Abstract
A thorough study of Robert Fludd’s writings reveals surprising details hitherto unnoticed, the most striking of which suggests a slight but very indicative change in his epistemology. The “divine monochord,” a wonderful metaphor of the three Boethian musicæ (instrumentalis, mundana and humana), is heavily present in Fludd’s earlier writings. Nonetheless, in his later works he seems to leave room for another instrument: the weather-glass. This is used mainly metaphorically, and with a single aim: to defend and demonstrate a view of the world which, in the first half of the seventeenth-century, was being inexorably challenged by new ideas, new cosmologies, and new discoveries: challenges with which the “hermetic” Robert Fludd dealt with surprising results. One of the most striking of these is the repurposing of new technology, and specifically of the emerging weather-glass, to old ends, i.e. to provide evidence that the macrocosm and microcosm work according to ancient and occult teachings. After giving an account of what I think are amongst the most important elements in Fluddean philosophy, i.e. the pyramidal scientia, the musical metaphor, and the weather-glass, I shall show how they all intertwine. In fact, I shall argue that they exist, as it were, in a symbiotic relationship. This article will show the chief steps which brought Fludd’s favorite philosophical experimentum, the weather-glass, from an early representation in 1617 to its complete affirmation as a key to the two cosmoses between 1626 and 1638.
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- 1.
For an up-to-date account of Robert Fludd’s life and networks see Luca Guariento, “Life, Friends, and Associations of Robert Fludd: A Revised Account,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 5 (2016): 9–37.
- 2.
See J. Peter Zetterberg, “Echoes of Nature in Salomon’s House,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1982): 179–193, at 182; Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone: dalla magia alla scienza (Bari: Laterza, 1957), chap. 1; and Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chap. 10.
- 3.
On the Fludd-Kepler debate, see: Wolfgang Pauli, “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,” in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, ed. Carl G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, 148–240 (London: Kegan Paul, 1955); Robert S. Westman, “Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers, 177–229 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Der Streit um Kosmologie und Harmonie zwischen Robert Fludd und Johannes Kepler,” in Buxtehude jenseits der Orgel, ed. Michael Zywietz, 119–150 (Granz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 2008); Patrick Boner, Kepler’s Cosmological Synthesis: Astrology, Mechanism and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 135–166; Johannes Rösche, Robert Fludd: Der Versuch einer hermetischen Alternative zur neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft (Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2008), 465–494. On the Mersenne-Gassendi-Fludd debate, see: Sylvie Taussig, L’examen de la philosophie de Fludd de Pierre Gassendi par ses hors-texte (Pisa: F. Serra, 2009); Luca Cafiero, “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 20 (1965): 4–15; Rösche, Robert Fludd, 495–529.
- 4.
Vickers, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, 1; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London: Bell, 1957), 141.
- 5.
Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vols 7 and 8 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Walter Pagel, Paracelsus. An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York: S. Karger, 1958); Ibid., “Religious Motives in the Medical Biology of the seventeenth Century. Six Parts,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 3 (1935): 97–128, 213–231, 265–312; Ibid., “William Harvey: Some Neglected Aspects of Medical History,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 144–153. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); Ibid., The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Ibid., “The Stage in Robert Fludd’s Memory System,” Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967): 138–166; Ibid., Theatre of the World (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969); Ibid., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Ibid., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Allen Debus, Chemistry, Alchemy and the New Philosophy, 1550–1700: Studies in the History of Science and Medicine (London: Variorum, 1987); Ibid., Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Ibid., Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: The Webster-Ward Debate (New York: Macdonald & Co., 1970); Ibid., The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Science History Publications, 1977); Ibid., “Harvey and Fludd: The Irrational Factor in the Rational Science of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 3 (1970): 81–105; Ibid., “Key to Two Worlds: Robert Fludd’s Weather-Glass,” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di storia della scienza di Firenze 7 (1982): 109–144; Ibid., “Renaissance Chemistry and the Work of Robert Fludd,” Ambix 14 (1967): 42–59; Ibid., “Robert Fludd and the Chemical Philosophy of the Renaissance,” Organon 4 (1967): 119–126; Ibid., “Robert Fludd and the Circulation of the Blood,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences XVI (1961): 374–393; Ibid., “Robert Fludd and the Use of Gilbert’s De Magnete in the Weapon-Salve Controversy,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences XIX (1964): 389–417; Ibid., The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne, 1965); Ibid., “The Paracelsian Compromise in Elizabethan England,” Ambix 8 (1960): 71–97; Ibid., “The Sun in the Universe of Robert Fludd,” in Le Soleil à la Renaissance: Sciences et mythes (Bruxelles: Presses universitaires, 1965), 259–286. Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 95–101.
- 6.
D. Graham Burnett, “The Cosmogonic Experiments of Robert Fludd: A Translation with Introduction and Commentary,” Ambix 46 (1999): 113–130, at 123.
- 7.
Robert Fludd, De philosophia moysaica, in qua sapientia et scientia creationis et creaturarum Sacra vereque Christiana (utpote cuius basis sive Fundamentum est unicus ille Lapis Angularis Iesu Christus) ad amussim et enucleate explicatur (Gouda: Petrus Rammaseyn, 1638), fol. 1r: “Autor huius tractatus præcipuum fore victoriæ medium in hoc conflictu Herculeo, qui inter duos inimicos et agonistas fortissimos veritatem et falsitatem, hoc est, sapientiam Dei et illam mundanam est faciendus, existimavit, si vulgare et bene notum aliquod experimentum sive practicum instrumentum invenire potuisset, quod cœlesti nostro Athletæ, scilicet veritati loco massæ sive fustis Herculei ad monstrum illud deforme et horrendum, nempe Infidelitatem domandam et exterminandam inservire queat […]. Propter hanc igitur causam et ad hunc effectum machinam quandam spiritalem, nomine speculi Calendarii dictam elegit, quam ipse vocat instrumentum suum experimentale sive demonstrativum, ut per ocularia et practica eiusdem experimenta sapientiæ et philosophiæ mundanæ falsitatem delineare et veritatem defendere possit […]”
- 8.
Nicholas of Cusa, De coniecturis I, cap. IX, 42, in Opera omnia (Paris, 1514), fol. 46v: “Adverte quoniam Deus, qui est unitas, est quasi basis lucis; basis vero tenebræ est ut nihil. Inter deum autem et nihil coniecturamur omnem cadere creaturam. Unde supremus mundus in luce abundat, uti oculariter conspicis; non est tamen expers tenebræ, quamvis illa ob sui simplicitatem in luce censeatur absorberi. In infimo vero mundo tenebra regnat, quamvis non sit in ea. nihil luminis; illud tamen in tenebra latitare potius quam eminere figura declarat. In medio vero mundo habitudo etiam exstitit media. Quod si ordinum atque chororum interstitia quæris, per subdivisiones hoc age.” Translation in Nicholas of Cusa, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: AJ Banning Press, 2001), vol. 2, 182–183.
- 9.
To my knowledge, the first scholar to suggest so was Luis Robledo. See Robert Fludd, Robert Fludd: escritos sobre musica, ed. Luis Robledo (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1979), 55–58. Recently, Johannes Rösche has delved into a comparison between Cusa’s and Fludd’s philosophy in his Robert Fludd.
- 10.
Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 170. By the same author, see also “Geometry and Optics in Renaissance Alchemical Illustration: John Dee, Robert Fludd and Michael Maier,” Cauda Pavonis 14 (1995): 1–12.
- 11.
Robert Fludd, De utriusque cosmi historia, tomus I, tractatus ii, pars v (Oppenheim: Johan Theodor De Bry, 1618), 316–344. On Dürer’s influence on Fludd, see Westman, “Nature, Art, and Psyche,” 193.
- 12.
Paolo Gozza, ed., Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000), 2.
- 13.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, De institutione musica (Leipzig: B.G. Teubneri, 1867), 187–189.
- 14.
There is actually a “revised” celestial monochord, for some aspects different from one from 1617, published in Fludd’s 1623 reply to Johannes Kepler. See Robert Fludd, Monochordum mundi symphoniacum (Frankfurt: Johan Theodor De Bry, 1623).
- 15.
See Fludd, De philosophia moysaica, fols 3v–4v and passim. On the Paracelsians “aerial niter”, see Allen G. Debus, “The Paracelsian Aerial Niter,” Isis 55 (1964): 43–61.
- 16.
The contribution of Allen G. Debus in this respect is rather important; see, in particular, his “Key to Two Worlds.” See also Rösche, Robert Fludd; Peter J. Ammann, “The Musical Theory and Philosophy of Robert Fludd,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 198–227; and Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
- 17.
Medicina catholica, tomus I, tractatus ii, sectio i, 9. In De philosophia moysaica, Fludd states instead that the manuscript is “more than five hundred years old.” De philosophia moysaica, fol. 1v.
- 18.
F. S. Taylor, ‘The Origin of the Thermometer’, Annals of Science 5 (1942): 129–156, at 145.
- 19.
Francis Bacon, Novum organum (London: John Bill, 1620), passim. Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel, Ein kurtzer Tractat von der Natur der Elementen (Leiden: von Haesten, 1608), passim.
- 20.
Robert Fludd. Philosophia sacra (Frankfurt: Officina Bryana, 1626), 289.
- 21.
See note 18. For a detailed comparison between the air inside the weather-glass and the macrocosmic/microcosmic spirit, see Medicina catholica, tomus I, tractatus ii, sectio i, 33–49 and ibid., 50–63, respectively.
