Get Magic and the will to science: a political anthropology of liminal technicality 1st edition horv
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/magic-and-the-will-to-science-a-political-anthropology -of-liminal-technicality-1st-edition-horvath/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
‘Magic has been for too long treated as a residual category rather than a phenomenon with its own significance. This book takes a large step in the path of recovering its ubiquity and bond with the normal’.
Stephen Turner, DistinguishedUniversityProfessor, UniversityofSouthFlorida
‘MagicandtheWilltoScienceasks the question whether we live now in an age of magic, with social media, AI, and algorithms dominating our public and private lives. Horvath gets at the root of this subject by examining how science has transformed nature and our understanding of reality, so we no longer control technology but are controlled by it. To return to an authentic and human existence, we first need to understand the reality in which we live. MagicandtheWilltoSciencedoes an exemplary job of this and points us to a path of recovering a genuine human existence’.
Lee Trepanier, ChairandProfessorofPoliticalScience, SamfordUniversity
Magic and the Will to Science
This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, combining insights from historical sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Its central idea, departing from the works of Frances Yates and the Gnosticism thesis of Eric Voegelin, is that far from being the radical opposite of magic, modern science effectively grew out of magic, and its varieties, like alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, the occult, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Showing that the desire to use science to solve various – real or presumed – problems of human existence has created a permanent liminal crisis, it contends that the ‘will to science’ is parasitic, existing as it does in sheer relationality, outside of and in between concrete places and communities. A study of the mutual relationship between magic and science in different historical eras, ranging from the Early Neolithic to recent disease prevention ideas, Magic and the Will to Science will appeal to scholars and students of social and anthropological theory, and the philosophy and sociology of science.
Agnes Horvath is a political anthropologist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, and president of the InternationalPoliticalAnthropologyAssociation, she was an affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma and Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, the coauthor of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking
Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery, and Liminal Politics in theNewAgeofDisease:TechnocraticMimetism.
Contemporary Liminality
Series editor: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland
Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland; Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark; and Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK
This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality by now is a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought.
While charges of Eurocentrism are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the taken-for-granted foundations of social theory through incorporating ideas from major thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, as well as perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought.
Titles in this series
20 Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease
Technocratic Mimetism
EditedbyAgnesHorvathandPaulO’Connor
21 Art and Enchantment
How Wonder Works
PatrickCurry
22 Magic and the Will to Science
A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
AgnesHorvath
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Liminality/bookseries/ASHSER1435
Magic and the Will to Science
A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
Agnes Horvath
First published 2024 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprintofthe Taylor &Francis Group, an informa business
The right of Agnes Horvath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademarknotice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
BritishLibrary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781032457369 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032457376 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003378471 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378471
Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra
for sons
Daniel, Peter, Janos, Tommaso, Stefano don’t forget to live
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: what charis loathes…
1 Magical doubles as liminal technicity
2 Sensuals without borders: artificial man, artificial intelligence
3 The cunning of unreason: exposure to harm to transpose into a new status
4 Recursive algorithm in the amplification of magic
5 The unknown factor of effusion in spiritualised science
6 Mind control
7 One Tower: when the dead seized the living
Conclusion
Bibliography
Nameindex
Subjectindex
Preface
Guardians, take good care on your post, Sparklers are the nights, Fireflies in the garden, Memories of passing summers, In the summer of Florence, mixed with Farewell to autumn in Lido
Memories of the dawn
Dance hall, fussy and elegant, The beautiful that happened, that lived and were, Who can never die, Guarded living and dead,
The distant smile of hearts, Looks at you, worried, orphan, Guardians, take good care on your post.
Guardians, take good care on your post, Life lives and wants to live, It didn’t give so much beauty, To get through it now
By bloody and silly hecklers. Being human is so vulnerable
And so horrible are the bestial-heroic spells
And the sparkling nights
Even today, they will not let you forget Man’s faith woven into Beauty
And those of you who still are, guarding, orphaned, Guardians: take good care on your post.
Endre Ady, ‘Admonition to the guardians’, 1918 (trsl by A.H.)
This book intends to explore how magic formed our lives, considering technology and related mechanisms that are the illegitimate currencies of our knowledge and through which our history is enclosed in the vortex of transformation at the start of their existence. It offers a study on the nature of magic, which deserves and in fact needs to be done, at this current point, when the almost total absence of any mention of magic, in connection with modern experimental science, is something of a puzzle. An explanation for such absence might be that by the time of Bacon and Newton our civilisation, let alone in earlier centuries, had become overgrown with magic. Anyhow, the whole history of magic is an enigma, which probably will never be solved, as it is a continuous undulation of rising and falling of movements, to alternating sides: once into insignificance, as in Classical Athens, and Rome before the 1st century BC, another time swelling into the intersection with politics, like the late Roman times, or during Hellenism. Before that, for those free, inartificially happy, and unconstrained people, in general, magic was always a foreign influence, something apart, but this changed though. However, poetry intimates something about the subversive, sly nature of magic, as shown in the motto, a 1915 poem by the Hungarian poet Endre Ady, from the first year of WWI. Magic intrudes unperceived, and always appears when we forget to live. Magic is an increasingly aggressive challenge that deserves attention and response, an artefact concocted up by the prankster, the rebel, the heckler trickster that is fearless to act, attack and substitute, into a go-go infinity, until a new artificiality is constructed on the ruins of reality.
The need for a book such as this was confirmed when I met with one of the axioms of Roman legislation, accordingly to which objects that belonged to the gods were considered sacred; therefore, these
things were removed from use and trade among humans (see Agamben 2009: 18). Any violation that removes, separates, and restores objects from or into their own, sacral place was punished by Roman order. Magic by definition is a profanation of objects, by transforming them through methodical means, thus separating them from the rest of reality. A similar point, raised by Heidegger in his famous essay on technology (Heidegger 1977: 326–7), is that the essence of technology is nothing technological but – as we explore this in the book – is magical in nature, which violates entities and afflicts them into enframing by a terrifyingly great intensity and brutal desocialisation. And when we started to approach magical practices, even this enframing got a new light through trickster parasitism, which progresses until the host is emptied out of all life forces and transformed, with bodily form evacuated, historical tradition eradicated, and spiritual and material entity eliminated.
This book explores the idea of magic in a historical context, focusing on images, impulses, feelings, vibrating enthusiasm, investigating how magic was built up on them and developed its power for transgression. The result is a growing void that is coming to parasite on all of us, centrifuging the essence of living into an artificial cyst (Bowman 2019), which is both a generator and a prison, matrixing the world into a new existence, without will (or with a will to nothingness), but with subversive intentions.
As with sociology, and interdisciplinary issues like political anthropology, this book covers both theoretical and methodological alignment, to investigate magic. Magic, this ‘nameless thing’ (Hölderlin, The Death ofEmpedocles), while having no names, has many means and results: like substitution, duplication, liminality, artificial matrix, transformation, parasitic trickery, and absurdity, and naturally so, as magic aims and desires the void. Therefore, I hope to give an idea about the manifold nature of magic, whose exclusive aim is to forget to live life to the full. It is against this that Hadot (2008) evoked Goethe in admonishing to not forgetting to live, as evoked in the Dedication. It is also obvious that this kind of interest in magic must in the end occasion a degree of sameness and
repetition, if exclusively resorted to, and that we should return to life again, led by golden charis, to adopt the language of Plato.
Agnes Horvath Florence, Italy, 11 September 2023
Acknowledgements
I owe gratitude to all those who helped this volume towards a useful meeting point. For the courteous assistance of the staff in the library of European University Institute, Florence, in particular to Peter Kennealy the library’s information specialist, and Pep Torn Poch, the library director. My sincere thanks go to the excellent editorial staff at Routledge, especially the commissioning editor Neil Jordan and the editorial assistant Gemma Rogers, for always being there ready to help at every stage in the writing of this book. Thanks to Lee Trepanier, who published earlier versions of several of the ideas of the book in VoegelinView.
