95 Cyrgg strike the reader
as apparently numerological, but when they are isolated and

examined closely they prove to be consistent with Browne's

13S

position in Vulgar Errors that all things are created in

 

number, but nothing through its efficacy. But this is

still not to argue, as Joan Bennet does,36 that Browne's
attitude toward numerology in the Garden is that of a rational
scientist; Browne's positions in the two works, though not
contradictory, are also not identical. In the Garden 2£

Cyrg§_Browne avails himself of the imaginative suggestions In
of number mysticism without taking the ontological leap.

Number mysticism provides Browne with a discipline with r4

 

which he manages to conjoin the most disparate realities.

As such, numerology is compatible with other standard
Renaissance principles of order regarded as essentially true
such as hierarchy, universal analogy, correspondences between
spiritual orders Of being, and universal correspondences
among all things. It is as an artistic principle Of order
that we shall now turn to the number mysticism of the

Garden pf Cyrus.

III
In Basil Willey's discussion of the work of Sir Thomas
Browne, he considers Browne first as a "metaphysical" and
second as a Baconian, and it is my view that if subsequent
criticism of his work had taken this distinction into greater
account, studies of Browne's ideas and art would have arrived

at more satisfactory explanations. Willey says of Browne:

 

36Bennet, p. 212.

136

The "divided worlds" are so equipollent that
they are almost interchangeable. While Browne
is writing as a Christian, his experience as
a scholar is also available to him; while
writing as an archaeologist, his experience
as a mystic is available; as a naturalist,
his experience as poet, scholar or seer.
Like the metaphysicals, he seems to us to
get his thrill rather out of the actual
process of fusing disparates than from any
"truth" that may emerge from the process. 7

My discussion of Browne in this chapter, and my ultimate
evaluation of Browne's use of occult sciences, follows very

closely Willey's suggestions quoted here. I would therefore

 

like to comment on two of the implications of this statement.
First, Willey's discussion of Browne assumes as fact some-
thing that many writers on Browne's ideas do not assume,

and that is that Browne is fundamentally and principally a
writer Of artistic prose. This, Of course, is not to say
that Browne is indifferent about the truth of his work, but
that as an artist he directs his attention to the "process of
fusing disparates." Second, even though the worlds of
Browne's religion and science are almost interchangeable,
those worlds remain divided, and his attitudes toward astro-
logy, alchemy, the Cabala, and numerology are not identical
in his separate roles as a scientist and as a writer of sacred
prose. But these two roles appear to be in continuous
interaction as Browne writes. And this fact accounts for not

only the success of his "metaphysical" prose, but for the

 

37Wiiiey, p. 51.

137

success of his scientific writing as well. Vulgar Errors

 

remains an interesting and entertaining book, not because
of its scientific discoveries, which were relatively
insignificant and soon eclipsed by those of other more talented
scientists, but because of the prose in which it is cast.
Willey states, earlier in his essay on Browne, that
the peculiar quality of the "metaphysical" mind is a detach-
ment which preserves the mind from being finally committed to
any one world.38 To choose just one example of this detach-
ment exhibited by Browne, we can recall his treatment of alchemy.
Although Browne apparently does not believe that base metals
can be transmuted into gold, he continues to hold out the
possibility of projection, and as long as that possibility
exists Browne draws on another rich source Of metaphor which
allows him to artistically fuse "scientific" and religious
notions.
The Garden p£_§yrg§ provides the clearest example Of
Browne the metaphysical, the artist who enjoys the fusion
Of disparates in one work. In the Garden 2£.EXEE§ Browne
employs the figure of the quincunx, and the number five,
as an extended and elaborate metaphor which joins such
strikingly different Objects as the "Rhomboidall protuberances
in Pineapples" and the Hyades, the "Quincunx Of Heaven."
Except for Browne's digression on plastic nature, the single

unifying thread which connects the disparate examples of his

 

38Ibid., p. 50.

- 'J Eminent.

 

138

Garden is number mysticism understood as a synthesizing
principle. Browne, however, does not depend solely on
numerology, but rather employs it in combination with the
two rhetorical devices of amplification and repetition in
his tour-de-force of unity.

Through the retorical device of amplification -- that
is by presenting numerous examples -- Browne keeps the quin-
cuncial figure and the number five before the reader virtually
at all times. Browne overwhelms us with impression of an
ordered world, in large part by the sheer abundance of his
examples. As our guide through the "garden" of reality,
Browne calls to our attention many instances Of the quincunx
that are commonplace in the sense that any careful Observer
of ordinary natural objects could behold them. In this
category we have a variety of natural and artificial objects:
five leaved flowers, the honeycombs of bees, net works,

fenestrae reticulate or windows which are constructed after

 

Cyrus' order, the cinque side of the die, chess boards,
countless common plants such as the French honeysuckle, bushes
such as the houseleek, the protective shell of the pineapple,
and on and on..

But Browne promises Nicholas Bacon in his dedicatory
letter, that though writing nothing new, he will hOpefully
include someting to please "one so long out of trite learning"
(I, 175). In this statement Browne recognizes Bacon's con-
siderable erudition, and in doing so justifies the inclusion

Of numerous recondite examples of the quincunx. There are,

 

5.;

139

therefore, many examples of the number five which must be
brought before us by a historian, physician, natural philo-
sopher, biblical scholar, antiquarian, classicist, master of
occult and esoteric learning, and other roles in which Browne
poses as an expert. The quincunx is artificially, naturally,
and mystically considered and Browne presents his multifarious
examples, moving generally from the concrete and familiar
to the abstract and esoteric.

Thus in his observation that many fish nets conform
to the quincuncial order, Browne the classicist cannot resist
speculating about whether or not the net in which Vulcan
trapped Venus was of this order. As a military historian,

he can assure us that "the Roman Batalia was ordered after

 

this manner" (I, 189), also the Grecian cavalry, and the
Macedonian Phalanx, which though not identical with the Quin-
cunx bore a striking resemblance to it (I, 190).

As a master of Hebrew and Egyptian history, Browne
suggests that tradition has it that the Tables of the Law
given to Moses by God were of this figure (I, 191), and the
linen folds about Egyptian Mummies are also arranged in a
quincuncial lozenge (I, 204).

Browne relies on his reputation as an absolutely
reliable observer of nature, a recognized natural phiIOSOpher,
when he assures us that the number five is not only remarkable
in the "Sea Starre" (I, 225), but also the "dental sockets
and egges in the Sea Hedgehogge" (I, 201). The order can be

Observed by "signal discerners” in the houses made by flies

 

140

and insects (I, 203), in the "outward tegument" of serpents
and animals, such as the "52212; Dartsnake, Rattlesnake" and
in the tail of the beaver (I, 203); also, in the skin of
turkeys, geese and ducks, in the "finny feet” of waterfowl,
in the "scaly covering of mullets, carp, and tenches," and
finally in the skin of man (I, 204).

