Table Of Content75-24,957
SCHUCHARD, Marsha Keith Manatt, 1940-
FREE4ASONRY, SECRET SOCIETIES, AND THE
CONTINUITY OF THE OCCULT TRADITIONS IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
The University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D., 1975
Literature, general
Xerox University Microfilms,
Ann Afbor, Michigan 48106
@ Copyright
by
Marsha Keith Manatt Schuchard
1975
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FREEMASONRY, SECRET SOCIETIES, AND THE CONTINUITY
OF THE OCCULT TRADITIONS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
by
MARSHA KEITH MANATT SCHUCHARD, B.A., M.A.
DISSERTATION
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
MAY 1975
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FREEMASONRY, SECRET SOCIETIES, AND THE CONTINUITY
OF THE OCCULT TRADITIONS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:
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FREEMASONRY, SECRET SOCIETIES, AND THE CONTINUITY
OF THE OCCULT TRADITIONS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Publication No. ___________
Marsha Keith Manatt Schuchard, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 1975
Supervising Professor: Charles Rossman
This dissertation examines the role of
Freemasonry and related secret societies in the trans
mission of the occult traditions in English literary
history from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.
The study draws upon recent Renaissance and Hebrew
scholarship to define those elements of vision-inducement
and magical theories of art which were developed into the
syncretic Renaissance tradition of Cabalistic and Hermetic
symbolism. After the publication and subsequent
suppression of this occult tradition during the Rosicrucian
agitation in Germany, Rosicrucianism was assimilated into
the secret traditions of Freemasonry in England in the
mid-seventeenth century. Many English literary figures,
such as John Dee, Francis Bacon, Elias Ashmole, and John
Milton, were involved in this theosophical, millenial
reform movement.
From the merging of the neo-Rosicrucian
'•invisible college" into the Royal Academy of Science
in the 1660's, Freemasonry became the repository of
contradictory strains of thought— rational egalitarian
iv..
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deism and occultist hierarchical theism. Both strains
influenced Samuel Butler, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift,
and their contemporaries in France. The 1753 splitting
of English Freemasonry into radical "Ancient" lodges and
conservative "Modern" lodges, and the proliferation of
occultist "high degrees" in European Masonry, are shown
to he major factors in the scholarly lacunae and
confusion about what happened to Rosicrucian occultism
after it went "underground" from the 1630's to 1860’s,
Swedenborg and Mesmer developed Cabalistic
visionary techniques which were practiced in occultist
lodges in Europe. This study analyzes for the first
time the impact of these Masonic theories of Animal
Magnetism and psycho-political regeneration on English
secret societies. Special emphasis is given to William
Blake from 178O to 1827, showing the involvement of
Blake*s Swedenborg Society with the occultist, revolution
ary "Illuminism" of European Masonry. Materials from
Swedenborgian and Masonic archives and publications
document the Masonic activities and Mesmeric practices
of Blake and his associates in the arts world, Wolsh
Druid societies, astrological groups, and British
Israelite movement.
The study traces the role of John Varley and
Bulwer-Lytton in transmitting documents, oral instructions,
and ritual practices from Blake’s societies through
Victorian Rosicrucian-Masonic orders to Yeats’s Cabalistic
society, Blakean occultism influenced the Rossetti
family and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Tennyson
family, and the English colony at Florence. The
differences between the "spiritualism" of Mrs. Browning
and Harriet Martineau and the Rosicrucian "magic" of
V,.
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Bulwer-Lytton and Richard Burton are discussed in order
to define the complex theosophical milieu which emerged
by the 1880’s.
Yeats revitalized the artistic significance of
this neo-Masonic occult tradition. He drew upon
Masonic archives and oral materials in order to
accurately place Blake in an occultist, millenial
tradition, rooted in seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism
and carried on in Blake’s day by fellow Masonic Illumines
in Europe, such as Goethe, Lavater, Cagliostro, Mozart,
Grabianka, Lafayette, Saint-Martin, and the Duke of
Orleans. Thus, for nearly three centuries, Freemasonry
provided a continuous reservoir of occultist philosophy,
visionary training, and political radicalism, which
linked many English writers with an international world
of ideas.
vi..
