Occult London E-Book

Merlin Coverley

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 259

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry, lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations. Occult London rediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman, to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London's literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London's most resonant occult locations. Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city.

Leseprobe

OCCULT LONDON

London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry, lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations.Occult Londonrediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman, to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack, to thefin de siècleheyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London’s literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London’s most resonant occult locations.

Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city.

About the author

Merlin Coverley is a writer and bookseller. He is the author of London Writing, Psychogeography, Utopia, The Art of Wandering and South.

Praise for Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography

‘The word psychogeography has become common coinage; well, at least in London literary circles. Merlin Coverley informs us that the word was first used by the Letterist group (forerunners to the Situationist International), in Paris in the 1950s. But no one seems sure exactly what it means. In the introduction, the author asks, “Are we talking about a predominantly literary movement or a political strategy, a series of new age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices?”’ – Jah Wobble, Independent on Sunday

‘This little book does exactly what an introduction should; it examines, explains, and whets the appetite...It has an extensive bibliography and an index of websites, research into which has been clearly and cogently utilised. It is a short, but valuable, book’ – Niall Griffiths, The Telegraph

‘A short book that offers an explanation and definition of this widely used term, and an analysis of the key figures and their work’ – Shaun Morris

‘Now Merlin Coverley has written a short guide to psychogeography for beginners. It traces a line from English metrographers such as Daniel Defoe, through Thomas De Quincey and Arthur Machen, right up to Iain Sinclair. It also examines the emergence of the flâneur, and in so doing not only offers thumbnail sketches of some of the writings of Poe and Baudelaire, but suggests that psychogeography is a mode of urban counter-surveillance largely restricted to Paris and London’ – Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman

‘It would be a fitting tribute to Coverley’s unfussy and informative book if it encouraged people in other cities to try psychogeography’ – Stuart Kelly, Scotland On Sunday

‘An excellent overview of a tradition that can be tricky to pin down and a great portal for loads of further reading’ – Hugh Marwood

‘Highly recommended’ – The Cauldron

To Cate & Orla

The secret routines are uncovered at risk

& the point is

that the objective is nonsense

& the scientific approach a bitter farce

unless it is shot through with high occulting

fear & need & awe of mysteries &

does not demean or explain

in scholarly babytalk

Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat (1975)

Introduction

The best place to start finding out about magic is not Cairo or Calcutta, Paris or Prague, but London. Just as the English language has grown to become the dominant world language in science, diplomacy and commerce, so fate and history have decreed that England, and in particular its capital, has over the centuries become the most important repository and breeding-ground of the magical arts in all the world.

Philip Carr-Gomm & Richard Heygate, The Book of English Magic1

London is a city whose origins are obscure and whose identity is bound up with the mythical and the legendary, the hidden and the occult. In the absence of any solid evidence, London’s pre-Roman history remains a mystery, the most influential voice belonging to the twelfth-century cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, c.1136) seeks to explain the origins of Roman Londinium through recourse to the city of Troy and the figure of King Brutus:

Once he had divided up his kingdom, Brutus decided to build a capital. In pursuit of this plan, he visited every part of the land in search of a suitable spot. He came at length to the River Thames, walked up and down its banks and so chose a site suited to his purpose. There then he built a city and called it Troia Nova. It was known by this name for long ages after, but finally by a corruption of the word it came to be called Trinovantum.2

As the story goes, Brutus, the Trojan great-grandson of Aeneas and descendent of Judah, established the city of Trinovantum on the bank of the Thames in c.1100 BC. But it was much later, in 113 BC, that the city was refortified by King Lud who, having constructed the walls and towers, renamed it in his own honour as Caer Lud, the name gradually giving way to Caerlundein, Londinium, and finally London. Buried at Ludgate, the westernmost gate of the city wall, he is remembered today in the names of Ludgate Hill, Circus, Square and Broadway.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account was no doubt born of a competitive desire to provide London with a history as old and as grand as that of Rome itself. And these early myths and counter-myths, in which the more straightforward Roman history is welded to an exotic, but wholly unsubstantiated, strand of Celtic folklore, demonstrate the way in which London’s past remains a contested one, as new histories, both the official and the more unorthodox, continue to be written. Indeed, in Tudor times, a new version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tale was to emerge, in which Brutus captures the two native giants, Gog and Magog, only to return them to London to be used as porters at the gates of his palace. These two figures have since come to be seen as guardians of the city, their effigies frequently used to symbolise London in displays of civic pageantry, and today their statues can be found inside the Guildhall.3

