Download FULL-TEXT - Manchester eScholar

WILLIAM STUKELEY’S ‘MUSIC OF THE SPHERES’ MANUSCRIPT:
ANCIENT WISDOM AND MODERN NEWTONIANISM, c. 17201
On 1 January 1719/20, William Stukeley (1687-1765) – Cambridge
medical doctor, antiquarian, and Newtonian natural philosopher –
noted the completion of a manuscript essay on ‘The Music of the
Spheres’.2 Though the work was to remain unpublished, its meticulous
preparation in multiple versions suggests the importance it held for its
author, who may indeed have felt it to be a part of that arcane
knowledge which, as he wrote elsewhere, ‘prudence forbids . . . being
vulgarly divulgd’.3 At first glance, the essay might seem a curious, even
ill-matched hybrid of compendious Renaissance treatise and detached,
modern scholarly history. Yet, upon closer examination, it can be seen
that Stukeley employed the concept of the music of the spheres in an
examination of the spectrum of ancient wisdom and modern knowledge
that constituted an early eighteenth-century Newtonian’s worldview:
the sequence of pristine revelation, corruption, and recovery at the heart
of Newton’s own philosophy of providential history and that of some of
his closest followers. In what follows I intend to explore the ways in
which Stukeley used his essay as a means of establishing the status of
Newtonian natural philosophy as a modern rehabilitation of the ancient
I wish to thank all those who have read and entered into discussion about aspects of this paper, in
particular Barbara Coulton, Chloë Dixon, Penny Gouk and Andrew Weeks.
2 The date of completion is given in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng Misc 667/1, ff. 51 and 54. The
essay exists in at least three versions, the one I have mainly followed here being the first of the two to
be found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Misc. c.401; including some preliminary material, this
first version occupies ff. 51-82. A third, abbreviated version appears as part of the composite Stukeley
MS 1130 STU at Freemasons’ Hall, London, listed under the catalogue title of ‘A collection of
discourses on the creation, Solomon’s Temple, anatomy and other matters…’: the essay begins on f.
51. An approximate outline of the essay, in the first Bodleian version, is: (ff. 55-9) responses of the
ancients to the idea of the music of the spheres, establishing Pythagoras as a key figure; (ff. 59-63) a
consideration of how the ancients came to receive the music of the spheres as part of the original
wisdom, given their lack of exposure to either Christian revelation or Newtonian science; (ff. 63-5)
some preliminary remarks on the nature of musical sound, particularly as understood by Pythagoras;
(ff. 65-6) musical cures (biblical and classical examples; the tarantula); (ff. 66-71) on the nature of
physical sound, with a table of musical intervals and vibration frequencies, and some observations on
discords; (ff. 71-81) connections between humanly constructed music and the music of the spheres,
including relationships between musical intervals and planetary distances; (ff. 81-2) concluding
remarks on the music of the spheres and its moral implications for human society. For Stukeley, see
Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley, revised and enlarged edn of original 1950 version (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1985); David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in EighteenthCentury England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002).
3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng Misc e. 553, f. 98.
1
1
wisdom, the prisca sapientia, and to throw light on the role of the concept
of celestial music within this aim.
There is an otherness at the heart of the English Newtonian culture
of this period that inevitably eludes its persistent presentation by a
number of influential historians as the gateway to modernity.4 A key
factor in approaching Newtonians on something closer to their own
terms is their continuing belief in the fundamental significance of God’s
early revelations as preserved by the ‘wise ancients’. Whether in the
hidden recesses of Newton’s own manuscripts, in the relatively
simplified accounts of Newtonian ‘popularizers’ such as Colin
MacLaurin, in the heterodoxy of William Whiston’s ‘primitive
Christianity’, or in the new wave of English freemasonry which
Newtonians such as Stukeley himself helped to establish, the recovery
and understanding of the ancient wisdom was a central motivation. This
is, of course, no new insight on my part; it has represented a growing
strand of Newtonian scholarship at least since the inspired 1960s
revisionism of McGuire and Rattansi.5 Its significance as an end in itself
does, however, require continuing emphasis in response to the strong
tendency to employ Newtonianism in the service of the mythologising
of modernity in teleological accounts of the rise of ‘public science’. There
is no denying that applications of Newtonian culture to the public
demonstration of practical experiment had become commonplace even
in Newton’s own lifetime; but, through the somewhat improbable
medium of celestial harmony, Stukeley’s work suggests other
dimensions.
Why improbable? Much of the available historiography might lead
us to wonder why a serious scholar, at so late a date, was writing about
the music of the spheres at all. By the end of the seventeenth century,
claimed John Hollander some decades ago, the victorious march of
practical music’s domination had ‘un-tuned the sky in the sense that it
ha[d] already rendered the notion of heavenly music . . . as trivial as it
rendered silent the singing spheres’.6 While it has been more usual for
A notable example of this ongoing trend is provided by Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart,
Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
5 J.E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Pipes of Pan’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society
of London 21 (1966), pp. 108-143.
