8. The New Atlantis

Curse of Ham

Columbus as well was in search of the lost continent of Atlantis.[1] Through his marriage to Felipa Perestrello, Columbus had access to the nautical charts and logs that had belonged to her deceased father, Bartolomeu Perestrello, a Knight of the Order of Santiago, who had served as a captain in the Portuguese navy under Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460), Grand Master of the Order of Christ.[2] Prince Henry was the son of King John I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England, founder of the Order of the Garter. Henry’s brother was Edward, King of Portugal, also a Knight of the Garter, who married Eleanor of Aragon, Queen of Portugal. Their son was Afonso V of Portugal, also Knight of the Garter and of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Alfonso V’s sister Eleanor of Portugal married Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, successor to Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, and fellow member of the Order of the Dragon. Frederick III and Eleanor’s son was Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, a Garter Knight and Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1340 by Philip the Good to celebrate his marriage to Prince Henry’s sister, Isabela of Portugal.

Tragically, according to David Brion Davis—the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian—Columbus’ sponsor, Don Isaac Abarbanel also played a key role in providing the justification for enslavement of black Africans, based on the so-called “Curse of Ham”:

 

[…] the great Jewish philosopher and statesman Isaac ben Abarbanel, having seen many black slaves both in his native Portugal and in Spain, merged Aristotle’s theory of natural slaves with the belief that the biblical Noah had cursed and condemned to slavery both his son Ham and his young grandson Canaan. Abarbanel concluded that the servitude of animalistic black Africans should be perpetual.[3]

The earliest Christian formulation of the Curse of Ham was articulated in the mid-fifteenth-century Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea of Gomes Eannes de Zurara (c. 1410 – c. 1474), to Prince Henry the Navigator.[4] According to Zurara, the claim was advanced by Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo, who has been identified as Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c. – 1247), who, at the helm of the Archdiocese of Toledo, held an important religious and political role in the Kingdom of Castile during the reigns of his friend Alfonso VIII, a patron of the Order of Santiago, and Ferdinand III of Castile, the father of Alfonso X.[5]

Some writers have pointed out that, as the Western world began the profit increasingly from the slave trade, the image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to his value as a commodity, and scholars began to search for definitive proof the Negro’s inferiority.[6] Despite the prohibition against Jewish participation in slave trading during the Middle Ages, Jews were the chief traders of Christian slaves and played a significant role in the slave trade in Europe and other regions.[7] The Babylonian Talmud, which appeared in the sixth century AD, asserted that the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.[8] Talmudic or Midrashic explanations of the myth of Ham were well known to Jewish writers in the Middle Ages, such as Benjamin of Tudela (1130 – 1173). By the year 1600, the notion was generally accepted. In one of the earliest post-medieval references found, Leo Africanus, the great Arab traveler and one-time protégé of Pope Leo X, wrote about Negro Africans as being descended from Ham. His translator, the Englishman John Pory, followed the text with his own commentary.

According to Henri Pirenne, though many merchants were engaged in the slave-trade, they seem to have been principally Jews.[9] In his book, A History of the Jews, Solomon Grayzel states that “Jews were among the most important slave dealers” in European society.[10] Lady Magnus writes that during the Middle Ages, “The principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews… [T]hey seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay.”[11] According to Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, author of The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics, “The golden age of Jewry in Spain owed some of its wealth to an international network of Jewish slave traders. Bohemian Jews purchased Slavonians and sold to Spanish Jews for resale to the Moors.”[12] Seymour Drescher concludes that “New Christian” or “Converso” merchants managed to gain control of a sizeable share of all segments of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade.[13]

Christianopolis

As the Counter-Reformation advanced in Europe, Hartlib looked to England to advance his project. To ensure co-operation, Hartlib advocated a union of all good men, bound together in an “invisible college” by religious pacts and devoting themselves to the advancement of science and the study of the Apocalypse.[14] Ever since 1620, the year of collapse of the Rosicrucian movement, Hartlib and his friends had dreamed of establishing “models” of Christian society, based in Andreae’s Christianopolis. They called it “Antilia” or “Macaria.” The former name came from Andreae’s work, the latter from More’s Utopia.[15] In Hartlib’s A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria, published in 1641, that ideal “model” was the first step to “the reformation of the whole world.”[16]

Andreae’s Christianopolis was influenced by Tommaso Campanella the City of the Sun, which was also inspired by Plato’s Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, a Genoese sea-captain who has wandered over the whole earth carries on a dialogue with his host, a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers, for whom he relates his experiences in the City of the Sun, in Taprobane, “immediately under the equator,” which he describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. In the final part of the work, Campanella provides a prophesy in the veiled language of astrology that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which inspired the founding of America, significantly resembles Johann Valentin Andreae’s Description of the Republic of Christianopolis. The island on which the utopian city of Christianopolis stood was discovered by Christian Rosenkreutz on the voyage on which he was starting at the end of The Chymical Wedding. In Christianopolis spiritual fulfilment was primary goal of each individual where scientific pursuits were the highest intellectual calling. Andreae’s island also depicts great technological innovations, with many industries separated in different zones which supplied the population’s needs, which shows great resemblance to Bacon’s scientific methods and purposes.