This is the place to offer appreciation to Arpad, Giulia, Marianna, Federica, and Ginevra who have helped in various ways in connection to the book; just as Katalin, Silvia, Mátyás, Clara, and Lea. I owe a special debt to Marius Bența and Paul O’Connor who liberated me from the tiresome work of the main editorship of InternationalPoliticalAnthropology, so I had time to finish the book.
Introduction
What charis loathes…
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378471-1
charis loathes intolerable necessity.
(Empedocles, fr.116)
We can start with the simple claim that magic has very little if anything to do with charis. Magic is directed not only against objects and their constitution of reality, but also against their meaning, but how? What kind of process is that magic continues? This may not seem to be particularly significant, but arguably it is so, as it reveals the unmistakable presence of a mechanistic pattern of necessity in magic. And, given that the Pre-Socratic magician Empedocles has already argued that ‘charis loathes intolerable necessity’ (as the motto), the idea was already ripe that charis detests anything mechanical, they confront with each other, the highest mindfulness against the lowest repetitive technicalisation. The case of Empedocles can be taken as a reminder that already at the beginning of reflections on magic necessity – or its personification, Ananke, who is spinning the threads of life, at orderly intervals –appeared as something as a problem. Mechanism, or the analysis of the functional and technical aspects of the forces that were acting repetitively on objects and their surroundings was at the centre of Empedocles’ thinking, all the more so as he recognised their opposition with charis.
There is not much to do about this, except to acknowledge the statement that for Empedocles’ state of mind the world and its meaningful order, including his own reality in it, was a problem. Although our sources might have their shortcomings, the nihilistic pattern in his thought, that existence is senseless, as we live in an unreal nothingness, and all these appeared for him as something unresolved. When he acknowledged the existence of charis, he declared himself as a magician, as someone who has nothing to do with charis, nothing relating to the sweetest aspects of civilities, but instead approved the coexistence of disparate principles: the principle of destruction and the principle of reconstruction. But only seemingly was this a dual allegiance to two different principles; no, Empedocles, the arch magician did not maintain contradictory attitudes: he was a man of the abyss, and there was no escape from his idea of wearing the mind into a morbid state, ready for effluences.
Second, from the point of view of mechanics, which deals with the repetitive, necessary, and unending action of forces on objects, and also with motion, comprising kinetics, routine or basic methods or procedures, it is evidently the technique necessary to exert a force or generate a movement of deconstruction-construction that is important, not charis. The methodical issue again seems trivial and not even worth mentioning, but it is not so, as nobody knows where energy comes from, while everybody is familiar with acts motivated by charis, kind benevolence.
In anything that we know and that has to do with us, with any living being, even any object in our own life-world, what matters is the manner in which an action or a movement is brought about: whether charis oriented or violent, whether a decent one or loathsome: how a child is asked to do something, how two adults, whether a couple, neighbours, or simple co-workers, decide about the course of action to be followed, it never can be reduced to simple technical issues of how a desired result can be achieved, which however was Empedocles’ main concern, as we will see. It is not a matter of mere power or efficiency, though of course elements
of power, and the need to complete an action within a certain time is present. However, the central issue is how to do this in a decent, discreet and considerate manner that would be pleasant for everyone1; that leaves a good aftertaste; that reinforces our belief in the worthiness of life, and is never a mere issue of producing a technically efficient end result which has no interest in charis, just produces dull senses and impaired bodies.
There is one highly significant aspect of charis, which is more familiar to us, and it is the likeness to Ancient Greek nous, or thinking well, a form of goodness, recognising and appreciating every living being in its own unmistakable, unique space. Thinking well and proper perception are just two aspects of the attitude of a harmonious being, and proper perception is the source of genuine knowledge and marvellous charis: desiring and wanting good. As for being an elaboration along the same line, we do not see any contradiction. It can be illustrated by the classical Greek mythological vision of the above-mentioned Ananke. Ananke is a spider-like being, attached to her repetitive, mechanical activity,2 day and night, without a break, working on the hateful destiny of man. But Greek thought seemingly did not bother with Ananke; the necessity of death was not a philosophical question for them. Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle mentioned it only vaguely, as for them good thinking orchestrates our life, character, thinking, and feeling, creating a life that deserves its name, where we are able to exercise virtue, a life bettered by man’s good beliefs and actions animated by charis. Ananke was solely interesting for magical thinking, represented in Empedocles.
Naturally, the two predispositions, the mechanics of Ananke, necessity, and the charisof nousbring two different results, but only one is valid, the one which preserves and does not cause harm. For charis, good order only lasts as long as the beliefs in good society support it; otherwise, whatever is the name under which it is described, democracy, socialism, or national sovereignty, the word is a mere anachronism. Even the actual order could be prone to instability when an underlying and endemic discord is inevitable.
Accordingly, there is a close relation between order and way of life, or between the knowledge of order and virtuous life: mindfulness is only indispensable if it grasps charis in its manifestations. However, these are just intuitions, whether for good or bad. There could in fact be few things less obvious than creating a good life is a constant toil, though not always a conscious effort, and the bad one is close whenever the attention is loosened. Empedocles was certainly one of the first who misunderstood this alertness when he accepted and loudly propagated that strife is one of the main movers of things, thus creative destruction became, by continuous repetition, if not a fact of life, but at least a major mechanicalmethodical process passed into history and human truth. Since his time magic, which proposes the destruction of objects for gaining new ones, became accepted as a philosophical or scientific practice. In the vital competition for dominance, strife gained a decisive victory, as the actors and propagators of magic gained control of life. Profit-making was on their side, which in the first place they considered as just, and therefore gained rule widely. Its propagators could marry whom they wanted, and also its actors could trade and deal where they liked, and because its dealers had no misgivings about injustice at any level of public and private life, all these propagators, dealers, and actors did get the better of their opponents.
Magical practices in science
It is very tempting to describe magic as merely mechanical technology, but there are always transcendental intentions and persons behind it. Magic grew over time and during the centuries transformed the ways to see, perceive, and interpret the uses of magical substances. There was indeed a lot to change, and generations of magicians were involved in such transformation of the state of mind, getting inside of thinking in complex interconnected processes, having received growth and multiplication back to Palaeolithic times, when magic first appeared and progressed into the vast magical enterprises of the Meso-Neolithic. Magical technical
methods became more and more popular, deeply embedded in the way people thought, without a merely external imposition, and soon established all those transformative changes that marked this period, like metallurgy, settlement, and agriculture, accompanied by molecular changes in plants, animals, and stones. Therefore, the progress of magic was always accompanied by suspicion and the charge of impiety for its contempt of the natural order. The rest of the society accused magic of contaminating the elements, contagious transformation, and the substitution of normal reproduction with their own method of deconstructive construction. The parallels with magic as a kind of substitution go still further: just as that magic cuts short the natural progress of the body, snatching the soul of the living into enslavement, and finally covering accidental souls with alien flesh, all of them attach themselves to the transformative miracle-making of magic through corrupting bodies.
Corrupted bodies
Animated by a hostility against anything that is stable, magicinspired hatred against objects sees them as only obstacles to the flux – which actually is etymologically correct, as object indeed means resistance. For instance, in Gnosticism,3 a relatively late philosophical branch of magical thinking, everything which has mass and occupies space, the matter, every form objectivised in matter, which is real in quality or character, which has a practical value, significance or character, became an enemy that must be eliminated or liquidised, in order to reach the incommensurable transcendental. But in general, we should say that every material possession and every person of substance and valour was targeted by the magical type of thinking, whether we consider the Pythagorean or Orphic thought (Laks and Most 2016) that culminated in the Hellenistic age, as they irritated it. Their ascetism undermined any concrete substance; their life was offered to the transcendental. Magic is corrupting the consistency of objects, their actuality and reality, the valour of efforts for bettering ourselves, launching into the sphere of
immortals, the realm of the flux, and the relativity of the incommensurable.