Turning to man, Browne, in his role as anatomist, unearths la
the figure of the quincunx in regions of the human body that

only dissection can reveal. I quote the following passage Ti

 

not only because it illustrates Browne's anatomical learning,
but also because it demonstrates one of the characteristic
"metaphysical" fusions that this chapter concerns itself

with.

This Reticulate or Net-work was also considerable
in the inward parts of man, not only from the
first subtegem or warp of his formation, but
in the netty ibres of the veins and vessels
of life; wherein according toccommon Anatomy
the right and transverse fibres are decus-
sated by the Oblique fibres; and so must frame
a Reticulate and QuincunCiall Figure by their
Obliquations, Emphatically extending that
Elegant expression of Scripture; Thou hast
curiously embroydered me, thou hast wrought

me up after the finest way of texture, and

as it were with a Needle (I, 204).

Still in the role as anatomist, discussing specifically
Optics, Browne describes the decussated path of Objects of
sight to the retina: "For all things are seen Quincuncially;
For at the eye the Pyramidal rayes from the object, receive

a decussation, and so strike a second base upon the Retina

or hinder coat, the proper organ of Vision ... (I, 219).

141

In his prefatory letter to the Garden 2£.QX£E§’ Browne
declines the role of mathematician, instructing Nicholas
Bacon to expect no "mathematicall truths," but it is as a
mathematician that Browne examines the Rhombus which "containing
four Angles equall unto four right, it virtually contains
four right" (I, 214).

We could extend this examination, but these examples I
should suffice to demonstrate the way in which Browne

keeps the figure of the quincunx constantly before us. This I

 

amplification argues an ordered world, since literally
everywhere we turn in Browne's Garden, we are confronted with
still another example of the quincunx.

But Browne does not rely on amplification alone to keep
the notion of order before the reader; he also reinforces
the idea by repeating with poetic regularity the word "order"
or some synonym of it throughout the work. Cyrus the younger
disposed "his trees like his armies in regular ordination,"
and his reputation as a planter was based on his garden's
"splendid and regular" quality (I, 181). Constantine and his
sons claimed to see this "pattern in the sky" (I, 182);
Diomedes' trees were "orderly planted" (I, 183). Solomon is
described as an "eminent Botanologer, and orderly disposer
of all his works," (I, 184) and "that order so invariably
maintained in the fixed Stars Of heaven" is one of the examples
of this "elegant ordination" in nature (I, 192). In leading
up to his digression on the "plastic principle" in Chapter III,

Browne adjusts for the fact that this digression contains not

142

a single reference to the number five or the quincunx or

the word "order," by repeating the word "order" in virtually

every paragraph which leads to the digression, and the first

sentence after it picks up the repetition once again. Browne
continues to underline the unity of the work in this way

up to and including his justly famous passage near the close

of the work which begins "All things began in order ..."

(I, 226).

In the Garden 2£.EX£B§ there is repetition not only of
the simple idea of order, but of a theme which occurs in each
section of the work. In three parallel discussions, Browne
variously considers the movement of invisible celestial
emanations into the world. I shall examine these in reverse
order of their appearance in Browne's Garden, beginning
first with the Cabalistic Sephiroth and the Hermetic doctrine
of emanations, which appear in the final section of the work,
where the quincunx is "mystically" considered; second,
the doctrine Of plastic nature, which appears in the central
section of the Garden; and third Browne's humorous explanation
of the charm against strangling weeds, which appears with the
"artificial" consideration of the quincunx.

Browne's ambivalent attitude toward the Cabala is con-
sistent with his attitude toward occult and esoteric learning
generally, at once condemning it, in his role as a rational
scholar, but employing its imaginative suggestions in his

meditative prose. In Vulgar Errors, he ridicules those

 

"cabalisticall heads" that "wrackt numbers beyond their

143

symbolizations" (II, 381), and he holds that the belief

in the Cabalists' ability to predict future events will not
hold up under the scrutiny of rational inquiry (II, 430),
but, on the whole, most of Browne's references to "that
worthy inquiry Cabalism" (II, 30) are favorable. Joseph
Blau, who has studied Browne's use of Cabalistic ideas,39
and the Cabalistic tradition generally, isolates Browne

as the only seventeenth-century writer on the Cabala whose
Cabalistic ideas can be traced to specific sources.40 Even
though Browne's sources are well known, and even though he
displays a thorough understanding of the Sephirothic system,
Blau argues that Browne does not appear to be much influenced
by Cabalistic ideas.

My interest in Browne's Cabalism, however, does not
concern itself with whether or not he himself was an adherent,
since, consistent with his attitude toward occult and
esoteric learning generally, he manages to remain uncommitted
and thus able to effortlessly weave figurative language
drawn from occult studies into the fabric of his prose. The
Cabala, itself, is a Jewish numerological system of theOSOphy

and theurgy which, at least in its earliest forms, was a

 

39Joseph Blau, "Browne's Interest in Cabalism" PMLA,
49 (1934), 963-4.

40Blau, "The Diffusion of the Christian Interpretation
of The Cabala in English Literature " Review of Religion, VI,
No. 2 (January, 1942), 153. ’ “—“‘

144

mystical method of interpreting the Scriptures41 in such a
way that God's transcendence and presence in man and the world

could be reconciled.42

As originally stated, the doctrine of the Sephi-
roth was that the Supreme and One God, the
boundless, the limitless, the Ain Soph, by a
voluntary reaction of self limitation, mani-
fested himself in the highest Of the Sephiroth,
Keter, the Crown. This was not God; it was,
however, a manifestation through which God
could be seen, "as in a glass darkly" ...

From Keter, there were three emanations, thus
producing a total of four Sephiroth, each of
which represented a manifestation of God at

a level of grossness further removed from God's
sublimity and transcendent Being. Further
regression produced the complete system of

ten emanations.

According to the Cabala each of the mansions of the Sephiroth
is numbered, and each of the Hebrew letters associated with
each mansion as a sign also has a numerical designation.
Browne draws from the "Cabalistical Technology" two numero-
logical examples compatible with his mystical quincunx.

In his discussion of five as the number of generation, Browne
notes that had Abraham not had the letter Hg -- the number
five -- added to his name he would have been unable to father

Isaac, since "he received that power of generation from that

measure and mansion in the Archetype" (I, 223). The specific

 

41This aspect Of the Cabala is called Gamatria. Browne
attacks a specific example of this variety of interpretation
in his discussion of the rainbow (II, 495).

42Blau, "Diffusion," pp. 150-1.

43Ibid., p. 150.

14S

mansion Browne refers to, Binah -- the third manifestation
from Keter --, he describes traditionally as the "mother

of Life and the Fountain of souls... whose seal and character
was He." Browne alludes to the processes by which this addi-
tion to Abraham's name had taken place as "involved considera-
tions," which he rightly chooses to exclude since the

technical explanation44

in no way advances his purpose,
which is to include still another example of a mystical
consideration of the number five.

