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The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason
Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy. In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment , John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment―generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion―were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy. Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age. Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet. Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction. 20 illustrations
432 pages, Hardcover
First published July 22, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
March 20, 2024
In an eloquent and witty style this reminds the reader on the dichotomous nature of the age of rationalism. Logic and spirituality combined to produce the most amazing scientific advances of the renaissance. In a nutshell this is the authors claim and it is well supported with examples and reasons. This is a great book that not only gives us great insights but also provides interesting tidbits about some of the famous philosophers and scientists of the age of rationalism.
January 8, 2017
A surprisingly entertaining and witty overview of occult or fringe spiritual belief in the Enlightenment. It is not so much a comprehensive history, but a study of particular events and lives as examples or illustrations of the theme.
November 12, 2020
Moved to gwern.net.
November 6, 2017
Brief Synopsis: It contains entertaining biographical sketches of some curious figures from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, but I’m not sure what—if anything—it actually says about the Enlightenment.
Detailed Thoughts:
In “The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason,” John V. Fleming seeks to demonstrate that, during, the period that we call “The Enlightenment,” not every educated person scorned religion and traditions like alchemy and ritual magic that might seem mystical, irrational or superstitious by modern standards. Rather, he contends, older patterns of religious belief and hermetic/occult practices persisted and were indeed critically important components of the Enlightenment itself.
There nothing new about this argument. In fact it's not really an argument at all. No serious historian of the Enlightenment contends that that every educated Westerner became a scientific-minded rationalist during the 17th and 18th-centuries—or even that those who did abandoned religion or matters that might be considered “supernatural” or “metaphysical” . In fact, there’s been a lot of scholarship on this very subject by top-notch historians over the past half-century, including Keith Thomas, Frances Yates, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Darnton, Darrin McMahon and others. There has also been plenty written on 18th century religious developments ranging from Swedenborgianism, to the Great Awakening in America, to John Wesley and the rise of Methodism.
Still, even if the argument’s not original—the subject matter is interesting enough, And since Fleming’s stated goal is to produce a popular book on this subject, rather than a scholarly one, I figured that "Dark Side of the Enlightnment" could, at the very least, be an entertaining, accessible survey of the subject.
And, some parts are very entertaining. Despite a rambling, polemical, and tangent-filled introduction, the first chapter provides a lively and spirited bio of Valentine Greatrakes (love the name!) a 17th century Anglo-Irish gentleman faith healer. It also discusses several colorful characters Greatrakes was involved with, and his perception by others: some thought he was a charlatan; others championed him as a modern Protestant (and conforming Anglican!) miracle-worker. Here, Fleming does some astute analysis of the sources, noting that many of the works championing Greatrakes use tropes and phrasing straight out of medieval hagiography.
Later chapters provide similarly intriguing biographies of the notorious Count Cagliostro (a self proclaimed wizard, alchemist, medium, and the founder of Egyptian-rite masonry, and alleged charlatan and criminal), and Julie de Kruedener, a well-traveled Latvian noblewoman and single-novel author who, late in life underwent a religious turn towards both pietism and chialism.
In between these character sketches, the book's central chapters offer surveys of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the practice of the “occult arts” of alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic in early modern Europe. Sadly, these middle pages lack the detail, color, and flavor of the portraits of Greatrakes, Cagliostro, and Kruedener. In fact, they are so general and cursory as to say very little at all. (Fortunately, Fleming does provide references to more detailed books on the subjects.) There’s also a curious chapter on the Paris Convulsionsists, which provides a discussion of why a set of miraculous events at a Parisian cemetery during the early 1700s was so contraversial.
Though engaging, Fleming’s accounts of Greatrakes, Cagliostro, and Kruedener are also puzzling. With the possible exception of Cagliostro, it’s not clear exactly how they constitute “Enlightenment” figures in the first place. Greatrakes’ healing activity barely falls within what the most generous historians would call “the early Enlightenment” —and even then, he doesn’t appear to have ever engaged intellectually with any issues relating to the new science or philosophy of his day. The closest Enlightenment connection in his story really seems to be that he published an account of his healing actions in the form of an open-letter to fellow Anglo-Irishman Robert Boyle (the chemist/physicist)-- and to which Boyle never responded. That’s not much of a connection in my view. The Enlightenment credentials of Julie Kruedener are even more suspect. Though born in the late 18th century, her main activity of interest for Fleming (including both the publication of her novel and her religious conversion) happened in the 19th. Moreover, the circles she moved in— which included Germaine de Stael, Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Richter suggest that she was very much part of the early Romantic movement— not the Enlightenment.
The inclusion of such questionably relevant figures as Greatrakes and Kruedener points to a broader problem with Fleming's book— namely, his tendency to play extremely fast and loose with the boundaries and definition of “The Enlightenment” as a historical period and concept. This becomes most clear in the “Three Occult Arts” chapter, where his discussion includes numerous references to authors and texts more associated with the Renaissance (e.g. Pico della Mirandola ) and even the Middle Ages (Chaucer, Dante, and others)!
No less puzzling are the many things that Fleming does NOT discuss in “The Dark Side of the Enlightenment” that might have seemed more relevant. For instance, Isaac Newton’s interest in alchemy, biblical interpretation, and apocalypticism; or Robert Boyle’s own interest in alchemy; or Franz Mesmer’s investigations into animal magnetism and what we would now call “mesmerism” or hypnosis. A similarly curious absence is that in his discussion on “occult” arts, Fleming doesn’t mention tarot cards. An examination of why tarot decks, which had previously been used primarily as playing cards, came to be widely used for divination in the 18th century strikes me as more pertinent to a discussion of Enlightenment-era occult practices than what medieval and Renaissance-era writers had to say about alchemy.
One further criticism I have about this book is the author’s style. While his wit and jargon-free prose make the book accessible, and even pleasurable to read, I find his glibness suspect. Too often, he seems to rely upon a witty turn of phrase to advance his argument rather then by citing and analyzing evidence. Sometimes, he delivers quips that sound clever, but say nothing, like “The darkest secret of the Masons is that there was no secret.” He frequently uses “scare quotes” to imply insincerity on the part of the figures under discussion, or as a way of transforming his own failure to find a precise word into irony. Fleming also deploys anachronistic metaphors and analogies (such as referring to the Paris police who closed the Saint-Medard churchyard in 1732 as “an elite special-ops force”), which may add drama and immediacy to a popular reader, but also risk misrepresentation. He also makes anachronistic literary allusions, such as when he compares Julie de Kruedener’s attempt to improve peasant life with those of Dorothea Brooke in “Middlemarch”. Finally, the absence of any footnotes and in-text citations bugs me, and makes me all the more suspect that this book relies too much on rhetoric, rather than research.
Ultimately, I can’t say that I’d recommend this book. That said, I can’t say one should avoid it either, at least not of the topic sounds interesting. Rather, I would suggest read it for the style and storytelling, while remaining on the lookout for other works that may present a more scholarly and rigorous discussion of the subject.
Detailed Thoughts:
In “The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason,” John V. Fleming seeks to demonstrate that, during, the period that we call “The Enlightenment,” not every educated person scorned religion and traditions like alchemy and ritual magic that might seem mystical, irrational or superstitious by modern standards. Rather, he contends, older patterns of religious belief and hermetic/occult practices persisted and were indeed critically important components of the Enlightenment itself.
There nothing new about this argument. In fact it's not really an argument at all. No serious historian of the Enlightenment contends that that every educated Westerner became a scientific-minded rationalist during the 17th and 18th-centuries—or even that those who did abandoned religion or matters that might be considered “supernatural” or “metaphysical” . In fact, there’s been a lot of scholarship on this very subject by top-notch historians over the past half-century, including Keith Thomas, Frances Yates, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Darnton, Darrin McMahon and others. There has also been plenty written on 18th century religious developments ranging from Swedenborgianism, to the Great Awakening in America, to John Wesley and the rise of Methodism.
Still, even if the argument’s not original—the subject matter is interesting enough, And since Fleming’s stated goal is to produce a popular book on this subject, rather than a scholarly one, I figured that "Dark Side of the Enlightnment" could, at the very least, be an entertaining, accessible survey of the subject.
And, some parts are very entertaining. Despite a rambling, polemical, and tangent-filled introduction, the first chapter provides a lively and spirited bio of Valentine Greatrakes (love the name!) a 17th century Anglo-Irish gentleman faith healer. It also discusses several colorful characters Greatrakes was involved with, and his perception by others: some thought he was a charlatan; others championed him as a modern Protestant (and conforming Anglican!) miracle-worker. Here, Fleming does some astute analysis of the sources, noting that many of the works championing Greatrakes use tropes and phrasing straight out of medieval hagiography.
Later chapters provide similarly intriguing biographies of the notorious Count Cagliostro (a self proclaimed wizard, alchemist, medium, and the founder of Egyptian-rite masonry, and alleged charlatan and criminal), and Julie de Kruedener, a well-traveled Latvian noblewoman and single-novel author who, late in life underwent a religious turn towards both pietism and chialism.
In between these character sketches, the book's central chapters offer surveys of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the practice of the “occult arts” of alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic in early modern Europe. Sadly, these middle pages lack the detail, color, and flavor of the portraits of Greatrakes, Cagliostro, and Kruedener. In fact, they are so general and cursory as to say very little at all. (Fortunately, Fleming does provide references to more detailed books on the subjects.) There’s also a curious chapter on the Paris Convulsionsists, which provides a discussion of why a set of miraculous events at a Parisian cemetery during the early 1700s was so contraversial.
Though engaging, Fleming’s accounts of Greatrakes, Cagliostro, and Kruedener are also puzzling. With the possible exception of Cagliostro, it’s not clear exactly how they constitute “Enlightenment” figures in the first place. Greatrakes’ healing activity barely falls within what the most generous historians would call “the early Enlightenment” —and even then, he doesn’t appear to have ever engaged intellectually with any issues relating to the new science or philosophy of his day. The closest Enlightenment connection in his story really seems to be that he published an account of his healing actions in the form of an open-letter to fellow Anglo-Irishman Robert Boyle (the chemist/physicist)-- and to which Boyle never responded. That’s not much of a connection in my view. The Enlightenment credentials of Julie Kruedener are even more suspect. Though born in the late 18th century, her main activity of interest for Fleming (including both the publication of her novel and her religious conversion) happened in the 19th. Moreover, the circles she moved in— which included Germaine de Stael, Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Richter suggest that she was very much part of the early Romantic movement— not the Enlightenment.
The inclusion of such questionably relevant figures as Greatrakes and Kruedener points to a broader problem with Fleming's book— namely, his tendency to play extremely fast and loose with the boundaries and definition of “The Enlightenment” as a historical period and concept. This becomes most clear in the “Three Occult Arts” chapter, where his discussion includes numerous references to authors and texts more associated with the Renaissance (e.g. Pico della Mirandola ) and even the Middle Ages (Chaucer, Dante, and others)!
No less puzzling are the many things that Fleming does NOT discuss in “The Dark Side of the Enlightenment” that might have seemed more relevant. For instance, Isaac Newton’s interest in alchemy, biblical interpretation, and apocalypticism; or Robert Boyle’s own interest in alchemy; or Franz Mesmer’s investigations into animal magnetism and what we would now call “mesmerism” or hypnosis. A similarly curious absence is that in his discussion on “occult” arts, Fleming doesn’t mention tarot cards. An examination of why tarot decks, which had previously been used primarily as playing cards, came to be widely used for divination in the 18th century strikes me as more pertinent to a discussion of Enlightenment-era occult practices than what medieval and Renaissance-era writers had to say about alchemy.
One further criticism I have about this book is the author’s style. While his wit and jargon-free prose make the book accessible, and even pleasurable to read, I find his glibness suspect. Too often, he seems to rely upon a witty turn of phrase to advance his argument rather then by citing and analyzing evidence. Sometimes, he delivers quips that sound clever, but say nothing, like “The darkest secret of the Masons is that there was no secret.” He frequently uses “scare quotes” to imply insincerity on the part of the figures under discussion, or as a way of transforming his own failure to find a precise word into irony. Fleming also deploys anachronistic metaphors and analogies (such as referring to the Paris police who closed the Saint-Medard churchyard in 1732 as “an elite special-ops force”), which may add drama and immediacy to a popular reader, but also risk misrepresentation. He also makes anachronistic literary allusions, such as when he compares Julie de Kruedener’s attempt to improve peasant life with those of Dorothea Brooke in “Middlemarch”. Finally, the absence of any footnotes and in-text citations bugs me, and makes me all the more suspect that this book relies too much on rhetoric, rather than research.
Ultimately, I can’t say that I’d recommend this book. That said, I can’t say one should avoid it either, at least not of the topic sounds interesting. Rather, I would suggest read it for the style and storytelling, while remaining on the lookout for other works that may present a more scholarly and rigorous discussion of the subject.
February 2, 2021
I found the first half of this was, how can I put this? Dry as fuck.
It seems the aspects of the Enlightenment Fleming chose to examine were not necessarily those I find most interesting in terms of the era’s inherent ‘darkness’. I did very much enjoy the way he highlighted how important it is to see each period in terms of continuation rather than as a stand alone era of thought. Medieval ‘hangovers’ suffuse the Enlightenment in much the same way that Romanticism is undoubtedly both a reaction to and tinged by certain modes of enlightenment thought.
The last half of this, as Fleming discussed the lives of Cagliostro and Julie de Krüdener, was fascinating and I’m glad I persevered through some very intricate interrogations of Masonic symbolism and occult numerology to get there.
It seems the aspects of the Enlightenment Fleming chose to examine were not necessarily those I find most interesting in terms of the era’s inherent ‘darkness’. I did very much enjoy the way he highlighted how important it is to see each period in terms of continuation rather than as a stand alone era of thought. Medieval ‘hangovers’ suffuse the Enlightenment in much the same way that Romanticism is undoubtedly both a reaction to and tinged by certain modes of enlightenment thought.
The last half of this, as Fleming discussed the lives of Cagliostro and Julie de Krüdener, was fascinating and I’m glad I persevered through some very intricate interrogations of Masonic symbolism and occult numerology to get there.
abandoned
October 7, 2014This book is not at all what I expected. I thought that there would be a lot more science in it, but instead there is way more church history than I'm interested in pursuing. I gave up at page 100. It is well-written, though.
September 9, 2013
Here we have a book that goes into much detail about what happens when the human mind is unleashed from centuries of untapped— untappable— potential. Unlike what we may in these ‘enlightened’ times may believe would be the vector all that untapped mental energy might take, the truth is quite different. The opening of human brainpower beginning in the seventeenth century gave us instead such exotic and esoteric social groups as the Masons, the Convulsionists, Alchemists and magicians of every stripe. The Enlightenment saw the rise of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and several other ‘isms’ that sought to replace reasoned thinking, the snake-oil sales instinct that lingers yet today in certain societies and that would endure in our own, we suspect, were it not for the scientifically rigorous disciplines, peer review, the internet sites that help to debunk much of the bunk, and strict government oversight agencies such as the FDA, CDC etc.
Fleming’s well-crafted book is highly readable, though not addressed to the average consumer of non-fiction. It culls much history that’s been lost to common view, and is intense in its focus on individuals who characterize some of the more outrageous mental extravagances of that age. Two of those persons, Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, roamed across Europe healing and ingratiating himself with the wealthy and powerful. Most of this mental chicanery was innocuous, but not all. Cagliostro was indirectly involved with the infamous ‘affair of the diamond necklace,’ a ruse against Marie Antoinette that may have been the spark that ignited the French Revolution.
Julie de Krüdener, a novelist, Pietist preacher, and so called political mystic charmed heads of state, and young men, with impunity, gadding about in defiance of her gender and marriage.
Indeed, that only shortcoming of this work may be its intense focus on just two individuals among many practitioners of social movements and arcane concepts that followed the freeing of human thought. This reader would have liked more detail of those movements, rituals, initiations and populations. Also, which of those secret societies and such evolved into modern counterparts? Yes, we have the Knights of Columbus and Freemasonry today. Yes, alchemy did become respectful over time, becoming simple chemistry. What of the other sects, groups and cabals? Or are we to settle for the Tea Party?
Byron Edgington, author ofThe Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life
Fleming’s well-crafted book is highly readable, though not addressed to the average consumer of non-fiction. It culls much history that’s been lost to common view, and is intense in its focus on individuals who characterize some of the more outrageous mental extravagances of that age. Two of those persons, Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, roamed across Europe healing and ingratiating himself with the wealthy and powerful. Most of this mental chicanery was innocuous, but not all. Cagliostro was indirectly involved with the infamous ‘affair of the diamond necklace,’ a ruse against Marie Antoinette that may have been the spark that ignited the French Revolution.
Julie de Krüdener, a novelist, Pietist preacher, and so called political mystic charmed heads of state, and young men, with impunity, gadding about in defiance of her gender and marriage.
Indeed, that only shortcoming of this work may be its intense focus on just two individuals among many practitioners of social movements and arcane concepts that followed the freeing of human thought. This reader would have liked more detail of those movements, rituals, initiations and populations. Also, which of those secret societies and such evolved into modern counterparts? Yes, we have the Knights of Columbus and Freemasonry today. Yes, alchemy did become respectful over time, becoming simple chemistry. What of the other sects, groups and cabals? Or are we to settle for the Tea Party?
Byron Edgington, author ofThe Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life
September 20, 2013
This book was just bizarre. That's not to say it wasn't very well written (even quite lively at times), interesting, and informative (offering discussions of early modern alchemical practice, faith healing, miracle working, Freemasonry, and eschatological number theory, to name some examples), only that all those things seemed rather haphazardly thrown together with no real overarching thesis or point. Frankly, it just seemed like the author just had a bunch of things he wanted to look at and the only real thing they had in common was that they all happened in the late 17th to early 19th century.
Fun fact: According to Fleming, the "identification of Napoleon with the Antichrist was widespread before 1805, and nearly universal by 1812"!
Fun fact: According to Fleming, the "identification of Napoleon with the Antichrist was widespread before 1805, and nearly universal by 1812"!
September 6, 2016
Cyclical recurrence continues to thrive in the vanguard non-fiction pushing back against the network hucksters--cyber-utopians, gamification aficionados, marketing gurus-- who unfortunately lack or malfeasantly ignore historical perspective in an attempt to promise salvation via algorithm. Increasingly confronted with a litany of near-gleeful works eager to puncture the delusional claims of cultural sea change and inevitable Pax Artificium, it takes a particular brand of myopic self-aggrandizement to ignore a century-old claim like, say, that the telegraph would end all war while promising the internet will do as much or more. The Dark side of the Enlightenment absolutely does not promise to apply occult understanding to modern issues, or even attempt to overlay historical trends onto current socioeconomic woes. It simply elucidates from what seems like an unending font of personal—and personable—knowledge about the past. It is a refreshing, a book that knows what it wants to discuss; its scope isn’t widened in an attempt to appear relevant to a mass market audience, its depth goes undiminished by fear that it might be too complex, too esoteric.
Telecommunications are modern arena fecund with opportunity to blend the fanciful with reality, allowing space in which charlatans can proclaim each networking advancement heralds a new epoch of idealism and misconception. “Effectively obliterates time and distance,” was the contemporaneously claim regarding the telegraph. From postal courier to instantaneous long-distance communication, the changes in the Victorian world were at least as fundamentally disruptive as the modern rise of the internet, and likely more culturally impactful for their time. But what happens when you push back a little further into the penumbra of science, technology, and culture?
The technological advances that enable much of modern life grew out, for the most part, of the European Enlightenment; that transitional period where old mysticism gave way to empirical thought. Or so it is understood by most people, if it understood at all, in what the author of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment might call the “unfortunate Gibbsonesque view of the matter”—the unambiguous chiaroscuro between the medieval Dark Ages and the rationalist Enlightenment. “Enlightenment” is a particularly vague term, one where “[i]t is not going too far to say that many scholarly definitions of the Enlightenment have been designed in part to exclude important phenomena uncongenial to the definer.” The Dark Side of the Enlightenment spends its time entertaining the reader with stories and facts that deflate the idealism without damning the past as parochial or hopeless. It sticks with a time period, up to the turn of the nineteenth century, and wades into the interstices of “the actual and historical but deeply obscure”, and the vivid but fanciful and legendary:”
While much is made of novelty, the freshness of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment comes not from a fecundity of new insights about old documents but a levity and joyfulness in accurate dissemination of factual information, running counter to the typical historical text detailing mysticism where “spurious certainty generally triumphs over honest confusion:”
But back to the beavers; did the medieval world take it as true, that beavers drop their testicles, a sort of a precursor to the modern “alligator in the sewer” urban legend? Or was it known to be the animal-avatar for chastity, an allegory created for reasons unfathomable? It smacks to contemporary hubris to assume that most people a few centuries ago knew so little of the world as to believe what amounts to a monk's fable; likely those presented with the tale were learned enough to spot allegory when it was presented. And there is context—the beaver was not the only animal to be commended as virtuous:
When people—rather than esoteric movements or allegorical representations—dominate the mise-en-scène, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment unleashes a torrent of likable narrative that blends reality with grandiosity so well that one might be forgiven for forgetting it is a historical inquiry and not a page-turning romance novel:
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment demands much from the reader, either in prior knowledge or simple patience; one is hard-pressed not to break the flow of the intricate prose at least once per page to look up a word an oblique reference. There is so much personality on the pages, however, that it’s less lecture and more conversation, albeit with someone very, very clever. “Keep going,” the pages seem to say, “and you will enjoy the view from the top.” And yet, after it’s all over, it was the journey itself that was the best part. There are digressions that hint at the depth of research taken on the reader’s behalf, a sense that you’re always getting the most interesting tidbits, the finest tales woven from hours of work:
Telecommunications are modern arena fecund with opportunity to blend the fanciful with reality, allowing space in which charlatans can proclaim each networking advancement heralds a new epoch of idealism and misconception. “Effectively obliterates time and distance,” was the contemporaneously claim regarding the telegraph. From postal courier to instantaneous long-distance communication, the changes in the Victorian world were at least as fundamentally disruptive as the modern rise of the internet, and likely more culturally impactful for their time. But what happens when you push back a little further into the penumbra of science, technology, and culture?
The technological advances that enable much of modern life grew out, for the most part, of the European Enlightenment; that transitional period where old mysticism gave way to empirical thought. Or so it is understood by most people, if it understood at all, in what the author of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment might call the “unfortunate Gibbsonesque view of the matter”—the unambiguous chiaroscuro between the medieval Dark Ages and the rationalist Enlightenment. “Enlightenment” is a particularly vague term, one where “[i]t is not going too far to say that many scholarly definitions of the Enlightenment have been designed in part to exclude important phenomena uncongenial to the definer.” The Dark Side of the Enlightenment spends its time entertaining the reader with stories and facts that deflate the idealism without damning the past as parochial or hopeless. It sticks with a time period, up to the turn of the nineteenth century, and wades into the interstices of “the actual and historical but deeply obscure”, and the vivid but fanciful and legendary:”
The idea that Milton was subconsciously “of the Devils party”—or putting it in more forceful terms that Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost and God Almighty its true villain—has become one of the orthodoxies of modern literary history. It seems to accord with our sense of what is good and true, and it seems confirmed by the nature of the verse. Milton’s God is arbitrary and autocratic, and His words, when compared with Satan’s fiery speeches, are boring. According to one famous interpretation, by the literary critic William Empson, Milton’s God is actively evil. Satan, on the other hand, is dynamic. Pandemonium—the parliament of all the devils—is less like a royal court than a democratic senate. There is verbal thrust and verbal parry, the most fundamental challenging of authority. Non serviam, cries Satan. I shall not serve. His most memorable line may be “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!”While Pope’s eighteenth-century sensibilities couldn’t be further from the current zeitgeist—where individual experience is allowed free reign over every word and personal interpretation becomes sacrosanct—the twentieth century, as represented by Empson and the New Criticism, wasn’t immune to the lust for novelty that plagues modern discourse. Even when it ignores historical facts—whether they are facts concerning Milton’s religiosity or the ahistorical positioning of Twitter as a new sphere for public promulgation—people want to be part of something fresh.
Despite tortured attempts to attribute this “reading” to Milton’s conscious intention, It seems impossible that a seventeenth-century English Puritan would write a biblical epic in which God is the villain and Satan the hero, or that it would be received by nearly the entire Protestant eighteenth century as the greatest Christian poem ever written. It is much more likely that what seemed manifestly clear to the twentieth century never occurred to anybody for a century or more after the poem’s publication. When, however, the Old World view of the Great Chain of Being and the rightness of fixed hierarchies gives way to a very different view—of the generative power of dynamically interacting polarities--the phenomena may look very different. Yet unless we are willing to turn all of cultural history into a vast Rorschach test that can tell us only what is already in our own minds, we need to make a strenuous effort to grasp something very different from what may already be there. “A perfect judge will read each work of wit,” says Alexander Pope, “With the same spirit that its author writ.”