Of course, an attempt to provide an exhaustive account of London’s occult heritage would result in a history as extensive as any of those which aim to capture the city in its entirety. For London’s occult history is less a chapter within a larger work than an alternative method of apprehending the city, albeit an unconventional one. Inevitably, therefore, this guide is forced to limit itself to an illustrative sample from London’s occult archive, a brief introduction to a subject whose mastery would require a lifetime’s study. Regarding the occult not simply as a series of isolated episodes, but rather as a continuous history which unfolds, largely unacknowledged, behind that of our everyday experience, I have chosen to focus chronologically upon those historical periods in which the occult has come momentarily to the forefront of the public imagination, before returning once again to a position of obscurity.

From the Elizabethan era, in which the occult was often indistinguishable from the emerging New Science of the Enlightenment, to the occult reconfiguration of the city in the early eighteenth century; from the flowering of occult interest in fin de siècle London, to the occult revival that we are experiencing today. Throughout these periods, London’s history may be characterised as a tale of two cities, in which the rational façade of scientific and economic progress is offset by the existence of another city, governed by quite different imperatives. This other London, which exists in tandem with our own, has provoked visions of the city celebrated in the works of such figures as Blake, De Quincey and Stevenson, while more recently writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair have demonstrated their own engagement with the Matter of London.

But when we talk of the occult, what exactly do we mean? Definitions seem to be as nebulous as the supernatural phenomena they claim to describe.4 The only point of unity appears to be an academic dismissiveness towards the occult itself and an uneasy mistrust of its practitioners: ‘Claims for the ubiquity of occult influence on aesthetic culture are commonly received as allegations, reflecting scholarly fear of the occult. It seems to be widely believed that any contact with the occult is rather like contact with an infectious and incurable disease.’5 Elsewhere, the occult has been described as ‘a residual category, a wastebasket, for knowledge claims that are deviant in some way’6, reflecting the perception of this subject as home to a motley collection of disreputable pseudo-sciences and bizarre practices.

There are a number of adjectives which are widely employed, often interchangeably, to suggest an occult influence, amongst them: uncanny, secret, hidden, esoteric and obscure. The historian of the occult, Gary Lachman, notes the root of the word in the Latin occulo, to hide, and links its use with the astronomical term ‘occultation’, in which ‘one heavenly body obscures or “occludes” another by passing in front of it’.7I will not be pursuing a rigorous attempt at definition here, but will instead be employing the term in a twofold sense, in reference both to the esoteric traditions with which the occult is commonly identified and, more broadly, to those places, people and works which have been hidden or overlooked, and which such a tradition seeks to explore. For ultimately, the occult may be regarded as much more than merely a footnote to the official version. Instead it comes to symbolise those neglected quarters of the city and their forgotten histories, which continue to resist all attempts to overwrite or erase them, and whose very peculiarity provides a welcome corrective to the more anodyne aspects of London’s carefully managed past.

Notes:

1 Philip Carr-Gomm & Richard Heygate, The Book of English Magic, London: John Murray, 2009, p. 3.

2 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. by Lewis Thorpe, London: Penguin, 1966, p. 74.

3 For an account of London’s contested pre-history and the founding myths of the city, see John Matthews, ‘New Troy: London Before History’, in The Secret Lore of London, ed. by John Matthews & Caroline Wise, London: Coronet, 2016, 31-49. Here he writes: ‘What we seem to have, in this account of the battle between Brutus and Gogmagog, is a distant, garbled memory of the overthrow of one set of people by another, and of their own subsequent enslavement at the hands of incomers from the fabled city of Troy. […] Whether there is any historical foundation for any of this is doubtful, and the notion must remain purely speculative at this level. There is, however, a deeper stratum of belief, in the power of the hidden, inner guardians of the Land that accounts for the ability of these stories to move us still.’ (Matthews, p. 47).

4 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th Edition; Oxford: OUP, 2004) provides the following definition: Occult (adj.) Kept secret, esoteric; recondite, mysterious, beyond the range of ordinary knowledge; involving the supernatural, mystical, magical; not obvious on inspection. Occult (vb.) Conceal, cut off from view by passing in front, (usu. Astron., of concealing body much greater in apparent size than concealed body).

5 Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, WB Yeats and the Occult, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, p. 12.

6 Marcello Truzzi, ‘Definition and Dimensions of the Occult: Towards a Sociological Perspective’, Journal of Popular Culture, 5: 2 (1971/2), 635-646, p. 635.

7 Gary Lachman, ed., The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, Cambridge: Dedalus, 2003, p. 11.

Chapter One

The Occult in Elizabethan London

The Elizabethan world was populated, not only by tough sea-men, hard-headed politicians, serious theologians. It was a world of spirits, good and bad, fairies, demons, witches, ghosts, conjurors.

Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age.1

Elizabethan London was the boom-town of Europe. Occupying roughly the same area as today’s financial heartland, the City, London more than doubled in population during Elizabeth’s long reign (1558-1603), dwarfing its domestic rivals, Bristol and Norwich, and soon becoming the largest and most congested city in Europe. The Elizabethan city was walled on three sides and open to the Thames on its southern perimeter. These walls were gated in the North at Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, with the Tower to the East and the prisons of Ludgate and Newgate to the West. The Thames, London’s busiest thoroughfare, was spanned only by a single bridge, whose gatehouse tower was adorned with the heads of executed traitors. On the Surrey side, the borough of Southwark, with its famous playhouses and ‘stews’ or brothels, soon became home to those seeking refuge from the jurisdiction of the City. This was a city of sharp contrasts, as extreme wealth and abject poverty stood side by side and disease-ridden slums soon gave way to pockets of rural tranquillity. But transcending these differences in status, the average Londoner was united by a belief in, and an observance of, the rituals and practises of occult power.

The format of such occult beliefs varied widely, from the practical application of folk-medicine on the one hand, to the arcane formulae of the astrologer on the other. But it was the medieval Catholic Church that provided the most widely accessible and officially sanctioned form of ritualistic magic; confession and absolution, conjuration and consecration, exorcism and healing all offered an outlet, to rich and poor, to assuage the trials of everyday life. Of course, it was exactly such an outlet that was to be challenged by the Reformation as the newly established Church of England ‘almost literally took the magic out of Christianity’.2 Elizabeth was to annul the brief return to Catholicism espoused by her predecessor, Mary, and in formally adopting this alternative brand of Christianity she was to deny access to these magical resources. What had previously been interpreted literally was now to become symbolic as the emphasis moved from the miraculous to the mundane; prayer and unceasing effort were now the order of the day.

Predictably enough, this official version had little to offer the mass of Londoners who were seeking to escape the deprivations of their everyday existence rather than attempting to mend their ways and, in the absence of an institution able to provide such relief, alternatives were sought elsewhere. With no shortage of men and women willing to fulfil such a role, Elizabethan London soon became home to an emerging class of occult professionals, variously termed ‘cunning men’, ‘wise women’, ‘blessers’, ‘charmers’, ‘conjurors’, ‘sorcerers’, and, of course, ‘witches’.3

Dr John Dee (1527-1608)

The extraordinary life of Dr John Dee exemplifies the contradictory role of the occult in the London of his day. Dee is, as Frances Yates proclaims, the true Renaissance Man, his abilities as an alchemist and conjuror of angels complemented by concrete achievements in mathematics and science, and tempered by a fervent sense of patriotism and devout Christian beliefs.

