From 17 March 1679 to 21 October 1696, the diarist and prophet Ann Bathurst (b. c. 1638, d. in or before 1704), recorded her spiritual meditations and visions in a rhapsodic mixture of verse and prose in a two-volume diary that survives in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS Rawl. D 1262 and 1263). In several verse interludes written between 1692 and 1693, Bathurst draws on the rich imagery of spiritual alchemy, and the long-established tradition of using the physical processes of alchemy as a metaphor for the spiritual purification of the body and soul. Abounding in the language of early modern metallurgy and alchemy – distillation, calcination, dross – Bathurst deploys precise technical terms to express her desire for spiritual purification and blissful union with the divine.
Bathurst was an early member of the London Philadelphian Society, the dissenting religious group which formed around John Pordage, Jane Lead, and Francis Lee. Its members were heavily influenced by the theosophy and alchemical imagery of German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme (c.1575–1624), the majority of whose works were printed in English translation at London between 1645 and 1662. Active from the middle of the century, the Society emphasised the importance of prophecy, mystical experience, and visions in its mission ‘for the Advancement of an Heroical Christian Piety, and Universal Love towards All’ ([Francis Lee], The State of the Philadelphian Society or, The Grounds of their Proceedings Considered (1697), p. 7). When the first volume of Lead’s own spiritual diaries was published as A Fountain of Gardens (1696), it was prefaced with a poem by Richard Roach describing the coming of the Philadelphian age as an alchemical process:
Quint-Essence streaming from the Godhead Source;
So Ravishing sweet, of such high Force;
As to transmute Man’s Earth, and drossy Mold
To Pearly Beauty, Living Gold.
‘Solomon’s Porch’ in A Fountain of Gardens (1696), sig. *G4v.
By the time the Society was formally founded by Lead and Lee in 1697, Bathurst was considered one of its key prophets.
On August 13th, 1692, Bathurst experienced a dream vision: ‘A wonderfull deep sleep fell upon me and could not be putt by […] I saw my spirit at prayer and heard it continue long in prayer, and the words it prayed all was for Direction’ (p. 480). The vision is followed by the following verse:
I wait O God! I wait to be inspir’d
with that Seraphick Love wch setts my heart on fire.
Thy flameing Love doth ev’n our bodies fill,
and we in sweetness feel it doth distill:
It calmes & quiets, setts Natures storms asleep 5
till we O God with Thee a fast may keep!
Bodleian, MS Rawl. D. 1262, p. 480.
In the opening line of the poem, Bathurst’s desire for spiritual direction is poetically reframed as a desire for inspiration, here rendered as a divine fiery infusion. ‘Seraphick Love’, evokes the class of angels associated with flaming ardour due to the derivation of ‘seraphim’ from the Hebrew root saraph, to burn or flame. The chemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle also used this term in Some Motives and Incentives To the Love of God (1659) to signify the highest form of divine love. In Bathurst, this divine love operates on the speaker like a chemical experiment. As fire purified matter through a process of vaporization and condensation in distillation so does the speaker experience God’s ‘flameing love’ as transformative process that produces feelings of sweetness, calm and quiet.
Two months later, in a diary entry dated October 30th, Bathurst grapples with the difficulty of expressing her experience of religious devotion:
how can I sing the Lord’s song in a Strange Land? who can understand my meaning? [...] ’tis well I can talk at all & speak sense or yt all is not catch’d from me into an high Trance in the beholding Him & enjoying Him, who is the Essence of delights’ (p. 513).
These lines give way to the verse ‘Baptis’d I am into the Love of Thee’, in which once again Bathurst relies on alchemy to provide the key metaphors for relating her spiritual desires and experiences:
Baptis’d I am into the Love of Thee
Nature’s dead, I wholly am sett free
Eternal Love doth sett me in a flame
Nature dies when once my Lord I name
O Holy, Holy! fitt me for thy Fire, 5
when ’tis on us we’re fitting to expire.
Cause us O God to melt into that Flame
wch Nature doth transmute, & change the same:
that melts down dross and wholly it calcine
and raise a Phœnix wch knows not mine or thine. 10
particular Loves here are ne’r known
but all our Love doth center into one,
one Being, one Good, the one in all;
what doth remain when God is all in all?
Then cease O Man! remember Thou art Dust, 15
and so a nothing be before This all Thou must.
Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 1262, p. 513
In the first few lines, the speaker returns to the idea of love as a fire with transformative effect. This poem seems to evoke either an ecstatic vision, or death itself, in which the speaker is set free from the constraints of corporeal form by ‘Nature’s death’ – ‘Nature’ is used here to denote ‘the vital functions of the human body’ as in the Scale of Nature in Milton’s Paradise Lost (V.509).
The poem, however, diverges from ‘I wait O God! I wait to be inspir’d’ as in the fluid syntax of lines 7-8, the effect of fire is here supplied by Nature (ll.7-8), which is imbued with the flame’s capacity to ‘transmute’ or cause the conversion of one element into another. The speaker imagines spiritual union with God as a process of melting, whereby she, like a metallic element, is stripped of ‘dross’, or impurities. More specifically, this melding of form and flame is expressed as a process of calcination, the alchemical conversion of an element to powder or dust through fire, thereby purifying it by burning away impurities. In the poem, this process produces a melting away of corporeal form and the boundaries between the speaker and God, ‘rais[ing] a Phœnix wch knows not mine or thine’. The ultimate symbol of renewal and resurrection in alchemy, the Phoenix represents the successful completion of the alchemical process whereby disparate elements come together in a harmonious mixture. The result is a perfect union between the speaker and God as ‘all our Love doth center into one, / one Being, one Good, the one in all’: the Philadelphian Society’s ‘Universal Love’ figured in chemical terms.
In Rhapsodical Meditations and Visions, alchemical metaphor offers Bathurst one solution to her problem of how to ‘sing the Lord’s song in a Strange Land’, of how to convey the meaning of her spiritual visions. By analogising her experiences to physical processes, such as distillation and calcination, Bathurst’s poetry not only displays her technical understanding of early modern alchemy but also highlights the creative exchange between early modern science, poetry, and devotion, and how for Bathurst alchemical metaphor offered a way to render tangible the transcendent state of religious ecstasy.
Further extracts
In March 1693, Bathurst returns to this alchemical theme in the verse below:
The Fire does burn, where should we run
but unto That within me,
wch doth refine and quite calcine
all of flesh that’s in me.
The Fire of Love divinely moves, 5
and moveth all within me
that I may know the Lord of Love
The Holy Ghost, He gave me,
who is my Life, my Light & Love
The Holy Ghost within me: 10
that I may have no will of mine
but He alone move in me.
The Lordly Power of th’ Holy Ghost
I begin to feel within me,
wch will me rule, and so consume 15
the Corruption that is in me.
My Lord, The Holy Ghost I say,
will rule in me alone
when He alone has won the day
and’s seated on the Throne. 20
My Lord, my God the Holy Ghost
will rule in & over me:
when He is seated on his Throne
the victory we shall see,
and as Little Children, nothing be. 25
Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 1262, p. 578
Further reading
Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Jayne Archer, “A “Perfect Circle”? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter”, Literature Compass, 1 (2005): 1-14.
Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Sylvia Bowerbank, ‘Bathurst, Ann, (b. c. 1638, d. in or before 1704)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
Sajed Chowdhury, ‘Ann Bathurst – Poet’, RECIRC (November, 2017) https://recirc.universityofgalway.ie/2017/11/ann-bathurst-poet.
Cassandra Gorman, The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (D.S.Brewer, 2021).
Ariel Hessayon ed. Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
[Francis Lee], The State of the Philadelphian Society or, The Grounds of their Proceedings Considered (London, 1697).
Katherine M. Quinsey, Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation England and Europe (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).