Giving an example, anything can be altered, even the molecular structure of matter. This molecular structure is the most rigid structure in nature. Every object has its own distinguished DNA structure, which makes it different from others, but by extreme heat or radiation or by other effluences this can be changed, altered, modified, and hybridised by artificial means, thus falsified into disaccord with that truth of regularity and validity. So, objects are objecting to flux and not serving it. Magic presented a very opposite picture of nature, the image of a new world, with perfected objects, whose dynamic movement is dependent of outside energy. These are the Empedoclean delirious effluences, the outflowing energy emanating in crisis situations from decaying objects, the efflux that the body cannot control anymore, like the lawless passions of love or strife. A new world is coming, where these emanations are reflections of an aspect of the otherworld, that kind of surrounding bright effluence we all feel, as though the air were heavy with something strange. It flows into the eye and ear, overflowing objects from another region of existence, like a breeze causing the flowing forth of radiating energy, in the meantime when our inner strength is evaporating.
This is why the reasoning of magic is ruthlessly simple, the vision that inspired it even simpler. Magic wanted deadly connections that inspired the invasion of efflux – considered and feared as a possibility, and which became a reality due to the failure to link man and his defending allies together, elevated and stable, by a continuous exercise of the goodwill. Without nous, or as we specified it, without charis neither the individual body nor the collective body can function in the objective manner of wholesome virtues if the necessity of producing emanations overrules the scene. In this sense, order is not outside or prior to man, but is exercised as a quality of being, in its composure and not in decay as magic dictates. In Plautus’s Amphitryon (see Ch 1), Alcmene’s goodness is morally sound, her probity lies jointly in her uncorrupted body, in her
personality, and in her righteousness towards her community. In the proper government of her family, she exercised temperance, fortitude, justice, and similar habits; her qualities were aspects of an excellent character, jointly with composure, which could be only corrupted by deceiving her through mimesis. The possession of virtues is the characteristic feature of any citizen, implying the duty to preserve one’s integrity and goodwill, which first of all must be guarded and gained when growing up from childhood.
Viewed from this perspective of order, the nous is always valid and is functioning without any particular morality, as virtue is natural. Referring to utility, the capacity to gain power by the skilful technical object manipulation is the concern of magic. Corruption is artificial ingenera, it must be prepared, made, and delivered to its subjects. Only mimesis and false utility allowed magic to powerfully theorise about corruption to promote its own profitable benefit. However, neither utility nor any of the useful crafts like politics or science has value by itself, only if they are anchored in preserving integrities.4
Magic and magical construction leave no memory, however, influential they were in their own time – magical corruption leaves a hole in the texture of the world, makes existence a quick repetitiveness in the narrow path of birth and death. And it is fairly clear that the (non)relevance of magic was not confined to history or to the history of thought. As was mentioned earlier, if we stretch the bounds even beyond written history, we can find traces, strong or weak, of magic, as far back as the Palaeolithic, but nowhere as a high culture. How could be? While parasitism has no poesis, no morality, no virtuous thinking, it is stripping life of its heartful graces, diminishing integrities, and eliminating entities by their infinite replication. It is difficult to find any connection between magic and high cultures. Magic is a heavy top-down net, which interest-looking heightened down almost to a sinking point on every living being until it has at least one drop of juice of life. It is obviously tempting to describe magical enchantment in a positive manner, for instance, the way Weber introduced charismatic enchantment into political
science, but a very similar situation of mystical suggestion (Horvath 2013) has been given a quite realistic representation by Tiepolo in his ‘The Rape of Europa’.5 The painting depicts gruesome scenery, with a cherub urinating at the top of the picture, above rock-like clouds, next to the eagle, the bird of Jupiter, while in the middle there is Europa, with wide-open but rigid, fixated eyes,6 sitting in horror, as if looking out of the scene, in the grim aftermath of the transcendental melodrama.
Magic attempts to make the transcendental available, at hand, anywhere and anytime, without any limitations to flux experience. Its universalism is thus by definition bodiless, characterless, and formless: sensuals are ruling the scenery. But sensuals, like all parasites, are ineffective without hosts that they can use and abuse, so destruction is necessary to restart the whole circle of generation. Further on, in order to extend the powers of magic, more sensuals are needed, and so a whole epoch started, with wars and strife again. We find the same magic constantly re-emerging, either by reducing nature to its component parts and so facilitating its exploitation, or by attempting a reconstruction, sometimes even connecting this to an enlivened collective body of thought. Mimetic esoterism, misleading Neoplatonism, and blasphemous and unreasonable Gnosticism, as Plotinus (2014) called it, gave rise to the unending spinning of a spider’s web by enthusiasts, who are using ecstasy, intuition, mystery, or prophetic wisdom, inspired by magician-activists, and where traces of magic and the technological tradition overlap, developing into the modern class of technicianmerchants who despise reality, in the way of Empedocles, and who are critiqued by the even more reality-hating enthusiasts of critical theorists.
We could also have arrived at the same result by following a quite different route. The incorporation of philosophy into religion disregarded matter and natural philosophy, splitting the soundness of their Antique unity. This event has an unmistakable resemblance to the collective mindset, which diverted the attention from the individual and the polis onto levelling into a whole. This helps to
explain how Neoplatonism, which initially was an opponent of any collective mindset idea, became in the late Romanitas its main ideological backing, fulfilling the destiny of a philosophy merged with religion, and spreading a mindset of thinking with one will and having the desire, as searchers after the absolute, for a method and a tradition that exceeds one’s own individual power and possibilities.
This does not mean that magic lost its hidden and secretive character. It is and always remains tied to Ananke, necessity, doom, or fate (Hesiod 1914), being secretive, and omnipresent, however hidden in every structure as a potential or a growing possibility. A similar point of view is offered by Plato’s Republic. Here, in Book X, Plato explains that imitation is the main enemy of the organisation of the polis, and the state of mind useful for its custody. But all kinds of imitations are corrupting the mind, as, through technology, manufactured objects are used to spread false prosperity in the political body. The fabrication of objects, facts, ideas, and images is the main craft of imitation, which extends much beyond politics, being present in any collective body of thinking. Imitation is not something difficult, being just a simple craft, ‘as if you should choose to take a mirror and carry it about everywhere’ (Plato, Republic, 596d). Yet, again it is striking how Plato puts the details of the definition of imitation as something to fit too easily into place, as if a smooth parasite free from care, saying that it is so simple and could be applied to everything, from imitating the sun to imitating the cosmos and so on, yet the truth remains solid all the time:
“You will speedily produce the sun and all the things in the sky, and speedily the earth and yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and all the objects of which we just now spoke.” “Yes,” he said, “the appearance of them, but not the reality and the truth.”
(Plato, Republic596e)
The very fact that nous, or the marvellous charis filtrated thinking is not imitable, means that even though the imitators have the skill, in
all likelihood, they are not truthful. Any imitation just reproduces itself in a ‘dim adumbration in comparison with reality’ (Plato, Republic, 597a), without the high transcendental substance of charis. Charis gives the authorship to objects and state formations, innocent delight is the performance in every matter and thought, so whatever lacks gaieties is just an imitation of some kind, producing only depressive fakes and lies, which weighs us down and makes us wretched.
But for our specific purposes, it is especially important to understand more from Plato’s ideas about imitation and to look into the secretive role of magic. There is much more that could still be said, about the imitative and substitutive character of magic, both as an unjustifiable transposition of power and as a premeditated engine for the corruption of objects and living life. So, we will focus here on the main goal of this introduction, which is to understand the role of effluences, the abundant, freely emanating, flowing sensuals, especially the delirious effluences which are given off by decaying matter.
