Robert Fludd and the Utriusque cosmi historia: Macrocosm and Microcosm

Between 1617 and 1621 the volumes of one of the most spectacular works of seventeenth-century esotericism appeared at Oppenheim on the Rhine: the Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, that is, the metaphysical, physical and technical history of the two worlds, the greater and the lesser. The author was Robert Fludd, an English physician born in 1574 at Bearsted in Kent. The publisher was Johann Theodor de Bry, who furnished the text with engravings that became famous.

A Physician between Oxford and London

Fludd studied at Oxford, at St John's College, and then travelled for some years in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, supporting himself as a tutor. Back home, he took his degree in medicine in 1605 and, after some difficulties due to his Paracelsian ideas, was admitted to the College of Physicians in London, where he practised successfully until his death in 1637.

As a physician Fludd stood in the wake of Paracelsus, but his vision was above all theological and cosmological. For him the Bible, read in the light of the Hermetic and Kabbalistic tradition, contained the true philosophy of nature, and science had to start from the revelation of Moses rather than from the Greek philosophers. This idea is developed above all in the Philosophia Moysaica, published posthumously in 1638.

The Images of the Two Worlds

The Utriusque cosmi historia describes the macrocosm, that is the universe, and the microcosm, that is man, as two mirrors of the same divine structure. The engravings show creation as a passage from darkness to light, the universe as a great monochord tuned by the hand of God, and nature as a woman leading on a chain the “ape” of the human arts. These plates are among the most reproduced images in the history of esotericism.

The work is not merely speculative. A substantial part is devoted to the technical arts: arithmetic, music, geometry, perspective, military art, mechanics, geomancy and the art of memory. In this Fludd follows the encyclopaedic ideal of the Renaissance, in which every discipline belonged to a single order of knowledge, from theology down to the craftsman's tools.

Rosicrucians and Controversies

In 1616 Fludd had published an Apologia compendiaria in defence of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, whose manifestos had appeared in Germany a few years earlier. He never declared himself a member, but he shared its aspiration to a general reform of knowledge. This stance, restated the following year in a Tractatus apologeticus, exposed him to much criticism on the Continent.

Famous disputes followed. Johannes Kepler, in an appendix to his Harmonices mundi of 1619, criticised Fludd's symbolic use of mathematics, and Fludd replied vigorously. Marin Mersenne and later Pierre Gassendi attacked him as a magician and a supporter of dangerous doctrines. In England he became involved in the controversy over the weapon-salve, a supposed cure of wounds at a distance, debated with the clergyman William Foster in 1631.

Fludd represents the last great season of Renaissance occult philosophy, when the new science was beginning to separate mathematics from symbol. His plates preserve intact Agrippa's dream: a universe in which every level of reality corresponds to the others and in which man is the meeting point of all the worlds.