This chapter concerns the prisca theologia, or ancient theology: the fundamental religious precepts thought to have been transmitted by God to human beings in the earlier stages of the world's history. Terms that closely overlap are prisca sapientia or prisca scientia, emphasising wisdom or knowledge, and, highlighting the continuity of the prisca theologia through all ages, philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. The ancient theology has usually been presented as a timeless tradition, common to early human cultures, or more precisely to exceptionally wise individuals (sages) within those cultures. While there is a good deal of evidence from ancient times onward for the awareness of manifestations of such a tradition, and of genealogies of major figures within it, present-day critics such as Kocku von Stuckrad are now drawing attention to its status as an ‘invented tradition’, implying that it serves some purpose specific to any given culture in which it is recognised. Its presence within such a context can be treated as an indicator of continuity (it portrays an image of timelessness) but also change (we can chart its shifting meanings and relationships within the culture at large).

We need to remind ourselves, from time to time, that underlying the concept of the ancient theology is a ‘pre-Darwinian’ worldview in which the Earth has a clearly finite history, having been created approximately four thousand years before the time of Christ, and destined to come to an end – at least in its pres-ent form – at some time in the conceivably near future. Within this worldview, mankind is defined not, of course, in evolutionary terms but as the chosen being to whom God entrusts custodianship of the Earth, and into whom the divine spirit is breathed, but who is also tarnished from the Fall. Human history is built on a cyclical pattern of perfection through revelation, and corruption through sin. The various regenerations of the prisca theologia throughout the ages are brought about through divinely inspired individuals such as Noah, Moses and most notably Jesus – or, more controversially for Christians, Orpheus, Pythag-oras or the Egyptian Hermes. Because mankind was, at the time of the early rev-elations, proportionately very much nearer to the moment of creation than were later ages, this gives the ancient theology an authenticity that extends beyond the content or provenance of its defining texts.

All four of the individuals with whom I am concerned attended one or other of the English universities of their time: Oxford and Cambridge. In this chapter, I examine the kinds of music-related experience they likely encoun-tered in their student and fellowship careers, encompassing musical life in both institutional and informal contexts. Official provision for musical education was always limited, but this did not inhibit the presence of a range of opportunities for the strictly masculine members of the universities to familiarise themselves with music on a number of levels. Allowing for fluctuations and developments over time, these broadly comprised theoretical concepts and practical skills, but, for those keen to seek it out, might also extend to engagement with music's more spiritual or arcane aspects. This chapter will seek to outline three ‘still lifes’ of the university milieu in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on my subjects’ respective careers. The most detailed will coincide with Sterry's time as a student and fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge immediately prior to the Civil Wars, establishing a pattern that, allowing for the constant flux of change, can be followed through our other contexts too. As well as examining the everyday practicalities of music making I aim to suggest ways in which musical experiences could help shape the distinctive worldview developed by Sterry and his Cambridge Platonist contemporaries. I shall then look rather more succinctly at Roach's career at St John’s, Oxford half a century later during the scarcely less traumatic 1680s. Finally, a brief overview of the first decades of the new century will take us into the Cambridge experiences of Stukeley at Corpus Christi and, a little later, of Hartley at Jesus College.

The premise I shall adopt is that university life in all its facets exerts an influence on these individuals and their responses to music, even if other factors clearly came into play. Of course, all university entrants were notionally open to the same influences, but we are looking for something beyond broad generalisations. I contend that, in rare cases such as those of Sterry and Roach in particular, who shared a receptive mindset along with a keen musical intelligence and a strongly aesthetic apprehension of the divine in nature, university experience was a necessary though hardly a sufficient factor in forming a conception of music rarely articulated prior to Romantic literature.

Part of the purpose of this study is to show how far some individuals could depart from the attitudes to music most usually associated with the age. Some idea of the scope of more conventional responses needs to be formed so that we can begin to assess how far our protagonists were at odds with them. In the years between 1650 and 1750, as no doubt at any time in identifiable history, music – conceived as a human, natural or divine category – commanded a spectrum of meanings. We are often told that music of earlier times was more strictly functional than its present-day counterpart, fulfilling a number of relatively clearly defined sacred and secular roles, from religious worship to dance accompaniment to sounding the hours. At the same time, we might also see it as having been more ephemeral, more ‘in the moment’, than music in our own culture, with its recordings, established repertoires and (for some kinds of music) closely studied published scores. In any case, the individual contexts to be explored in the present study, while by no means negating this broad picture, do tend to undermine its universality. My goal here is not to construct a systematic general survey of this area of cultural life (which would of course require a vast amount of space), but more succinctly to come to some understanding of the ways in which our individuals reflected judgments and values typical of their time, and the extent to which they departed from them.

Debate on Music's Value

Certainly, music's broader ontology was a matter of some debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Should its divine status and origins (the music of the angels, music in the mind of God) be stressed, or should greater emphasis be laid on its abuse by the devil in tempting fallen humanity? Was it a valid medium for rendering the souls of worshippers receptive to divine influence, or a dangerous (or, at least, superfluous) diversion from the proper attention owed to the divine word? Did music, indeed, really emanate from God, or was it to be understood, in the forms through which we experience it, as a merely human construct? Even today the question of what music ‘is’ remains a vexed one, as philosophers and critics continue to speculate about the nature of its existence beyond the physically perceived sound of any particular song or piece.

Magic, like the Holy Roman Empire or twentieth-century cinema, is one of those historical phenomena that seems to have been a long time dying. There is, admittedly, a widely held view that it was already terminally chal-lenged by around 1500 or so, and that its last vestiges were easily extinguished by the triumphant march of the Scientific Revolution. This interpretation loses none of its persuasiveness in specifically musical contexts. Citing Gary Tomlinson's Foucauldian investigation of Music in Renaissance Magic, Daniel K. L. Chua concurs that ‘perhaps the last significant stage of [the] magical epistemology can be heard at the end of the fifteenth century’, to be silenced by the muting of (musical) nature in the materialising theories and physico-mathematical models of a new age. On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 5, there is also a significant historiographical trend identifying the continuing presence of aspects of magic in the new philosophy itself, and emphasising magic's positive contribution to the achievement of the Scientific Revolution. In this chapter, though, I aim to show that neither of these historical models corresponds to the strand of thought I seek to portray. What marks out the role of magic here is that, in contrast to either its ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ roles in the development of science, we are not dealing with a set of practices but with a recognition of the divine presence within nature. This key distinction will be explored throughout this chapter, but I begin with some broader observations on the treatment of ‘magic’ in the literature.

One reason why so many commentators have found any tendency toward a generous interpretation of magic's historical function difficult to accept is the persistence of an essentialising view in which ‘science’ and ‘magic’ are per-ceived as fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable modes of thought. We have long been conditioned by figures of the stature of Freud, Weber or Mal-inowski to see magic as representative of an early or intermediate stage in the social and psychological development of human culture. While once a neces-sary part of mankind's search for maturity, it was something that needed to be relinquished as a prerequisite of the proper functioning of modern societies.

Tom Dixon never drafted a conclusion to his book – at least not in any of the versions we found. Neatly and succinctly revisiting what he had already written about the period between 1650 and 1750 seems not to have been a priority. Instead of penning a conventional synopsis, he was more interested in looking forward to the next century, focusing chiefly on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In particular, he had increasingly come to realise just how much Coleridge's quintessentially Romantic thinking about music and divinity echoed that of his own four protagonists. As noted in the Foreword, he had discerned some striking resemblances between the poet's views on divine harmony and universal salvation and theirs.

Some Provisional Conclusions

The chapters we have presented here have depicted Sterry, Roach, Stukeley and Hartley as distinct early modern partakers in a tradition where divine har-mony was more than bookish abstraction. As seems to have been the case for Coleridge, it was a vibrant part of their daily lives, whether they corresponded enthusiastically or practised instruments, whether it inspired impassioned preaching or novel physiological work. Moreover, the mystical approach they shared reflected an inclusive view of humanity. Their shared belief in truly uni-versal salvation was articulated through a language redolent of music, one that implied a feminising influence that set these male individuals apart from con-temporaries who often strictly emphasised the rational – i.e. the supposedly masculine – aspects of religion. Dixon has shown that for his four thinkers, who shared similar views on the triumph of God's all-encompassing love as a mani-festation of divine harmony, the impact of music on their thinking transcended contextual differences.

This book also uncovers the centrality of music to the ancient theological tradition, notably as this played out in the context of Newton's work and in that of his followers. It is generally acknowledged that most Newtonians were engrossed in the history of ancient religions and their relationship to Christianity as it developed through the ages. Only Dixon, however, has shown the real extent to which musical ideas and practices were constitutive of this constantly evolving tradition, at least as it unfolded in England. Sterry and Stukeley, for instance, understood the British Druids to have been teachers of Pythagoras’ thought; these ancient lawgivers combined the roles of bard and seer and communicated fundamental truths about nature through voice and instrument.