Browne's second reference to the Cabala, in Chapter V
of the Garden, asks a question about the celestial emanations
which had allegedly guided the ten harp strings of David.
"Why the Cabalisticall Doctors, who conceive the whole
Sephiroth or divine emanations to have guided the ten
stringed Harp of David, whereby he pacified the evil spirit
of Saul, in strict numeration doe begin with the Perihyphate
Meson, or si fa ut, and so place the Tiphereth answering C
sol fa ut, upon the fifth string ..." (I, 224) constitutes
an abstrusity "of no ready resolution." Browne asks here,
rather obscurely, why emanations from the sixth mansion,
Tiperheth, should tune the fifth string of the harp. Neither
this, nor any other Cabalistic notion is wholeheartedly
embraced by the author, but he has nonetheless introduced
another instance of celestial emanation in which the

fundamental numbers of his quincunx obtain. It is such

 

44For'a complete explanation and possible source see:
Sir Thomas Browne, ed. L. C. Martin, p. 359, n. 171.

 

146

accumulations of parallel examples that account for much of
the impact of the Garden pr_gyrp§.

For still another example of emanation, Browne turns to
the Hermetic notion that celestial influences move in a
quincuncial path from the heavens, through the earth. "And
if Aegyptian Philosophy may obtain, the scale of influences
was thus disposed, and the geniall spirits of both worlds do
trace their way in ascending and descending Pyramids, mys-
tically apprehended in the Letter X, and the open Bill and
straddling Legges of a Stork, which was imitated by that
character" (I, 220). Athanasius Kircher, the German mathe-
matician and archaeologist to whom Browne is heavily indebted
for the Egyptian material in the Garden 2£.9X£2§! is the pro-
bable source for Browne's description.45 The stork with the
"open Bill and straddling Legges "appears in a group of many

similar characters in Obeliscus Pamphilius, which Browne

 

possessed.46 Kircher's description Of the path of the celestial
emanations differs from Browne's in that Kircher links those
influences to the "Spiritus Mundi" while Browne makes no such
connection in his discussion. The "Spiritus Mundi" is implicit,
however, in the doctrine of plastic nature, another instance

of the idea of the invisible presence and movement of the

 

45Kircher, Obeliscus, p. 385. "Ibidis apertum, reditum
Numinis ex inferioribuslhd superiora denotabat, quibus quide
in coniunctis verticibus, X emergebat, decussis illa celebris
et mysteriosa, qua processum Spiritus mundi apte innuebat..."

 

46Ibid., p. 131. The stork Browne alludes to in this
passage appears in a group of other letters and figures.

 

 

147

of the spirit in matter.

Richard Westfall, in a discussion of the English
virtuosi of the seventeenth century, a group in which the
author includes Sir Thomas Browne, comments upon the relation-
ship Of science and religion in the seventeenth century:

SO strong was the influence of Christianity

upon them LEnglish virtuosr7 that it helped to

mold their conception of nature, softening

the harsh mechanical outline with the comforting

light of benevolence. At the same time the in-

fluence of natural science was helping to change

their idea of Christianity profoundly, leading

them to emphasize rational or demonstrable

elements at the expense of suprarational

mysteries, until by the end of the century some

virtuosi were professiong a form of Christianity

which scarcely diffiged from the enlightenment's

religion of reason.

For Browne, however, as Westfall confesses in his discussion

Of him, it is the suprarational, the mysterious, which always
remains uppermost in his writing.48 That Browne found religious
motives for studying science is a critical commonplace. But

how much space does science actually occupy in the Garden pr
Cyrus? Outside the digression we are about to examine, which
itself parallels other discussions of celestial emanations.

in the same work, there is very little. The investigation of

nature for examples of the quincunx is far closer in spirit

to numerology than to science, and it is not difficult to

 

47Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion rp Seventeenth
Century England (New Haven, 1958), p. 11.

 

 

431bid., p. 148.

148

show that references to occult and esoteric learning far out-
weigh any actual scientific interest in the Garden pr_gyrp§.
Still, Browne maintains the pose of the scientist, insisting
on "Occular Observation" as an absolute necessity in tracing
the "Labryinth of Truth." But it is clearly the striking
fusion of disparates rather than objective truth which fires
Browne's imagination. The generative principle in seeds and
Hebrew and Egyptian mysticism appear to be widely divided
subjects, but treating his readers as "Studious Observators,"
Browne reveals their "analogies and correspondencies." As
Margaret Heideman has observed of the Garden, "Browne's
scientific knowledge is rarely its subject matter ...
scientific data is not here isolated from other worlds, but
has imaginative contact with remote fact and fiction."49
The most striking fact about Browne's digression on the
plastic principle is that it is precisely that, a digression;
it is the only subject in the Garden pr erp§_that has nothing
whatever to do with the numbers five, ten, or the figure of
the quincunx. But as a theory of emanations, Browne draws
it into the principle movement of the work. The theory of
plastic nature was an attempt by scientists and philosophers,
mainly of the seventeenth century, to account rationally for
a spiritual presence in matter. Browne refers obliquely to
two authorities in his discussion of the notion, Paracelsus,

who affirmed, and Aristotle, who implied, that "bodies are first

 

49Heideman, p. 245.

149

spirits" (I, 198). William Hunter, who has investigated the
notion of plastic nature historically, asserts that it was
scientists hoping to escape the charge of atheism who first

50 which views matter as not abso-

devised this explanation,
lutely separated from God or the soul. As a physician, Browne
felt that he was open to the charge of atheism, so much so

that his announced intention for writing Religip Medici was

 

to oppose the scandal Of his profession, that is, the belief
that all medical doctors were atheists.51 Browne is one of
the first writers in the seventeenth century to employ the

term plastic nature. Hunter says of this idea: "these men

 

believed that God had at creation endowed matter with a
spiritual power, the lowest such power in existence. It
functioned as the last of the chain of incorporeal substances
which descended from God through the angels and the rational
soul; at the divine command it ordered rude matter successively

"52 It scarcely needs to

into the creation of the six days.
be pointed out, how closely the descent of the spiritual power
from God to matter resembles the other discussions of
emanations we have been considering.

Cudworth, another seventeenth century adherent of the

doctrine of plastic nature, attempts to carefully distinguish

 

soWilliam Hunter, "The Seventeenth Century Doctrine
of Plastic Nature," Harvard Quarterly Review, 43 (July, 1950),
p. 192.

 

51Kocher, Science and Religion, Chapter XII.

 

SZHunter, p. 200.

"I!