Like his fellow Londoner, Simon Forman, Dee was a prolific diarist whose records have been preserved, largely thanks to the antiquary Elias Ashmole, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is here that one may find the horoscope of Dee’s birth, which took place on 13 July 1527 and which is marked by the latitude of 51 degrees and 32 seconds north of the equator, the approximate latitude of London.4 It is probable that Dee was born in the City where his father was employed as a textile merchant. In 1542, at the age of 15, Dee entered Cambridge University and having demonstrated a precocious ability in mathematics and astronomy, he became a fellow of Trinity College in 1547. For the next few years, Dee travelled widely on the Continent, studying alongside the cartographer Gerard Mercator in Louvain, before returning to London in 1553. By this time Dee’s father, who had prospered during the property boom in London following the dissolution of the monasteries, was now caught up in the anti-protestant backlash that accompanied Queen Mary’s reign. Dee was soon forced to fend for himself and he too came under suspicion and was arrested in 1555, possibly as a result of compiling a horoscope for Mary’s sister, Elizabeth. During this period, magic and science were judged as largely indistinguishable and horoscopes were illegal, amounting to a form of illicit surveillance.5 In his biography of Dee, Benjamin Woolley has described the inter-relationship between magic and science in Dee’s work:

Thus, at the heart of Dee’s science lay what has come to be called ‘natural’ (as opposed to supernatural) magic. When God created the universe itself, an act that Dee accepted to be beyond scientific understanding, He let loose a divine force which causes the planets to turn, the Sun to rise and the Moon to wax and wane. Magic, as Dee saw it, is the human ability to tap into this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology.6

In 1558, Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne, entering London to a rapturous reception less than a week after Mary’s death. Dee was now in the clear and it was he who was instructed to use his astrological skills to choose an auspicious date for her coronation. Having chosen 15 June 1559, Dee was now elevated from a position of shame and suspicion to the role of ‘intelligencer’, an Elizabethan term describing ‘a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy’.7 For the next five years there is no historical record of Dee’s activities although it is probable that he used this time in a study of the Cabbala, the ancient form of Hebrew mysticism combining words and numbers to reveal the hidden language of God. In 1564, at the age of 37, Dee published his most famous occult work, the Monas Hieroglyphica (The Hieroglyphic Monad), in which he reveals an esoteric hieroglyph of his own design. This he identifies as the ultimate symbol of occult knowledge. Reputedly written in just twelve days while Dee was in a trance-like state of mystical insight, the Monas is either highly enigmatic or wilfully obscure, and without a key with which to unlock his lengthy commentary its true meaning appears impossible to decipher.

By the 1560s, Dee had settled eight miles upriver from London in what was then the village of Mortlake. It was here, in his mother’s cottage, that he set about establishing one of the largest libraries in Europe. Dee’s Mortlake home gradually came to be perceived as a centre for magical activity and many notable figures came to pay their respects to Dee and to view his extraordinary collection of occult books and devices. Queen Elizabeth herself is known to have visited Dee on at least two occasions and, in 1577, Dee presented Elizabeth with his magnum opus, the four-volume General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, described by Woolley as ‘one of the earliest authoritative statements of the idea of a British Empire’.8 Whilst ignored at the time and overlooked ever since, Dee’s geopolitical blockbuster was remarkably astute and his key prescription that an enlarged navy could provide England with the security to realise her imperial ambitions has, of course, since been proven accurate.

However, Dee’s political concerns were soon to give way to the notorious occult practises for which he is now remembered. For many years Dee had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish contact with the spirit world. But, in 1582, Dee was to record his first successful contact using his speculum or ‘scrying’ mirror of polished obsidian (now on display in the British Museum). A scryer was a spirit medium and Dee would often employ such figures on his behalf. It was his fateful meeting in 1582 with such a figure, the forger and conman extraordinaire, Edward Kelley (or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot; 1555-1597), that allowed Dee’s desire to commune with angels to be finally satisfied. Kelley appears to have had Dee under his sway from the outset and Dee was soon persuaded of Kelley’s unique gifts as a medium. By the following year, Dee, Kelley and their entire families left Mortlake for the Continent, embarking on a bizarre six-year occult odyssey that would lead ultimately to their installation as alchemists at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Little is known about the purpose behind this visit and whether it was conducted primarily for occult or for political motives. But this period has since become the stuff of legend, as the credulous Dee and his unscrupulous sidekick crossed Europe in a series of unlikely episodes. Needless to say, this relationship ended badly and Dee returned to England in 1589 without Kelley, but not before Kelley had persuaded Dee of the magical necessity for him to sleep with his long-suffering wife.

