(1574-1637)
English Rosicrucian and alchemist who was born at Milgate House, in the parish of Bearsted, Kent, England. His father was Sir Thomas Fludd, a knight who enjoyed the patronage of Queen Elizabeth and served her for several years as "treasurer of war in the low countries."
At age 17 Robert entered St. John's College, Oxford. Five years later he took his bachelor of arts degree. Soon afterward he decided to take up medical science and left England to study on the Continent, visiting France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, supporting himself as a teacher. Upon returning home his alma mater, Oxford, conferred on him the degrees of bachelor of medicine and doctor of medicine; five years later, in 1609, he became a fellow of the College of Physicians.
Having prepared himself thoroughly for the medical profession, Fludd went to London and took a house in Fenchurch Street. He soon gained an extensive practice, his success attributable not merely to his genuine skill but also to his having an attractive and even magnetic personality. Although he kept busy with his medical practice, Fludd found time to write at length on medicine. He also became an important and influential member of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross and began experiments in alchemy. He preached the great efficacy of the magnet, of sympathetic cures, of the weapon salve, and declared his belief in the philosophers' stone, the universal alkahest or solvent, and the elixir vitae.
As a writer, Fludd represented a school of medical mystics, which laid claim to the possession of the key to universal sciences. Fludd maintained that all things were animated by two principles: condensation, the boreal, or northern virtue; and rarefaction, the austral, or southern virtue. He asserted that the human body was controlled by a number of demons, that each disease had its peculiar demon, and each demon his particular place in the frame of humanity, and that to conquer a disease— say, in the right leg—one must call in the aid of the demon who ruled the left, always proceeding by this rule of contraries. As soon as the doctrines of the Rosicrucians were promulgated in the early seventeenth century Fludd embraced them with eagerness, and when several German writers attacked them he published a defense in 1616, under the title Apologia Compendiaria Fraternitatem de Rosea-Cruce Suspicionis et Infamiæ Maculis Aspersam Abluens, which procured him a widespread reputation as one of the apostles of the new fraternity.
Fludd met with the usual fate of prophets and was lustily denounced by a host of critics, including Pierre Gassendi and Johann Kepler. Fludd retorted in an elaborate treatise, Summum Bonum, quod est Magiæ, Cabalæ, Alchimiæ, Fratrum Roseæ-Crucis Verorum, et adversus Mersenium Calumniatorem. At a later period he made an adventurous attempt to identify the doctrines of the Rosicrucians with what he called the "philosophy of Moses" in his new volume, Philosophia Mosaica, in quâ sapientia et scientia Creationis explicantur (1638), and wrote numerous treatises on alchemy and medical science. His Philosophia Mosaica is notable for a discussion of the relationship between a rod and the mineral and vegetable world (i.e., the divining rod or dowsing rod). He also founded an English school for Rosicrucians.
Fludd was one of the high priests of the magnetic philosophy and learnedly expounded the laws of austral medicine, the doctrines of sympathies, and the fine powers and marvelous effects of the magnet. According to his theory, when two men approach each other their magnetism is either active or passive, that is, positive or negative. If the emanations that they send out are broken or thrown back, there arises antipathy, or magnetismus negativus; when the emanations pass through each other, positive magnetism is produced, for the magnetic rays proceed from the center to the circumference. Humans, like the earth, have their poles, or two main streams of magnetic influence, according to Fludd's theory. Like a miniature world, humans are endowed with a magnetic virtue that is subjected to the same laws as those of the universe. How these principles could be developed in the cure or prevention of disease is described at length in Fludd's books.
Fludd died September 8, 1637, at a house in Coleman St., London, to which he had moved a few years before. Before his death he had won a fairly wide reputation founded on his chemical ability and had also written a number of books that contributed to the establishment of Rosicrucianism in Europe.
Sources:
The Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Fludd, Robert. Medicina Catholica. Frankfurt: William Fitzer, 1629.
——. Monochordum Mundi Symphoniacum. Frankfurt, 1622.
——. Philosophia Mosaica, in quâ sapientia et scientia Creationis explicantur.
Gouda: Peter Rammazen, 1638. Translated as Mosaicall Philosophy. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1659.
——. Tractatus Apologeticus integritatem Societatis de Rosae Cruce defendans. Leiden: Gottfried Basson, 1617.
——. Veritatis Proscenium. Frankfurt: Johann Theodore de Bry, 1621.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1979.