The Tantric Alchemist: Thomas Vaughan and the Indian Tantric Tradition by Peter Levenda

Author:Peter Levenda
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780892546299
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc
Published: 2015-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

SECTION THREE

RUBEDO

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANTHROPOSOPHIA THEOMAGICA

That which I now write must needs appear very strange and incredible to the common man, whose knowledge sticks in the bark of allegories and mystical speeches, never apprehending that which is signified by them unto us.

— Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica

Between the years 1650 and 1655 Thomas Vaughan published all of his work, beginning with Anthroposophia Theomagica and ending with Euphrates. That is a mere five years for eight works on alchemy and several polemics directed at his critics. He married Rebecca on September 28, 1651, the same year he published Lumen de Lumine, and after he had already published his first alchemical treatises the previous year. Rebecca Vaughan died on April 17, 1658, on her husband's thirty-seventh birthday. On the first anniversary of her death he expressed a desire to die, to join his wife in the afterlife and leave the sinful world behind.1

Indeed in the years immediately after his wife's death, from 1659 to 1661, Vaughan disappears. There is no record of where he lived or what he was doing in those two years. No further publications, no civil records, nothing. His notebook contains notations up to the anniversary of his wife's death in 1659 and then no entries at all for 1660 or 1661, and only two in 1662. There is, as Alan Rudrum points out in the biographical introduction to his edition of Vaughan's works,2 a possibility that Vaughan went abroad at this time and there is a record of a Thomas Vaughan visiting Padua, but as Rudrum states it does not necessarily identify the same Thomas Vaughan we have been discussing. There is also a rumor in esoteric circles that Vaughan had gone to America but there is no proof of this.3

In 1661 we learn he was involved in a lawsuit. It seems he was teaching some form of “physic” to a man who paid him for the lessons, as well as for a formula of some kind. Vaughan supplied all of this, and then years later the student enlisted the aid of a comrade and the two of them tried to extort more money out of Vaughan at which point Vaughan sought the remedy of the courts. The outcome of the case is unknown. The defendant claimed that Vaughan had promised to make the Philosopher's Stone at his request, but this seems rather unlikely. The time period during which all of this was supposed to have taken place was roughly five years before the lawsuit, thus 1656 or so. Again, referring to Rudrum's account,4 it seems that the defendant was lying about all of this in a brazen attempt to collect some cash. The lack of further information on the case simply may indicate that the matter was dropped.

In 1666, at the age of forty-five, Thomas Vaughan was dead under mysterious circumstances involving that most important alchemical metal of all alchemies anywhere in the world: mercury.

Mercury is a dangerous element; its fumes are poisonous, and volatile. While some sources claim he

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