Blackmail today, which appears in detective fiction more frequently than in actual life, is a form of extortion in which Party A threatens Party B to reveal to the police or an unsuspecting spouse information concerning Party B so potentially injurious to him that he will be willing to pay to have it suppressed. This concept of blackmail assumes some actual information of a compromising nature. The eighteenth-century sense was somewhat more elastic. In general the blackmailer threatened publication of certain claims, presumed to be scandalous, in a book or journal of potentially wide circulation. The scandalous material might be true, partially true, or not true at all. It might be put in a fictional form that so very thinly disguised the objects of attack as to leave their identities obvious to anyone in the know.A platform for written communication that depends on an “ever-expanding reading public, insatiable in its appetite for scandal,” riddled with “scandalous material [that] might be true, partially true, or not true at all.” Everything old is new again.
The word “libel” originally meant just “a writing” or “a little book” as the libretto of an opera still does. It took on its negative and legal meanings only with the expansion of printing in the seventeenth century. In fact eighteenth-century “literary” blackmail, of which Robert Darnton has written so engagingly, was one of the undersides of the expanding “print culture” which was also one of the great enablers of the Enlightenment. It depended for its success on a robust gutter press and an ever-expanding reading public insatiable in its appetite for scandal.
While much is made of novelty, the freshness of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment comes not from a fecundity of new insights about old documents but a levity and joyfulness in accurate dissemination of factual information, running counter to the typical historical text detailing mysticism where “spurious certainty generally triumphs over honest confusion:”
As regards the development of modern experimental science, the sacramental assumption entailed ambivalent implications. A theologian whose chief interest in birds is to find in the Phoenix, mythical “Arabian bird,” an emblem of the self-sacrifice and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is perhaps unlikely to become a knowledgeable ornithologist. Nor will we find a modern zoologist in the medieval friar and collector of animal exempla who perceives a noble ascetic lesson in the action of the beaver. The beaver (castor, in Latin), when hotly pursued by his carnivore enemy, escapes by castorating himself, leaving the detached testicles in the path to distract his pursuers, while he makes his way to safety. (This is an allegory of the ascetic vow of chastity, taken by those who flee the world and “make of themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God’s sake.”Why would a medieval monk create this allegory, and why select beavers to be on the receiving end of this horrific defense mechanism? The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is silent on these burning questions, and the internet is distressingly quiet on the issue as well. Further troubling how simple it would be to take a medieval metaphor and create the same sort of modern misinterpretation—the patronizing, diminishing view of an uneducated past—that gave rise to the misconception that Hic Sunt Dracones was a literal warning of dragons prowling at the edges of civilization. That labeling was more cartographical shorthand, key iconography symbolizing the mysteries inherent in an uncharted portion of the world rather than literal zoological annotation.
But back to the beavers; did the medieval world take it as true, that beavers drop their testicles, a sort of a precursor to the modern “alligator in the sewer” urban legend? Or was it known to be the animal-avatar for chastity, an allegory created for reasons unfathomable? It smacks to contemporary hubris to assume that most people a few centuries ago knew so little of the world as to believe what amounts to a monk's fable; likely those presented with the tale were learned enough to spot allegory when it was presented. And there is context—the beaver was not the only animal to be commended as virtuous:
The furnace [of an alchemist] had two chambers, separated by a carefully constructed tight-fitting door called by the wonderful name of the “seal of Hermes”—the distant original of our “hermetically sealed” and “vacuum-packed” processed foods. The complex of retorts and alembics used in the distillation process was called the pelican, as the positioning of a long glass “beak” suggested the distinctive shape of that bird. In the moralizing nature of the bestiaries, the “pious” pelican was said to feed its young with its own very life blood spouting from its pierced breast. The commonplace interpretation of the “pious pelican” as image of the self-sacrifice of Christ was incoherently, but piously, attached to the alchemist’s quest.The chaste beaver, the pious pelican, and the messianic phoenix are joined by our modern fail whale, keyboard cat, and orly owl; allegory or meme, cultural shorthand is remains incoherent. Will the future generations puzzle over whether we truly believed that cat was playing the keyboard, proscribing on us a certain naïve barbarism or hopeless cultural ignorance—soulless pagans condemned to purgatory for want of an anno domini birthdate? Only time will tell.
When people—rather than esoteric movements or allegorical representations—dominate the mise-en-scène, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment unleashes a torrent of likable narrative that blends reality with grandiosity so well that one might be forgiven for forgetting it is a historical inquiry and not a page-turning romance novel:
There was a conspicuous mismatch between the middle-aged diplomat and the romantic teenager. One anecdote among many culled from her letters and her journal offers dramatic evidence of the hypersensitivity and egocentrism that her critics have found culpable. The child bride had unreasonable (we would say neurotic) worries about the safety of her husband, especially any time he was on horseback. One day when he was riding and she awaited his scheduled return, a rainstorm began. She fretted for his safety and could not restrain herself from setting off on foot to meet him along the road--an act that was from any practical point of view foolish and useless. When they met on the road, the nonplussed husband was so indelicate as to point this out to her. Why had she not stayed snug at home? That’s what he would have done. This fatal want of emotional extravagance struck her like a knife to the heart.The “she” referenced above was Julie de Krüdener, “a great “character” in an age of great characters, but she is hardly known today. One struggles to find a plausible modern analogue. Think, perhaps, of a combination of Danielle Steele and Mother Teresa.” Many a page is dedicated to Madame de Krüdener, both mondaine and dévote and she lives up to the ambiguity admirably, personifying the spirit of the era, as well as this book—no one quite knew at the time what would shake out to be provable, tenable reality and what would end up being mystical fantasy.
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment demands much from the reader, either in prior knowledge or simple patience; one is hard-pressed not to break the flow of the intricate prose at least once per page to look up a word an oblique reference. There is so much personality on the pages, however, that it’s less lecture and more conversation, albeit with someone very, very clever. “Keep going,” the pages seem to say, “and you will enjoy the view from the top.” And yet, after it’s all over, it was the journey itself that was the best part. There are digressions that hint at the depth of research taken on the reader’s behalf, a sense that you’re always getting the most interesting tidbits, the finest tales woven from hours of work:
The apparent significance of Greatrakes’s cures for Stubbe is that they are the first known instance of God performing miracles among the Protestants. His view is surprisingly liberal. He doubts not that Catholics and Muslims have indeed had their miracles. “Undoubtedly God hath permitted all Religions (though not the Protestants, till now) to have their real miracles, that men may learne to trye Miracles by the Truth, and the Truth by Miracles.” Though he knows he is writing to a great man of science, he makes so bold as to attempt various scientific explanations of his own. Since disease can be spread by contagion, why might it not also be cured by contagion? This may have been a common speculation among the “Ragley group,” as it had already appeared in More’s Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656): “there may be very well a sanative and healing contagion, as well as a morbid and venomous.”Repositioning a time period that is colloquially defined by its quest for rational behavior as an extension of the mystical, belief-driven culture it was built upon is a fascinating quest of epic proportion. It can create insight into modern cyber-utopianism and idealist futurism, if you’re looking for them. It can likely serve to illuminate whatever cultural mores or movements you're looking to uncut (or support). Regardless of whether you draw modern parallels of cultural relevancy from The Dark Side of the Enlightenment or are just looking for excellent writing by a preeminent scholar, it is thoroughly enjoyable to be presented with minute details of a time period typically referenced by broad cultural strokes. It is eminently readable and delightfully entertaining, recommended for anyone willing to confront demanding text and complex thoughts.
December 17, 2017
This curious work provides us with brief histories of European eccentrics during the period from the late 17th-c–late 18th-c (the period one can loosely refer to as The Enlightenment) and which attempts to create a certain sympathetic approach towards them.
Thus we have the “miraculous cures” of Valentin Greatrakes (who “healed” through stroking his patients), the Convulsionists (a group alleging miraculous cures apparently achieved posthumously by a certain François de Pâris), the controversial Freemason-healer-alchemist Count Cagliostro, and the sinner-saint-mystic-prophetess Julie de Krüdener. The last two are given two chapters each; the first two, one only, with the Convulsionists section containing cross-references to the Jesuits and the Jansenists for “context”; but in between we a given three extra chapters (one each on the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and one on three occult arts (“magic”, the Kabbala, and alchemy)). Every Chapter contains at its end a separate bibliography relevant to the issues contained in that Chapter.
