Elias Ashmole

The teaching

Taught from his Prolegomena to the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), his diary, and his book on the Garter (1672).

The four stones

Ashmole teaches that the stone of the philosophers is not one thing but four, and that the change of metals is the least of what the true philosophers sought. The mineral stone turns base metals into gold, and that is all it does. The vegetable stone knows the nature of every growing thing, man and beast, fowl and fish, tree and plant, and makes them grow and flourish, even out of their season. The magical or prospective stone shows the one who has it any person in any part of the world, though hidden in a closed room.

Highest is the angelical stone, so subtle that it can be neither seen, felt nor weighed, but only tasted. It gives the sight of angels and the power to speak with them in dreams and revelations, and no evil spirit dares come near the place where it is kept.

The English masters

His gathering of the English poems of the art teaches that England has a line of adepts of its own, from Thomas Norton and George Ripley down to the men of his own century, and that their verses must be read as they were written, slowly and with patience. The poets wrote in veiled words on purpose, so that the greedy and the idle should find nothing in them. The art itself, as the poems hold, passes from a master to a chosen pupil by word of mouth, and the books are a map that only one who has walked the road can follow.

Questions put to the heavens

Ashmole practised astrology as his friend Lilly taught it, and his diary shows the art in daily use. He notes the hour and often the minute of what he did, because he chose his times by the chart and judged questions by the chart of the moment: when to begin a journey or a suit, how a sickness would go, whether a matter would prosper. The same diary keeps the old physic of amulets that went with the art: in April 1681 he writes that he took a dose of his elixir and hung three spiders about his neck, and that they drove his ague away. It is his note of the old physic, given here as his and not as a remedy.

The Order of the Garter

As a herald he teaches the ceremonies of chivalry as signs, each carrying a duty. The Order of the Garter is a fellowship of the Sovereign and twenty-five companions under the patronage of St George. Each knight wears the garter, blue with the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense, shamed be he who thinks evil of it, buckled below the left knee as the bond that ties the companions to one another and to their sovereign, and with it the George, the image of the patron saint slaying the dragon.

The knight is installed in the chapel of St George at Windsor, where his banner, helm and crest hang over his stall, and the order keeps its feast on St George's day. A knight who betrays his oath is degraded: his achievements are taken down and cast out of the chapel, and his name is struck from the roll.

Knowledge by things

The museum he gave to Oxford rests on a teaching set down in its statutes. The knowledge of nature is needed for life, for health and for the comforts of life, and it cannot be had without the history of nature, which calls for the sight of particular things, above all those that are strange in their make or useful in medicine, in manufacture and in trade. So the things themselves are to be gathered, kept and shown, and the student is to learn from them as well as from books.