6 John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 422.
4
2
historians to subsume the influence of ‘practical music’ within that of
‘practical science’, the seventeenth-century rejection of the music of the
spheres on empirical or ideological grounds, leaving the old myths to
provide fodder for the speculations of ‘people that abounded more with
imagination than skill’, seems to have remained the default position
adopted by historians.7 After all, insofar as the physical reality of the
celestial music had been conceptualized in terms of the rotation of
crystalline spheres, must not the obsolescence of those spheres along
with the Ptolemaic planetary model itself have led to the inevitable
trivialization of the concept as a remnant of the ‘mere dreams and
chimeras’ of the ancients?8
If matters simply rested there, it would be difficult to see
Stukeley’s essay as anything other than an anachronistic undertaking, at
best an irrelevant piece of antiquarianism. But, long before the recovery
of heliocentrism or the advent of the Baconian method, it had been
possible to distinguish between two fundamentally contrasting
responses to the concept of the celestial music: on the one hand, that ‘the
impossibility of being experienced by the senses render[ed] the notion . .
. preposterous and its investigation foolish’; on the other, that ‘the
sensory implications [were] immaterial, for the subtleties . . . [were]
conceptual and of a divine nature’.9 Employing many of the sources that
Stukeley was later to adopt, the latter position had been elaborated in
Renaissance Florence by Marsilio Ficino, who distinguished between
two forms of the divine music, the one existing ‘in the eternal mind of
John Eachard, The Grounds & Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired into in a
Letter Written to R.L. (London, 1672), pp. 76-7. See also John Wilkins, Discovery of a New World in the
Moone, 3rd imprint, corrected (London, 1640), p. 38. For relevant examples relating to the history of
music theory, see Rebecca Herissone, Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 2-3; Daniel K. Chua, ‘Vicenzo Galilei, Modernity, and the Division of
Nature’, in Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, Music Theory and Natural Order: Foundations of
Musical Thought from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 18.
8 Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, A Commentary upon Mr. Pope's Four Ethic Epistles, Intituled, An Essay on Man.
Wherein His System is Fully Examined (London, 1738), p. 64: editorial comment by the English
translator; Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, p. 29.
9 Gabriela Ilnitchi, ‘Musica Mundana, Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and Ptolemaic Astronomy’,
Early Music History 21 (2002), p. 43. The dichotomy was still being expressed in the opposite poles of
late eighteenth-century musical criticism represented by Burney (‘we no longer admit of Music that
cannot be heard, or of Philosophy that cannot be understood’) and Hawkins (the Pythagorean
doctrine ‘seems to prevail even at this day’): Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the
Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1776-1789), I, p. 346; Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of
Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 14.
7
3
God’, the other ‘in the order and motions of the heavens’ – the second
being in some sense a subordinate manifestation of the first.10
In England, at the turn of the eighteenth century, there was still
room to express the divine aesthetics implicit in the idea of music in the
mind of God; in the words of the one-time Cromwellian chaplain,
Jeremiah White, ‘[t]he wisdom of God, which is a pure act of highest and
most universal harmony, is the music of divine love, by which it
[c]harmeth souls and attracts them to itself’.11 We might be tempted to
ascribe such usages to the increasingly beleaguered realm of religious
enthusiasm, or to the fanciful forces of sympathetic attraction for which
Newton’s own philosophy came under early attack from his more
thoroughly mechanist critics. Yet Ficino’s second category for the
manifestation of the divine music – ‘the order and motions of the
heavens’ – was taking on a new lease of life in England, fuelled by
Newton’s all-encompassing mathematical explanations of physical
reality. The ideal of universal order and harmony was to become an
eighteenth-century commonplace, and indeed one which transcended
direct reference to celestial or even earthly music. But – as McGuire and
Rattansi were to reveal not long after Hollander’s would-be silencing of
the spheres – in Newton’s own case order and harmony took on a more
specifically Pythagorean meaning in relation to the recovery of the
ancient wisdom.12
Newton's reconciliation of mathematical physics with a prisca
theologia so often compartmentalized by historians as secret, obsolescent
knowledge was made publicly explicit in MacLaurin's 1748 presentation
of Newtonian natural philosophy, by direct reference to the celestial
music:
Ficino, quoted in William R. Bowen, ‘Ficino’s Analysis of Musical Harmonia’, in Konrad Eisenbichler
and Olga Zorzi Pugliese, eds, Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, University of Toronto Italian
Studies, No. 1 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1986), pp. 17-18. Though he does not mention him in the
body of the essay, Stukeley does refer to Ficino in a preliminary note at the beginning of the
manuscript, and it may not be too much to say that the Florentine philosopher maintains an
unspoken presence in Stukeley’s piece.
11 Jeremiah White, The Restoration of All Things (London, 1712), p. 195. See also Richard Allestree, Scala
Sancta: Or, The Exaltation of the Soul (London, 1678), Preface; Thomas Tryon, The Knowledge of a Man’s
Self the Surest Guide to the True Worship of God (London, 1703), p. 330; John Dunton, The Visions of the
Soul Before it Comes into the Body, in Several Dialogues (London, 1692): Dialogue 15, ‘Betwixt Two Spirits
about the Music of the Spheres’; Richard Roach, ‘The Jew’s Harp’: Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Rawlinson MS D832 (Papers of Richard Roach), item 274.