Energy transposition by effluences
Effluences were first described by Empedocles, and later Plato also wrote about them in the Menoat approximately the same time when the atomist Democritus – a few years older than Plato – emphasised the existence of void inside every matter to move about in. Empedocles’ idea is that everything owns, produces, and secretes a quantity of effluences during their lives, an activity that is intensified in certain specific moments, especially in relation to love and death, or in liminal situations, as we now would say. Effluences are commensurate with perception, images, colours, odours, and hearing, and in fact for the Antique authors perception is equal to unconscious sensuality, with the high or low flux of vibrating effluences, the light waves of the void. Later the Neoplatonists used the notion of effluences in their divinisation practices (Wilberding and Horn 2012), concerning how to gain access to the power of effluences, and how to encounter this particular flux, this particular
emanating, a manifestation of matter. Such Neoplatonist enquiry went parallel with a growing interest in magic and alchemy, used by activists who always lived on the borderline of legitimacy, having a merchant spirit and trying to gain a fortune by provoking an illicit transformation of objects, the multiplication of matter and the production of new species through suspicious means of communicating with the dead, like in sacrifice.
The most famous example was metallurgy, which both made use of and served as a model for sacrifice, having between the two a kind of elective affinity, in order to make bronze and iron production successful (see Eliade 19627; Goldhahn and Østigård 2008).8 The smith was truly ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner 1967), dangerous but necessary, an Ananke being, like magic itself, always on the borderline. But forging and shaping iron with an anvil and a hammer is one thing, and the manipulation of matter is another. Manipulation was the reason why magicians were banned and illegitimate for more than two millennia, only the smith was allowed to practice, in a restricted sphere and on closely limited objects, when suddenly in the 17th-century magic gained legitimacy, and with alchemists like Bacon, Newton, or Boyle a new science began to grow, on the decontextualising basis of alchemy (Horvath 2021), called the method of fluxion, focusing on the all-pervading effluences of matter that produce nervous stimuli, sensation, light and heat, and thus a spiritualised science as well, concerning dynamic, interacting entities, via electric and magnetic forces.
This is also how eventually the transmutation of matter by the alteration of the DNA structure became a legitimate scientific enquiry, transposing more and more entities through cloning, duplication and transmutation into hybridity, until such an awkward, borderline activity turned into the mainstream and became overwhelming, openly and publicly coordinated under the misleading name of ‘natural sciences’. Since its asserted aim, the transmutation of integrities never changed, it gradually sickened us all, and maddened us all, with hunger for the next integrity to be caught, levelled, and transformed.
The idea can be illustrated through Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The protagonists of the play desire to transform themselves into beasts, to subvert their character, their life into a new version, thinking themselves as original when they are just regurgitating the general opinion emerging around them. Unconsciousness became gradually the standard, and Bérenger, the last man in the play who is able to articulate grace and benevolence, is forced into an impossible fight against the new orthodoxy. In the play, everybody’s feelings become altered, not because they wanted it, but as the infernal machine imposed it from the inside on them, in utmost details, in everything that one has done, thought, felt, or sensed. They became corrupted into a different entity, with a new identity, with changed faces and movements, behaviour and sensuals, beyond recognition. The infernal machine required their love too, their enthusiasm, but not even their enthusiasm is their own, but already incorporated, as it belongs to the infernal machine. Nobody has their own private emotions, not even a respite from enthusiasm, but is driven by a continuous frenzy of love-and-hate delirium.
The reason for such transformative power is that only effluences are able to change matter by entering and – equally importantly –by leaving it. Effluences of voided, fluxed sensuals are the only force in nature that causes kinetic energy, movement, light, and heat. In their compressed form, effluences are either magnetic or are spiralled into gravity, the basic logic being that the vibration of effluences is compressed into the bodies. This can be captured through the terms ‘flux’ and ‘void’: the flux of effluences is directed into specifically prepared empty spaces, or incubators, which act like matrices of non-linear transformation (an example for the original matrix of a linear transformation is the womb). What started as a spiritual upheaval, when a moment of ecstasy (ek-statis, or a stepping out of one’s solid integrity) started to spin up emotions, producing effluences that were previously part of the natural world, now became turned into a purposefully animated process, where nothing hindered those adventurous and mercantile minds to intrude into natural processes and spin them there where they wanted to
arrive – gaining influence (from effluences), money, fame, and especially prestige.9 This went on until the last entity to decompose was reached in the last century, the indivisible and indecomposable, which however magician-scientists succeeded to destabilise by decomposing molecules, turning them through recombination into corrupted, dependable entities, without their own solidity and movement, as if becoming parasites, waiting for the impulses that can direct them into various, centrally assigned activities. However, parasites, decompositions, and corrupted matter are unfortunately animated by lucid dreams, and what is more, these even have a demonic version, where not only the dreamers are aware that they are dreaming, but also the world of demons become aware of such presence in the dream, with their eager hunger for possessing the sleeper.
When the void devours its bearer
Through modern alchemic technology, effluences are generating new pathways towards new compounds and new species, which are produced even more intensively in times of disintegration, uncertainty, corruption, or sensual upheavals, in emergency or liminal situations, diseases and viruses not being excluded. So, we can safely bet that such emergencies will become ever more frequent, an inevitable consequence of the excitation of effluences. Emanation is the product of decay, formed by disintegration.
How to understand magic
The doctrine of magic, as it was preserved by Empedocles and described by later authors like Ficino and Newton is very precise in its outline of fluxing objects and did not really change during hundreds or thousands of years. Its underlying logic is always the same: the more altered objects are produced the more waste is produced – as magic and technology, being a parasite, cannot help but produce parasitised objects, thus waste –, 10 we are more and more enslaved and humiliated, as we have become dependent on
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
rebel resistance by proclaiming that it was the intention of the Duke of Cumberland to transport the Highlanders to America. On April 3rd, the rebels captured Blair Castle, and on the 16th the duke’s victory at Culloden proved decisive of the fate of the Stuarts.
Exactly a week after the Duke of Cumberland gained the victory, a report to that effect reached London, but there was no news from the duke himself till the 25th. His business-like account of the battle appeared in the ‘London Gazette’ next day. In the interim the London Jacobites in their places of resort asserted loudly that the duke was in full retreat; and it was whispered that if he was hopelessly beaten, the ‘Papists would rise all over the kingdom.’ But now ‘hope’ herself was beaten out of the souls of Papists and Jacobites. The military in London were in a vein of swaggering delight. They talked of the young duke’s briefly heroic address to a cavalry regiment on the point of charging. He patted the nearest man to him on the back, and cried aloud, ‘One brush, my lads, for the honour of old Cobham!’ Then was curiosity stirred in London barracks as to which regiments were to get the prize for bravery, subscribed by the Corporation of London—namely 5,000l. The duke so wisely distributed it as to rebuke nobody. Veterans at Chelsea were looking at the vacant spaces where they should hang the captured flags, and were disappointed when they heard at the Horse Guards that the duke, considering that it was said how little honour was connected with such trophies, had sent the flags to Edinburgh to be burnt by the common hangman. The Chelsea veterans, however, envied the capturers of the (four) flags; for to each man the duke gave sixteen guineas. Medals and crosses were not yet thought of. His generosity was lauded as enthusiastically as his valour.
NEWS OF CULLODEN.
While the Jacobites were overwhelming him with charges of cruelty and meanness, the friends of ‘the present happy establishment’ were circulating stories in and about London of his humanity and liberality. Soldiers of the young Chevalier’s army had wreaked their vengeance upon Mr. Rose, the minister at Nairn—on himself and his house. He was a Whig and anti-Romanist, who had favoured the escape of some prisoners taken by the Jacobite army.