As Frances Yates notes, Dee’s return to England marks the last and least happy period of his life: ‘After Dee’s activities abroad, he received no reward on his return home, and was never adequately rewarded for his outstanding contribution to the greatness of Elizabethan England. Semi-banishment, ill-success and poverty were to be his fate’.9 Returning to Mortlake, Dee found his cottage in ruins, his library ransacked and his occult equipment destroyed. Aged 62, with his friends dead, and the court unrecognisable, he was now isolated and in poverty. He remained in London, determined to restore his fortunes, but this proved futile. Now a figure of mistrust, he was blamed by many Londoners for the outbreak of the plague in the early 1590s. Finally, in 1597, he was appointed to the position of Warden to Christ’s College in Manchester, and he remained there in semi-exile for the next ten years before returning to London. He died in 1608 and was buried in Mortlake.

After his death, Dee’s reputation, such as it now was, moved further downhill and he was largely dismissed from the official histories of the Elizabethan era. However, as Woolley notes, ‘the one place where Dee’s reputation thrived was in the world of modern mysticism’.10 Indeed, Dee has since been cited as the founder of the Rosicrucian movement; in the nineteenth century he was seen by some as the English Nostradamus and was adopted by the Golden Dawn at the start of the twentieth. More recently, however, it was the publication of Frances Yates’ The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) that led to a reassessment of Dee’s position in the light of Yates’ argument that it was his marriage of magic and science as a ‘Christian Cabbalist’ that provided the dominant philosophy of the Elizabethan age. Elsewhere, Dee lives on through a parallel existence in print and on film. From Gustav Meyrink’s TheAngel of the West Window (1927) to Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978) and Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee (1993), in which Dee is transported from Mortlake to Clerkenwell, this is a figure who has been repeatedly resurrected. If Yates returned Dee to his rightful prominence within Elizabethan history, however, he has today acquired an equally iconic role within the occult history of London. For with his appealing blend of the arcane and the political, allied to his work as a cartographer, Dee appears to satisfy many of the requirements of contemporary psychogeography and its search for lines of resonance through London’s neglected past. In this way, Dee’s home-town of Mortlake has since been incorporated into London’s increasingly well-trodden psychogeographical circuit, the itinerary of which Iain Sinclair delineates: ‘Blake at Lambeth, Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternate universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.’11

Today Dee’s influence extends well beyond his London home, to the extent that he appears to have become caught up in something of a battle for his affiliation, as Manchester, no doubt eager to supplement its more modest occult history, seeks to claim him for its own. In 1996, the Manchester Area Psychogeographic gathered to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Dee’s exile to Manchester, ambitiously proclaiming their intention to levitate the Corn Exchange. In answer to the question ‘What’s the latter-day importance of Dee living in Manchester?’ came this rather unexpected reply:

Dee and Manchester form a focal point in the invention and realization of everything we have to live through and deal with: mechanization, post-industrialisation, the simulacra of “nationhood” and “the state”. To enter Dee’s world of Jacobean Manchester can initiate a deconstruction of now.12

Of course, the final word here must go to London, Dee’s home for so much of his life. In their widely overlooked publication, ‘Nazi Occultists Seize Omphalos’ (1994), published two years prior to the events in Manchester, the London Psychogeographical Association manage to surpass their northern compatriots in both the obscurity and portentousness of their proclamation, reaffirming Dee’s dominant position not only within London’s history but also that of the British Empire which he did so much to inaugurate:

Many people believe that Greenwich is in fact the Omphalos – or spiritual centre – of the British Empire. However, those with a deeper understanding of Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of land divination, will recognise that the actual Omphalos must be on the Isle of Dogs, protected by water on all sides. Those who visit the Mudchute – a piece of park mysteriously built as an exact replica of an ancient hill fort will find a special staircase leading to a cobbled circle. This is the Omphalos, the spiritual centre, where the Magus John Dee conjured up the British Empire in the presence of Christopher Marlowe, four hundred years ago this year. However, using the leyline for such evil purposes necessitated the sacrifice of a human life. A psychic attack on Christopher Marlowe and his friends in a Deptford pub led to a brawl in which the famous playwright died.13

Dr Simon Forman (1552-1611)

In terms of his occult reputation, Dr Simon Forman is something of a poor relation to Dr Dee and has received little of the posthumous fame accorded to his sometime rival. Although the two men inhabited the same city for much of the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, it appears that their lives never intersected. For while Dee was to become the most renowned astrologer and scientist of his day (in Elizabethan times these two terms were barely distinguishable) and was at one time patronised by the Queen herself, Forman was the outsider who struggled to establish himself in his adopted city and was later to achieve a posthumous and largely unwarranted notoriety.

Through his pioneering use of medical notes as well as his diaries and an autobiography of his early years, the details of Forman’s life and experiences in London have been preserved and are held by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Forman was born on 31 December 1552 in Quidhampton in Wiltshire and was educated sporadically both there and in neighbouring Salisbury before spending a year at Oxford University. His time in Oxford, however, appears to have been spent largely as a servant rather than as a student, and his attempts to gain an education were repeatedly hampered by his humble origins and the need to support himself financially. For many years, he was apprenticed to a local merchant trading in herbal medicines, and it was during this time that he developed his knowledge of such remedies. After an itinerant period in which he held several jobs and spent the first of several spells in gaol for acting as an unlicensed physician, Forman made his first visit to London in 1580. This initial entry into the city has been described by Forman’s biographer, Judith Cook:

The approach to the City from the south and west was through countryside; fields and orchards reached as far as the outskirts of Lambeth and Southwark, then suddenly the traveller was plunged into the sprawl of Bankside. For the newly arrived Simon it was neither its stink and bustle nor the wonders of the great buildings across the river that he first thought worthy of note, but the fact that immediately on arrival he was solicited by ‘a cozening quean [slut]’ pretending to be his sister. He stoutly refused her advances, though it must have been the last time he ever turned down such an offer.14

As an innocent abroad on the streets of the Elizabethan city, Forman would have faced a bewildering and dangerous environment, and he soon retreated to Greenwich, where he was briefly employed as a carpenter. Indeed, this soon became a pattern in which brief forays into the city were followed by prolonged returns to his native Wiltshire. These early years, as Forman struggled to acquire the necessary knowledge of medicine and astrology and to establish himself as a physician, are recorded in his autobiography, written around 1600. The first truly noteworthy year for Forman was 1582 when, after an unusually abstemious period of 29 years, he finally lost his virginity. From then on Forman appears to have made up for lost time and he records in meticulous detail his astonishing series of sexual conquests. Writing in code, he appears to have managed to ‘halek’ almost every woman he came across. An entry for February 1583, for example, reads: ‘I did halek cum [with] two women […] we went to London and lay there until we had spent all.’15

During the late 1580s, with the country bracing itself for a possible Spanish invasion, a climate of fear arose and it was against this backdrop that Forman’s reputation first began to reach the medical authorities. His occult activities were now viewed with increasing suspicion, although Forman’s interests in astrology and necromancy were by no means unique during a period in which medical practices had changed little since the era of Galen in the second century AD. His treatments were astrologically based, as was common at this time, and many Londoners would habitually pay not only to see what was in store for them medically but also to seek answers in other matters from questions of love and marriage to help in finding lost possessions.16 The antipathy his activities created in the medical establishment was probably due to no more than a straightforward dislike for an untrained outsider who was apparently prospering and had a large and often distinguished list of clients.