Freemasons. - The magus of freemasonry: the mysterious life of Elias Ashmole, scientist, alchemist, and founder of the Royal Society

Inner Traditions

Rochester, Vermont

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank the following for their encouragement in producing this biography. Dr. Christopher McIntosh was the first to suggest in print that Ashmole deserved a wider appreciation and a new biography, and that Tobias Churton could do worse than attempt it.

Friends and colleagues who have helped me on the way include the publisher Philip Wilkinson, Adam McClean, Columba Powell, the late and much missed Peter Maxwell Jones, Michael Embleton, and my agent, Tuvia Fogel.

I should like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Williamson and their daughter, Sue Steer, for their kindness in showing me the remains of Colonel Henry Mainwarings Hall at Kermincham, Cheshireone of the most magical memories in my treasured box of Ashmole accidents. Warm thanks are also due to the Principal and Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford, for permission to photograph the Library and old Quad of my (and Ashmoles) old college.

Interest in the project over the years has been stimulated by lively and frequent dialogue with Masonic historian Matthew Scanlan; he deserves the credit for showing the world of scholarship the signal importance of the early records of acceptions in the accounts of the London Masons Company. Freemasonry is not an invention of the eighteenth century; there was never such a thing as speculative Freemasonry in the seventeenth century. The Master Mason of freestone in that period knew more about the Craft in symbol, allegory, theory, and practice than Freemasons do today; he judges us, not we him.

The resources provided by J. R. Ritmans Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, have been invaluable to all serious researchers into Hermetic and Rosicrucian ideas and history, not least to this one.

My feeling for Ashmoles life and sensibility was enhanced considerably following an invitation from Sir William and Lady Dugdale to photograph Blyth Hall, Warwickshire, for this book. Ashmole was a regular visitor to Blyth Hall over several decades and I am not entirely sure that something of the warm friendship he shared with a past Sir William Dugdale has altogether vanished.

I should like to thank the current owner of Penketh Hall near Warrington for allowing us to photograph his property and for explaining something of its checkered history. Tom Baker of Smallwood also elicits gratitude for granting permission to investigate the site of Peter Mainwarings now long-since demolished manor house in Cheshire. Seventeenth-century England is much more difficult to find than one might imagine. This is a great shame, for much of it was exceedingly beautiful. If only contemporary architects would take up where the Jacobean masters left off!

The book has benefited greatly as a result of the kindness of the staff at a number of other significant places. The staff of Ansons Solicitors in Breadmarket Street, Lichfield (Ashmoles birthplace), have never been anything less than helpful and friendly. The kindly gentlemen who work at the St. Marys Heritage Centre, Lichfield, deserve special thanks for permitting Ashmoles Loving Cup a brief, touching parole from behind exhibition glass. The caretaker at Swallowfield Park who left her lunch to help us find our way around the property also warrants a warm thank youas do the enthusiastic and helpful staff at the Museum of Gardening History, St. Marys, Lambeth. I am sure they would have moved their offices from above Ashmoles tomb had it been physically possible.

Enormous thanks are due to the painstaking professionalism exhibited daily by staff of the Lichfield Record Office, Stafford Record Office, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their goodly assistance in this search for the real Ashmole and his fascinating world. Ashmole himself was one of historys great preservers and would doubtless have been cheered by the care now attendant upon the nations written treasures.

This book has been greatly enhanced by the use of photographs. For these, I have to thank Philip Wilkinson, Joanna Edwards, and Mark Reynolds for their time and care.

The goodness, patience, and encouragement of my wife, Joanna, have gone beyond the call of duty. She has seen what the world has not. Now the world can see what she saw long ago.

This book is dedicated to all who seek the Stone of the Philosophers. Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be crushed; but on whomsoever it shall fall, he shall be winnowed (Luke 20:18).

INTRODUCTION

Ex Uno Omnia

T welve years ago, I was standing at Birmingham Airport waiting for a connection to Gteborg. Thanks to the encouragement of Jan Arvid Hellstrm, the late bishop of Vxj, I was about to begin training for the priesthood in the Church of Sweden. This connection was expected to mark a turning point in my life. Indeed, it did. I found myself hailing a taxi to take me back home to the city of Lichfield, Staffordshire. As the driver released the hand brake, the gate to a possible future slammed shut.

Within a week I found myself in the Lichfield Record Office, strangely motivated and poring over anything I could find on the life of Lichfield-born Elias Ashmole (161792). I had long been aware of the little stone memorial set into the wall above Ansons Solicitors in Breadmarket Street. However, while knowing something of Ashmoles place in the story of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian movement, what I had known meant curiously little to me. I say curiously because I had been seriously engaged in studying the history of that extraordinary movement since the mid-1980s. The Rosicrucians were part of Gnostic history, which has been my chief intellectual and spiritual interest since the late 1970s. Somehow, I had passed by the works of Ashmole as casually and unthinkingly as the many shoppers who today pass his memorial stone on the way to Lichfields thrice-weekly market.

Within a few quick steps of the birthplace of Elias Ashmole, those shoppers and tourists can hardly miss the birthplace of another of Lichfields luminaries, Dr. Samuel Johnson. The tireless author of the Dictionary of the English Language has garnered all the attention. Johnsons birthplace, unlike Ashmoles, is itself a museum and Lichfield has gained national notice as the provincial home of the great wit who informed us that the man who is tired of London is tired of life. But as Johnson also informed Boswell in 1776, Sir, we [of Lichfield] are a city of philosophers; we work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands. He had not tired of Lichfield but Lichfield had, it seems, tired of him. The city has been trying to make up for this appalling lack of judgment for the last two centuries.

Something must have been stirring subconsciously to explain the sudden turnabout in my life. I had been back in Lichfield for four years. Lichfield has been considered by some to be the true spiritual center of England. And, as freemasons should know, At the center of the circle, a master mason cannot err.

Right at the center of that circle was Elias Ashmole, the privileged blend that is Renaissance Man, the British Hermetic philosopher