12 McGuire and Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Pipes of Pan’, p. 119.
10
4
If therefore we should suppose musical chords [that is, strings]
extended from the sun to each planet, that all these chords might
become unison, it would be requisite to increase or diminish their
tensions in the same proportions as would be sufficient to render
the gravities of the planets equal. And from the similitude of these
proportions, the celebrated doctrine of the harmony of the spheres
is supposed to have been derived.13
MacLaurin claimed that the music of the spheres - which he had no
compunction in addressing alongside notions of gravity, the inverse
square law, and heliocentricity - was ‘very remote from the suggestions
of sense and opposite to vulgar prejudices’, and was therefore likely to
reflect the 'very considerable progress’ of the wise ancients in astronomy
and natural philosophy, thus reversing the position of historians who
have assumed that ideas about the music of the spheres were simply
superseded by modern science. More particularly, his image of the sun’s
rays as musical strings suggests the manifestation of the ancient wisdom
in the Chaldean Oracles, where the rays of the sun are called ‘material
connectors’, ‘whose chief purpose is to harmonize . . . the various parts
of the universe’.14 Newton himself noted that Orpheus was supposed to
have learned his music along with the ancient wisdom when travelling
in Egypt, and that ancient Phoenician culture included ‘a sort of men
skilled in the Religious Mysteries’ who also excelled in music.15
Newton conceived of the music of the spheres neither as
notionally observable physical fact, nor yet as symbol or metaphor in the
modern sense, but in terms of a providential typology, a foreshadowing
of the fundamental and universal truths that it was Newton’s task to
explicate for his own age.16 Pythagoras’ deliberately obscure
Colin MacLaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (London, 1748), pp. 32-3.
Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), p. 10.
Though dating from the second century AD, after its introduction into Western culture in the fifteenth
century this work was initially believed to have been written by the ancient sage Zoroaster: see
Moshe Idel, ‘Prisca Theologia in Marsilio Ficino and in some Jewish Treatments’, in Michael J.B. Allen
and Valery Rees with Martin Davies, eds, Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy
(Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 144.
15 Newton, ‘Drafts on the History of the Church’, section 6 (Jerusalem, National Library of Israel,
Yahuda MS 15, f. 110r): The Newton Project
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00223 ; idem, The
Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London, 1728), pp. 13-14.
16 See Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press,
1982). John Conduitt, the husband of Newton’s niece, and his early biographer, recounts how ‘Sir
Isaac thought Pythagoras’ music of the spheres was intended to typify gravity, and as he makes the
13
14
5
pronouncements on celestial music had pre-figured modern
explanations of heliocentricity and the Newtonian concept of
gravitational force.17 For Newton this was, in a typological sense,
something approaching the equivalent of Old Testament prophecy, at
least insofar as it was an instrument ‘not only for predicting but also for
effecting a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth’.18 In
addition to its potential for polemic – on a number of occasions Newton
related ‘the number-musical ratios that preside over the law of the
inverse squares’ to the necessary existence of God and His continuing
activity in the universe, a key strategy in the defence of divine truth
against the atheistic tendencies of the time – it also had relevance for
aesthetic theory: Newton claimed that the pleasure that comes from
experiencing beauty ‘is more or less, as the approaches are nearer to the
harmonic ratios’.19
Even so, Newton’s writings are not, on the whole, especially
rewarding for their insights into musical aesthetics. We are on different
ground, however, when encountering William Stukeley, who as a young
man conversed regularly with the ageing Newton and wrote an early
account of his life.20 In contrast to Newton’s notorious disinclination
toward sitting through musical performances – and it is to Stukeley that
we owe the account of his mentor’s unceremonious exit from the theatre
before the end of the only opera he is supposed to have attended –
Stukeley himself led a full musical life.21 He played and copied music for
the flute, worked on adaptations of instruments, discussed the history of
composition with fellow antiquarians, owned copies of works by
sounds and notes to depend on the size of the strings so gravity depends on the density of matter’:
Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 97.
17 Maurizio Mamiani, ‘Newton on Prophecy and the Apocalypse’, in I. Bernard Cohen and George E.
Smith, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.
404.
18 Newton, quoted in Korshin, Typologies in England, p. 333.
19 Paolo Casini, ‘Newton: The Classical Scholia’, History of Science 22 (1984), p. 7; Newton, quoted in
Battestin, The Providence of Wit, p. 6. See also Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 25.
20 For Stukeley’s conversations with Newton, see, for example, W.C. Lukis, ed., The Family Memoirs of
the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D., Surtees Society, Vol. 73 (Durham: Andrews & Co, 1882), Vol. 1, pp. 59
and 78. For his account of Newton’s life, see William Stukeley, ‘Memoirs of Isaac Newton’s Life’
(London, Royal Society Library, MS 142), ‘The Newton Project’
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTHE00001
21 Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, vol. 1, p. 59: diary entry for 18 April, 1720. Stukeley’s
rather rosy picture of Newton’s love of music, in his later manuscript ‘Memoir’ of Newton’s life, may
be a projection onto Newton of Stukeley’s own response, or at least a generic statement of one of the
attributes deemed desirable in a ‘great man’.
6
Dowland and Purcell, and belonged to local musical societies.22 His
claim to have been ‘powerfully affected’ by the ‘Divine Art’ of music
comes through in his comments on the ancients in the essay; ‘[t]he more
they divd into the secrets of nature’, he assures us,
the more they perceivd an endless chain of beautiful Connexions &
correspondencys between the parts of creation. A Genius of a
delicate make[,] & that is of consort pitch with the World, cannot
but be mightily affected with this intellectual harmony, as much as
with a fine Lesson upon a Musical Instrument: & in truth, both is
[sic] but one & the same thing.23
The ‘intellectual harmony’ of Newtonian laws, in other words, shares a
real identity with the music that we hear, one that can be perceived by
the individual whose being is tuned to ‘consort pitch with the world’: a
state to which the spiritually aware Stukeley himself undoubtedly
aspired.24 Far from un-tuning the sky, the intricacies of Newtonian
astronomy served instead to enliven ‘the endless complications of
amazing harmony, relation, beauty & proportion’.25 The ‘exuberant
theme’ of the music of the spheres not only permeated the writings of
the ancients, it ‘increases daily upon us in every new improvement of
Philosophy or any other Science’. In Stukeley’s view, the idea of celestial
harmony was clearly more central to the ‘new science’ than many
historians of that subject have since cared to admit.26
In answering those who might level against him ‘the imputation of
trifling’, Stukeley invoked the full force of Newton’s own reputation.