Ben Jonson referenced the idea related to Solomon’s House in his masque, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, which satirized the Rosicrucians. The Fortunate Isles were semi-legendary islands in the Atlantic Ocean and were one of the most persistent themes in European mythology. Later on the islands were said to lie in the Western Ocean near the encircling River Oceanus, as well as Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde, Bermuda, and the Lesser Antilles. The Antilles were named after Antilia, an alternate name, along with Macaria, used by Samuel Hartlib for his Invisible College and related to the college described by Andreae in his Christianae Societatis Imago.[17]

Mayflower

According to Nicholas Hagger in The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World, “Indeed, so close were Puritanism and Rosicrucianism in essence that it can be said that the Puritan philosophy was actually Rosicrucian.”[18] A group dissatisfied with the efforts of the Puritans, decided they would sever all ties, and became known as Separatists, led by John Robinson (1576 – 1625) and William Brewster (1560 – 1644). However, in 1608, shortly after James I declared the Separatist Church illegal, the congregation emigrated to Leiden where they were joined by Rosicrucian circles. It was here that Brewster set up a new printing company in order to publish leaflets promoting the Separatist aims and pamphlets supporting the Rosicrucian cause.[19]

In November 1620, following the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, which erupted after the Habsburgs set out to crush the Rosicrucian movement, Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart fled into exile to The Hague in the Netherlands, and numerous Rosicrucians migrated with them. Frederick and Elizabeth sought refuge in the Netherlands with Frederick’s uncle, Maurice, Prince of Orange (1567 – 1625), the son of William the Silent, who was a strong supporter of their cause and sympathized with the Rosicrucians. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and until his death in 1625, Maurice was the Stadtholder of the Netherlands provinces of Holland and Zeeland, the southern coastal states, which included the towns of Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague. It was Maurice, in fact, who had offered the English Separatists a safe haven in Leiden in 1608.[20] The last known Rosicrucian document, published in Latin by Brewster in Leiden in 1615, was called the Confessio Fraternitatis, or “Confession of the Fraternity,” and was written under a pseudonym, Philip A Gabella (Philip the Cabalist), while some scholars have proposed that its true author was Pierre Du Gua.[21]

It was to Brewster’s home in Leiden in 1615 where fled Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Monts (c. 1558 – 1628), a French merchant, explorer and colonizer with Rosicrucian connections.[22] Du Gua, a Calvinist, founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit. He sent Samuel de Champlain to open a colony at Quebec in 1608, thus playing a major role in the foundation of the first permanent French colony in North America.

When the Fama Fraternitatis publicly announced the existence of the Rosicrucian fraternity in 1610, the document was circulated in Paris, and one of the first to publicly respond to it was Du Gua.[23] Du Gua was also a member of the School of Night, a modern name for a group of men centered on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the “School of Atheism.”[24] The group supposedly included poets and scientists Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Thomas Harriot. It was alleged that each of these men studied science, philosophy, and religion, and all were suspected of atheism. Marlowe was the author of Doctor Faustus, which is the most controversial Elizabethan play outside of Shakespeare. It is based on the German story of Faust, a highly successful scholar who is dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil, and exchange his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. There is no firm evidence that all of these men were known to each other, but speculation about their connections features prominently in some writing about the Elizabethan era.

City Upon a Hill

John Winthrop (1587 – 1649) a wealthy English Puritan lawyer sailed across the Atlantic on the Arbella, leading to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[25] Winthrop’s arrival signaled the beginning of the Great Migration. The term Great Migration usually refers to the migration in this period of English settlers, primarily Puritans to Massachusetts and the warm islands of the West Indies, especially the sugar rich island of Barbados, 1630–40. From 1630 through 1640 approximately 20,000 colonists came to New England. They came in family groups (rather than as isolated individuals) and were motivated chiefly by a quest for freedom to practice their Puritan religion. Winthrop’s noted words, a “City upon a Hill,” refer to a vision of a new society, not just economic opportunity.

