Magic in Merlin's Realm Quotes

“Some occultists themselves believed that the authorities were showing an interest in their activities. Ronald ‘Chalky’ White, a prominent follower of the early pioneer of Neopagan witchcraft Robert Cochrane, claimed he was once visited by MI5 officers in the 1970s and questioned about rituals in which he assumed the identity of Merlin as ‘kingmaker’.119 It is possible that White made up this story in order to inflate his own importance, and it seems somewhat unlikely that British intelligence took seriously magical ritual performances in which members of the covine took on roles such as King Arthur, Merlin, Queen Elizabeth and John Dee.”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“The political term ‘cabal’, which derived from the Hebrew Kabbalah and referred to a secret group seeking to hold onto power, originally retained some of its mystical significance in Charles II’s reign. In 1676, the Royalist newspaper Poor Robin’s Intelligencer satirically reported that the ‘Green ribbon’d cabal’ (the Green Ribbon Club, whose members would go on to form the core of the Whig party) was meeting with Rosicrucians, alchemists and Freemasons.”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“In 1680, the bishop of Norwich remarked that astrology ‘lies in the midway between magic and imposture’,132 suggesting that critics of astrology were now as likely to regard it as fraudulent as morally impermissible. Publication of learned speculations on the nature of astrology declined after 1688, although almanacs remained popular. The astrologer John Partridge, an ardent Whig who returned from exile after the revolution, maintained traditional astrological methods – to the point where he stubbornly rejected Copernican heliocentrism, by then virtually universally accepted. Partridge’s rival, the pro-Jacobite John Gadbury, embraced a heliocentric universe with equal fervour.133”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“one historian has described the eighteenth century as ‘the age of credulousness tempered in places by a combination of curiosity and doubt’.91”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“During the Interregnum, the learned Polish émigré, Samuel Hartlib (1600–62), advocated the establishment of a ‘Solomon’s House’ for the sharing of all wisdom, after the model proposed in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). Hartlib received the support of many future fellows of the Royal Society,14 and in 1649 his follower John Hall addressed Parliament on the need to advance learning in ‘chymistry’.”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“The Scottish royal council saw witches as a national problem to be dealt with on a national scale,32 and only the prosecution of treason was more tightly managed by central government. This meant that witch-hunting was one of the ways in which central government could impose its authority on local magnates, allowing Scotland to emerge as a modern nation state.33 Witch-hunting served to legitimise the Scottish state and may have been one of the ways in which the state sought stability at times of anxiety and turmoil.34 In other words, the one thing the state could be relied upon to do was hunt witches. Witch-hunting lay at the foundation of the ‘theocratic government’ of early modern Scotland, legitimating the Stewarts’ ‘godly’ rule as divinely ordained kings.35 Furthermore, the propaganda of Scottish reformers managed to create the impression of a much closer connection between witchcraft and Catholicism than English Protestants ever managed. Even Queen Mary herself was not immune from suspicion. The clergyman William Harrison was convinced that Mary practised sorcery and that she married Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley in 1566 on the advice of witches, who promised Queen Elizabeth’s death and Mary’s succession to the English throne.36 When Mary gave birth to the future James VI in June 1566, it was widely reported that the countess of Atholl attempted to use sympathetic magic to transfer Mary’s labour pains to another person, perhaps with Mary’s connivance.37”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“He saw three women by going, And those three women then thought he Three weird sisters like to be. The first he heard say going by: ‘Lo, yonder the thane of Cromarty!’ The other sister said again: ‘Of Moray yonder I see the thane.’ The third said: ‘Yonder I see the King’.”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“Emboldened by the new atmosphere of hostility to occult practices, the Kentish magistrate Reginald Scot published his avowedly sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, which took aim at Leicester and, without naming him, at Dee as well.174 However, the change in atmosphere meant that not only the overt practice of magic but also the ‘prophetic politics’ beloved of Dee and sustained by astrology came under attack.175 Even the use of occult imagery in Elizabeth’s cult of personality met with a frosty reception. In 1590, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a wide-ranging mythological epic poem directed at Elizabeth and suffused with alchemical, Neoplatonic and Hermetic symbolism, gained the poet little favour. It has been suggested that the poem’s heady mix of patriotic imagery and prophetic enthusiasm may have been linked to Dee’s Arthurian theories about the ‘British empire’,176 but publication came at the wrong time. In England in the 1590s ‘the spirit of reaction’ prevailed against ‘the daring spiritual adventures of the Renaissance’.177 Nevertheless, in spite of official hostility to magic, Elizabeth remained fascinated by alchemy and continued to hope for the Philosophers’ Stone, employing Dee in alchemical experiments from July 1590. Elizabeth also began her own personal correspondence with Edward Kelley, promising him incentives to return to England as her personal alchemist.178 However, by May 1591 Burghley had lost patience with Kelley’s claims. Meanwhile, the alchemist was imprisoned in Bohemia by Rudolf II for killing another man in a duel.179 Dee may have temporarily won his way back into Elizabeth’s favour in June by claiming occult knowledge of a Spanish invasion,180 but the subsequent discovery of threats to the queen’s life that summer by William Hacket and other messianic Protestant sectaries did not shed a very flattering light on Dee’s style of political prophecy.181”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“Nevertheless, an eloquent testimony to Henry III’s occult interests survives in the form of an exquisite inlaid marble ‘Cosmati’ pavement in front of the high altar of Westminster Abbey. Restoration of this pavement was completed in 2010, revealing a pattern laid down in 1268. Modelled ultimately on the marble pavement marking the ‘centre of the world’ on which the Eastern Roman emperors were crowned in Hagia Sophia, at the centre of the Westminster pavement is a disc of Egyptian onyx on the spot where the throne is placed for a coronation. An inscription around this sphere of marble by the monk John Flete (c. 1398–1466) identifies it as a representation of the ‘macrocosm’, the spherical medieval universe and its elements.25 The placement of the coronation chair above a representation of the macrocosm is highly suggestive, and could mean that Henry intended the pavement’s mimicry of the pattern of the universe to channel astrological forces from the stars into the person of the king. The Hermetic principle ‘as above, so below”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

“Bacon understood the political significance of alchemy as a source of wealth to the crown. He also speculated on the numerological importance of the number five to the defence of the realm in the form of the Cinque Ports (Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, New Romney and Hastings).21 Bacon’s introduction to the Secreta distinguished legitimate from false astrology, claiming that the Church Fathers had attacked only a false kind of astrology, just as they inveighed against debased forms of the true sciences of geomancy (divination by earth), hydromancy (divination by water), aeromancy (divination by air) and pyromancy (divination by fire). Bacon went so far as to advise Henry III to do nothing without the advice of learned astrologers.”
― Francis Young, Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain