Francis Barrett
About 1774 to after 1802
Who was Francis Barrett, and what is truly known of them?
What is known
English writer on magic, of whom little is recorded. In 1801 the London firm of Lackington, Allen printed his book The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer, with coloured plates of spirits’ heads drawn by himself. It is a compilation: most of it is taken, without saying so, from the seventeenth-century English versions of Cornelius Agrippa and of the grimoires printed with him. In the book he offered lessons in the occult arts to up to twelve pupils at his house in Marylebone. Newspapers of 1802 report his attempts at balloon flights at Greenwich and Swansea, most of them failures. His dates of birth and death are not settled.
The teaching
Taught from his book The Magus (1801), with the old English Agrippa it is drawn from.
What magic is
The Magus teaches that magic is the highest knowledge of nature: the wisdom of the hidden causes of things, by which the wise do wonders with natural means. The world is threefold, elemental, celestial and intellectual, and each lower world is ruled by the one above it, so that the virtues of the angels pass through the stars into the elements and the things made of them. The magus studies all three: natural philosophy for the elements, mathematics and astrology for the heavens, and theology and the Kabbalah for the intelligences above.
Natural magic
Every thing has two kinds of virtue. Its manifest virtues come from the elements it is made of, heat and cold, moisture and dryness; its occult virtues come from above, from the star and the idea it answers to, and they are known not by reasoning but by experience. Things that share an occult virtue draw one another and things opposed repel, and this sympathy and antipathy, seen most plainly in the lodestone and the iron, is the ground of natural magic.
So the magus gathers the herbs, stones and other things that share a planet's virtue, at the hour when that planet is strong, and joins them so that the virtue is increased. Many of the plants and metals of the old books are poisons; the house teaches them as the book's lore and gives no preparations.
The tables, the seals and the circle
The Magus prints the planetary tables of Agrippa, each a magic square with the names and seals of its intelligence and its spirit, together with the art of making talismans under the right sky; that art is taught in full on the branch of talismans and sigils. It prints too the ceremonial magic of the Heptameron, with the circle drawn for the day and the hour, the angels of the days and seasons, and the conjurations, which are taught on the branch of the grimoires. Like his sources, Barrett holds that the power in all of it is God's: the names command because they are His, and the operator who forgets this is in danger.
The magus himself
The book is plain about the one who practises. The magus must be pure, humble and devout, sober in life and patient in study, free of greed and of the wish to harm, and he works by faith, by a strong and steady imagination and by a will turned toward God; without these the instruments and the words are empty. The evil spirits, he warns, deceive those who call them out of curiosity or pride, and the student is to seek the art for wisdom and for the good of others.
The school
In the book he offers a school as well. He will receive a few students, no more than twelve, to be taught in private the arts the book sets out, natural magic, the Kabbalah, chemistry, the talismanic art, astrology and the rest, together with the rites and principles of the old philosophers and magi. The art, as he presents it, is for a few serious students, taught face to face.
The lives of the magi
Barrett also sets the art in a line of the wise. The lives of the ancient philosophers and adepts added at the end of his book, from Zoroaster and Hermes to the magicians of the Renaissance, teach that magic is an old and honourable learning, kept by priests and sages in every age, and that the student who takes it up joins their company.
Orders and memberships
None is documented. On his title page he put letters after his name that stand for a Brother of the Rosy Cross; no such body is known to have received him. Whether his school ever met is not known.
The legend
That he was a learned adept and The Magus an original system of magic, and that a line of teaching runs from his school through Frederick Hockley to the Victorian orders. Hockley copied manuscripts for the bookseller John Denley, who had lent Barrett his sources; that he was Barrett’s pupil is unproven. The reprint of 1875 fed the occult revival.
Their works
- The Magus, or Celestial IntelligencerBook, 1801
A book of natural magic, astrology, talismans and the raising of spirits, with coloured plates of spirits’ heads drawn by himself. Most of it is taken, without saying so, from the seventeenth-century English versions of Agrippa and the grimoires. Its reprint of 1875 fed the occult revival.
Ask the Oracle about it - The Lives of Alchemystical PhilosophersCollection, 1815
A collection of short lives of the alchemists with a catalogue of alchemical books, printed in London. It was reprinted and read in the Victorian occult revival.
Ascribed to Barrett, and his authorship is not certain.
Ask the Oracle about it
How the house tells a life
This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.
The arts it feeds
Lives near it in time
Lives and legends
Franz Anton MesmerEtteillaCount CagliostroAdam WeishauptNapoleon BonaparteMarie Anne LenormandMarie LaveauEdward Bulwer-LyttonAllan KardecAlbert PikeÉliphas LéviPaschal Beverly RandolphThe whole tree
