Isaac the Magus

Isaac Newton's tomb, Westminster Abbey

"Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic...[He] was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians..." John M. Keynes on Isaac Newton

I had the privilege of meeting a pioneering member of the Newton Project over the weekend. The Newton Project is a foundation dedicated to cataloging and digitally transcribing Newton's unpublished works and making them available to the public via the internet. A large part of this collection includes private manuscripts that detailed his lifelong passion for esoteric scholarship, which he pursued with equal, if not greater, intensity as the scientific work he for which he was more renowned. A prodigious author, Newton wrote more about theology and alchemical arcana than math and science combined. His extensive research on both subjects (writing up to four million words on theology alone) had been hugely ignored or downplayed by those who esteemed him as the paragon of the Scientific Revolution - a period characterized by critical and skeptical thought.


"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

Though the procedures he used to develop his theories were precise and logical, Newton personally refused to subscribe to the mechanical ideal of the universe. For him faith and reason were equally important parts of the same mission to understand nature. He saw the forces at work in the universe as proof of an inherent divine Will. This Will was articulated as the fixed and essential wisdom that permeates all levels of reality.

"The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."

Newton believed that the wisdom of the universe had been given to man as the prisca sapientia or "first knowledge" at the dawn of civilization. The corpus of this knowledge was lost or corrupted over time but he thought it could be found in religious and mystical traditions handed down from antiquity. He was a keen advocate of the principles of alchemy, drawing exhaustively on the hermetic texts of Nicolas Flamel and Ovid's The Metamorphosis. He delved into sacred geometry and numerology. He regarded Pythagoras' "Music of the Spheres" as an early metaphor for the inverse square law of gravity, as put forth in Proposition VIII of Principia. For more than 30 years, through an assiduous exegesis of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, often correlated with astronomical data, Newton attempted to draw a methodology for determining God's plan for history. He devoted a significant amount of time interpreting the form and measurements of Solomon's Temple, believing the ancient site to be a microcosm symbolizing the design of the cosmos.

Fragment of a manuscript by Newton, part of his observations on the Hebraic institution and Solomon's Temple

Newton's mysticism is less an occult practice than another way to investigate empirical phenomena in the natural world, an attempt to find correspondence and unity among widely disparate systems. To him, reality is one. He chose to be unencumbered by the "rational" disciplines, and pursued unorthodox avenues to perceive and decipher the absolute. Newton's preoccupation with metaphysical philosophy is considered desultory by scientific standards, nevertheless it offers insight into the beliefs and motivations behind one of the greatest minds in history, the ideas that shaped his view of the world and influenced the way he directed his science.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."