150

this shaping spiritual power from occult qualities: "he

that asserts an occult quality for the cause of any pheno-
menon, does indeed assign no cause at all of it, but only
declares his own ignorance of the cause: but he that asserts
a plastic nature, assigns a determinate and proper cause,

nay the only intelligible cause, of that which is the greatest
of all phenomena of the world."53 Despite such statements

by Cudworth and others, the fact that plastic nature was

ultimately indistinguishable from occult qualities, a fact

 

most real scientists recognized immediately, accounted for
its rapid demise at the close of the seventeenth century.54
But Browne, far from attempting to distinguish plastic
nature from occult qualities, suggests an affinity since
this digression is linked to the rest of the Garden 2£.EXIE§
solely because it provides another example of invisible
celestial power which moves from God into the material world.
The example of invisible emanations, spirits or influences
which Browne presents in Chapters I and II of the Garden pf
Cyrur, where the quincunx is "artificially" considered,
balances those examined earlier in the "natural" and "mystical"
considerations of the quincunx. But the following instance
is without a doubt humorous in intent. Douglas Bush describes

"55

Browne's sacred prose as a "solemn game, and playfulness

 

S3Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System 2: the

universe (London, 1845), p. 234.

 

S4Hunter, p. 210.

55Bush, English Literature, p. 351.

 

Illlllll .ll'llau ..‘l

151

joined to high seriousness is as much a part of the Garden
pr Cyrus as of any other of Browne's works. Here he exposes
the popular superstition by which the "vulgar" attempt to
construct an amulet to convey harnessed celestial influences
quincuncially to every part of a field.

The Rurall Charm against Dodder, Tetter, and

strangling weeds, was contrived after this

order, while they placed a chalked Tile at

the four corners, and one in the middle of

their fields, which though ridiculous in the

intention, was rationall in the contrivance, ’y

and a good way to diffuse the magick through

all parts of the area (I, 188).
To paraphrase, Browne observes that even though there is no
invisible power to kill the troublesome weeds, if there were
such a power this would be an excellent way to disperse it
throughout the field. These four examples of celestial
emanation drawn from all three sections of Browne's treatment
of the quincunx demonstrate again the way number mysticism is
combined with repetition to underline the unity of the work,
and the unity of all creation. And that unity is not greatly
lessened by the fact that these three instances are merely
analogical rather than identical. Browne makes no attempt to
say that plastic nature is the "Spiritus Mundi" -- as Kircher
had done -- or that the invisible spiritual emanations which
guided David's harp strings are the same as those which account

for the existence of the duckweed plant.56

 

56Merton, p. 82 argues that Browne kept this aspect of
his science separated from his teleology.

 

152

Another patterned repetition which unifies the Garden
pf Cyrug, and one suggested by our discussion of emanations, is
the continuing suggested reconciliation of Hermetic-Egyptian,
Hebrew, Greek, and Christian religions through the manipulation
of rhetorical devices in combination with number mysticism.
In the previous chapter, I have dealt with the notion of

prisca theologia, the belief that all ancient religions in

 

some way foreshadow Christianity. This belief was grounded

in the mistaken assumption that Hermetic Philosophy, which was
the supposed mystical religion of the Egyptians, antedated

the Mosaic, the Greek, and the Christian religions. It is
difficult to believe that a scholar of Browne's breadth and
reputation could have overlooked the discovery of Isaac Casaubon
in 1614 which more accurately dated the Hermetic literature

at around the second or third century A.D., rendering the

idea of prisca theologia groundless. It is certain that two

 

of the authors on whom Browne relies heavily in the Garden pr
Cyrup, Athanasius Kircher and Robert Fludd (Browne possessed
copies of the work of both men in his library) were aware of
but totally ignored Casaubon's discovery.57 The question of
whether or not Browne follows Fludd and Kircher in this is
examined at greater length in my chapter on Browne's use of

Alchemy and the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Garden pr Cyrus

 

it is clear that Browne continues to adhere, at least for the

purpose of his art, to the idea of prisca theologia.

 

 

57Yates, pp. 403 and 416.

 

153

The opening paragraph of the Garden pf Cyrug provides
an excellent example of this idea.

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana

the fourth day after their Nativities, according

to Gentile Theology, may passe for no blinde ap-

prehension of the Creation of the Sunne and

Moon, in the work of the fourth day; When the

diffused light contracted into Orbes, and shoot-

ing rays of those Luminaries (I, 180).

The reconciliation between the classical myth and Genesis is
clear, but Margaret Heideman points also to the Hermetic under-
current in the passage. "The image of the Roman Fire-God
giving arrows to the God of the Sun and Goddess of the Moon
dissolves into the Genesis account of the creation of the

sun and moon while providing in the sequence another aspect

of theme, for Apollo and Diana are as well the Hermetic
Androgyne."58 Sub-currents of this triple analogy, Heideman
argues, pervade the work.

Even though Browne does not relate this opening
reconciliation to the figure of the quincunx or the number
five, this is seldom~ the case anywhere else in the Garden.
One of the most interesting treatments in which the quincuncial
figure becomes the device of synthesis occurs in the opening
chapter when Browne declares Openly that he will not look
for analogies of the Christian cross in ancient religious

symbols: "Where by the way we shall decline the old Theme,

so traced by antiquity, of crosses and crucifixion: Whereof

 

58Heideman, p. 241.

154

some being right, and of one single piece without transversion
or transome, do little advantage our subject" (I, 182).

Browne moves, however, from his rejection of this "old Theme"
through two long paragraphs which draw examples of crosses

from classical Greece, from the "mysterious crosses of Aegypt,"
and, finally, from the Hebrew Tenupha. Each statement begins
with a disclaimer: "nor shall we," "we will not revive,"

"we shall not call in," but the number of examples far out-
weighs the force of the negative statements so that the reader
is left with the distinct impression that there is indeed a
connection between the many crosses of antiquity and the

Christian cross. In her study of Religio Medici, Joan Webber

 

describes this technique by which Browne employs negative
statement for positive ends: "The farthest reach of this way
of thinking, which is still an entirely typical and persuasive
technique of Browne's Speech, is a rhetoric of negativism

that can be applied to a wholly positive end."59 Employing
this negative rhetorical technique, Browne begins his dis-
cussion of the crosses of ancient religions by suggesting

that he will end the commonplace comparison of the Cross

of Christ with visibly similar objects of antiquity, but by
the close of his treatment Browne's argument has undergone

a curious reversal.

 

59Webber, p. 176.

155

Though he that considereth the plain crosse
Upon a picher difusing streams of water into
two basins, with sprinkling branches in them,
and all described upon a two-footed Altar,

as in the Hieroglyphs of the brasen Table of
Bembus; will hardly decline all thought of
Christian signality in them (I, 182).

And finally:

We shall not call in the Hebrew-Tenupha, or
ceremony of their Oblations, waved by the priest
unto the four quarters of the world, after

the form of a cross; as in the peace Offerings.
And if it were clearly made out what is remark-
ably delivered from the Traditions of the Rab-
bins, that as the Oyle was poured coronally or
circularly upon the head of Kings, so the High-
Priest was annointed decussatively or in the
form of an X; though it could not escape a
typicall thought of Christ, from mysticall
considerations...(l, 183).

Instances of the device of negative argument appear
throughout the Garden pr Cyrug, but nowhere with such frequency
as in the final mystical chapter. Joan Bennet quotes the
chapter's Opening sentence as evidence for her contention
that Browne deliberately avoids number mysticism in this work.60
But Browne's opening, "To enlarge this contemplation unto all
mysteries and secrets, accommodable to this number were
inexcusable Pythagorism" (I, 221), must be viewed in relation
to the clauses which follow beginning with "yet cannot omit
the ancient conceit of five surnamed the number of justice,"
and a Catalogue of examples from number mysticism which

follow hard upon this one. Through this rhetorical technique,

 

6OJoan Bennet, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge, 1962),
p. 212.

 

156

Browne maintains the "metaphysical" detachment referred to
earlier, taking advantage of the metaphorical force of the
various mystical considerations he crowds into this chapter
without committing his belief to all or any of them. But
there is no avoidance, as Bennet suggests, of number mysticism.
In fact, the reader's perplexity at being confronted with so
many examples drawn from that tradition encourage him to take
the "ontological leap," to generalize from the only "evidence"
Browne places before him, and to concur that through the
observance of a multitude of examples of the number five and
the quincunx we have an intuition of the Great and Mystical
Numerist.

My final analysis of the unity of the Garden pr erug
focuses on the way Browne underlines the reconciliation of
classical, Hebrew, Hermetic-Egyptian and Christian religion
through his repetition of geometric imagery which fuses the
figure of the quincunx, the Christian cross, and the circle.61
One of the earliest occurrences of this pattern of imagery
is located near the opening of Chapter II, where Browne calls
attention to the decussations in the crowns of some ancient
monarchs, "The Triumphal Oval, and Civicall Crowns of Laurel,
Cake, and Myrtle, when fully made, were pleated after this
order" (I, 186). Browne begins here a pattern of imagery which

will be repeated to the conclusion of the Garden gr Cyrus.

 

61Heideman alludes to this aspect of the imagery (p. 241),
but she is primarily concerned with the light and darkness
imagery.

‘\

 

 

157

The circle, which later will be related to perfection and
eternity because it is a figure for God, is here a characteristic
of the ancient laurel crowns, presumably of the Greeks, which
were held together by two decussated strips. Thus the first
image is that of a circle circumscribing the letter X, an
image repeated at the close of Chapter IV when Browne recalls
that Plato used the figure of a decussated cross positioned
inside a circle to "illustrate the motion of the soul, both
of the world and man" (I, 220).

The crown which adorns the heads of some Christian
princes appropriately contains the Christian Cross. Browne
continues to put before us a variety of crowns which consist of
various combinations of crosses and circles, for example that of
Charles the Great, which "was framed after this manner, with an
intersection in the middle from the main crossing barres, and the
interspaces unto the frontall circle, contained by handsome
network-plates, much after this order" (I, 186). Finally, Browne
admits that we have no description of the two crowns which Ptolemy
wore simultaneously, but Browne assures us that they conformed
to some variety of this order. In these examples, Browne returns
to the fundamental imagery of his work to begin again, in
another way, to synthesize the disparate religious and cultural
elements Of his Garden. Not only Christian princes wore crowns
composed of the spherical figure of perfection Combined with some
variety of the Christian or decussated cross, but Ptolemy, an
Egyptian, and the ancient Greeks as well possessed crowns

accommodable to this figure.

158

Browne's use of imagery to underline the idea of

prisca theologia can be seen with equal clarity in the following

 

example. Browne begins by calling attention to the fact

that the fundamental figure of the quincunx, is notable not
only in the folds of cloth he has observed on the Mummies,

but also in the linen folds in which l§r§_and Osyris and the
"Tutellary Spirits in the Bembine Table are wrapped" (I, 204).
Browne apparently relies here on an elaborate illustration

of the Bembine Table, which is an assemblage of hieroglyphs

in bronze, that Kircher includes in Oedipus Apgypticus.62

 

Browne in this same passage alludes to the cruces
ansatae or handed crosses, whose invention he traditionally

attributes to Hermes Trismegistus.63 This cross, which is

 

identical to the astrological sign of Venus, is in the
Christian figuration and it is attached to a circle. The
important point for Browne's imagery inheres in the fact
that this Christian cross attached to the symbol of perfection
is an Egyptian creation. Browne returns to the handed cross
in the mystical consideration of the quincunx where he asserts
that Justin Martyr "took for granted, this figure had the
honour to characterize and notifie our Blessed Saviour" (I, 220).
As Browne's Garden moves closer to the "ordainer of
order and the mysticall Mathematics of the City of Heaven," the

circle appears with greater frequency. As the quincunx is

 

62Kircher, Oedipus, pp. 80-160.
63Yates, p. 419.

159

mystically considered Browne brings together the Platonic
belief in the spherical nature of the soul, the notion that
five is a circular number, and those other spherical numbers
-- Hebrew -- which set forth "the Notion of Trismegistus,
and that intelligible Sphere which is the Nature of God"
(I, 223). Once again, we observe the fusion of the number
symbolism and the religious traditions to figure the
order of God.

It could not be clearer from Browne's analysis of

numerology in Vulgar Errors that he is not a numerologist,

 

but the Garden pr_§yru§ just as clearly demonstrates that
this fact did not deter Browne from appropriating the poetic
possibilities of the numerological tradition for his own
uses. If the Garden pf Cyrup is a polemic against number
mysticism, as Joan Bennet suggests, it is a good deal like
the polemic reportedly delivered by Hippolytus against

numerology: "He [Hippolytugf succeeded only in convincing

 

everybody that 'Pythagorean Calculus" -- as he called
numerology -- was true.”64
64

Bell, p. 9.

CHAPTER IV

BROWNE'S PERSONA AND THE LANGUAGE
OF OCCULT SCIENCES

Early in my study of Browne, I found evidence in
numerous passages in his devotional prose, that he shared with
other literary figures of the seventeenth century, notably
Donne and Vaughan, a substantial debt to the occult and
esoteric tradition. A number of literary scholars had raised
this possibility, and students of the history of ideas had
also found in Browne's prose flights to an 3 altitudo
indebtedness to the occult tradition. De Santillana, for
one, includes Browne in a group of philosophers and
scientists --among them Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola,
Cardan, Paracelsus, and Kepler -- who turn to the Renaissance
synthesis of Greek philosophy, especially Pythagoras and

Plato, to the Hermetic tradition (both the Corpus Hermeticum

 

and the numerous apocryphal allegories ascribed to Hermes
Trismegistus) and to Christianity because these systems of
thought restored to religion the dimension of mystery which

had disappeared during the Middle Ages.1 Walter Pagel, another

 

1Giorgio De Santillana, The Age p£_Adventure (New York,
1956), p. 38.