Had not the great man,
in his wonderful treatise of Optics . . . observd the Rays of the Sun
which are the spirit & life to the whole system, when they are
refracted thro’ a prism & assume seven colors as ordinarily
Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, vol. 1, pp. 48, 75, 112, 134, 385; C.E. Wright, ‘Four
Stukeley Notebooks’, British Museum Quarterly 27 (1963-4), p. 63; Stuart Piggott, ed., Sale Catalogues of
Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. X (London: Mansell, 1974), p. 448; Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 32.
23 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 55.
24 See, for example, Stukeley’s view of being a philosopher, ‘one whos soul is of tune with the
creation, the beauty & order of the world delights him bec’ tis consort-pitch with him, others it affects
not’: Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, vol. 1, p. 120.
25 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 81.
26 Ibid., ff. 59-60.
22
7
according to their different degrees of refrangibility, may be
divided one from another exactly in the same proportions as is a
monochord to frame the seven musical notes[?]27
As Richard Allen comments, ‘Newton’s analogy of spectrum and octave
held out the promise of a science that could discover the fundamental
harmonic principles that structured all physical reality’.28 For Newton,
these cosmic harmonic principles had also been at the root of the
construction of the temples of the ancient world, an analogy which
Stukeley was to develop thoroughly later in his career, and to which he
also drew attention in a short book published in the same year in which
the essay was written:
For it is no new thing in architecture to claim kindred to music, as
is largely and laboriously handled in Vitruvius . . . and
Vilapandus’s Description of the Temple of Solomon.29
In the essay, Stukeley continued by asking:
[W]ho is not ravishd to find the comfortable efflux of that most
glorious Luminary & Soul of the world [that is, the Sun] so strictly
musical[?] What credit is it to the divine art of Music to observe
that it is the very scale[,] the measure by which the Supreme
Author of the world has built & perfected all his Works of greatest
energy & excellence[?] So that we have in a literal sense all the
colors of Music . . .30
With this ‘music of the eyes’, then, Stukeley gave voice to the musical
aesthetics, even synaesthetics, implicit in the Newtonian system.31
Ibid., ff. 79-80.
Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1999), p. 102.
29 William Stukeley, An Account of a Roman Temple, and Other Antiquities, Near Graham’s Dike in Scotland
([London], 1720), p. 19.
30 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, ff. 79-80.
31 Leo Spitzer noted that ‘synaesthetic apperception always bears witness to the idea of world
harmony. All the senses converge into one harmonious feeling’: Classical and Christian Ideas of World
Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher
(Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 24. For the phrase ‘the music of the eyes’,
see for example the English translation of Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame: Sir Isaac
Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies (London, 1739), p. 222.
27
28
8
Yet why take so much trouble to give the apparently embattled,
trivialized concept of the music of the spheres Newtonian credibility? As
was the case with Newton, the cornerstone of Stukeley’s belief system
was that, in early ages of mankind’s history, God had imparted
fundamental truths which had been passed down by certain of the
ancient sages, in primitive lineages of wisdom which had, over time,
been lost or corrupted.32 Now, as the divine plan unfolded toward the
last days, some privileged thinkers were entrusted with the task of
restoring this wisdom and announcing it to the world – or, at least, to
the more enlightened among their contemporaries.33 This may help to
clarify Stukeley’s conception of the relationship between the earliest
knowledge and that of his own day; a conception which may, on the face
of it, seem inconsistent.34 On the one hand, he felt that Newtonian
advances were indispensable to a clear understanding of the heavenly
harmony: the ancients ‘scarce knew themselves what they meant by it’.35
He referred to ‘those comparatively dark ages’ in which the ancients
‘wanted the full power of explaining’ the concept, since they
‘understood it but in gross’.36 Deprived of both the divine light of
Stukeley’s exact specification of this lineage varied in detail in different contexts over his long
career. He believed that the ancient wisdom was transmitted by the antediluvian patriarchs and by
Noah, and that it came to Pythagoras in a line from Orpheus via Aglaophemus, but also as a result of
Pythagoras’ direct contact with the Chaldeans, Persians, Egyptians and Phoenicians: Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Eng Misc e. 650: ‘Disquisitio de Deo’, f. 43. See also David Boyd Haycock, ‘The Long-Lost
Truth: Sir Isaac Newton and the Newtonian Pursuit of Ancient Knowledge’, Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), pp. 605-623. In general, in comparison to Newton, Stukeley was more
sympathetic to non-Hebrew roots of the ancient knowledge, and to (Neo)Platonist syncretism. On f.64
of the essay, Stukeley emphasised the centrality of music to the ancient wisdom, describing the
former as ‘the first theology, poetry and philosophy’, and citing Sextus Empiricus’ claim that ‘of all of
the learned studys it was the most antient’.
33 See Karin Figala, ‘Newton’s Alchemy’, in I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, eds, The Cambridge
Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 370.
34 In a letter of 1715 to the Lincolnshire antiquary, Maurice Johnson, Stukeley apparently gives a more
unequivocal view of the ‘ancients versus moderns’ controversy than that put forward in the essay,
‘express[ing] his conviction of the superiority of the ancients over the moderns, and his conviction
that modern men are inferior to their classical counterparts, especially in their writings’: D. and M.