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Table of Contents
Pages
Introduction 1 - 9
Chapter I:
The Cabala, Sexual Magic, and the
Jewish Visionary Traditions 10- 58
Chapter II:
The Christian Interpretation of the
Cabala in the Renaissance, and the
Development of the Syncretic Occult
Tradition............................ 59 - 93
Chapter III:
The Rosicrucian Furore in Seventeenth-
century Germany and England .......... 9k - 120
Chapter IV:
Freemasonry and the 11 Invisible College"
in Seventeenth-century England 121 - 165
Chapter V:
Eighteenth-century Freemasonry—
Deism versus Occultism .............. 166 - 229
Chapter VI:
Freemasonry in England in the late
Eighteenth Century— the "Iiluminized
Lodges" end the Occult Traditions .... 230 - J06
Vii..
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Pages
Chapter VII:
William Blake and the Swedenborgian,
Masonic Milieu in London in the 17SO's
and 1790;s 307 - 373
Chapter VIII:
Cabalistic and Magnetic Visions among
the London Swedenborgians in the
and 1790's 37^ - 391
1 7 8 0 's
Chapter IX:
William Blake and the "Illuminized"
Prophets—-Hichard Brothers, Joanna
Southcott, and their Followers 392 - hZh
Chapter X:
The Visionary Years, 1790-1803:
Blake's Work at Lambeth and Felpham b25 - ^75
Chapter XI:
Blake in London, 180^-1827: Rosi-
crucians, Astrologers, and John Varley h76 - 505
Chapter XII:
The Nineteenth-century Tradition of
Blakean Occultism: the German
Connection and the English Line of
Descent ............................... 506 - 550
Chapter XIIIs
The Nineteenth-century Masonic and
Rosicrucian Channel of Occultism 551 - 598
Chapter XIV:
The Victorian Magnetisers ..... 599 - 618
Chapter XV:
W.B, Yeats and Fin de Siecle Occultism 619 “ 670
Conclusion 671 - 672
viii.
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Freemasonry, Secret Societies,
and the Continuity of the
Occult Traditions in English Literature
When W.B. Yeats suggested in 1893 that William
Blake was probably a member of a Rosicrucian Society—
the "Hermetic Students of the G. D."^— and held up his
work on Blake to Madame Blavatsky as proof of his own
2
"obedience" to the "work of theosophy," he was widely
ridiculed or patronized by most literary critics.
Among the "great deluge" of Yeats and Blake scholarship
since then, there has still been no serious study of
Yeats's ground-breaking critical edition of Blake's works
or any thorough scholarly investigation of why Yeats
believed in Blake's association with an occultist secret
society. But any objective examination of Yeats's
occultist milieu and of his active participation in
secret societies, which had handed down from generation
to generation a corpus of ritual instruction and magical
theory, soon makes clear that Yeats knew much more about
Blake and his era than he has been given credit for.
When the historical antecedents and lines of
transmission which issued in the theosophical societies
of the nineteenth-century fin de siecle are traced back
to their origins, a verifiable, consistent, and complex
picture of actual secret societies— with oral traditions,
private archives, and hereditary instruction— emerges as
an important "non-literary" source for many of the
^ Edwin Ellis and W.B. Yeats, eds. The Works of
William Blake (London: Quaritch, 1893)t 2k.
A
W.B. Yeats, Memoirs. ed, Denis Donoghue (New York:
Macmillan, 1973)» P» 281.
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preoccupations and themes of major works of English and
Continental literature. The omission of this historical
phenomenon from English literary research has left many
gaps and theoretical red herrings in the scholarly in
formation available on a wide range of English writers—
from Milton to Blake to Bulwer-Lytton to Yeats, with a
host of figures in between. The reasons for the
inadequate research on the role of secret societies in
English literary history are many, but the predominant
ones are, first, a rationalist bias on the part of
scholars against occultism in general, and, second, the
difficulty of access to the documents and archival
materials of groups which maintained strict vows of
secrecy. Thus, Yeats's statement that Blake would have
said nothing about his Rosicrucian initiation, "even if
he had received it" (Ellis and Yeats, I, 2k), was not as
lame as it seemed to rationalist critics, but it did
point to a major area of scholarly difficulty.
Fortunately, the probing work of many contempor
ary Hebraic and .Renaissance scholars is beginning to shed
much light on the origins and nature of the occult tradi-
3
tions and their impact on Renaissance art, and works in
progress by George Harper and William O'Donnell on the
unpublished occult journals and autobiographical
novel of Yeats should yield new material on late
nineteenth-century "schools" of occultism. But the major
gap between these areas of ongoing investigation occurs
in the eighteenth century, a gap which has left Blake's
3
Especially valuable are the works of Gershom Scholem
on the Cabala and traditions of Jewish mysticism, and of
Francis Yates, D.P. Walker, and Robert J.W, Evans on
Renaissance occultism and secret societies.
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