Robert Fludd: the English physician who drew the macrocosm

If one looks for a direct heir to Agrippa's cosmic vision in the seventeenth century, the most obvious candidate is Robert Fludd. Born in 1574 in Kent, the son of a senior crown official, and died in London in 1637, Fludd was a successful physician and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. He was also the author of some of the most famous images of Hermetic philosophy: engravings representing the universe as a system of spheres, harmonies and divine rays, in which man is a mirror of the cosmos.

A Paracelsian physician in London

Fludd studied at Oxford and travelled for some years on the Continent, in France, Germany and Italy, working at times as a tutor. Back in England, he had some difficulty being admitted to the College of Physicians, partly because of his sympathy for the chemical medicine of Paracelsus, viewed with suspicion by the Galenic tradition. He was eventually accepted and practised a lucrative profession in London.

In 1616 he published an Apologia compendiaria in defence of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, followed the next year by a larger treatise. Fludd never declared himself a member of the brotherhood, but he defended its ideals of a reform of knowledge on biblical and Hermetic foundations. This stance made him the best-known representative of the Rosicrucian cause in England.

The Utriusque cosmi historia

His major work, the Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, that is the history of the two worlds, the great and the small, was published at Oppenheim from 1617 by the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry. The volumes, lavishly illustrated with engravings, deal with creation, the celestial spheres, music, geometry, geomancy, the art of memory and techniques of every kind.

The underlying scheme is close to that of De occulta philosophia: a universe ordered in levels, traversed by a single divine force, in which every part corresponds to the others. Fludd, however, develops it through a very personal reading of Genesis, founded on the contrast between light and darkness, and with constant attention to music as the key to the proportions of the world.

The disputes with Kepler and Mersenne

Fludd's work provoked important reactions. Johannes Kepler, in the appendix to the fifth book of his Harmonices mundi of 1619, criticised his symbolic use of numbers and figures, setting against it the need for precise measurement and mathematical demonstration. Fludd replied sharply, and the dispute became an exemplary confrontation between two ways of understanding the harmony of the cosmos: as a mystery to be contemplated or as a law to be calculated.

In France the Minim friar Marin Mersenne attacked him as a magician and Kabbalist, and Pierre Gassendi intervened against him. In England Fludd was also drawn into the controversy over the weapon-salve, which was said to heal wounds when applied to the weapon that had caused them: in 1631 he replied to the clergyman William Foster, who had denounced the practice as magical. Fludd maintained that it was a natural effect, founded on sympathy.

With Fludd, occult philosophy of the Agrippan kind perhaps reached its last great systematic expression. His Mosaicall Philosophy, published in English in 1659, many years after his death, sums up his thought. His engravings continue to be reproduced as emblems of the Hermetic vision of the world, precisely while his opponents were building the science that would replace it.