Honeybone, eds, Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, Lincoln Record Soc, vol. 99
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), p. 10. If this is an adequate distillation of Stukeley’s view in 1715,
it fails to reflect the complexities revealed in his subsequent writings. For more background on this,
see Rosemary Sweet’s review of Haycock’s ‘William Stukeley’, Historical Journal 46/3 (2003), pp. 7756; Sweet, however, does not quite capture the essence of Stukeley’s position. Those who entered into
the debate can often be seen to have espoused opposing versions of the same mindset; on the other
hand, for those who, like Stukeley, prized the veracity and authenticity of the prisca sapientia, the
competition is meaningless, to be replaced by questions about who possessed the wisdom, who lost
or corrupted it, and how it can be recovered – and the presence of a serious view of the celestial music
is often a reliable indicator of this general position.
35 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 56.
36 Ibid., f. 60.
32
9
Christian redemption and Newton’s inspired explanatory framework, it
was ‘easy to observe ho[w] pitiful & inconsistent were their Notions
about the Cause and manner of the Worlds Production’.37 Without the
benefit of ‘our present apprehensions & vast improvements from the
Newtonian theory’, they could no more grasp the intricacies of planetary
music ‘than the barbarous Indians . . . [could account for] the powerful
vertues of the Peruvian bark’, or ‘the ignorant Turks . . . the surprising
spirituosity of their Coffee berrys’.38
Yet Stukeley did not believe that the knowledge possessed by the
ancients had been simply static. He later observed that ‘in the
antediluvian times it must have been brought to as high a perfection as
at present’, but that the sources in which it had come down to us
generally represented a corruption or falling away of the original truth.39
Nevertheless it was still possible to glimpse the truth behind the
corruption. ‘Truth is most ancient, fable and fiction is new. When
fabulous theology is ancient, it shows true religion is more ancient’.40
The music of the spheres, the prototype of the Noachic embodiment of
original truth in temple architecture, was itself an important
manifestation of pristine knowledge. Furthermore, was not this
knowledge received by the ancients through a kind of revelation –
perhaps even, as Stukeley himself wrote on one occasion, ‘immediately
from God’ – and therefore inherently superior to anything that could be
acquired through the exercise of any human intellect, even Newton’s?41
It was, indeed, intuitive wisdom, and even though the thoughts of the
ancients
. . . about these Matters [we]re but loose, & often no other than
Sallys of Imagination, or a tacit admiration of distant beautys in
the Creation, which they would not venture to declare more
explicitely: We ought to reckon it a great glory either perfectly to
enter into their sentiment, or to be able to doe justice to those Great
men, who saw the lovely appearance of Truth & pronouncd
Stukeley, ‘A collection of discourses on the creation . . .’, London, Freemasons’ Hall, MS 1130 STU,
f.3.
38 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 60.
39 Stukeley, quoted in Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 95.
40 Stukeley, quoted in David Boyd Haycock, ‘“Claiming Him as Her Son”: William Stukeley, Isaac
Newton, and the Archaeology of the Trinity’, in John Brooke and Ian Maclean, eds, Heterodoxy in Early
Modern Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 308.
41 William Stukeley, Abury, A Temple of the British Druids (London, 1743), p. i.
37
10
obscure realitys that they might so incite after ages to explain &
illustrate them.42
What was the medium through which the ancient sages received this
wisdom? Quite plausibly, thought Stukeley, ‘by dreams or other
intelligence of Superior Beings [or, in an alternative version of the
manuscript, ‘Good Angels’], as in all probability several other things of
consequence to Mankind have been, & some of curiosity only, which
since have been found true by experience of succeeding ages’.43 In this
sense, the dreams of the ancients were no chimeras after all, and the new
philosophy was a post hoc confirmation of revealed truth, the application
of Newton’s laws a way of filling in the detail, of ‘helping out the
Antients, & showing what they would have said, had they now livd’ –
questionable methodology for a historian, no doubt, but in keeping with
Stukeley’s perceived need for the recovery and explication of the divine
purpose.44
Stukeley’s essay, then, is predicated on the typological connections
between the fundamental truths of the prisca sapientia, their dream-like
adumbration in the works of the ancients, and their full rehabilitation
via Newtonian natural philosophy. This is reflected in the wide variety
of ancient sources: more than twenty-five Greek or Latin authors are
cited, some several times, and many of them representing
understanding that had supposedly originated still earlier. By contrast,
only four moderns (apart from Newton himself) receive a mention. The
obvious modern authority on celestial harmony – Kepler – is present,
but only by way of a passing reference to the insight which might have
rendered him particularly relevant: the positioning of his notional
‘listener’ at the centre of the system, in the sun.45 Kepler’s engagement
Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, ff. 56-7. Cf. Stukeley’s comment, in a manuscript treatise
written about three years later: ‘A Free People will reserve to themselves the liberty of thinking too,
which naturally runs us up to the spring-head of things, the only way to shake off disguisements &
rust of time, to see truths in their original purity & splendour.’ Bodleian MS Eng Misc c. 323: ‘Celtic
Temples’, f. 81.
43 Ibid., f. 60; the Freemasons’ Hall version has ‘Good Angels’ for ‘Superior Beings’. In his writings on
the Apocalypse, Newton also emphasised the importance of oneiric (dream-like) language in the
transmission of prophetic visions, although he restricted its reliability to the collective rather than
individual imagination: Mamiani. ‘Newton on Prophecy and the Apocalypse’, pp. 401-2.
