Elias Ashmole: Alchemy, Astrology and the Birth of the Ashmolean

Britain's first university museum, opened to the public in 1683, bears the name of a man who was at once antiquary, herald, astrologer and collector of alchemical texts. Elias Ashmole was born in Lichfield in 1617 and died in London in 1692. In his long life he lived through the English Civil War, the Restoration and the birth of the Royal Society, leaving Oxford a legacy that includes objects, books and an immense archive of manuscripts.

A Royalist between Astrology and Alchemy

During the Civil War Ashmole sided with the king and, after the royalist defeat, devoted himself to study. He became friends with the astrologer William Lilly and took up alchemy, collecting and copying treatises. In his diary he noted that on 16 October 1646 he had been received into a lodge of Freemasons at Warrington, one of the earliest records of a Masonic initiation in England.

In 1650 he published, under the anagrammatic pseudonym James Hasolle, the Fasciculus chemicus, a translation of a work by Arthur Dee, John's son. In 1652 came his best-known work in this field, the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, an anthology of medieval and Renaissance English alchemical poems, with notes and engravings, which rescued from oblivion texts otherwise destined to be lost.

The Tradescant Legacy

The collection that made Ashmole famous was not originally his. John Tradescant the Elder and his son of the same name, gardeners and travellers, had assembled at Lambeth, near London, a museum of natural and artificial curiosities popularly called The Ark. Ashmole contributed to its catalogue, published in 1656, and obtained from the younger Tradescant a deed of gift in his own favour.

After the death of John Tradescant the Younger in 1662, his widow Hester contested the gift, but Ashmole won the case. In 1677 he offered the collection to the University of Oxford on condition that a suitable building be erected. The museum bearing his name opened in 1683 on Broad Street and included a chemical laboratory in the basement as well as a lecture room.

The Fate of the Manuscripts

Ashmole also left Oxford his library, extraordinarily rich in manuscripts on astrology, alchemy, magic and heraldry. Among them were the papers of the astrologer and physician Simon Forman, those of Richard Napier and numerous documents connected with John Dee, including the transcripts of the angelic diaries that Ashmole himself had recovered. In 1860 the whole collection passed to the Bodleian Library, where the manuscripts still carry the Ashmole shelfmark.

The old Broad Street building now houses the History of Science Museum, while the art and archaeology collections are in the Ashmolean's newer home, opened in the nineteenth century on Beaumont Street. Several Tradescant objects are still preserved, among them a famous deerskin mantle traditionally attributed to the Native American chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas.

Ashmole embodies well the passage between two eras. He was a founding member of the Royal Society, the society of the new experimental science, and at the same time a passionate collector of alchemical and astrological texts. His legacy shows that, in seventeenth-century England, curiosity about nature and curiosity about occult learning could inhabit the same library and the same museum.