The Lost Pillars of Enoch by Tobias Churton

Author:Tobias Churton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gnosticism/Mysticism
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 11.4. Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchymy (1477)

Fig. 11.5. Thomas Norton’s reference to “Free Masons” (Ordinall of Alchymy, 1477), published by Elias Ashmole in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)

Fig. 11.6. Robert Vaughan’s engraving to accompany Ashmole’s publication of Norton’s Ordinall of Alchymy in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)

Ashmole had the design engraved by Robert Vaughan (1597–1663) for the printed Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. In Vaughan’s exquisite engraving, the master puts one book—possibly the Bible—before the one who swears to keep secret the “donum dei” he has accepted. Instead of a Gothic archway we now have two distinct pillars, differently decorated and constructed, with curious inscriptions of figures and a symbol resembling a door, while an arch, flanked by lions, adjoins the capitals. The left pillar displays illogical perspective and may be hollow. There is perhaps an inner shelf in darkness (the pillar on the right is light). The pillars appear to be tilted slightly off a checkered floor that recedes to a veil, above which the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers, emanating beams of light, flanked by angels. One may speculate whether Ashmole, in altering the original manuscript design, perhaps drew on personal experience of being asked to accept a secret. The authentic meaning of acception would not then be, in the first instance, that a person is accepted, but rather that the initiate has accepted something: a significant distinction and two-way process. Having accepted, the candidate is accepted; that is, becomes acceptable (see Romans 5:2 and 12:5). The one who enters the Holy of Holies, who passes through the veil, must be acceptable to the Lord. Recall Samber’s point about true Freemasons being those who had passed the veil. Enoch “walked with God,” acceptable to the Lord, for he accepted God, source of wisdom, and could thus approach the source (eternal life) untrammeled by the world.

The precise words exchanged by master and pupil in the engraving reappeared in 1698 in a work about the Philosopher’s Stone, THE GOLDEN AGE: Or, the REIGN of SATURN REVIEW’D,*54 in praise of the alchemical works of Eugenius Philalethes (Ashmole’s friend Thomas Vaughan), particularly with regard to the anima mundi, the soul of the world, or “breath of God,” which Vaughan says in his Lumen de Lumine must—note—be received.

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