The Highlanders burnt his house, and, tying the minister up, they gave him 500 lashes. The duke, on hearing of this outrage, fell into uncontrollable fury, and swore he would avenge it. If there was some savagery at and after Culloden, no wonder! Such, at least, was the London feeling among the duke’s friends. But the feeling generally was one of ecstacy at the decisive victory. Lord Bury, who had arrived on the 25th with the news direct from the duke to the king, could hardly walk along the then terraced St. James’s Street for the congratulations of the crowd. Nobody thought such a halcyon messenger was too highly rewarded with a purse of a thousand guineas, and with being nominated own aide-de-camp to King George.
A POPULAR HOLIDAY.
That 25th of April was indeed a gala day for the London mob. They had ample time for breakfast before they gathered at the ‘end of New Bond Street, in Tyburn Road’ (as Oxford Street was then called), to see the young footman, Henderson, hanged for the murder of his mistress, Lady Dalrymple. The culprit did not die ‘game,’ and the brutes were disappointed, but they found consolation in the fall of a scaffolding with all its occupants. Then they had time to pour into the Park and see four or five sergeants shot for trying to desert from King George’s service to King James’s. Moreover there was a man to be whipt somewhere in the City, and a pretty group of sight-seers assembled at Charing Cross in expectation of ‘a fellow in the pillory.’ What with these delights, and the pursuing Lord Bury with vociferations of sanguinary congratulation, the day was a thorough popular holiday.
The anxiety that had been felt in London before Culloden may be measured by the wild joy which prevailed when the news of the victory arrived. Walpole, in Arlington Street, on the evening of the 25th April, writes: ‘The town is all blazing around me as I write with fireworks and illuminations. I have some inclination to wrap up half a dozen sky-rockets to make you drink the duke’s health. Mr. Dodington, on the first report, came out with a very pretty illumination, so pretty that I believe he had it by him, ready for any occasion.’
On the same evening the Rev Mr Harris wrote from London to the mother of the future first Earl of Malmesbury, just born: ‘You cannot imagine the prodigious rejoicings that have been made this evening in every part of the town; and indeed it is a proper time for people to express their joy when the enemies of their country are thus cut off.’
On that evening Alexander Carlyle was with Smollett in the Golden Ball coffee-house, Cockspur Street. ‘London,’ he says, ‘was in a perfect uproar of joy. About nine o’clock I asked Smollett if he was ready to go, as he lived at May Fair’ (Carlyle was bound for New Bond Street on a supper engagement). ‘He said he was, and would conduct me. The mob were so riotous and the squibs so numerous and incessant that we were glad to go into a narrow entry to put our wigs into our pockets, and to take our swords from our belts and walk with them in our hands, as everybody then wore swords; and after cautioning me against speaking a word lest the mob should discover my country and become insolent, “John Bull,” says he, “is as haughty and valiant to-night, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday (Friday?) when the Highlanders were at Derby.” After we got to the head of the Haymarket through incessant fire, the doctor led me by narrow lanes where we met nobody but a few boys at a pitiful bonfire, who very civilly asked us for sixpence, which I gave them. I saw not Smollett again for some time after, when he showed Smith and me the manuscript of his “Tears of Scotland,” which was published not long after, and had such a run of approbation.’
CARLYLE AND SMOLLETT ‘TEARS OF SCOTLAND.’
Smollett was one of those Tories who, like many of the Nonjurors, were not necessarily or consequently Jacobites. They were more willing to make the best of a foreign king than to risk their liberties under an incapable bigot like James Stuart, who, save for the accident of birth, was less of an Englishman and knew less of England (in which, throughout his life, he had only spent a few months) than either of the Georges. But Smollett felt keenly the sufferings of his country, and out of the feeling sprung his verses so full of a tenderly expressed grief,—‘The Tears of Scotland!’ How that mournful ode was written in London in
this year of mournful memories for the Jacobites, no one can tell better than Walter Scott. ‘Some gentlemen having met at a tavern, were amusing themselves before supper with a game of cards, while Smollett, not choosing to play, sat down to write. One of the company (Graham of Gartmoor), observing his earnestness and supposing he was writing verses, asked him if it was not so. He accordingly read them the first sketch of the “Tears of Scotland,” consisting only of six stanzas, and on their remarking that the termination of the poem being too strongly expressed might give offence to persons whose political opinions were different, he sat down without reply and, with an air of great indignation, subjoined the concluding stanza:—
While the warm blood bedews my veins And unimpair’d remembrance reigns, Resentment of my country’s fate Within my filial breast shall beat. Yes! spite of thine insulting foe, My sympathising verse shall flow; Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn Thy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn!’
INDIGNATION VERSES.
The following were the lines which were supposed to be likely to offend the friends of the hero of Culloden; but the sentiment was shared by many who were not friends of the Stuart cause:—
Yet, when the rage of battle ceased, The victor’s rage was not appeased; The naked and forlorn must feel Devouring flames and murd’ring steel. The pious mother, doom’d to death, Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath, &c., &c.
The picture was somewhat over-drawn, but there were thousands who believed it to be true to the very letter.
CHAPTER
VII.
(1746.)
players and the playwrights were zealous Whigs throughout the rebellion. The Drury Lane company to a man became volunteers, under their manager, Mr. Lacy, who had asked the royal permission to raise a couple of hundred men, in defence of his Majesty’s person and Government. To attract loyal audiences at a time when the public could not be readily tempted to the theatre, ‘The Nonjuror’ was revived, at both houses. Two players, Macklin and Elderton, set to work to produce plays for their respective theatres, on the subject of Perkin Warbeck. While Macklin was delivering what he wrote, piecemeal, to the actors, for study, and Elderton was perspiring over his laborious gestation of blank-verse, the proprietors of the playhouse in Goodman’s Fields forestalled both by bringing out Ford’s old play, which is named after the Pretender to the throne of Henry VII. Macklin called his piece ‘Henry VII., or the Popish Impostor.’ This absurd allusion to Perkin was a shaft aimed at the actual Pretender. The Whigs approved of both title and play, and they roared at every line which they could apply against Tories and Jacobites. At both houses, occasional prologues stirred the loyal impulses or provoked the indignation of the audience. At Covent Garden, ‘Tamerlane,’ which was always solemnly brought out when the popular wrath was to be excited against France, was preceded by a patriotic prologue which Mrs. Pritchard delivered in her best manner, and Dodsley sold the next day, as fast as he could deliver copies over the counter of his shop in Pall Mall. Rich and his Covent Garden players did not turn soldiers, but he gave the house, gratis, for three days for the benefit of a scheme that was to be to the advantage of the veterans of the army; and this brought 600l. to the funds. The actors sacrificed their salaries, and charming Mrs. Cibber sang as Polly, in the ‘Beggars’
THE PLAYERS.
Opera’ more exquisitely than ever, to prove (as she said) that, ‘though she was a Catholic, she was sincerely attached to the family who was in possession of the Throne, and she acknowledged the favour and honour she had received from them.’ On the night when the first report of the victory at Culloden was circulated, Drury Lane got up a play that had not been acted for thirty years, ‘The Honours of the Army,’ and Mrs. Woffington, as ‘The Female Officer,’ ‘new dressed,’ spoke a dashing prologue. A night or two later, Theophilus Cibber wrote and delivered a prologue on the Duke of Cumberland’s victories. At Covent Garden were revived two pieces, by Dennis: ‘Liberty Asserted’ and ‘Plot and no Plot.’ Genest says of the first piece that it was revived ‘for the sake of the invectives against the French; and “Plot and no Plot,” for the sake of the cuts on the Jacobites,—at this time almost every play was revived, which might be expected to attract, from its political tendency.’