On 12 June 1630, the Arbella led the small fleet bearing the next 700 settlers into Salem harbor. Salem may have inspired the city of Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis, which was published in 1627. The settlement of Salem by Rosicrucians would explain the existence of witchcraft in the city, which would have given cause to the famous witch trials of 1692. Frances Yates notes that Dee’s influence later spread to Puritanism in the New World through John Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop, Jr., an alchemist and a follower of Dee. Winthrop used Dee’s esoteric symbol, the Monas Hieroglyphica, as his personal mark.[26] In 1628, to acquire the alchemical knowledge of the Middle East, Winthrop sailed to Venice and Constantinople, further extending his abilities and chemical contacts. Winthrop was famously eulogized Cotton Matther as “Hermes Christianus,” and praised as one who had mastered the alchemical secret of transmuting lead into gold.[27]

In Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture (1606–1676), believes that, although less famous than his father, John Winthrop, Jr. was one of the most important figures in all of colonial English America, and describes how he used alchemy to shape many aspects of New England’s colonial settlement, and how that early modern science influenced an emerging Puritanism. Winthrop joined his father in New England in 1631. Following the collapse of New England’s economy at the outbreak of the English Civil War, Winthrop returned to Europe from 1641 to 1643. While there, he was influenced by Samuel Hartlib and members of his circle, including John Dury and Jan Comenius. Dury as well was an active advisor and fundraiser for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, having also attempted to get Comenius appointed the first President of Harvard.[28]

Winthrop was also reputed to be Eirenaeus Philalethes, a pseudonymous author whose widely praised texts were then circulating in English alchemical circles. These works have been conclusively identified as the work of George Starkey (1628 – 1665), a young alchemist whom Winthrop helped train, and a devoted follower of van Helmont. Starkey reported to Hartlib that he was held under arrest in Massachusetts for two years under suspicion of being a Jesuit or a spy. Starkey emigrated to England in 1650, where he gained a significant reputation as an adept and influenced both Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Winthrop’s English connections to the Reverend John Everard (1584? – 1641), a Christian alchemist who was in touch with Robert Fludd. Winthrop’s interest in Everard was focused on determining whether or not he was a member of the Rosicrucians, with Winthrop finally determining he was not. Everard’s antinomian beliefs have led some scholars to speculate that Winthrop shared the same.[29]

Rev. George Phillips, the founder of the Congregational Church in America, arrived on the Arbella in 1630 with Governor Winthrop. In 1781, Phillips’s great-grandson, banker Dr. John Phillips, established Exeter Academy, a prestigious American private prep school in New Hampshire, and is one of the oldest secondary schools in the US. The Economist described the school as belonging to “an elite tier of private schools” in Britain and America that counts Eton and Harrow in its ranks. Exeter has a long list of famous former students, including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gore Vidal, Stewart Brand, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, novelist John Irving, and Dan Brown the author of The Da Vinci Code and the Masonic-inspired The Lost Symbol.

In 1681, William Penn (1644 – 1718), a Quaker and member of Furly’s Lantern, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.[30] In 1682, Penn founded the city of Philadelphia, named after one of the “Seven Churches of Asia” mentioned in the Book of Revelation 3:10, as “the church steadfast in faith, that had kept God’s word and endured patiently.” Another possible reason for the use of the name was the Society of the Philadelphians. Both George Fox and William Penn knew its founder, Jane Lead (1624 – 1704), who was influenced by Jacob Boehme. Central to the founding of the society were visions Lead received of the “Virgin Sophia,” the Feminine Aspect of God, who promised to unfold the secrets of the universe to her. Lead declared herself a “Bride of Christ.” The society made many proselytes in England and on the Continent of Europe, in Holland, Belgium, and Germany.[31]

Penn was personally acquainted with several members of the Royal Society, including John Wallis, Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Aubrey, Robert Hooke, John Dury and William Petty.[32] As explained by Dr. John Palo, in New World Mystics, after Penn’s first trip to America in 1681, on several trips he made back to Europe, he had come into contact with individuals in England, Holland and Germany, who were playing an important role in executing a plan to establish a Rosicrucian colony in America by 1694. Notable among them were William Markham of the Philadelphian Society in London, who would serve later as Penn’s Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania, and Jacob Isaac Van Bebber, a German Rosicrucian, who later purchased a thousand acres of land from Penn for the purpose of establishing a colony in America. [33]

According to Rosicrucian legend, Bacon’s The New Atlantis inspired the founding of a colony of Rosicrucians in America in 1694 under the leadership of Grand Master Johannes Kelpius (1667 – 1708), who was a friend of Lead’s secretary, Heinrich Johann Deichmann. Born in Transylvania, Kelpius was a follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, an avid disciple of Jacob Boehme, who was also “intimately acquainted” with Benjamin Furly, who was Penn’s agent in Rotterdam.[34] Zimmerman was referred to by German authorities as “most learned astrologer, magician and cabbalist.”[35] Kelpius came to know the Kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth, and later used many of his hymns as the inspiration for his own.[36] According to Elizabeth W. Fisher, his later writings indicate that he was well acquainted with the Rosicrucian manifestos.[37]

With his followers in the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, Kelpius came to believe that the end of the world would occur in 1694. This belief, based on an elaborate interpretation of a passage from the Book of Revelation, anticipated the advent of a heavenly kingdom somewhere in the wilderness during that year. Answering Penn’s call to establish a godly country in his newly acquired American lands, Kelpius felt that Pennsylvania, given its reputation for religious toleration at the edge of a barely settled wilderness, was the best place to be. With the help of Furly, Kelpius and his followers crossed the Atlantic and settled in the valley of the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia from 1694 until his death in 1708. After Kelpius died, the brotherhood greatly diminished, and the few remaining members lived out their days as solitary holy men who were associated with the Ephrata Cloister and the Moravian Church.[38]


[1] Frederick A. Ober. Amerigo Vespuci (New York: Harper Brothers, 1907), p. 28.

[2] Samuel Eliot Morison. Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Read Books, 2008), pp. 37-39

[3] David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 55; Cf. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, pp. 17-22;27;36-49.

[4] As cited in Benjamin Braude. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” p. 128.

[5] Braude. “The Sons of Noah,” p. 128.

[6] Edith R. Sanders. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969), pp. 524.

[7] Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” p. 107.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Pirenne. Mohammed and Charlemagne. p. 99.

[10] Solomon Grayzel. A History of the Jew: From Babylonian Exile to the End of World II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 312.

[11] Lady Magnus. Outlines of Jewish History, revised by M. Friedlander (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1890), p. 107.

[12] Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht. The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: Times Books, 1983), p. 39:  Also, Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. 11, p. 402.

[13] Seymour Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Strangers & neighbors: relations between Blacks & Jews in the United States, Maurianne Adams (Ed.), (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 109.

[14] Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967), p. 232.

[15] Ibid., p. 233.

[16] Ibid., p. 249.

[17] G. H. Turnbull. “Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the Early History of the Royal Society.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr., 1953), pp. 103.

[18] Nicholas Hagger. The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World (Watkins, 2009)..

[19] La vie d’un exploer (Paris: Laperouse, 1625) cited in Graham Philips, Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2011).

[20] C. Oman. The Winter Queen (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), ch. 50; cited in Graham Phillips. Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (p. 169) (Inner Traditions/Bear & Company). Kindle Edition.

[21] Ibid., p. 103.

[22] Du Gua’s autobiography survives in two volumes in La vie d’un exploer (Paris: Lapérouse, 1626). Cited in Graham Phillips. Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition).

[23] D. Simmons. Henri of Naverre (London: Blakewell, 1941), p. 67–78.

[24] Frederick Samuel Boas. Christopher Marlowe: a biographical and critical study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).

[25] Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 226.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Neil Kamil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517-1751 (JHU Press, 2020), p. 243.

[28] Laursen & Popkin. “Introduction.” In Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, p. xvii.

[29] “Winthrop, John, Jr.” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Encyclopedia.com (January 25, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/winthrop-john-jr

[30] Elaine Pryce. “‘A New Order of Things’: Benjamin Furly, Quakers and Quietism in the Seventeenth Century.” Quaker Studies, vol. 23/2 (2018); Marion Balderston. “The Mystery of William Penn, The Royal Society, and the First Map of Pennsylvania.” Quaker History, 55: 2 (Autumn 1966), p. 79.

[31] J. Thomas Scharf. History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & co., 1884), p. 155.

[32] Quaker History, Volumes 58-59 (Friends Historical Association, 1969), p. 29 n. 20.

[33] Linda S. Schrigner, et al. Bacon’s “Secret Society” – The Ephrata Connection: Rosicrucianism in Early America (1983)

[34] Julius Friedrich Sachse. The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1895; New York, 1970 [reprint]), p. 258.

[35] ‘doctissimus Astrologus, Magus et Cabbalista’, cited in Levente Juhász, “Johannes Kelpius (1673–1708): Mystic on the Wissahickon,” in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-9.

[36] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 318.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid., p. 300.

Zionism