While this book is not primarily a biographical study, it will be necessary to give some idea of my main protagonists’ lives and, where possible, to sketch an outline of their practical engagement with music. This might present a somewhat irregular group picture, given the diverse circumstances of their individual attitudes and experiences and the uneven nature of documentary survival. Both Stukeley and Hartley were musical amateurs whose involvement was in many ways typical of our accepted picture of the cultivated gentleman in the eighteenth-century world of societies, meetings and public concerts. It is only in the special role music fulfilled in their interior worlds that they emerge as extraordinary. This, up to a point, is also true of Roach, except that in his case the level of his interaction with the musical world around him seems almost to reach obsessive proportions and thus to be at odds with the norms of cultivated restraint. We also need to keep in mind, though, that this impression is inevitably strengthened by the relative wealth of detail on his musical activities that happens to survive in his diaries and papers, at least in relation to some periods of his life. It does mean that the material in this chapter on Roach's musical life may appear somewhat disproportionately detailed, but it does at least enable me to draw on a good deal of evidence that has received little attention to date. In stark contrast, we shall find that any inference of external musical circumstance associated with Sterry's life can only be indirect and speculative.

Peter Sterry

Sterry was born in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, across the river from the Tower of London. The record of his baptism bears the date of 22 September 1613. He was the son of Anthony Sterry, an apparently prosperous cooper or wine merchant who, together with Peter's uncle, had moved to the city from the family home in the Forest of Dean. In addition to this commercial background, at least one member of the family may have held a church ministry back in Gloucestershire during the sixteenth century, in which case there is precedent for the religious orientation that would shape Sterry's own life.

The editors’ aim in publishing this volume has been to make the highly original and insightful work of the late Tom Dixon (1948–2015) accessible to the wider scholarly community, and to celebrate his regrettably short scholarly career. He had begun to work seriously on his book, “Between the Rational and the Mystical”: Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650–1750, around 2012. It was to be his unique contribution to the history of music, religion and ideas in early modern England, challenging the hegemonic concepts of a seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’ and an eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ by advancing an alternative narrative of continuity and change covering the period between 1650 and 1750. At one point, this timeline even extended to the 1830s of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Unfortunately, the work remained incomplete at the time of his death, existing only in the form of a plethora of notes and nearly a dozen chapters in various stages of development. Stored on his laptop computer, these files might have easily been destroyed or simply lost. Fortunately, their significance was well understood by two of us: Chloë Dixon, his daughter, and Penelope Gouk, his former supervisor and later friend and colleague. While we had hardly known each other before Tom's death, at the reception after his funeral we joined in sharing memories about his passion for history. Our conversations strengthened our conviction that publishing the fruit of his later years’ research would benefit a larger audience. The task deserved our time and energy.

Academic work and publications

Tom was an unusual scholar who came late and purposefully to academic life, having taken early retirement after a career in insurance and estate agency. In his fifties, he took his BA in Independent Studies (2000) and MA in Historical Research (2002) at the University of Lancaster, where he found a welcoming academic community.

We customarily associate the romance of place, the search for isolation and darkness, and their internalisation in the recesses of the psyche, with a later age than the one addressed by this book. Here, I aim to explore the deeply personal responses of two of my protagonists, Peter Sterry and William Stukeley, to imaginary worlds inspired by their notions of ancient British Druidic culture. This should enable us to see, firstly, how the dry, scholarly façade of the prisca theologia could be brought to life; secondly, how two thinkers, each sympathetic to this culture but writing a good half-century apart, might relate to it in differing ways, partly conditioned by their respective times and circumstances; thirdly, how such seldom-discussed contexts can help us to expand, and to question, received views of intellectual life either side of 1700; and finally, how convictions about music's ontological realities helped to create such individual perspectives.

An awareness of the Druids had been gradually gaining ground in English culture at least since the sixteenth century, when Holinshed chronicled their skills in theology, philosophy and music, while Camden and other scholars of antiquity collated allusions from classical texts. That they could be utilised by Protestant polemicists as a metaphor for the papist corruption of true religion serves only to emphasise the extent of their assimilation into the culture during the Tudor period. By the second half of the seventeenth century, this growing body of knowledge was being further expanded by the more focused studies of, among others, Edmund Dickenson and Aylett Sammes. John Aubrey suggested that sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury, generally thought to be of Roman or even Viking origin, might in fact be Druidic temples. Thus the stage was set for Stukeley's extensive research, begun in the late 1710s and continued for the rest of his life, into the Druidic identity of such monuments, and more generally into British Druidry.

Britain, however, was not the only country to claim a Druidic past. In France, scholars from at least the early sixteenth century onward had been piecing together their own Gallic version, one that sited itself even more explicitly in prisca theologia traditions.

We saw in Chapter 2 how all my main subjects gravitated to London in pursuit of their careers. This is scarcely surprising, given the increasing importance of the capital city relative to the rest of the country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Peter Sterry preaching to the new Cromwellian establishment, just as for David Hartley the ambitious medical practitioner a century later, it was to London that opportunity inevitably led. The city shaped their existence not just simply in terms of career enhancement but by virtue of its distinctive character of life: the variety, extensiveness and content of the day-to-day contacts it enabled. In this chapter I focus on the social and cultural worlds occupied by my protagonists, the kinds of relationship they were able to form within those worlds and the extent to which music and related interests and beliefs played a part in that process. In Chapter 8 I argue that, as well as providing a unique site of potential interaction, London appeared at times as a negative force, a foil for an alternative and contrasting lifestyle privileging rural isolation and its associations with unspoiled Nature and primal wisdom. In the present chapter, though, my focus will be on the practical role of the city in promoting musical and related cultures and thence in stimulating the musical content of my subjects’ worldviews. As well as helping to provide a grounding for the more conceptual content of Part II, the orientation of this material will throw up a few surprising connections and a certain amount of previously unidentified biographical detail on some diverse historical figures.