The minor, or unlicensed, theatres tempted loyal people with coarser fare,—to the same end, keeping up a hostile feeling against the French and the Jacobites. Observe with what quaint delicacy the matter is put in the following advertisements.
SADLER’S WELLS AND THE NEW WELLS.
‘As the Proprietors of Sadler’s Wells have diligently embraced every opportunity of giving their audiences satisfaction, they would have thought themselves guilty of the highest Error to have been silent upon the present happy occasion. Every Class of Britons must be pleased at the least Hint of Gratitude to the excellent Prince who has exposed himself to so many Difficulties for the sake of his country, and therefore they have endeavour’d to show a Natural Scene of what perhaps may happen to many a honest Countryman in consequence of the late happy Victory, in a new Interlude of Music, called Strephon’s Return, or the British Hero, which will be perform’d this Night, with many advantages of Dress and Decoration.’
But ‘how the wit brightens and the style refines’ in the following announcement from Mr. Yeates!
‘The Applause that was so universally express’d last Night, by the numbers of Gentlemen et cætera
CULLODEN ON THE
STAGE.
who honoured the New Wells near the London Spaw, Clerkenwell, with their Company, is thankfully acknowledg’d; but Mr. Yeates humbly hopes that the Ideas of Liberty and Courage (tho’ he confesses them upon the present Occasion extremely influencing) will not for the future so far transport his Audiences as to prove of such Detriment to his Benches; several hearty Britons, when Courage appeared (under which Character, the illustrious Duke, whom we have so much reason to admire, is happily represented) having exerted their Canes in such a Torrent of Satisfaction as to have render’d his Damage far from inconsiderable.’
The other ‘New Wells’ declined to be outdone. There too, love and liquor were shown to be the reward due to valiant Strephons returning from Culloden to London. There, they were taught to ‘hate a Frenchman like the Devil;’ and there, they and the public might see all the phases of the half-hour’s battle, and of some striking incidents before and after it, all painted on one canvas.
‘At the New Wells, the Bottom of Lemon Street, Goodman’s Fields, this present Evening will be several new Exercises of Ropedancing, Tumbling, Singing, and Dancing, with several new Scenes in grotesque Characters call’d Harlequin a Captive in France, or the Frenchman trapt at last. The whole to conclude with an exact view of our Gallant Army under the Command of their Glorious Hero passing the River Spey, giving the Rebels Battle and gaining a Complete Victory near Culloden House, with the Horse in pursuit of the Pretender.’
To these unlicensed houses, admission was gained not by entrance money, but by paying for a certain quantity of wine or punch.
MRS. WOFFINGTON.
It would, however, appear as if some of the bards, like Bubb Dodington with his transparency, had so contemplated the result of the war, as to be ready to hail any issue, and any victor One of these, the Jacobites being defeated, wrote an epilogue, ‘designed to be spoken by Mrs. Woffington, in the character of a Volunteer;’—but the poem was not finished till interest in the matter had greatly evaporated, and the
poet was told he was ‘too late.’ Of course, he shamed the rogues by printing his work,—which is one illustrating both the morals and the manners of the time. It illustrates the former by infamously indecent inuendo, and the latter by the following outburst, for some of the ideas of which the writer had rifled Addison’s ‘Freeholder.’
Joking apart, we women have strong reason To sap the progress of this popish treason; For now, when female liberty’s at stake, All women ought to bustle for its sake. Should these malicious sons of Rome prevail, Vows, convents, and that heathen thing, a veil, Must come in fashion; and such institutions Would suit but oddly with our constitutions. What gay coquette would brook a nun’s profession? And I’ve some private reasons ’gainst confession. Besides, our good men of the Church, they say (Who now, thank Heaven, may love as well as pray) Must then be only wed to cloister’d houses;— Stop! There we’re fobb’d of twenty thousand spouses! And, faith! no bad ones, as I’m told; then judge ye, Is’t fit we lose our benefit of clergy?
In Freedom’s cause, ye patriot fair, arise! Exert the sacred influence of your eyes. On valiant merit deign alone to smile, And vindicate the glory of our isle.
To no base coward prostitute our charms; Disband the lover who deserts his arms. So shall ye fire each hero to his duty, And British rights be saved by British beauty.
THE PRESS, ON CULLODEN.
The Whig press was, of course, jubilant. The papers in the opposite interest put as good a face as they could on the matter, and expressed a conviction that they ‘ventured no treason in hoping that the weather might change.’
The ‘Craftsman’ was, or affected to be, beside itself for joy at the thought that no foreign mercenaries had helped to reap the laurels at Culloden. The victory was won by British troops only; and the duke might say, like Coriolanus, ‘Alone, I did it!’ The ‘True Patriot’ insisted on some share of the laurels being awarded to the king, since he stood singly in refusing to despair of the monarchy, when all other men were, or seemed, hopeless and helpless. To which the ‘Western Journal’ added that not merely was the king far-seeing, and the duke victorious at the head of English troops without foreign auxiliaries, but that never before had an English army made its way so far into the country, to crush a Scottish foe. The ‘Journal,’ much read in all London coffee-houses resorted to by Western gentlemen, was opposed to the killing of rebels in cold blood, and could not see what profit was to be got by hanging them. This paper suggested that some benefit might be obtained by making slaves of them; not by transporting them to the Plantations, but by compelling them to serve in the herring and salmon fisheries, for the advantage of the compellers, that is, the Government!
In the ‘General Advertiser,’ a man who probably had reached the age when a sense of humanity fails before any of the other senses, asked what objection was to be found with such terms as ‘Extermination,’ ‘Extirpation,’ and similar significances applied to those savages, the Highlanders? This ogre, in his easy chair, cared not to see that, in driving out a whole race, more cruelty would be deliberately inflicted on innocent human beings, than the savage Highlanders had inflicted in their fury And indeed, the latter did not spare their own people, if the milkmaids’ song be true, in which the illustrative line occurs, ‘We dare na gae a milkin’ for fear o’ Charlie’s men.’ However, the least punishment which the correspondent of the ‘Advertiser’ would accept was a general transportation of the race to Africa and America, and a settlement on their lands of English tenants at easy rents! This sort of Highlander-phobia and the threatened application of severe laws which included the suppression of what has been called ‘the Garb of old Gael,’ or Highland dress, gave rise to some good-natured satire. ‘We hear,’ said one of the newspapers, ‘that the dapper wooden Highlanders, who guard so heroically the doors of snuff shops,
SAVAGERY AND SATIRE.
intend to petition the Legislature in order that they may be excused from complying with the Act of Parliament with regard to their change of dress, alleging that they had ever been faithful subjects to his Majesty, having constantly supplied his Guards with a pinch out of their Mulls, when they marched by them; and so far from engaging in any Rebellion, that they have never entertained a rebellious thought, whence they humbly hope that they shall not be put to the expense of buying new Cloaths.’
THE CARICATURIS TS.
So spoke the fun-loving spirits; but there were baser spirits on the conquering side, and these speedily exhibited an indecent exultation. The ignominious caricaturists attracted crowds to the print shops to gaze at the facility with which vulgar minds can degrade solemn and lofty themes. On the one hand, the defeat of the Highlanders and the consternation of Sullivan, the standard-bearer in Charles Edward’s army, attracted laughter. On the other hand, the too early, and altogether vain, boast conveyed on the young Chevalier’s banner, ‘Tandem triumphans,’ was more legitimately satirised in an engraving in which the standard-bearer is an ass, and on his standard are three crowns surmounted by a coffin, with the motto ‘Tandem triumphans,’ done into English by the Duke of Cumberland, as equivalent to ‘Every dog has his day;’—which, after all, was no great compliment to the duke. The triple crown and coffin represented the issue of crown or grave; in one print the Devil is seen flying with it over Temple Bar, as if it merited to be planted there, as were afterwards the spiked heads of Towneley and of Fletcher.
