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Shortly after arriving at Bearsted station in Kent, I discovered my technique to a picturesque village inexperienced, bordered by Tudor homes and Oast kilns. Peeking over the roofs on the opposite aspect was the tower of Holy Cross Church. I’d taken two trains to get right here underneath the reassurance it will be open.
I headed up a lane that wound gently uphill, and the church disappeared from view totally. After a couple of minutes, I used to be beginning to marvel if I’d taken the fallacious street. Then I turned a nook, and instantly I used to be proper upon it.
The primary door I got here to was locked. Persevering with spherical, I discovered the southern porch, which was clearly the principle entrance. The inside was pretty typical for a parish church. I used to be alone.
I checked my telephone for the e-mail describing the placement of the door I wanted, and the place the important thing was stored. I discovered the latter on a big bunch, with a fearsomely lengthy, medieval-looking companion.
The bell tower was locked, I’d been advised, to forestall the general public going up into the ringing chamber. Irrespective of: I wasn’t excited by bells at present. Feeling a bit like a person on a mission, I slowly opened the door into darkness. I turned on my telephone torch to search out the sunshine change, and the beam flashed throughout a pale face. This was who I had come to see.
Lights on, and he was brightly revealed: presiding like a choose over an open e book, with massive moustache and ruff. However this was additionally an earthly scene of informal storage – odds and ends cluttered a bench constructed round his pedestal. An undignified state, for certainly one of Bearsted’s most illustrious sons.
I fastidiously shifted a couple of issues apart (I might put them again earlier than I left). I may now see the prolonged Latin inscription. Within the recesses on both aspect, operating up from the ground, had been faintly etched staffs with winding snakes: the Rod of Asclepius, historic image of drugs. And within the left-hand recess had been two smaller books with phrases inscribed. Trying carefully, one was marked ‘Misterium Cabalisticum’, the opposite ‘Philosophia Sacra’.
This was the monument to Robert Fludd, born in close by Milgate Home, and buried in Holy Cross after his loss of life in 1637. The inscription tells us that he travelled overseas, advert recipiendum ingenii cultum – ‘to obtain the cult of genius’ – earlier than returning house and being elected to the London School of Physicians.
Fludd was a physician, however these two books of ‘cabbalistic thriller’ and ‘sacred philosophy’ recommend what he’s greatest remembered for at present: publications of occult science. Particularly, his magnum opus Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia – ‘the metaphysical, bodily, and technical historical past of the 2 worlds, specifically the higher and the lesser’.
These ‘two worlds’ are the macrocosm and microcosm, as expressed by the Airtight precept of correspondences between man and the universe: ‘as above, so beneath’. Utriusque Cosmi combines influences of Hermes Trismegistus with Christian Caballah, Astrology, and Alchemy, and features a vary of sensible subjects, from arithmetic to optics, army technique, and music.
Music, the truth is, was significantly vital to Fludd’s occult worldview, as will be seen in among the luxurious engravings that accompany his work. These visions, wealthy in marvel and thriller, have an everlasting fascination – with tongues of flame, billowing clouds, and contours of radiating vitality in geometric frameworks. And amongst them we discover depictions of the monochord: a single-stringed instrument used to indicate the proportions of consonances, and a illustration of common concord, or musica mundana.
For Fludd, the truth is, the octave divisions of the string had been a vital metaphor for the universe. He positions the monochord on the centre of diagrams, operating the dimensions from earth to God, matter to gentle, by way of the spheres of the weather, planets and angelic hierarchies. It additionally runs by way of the microcosm of man, representing the descent and re-ascent of the divine soul. In a single engraving, a Monty Python-esque hand emerges from a cloud to regulate its tuning peg.
One other a part of the Utriusque Cosmi covers sensible music concept. For this, Fludd constructed a fantastical reminiscence palace, a ‘Temple of Music’ festooned with musical symbols round its columns, partitions and towers. Its scheme is populated by legendary figures – the muse Thalia offers a music lesson in an alcove, Pythagoras listens to the hammers of the smithy in one other. Apollo sits together with his lyre, representing concord, whereas Saturn stands on an hour-glass for rhythm. Two doorways symbolise the ears, a spiral the motions of the air. Fludd’s introduction invitations us to think about the setting as Mount Parnassus, surrounded by woods, fields and fountains, and crammed with dancing shepherds, satyrs and nymphs.
This delightfully realised picture showcases the Renaissance penchant for mnemonic gadgets. And within the ultimate chapter of the treatise, Fludd turns to a different mental fascination of his period: automata. He offers detailed directions for constructing a mechanical psaltery, an instrument that may be hidden behind a curtain or a wall and play pavanes or galliards by itself, for the delight of dinner company.
Fanciful as all this will appear, Fludd’s bold publications, and the wondrous engravings that accompany them, have ensured him a spot in mental historical past. In widespread tradition, he has additionally appeared in works of conspiracist fiction corresponding to The Da Vinci Code, because of his affiliation with the Rosicrucians. He wrote a defence of the 2 nameless manifestos credited to that supposed secret society – the Order of the Rosy Cross – manifestos which had been revealed to widespread consternation, promising nice developments of human data for these worthy to obtain their truths.
Regardless of the origins of these cultish paperwork, Fludd has maybe inevitably been conflated with the Order, and assumed to have been a member. Little question, the manifestos recommend an occult worldview very a lot in tune together with his personal. Among the many Rosicrucian claims was a sort of singing, which may collect valuable stones and transfer the princes of the world. In Fludd’s defence of the Fraternity, he writes of ‘great music of true and mysterious energy in each creature each animate and inanimate’.
A lot of Fludd’s work envisioned hidden forces behind observable actuality, and so it appears considerably becoming that this occultist’s monument is now locked away, sealed in Airtight secrecy. I discover his philosophy fascinating, partly as a result of there’s an interesting completeness to it, an audacious wholeness that opens up a distinct psychological house to fashionable science, with its separate specialisms and materialist assumptions.
And what, extra exactly, is the character of that attraction? As I’ve appeared on the information this summer time, with fires raging around the globe, it’s been onerous to not understand a stark disconnect between the macro- and the micro-level occasions in our personal time. We now have extremely developed and complicated science, the like of which Fludd may by no means have dreamed, informing us that our local weather on which all earthly life relies upon is being systematically destabilised. However the microscopic trivia of the on a regular basis nonetheless largely holds us in thrall, and allows its additional destruction. For which you would possibly ask: what’s the level of all our mental progress? In 4 hundred years, it appears, we’ve travelled from common concord to common cognitive dissonance.
I locked the door, put the important thing again, and left the church to take a look around the grounds. There are three carved beasts perched atop the tower, and on a cloudy day that threatened rain, the entire scene felt suitably gothic. However as I used to be about to depart to catch the practice again to London the solar got here out, and Holy Cross Bearsted stood vivid in opposition to the darkish sky.
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Additional studying:
Peter Ammann: The Musical Concept and Philosophy of Robert Fludd.
Dante Diotallevi: The Case of Robert Fludd
Urszula Szulakowska: Robert Fludd and His Photos of The Divine
Frances Yates: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
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