44 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 71.
45 See D.P. Walker, ‘Kepler’s Celestial Music’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967),
pp. 228-250. Stukeley writes: ‘Nevertheless did the excentricity of the planets orbits in any degree
disturb our proportions as to their diameters, yet to make amends the sagacious Kepler had been our
ready Champion, for in his Harmonices Mundi V.4 he has discoverd that the aphelia & perihelia of
42
11
with the question of what kind of music the spheres might produce is
passed over, and the analogy with the ‘exactness & delicacy’ of the
consort is simply taken for granted, even though Stukeley must have
been well aware of the prevalent educated opinion of his time that
ancient music had lacked polyphony to any meaningful extent.
At the same time, in giving considerable space to the harmonic
proportions of planetary distances and their compatibility with
Newtonian astronomy, Stukeley did not ignore questions of musical
practice altogether. As much as the theory-bound monochord it is the
performance-orientated trumpet which forms a type with planetary
harmony, its widely spaced deep notes corresponding to the greater
distances between the outermost planets, whereas its higher register
echoes the smaller intervals nearer to the sun.46 Equipped with
knowledge of ‘the great spring of all action in Matter, Gravitation, &
other Laws of motion’, he felt that Newtonians were now in a position to
test and confirm the intuitive insights of the ancient sages.47 He first
reminds his readers of the terms in which those intuitions were couched;
like Newton in the ‘Classical Scholia’ – a set of unpublished additions to
the Principia – he relates the seven-fold planetary system to the pipes of
Pan, who (according to Apollodorus, says Stukeley) taught the arts of
prophecy and music to Apollo, the player of the seven-stringed lyre
(that is, the sun, exerting its gravitational influence over the planets).48
He goes on to discuss in some detail the harmonic proportions
represented by the various distances between planetary orbits, before
attempting to link this more directly with harmony ‘when compounded
as musical notes into a lesson’.49 In this respect, even the vast distance
between the outer planets is found to equate to an ‘octave & fifth[,] the
the planets, that is, the points in their orbits where they are nearest to & farthest from the Sun, taken
from the angle they make to an eye in the central Sun subtended by an arch of a common circle as
suppose the Ecliptic are in true harmonic ratio’s . . .’: ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 78.
46 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 76.
47 Ibid., f. 71.
48 Ibid., f. 72. Cf. Ralph Cudworth. ‘For first of all Pan, as the very word plainly implies him to be a
universal numen, and as he was supposed to be the Harmostes of the whole world, or to play upon
the world as on a musical instrument, so have we before showed that by him the Arcadians and
Greeks meant not the corporeal world inanimate, nor yet as endued with a senseless nature only, but
as proceeding from an intellectual principle or divine spirit, which framed it harmoniously, and as
being still kept in tune, acted and governed by the same’: The True Intellectual System of the Universe
(London, 1678), p. 483. See also McGuire and Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Pipes of Pan’, p. 119; Casini,
‘The Classical Scholia’, p. 56; Joscelyn Godwin, Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 17501950 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), p. 9.
49 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 75.
12
sweetest of all concordances’.50 The content of this cosmic musical
analysis is updated by a consideration of the planetary satellites known
to the modern world through telescopic observation, and here too the
mathematical concordances are confirmed, the positions of the moons of
Jupiter and Saturn being found to produce harmonious relations.51 The
variations in distance caused by elliptical orbits are themselves resolved
by analogy with musical ornamentation, more particularly the
‘ravishing vibration of the close shake’.52
Like Newton and others, Stukeley believed that the true wisdom
had been vouchsafed to only a handful of ancient sages. It had been
ignored or misunderstood by the great mass of humanity (or simply
kept from them), and it had been corrupted and perverted by the
worldly misconceptions of the powerful intelligentsia of later ages. What
were the circumstances of its potential preservation and transmission in
uncorrupted form? Taking the music of the spheres as a prime instance
of this, Stukeley makes a point of interlinking biblical sources and
Newtonian natural philosophy. The Book of Genesis, in which God is
described as setting in motion the revolutions of the planets, is
‘conformable to those never failing Canons of Nature, the Principles
which the Immortal Newton has discoverd to the World’.53 Newton’s
planetary system, he claims, is adumbrated in the Book of Job.54 ‘[T]he
sacred Architecture of Solomons temple & other buildings conform[s] to
the musical scale’ of the heavens.55 This last point was an area to which
Newton had given considerable attention, not least in exploring the
belief that the dimensions of the Temple were typologically related to
the rites of the Prytanaea, characteristic of the ancient Hebrews and of
certain pagan civilizations, in which priests (equivalent to the planets)
moved ceremonially around a central flame (the sun).56 Whereas
Stukeley reported that Newton believed Solomon’s edifice to be ‘older
Ibid.
Ibid, ff. 76-7.
52 Ibid., f. 77.
53 Stukeley, ‘Creation’ MS, f. 5; Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 89.
54 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 61. The source, Job 38. 7, reads: ‘[w]hen the morning stars
sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’.
55 Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 82.
56 Richard S. Westfall, ‘Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae’, in W, Warren Wagar,
ed., The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe (New York and London: Holmes &
Meier, 1982), pp. 24-5; Ayval Leshem, Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity (Dordrecht and
London: Kluwer, 2003), ch. 9.
