John Heydon

John Heydon (September 10, 1629 – 1667) was a Neoplatonist occult philosopher and Rosicrucian.

Life

Rosicrucian sources, including Heydon's own English Physician's Guide and Frederick Talbot's The Wise Man's Crown, give a florid biography for Heydon, in which he is descended from a King of Hungary. More immediately, he was born in London, the son of Francis Heydon and Mary Chandler Heydon, of Sidmouth in Devonshire. He had one sibling, a sister, Anne, two years his junior. He studied Latin and Greek with a tutor and was apprenticed to the study of law; as a young man he served in the royalist armies during the English Civil War, then travelled to Italy, Spain, Egypt, Arabia, and Persia. He attracted attention in royalist and occultist circles for predicting the future, including the death of Oliver Cromwell, then Protector. Their royalist connections caused both Francis and John Heydon to be imprisoned in the final years of the Commonwealth era. The Restoration of 1660 resolved Heydon's incarceration — though he was imprisoned briefly later in 1663 for dealing in suspect (treasonous) literature, and in 1664 for debt.

Works

John Heydon published a remarkable volume of abstruse work in the last twelve years of his life. A partial list could include:

• Eugenius Theodidactus, the Prophetical Trumpeter... (1655)

• A New Method of Rosie Crucian Physick... (1658)

• The Rosie Crucian Infallible Axiomata; or, generall rules to know all things past, present, and to come (1660)

• The Harmony of the World... (1662)

• The English Physitians Guide: or a Holy Guide (1662)

• Theomagia, or the temple of wisdom in three parts, spiritual, celestial, and elemental: containing the occult powers of the angels of astromancy in the telesmatical sculpture of the Persians and Ægyptians: the mysterious vertues of the characters of the stars...the knowledge of the Rosie Crucian physick, and the miraculous secrets of nature... (three parts, 1662/4)

• Psonthonpanchia... (1664)

• El Havarevna; or, the English Physitian's Tutor in the Astrobolismes of Metals Rosie Crucian (1665).^[1]

He married in 1656, and is thought to have fathered a daughter. Elias Ashmole called him "an ignoramus and a cheat." Frances Yates termed him a "strange character...an astrologer, geomancer, alchemist, of a most extreme type."^[2] He was accused of plagiarizing Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Vaughan, and other writers; his Physician's Guide of 1662 largely derives from Sir Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis.^[3] He was in trouble again in 1667, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London for dealing in the treasonous plots of his patron, the Duke of Buckingham. The precise date of his death is unknown. John Heydon the Rosicrucian is liable to confusion with Sir John Heydon (1588 – 1653), a royalist military officer and mathematician.^[4]

References

1. ^ Waite, Arthur Edward. The Real History of the Rosicrucians. 1887.
2. ^ Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London, Routledge, 2002 edition; p. 241.
3. ^ Yates, p. 167.
4. ^ Stephen, Leslie, and Sidney Lee, eds. Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 9. London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1908; pp. 768-9.