Fleming’s concern in retracing these stories appears to be to soften traditional historical dismissal of the four specifically chosen characters as charlatans. His main argument appears to be that each of these personages reflect, in their particular circumstances, their adherence to long-held beliefs and practices, and that they practised their crafts with the very best of intentions…
All this, however interesting though it might be, comes across to me as being neither here nor there — and I am saying this because Fleming is presenting these alternative histories, coexisting as they do throughout the Enlightenment period, as some kind of counter-argument against some historians’ interpretations of what The Enlightenment was supposed to do. It therefore also implies that The Enlightenment as a concept is rather flawed, in that it did not achieve whatever it was supposed to achieve. This interpretation is raised in the Introduction to the book, where Fleming attempts to explain away his reasons for writing his book — all well and good, I suppose, except that in my opinion his justification comes across as more apologetic than anything else. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He is both for and against “the Enlightenment” and plays a kind of linguistic sophistry to cloud “definitions” (e.g. there are many definitions of the word “enlightenment”, as each variation of religions and their sub-groups would assert; and, indeed, as would scientists regarding their theories and interpretations). Thus there is the essentially Christian dislike of the term The Dark Ages for the Middle Ages because, from their interpretation, the “light” of the revealed truth of their religion shone strong and bright throughout them. The terms “light” and “dark”, therefore, are relative (and the ironic paradox is that one group’s “light” is “darkness” for the rest!). There is something naive and/or disingenuous about this approach.
The philosophical and historical issues surrounding the above subject matter are extensive and complex, as Fleming himself tells us, and this is not the time or place to go into the many intricacies of these to any great degree. What I suspect, however, is that there is an underlying Christian bias against the Enlightenment as such (particularly the argument that Reason and rationality is a better guide than Superstition and miracles in our dealings with ourselves and our societies) and we find this anti-reason and anti-intellectual bias rampant even today. Fleming seems to be saying that, regardless of what the ideals of the Enlightenment have to offer, people still believe in and act upon irrational, superstitious and miraculous beliefs preferentially. But a group’s preferential choice of belief systems and activities has nothing to do with whether their approach is therefore “good”, or “truthful”, or not. Surely Fleming is not advocating that magic, seances, numerology, symbolic sigils used to disguise hidden spiritual truths, the miraculous, the occult and the mysterious in general (all charged with the increasing temptation to abuse of the gullible by unscrupulous charlatans), etc. is preferable to reasoned, rational discourse on these matters?
As for the argument that the Enlightenment disappointed in not achieving its “goals” because it “failed to inoculate us against the two great cultural pathologies of the twentieth century, Bolshevism and Nazism”, this truism is only partially accurate: if one were to apply a longer time-line, one could also argue that tolerant, neighbour- and enemy-loving Christianity, once it had become universal and all-powerful in the 4th–5th century CE, failed to inoculate us from intolerant, murderous, neighbour- and enemy-hating activities ever since, and, indeed, it could be argued that its choice for absolute power and authority at that time served only as the fuel and ammunition sustaining both Bolshevism and Nazism in many of its ideals and activities!
So, returning to our book in question, I think the title of the book is the cause of much which could be misinterpreted. True, the Enlightenment ideals appeared to be virtually ignored by its contemporaries, who apparently preferred blithely to continue trusting untrustworthy pursuits, and which crypto-charlatans (however “honourable” their intentions) relished for the potential benefits they might gain based on that ignorance and superstition. If one were to change one’s perspective just slightly, one could argue that while the characters and activities of those Fleming has offered here were antithetical to what would become the Enlightenment ideals, they actually do represent completely antipathetic beliefs to the established orthodox Christian religions of their times, who would have considered them and their activities as absolute “darkness” inimical to the true “light”. From this perspective, I believe the book would be better served if the fiddly and unconvincing opposition to the Enlightenment were removed, and the title changed to “The Dark Side of Established Christianities during the Eighteenth Century in Europe.” It makes more sense.
Thus we have the “miraculous cures” of Valentin Greatrakes (who “healed” through stroking his patients), the Convulsionists (a group alleging miraculous cures apparently achieved posthumously by a certain François de Pâris), the controversial Freemason-healer-alchemist Count Cagliostro, and the sinner-saint-mystic-prophetess Julie de Krüdener. The last two are given two chapters each; the first two, one only, with the Convulsionists section containing cross-references to the Jesuits and the Jansenists for “context”; but in between we a given three extra chapters (one each on the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and one on three occult arts (“magic”, the Kabbala, and alchemy)). Every Chapter contains at its end a separate bibliography relevant to the issues contained in that Chapter.
Fleming’s concern in retracing these stories appears to be to soften traditional historical dismissal of the four specifically chosen characters as charlatans. His main argument appears to be that each of these personages reflect, in their particular circumstances, their adherence to long-held beliefs and practices, and that they practised their crafts with the very best of intentions…
All this, however interesting though it might be, comes across to me as being neither here nor there — and I am saying this because Fleming is presenting these alternative histories, coexisting as they do throughout the Enlightenment period, as some kind of counter-argument against some historians’ interpretations of what The Enlightenment was supposed to do. It therefore also implies that The Enlightenment as a concept is rather flawed, in that it did not achieve whatever it was supposed to achieve. This interpretation is raised in the Introduction to the book, where Fleming attempts to explain away his reasons for writing his book — all well and good, I suppose, except that in my opinion his justification comes across as more apologetic than anything else. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He is both for and against “the Enlightenment” and plays a kind of linguistic sophistry to cloud “definitions” (e.g. there are many definitions of the word “enlightenment”, as each variation of religions and their sub-groups would assert; and, indeed, as would scientists regarding their theories and interpretations). Thus there is the essentially Christian dislike of the term The Dark Ages for the Middle Ages because, from their interpretation, the “light” of the revealed truth of their religion shone strong and bright throughout them. The terms “light” and “dark”, therefore, are relative (and the ironic paradox is that one group’s “light” is “darkness” for the rest!). There is something naive and/or disingenuous about this approach.
The philosophical and historical issues surrounding the above subject matter are extensive and complex, as Fleming himself tells us, and this is not the time or place to go into the many intricacies of these to any great degree. What I suspect, however, is that there is an underlying Christian bias against the Enlightenment as such (particularly the argument that Reason and rationality is a better guide than Superstition and miracles in our dealings with ourselves and our societies) and we find this anti-reason and anti-intellectual bias rampant even today. Fleming seems to be saying that, regardless of what the ideals of the Enlightenment have to offer, people still believe in and act upon irrational, superstitious and miraculous beliefs preferentially. But a group’s preferential choice of belief systems and activities has nothing to do with whether their approach is therefore “good”, or “truthful”, or not. Surely Fleming is not advocating that magic, seances, numerology, symbolic sigils used to disguise hidden spiritual truths, the miraculous, the occult and the mysterious in general (all charged with the increasing temptation to abuse of the gullible by unscrupulous charlatans), etc. is preferable to reasoned, rational discourse on these matters?
As for the argument that the Enlightenment disappointed in not achieving its “goals” because it “failed to inoculate us against the two great cultural pathologies of the twentieth century, Bolshevism and Nazism”, this truism is only partially accurate: if one were to apply a longer time-line, one could also argue that tolerant, neighbour- and enemy-loving Christianity, once it had become universal and all-powerful in the 4th–5th century CE, failed to inoculate us from intolerant, murderous, neighbour- and enemy-hating activities ever since, and, indeed, it could be argued that its choice for absolute power and authority at that time served only as the fuel and ammunition sustaining both Bolshevism and Nazism in many of its ideals and activities!
So, returning to our book in question, I think the title of the book is the cause of much which could be misinterpreted. True, the Enlightenment ideals appeared to be virtually ignored by its contemporaries, who apparently preferred blithely to continue trusting untrustworthy pursuits, and which crypto-charlatans (however “honourable” their intentions) relished for the potential benefits they might gain based on that ignorance and superstition. If one were to change one’s perspective just slightly, one could argue that while the characters and activities of those Fleming has offered here were antithetical to what would become the Enlightenment ideals, they actually do represent completely antipathetic beliefs to the established orthodox Christian religions of their times, who would have considered them and their activities as absolute “darkness” inimical to the true “light”. From this perspective, I believe the book would be better served if the fiddly and unconvincing opposition to the Enlightenment were removed, and the title changed to “The Dark Side of Established Christianities during the Eighteenth Century in Europe.” It makes more sense.
Read
November 16, 2018Stylistically I found Flemming's overly clever literary flare a bit clunky in which I saw stumbling and stammering through the first half of the book, but as I progressed I got used to an enjoyed it.
In terms of content, I was initially a bit leery of this book and left it unread on my book shelf for a couple of years, as I thought it might delve a bit too deeply into some shocking expose' on the eccentricities of the sacred minds of the Enlightenment with murky conspiracy theories. On the contrary, I found the book to give nice context of some of the occult pathos of the Enlightenment period, what we might today think of as dead weight of the medieval mind that was alive and well within intellectual circles during the Modern Period.