50
51
13
than any great heathen temples’, however, he himself came to think
otherwise.57
Even before the completion of the ‘Music of the Spheres’ essay,
Stukeley had already embarked on the task which was eventually to
constitute his main claim to fame. His regular summer excursions to
various of Britain’s ancient monuments had led to his conviction that
Avebury, Stonehenge, and other comparable sites were not of Roman or
Viking origin (as most of his contemporaries thought), but were the
considerably earlier remains of the culture of the British Druids.58 It was
Avebury in particular to which he ascribed a date – 1,859 BC –
contemporary with Abraham and considerably earlier than the known
age of Solomon’s Temple.59 Commenting a few years later on the
transmission of the doctrine of the Trinity, Stukeley claimed that ‘the
learned [were mistaken] to say that they had it from the Jews. It was of
much earlier date . . . the heathens were acquainted with it either from
the patriarchs of Abraham’s family or earlier from Noah’.60 In any event,
he came to see Druidic culture as intrinsic to the ancient Noachic
religion he sought to recover. ‘[T]here was but one religion at first, pure
and simple’, and it was the one ‘professed in these places’ of Druidic
antiquity.61 ‘In Bryttish Oak Groves’, he wrote in his early ‘Creation’
manuscript, ‘our old Naturalists Poets & Priests the Druids inculcated
the Precepts of Religion, [and] studyd the Celestial Sciences’, including
the divine harmony.62 These sacred groves, formalized through the
‘Regularity & Conformity’ of celestial dimensions, gave rise to the
construction of temples, of which the remains of Avebury and
Stonehenge were surviving instances.63 They had, he thought, ‘an
Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, Vol. 1, p. 78: diary entry for April, 1726.
Ronald Hutton, ‘The Religion of William Stukeley’, The Antiquaries Journal 85 (2005), p. 384.
59 Stukeley: ‘[the evaluation of the evidence] brings us, in Usher’s chronology, which I take to be the
best, to the year of the death of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, which happened in the summer-time of the
1859th year before Christ . . . I judge our Tyrian Hercules made his expedition into the ocean, about the
latter end of Abraham’s time: and most likely ’tis, that Abury was the first great temple of Britain, and
made by the first Phoenician colony that came hither’: Abury, p. 53. Solomon’s Temple is thought to
have been built somewhere between 966 and 946 BC: F.J. Hollis, ‘The Sun Cult and the Temple at
Jerusalem’, in S.H. Hooke, ed., Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and Ritual of the Hebrews in Relation
to the Cultural Pattern of the Ancient East (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 90.
We do, however, need to keep in mind that typological relationships might well be expressed in
terms of an earlier instance pre-figuring the type.
60 Stukeley, quoted in Haycock, ‘Claiming Him as Her Son’, p. 313.
61 Stukeley, Abury, pp. i-ii.
62 Stukeley, ‘Creation’ MS, f. 31. See also Aylett Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata (London, 1676), p.
100.
63 Stukeley, ‘Creation’ MS, ‘Music of the Spheres’ section, f. 71; Stukeley, Abury, p. i.
57
58
14
amazing grandeur in the design’ based on the ‘symmetry and harmony
of their parts’, intended even as a replication of heliocentric planetary
dimensions.64 Indeed, he believed that ‘the first idea of temples was to
make them somewhat resembling the universe’, and (as Ronald Hutton
puts it) that monuments such as Avebury ‘acted as receivers by which
the divine power emanating from the creator was drawn down more
effectively to Earth’ – a concept with strong musical associations in some
of the literature with which Stukeley was familiar.65 He found that the
dimensions of Avebury matched those of the musically proportioned
design of the Temple of Solomon.66 Similarly, he held that in specific
respects the British temples resembled the harmonically based
constructions of classical Greek and Roman architecture, although, since
the Druids could have ‘know[n] nothing of Vitruvius’, he deduced that
their skills derived directly from the quintessentially British qualities of
‘natural reason, and good sense’.67
It was Stukeley’s interest in the relationship between the
harmonious architecture of ancient temples and the prisca theologia that
provided the rationale for his participation in freemasonry, a movement
which was enjoying a resurgence in England at just the time he was
writing his essay on the music of the spheres, and with which he first
became involved very soon after completing it.68 Some early eighteenthcentury editions of the masonic constitutions refer to masons as
‘Noachidae’ (sons of Noah) and to Zoroaster as the ‘grand master’ of the
magi, and connections between the freemasonry of this period and
Stukeley, Abury, pp. i and 23-4; Haycock, William Sukeley, p. 125.
Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 155; Ronald Hutton, The Druids (London: Hambledon Continuum,
2007), p. 159; Hutton, ‘The Religion of William Stukeley, p. 388.
66 Ibid., 38; Stukeley, ‘The Music of the Spheres’, f. 82. One of Stukeley’s contemporaries, the Bath
architect John Wood the elder, claimed that ‘the remains of the Druidical works now at Stanton Drew,
near Bath and Bristol, point out the most ancient system of the planetary world; there we see a circle
of stones, on the summit of a hill, which images the sun; near which there were other circles and
stones, representing the moon, the earth and the planets . . . One of these circles answers the very
description of the temple of Jerusalem’: The Origin of Building: or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected
(Bath, 1741), p. 221.
67 William Stukeley, Stonehenge; A Temple Restored to the British Druids (London, 1740), pp. 16-17. In An
Account of a Roman Temple, Stukeley expands on the musical relationships common to seemingly
disparate traditions of architecture.
68 Stukeley was ‘made a freemason at the Salutation Tavern, Tavistock Street’ on 6 Jan, 1721, and –
contrary to Hutton’s claim – his association with the movement seems to have lasted for many years.