Jacobite sympathies were attracted and puzzled by a portrait of ‘The young Chevalier,’ which was to be seen, for sale, in every printshop. Alexander Carlyle gives an amusing account of it in his ‘Autobiography.’ ‘As I had seen,’ he says, ‘the Chevalier Prince Charles frequently in Scotland, I was appealed to, if a print that was selling in all the shops was not like him? My answer was, that it had not the least resemblance. Having been taken one night, however, to a meeting of the Royal Society, by Microscope Baker, there was
PSEUDOPORTRAIT OF CHARLES EDWARD.
introduced a Hanoverian Baron, whose likeness was so strong to the print which passed for the young Pretender, that I had no doubt that, he being a stranger, the printsellers had got him sketched out, that they might make something of it before the vera effigies could be had. The latter, when it could at last be procured, was advertised in cautious terms, as ‘A curious Head, painted from the Life, by the celebrated M. Torcque, and engraved in France, by J. G. Will, with proper decorations in a new taste.’ Beneath the portrait, the following verses were inscribed:—
‘Few know my face, though all men do my fame, Look strictly and you’ll quickly guess my name. Through deserts, snows, and rain I made my way, My life was daily risk’d to gain the day. Glorious in thought, but now my hopes are gone, Each friend grows shy, and I’m at last undone.’
Fear of him, and of his followers, was far from having died out. A letter in the ‘Malmesbury Correspondence,’ dated May, might almost have been written by the advocate of Extermination, in the ‘Advertiser;’—the rev. writer says: ‘A Bill is now preparing and will soon be brought into the House of Lords, for putting the Highlands of Scotland under quite a new regulation, and you may be assured, until some bill is passed effectually to subdue that herd of savages, we shall never be free from alarms of invasion in the North of England.’
Lord Stair, then in London, was more hopeful, and expressed a belief that the king would now have weight in the affairs of Europe. ‘Fifty battalions and fifty squadrons well employed, can cast the balance which way his Majesty pleases.’ Derby captains now looked to shake themselves out of mere tavern-life; while spirited young fellows thought of commissions, and the figure they would cut in new uniforms.
Meanwhile, the Government was not meanly hostile to their dead enemies. The Duke of Ormond, the boldest and frankest of conspirators against the Hanoverian succession; the man who more than once would have
THE DUKE OF ORMOND.
invaded his country at the head of foreign troops; he who had fostered rebellion, and maintained foiled rebels, during his thirty years’ exile, had, at last, died in his eighty-third year. King and ministers made no opposition to the interment of this splendid archtraitor in Westminster Abbey. His anonymous biographer (1747), after stating that the duke died, on November 14th, 1745, at Avignon, says: ‘On the 18th, his body was embalmed by four surgeons and three physicians, and in the following month, May, as a bale of goods, brought through France to England, and lodg’d in the Jerusalem Chamber, and soon after, decently enterr’d.’
There was something more than mere ‘decency.’ In the ‘General Advertiser,’ May 23rd, it is announced, but without a word of comment on the great Jacobite: —‘Last night, about Eleven o’Clock, the Corps of the late Duke of Ormond was, after lying in State, in the Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Abbey, interr’d in great Funeral Pomp and Solemnity, in the Ormond Vault in King Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, the whole Choir attending, and the Ceremony was perform’d, by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster.’
BURIAL OF ORMOND.
But the popular attention was directed to the other ‘Duke.’ Whatever Tories may have said at the time, or people generally, since that period as to the character of the Duke of Cumberland, he was the popular hero from the moment he arrived in London, after the victory at Culloden. The papers were full of his praises. They lauded not only his valour but his piety. After the battle, so they said, he had gone unattended over the battle-field, and he was not only seen in profound meditation, but was heard to exclaim,—his hands on his breast, and his eyes raised to heaven—‘Lord! what am I that I should be spared, when so many brave men lie dead upon the spot?’ Even Scotsmen have owned that the duke attributed his victory to God, alone, and that he was unmoved by the adulation of that large body of Englishmen who were grateful at having been relieved by him from a great danger. They compared him with the Black Prince, who won the day at Poictiers, when he was about the same age as the duke, when he triumphed at Culloden. The latter was then in his twenty-sixth year.
THE QUESTION OF INHUMANITY
The orderly-books of the Duke of Cumberland, recently published, fail to confirm the reports of his cruelty after Culloden. The Jacobites exaggerated his severity, and they gave the provocation. That an order was given to the Highlanders to refuse quarter to the troops under the Duke of Cumberland is proved by Wolfe’s well-known letter. The only trace of retaliatory rigour is to be found in the following entry in the above book (Maclachlan’s ‘William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland,’ p. 293): ‘Inverness, April 17th.—The ‘Officers next from Duty to come from Camp, in order to divide and search the Town for Rebels, their effects, stores, and baggage. A Captain and 50 Men to march immediately to the field of Battle, and search all cottages in the neighbourhood for Rebels. The Officers and Men will take notice that the public orders of the Rebels yesterday were to give us no quarter.’ In Wolfe’s letter (he was then on the staff, and one of Hawley’s aides-de-camp), written on the day the above order was issued, that young officer says: ‘Orders were publicly given in the rebel army, the day before the action, that no quarter should be given to our troops.’ The latter, it is equally true, had said on leaving London for the North that they would neither give nor take quarter; but they had no orders to such cruel effect. It was soldierly swagger. At the very outset, what savagery there was, was fostered by the London gentlemen who lived at home at ease. Walpole suggested if Cumberland were sent against the Jacobite army, ‘it should not be with that sword of Mercy with which the present Family have governed their people. Can rigour be displaced against bandits?’ But, if the young duke should be full of compassion after victory, Walpole rejoiced to think that in General Hawley there was a military magistrate of some fierceness, who would not sow the seeds of disloyalty by too easily pardoning the rebels.
INSTIGATORS OF CRUELTY.
It was said in the London newspapers that the French did not act at the Battle of Culloden, by reason of their being made acquainted with the order of giving no quarter to our troops; and that the French Commanding Officer declared that rather ‘than comply with such a Resolution he would resign himself and Troops into the Hands of the Duke of
THE PRISONERS IN LONDON. Cumberland; for his directions were to fight and not to commit Murder.’
While London was awaiting the return of the hero, whose triumphs had already been celebrated, the anti-Jacobites were disappointed by being deprived of greeting in their rough way the arrival of the captured rebel lords. As early, indeed, as November 1745, Charles Radcliffe (calling himself Lord Derwentwater) had been taken with his son on board the ‘Soleil,’ bound for Scotland and high treason, and these had been got into the Tower, at peril to their lives. But others were expected. The Earl of Cromartie and his son, Lord Macleod, had been taken at Dunrobin the day before Culloden. The Earl of Kilmarnock had been captured in the course of the fight; Lord Balmerino a day or two after. The old Marquis of Tullibardine, who had been in the fray of ’15, the attempt in ’19, and had escaped after both, missed now his old luck; that passed to his brother, Lord George Murray, who got clear off to the Continent. Lord Tullibardine being sorely pressed and in great distress, sought the house of Buchanan of Drummakill. It is a question whether Tullibardine asked asylum or legally surrendered himself. In either case, he was given up. The above lords were despatched to London by sea in two separate voyages. Thus they were spared the insults undergone thirty years before by Lord Derwentwater and his unfortunate companions. On June 29th, Walpole writes: ‘Lady Cromartie went down incog. to Woolwich to see her son pass by, without the power of speaking to him. I never heard a more melancholy instance of affection.’ Lord Elcho, who had escaped, solicited a pardon; but, says Walpole, ‘as he has distinguished himself beyond all the rebel commanders by brutality and insults and cruelty to our prisoners, I think he is likely to remain where he is.’ Walpole was of opinion that the young Chevalier was allowed to escape. He also says: ‘The duke gave Brigadier Mordaunt the Pretender’s coach, on condition he rode up to London in it. “That I will, sir,” said he, “and drive till it stops of its own accord at the Cocoa Tree”—the Jacobite Coffee House in St. James’s Street.’
