Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus (17 January 1574 – 8 September 1637), was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian apologist.
Fludd is best known for his compilations in occult philosophy. He had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.
Between 1598 and 1604, Fludd studied medicine, chemistry and hermeticism on the European mainland following his graduation. His itinerary is not known in detail. On his own account he spent a winter in the Pyrenees studying theurgy (the practice of rituals) with the Jesuits. Furthermore, he indicated that he travelled throughout Spain, Italy and Germany following his time in France.
Upon returning to England in 1604, Fludd matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford. He intended to take a degree in medicine. The main requirements to obtain this, at the time, included demonstrating that he (the supplicant) had read and understood the required medical texts—primarily those by Galen and Hippocrates. Fludd defended three theses following these texts, and on 14 May 1605, Fludd made his supplication. He graduated with his M.B. and M.D. on 16 May 1605.
After graduating from Christ Church, Fludd moved to London, settling in Fenchurch Street, and making repeated attempts to enter the College of Physicians. Fludd encountered problems with the College examiners, both because of his unconcealed contempt for traditional medical authorities (he had adopted the views of Paracelsus), and because of his attitude to authority—especially those of the ancients like Galen. After at least six failures, he was admitted in September 1609. He became a prosperous London doctor, serving as Censor of the College four times (1618, 1627, 1633, and 1634). He also participated in an inspection of the London apothecaries put on by the College in 1614, and helped to author the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis in 1618—a directory of standardized pharmaceutical preparations given by the London College of Physicians. He became such an established figure within the College that he was included in seventeenth-century critiques of the college, including those by Nicholas Culpepper and Peter Coles.
Subsequently, both his career and his standing in the College took a turn very much for the better. He was on good terms with Sir William Paddy. Fludd was one of the first to support in print the theory of the circulation of the blood of the college’s William Harvey. To what extent Fludd may have actually influenced Harvey is still debated, in the context that Harvey’s discovery is hard to date precisely. The term “circulation” was certainly ambiguous at that time.
While he followed Paracelsus in his medical views rather than the ancient authorities, he was also a believer that real wisdom was to be found in the writings of natural magicians. His view of these mystical authorities was inclined towards the great mathematicians, and he believed, like Pythagoras and his followers, that numbers contained access to great hidden secrets. Certainty in religion could be discovered only through serious study of numbers and ratios. This view later brought Fludd into conflict with Johannes Kepler.
Much of Fludd’s writing, and his pathology of disease, centered around the sympathies found in nature between man, the terrestrial earth, and the divine. While Paracelsian in nature, Fludd’s own theory on the origin of all things posited that, instead of the Tria Prima, all species and things stemmed from first, dark Chaos, then divine Light which acted upon the Chaos, which finally brought forth the waters. This last element was also called the Spirit of the Lord, and it made up the passive matter of all other substances, including all secondary elements and the four qualities of the ancients. Moreover, the Fluddean tripartite theory concluded that Paracelsus’ own conception of the three primary principles—Sulphur, Salt and Mercury—eventually derived from Chaos and Light interacting to create variations of the waters, or Spirit.
The Trinitarian division is important in that it reflects a mystical framework for biology. Fludd was heavily reliant on scripture; in the Bible, the number three represented the principium formarum, or the original form. Furthermore, it was the number of the Holy Trinity. Thus, the number three formed the perfect body, paralleling the Trinity. This allowed man and earth to approach the infinity of God, and created a universality in sympathy and composition between all things.
Fludd’s application of his mystically inclined tripartite theory to his philosophies of medicine and science was best illustrated through his conception of the Macrocosm and microcosm relationship. The divine light (the second of Fludd’s primary principles) was the “active agent” responsible for creation. This informed the development of the world and the sun, respectively. Fludd concluded, from a reading of Psalm 19:4—”In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun”—that the Spirit of the Lord was contained literally within the sun, placing it central to Fludd’s model of the macrocosm. remained in manuscript. As the sun was to the earth, so was the heart to mankind. The sun conveyed Spirit to the earth through its rays, which circulated in and about the earth giving it life. Likewise, the blood of man carried the Spirit of the Lord (the same Spirit provided by the sun), and circulated through the body of man. This was an application of the sympathies and parallels provided to all of God’s Creation by Fludd’s tripartite theory of matter.
The blood was central to Fludd’s conception of the relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm; the blood and the Spirit it circulated interacted directly with the Spirit conveyed to the macrocosm. The macrocosmal Spirit, carried by the Sun, was influenced by astral bodies and changed in composition through such influence. Comparatively, the astral influences on the macrocosmal Spirit could be transported to the microcosmal Spirit in the blood by the active commerce assumed between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Fludd extended this interaction to his conception of disease: the movement of Spirit between the macrocosm and microcosm could be corrupted and invade the microcosm as disease. Like Paracelsus, Fludd conceived of disease as an external invader, rather than a complexional imbalance.
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías