in sexuality being deliberately contaminated with faux Satanism. Perhaps rumours of the Black Mass were encouraged simply to keep away prying eyes, but it seems that some did indulge in that tasteless and ultimately pointless activity. Did they, perhaps, like some Knights Templar, Johannites and other Luciferans believe in their heart of hearts that they were indeed as evil as they stood accused? Christianity was, and to some extent still is, a most potent form of conditioning, and to subvert its teachings is for many brought up in the faith a very grave step, no matter how loud and brittle their pseudo-Luciferan bravado.
As the Enlightenment took hold of hearts and minds, science progressed by leaps and bounds, aided not only by a new secular freedom but by the astonishingly under-estimated mass drug of choice - caffeine. Tea, coffee and chocolate poured into the coffee shops and homes of the West, kick-starting a whole new level of energy and enquiry. Foremost among that blossoming of exciting new talent was, of course, Isaac Newton, who came second in a recent survey of the world's most influential people - after Mohammed (1) but before Jesus Christ (3).11 He is seen as the epitome of the no-nonsense rationalist, the atheistic scientist par excellence, but - as with Leonardo - nothing could be further from the truth.
At the end of the entry on Newton in Chambers' Biographical Dictionary (1990), very much as an apologetic afterthought, there is a passage of just three-and-a-half lines about his religious and esoteric interests, beginning: `Newton was also a student of alchemy ...'33 He was indeed: as the economist John Maynard Keynes remarked after reading Newton's previously lost notebooks (which were `of no scientific value'): `Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.''
Born in 1642, Newton was to write over a million words on the subject of alchemy, although the Royal Society declared they were ,not fit to be printed'. He is most famous for his discovery of the Law of Gravity in 1665 or 1666, the fall of an apple in his garden suggesting the earth's irresistible pull.
In his specially constructed laboratory on the edge of the fens near Cambridge, Newton obsessively studied the construction of telescopes and the refraction of light through prisms, which led him to build reflecting telescopes, although they were to be considerably refined by William Hershel (1738-1822) and the Earl of Rosse (1800-67) 35 In the near-literal sense of the word, Newton was a true Luciferan, for he believed that light - his lifelong fascination - embodied the word of God, echoing the obsession of the Gnostics and esotericists with Light as both metaphor and actuality.
One of Newton's servants recorded:
He very rarely went to bed until two or three of the clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at springtime or autumn, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire [furnace] scarce going out night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate to.36
From his writings, we now know he was striving to create the Philosopher's Stone that would convert base metals into gold. Perhaps it was this unusual hobby that prompted him to accept the occupation as Director of the Royal Mint, with the responsibility of looking after England's store of gold, instead of accepting a Cambridge professorship.
An eccentric scientist to his fingertips, Newton is said to have only laughed once in his life - when he was asked what use he saw in Euclid. He nearly ruined his eyesight by sticking a knife behind his eyeball to induce optical effects. A tortured and introverted homosexual, his only romantic involvements appear to have been with younger men, one of whom induced a nervous breakdown. Obsessed with the apocalyptical interpretations of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, he wrote on the subject extensively, and as a vehemently anti-Catholic Puritan he saw himself as a kind of prophet. As F. E. Manuel writes in his The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974):
The more Newton's theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in the moments of his grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God's will in actions, living on the fulfilment of times.37
Despite this, he was more heterodox than orthodox in his theology, subscribing to the Arian heresy, which upheld the theory that Jesus was not divine. But it was his passion for alchemy that primarily drove him. As Michael White notes in his Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (1997):
Newton was motivated by a deep-rooted commitment to the notion that alchemical wisdom extended back to ancient times. The Hermetic tradition - the body of alchemical knowledge - was believed to have originated in the mists of time and to have been given to humanity through supernatural agents.3x
That body of esoteric knowledge was known as the Emerald Tablet, and its guardian was the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, inspiration throughout the ages to the likes of Nicholas Flamel and, one assumes, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaac Newton translated the Tablet:
It is true without lying, certain and most true. That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father; the Moon its mother; the Wind hath carried it in its belly; the Earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be converted into Earth. Separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the gross, sweetly with great industry. It ascends from the Earth to the Heavens and again it descends to the Earth and receives the force of things superior and inferior. By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created. From this are and do come admirable adaptations, whereof the process is in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have said of the operation of Sun is accomplished and ended 39
It is easy to understand how even his short passage might obsess and even madden generations of seekers after alchemical truth. Newton cautioned fellow alchemist-scientist Robert Boyle (1627-91) against letting the uninitiated into their secret hot-house world `if there be any verity in the warning of the Hermetic writers. There are other things besides the transmutation of metals which none but they understand' ao
Some authorities' suggest Newton (who was knighted in 1705) may have actually achieved the fabled Great Work - after all, secrecy is no proof of failure, especially in such an intensely private discipline as alchemy. Look at how Leonardo triumphed behind closed doors, although his natural secretiveness did little to prevent the spread of rumours about his `sorcery'.
However, in the case of the British scientist Andrew Crosse, such a reputation - and worse - was to cost him a very promising career and the prospect of being feted throughout history as the discoverer of something very strange, perhaps even the creator of life itself ...
One who, according to his second wife, `delighted in whatever was strange and marvellous', Andrew Crosse was born in 1784 in the west of England and grew into a clever, questing young man. Probably because his father knew Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, both pioneers of the new science of electricity, Crosse was fascinated by it from the age of twelve. After some wasted years as a typical `lad-about-town', he settled down to experiments into electro-crystallization in partnership with George John Singer. But then in 1837 something happened that remains bewildering to this day, as Crosse explains:
In the course of my endeavours to form artificial minerals by a long continued electric action on fluids holding in solution such substances as were necessary to my purpose, I had recourse to every variety of contrivance that I could think of; amongst others I constructed a wooden frame, which supported a Wedgwood funnel, within which rested a quart basin on a circular piece of mahogany. When this basin was filled with a fluid, a strip of flannel wetted with the same was suspended over the side of the basin and inside the funnel, which, acting like a syphon, conveyed the fluid out of the basin through the funnel in successive drops: these drops fell into a smaller funnel of glass placed beneath the other, and which contained a piece of somewhat porous red oxide iron from Vesuvius. This stone was kept constantly electrified ...
On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and stuck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail ... On the twenty-eight day these little creatures moved their legs ... After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure 42
What on earth were the acari, or tiny mites? Further experiments only served to reinforce the mystery. Crosse recorded after the third attempt at replication:
I had omitted to insert within the bulb of the retort a resting place for these acari (they are always destroyed