THE DUKE IN ABERDEEN.
With leafy June came the duke; but before him arrived his baggage. When that baggage which the duke and General Hawley brought with them from Scotland was unpacked in London, the articles of which it consisted must have excited some surprise. To show what it was, it is necessary to go northward to the house of Mr. Thompson, advocate, in the Great Row, Aberdeen. The duke had his quarters in that house, after his state entry into the granite city, in February 1746. Six weeks were the Thompsons constrained to bear with their illustrious but unprofitable lodger They had to supply him with coals, candles, the rich liquids in the advocate’s cellars, and all the milk of his sole cow. The bed and table linen was both used and abused. The duke is even charged with breaking up a press which was full of sugar, of which he requisitioned every grain. At the end of the six weeks, when about to march from the city, the duke left among the three servants of the house as many guineas. This was not illiberal; but Mr. and Mrs. Thompson were chiefly aggrieved by his Highness’s lack of courtesy. He went away without asking to see them, or leaving any acknowledgment of their hospitality by sending even a curt thank ye! General Hawley behaved even more rudely in the house of Mrs. Gordon of Hallhead. Before he took possession it was understood that everything was to be locked up, and that the general was only to have the use of the furniture. This gallant warrior, as soon as he had flung his plumed hat on the table, demanded the keys. Much disputation followed, with angry squabbling, and the keys were only given up on the general’s threat that he would smash every lock in the house. The yielding came too late. General and duke together declared all the property of Mrs. Gordon to be confiscated, except the clothes she wore. ‘Your loyalty, Madam,’ said Major Wolfe to her, ‘is not suspected;’ which made the poor lady only the more perplexed as to why she was looted. The major politely offered to endeavour to get restored to her any article she particularly desired to recover ‘I should like to have all my tea back,’ said Mrs. Gordon. ‘It is good tea,’ said the major. ‘Tea is scarce in the army. I do not think it recoverable.’ It was the same with the chocolate and many other things agreeable to the stomach. ‘At all events,’ said the lady, ‘let me
LOOTING.
have my china again!’ ‘It is very pretty china,’ replied the provoking major, ‘there is a good deal of it; and we are fond of china ourselves; but, we have no ladies travelling with us. I think you should have some of the articles.’ Mrs. Gordon, however, obtained nothing. She petitioned the duke, and he promised restitution; but, says the lady herself, ‘when I sent for a pair of breeches for my son, for a little tea for myself, for a bottle of ale, for some flour to make bread, because there was none to be bought in the town, all was refused me!’ ‘In fact, Hawley, on the eve of his departure,’ Mrs. Gordon tells us, ‘packed up every bit of china I had, all my bedding and table linen, every book, my repeating clock, my worked screen, every rag of my husband’s clothes, the very hat, breeches, night-gown, shoes, and what shirts there were of the child’s; twelve tea-spoons, strainer and tongs, the japanned board on which the chocolate and coffee cups stood; and he put them on board a ship in the night time.’
Out of this miscellaneous plunder, a tea equipage and a set of coloured table china, addressed to the Duke of Cumberland at St. James’s, reached their destination. With what face his Highness could show to his London friends the valuable china he had stolen from a lady whose loyalty, he allowed, was above suspicion, defies conjecture. The spoons, boy’s shirts, breeches, and meaner trifles, were packed up under an address to General Hawley, London. ‘A house so plundered,’ wrote the lady, ‘I believe was never heard of. It is not 600l. would make up my loss; nor have I at this time a single tablecloth, napkin, or towel, teacup, glass, or any one convenience.’ One can hardly believe that any but the more costly articles reached London. Moreover, whatever censure the Londoners may have cast upon the plunderers, the duke was not very ill thought of by the Aberdeen authorities. When the duke was perhaps sipping his tea from the cups, or banquetting his friends at St. James’s off Mrs. Gordon’s dinner-service, a deputation from Aberdeen brought to his Highness the ‘freedom’ of the city, with many high compliments on the bravery and good conduct of the victor at Culloden!
THE DUKE AND HIS PLUNDER.
The duke got tired of his tea-set. He is said to have presented it to one of the daughters of husseydom, and the damsel sold it to a
dealer in such things. A friend of Mrs. Gordon’s saw the set exposed for sale in the dealer’s window, and on inquiry he learnt, from the dealer himself, through what clean hands it had come into his possession.
If report might be credited the Duke of Cumberland brought with him to London, and in his own carriage, a human head, which he believed to be that of Charles Edward! Young Roderick Mackenzie called to the soldiers who shot him down in the Braes of Glenmorristen, ‘Soldiers, you have killed your lawful prince!’ These words, uttered to divert pursuit from the young Chevalier, were believed, and when Roderick died, the soldiers cut off his head and brought it to the Duke of Cumberland’s quarters. Robert Chambers, in his ‘History of the Rebellion,’ qualifies with an ‘it is said’ the story that the duke stowed away the head in his chaise, and carried it to London. Dr. Chambers adds, as a fact, that Richard Morrison, Charles Edward’s bodyservant, and a prisoner at Carlisle, was sent for to London, as the best witness to decide the question of identity. Morrison fainted at this trial of his feelings; but regaining composure, he looked steadily at the relic, and declared that it was not the head of his beloved master.
A HUMAN HEAD. ‘SWEET WILLIAM.’
But all minor matters were forgotten in the general joy. Now the duke was back in person, loyal London went mad about ‘the son of George, the image of Nassau!’ Flattery, at once flowery and poetical, was heaped upon him. A flower once dedicated to William III. was now dedicated to him. The white rose in a man’s button-hole or on a lady’s bosom, in the month of June, was not greater warranty of a Jacobite than the ‘Sweet-William,’ with its old appropriate name, was of a Whig to the back-bone. Of the poetical homage, here is a sample:—
The pride of France is lily-white, The rose in June is Jacobite; The prickly thistle of the Scot Is Northern knighthood’s badge and lot. But since the Duke’s victorious blows, The Lily, Thistle, and the Rose
All droop and fade and die away: Sweet William’s flower rules the day. ’Tis English growth of beauteous hue, Clothed, like our troops, in red and blue. No plant with brighter lustre grows, Except the laurel on his brows.
FLATTERY
Poetasters converted Horace’s laudation of Augustus into flattery of Cumberland. Fables were written in which sweet William served at once for subject and for moral. Epigrams from Martial, or from a worse source—the writers’ own brains—were fresh but bluntly pointed in his favour. Some of them compared him to the sun, at whose warmth ‘vermin cast off their coats and took wing.’ Others raised him far above great Julius; for Cumberland ‘conquers, coming; and before he sees.’ Sappho, under the name of Clarinda, told the world, on hearing a report of the duke’s illness, that if Heaven took him, it would be the death of her, and that the world would lose a Hero and a Maid together. Heroic writers, trying Homer’s strain, and not finding themselves equal to it, blamed poor Homer, and declared that the strings of his lyre were too weak to bear the strain of the modern warrior’s praise. Occasional prologues hailed him as ‘the martial boy,’ on the day he entered his twenty-sixth year. Pinchbeck struck a medal in his honour; punsters in coffee-houses rang the changes on metal and mettle, and Pinchbeck became almost as famous for the medal as he subsequently became for his invention of new candle-snuffers, when the poets besought him to ‘snuff the candle of the state, which burned a little blue.’ In fine, ballads, essays, apologues, prose and poetry, were exhausted in furnishing homage to the hero. The homage culminated when the duke’s portrait appeared in all the shops, bearing the inscription, ‘E H !’
