Welcome to my Ashmolean Web site!
So Who is Elias Ashmole
and what did he do for the
English Education systemElias Ashmole was born in Lichfield on 23 May 1617 and died in South Lambeth on 18/19 May 1692. Ashmole’s father Simon was a saddler by profession, but preferred soldiering in Ireland and on the Continent to the pursuit of his peaceful trade. It was through the intervention of some wealthy relatives of his mother that young Elias gained an education, first at Lichfield Grammar School, then as a chorister at the Cathedral School. He became a solicitor in 1638, and though he practiced little, his familiarity with the law must have helped him to win most of the many lawsuits which troubled his career.
When the civil war broke out Ashmole, a staunch Royalist, quit London first for Cheshire, then for Oxford. In 1645 he found himself enrolled at Brasenose College, studying natural philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and astrology. The 1640s saw a great revival of interest in the occult sciences (astrology, alchemy, natural magic), and Ashmole quickly assimilated the Neoplatonic–hermetic world-view within which the occult sciences seemed to have their natural place. But astrology was more than just an occult science: it could also be used as a weapon in a propaganda war. Ashmole and his friend George Wharton found themselves providing Royalist readings of the stars to counter those given by the Parliamentary astrologer William Lilly. (Although initially political opponents, Ashmole and Lilly would later become close friends.)
[Elias Ashmole Esq]
In December 1645 Ashmole accepted the post of Commissioner of Excise for Worcester. Posts in the excise, combined with a series of financially advantageous marriages, laid the foundation for his future wealth. But this post did not last long: in 1646 he set out for London with the intention of joining forces with his friend Wharton to refute the ‘errors’ of Lilly. In the end, Ashmole found himself working more closely with Lilly himself: he published two translations in Lilly’s The World’s Catastrophe, or Europe's many Mutations untill 1666 (1647), and greeted Lilly’s Christian Astrology (1647) with a poem praising Lilly as unlocking the ‘cloystered secrets’ of the ancient wisdom of the East, and thus restoring an ancient science (astrology) to mankind. Like his fellow astrologers, Ashmole was keen to defend his science against the charge of determinism: astral causes, they would usually insist, only incline but do not determine the will.
[Elias Ashmole Coat of Arms]
The other occult science that fascinated Ashmole was alchemy. His first book, Fasciculus chemicus (1650), written under the pseudonym James Hasolle (an anagram) consisted of translations from the Latin of two alchemical texts, the Fasciculus chemicus (Paris, 1631) of Arthur Dee (son of the magician John Dee), and Jean d’Espagnet’s Arcanum hermeticae philosophiae opus (Paris, 1623). In his short Prolegomena to the book, Ashmole attempts to defend alchemy against the common charge that it is all fraud and imposture. There are, he insists, ‘many occult, specifick, incomprehensible and inexplicable qualities’ lying hidden in animal, vegetable and mineral substances, waiting to be discovered by the labours of the alchemist. The years 1650 and 1651 saw Ashmole immersed in the literature, and receiving personal instruction from his ‘father’ in alchemy, one William Backhouse. This period in Ashmole’s life came to fruition with the publication of his best-known work, the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, in 1652. (A second volume was planned, but never materialized.) The Theatrum is a collection of old English alchemical texts, in verse form, with a Prolegomena by Ashmole himself, in which he expresses his positive views of alchemy and his optimism about its future prospects.
[Elias Ashmole Esq]
Ashmole also maintained a lifelong interest in various aspects of magic, especially in attempts to make spirits appear. Here the figure of John Dee, whose ‘conferences with angels’ had caused much scandal in Elizabethan England, loomed large. Ashmole collected Dee’s manuscripts, gathered all the information he could from Dee’s son Arthur, and planned a biography of the great magician. The biography never appeared, but the figure of Dee continued to haunt Ashmole for the rest of his life.
During the 1650s, however, the focus of Ashmole’s interests began to change. Although he maintained his interest in the occult sciences, and published another old alchemical text, The Way to Bliss, in 1658, antiquarian pursuits gradually came to occupy more and more of his time. In 1655 he began work on a history of the Order of the Garter, which would be finished only as late as 1670 and published as a sumptuous folio volume in 1672. Worldly affairs also began to occupy more of his time. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought an upturn in his fortunes: his known loyalty to the Stuarts made him a favourite at court, and brought him tangible rewards in the way of places and offices. For the rest of his life, he was a courtier and an official (Controller of the Excise) with antiquarian interests, rather than a serious scholar. He continued, however, to dabble in matters scientific, helping with the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660–61 and becoming one of its first Fellows in 1663. Like many other devotees of the occult sciences, Ashmole was convinced that they had nothing to fear from scientific empiricism, believing that the experimentalism of the Royal Society would only purify and strengthen alchemy and astrology.
Ashmole also became known, in his later years, as a great collector of manuscripts and other curiosities. His house at South Lambeth received visits from people such as Robert Hooke and Henry Oldenburg, often escorting foreign virtuosi. The collection of another antiquarian, John Tradescant, was also inherited after a lawsuit. Looking for a permanent home for these collections, Ashmole turned to the University of Oxford, offering to bequeath them to the University if it could find a suitable home for them. The University accepted the offer, and a fine new building was erected with a chemical laboratory in the basement, and display rooms above. The Ashmolean, England’s first public museum, received a royal visit in May 1683, and was opened to the public in June, with Dr Robert Plot as its first curator.
[Ashmolean Museum, Oxford]
It would be all too easy to dismiss Ashmole as a mere ‘transitional’ figure in natural philosophy. Although he rubbed shoulders, in the early meetings of the Royal Society, with mechanical philosophers such as Hooke and Boyle, his own thought seems to be more akin to that of an Elizabethan magician like Dee. But this antithesis seems not to have been so clear to his contemporaries as it is to us. After all, scientists of the calibre of Boyle and Newton were prepared to take the occult sciences seriously, even to seek for ways to provide acceptably ‘corpuscular’ explan-ations of occult effects. And the idea of an ancient wisdom concealed – perhaps in coded or cryptic form – in the manuscripts of the alchemists was widely accepted even by people we like to think of as ‘moderns’. So perhaps Ashmole should not be dismissed quite so hastily as a credulous intellectual lightweight stuck in the mire of superstition.
[Old Ashmolean Museum, Oxford]
Bibliography[Hasolle, James] Fasciculus chemicus: Or Chemical Collections. Expressing the Ingress, Progress, and Egress, of the Secret Hermetick Science, out of the Choicest and Most Famous Authors (1650).
Theatrum chemicum Britannicum. Containing Severall Poeticall Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers, Who have written the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne Ancient Language (1652); repr. with an Introduction by Allen G. Debus as no. 39 in the series Sources of Science (New York, 1967).
The Way to Bliss. In Three Books (1658).
Other Relevant Works
Lilly, William, The World’s Catastrophe, or Europe’s Many Mutations untill 1666 (1647). Contains two translations by Ashmole of astrological works.
The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672).
Further Reading
Josten, C.H., Elias Ashmole (1617–1692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work, 5 vols (Oxford, 1966).
Andrew Pyle
The Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers
2 volumes : ISBN 1 85506 704 8 © Thoemmes Press, 2000