The book appears to focus on several biographies of people with mystical personas but rather than focus on their odd practices it provides a backdrop of common conceptions of their time period. The book also ties in these ideas and movements well from one chapter to the next, examples include Jansenism and Masonic culture. I can appreciate a book that can cover topics like the Masons and not jump into conspiracies but keep an objective detachment, like The Square and the Tower by Ferguson. I would recommend this book to anyone has has been reading too many books about historical progress and needs a little counter balance of historical inertia and regression.
Because the book is playing around with a number of occult and strange ideas from the past it spills some different thought provoking ideas here and there. Particularly in the Age of the Enlightenment, the question of discovery and invention and the two concepts interrelationship is what I found particularly interesting.
In terms of content, I was initially a bit leery of this book and left it unread on my book shelf for a couple of years, as I thought it might delve a bit too deeply into some shocking expose' on the eccentricities of the sacred minds of the Enlightenment with murky conspiracy theories. On the contrary, I found the book to give nice context of some of the occult pathos of the Enlightenment period, what we might today think of as dead weight of the medieval mind that was alive and well within intellectual circles during the Modern Period.
The book appears to focus on several biographies of people with mystical personas but rather than focus on their odd practices it provides a backdrop of common conceptions of their time period. The book also ties in these ideas and movements well from one chapter to the next, examples include Jansenism and Masonic culture. I can appreciate a book that can cover topics like the Masons and not jump into conspiracies but keep an objective detachment, like The Square and the Tower by Ferguson. I would recommend this book to anyone has has been reading too many books about historical progress and needs a little counter balance of historical inertia and regression.
Because the book is playing around with a number of occult and strange ideas from the past it spills some different thought provoking ideas here and there. Particularly in the Age of the Enlightenment, the question of discovery and invention and the two concepts interrelationship is what I found particularly interesting.
May 26, 2025
Most of this volumes was gripping reading, and it was interesting to learn more about figures like Count Cagliostro. I thought the book bogged down a little toward the end with the introduction of Julie de Krudener (whom the author finds more interesting than I did.)
June 9, 2025
no idea why I've read this book, I saw talk saying this explains Trump ... but honestly its waist of time .... no idea what Ive learned from this book !
June 8, 2014
Decent enough as a succinct sampler of irrational episodes, characters, and groups that permeated and percolated during the so-called "Enlightenment", this book largely fails as a vivacious contribution to the study of the period by the utter lack of promised synthesis and examination. Touting work on the Enlightenment period as given over to the stuffy stuff of the grand, secular, honkey philosophical and scientific traditions, Fleming sets out to undermine this simple view of the time by discussing episodes of faith healing, martyr worship, the occult, magic, and, naturally, the Freemasons. This is fine and dandy when one, greedily licking one's intellectual/iconoclastic chops, but there's no damn follow through. The book merely ends at the last case study!
Frustrating as this is, the book does shine in its come-uppance via case history of "modern" rationality and scientificism (is that a word? It is now.) Though woefully brief, the sections on the role of alchemy, the occult, the kabbala, and weird shit like the Convulsionists are pretty fascinating, giving one a window into the kind of new-age type shit that we mock so readily now but which was once part and parcel of the Weltanschaaung of some dedicated rationalists.
Frustrating as this is, the book does shine in its come-uppance via case history of "modern" rationality and scientificism (is that a word? It is now.) Though woefully brief, the sections on the role of alchemy, the occult, the kabbala, and weird shit like the Convulsionists are pretty fascinating, giving one a window into the kind of new-age type shit that we mock so readily now but which was once part and parcel of the Weltanschaaung of some dedicated rationalists.
December 11, 2016
I read a review of this book that interested me. The book itself didn't quite live up to it. The Age of Enlightenment was a big turning point in history as the climb out of the Dark Ages sped up. This was about very things that influenced that age, according to the author... who is an expert in the Middle Ages. Odd choice.
He spends some time defending the term "Medieval" before actually starting the book, which seems a bit defensive to me. He then covers side wide-ranging topics as the Freemasons, the Kabalah, Magic, a few faith healers, and some influential writers of the time.
I learned a few things, and there were random bit of interesting facts, but overall, I have to admit, my general reaction was, "Ok... so?"
I read history, I enjoy a lot of different types of books, but this one just didn't do much for me.
He spends some time defending the term "Medieval" before actually starting the book, which seems a bit defensive to me. He then covers side wide-ranging topics as the Freemasons, the Kabalah, Magic, a few faith healers, and some influential writers of the time.
I learned a few things, and there were random bit of interesting facts, but overall, I have to admit, my general reaction was, "Ok... so?"
I read history, I enjoy a lot of different types of books, but this one just didn't do much for me.
December 28, 2013
I'm a bedtime reader and this book really help put me to sleep! Seriously, this book was very "enlightening" but the vocabulary and complex sentence structure made it a difficult read, and it took me forever to get though. Part history, part biography, the book highlights the lesser known "movers and shakers" of the period, but it fails to develop a clear theme or overall conclusion. Still, I did learn some interesting tidbits about the era, ex. Freemasonry had its roots with a group of Catholic artisans in Scotland.
July 2, 2024
I'm not going to lie. I enjoyed the author's open and acknowledged medievalist bias in this book. Maybe that's not the most academic way to write, but it's more honest and certainly more entertaining. The weak point in the book stems from the uncertain method used. We are introduced to a book that will show us "the Dark side of the Enlightenment." The first section does cover some general currents through the era, but partway through we change gears from the general to the very specific with 2 mini biographies of Count Cagliostro and Julie De Krüdener. Don't get me wrong. These are 2 fascinating biographies. They are well written and made me want to lookup more about these people. These two people, however, were far from typical. I would even argue that they weren't that influential in characterizing the Enlightenment. They are examples of some interesting currents running through the epoch, but I'm not sure these two people could constitute a "side" of an age. I probably enjoyed learning about Cagliostro and De Krüdener more than I would learning about some other facet of the Enlightenment already covered a dozen times though.
August 11, 2021
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is an eccentric book, but a brilliant and overall engaging one, full of sharp observations and interesting tidbits of information. The book is loosely chronological and feels less like a single, cohesive narrative than it does a collection of essays about different topics and personalities that could be roughly said to run parallel (or even under) the events one would normally consider as Enlightenment boilerplate. Fleming has written a popular history with an eye less to the actual "dark side" of the Enlightenment and more to the outright curious, with subjects and ideas one would be tempted to term as counter-Enlightenment. I would argue that this book is worth-reading precisely because of its eccentricities, assuming you go in expecting the strange but never the sinister.
June 12, 2018
I liked this book. I did. I really did. But I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it and I’m not sure what I’ve taken away from this. The book starts off with a description of the life and times of healer Valentine Greatrakes (known as the Stroker for his methods of technique) and ends with a two chapter biographic description of the author and later Christian mystic Julie de Krüdener. In between there are chapters and sub chapters on Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, alchemy, occultism, and the controversial figure Cagliostro. Maybe I should have started with a book less expansive in scope of subjects and more in-depth of fewer personages and arts. But I’d still recommend it to an esoteric friend
October 28, 2021
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is a topic I'd love to learn more about, but sadly this book wasn't it, and it didn't help that the author evidently had more trouble focusing than I did. The chapter about the Convulsionists spent so much time discussing Jansenism vs Jesuits that it really never got around to the titled topic and left me feeling cheated. And in the chapter about the charlatan Cagliostro, Fleming spends pages and pages on the Affair of the Necklace, only to tell us in the end that Cagliostro probably wasn't involved in the affair. I don't mind an author who goes on historical tangents if they're enjoying themselves, but I'm not really sure that John Fleming was having fun. I know I wasn't.
September 19, 2017
This is a hard book to give a star rating. On the one hand, it's well written and well researched. On the other hand, it's not all that interesting. It's largely about the unenlightened--people and ideas extant at the time that have had little, if any, lasting influence of human society. They are like the flotsam and jetsam of human progress, deservedly left behind. If there's a point being made here, it's that the Enlightenment didn't instantly lead to all literate people becoming, well, enlightened. Science and reason did not suddenly dominate intellectual thought. There were still mystics and faith healers and secret societies and superstitions. Sadly, there still are.
March 3, 2019
Much like a promising course syllabus that is not fully realized within the semester's time frame, "The Darkside of the Enlightenment" doesn't really deliver, as one might hope, a grand synthesis of rational and irrational thinking in the Age of Reason. Such grand titles are often afterthoughts to the author's actual intentions or interests. Lisa Jardine's "Going Dutch" was a classic case - evoking an irresistible theme (for me) of the influence of Dutch culture on the English after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 - which was in actuality a rather dull survey of the papers of the somewhat influential Huygens family to which she had access. Fortunately John Fleming is both charming & erudite and that's enough to carry the day, if you're able to apply a little Zen and relax your expectations.
March 5, 2014
I got this book because I have an abiding interest in science, in the history of science, and in the history of various wider cultural backlashes against science. (I am a STEM/humanities dual degree holder, and came of age in Kansas during the most recent "Evolution Wars," so that's why that sort of thing interests me. How could it not?)
That's kind of what I thought this book would be --- an exploration of counter-trends to the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. And, to an extent, it is; the author is a medievalist, not an Enlightenment historian or a historian of science, and he makes the very interesting claim that the "occult" pursuits mentioned in the title were of a piece with the more widely known, and celebrated, empirical investigations of that era.
(This is not the first time I've encountered that idea, but John Fleming does a very good job of making the case for it. His training as a medievalist works to his advantage here, because he can trace the medieval roots of both Enlightenment science and Enlightenment "magic.")
But the thing that was most counter to my expectations was that this book wasn't really the kind of history I was expecting -- one that dealt with places, events, ideas, trends, and in which individual people appeared briefly, like rocks in a streambed, subtly changing the water's flow and then quickly passed by -- no, this was more like a series of long, detailed biographical sketches.
Fleming chooses individuals or groups that he thinks illustrate something important, arrayed more or less chronologically from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, and he focuses on them, bringing in the broader cultural trends as needed.
The people and groups he chooses to profile are: Valentine Greatrakes, an Irish country gentleman who became famous for miraculously curing people of scrofula by touching them; a small French Jansenist sect that venerated a churchyard where a Jansenist deacon who was thought to have been able to heal people during his lifetime was buried, and who were struck with shaking fits when they visited his grave; Alchemists; Kabbalists; Freemasons; Rosicrucians (who these people were wasn't entirely clear to me! They don't seem to have been an order or a club so much as any people, anywhere, who were interested in discovering things? So I'm not sure who wasn't a Rosicrucian?); Count Cagliostro, who was actually a Sicilian named Giuseppe Balsamo, who went all over Europe founding Masonic lodges of his own "Egyptian" rite, and who was imprisoned in the Bastille because Marie-Antoinette believed (unfairly) that he had participated in a scheme to defraud her that is remembered today as "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace"; and the very interesting Julie de Krudener, a Latvian noblewoman who first became famous in pre-revolutionary Paris's literary scene, where she befriended lots of people who are still famous today, like Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, and who later in life converted to Pietism and achieved further fame (or notoriety) as a sort of itinerant preacher. Most amazingly, she became convinced that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Antichrist, and that it was her special duty to stop him.
This is all very interesting, and also very well written; Fleming can be very funny. But what I thought was most admirable about his treatment of all these eccentric historical figures is how much he seems to respect them. No one is a fraud or a charlatan in this book, even when what they purport to be doing is physically impossible. Cagliostro in particular he seems to feel it his duty to rehabilitate, because Thomas Carlyle once called him the King of Liars. Fleming does his best to convince us that Cagliostro was not a liar, nor particularly mercenary; that he seems to have been a genuinely nice person, a loyal and honest person, and perhaps a bit too trusting. He is similarly gentle with Julie de Krudener. Lots of people have written her off as a frivolous, selfish, self-aggrandizing adulteress and social climber. Fleming does not deny the things she did to give people this impression, but he also tries to give us the full context of her actions, and to tell us how she saw things. He sees her as a woman of intense emotion, whose marriage could not give her everything she needed, and who did really love the men she had affairs with. He also does an admirable job of connecting her earlier "worldly" behavior -- her seeking out the literary salons like a flower follows the sun, and also her affairs -- to her later religious conversion, saying that both phases of her life follow logically from her florid emotionality and her need for an outlet for all those emotions. We are sympathetic to men whose devotion to Art, or to Principle, lead them to abandon their duties to family and community; why, besides sexism, would we not extend a woman the same benefit of the doubt?
My only complaint with this book was that it ended too soon; it cuts off abruptly after explaining how Julie de Krudener reached the conclusion that Napoleon was the Antichrist. We are not shown how it affects the rest of her life. What did she DO with this astonishing information? Did she preach against him on street corners? Did she abandon all other pursuits, to devote her life solely to denouncing him? This sounds like a life-changing revelation, but we don't get to see how, or if, it did change her life! We're just left hanging.
That's kind of what I thought this book would be --- an exploration of counter-trends to the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. And, to an extent, it is; the author is a medievalist, not an Enlightenment historian or a historian of science, and he makes the very interesting claim that the "occult" pursuits mentioned in the title were of a piece with the more widely known, and celebrated, empirical investigations of that era.
(This is not the first time I've encountered that idea, but John Fleming does a very good job of making the case for it. His training as a medievalist works to his advantage here, because he can trace the medieval roots of both Enlightenment science and Enlightenment "magic.")
But the thing that was most counter to my expectations was that this book wasn't really the kind of history I was expecting -- one that dealt with places, events, ideas, trends, and in which individual people appeared briefly, like rocks in a streambed, subtly changing the water's flow and then quickly passed by -- no, this was more like a series of long, detailed biographical sketches.
Fleming chooses individuals or groups that he thinks illustrate something important, arrayed more or less chronologically from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, and he focuses on them, bringing in the broader cultural trends as needed.
The people and groups he chooses to profile are: Valentine Greatrakes, an Irish country gentleman who became famous for miraculously curing people of scrofula by touching them; a small French Jansenist sect that venerated a churchyard where a Jansenist deacon who was thought to have been able to heal people during his lifetime was buried, and who were struck with shaking fits when they visited his grave; Alchemists; Kabbalists; Freemasons; Rosicrucians (who these people were wasn't entirely clear to me! They don't seem to have been an order or a club so much as any people, anywhere, who were interested in discovering things? So I'm not sure who wasn't a Rosicrucian?); Count Cagliostro, who was actually a Sicilian named Giuseppe Balsamo, who went all over Europe founding Masonic lodges of his own "Egyptian" rite, and who was imprisoned in the Bastille because Marie-Antoinette believed (unfairly) that he had participated in a scheme to defraud her that is remembered today as "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace"; and the very interesting Julie de Krudener, a Latvian noblewoman who first became famous in pre-revolutionary Paris's literary scene, where she befriended lots of people who are still famous today, like Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, and who later in life converted to Pietism and achieved further fame (or notoriety) as a sort of itinerant preacher. Most amazingly, she became convinced that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Antichrist, and that it was her special duty to stop him.
This is all very interesting, and also very well written; Fleming can be very funny. But what I thought was most admirable about his treatment of all these eccentric historical figures is how much he seems to respect them. No one is a fraud or a charlatan in this book, even when what they purport to be doing is physically impossible. Cagliostro in particular he seems to feel it his duty to rehabilitate, because Thomas Carlyle once called him the King of Liars. Fleming does his best to convince us that Cagliostro was not a liar, nor particularly mercenary; that he seems to have been a genuinely nice person, a loyal and honest person, and perhaps a bit too trusting. He is similarly gentle with Julie de Krudener. Lots of people have written her off as a frivolous, selfish, self-aggrandizing adulteress and social climber. Fleming does not deny the things she did to give people this impression, but he also tries to give us the full context of her actions, and to tell us how she saw things. He sees her as a woman of intense emotion, whose marriage could not give her everything she needed, and who did really love the men she had affairs with. He also does an admirable job of connecting her earlier "worldly" behavior -- her seeking out the literary salons like a flower follows the sun, and also her affairs -- to her later religious conversion, saying that both phases of her life follow logically from her florid emotionality and her need for an outlet for all those emotions. We are sympathetic to men whose devotion to Art, or to Principle, lead them to abandon their duties to family and community; why, besides sexism, would we not extend a woman the same benefit of the doubt?
My only complaint with this book was that it ended too soon; it cuts off abruptly after explaining how Julie de Krudener reached the conclusion that Napoleon was the Antichrist. We are not shown how it affects the rest of her life. What did she DO with this astonishing information? Did she preach against him on street corners? Did she abandon all other pursuits, to devote her life solely to denouncing him? This sounds like a life-changing revelation, but we don't get to see how, or if, it did change her life! We're just left hanging.
September 8, 2014
The title did its duty. It intrigued me and made me look deeper into the book." The Dark Side of the Enlightenment", as a life time student of intellectual history and humanistic studies, I have always been fascinated by that period in history-the 18th century-when certain members of the privileged class in Europe, seemingly as a group, together created an explosion of knowledge and a certain spirit which did nothing less than create the modern world. As a lifetime teacher of religious studies and history this "spiritual" aspect of the age of Enlightenment has also fascinated and piqued my scholastic curiosity. What better promise then that offered by such a title.
