Fludd, or Flud, Robert

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

This Rosicrucian and alchemist was born in 1574 at Milgate House, in the parish of Bearsted, Kent, his father being one Sir Thomas Fludd, a knight who enjoyed the patronage of Queen Elizabeth, and served her for several years as "Treasurer of War in the Low Countries." At the age of seventeen Robert entered St. John's College, Oxford, and five years later he took his degree as Bachelor of Arts; while shortly afterwards, on his deciding to take up medical science, he left England and went to prosecute his studies on the Continent. Going first to Spain, he travelled thence to Italy, and subsequently stayed for some time in Germany, where he is said to have supported himself by acting as pedagogue in various noble households; but soon he was home again, and in 1605 his alma mater of Oxford conferred on him the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Doctor of Medicine, while five years later he became a Fellow of the College of Physicians. Having thus equipped himself thoroughly for the medical profession, Fludd went to London and took a house in Fenchurch Street, a quiet place in those days, though now a noisy centre of commerce; and here he soon gained an extensive practice, his success being due not merely to his genuine skill, but to his having an attractive and even magnetic personality. But busy though he was in this way, he found leisure to write at length on medicine; while anon he became an important and influential member of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, and at the same time he commenced alchemistic experiments. He preached the great efficacy of the magnet, of sympathetic cures, of the weapon-salve; he declared his belief in the Philosopher's Stone, the universal alkahest or solvent, the elixir vita; he maintained that all things were animated by two principles-condensation, the Boreal, or northern virtue; and rarefaction, the Austral, or southern virtue. He asserted that the human body was controlled by a number of demons, that each disease had its peculiar demon, each demon his particular place in the frame of humanity, and that to conquer a disease-say in the right leg-you must call in the aid of the demon who ruled the left, always proceeding by this rule of contraries. As soon as the doctrines of the Rosy Cross Brotherhood were promulgated Fludd embraced them with all the eagerness of which his dreamy intellect was capable; and several German writers having made an attack upon them, he published a defence in 1616, under the title of Apologia Compendiaria Fratern- Rosea-Cruce Suspicionis et Infamiæ Maculis Aspersam Abluens, which procured him a wide-spread reputation as one of the apostles of the new fraternity. He met with the usual fate of prophets, and was lustily belaboured by a host of enemies-by Mersenne, Gassendi, and Kepler. Fludd was by no means discomfited, and retorted upon his opponents in an elaborate treatise, Summum Bonum, quod est Magica, Cabala, Alchimia, Fratrum Rosea-Crucis Verorum, et adversus Mersenium Calumniatorem. He made at a later period and aventurous attempt to identify the doctrines of the Rosicrucians with what he was pleased to call the Philosophy of Moses (Philosophia Mosaica, in quâ sapientia et scientia Creationis explicantur), published at Ghent, 1638, and wrote numerous treatises on alchemy and medical science. He founded an English school of Rosicrucians. Fludd is one of the high priests of the Magnetic Philosophy, and learnedly expounds the laws of ostral medicine, the doctrines of sympathies, and the fine powers and marvellous effects of the magnet. When two men approach each other-such was his theory-their magnetism is either active or passive; that is, positive or negative. If the emanations which they send out are broken or thrown back, there arises antipathy, or Magnetismus negativus: but when the emanations pass through each other, the positive magnetism is produced, for the magnetic rays proceed from the centre to the circumference. Man, like the earth, has his poles, or two main streams of magnetic influence. Like a little world, he is endowed with a magnetic virtue which, however, is subjected to the same laws as, on a larger scale, the magnetic power of the universe. How these principles may be developed in the cure or prevention of disease, the reader must learn from the mystic pages of Robertus à Fluctibus himself. Fludd died in 1637 at a house in Coleman Street, to which he had removed a few years before; but ere his demise he had won a fairly wide reputation by his chymical ability, and had also issued a considerable number of books, prominent among them being Tractatus Apologeticus integritatem Societatis de Rusae Cruce defendans, Leyden 1617, Veritatis Proscenium, Frankfort 1621, Medicina Catholica, Frankfort 1629, Monochordum Mundi Syhiphoniacum, Frankfort, 1622.