By 1750, London was a rapidly growing environment. It had reached an estimated population of close on 700,000, its newly developing suburbs fanning out beyond the walls of a still densely packed central city. The capital's population has been estimated to have represented 7 per cent of the country as a whole in 1650, but the figure rose to something like 11 per cent by the end of our time period. The Sterry family, drawn to London from rural England and prospering as merchants in their adopted home, typified the migratory patterns that produced exponential growth in spite of a persistently high urban mortality rate. Occupations were less dependent on agriculture than before, and commercial opportunities were governed to an ever-greater extent by overseas expansion enhanced by colonial trade.

Plainly stated, this book examines the role of music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity, by exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in the written transmission of elite ideas by four university-educated individuals on the fringes of the supposed mainstream of English thought, roughly between 1650 and 1750. While formulated within an unquestionably elite and normative society, the musical reflections of these individuals expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the world and the human psyche.

Music was not the sole foundation of these thinkers’ discourses. Indeed, none of them was, or indeed is now, generally known as a ‘musician’, at least, not in any of the usual senses of that term. They wrote in theological, devotional, antiquarian and ‘scientific’ contexts that often have no obvious relation to music at all. As such, this book's concerns must extend significantly beyond the musical. Yet the premise to be adopted is that music is always potentially present in their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and inner, public and private, rational and mystical.

This enquiry will lead us in directions that may at times seem surprising and even anachronistic. It is rarely questioned that the period in focus is traditionally celebrated as one of major transformation in British thought: the ousting of over-zealous religious enthusiasm by a more ‘reasonable’ approach to belief and worship, the culminating glories of the Scientific Revolution, the origins and early unfolding of the Enlightenment, the emergence of a politically open, commercially driven public sphere. The increasingly characteristic temper of the contemporary mindset has been identified by many epithets, including polite, rational, reasonable, secular, worldly and even satirical. All these qualities have been treated as antithetical to, and often leading to the destruction of, the traditions on which my protagonists drew, and thereby their approach potentially appears hopelessly outdated. Paradoxically, however, in privileging the human spirit and its identification with the mysterious other, their chal-lenges to dominant ideological currents of their times coincide with the future stirrings of Romanticism. If one considers them solely through the traditional ‘progress’ narratives of British early modernity, my subjects simultaneously appear archaic and improbably prescient.

Rather than relying on such stereotypes, the aim is to address this area of thought on its own terms.

The aim of this chapter is to see how musical concepts could, in the work of our writers, help to elucidate and express some fundamental areas of Christian belief, including – in David Hartley's words – ‘the origin of evil, free will, the nature of our future existence, the degree and duration of future pun-ishment’. For this purpose our main concern will be to view Hartley's work in the context of Sterry’s, almost a century earlier. Such a comparison throws into sharp relief both the advent of Newtonianism and the new approaches to the anatomy of the brain and nervous system that emerged during this time. Yet behind these far-reaching changes in physical understanding we find two exponents of a controversial Christian doctrine – universal salvation – that continued to pose no less a threat to religious, moral and political orthodoxies in 1750 than it had in 1650. While we are conditioned to classify work such as Sterry's under the heading of ‘religion’, Hartley's as part of the ‘new science’, I hope to show that the commonalities shared by these two thinkers are as revealing as their considerable divergences. Even if the ‘scientific’ elements of Hartley's work have been counted as its most forward-looking and hence most important dimension, we shall see that Hartley himself had a different teleology in mind: that of the Newtonian age's refinement of the knowledge of the physical world leading us to a closer understanding of the divine.

Through his musical discourse, Sterry sought to achieve a resolution of one of the major doctrinal clashes of his time, that between ‘the appearing Harshness’ of Reformed predestination theology and the ‘most absurd Extream’ of Arminian free will, through the meeting of ‘the most pleasant liberty’ and ‘the most potent necessity’ in the ‘Divine Harmony of the supream and universal good’. Convinced that an all-loving God would not forever reject any of his creatures, he nevertheless believed that a final restitution could not be left merely to the competing wills of individual human beings in a fallen world. He conceived God's saving grace aesthetically – ‘[g]race is beauty with its most powerful charms, as it … maketh all things answer it and dance to its music’ – as the final participation and resolution of all in the divine music.