 

160

161

historian of ideas, notes that Browne often interrupts his
sober scientific investigations with statements about

witchcraft and magic.2

Browne himself acknowledges the

influence of Athanasius Kircher, and he owned the works

of Robert Fludd, both of whom had attempted a synthesis

of all learning based upon occult and religious assumptions.
But closer examination of Browne's canon revealed in

his work a dualistic attitude toward occult learning.

In Religio Medici, for example, he writes in a meditation upon

 

the Trinity, "I have often admired the mysticall way of
Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers" (I, 21).
Later he writes an entire work on the quincunx, although

in a chapter in vulgar Errors he marshals several arguments

 

against number mysticism. This thesis has unearthed similar
apparent contradictions in Browne's treatment of astrology,

the Cabala, alchemy and the Corpus Hermeticum, and, in passing,

 

of physiognomy and chiromancy (palm reading). Even when one
turns to some of the assumptions, such as the macrocosm-
microcosm analogy, upon which the occult sciences rest,
Browne shows himself to be of two minds. Given these two
distinct positions, the reader faces a question of belief.
What precisely did Browne believe with regard to the
occult sciences?

The question can be clarified by contrasting Browne's

attitude toward the subject of universal analogy, or correspon-

 

2Pagel, "Religious Motives," p. 217.

162

dence, another of the assumptions which underlie the occult
sciences, with that of one of his literary contemporaries.
Herbert's poem, "Man," published in 1633, approximately ten

years before the publication of Religio Medici, states:

 

More servants wait on Man,
Than he'll take notice of: in ev'ry path
He treads down that which doth befriend him,
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.3
Herbert is here undertaking to reveal the universal analogy
between man and the natural world, to show man that he has an
affinity with all of nature. Earlier in his poem, when
Herbert writes: "Herbs gladly cure our flesh; because that
they/ Find their acquaintance there," he speaks not merely
figuratively, because he believes in the essential truth
of universal correspondence. Browne was among the religious
writers in the seventeenth century who considered it a duty
to demonstrate man's kinship to the harmonious and orderly
creation. This notion occurs throughout the Religio, and
it is perhaps the principal theme of the Garden pr Cyrus.
Browne, no less than Herbert, sought to call man's

attention to the analogies between man and nature, and in

Religio Medici he asserts that the interpretation of the

 

"universal and publick manuscript” is one of the chief

duties of the pious scientist.

 

 

3George Herbert, The Selected Poetr pr George Herbert,
ed. Joseph Summers (New Yor , , p. 140.

163

When we turn, however, from Browne's devotional to his

scientific work, Vulgar Errors, we discover that the emphasis

 

is placed not upon the interpretation of nature, but upon the
operation of natural phenomena; the role of the scientist which

emerges from Vulgar Errors is wholly in tune with the Baconian

 

scientific revolution in progress in the seventeenth century.
Browne was not a gifted scientist, but he clearly recognized
that the flame of analogical thinking which had kindled the
imaginations of scientific thinkers from antiquity to the
Renaissance was ”quite put out." We look in vain in Vulgar
Errors for medical cures based on assumptions such as those
recorded in Herbert's lines; rather, Browne regards such
ideas, in true Baconian spirit, as invasions of figurative
language into a domain where rigid rational inquiry must be
the rule. Browne, like Boyle, the scientific genius who
admired him, believed that God's existence could be confirmed
by a close study of the creation, but both men insist that
such recognition and knowledge depends upon prior religious
faith. Herbert, assumes the same unity in the creation

which underpins Paracelsian medicine, and the same unity

that allowed the alchemists to view the process of gold
making and the perfection of man as methodologically identical
processes of purification. Since all creation, including man,
emanates from one divine source which vitalistically pervades
that creation, God is present both in individuals and in the

"multiplicity of his manifestations."4 There can be no question

 

4Pagel, "Religious Motives," pp. 109-110.

164

that Browne believes in divine immanence, but he asserts that
God's presence cannot be known literally, as one knows the
weight of a Specific gas for example. It must be understood
intuitively, symbolically, through the faculty of the mind he
labels the understanding. The difference between these two
positions may appear slight, but it is upon this difference
that the worlds of Browne's science and religion truly divide.
Belief in the essential truth of the doctrine of universal
correspondence encouraged religious explanations for phenomena
which could be explained better through comprehension of the
natural principles which governed them. This is precisely

the point Browne makes in his denunciation of mystical expla-
nations of the loadstone (II, 116), and in his denunciation
of the explanation Christians advance for the presence of

a dark cross on the shoulders of the donkey (II, 475).

Browne never abandons metaphorical truth in order to
turn his full attention, as Bacon does, to scientific
investigation. He published both devotional works and
editions of his scientific treatise concurrently throughout

his lifetime. And even in Vulgpr Errors, Browne insists

 

upon the value of the metaphoric truth which speaks to
man's understanding; he warns only that countless popular
errors have embedded themselves in human thought because
men have understood literally expressions intended meta-

phorically. As Gordon Chalmers points out, Vulgar Errors

 

contains an incisive analysis of the limitations of metaphor:

"a metaphor does not compel the mind to accept a necessary

165

conclusion; its truth is merely recognized."S

Man truly
lives in "divided and distinguished worlds." One world
yields its secrets upon direct and methodical observation;
the other through shadowed analogies, symbols, in short,
metaphorically.

Browne views the occult sciences, as we have seen in
each chapter of this thesis, as a source of metaphors which
express his faith in a way which artistically joins his
science and religion. His analysis of animal fables,
another source of metaphor, provides a roughly parallel
example. As Liselotte Dieckmann notes "Browne loved the animal
fables and did not intend to deprive literature and art of
their richly imaginative symbols. He simply attacked them
insofar as they claimed to correspond to natural phenomena."6

Other scholars have noted Browne's distinctions between
science, faith, and occult sciences, but their arguments
do not follow the line of this thesis. Dewey K. Ziegler lays
out Browne's two positions clearly: "the analogical and
anthropomorphic thinking which he rejects as a scientist delights
him as a religious man. As a scientist he tries to clarify and
enlarge the field of knowledge, as a religious man he says 'I

love to lose myself in a mystery.'"7 Huntley, wrongly,

rejects Ziegler's statement of these two attitudes because

 

SChalmers, p. 557.
6Dieckmann, p. 320.

7Ziegler, p. ix.

166

he feels that this conclusion suggests that Browne is merely
playing with religion, and that he is either trivial, or
worse, insincere.8 In fairness to Huntley, Ziegler's
discussion of Browne's use of occult learning does lead one
to the conclusion that he was frivolous, and although I
reject that conclusion entirely, the fact that Browne's

work clearly manifests these two points of view remains,

and so does the unsettling suggestion of deception.

Joan Webber's recent book, which applies the notion of
the persona, or "implied author," to seventeenth-century prose,
helps to dispell the suggestion of deception by demonstrating
that one of the personalities which emerges from Religio
Medici is a created persona. Her analysis can also lead to
a more complete understanding of the place of the occult
tradition in effecting an apparent bridge between Browne's
faith and science. In her rhetorical analysis of Religio

Medici, Webber compares Browne's method to trompe-l'oeil art,9

 

an apparently straightforward but actually complex form. In

her discussion, which deals with Religio alone, she finds that
Browne's "I" alternates between Thomas Browne, Norwich physician
and natural phiIOSOpher speaking in his own undisguised voice,
and a created literary personality who expresses himself meta-

phorically and symbolically.10 I suggest that when Browne

 

8Huntley, "Sir Thomas Browne and the Metaphor of the Cir-
cle," Journal 2: the History pr Ideas, XIV (1953), 353.

 

9Webber, p. 157.
101bid., p. 153.

167

discusses occult sciences in Vulgar Errors he does so as a

 

physician and scientist, but in the devotional works he

assumes a created personality which has remarkable affinities
with the RenaiSsance magus, and he avails himself of the richly
suggestive symbols which abound in the occult and esoteric
tradition.

Webber describes Browne's persona as a "cosmic
personality," static and carefully posed. The world inhabited
by this persona resembles the Paracelsian world where the
microcosm-macrocosm analogy is an article of faith which draws
separate realities like religion and natural philosophy into
a single unity, where the Spirit of God, present in man and
nature, leaves visible "signatures" of his presence, and where
nature seems, at times, only an extension of human consciousness.
De Santillana describes Paracelsus' three-principled theory
as "essentially a science of psychic events" because his
three essential principles, salt, sulphur and mercury, are
principles of matter, sidereal principles, and principles
of the human soul.11 Frances Yates describes the tendency
to draw the world into the human psyche as the principal
characteristic which distinguishes the Renaissance magus
from the modern scientist, who strives to detach himself
from the material objects he studies.12 It would be difficult

to find a better illustration of the magus' approach than

 

11De Santillana, p. 126.
1zYates, p. 422.

168

Browne's statement in Religio Medici: "we carry with

 

us the wonders, wee seeke without us: There is all Africa,
and her prodigies in us ..." (I, 24).
Browne's "cosmic personality" inhabits a world, like
the mind of man, without limitations of time and space, through

which his metaphysical wit can range freely.

Before Abraham was, l am, is the saying of
Christ; yet is it true—In some sense if I

say it of my selfe, for I was not onely be-
fore my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the

Idea of God, and the decree of that Synod
held from all Eternity. And in this sense,

I say, the world was before the Creation, and
at an end before it had a beginning; and thus
was I dead before I was alive; though my grave
be En land, my dying place was Paradise, and
Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv'd
df_Cain (I, 68).

 

In the following passage Browne incorporates the astrological
prediction of the length of his life in a similarly playful

treatment of time.

If there bee any truth in Astrology, I may
outlive a Jubilee LhJewish computation for 50
years7; as yet I have not seene one revolution
of Sdturne, nor hath my pulse beate thirty
yeares, and yet, excepting one, have seene the
ashes, and left under ground all the Kings of
Europe, have beene contemporary to three Em-
perours, foure Grand Signiours, and as many
POpes; mee thinkes I have outlived my selfe,
and begin to be weary of the Sunne; I have
shaken hands with delight in my warme blood
and Canicular days; I perceive I doe Anticipate
the vices of age, the world to mee is but a
dreame, or mockshow, and we all therein but
Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contem-
plations (I, 52).

169

Browne's persona, his "cosmic personality," is not only
timeless but also infinite. In the example which follows
Browne celebrates the fact that no spatial boundaries limit

his being.

The world that I regard is my selfe, it is

the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I

cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it

but like my Globe, and turne it round some-
times for my recreation. Men that look upon

my outside, perusing onely my condition, and
fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am
above Atlas his shoulders, ... The earth

is a pOint not onely in respect of the

heavens above us, but of that heavenly and
celestiall part within us: that masse of flesh
that circumscribes me, limits not my mind:

that surface that tells the heavens it hath

an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take
my circle to be above three hundred and sixty;
though the number of the Arke do measure my
body, it comprehendeth not my minde; whilst

I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little
world, I finde myselfe something more than

the great. There is surely a peece of Divinity
in us, something that was before the Elements,
and owes no homage unto the Sun. Nature tels
me I am the Image of God as well as Scripture;
he that understands not thus much, hath not

his introduction or first lesson, and is yet

to begin the Alaphabet of man (I, 87).

In Chapter I of this thesis we observed that as a scientist
Browne rejects the macrocosm-microcosm conceit, but in the
passage above he uses the device to argue the superiority

of his own microcosm to the greater world which he "turns
about for his recreation." Browne, speaking through the
voice of his "cosmic personality," asserts that the piece

of divinity within him frees him from both the confines of

body and geographical locale. He, and by extension all men,

is greater than Atlas, who must remain bent beneath the weight

170

of the heavens; his spirit soars to the empyrean where he
enjoys, in mystical fashion, union with God.

Browne's manipulation of time and space through language
recalls still another quality of the Renaissance magus.
Ishmael Reed describes it in this way: "manipulation of the
word has always been related in the mind to the manipulation
of nature."13 Although Browne, even in his "cosmic personality,"
never utters conjuring words, he seems to sense the proximity
of the roles of magician and artist. French, in his study
of John Dee, notes that Philip Sidney's "poet and the Hermetic
magus are extraordinarily close in their conceptions of the
imagination: both -- and this is crucial -- worked through
images operating within the psyche."14 This similarity of
roles surely has not escaped Browne.

In Chapter II, of this study, Browne's complex attitude
toward the Hermetic tradition was examined in detail.

Although the nature of Browne's debt to this movement is
difficult to fix certainly, allusions to Hermes Trismegistus
appear in all of Browne's works, and he shares the Renaissance
proclivity to associate Hermes and the Egyptians with "abstruse
and mysticall sciences" (I, 73). French argues that not only
the Renaissance magus John Dee, but also literary figures such

as Spenser and Sidney, found in the Hermetic tradition an

 

13Ismael Reed, 19 Necromancers From Now (Garden City,
N.Y., 1970), Introduction.

 

14French, p. 147.

171

alternative to the excessive rationalism of the Middle Ages,

15 Browne's

which had divested religion of its mystery.
"cosmic personality" reflects the central thrust of the
Hermetic tradition which is "essentially a religious philo-
sophy based on the tenet that man is able to discover the
divine through a mystical rapport with the world and with
mankind."16

I shall close this chapter with two examples, the first

from Vulgar Errors, the second from the Garden pf Cyrus, which

 

clearly demonstrate the point not only of the chapter, but

also of the entire thesis. In the passage from Vulgar Errors,

 

Browne speaks in the voice of the true scientist as he sepa-
rates observable truth from metaphor. In the passage from
the Garden pr_§yru§, he speaks in the voice of the persona or
"cosmic personality."

The discussion from Vulgar Errors confutes the belief

 

that Genesis sanctions the idea that no rainbow appeared in
the heavens before the Flood in the passage," I do set my
bow in the clouds, and it shall be token of a Covenant
between me and the earth." Browne proceeds by offering a
scientific explanation of exactly what the rainbow is:

Now by decree of reason and Philosophy, the

Rain-bow hath its ground in Nature, as caused

by the rayes of the Sun, falling upon a roride
and opposite cloud: whereof some reflected,

 

151bid., pp. 129, 147, 156.

16Ibid., p. 69.

172

others refracted, beget that semi-circular
variety we generally call the Rain-bow; which
must suceed upon concurrence of causes and
subjects aptly predisposed. And therefore,
to conceive there was no Rain-bow before,
because God chose this out aS'a token of the
Covenant, is to conclude the existence of
things from their signalities, or of what is
objected unto the sense, a coexistence with
that which is internally presented unto the
understanding (II, 493-4).

The argument here is familiar. ”Vulgar heads" have mistaken
a metaphoric expression for a statement of literal truth
and they have reasoned to an absurd conclusion. Two similar
confusions, Browne continues, one from the Jewish Cabala
and another from "Christian conceits," grow out of a Biblical

passage from Isaiah on the rainbow.

Cabalistical heads, who from that expression in
Esay, do make a book of heaven, and read therein
the great concernments of earth, do literally play
on this, and from its semicircular figure, resem-
bling the Hebrew letter Caph, whereby is signified
the uncomfortable number of twenty, at which years
Joseph was sold, which Jacob lived under Laban,
and at which men were to go to war: do note a
propriety in its signification; as thereby de-
claring the dismal Time of the Deluge. And
Christian conceits do seem to strain as high,
while from the irradiation of the Sun upon

a cloud, they apprehend the mysterie of the

Sun of Righteousness in the obscurity of flesh;

by the colours green and red, the two destructions
of the world by fire and water; or by the colours
of blood and water, the mysteries of Baptism, and
the Eucharist (II, 495-6).

Browne closes his chapter by describing as "laudable" the
custom of regarding the rainbow as a reminder of God's

convenant with mankind and of his goodness and grace. But

here, as elsewhere, he condemns drawing literal conclusions

173

from figurative language.

Browne's analysis of the superstitions which surround
the rainbow is typical of the ”true scientist." In the
passage from the Garden pf Syrup to be examined next his
scientific language is a literary pose which masks a religious
purpose. As Browne leads into this passage we are tempted to
regard the preparatory discussion as evidence of his experi-
mental concerns. He asks, for example, why "magnetical Philo-
sophy excludeth decussations, and needles transversely placed
do naturally distract their verticities” (I, 255). But this
inquiry about why the study of magnetism does not include
the figure of the quincunx, or why compass needles do not form
the decussated figure because one always continues to point
north17 is not scientific. It is followed by inquiries about
why geomancers have failed to observe the quincuncial figure
in the Lady Bug, and why palm readers have decried the figure
in the hand, and on and on. Questions such as these, asserts
Browne, are not "trite or triviall disquisitions," but they
await an answer from trenchant intellects. Although the
passage which follows is often quoted as an example of
Browne's scientific interest as he expresses it in his devotional

works, it is in fact not scientific, but religious and literary.

 

1'7distract their verticities. Turn away their vertices
(OED, Verticity, ii, 3), sc. so as to point north again,
av01ding the decussation." L. C. Martin, p. 362.

 

174

Flat and flexible truths are beat out by every
hammer; But vulcan his whole forge sweat to work
out Achilles his armour. A large field is yet
left unto sharper discerners to enlarge upon
this order, to search out the quaternio's and
figured draughts of this nature, and moderating
the study of names, and meet nomenclature of
plants, to erect generalities, disclose unob-
served proprieties, not only in the vegetable
shop, but the whole volume of nature; affording
delightful Truths, confirmable by sense and
ocular Observation, which seems to me the surest
path, to trace the Labyrinth of Truth. For though
discursive enquiry and rationall conjecture may
leave handsome gashes and fleshwounds; yet with-
out conjunction of this, expect no mortal or
dispatching blows unto errour (I, 225-6).

 

Scientific insistence upon direct observation of nature is
certainly here, but what is Browne advocating observance of?
He suggests that since he has uncovered examples of the
quincunx throughout nature, perhaps someone, or some group of

observers, might search for examples of the quaternio, which

 

refers to the mystical Pythagorean relationship of the "quater-
nary numbers": l+2+3+4= 10. Pythagoreans considered ten

the perfect number because of this relationship. Even though
Browne does not intend to promote numerology here, but rather
a search for other signatures of order, other patterns in

nature,18

the search he advocates is hardly scientific. If
members of the Royal Society understood this passage as
Browne's idea of a serious scientific project, there would

no longer be any mystery about why he was never admitted. How

 

18Browne probably refers merely to as yet undiscovered
evidences of order in the world, but he may have a square
figure in mind to balance his triangular quincunx. See
Chapter III, p. 122, of this thesis.

 

 

I II All" .I 9

al‘ III-
4 III. I]! f

175

great, one may ask, is the difference between a search for
fives and fours in nature, and the association of the Hebrew
letter Caph with the rainbow, a superstition which, we have
seen, Browne condemns.

I suggest that this passage is not scientific in
any sense, but consummately literary. Browne here speaks in
the voice of the "cosmic personality" whose "metaphysical"
cast of mind allows him to draw upon all worlds available
to him. The passage contains arresting and allusive imagery
("his whplg forge sweat to work out Achilles his armour," and
”handsome gashes and fleshwounds"), a blend a sinewy
Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with the more rhythmic Latin
polysyllables, balanced phrasing without euphuism ("to erect
generalities, disclose unobserved properties"), Hebraic
synonymy ("handsome gashes and fleshwounds"), and cadenced
endings ("to trace the Labyrinth of Truth"). Browne assumes
the persona detecting and pointing out to his readers evidences
of the Divine Artist; he uses his literary powers to impress
upon his reader the presence of God in his creation, a presence
manifested through the mystical figure of the quincunx. The
Garden pf Cyrug, including the passage quoted above, is much
closer in spirit to numerology than to science.

Sir Thomas Browne is not a young mystic who becomes a
hard-headed, rational scientist by the time of his death in
1682. Browne realizes that nature yields her secrets only
to the investigator who accepts science's rigorous, uncom-

promising methodology, but that method is neither apprOpriate

176

nor adequate for expressing his deeply felt, unshakable
religious faith, for reaching the "portal of divinity."

For that purpose, Browne created a persona, a "cosmic
personality," who draws upon the rich language of occult
sciences as an abundant source of metaphors for reconciling

his faith and his science.

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