And So On....
The London of my youth, William and Mary’s London, was not nearly as somber as my father would have liked it-still, it was not the sea of mayhem and revelry that it had been in Charlie-Two’s day. Moreover, it was a dreadful place to be a Calvinist; though so saying likely implies that there is ever a good place to be a Calvinist. Save Heaven there is none, which is why most Nonconformists in London were in those days trying to jump into their graves as quickly as possible.
My father was one of them, both in name and action. He lived what some might call a “dangerous life” and others would refer to as just plain foolish, his Brothers in Faith included; perhaps especially so. He firmly believed that he was doing God’s work here on Earth, however, and I accepted his word without hesitation. My father’s word was always a strong thing, despite what his puritanical brethren might have had to say about it.
It was his desire that I should become a scholar, I believe, so that I could bring the teachings of the Dissenters to the educated world. I really cannot speculate much further than this, for the mind of my father was not an easy to thing to read.
Our strange home was the epicenter of alchemical activity in London, perhaps all of Christendom. Certainly, there were a great number of scholars who came and went under various pretexts but ultimately devoted to the search for the Philosophic Mercury, that elusive substance capable of transmuting base metals into gold and granting life eternal. They referred to themselves as the “Esoteric Brotherhood,” a name so couched in mystery already that whatever they could have gotten up to in those labs had to pale in comparison. It invariably did.
My father was one of them, both in name and action. He lived what some might call a “dangerous life” and others would refer to as just plain foolish, his Brothers in Faith included; perhaps especially so. He firmly believed that he was doing God’s work here on Earth, however, and I accepted his word without hesitation. My father’s word was always a strong thing, despite what his puritanical brethren might have had to say about it.
It was his desire that I should become a scholar, I believe, so that I could bring the teachings of the Dissenters to the educated world. I really cannot speculate much further than this, for the mind of my father was not an easy to thing to read.
Our strange home was the epicenter of alchemical activity in London, perhaps all of Christendom. Certainly, there were a great number of scholars who came and went under various pretexts but ultimately devoted to the search for the Philosophic Mercury, that elusive substance capable of transmuting base metals into gold and granting life eternal. They referred to themselves as the “Esoteric Brotherhood,” a name so couched in mystery already that whatever they could have gotten up to in those labs had to pale in comparison. It invariably did.