Order Within the Universe: The Rebellion Against Charles

Abstract

The modern mind, comforted by post-Enlightenment rationalism, finds the possible existence of a hidden realm of the miraculous both emotionally frightening and intellectually disturbing. If it were—true that unseen powers lay within seemingly dead stones or that trees possessed the will to act or that inclement weather was the result of malicious spirits, the resources of reason would seem meager indeed. We lull ourselves with the soothing belief that the world is mundane and ordinary, that one need not fear Mother Nature. In the seventeenth century, however, people were convinced of the very opposite set of premises. Indeed, the reasonable person of three centuries ago would have condemned our most fundamental ideas of the universe as willful blindness and ignorance. Every rural Englishman knew that strange forces were at work in the universe and that, in the words of one newsbook, “only the heathen philosophers had nothing but natural causes.” Nature was not benevolent, for physical existence was the vehicle through which hidden, often confusing, forces manifested themselves. Rivers, trees, animals, and even manufactured goods contained sometimes malevolent spirits.

“Every day bringeth forth some new horror.”

—The Most Strange and Wonderful Apparition of Blood in a Pool at Garreton (1647)