‘Here [at Grantham, in June, 1726] I set up a lodge of freemasons, which lasted all the time I lived
there. It ceased when I left Grantham. I set up the monthly meeting at West Deeping, which subsisted
until I left Stamford in Feb 1748’: Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, Vol. 1, pp. 62, 123, 133.
See also Haycock, William Stukeley, p. 175; Hutton, ‘The Religion of William Stukeley’, p. 387.
64
65
15
earlier esoteric traditions are well known.69 Such connotations support
both Stukeley’s general involvement in the movement and his
conception of celestial harmony as a validation of the post-Newtonian
revival of the ancient wisdom. Despite the limitations of Jacob’s model
of early eighteenth-century English freemasonry in undervaluing the
individual quest for spiritual enlightenment on the part of someone such
as Stukeley, her claim that it ‘imitat[ed] the cosmic order decreed by
Providence and confirmed by scientific observation’ does at least go
some way toward capturing his aims.70
Stukeley’s involvement in freemasonry and the culture of
meetings – the Royal Society and the newly reconstituted Society of
Antiquaries were only the most high-profile of a number of
organizations to which he belonged from time to time – seem outwardly
to place him firmly in the world of the ‘clubbable’ public sphere
routinely seen to have dominated the life of capital and provinces alike
in this period. This, though, is only part of the story. In some periods of
his life, at least, he seemed torn between the attractions that town
offered a man of learning and culture, and the more spiritual rewards to
be sought from a life in the country. His sense of the deeper truths
represented by the celestial harmony played a part in this inner struggle.
Oppressed by ‘party squabbles’ or the ‘affronts’ he perceived to have
come from his fellow society members, he sought at certain times of his
life a rural purity and simplicity that seemed to reflect the nature of the
ancient wisdom itself.71 This mood was particularly in evidence when he
turned his back on London in the mid-1720s to return to his native
Lincolnshire: by contrast with the degradations of the city – ‘[t]ime,
riches, politeness and prosperity bring on corruption’, he wrote – rural
life was ‘an imitation of the divine being’, a fitting place for ‘the
contemplation of divine truths’.72 Certainly the Virgilian tone fits the
early eighteenth-century culture of classicism, but Stukeley also
describes what at times sounds like a proto-Romantic tuning of the soul
Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, Freemasonry and the Idea of Natural Religion (Frome and London:
Butler & Tanner, 1942), p. 10; Jan Snoek, ‘On the Creation of Masonic Degrees: A Method and its
Fruits’, in Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, eds, Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion
(Leuven: Peeters, 1998), p. 146.
70 Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 58.
71 Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, Vol. 1, p. 91. In an unpaginated note at the back of the
volume containing his ‘Creation’ MS, Stukeley contrasts his uneasiness ‘at the Town’ with his
‘invincible love of nature’.
72 Stukeley, Abury, p. iii; Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, Vol. 1, p. 107.
69
16
to nature, albeit a nature perceived as the site of the pristine revelation,
where he plants out in his garden the celestial, harmonic dimensions of a
‘temple of the druids’ in trees and ‘pyramidal greens’.73 This can have
been no idle pursuit to a man for whom such places held so numinous a
charge:
. . . the vast Solitude & holy Silence . . . strikes at the first Entry
with a Sacred horror, an awful veneration as of a present Deity.
The Dreadful Gloom possesses us with a Religious Sense of his
Majesty whose resplendent Throne is vaild in thick Clouds of
pitchy Darkness. Who can doubt that the frequenting these places
on account of Divine Worship, first gave the Model of the
formation of their Antient Temples.74
Still alive to the macrocosmic-microcosmic relationship, he could feel
even in old age that, in the country, ‘harmony, and music, excites every
sense into complacency, and becomes rival to celestial melody’.75 And
yet there was always a streak of indecision: it was only in London, he
wrote regretfully from his rural seclusion to his antiquarian friend,
Samuel Gale, that ‘we can meet with souls tuned up to our own pitch’.76
Stukeley’s essay, with its indebtedness to Newton’s interpretation
of the ancient wisdom and planetary harmony, helps us to see how
those ideas were not just preserved but vitally transformed in
eighteenth-century English culture. Revisionist trends in Newton
scholarship have already done much to persuade us that this might have
been the case. Yet, even as scholars attempt to reconcile the so-called
‘two Newtons’ into one extraordinarily complex but essentially coherent
personality – a task which has by no means been fully realized as yet –
preconceptions about the nature of eighteenth-century Newtonianism
continue to go relatively unchallenged. Jacob assures us that Newton’s
ordered cosmos provided ‘a model for a stable and prosperous polity
ruled by the self-interest of men. That was what Newton’s universe
meant to his friends and popularizers’.77 There is no need to reject that
Ibid., p. 209.
Stukeley, ‘Creation’ MS, ff. 31-2.
75 William Stukeley, Palaeographia Sacra. Or Discourses on Sacred Subjects (London, 1763), p. 6.
76 Lukis, ed., Family Memoirs of William Stukeley, Vol. 1, p. 188.
77 Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Hassocks: Harvester Press,
1976), p. 18.
73
74
17
claim out of hand; rather, its sheer inadequacy is what needs
underlining. The dimension of Newtonianism that concerned beliefs
about the relationship between Newton’s natural philosophy, the prisca
sapientia, ancient temple architecture, and the music of the spheres
provides a necessary corrective to prevalent understandings of
eighteenth-century Newtonian culture, and a nuanced interpretation of
the thought of William Stukeley shows that, for such concepts, there was
indeed life after Newton.
18