paracelsian spirits in pope’s rape of the lock

Jan R. Veenstra

The Rape of the Lock is not a metaphysical poem, even though in one
important respect it follows Samuel Johnson’s description of that genre
as entailing a ‘kind of discordia concors’.1 The Rape yokes together two
heterogeneous entities that would not normally be found in each other’s
company; on the one hand it derives from Milton’s Paradise Lost the epic
dimensions of the world of angels, on the other hand the poet peoples
this world with sylphs and nymphs that properly belong to the world of
fairie. The metaphysical poets were criticised in the eighteenth century
for their perverse ingenuity and ‘false wit’, even though they wrote their
verse in a vein of high seriousness. Pope’s mock epic is the acknowledged
epitome of ‘true wit’, but seriousness is not something that Pope would
claim for his supernatural agents—the spirits that he referred to as the
‘machinery’.2
Pope derived his spirits from Rosicrucian doctrine, as he explained
in the dedicatory epistle to the second edition of his poem in 1714, and
thereby for a moment created the impression that he relied upon a solid
and authentic philosophy.3 Yet he knew, probably all too well, that Rosi­
crucians were generally denounced as a ‘sect of mountebanks’ and in
all likelihood he made the reference to create a suggestion of erudition
that on second reflection might easily be discarded. In like manner, his

1  In his ‘Life of Cowley’, Samuel Johnson defined a metaphysical conceit as a discordia

concors and added: ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ (quoted
from M. H. Abrams, G. Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms [Boston, 2005], p. 43).
2 ‘Machinery’ (cf. deus ex machina) was a general term for supernatural agents such as
angels, demons, spirits or gods. See Addison’s remark in note 9 below.
3 All references to The Rape are from the following edition: Alexander Pope, The Rape
of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 2
(London, 1940). The dedicatory epistle to Arabella Fermor is on pp. 142–43. On Rosicru­
cianism in Britain, see Tillotson’s remarks on pp. 356–57, and also Adam McLean, ‘The
Manuscript Sources of the English Translation of the Rosicrucian Manifestos’, in Rosen­
kreuz als europäi­sches Phänomen im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Bibliotheca Philosophica Her­
metica (Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 271–85. As a concept and a philosophy, Rosicrucianism
was introduced in England in the seventeenth century notably by Thomas Vaughan, John
Heydon and Robert Fludd (on Heydon, see note 56 below). Instrumental in the early dis­
semination of Rosicrucian doctrines—McLean argues—was a group of Scottish aristocrats
close to King Charles I and King James.
214 jan r. veenstra

application of the machinery suggests to the reader a pneumatological

metaphysics that is soon belied by the irony and satire of his burlesque.
Thus in an unexpected way—and possibly without the author’s express
intention—The Rape of the Lock came to reflect enlightened ideas and
sceptical attitudes regarding supernatural agency. In the age of reason the
witty satire might be construed to vent the metaphysical doubts of Locke
or Hobbes. Whereas Milton in Paradise Lost (from which The Rape derived
some of its epic grandeur) had indecisively wavered between a Ptolemaic
and a Copernican perception of the cosmos,4 Pope in his depiction of the
universe of his nymphs and sylphs underwent the further impact of the
mechanised world picture by introducing supernatural agents with shady
credentials.
The origin of Pope’s machinery has attracted the attention of a number
of scholars5 who all point at the doctrine of elemental spirits as devel­
oped by the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bom­
bastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541). The latter’s ideas were popularised
in Le Comte de Gabalis, a novel in the form of a series of dialogues by
the abbé Nicolas Pierre Henri Montfaucon de Villars (1635–1673), Pope’s
immediate source.6 There is, however, a considerable difference between

4 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, 1964), 10.668–680: ‘Some say
he bid his angels turn askance / The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more / From the
sun’s axle’ (Copernican view); ‘some say the sun / Was bid turn reins from th’ equinoctial
road’ (Ptolemaic view).
5 The Paracelsian roots of Pope’s machinery were noted, among others, by Montague
Summers in his introduction to Lodovico Maria Sinistrari, Demoniality (London, 1927),
pp. xxxvii–xxxviii; Edward D. Seeber, ‘Sylphs and Other Elemental Beings in French Litera­
ture since Le Comte de Gabalis (1670)’, PMLA 59 (1944), 71–83; Kurt Goldammer, Paracelsus
in der deutschen Romantik (Wien, 1980), p. 89; and recently by Bonnie Latimer, ‘Alchemies
of Satire: A History of the Sylphs in The Rape of the Lock ’, The Review of English Studies 57
(2006), 684–700.
6 The book was first printed in 1670. An edition of 1671 is available online through
gallica.bnf.fr: Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les siences secretes (Paris, 1671). Mont­
faucon de Villars, Le Comte de Gabalis ou entretiens sur les sciences secrètes. La Critique de
Bérénice, ed. Roger Laufer (Paris, 1963) is a critical and annotated edition; in this essay,
quotations in French (in the spelling of the seventeenth century) are from this edition.
Also important is the following edition produced for an esoterically minded readership:
Montfaucon de Villars, Le Comte de Gabalis ou Entretiens sur les Sciences secrètes, précédé
de Magie et Dilettantisme “Le Roman de Montfaucon de Villars”, et L’Histoire de “la Rôtisserie
de la Reine Pédauque” par René-Louis Doyon, et L’Ésoterisme de Gabalis par Paul Marteau
(Paris, 1921). In 1680 two English translations appeared almost simultaneously, the first
by Philip Ayres, the second by Archibald Lovell: The Count of Gabalis: Or, the Extravagant
Mysteries of the Cabalists, exposed in Five Pleasant Discourses on the Secret Sciences. Done
into English by P. A. [= Philip Ayres] Gent. (London, 1680); and The Count of Gabalis or,
Conferences about Secret Sciences. Rendered out of French into English with an Advice to
the Reader by A. L. [= Archibald Lovell] A. M. (London, 1680).