‘With no unholy madness’

Coleridge, aside from his interest in Gilbert’s field of knowledge, printed an essay of Gilbert’s and an extract from The Hurricane in his short-lived periodical The Watchman. Furthermore, as author of the apocalyptic poems ‘Religious Musings’ and ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, he shared common ground with Gilbert in his subject matter.Coleridge’s interest in Neoplatonism and attraction to visionary experience made Gilbert an interesting but problematic figure for him.This chapter follows the debates between them, and Coleridge’s manoeuvring as he pursued modes of thought that ran counter to his prior allegiance to the rationalistic Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley.

A Magus of the 1790s

During the year he spent in an asylum near Bristol, Gilbert acquired enough knowledge from John Henderson, the son of the asylum’s owner, to write articles on magic and astrology in the newly launched Conjuror’s Magazine after moving to London. Gilbert’s astrological prognostications of ‘death of aristocrats’ and ‘Seditions’ were in tune with the radical millennialist expectations that the French Revolution had inspired, but he regarded theoretical astrology as of greater value than prediction, and propounded a ‘Macrocosmal Astrology’based on a belief in the correspondence between the spiritual and material realms. He also insisted on the ‘omnipotence’ of the recently discovered planet Uranus, viewing it as epochally significant re-appearance of the star that the Magi had followed at the birth of Christ.

Esoteric Romanticism

This chapter views two particular forms of English Romanticism from the perspective of the history of esotericism, as defined by Antoine Faivre. First, Gilbert’s portrayal of Nature in his Bristol poems shows his receptivity to the ‘One Life’ vision propounded by the West Country Romantics. If, as this chapter argues, passages from poems such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ are records of visionary experience, their underlying philosophy belongs within the history of esotericism, which – according to Faivre – prioritises imagination as an ‘organ of the soul’. Second, Coleridge’s unpublished ‘compass of nature’ diagrams from 1814 onwards combine the traditional elements of Gilbert’s Hermetic diagrams with the newly discovered scientific elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. After Coleridge (and the German Nature philosophers who influenced him) the attempt to integrate scientific discoveries and esoteric wisdom has come to be viewed as a subcultural activity.

Son of a Saintly Slave Owner

This chapter examines Gilbert’s views about Africa and Africans in the context of his background as the son of an Antiguan slave plantation owner. Gilbert expressed publicly his opposition to the slave trade in 1790, but in The Hurricane this opposition is less evident: the evils of the slave trade are just one symptom of a universal cosmic imbalance. Gilbert’s Methodist father, Nathaniel Gilbert, had avowed the evils of slavery and praised the Africans’ higher spiritual capacity, but he nevertheless retained ownership. As John Wesley’s abolitionist views only became public around the time of Nathaniel’s death in 1774, it was possible for Nathaniel, as a benevolent slave-owner, to be considered a good Methodist. Gilbert came of age at a time when these moral values shifted.

Bristol and the First Romantics

Following his 1795 return to Bristol, Gilbert became part of the circle around the bookseller/publisherJoseph Cottle which included the first generation of English Romantic poets. Gilbert, as an alluring cross-pollination from a non-literary tradition, had a degree of fascination for young poets in search of new forms and new subject matter. The congenial atmosphere of poetry writing preserved in Cottle’s ‘Bristol Album’ raises the possibility that this is how Gilbert acquired the confidence to write or share his poetry. By concentrating on the group as a literary coterie, and paying more attention to its marginal figures, this chapter seeks to show how much the well-known poems of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey owe to the evolving aesthetic values of the group.

The Hurricane: A Theosophical and Western Eclogue to Which is Subjoined a Solitary Effusion in a Summer’s Evening

This chapter presents a newly edited text of the full 1796 publication. Gilbert’s discursive notes occupy the greatest proportion of the volume. In view of its long-standing reputation for incomprehensibility, the editorial commentary is thorough: explaining obscure passages, cross-referencing key ideas to the supporting chapters, and identifying sources from Gilbert’s wide range of reading. The text of ‘Solitary Effusion in a Summer’s Evening’, also included here, imagines the original Druidic inhabitants of Britain defeated by the invading Romans, remaining as spiritual presences in the landscape – in harmony with nature – in much the same way that the native Americans of The Hurricane survive as spirits, following their physical destruction at the hands of the invading Europeans.

Decoding the Allegory of the ‘Theosophical and Western Eclogue’

This chapter addresses what Gilbert intended to represent through the action of his poem. An evidently symbolic young girl, Elmira, is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Her mother is drowned. Gilbert makes several references to the Eleusinian Mysteries which concern the rebirth of Ceres’ daughter Proserpina. The common mother-daughter theme suggests a parallel interplay between the living and the dead. The ancient mystery cults, and their parallels with the secret rituals associated with Masonic initiation, were of contemporary interest, as can be shown by Thomas Taylor’s Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, which was based on an exegesis of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (Aeneid, Book VI). This method of exegesis – which had been used by Neoplatonists to unlock hidden meanings in Homer – provides a possible key to Gilbert’s allegory.

‘My astrological friend’

Southey’s poem Joan of Arc, published at the end of 1795, had, in Joan, a female saviour divinely inspired to be an instrument of change. Southey’s Joan has common elements with Elmira, the female saviour figure in The Hurricane. Both are millennialist poems showing how spiritual agencies intervene in history at decisive epochs, and both were intended to reflect and comment on the momentous period their authors were living through. Southey’s friendship with Gilbert is but one instance of his attraction to figures who claimed prophetic power or divine inspiration. This chapter also argues that Southey was in the vanguard of the ‘One Life’ poetic movement that celebrated direct experience of the divine through Nature.

Introduction

This chapter starts by describing the impact of Gilbert’s ‘strange poem’ The Hurricane on Gilbert’s friends and contemporaries: Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and their circle in Bristol, and then follows its critical reception. Romanticist critics John Livingston Lowes, Paul Kaufman, John Beer, and Jonathan Wordsworth drew on the views of Gilbert’s contemporaries to assess The Hurricane. Later culturally based scholarship has brought wider perspectives on the 1790s radical underworld, and its population of visionaries, prophets, and millennialists. Marsha Keith Schuchard’s identification of Gilbert’s pseudonymous writings on magic and astrology has made possible a better-informed assessment of Gilbert’s use of esoteric traditions – Hermeticism, astrology, theosophy, Neoplatonism – that are brought to bear in The Hurricane.

The Hurricane and Hermetic Geography

Gilbert’s view of the four continents, Africa, Asia, Europe and America as interactive principles underlying global politics has precedents in the Hermetic/alchemical tradition of the seventeenth century that equated the continents with the four elements fire, earth, water and air. Gilbert also took into account Swedenborg’s association of the continents with the cardinal points of the compass, and Swedenborg’s view of Africa as the hidden location of a true uncontaminated spirituality that was to help bring about the coming millennium. Gilbert’s opening statement that The Hurricane ‘is grounded on, a Theosophical view of the relation between America and Europe’ advances this tradition into the age of revolution: the hurricane’s change of direction eastward represents, for Gilbert, the revolutionary force of America turning back on Europe.