- 22.
So not Harvey: though he believed that indeed the blood carries within itself heat and spirits, he stressed the fact that arteries and veins both contain the same blood. Nevertheless, “Harvey acknowledged that arterial blood is more spirituous and ‘possessed of higher vital force’” (William C. Aird, “Discovery of the Cardiovascular System: From Galen to William Harvey,” Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis 9 (2011): 118–129, at 125).
- 23.
Robert Fludd, Pulsus (Frankfurt: William Fitzer, 1631), 81: “[…] philosophus quidem famigerabilis, et in medicina peritissimus, nec non verorum Astrologiæ mysteriorum gnarus […]”
- 24.
Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi–xii.
- 25.
Quoted in von Staden, Herophilus, xi: “Herophili authoritas apud me circa res anatomicas est Evangelium. […] Quando Galenus refutat Herophilum, censeo ipsum refutare Evangelium medicum.” Translation in Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (London: Springer, 2004), 342.
- 26.
Von Staden, Herophilus, 276; Nancy G. Siraisi, “The Music of Pulse in the Writings of Italian Academic Physicians (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries),” Speculum 50 (1975): 689–710, at 698.
- 27.
Von Staden, Herophilus, 280–281.
- 28.
The Conciliator was finished in 1303 and published for the first time in Mantua in 1472. Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) also connected the heartbeat to rhythmic durations; these are similar to those proposed by the music theorist Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia in the first half of fourteenth century.
- 29.
Luminita Florea, “The Body Animal and Human as a Simile: Aristotelian and Galenic Anatomy in Late Medieval Books of Music Theory and Practice, ca. 1200–1350,” Philobiblon x-xi (2006): 74–123, at 86.
- 30.
Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et precipue medicorum (Mantua: Ludovicus Carmelita, 1472), fol. 121r.
- 31.
Fludd, Pulsus, 51: “In quo pulsus naturalis compositio, et necessarius ad vitæ salutiferæ beneficium actus cum authoritate sancta, tum duplici oculari demonstratione indicantur.”
- 32.
Ibid., 54: “If [it is true], indeed, that the eternal wisdom (which is the source of life) emanates from the Father by means of the most perfect consonance, and occupied the centre of the heavens, He then placed his tabernacle in the Sun, which has its [tabernacle] in the middle of the skies, and claims for itself the place in the middle of the septenary. And there it moves in the centre, or middle unison, which originates two perfect equal consonances from the unity. In the same manner, the first emanation (as if it were the Son), proceeding from the Father, occupies the heart of the human being, and there, in that duty of life, acts. By means of the material (dense and heavy) octave itself on one side [of the heart] it moves by contracting, and on the other side, by means of the most perfect spiritual and subtle consonance, [it moves by] expanding” (“Si quidem ut æterna sapientia (quæ est vitæ fons) emanat a patre per consonantiam symphoniacam perfectissimam, centrumque seu cor cœli occupavit: posuit enim tabernaculum suum in sole, qui suum in meditullio cœlorum, et in centro numeri septenarii sibi vendicat situm, atque ibi movet in centro seu medio unisono, constituens ex unitate duas perfectas consonantias æquales. Sic quidem eadem prima emanatio quasi filius a patre procedens, in eisdem proportionibus influit in cor hominis, atque ibi vitæ in eo officio fungitur, ipsum per diapason materialem, et spissam sive gravem ex uno latere, hoc est contrahendo movens, et ex altera parte per diapason seu perfectissimam consonantiam spiritualem et subtilem illud agitando”).
- 33.
Ibid, 55: “[…] omnes tam consonantias quam dissonantias continens […]”
- 34.
Ibid., 57: “Atque hac ratione apertis oculis videtis rationem et proportionem æqualitatis ad pondus, quam in consonantia diapason consistere dixi: nam ut in monochordi figura prima A. se habet ad C. ita se habet 2.D. ad 2.E. et sicut diapason æqualitatis invenitur in B.medio, sic quidem pondus istius æqualitatis consistit in 1. æquinoctii.”
- 35.
Samuel Hafenreffer, Monochordon symbolico-biomanticum. Abstrusissimam pulsuum doctrinam, ex harmoniis musicis dilucide, figurisque oculariter demonstrans (Ulm: Balthasar Kühnen, 1640); Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 2 vols (Rome: Francesco Corbelletti, 1650), vol. 2, 413–420.
- 36.
Arianna Borelli, “The Weather-glass and Its Observers in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries, ed. Claus Zittel et al., vol. 2, 67–130 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 125.
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I would like to thank the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) for the permission to reproduce the images from Fludd’s works.
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Guariento, L. (2018). From the Divine Monochord to the Weather-Glass: Changing Perspectives in Robert Fludd’s Philosophy. In: Lancaster, J., Raiswell, R. (eds) Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91869-3_7
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