It has almost become cliché that the authors, philosophers, and scientists of the 1600s and 1700s also explored aspects of knowledge and science that are now somewhat out of fashion. Alchemy, magic, and the fringes of the Judeo-Christian traditions are today securely categorized in the closet called “supernatural”. But in those days, these branches of knowledge and tradition were part and parcel of any educated persons realm of study.
Prof. Fleming's work offers a study of such topics. It is a work both interesting and engaging and at the same time maddeningly academic. In 400 pages the promise of the title is only addressed in about 200. Prof. Fleming goes on and on about where he found his information. He spends lots of print space telling you about all the books he read in writing this book. One third to one half of the book comes across as the academic peer review process where he believes he has to review the sources for each chapter topic. While this is useful in the journals of academia, it really has no place, IMHO, in a popular work such as this volume purports to be. On the other hand in the sections and chapters dealing with the actual “dark side of the enlightenment” the storytelling is well done and interesting. He presents several lesser-known characters who typify the use of alchemy and magic in spreading their ideas. Ideas which meld seamlessly with other major ideas being brought forward during this time.
Let me offer two examples of the inconsistency of the work. Chapter 3,"The Rosy Cross", especially caught my attention because in my own admittedly sporadic studies I have never found any substantial information on this topic. Chapter 3 did nothing to improve that situation. I had to read it twice to see if I missed anything, but unfortunately the second reading did not inform me any further than the first. It amounts to a biography of a Rosicrucian of the early 17th century, Johann Valentin Andreae, whom Prof. Fleming seems to equate with the "legendary Christian Rosenkreuz". There is little to no information on what the Rosicrucians are about other than they seem to have contributed to the origins and spirituality of the Freemasons which are outlined in the next chapter. There was not a whole lot new in the chapter on the Freemasons that is not discussed in the dozens of other books about their origins and spiritual practices.
The next example I would offer is found in the interestingly titled chapter 5,"Three Occult Arts". This is one chapter where Prof. Fleming lives up to the promise of his book’s title. Covering three aspects of knowledge, namely Magic, Kabbalah, and Alchemy. Again, he spends lots of ink discussing his sources, but when he does discuss the actual occult arts the information is both entertaining and enlightening. However, there is one glaring example of his twisting of certain ideas. On page 189 he introduces the reader to something known as the original matter or in Latin the prima materia. I quote…
“The prima materia was associated with the chaos or nothingness out of which God had created the world.” He then quotes Genesis 1.2 which roughly translates as “the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” (the quote continues) “This text was parsed minutely. It did not say that God had created ex nihilo , out of nothing. It did not say that there was no earth, but that the earth was waste and void. There could be no darkness upon the face of the earth were there no face of the earth. Here was the theological spoor of the prima materia.”
This crazy phraseology, confusing if not outright incorrect, points to some very poor analysis of a given idea. He says the alchemists of the enlightenment based this notion of prima materia on Genesis 1.2 wherein God created the world where there was a world. He neglects to mention Genesis 1.1 which states simply that God created heaven and earth. Therefore, God did create according to Genesis ex nihilo, and then proceeded with the rest of creation. Now using his exegesis, it would seem that the prima materia would either be heaven or earth, neither of which was there before God spoke.
Having said all this, I leave it to the reader to decide the usefulness of this volume. For myself, after wading through all the academic BS and catching several oddities and inconsistencies, the rest of the book did justice to it's title. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Cagliostro as well as the information found in Chapter 5. It was an entertaining if inconsistent work of an academic trying to address a most interesting and not deeply studied aspect of that great movement of the 18th century that generated the ideas that laid the foundation for modern democratic society and as such led to the world we live in today.
It has almost become cliché that the authors, philosophers, and scientists of the 1600s and 1700s also explored aspects of knowledge and science that are now somewhat out of fashion. Alchemy, magic, and the fringes of the Judeo-Christian traditions are today securely categorized in the closet called “supernatural”. But in those days, these branches of knowledge and tradition were part and parcel of any educated persons realm of study.
Prof. Fleming's work offers a study of such topics. It is a work both interesting and engaging and at the same time maddeningly academic. In 400 pages the promise of the title is only addressed in about 200. Prof. Fleming goes on and on about where he found his information. He spends lots of print space telling you about all the books he read in writing this book. One third to one half of the book comes across as the academic peer review process where he believes he has to review the sources for each chapter topic. While this is useful in the journals of academia, it really has no place, IMHO, in a popular work such as this volume purports to be. On the other hand in the sections and chapters dealing with the actual “dark side of the enlightenment” the storytelling is well done and interesting. He presents several lesser-known characters who typify the use of alchemy and magic in spreading their ideas. Ideas which meld seamlessly with other major ideas being brought forward during this time.
Let me offer two examples of the inconsistency of the work. Chapter 3,"The Rosy Cross", especially caught my attention because in my own admittedly sporadic studies I have never found any substantial information on this topic. Chapter 3 did nothing to improve that situation. I had to read it twice to see if I missed anything, but unfortunately the second reading did not inform me any further than the first. It amounts to a biography of a Rosicrucian of the early 17th century, Johann Valentin Andreae, whom Prof. Fleming seems to equate with the "legendary Christian Rosenkreuz". There is little to no information on what the Rosicrucians are about other than they seem to have contributed to the origins and spirituality of the Freemasons which are outlined in the next chapter. There was not a whole lot new in the chapter on the Freemasons that is not discussed in the dozens of other books about their origins and spiritual practices.
The next example I would offer is found in the interestingly titled chapter 5,"Three Occult Arts". This is one chapter where Prof. Fleming lives up to the promise of his book’s title. Covering three aspects of knowledge, namely Magic, Kabbalah, and Alchemy. Again, he spends lots of ink discussing his sources, but when he does discuss the actual occult arts the information is both entertaining and enlightening. However, there is one glaring example of his twisting of certain ideas. On page 189 he introduces the reader to something known as the original matter or in Latin the prima materia. I quote…
“The prima materia was associated with the chaos or nothingness out of which God had created the world.” He then quotes Genesis 1.2 which roughly translates as “the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” (the quote continues) “This text was parsed minutely. It did not say that God had created ex nihilo , out of nothing. It did not say that there was no earth, but that the earth was waste and void. There could be no darkness upon the face of the earth were there no face of the earth. Here was the theological spoor of the prima materia.”
This crazy phraseology, confusing if not outright incorrect, points to some very poor analysis of a given idea. He says the alchemists of the enlightenment based this notion of prima materia on Genesis 1.2 wherein God created the world where there was a world. He neglects to mention Genesis 1.1 which states simply that God created heaven and earth. Therefore, God did create according to Genesis ex nihilo, and then proceeded with the rest of creation. Now using his exegesis, it would seem that the prima materia would either be heaven or earth, neither of which was there before God spoke.
Having said all this, I leave it to the reader to decide the usefulness of this volume. For myself, after wading through all the academic BS and catching several oddities and inconsistencies, the rest of the book did justice to it's title. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Cagliostro as well as the information found in Chapter 5. It was an entertaining if inconsistent work of an academic trying to address a most interesting and not deeply studied aspect of that great movement of the 18th century that generated the ideas that laid the foundation for modern democratic society and as such led to the world we live in today.
April 10, 2019
The topic is fascinating, but the book is ruined beyond redemption by tedious writing featuring tangled sentence structure and the worst employment of an "academic" vocabulary I've seen in my long life. The author is addicted to obscure words that no author respectful of his audience would allow into his book. Awful.
June 13, 2019
This is an excellent introduction to the irrational running through the rational highwater mark of European history -- the Enlightenment. Proving, yet again, there are two sides to our nature: rational and irrational. We can get nowhere without both of them. Till we make peace with that fact there's no dealing with the whole human being thang.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
December 19, 2021
The subject matter of this book was interesting but I found the writing style heavy going - digressive, verbose and unfocussed. It reads as a bit of a hodge-podge of individual biographies, social history and literary criticism. Personally I think this book would have benefitted from radical editing.
March 10, 2022
Not as comprehensive as I had hoped but provided some interesting historical snapshots. The author's frequent anti-communist statements were a bit bizarre and incongruous. Did not buy this book for the axe Fleming wishes to grind with Stalin.
March 8, 2018
Much to my disappointment, I had to abandon this book about halfway through. While I loved the topic, I was not a fan of Fleming's obviously biased, opinionated writing on it.
February 4, 2020
DNF I read part, skimmed the rest, skipped the last couple chapters, and it was just so boring
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