June 7, 1697

John Aubrey (March 12, 1626 to June 7, 1697) wrote about, and investigated many things. He lived at the end of an era we call the Renaissance but that is a misleading label--- there was no rebirth. One thing there was though, is a sense of the importance of the individual, the obscure, -- all surface phenomena, in a way. It was, newly, okay to pursue the apparently irrelevant. John Aubrey evidenced this thirst for a knowledge of the transitory. Aubrey wrote about the lives of his contemporaries, strange stones in the landscape, the stories told by the poor.

A recent New Yorker article uses some of Aubrey's  stories. We quote it:

It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything. One characteristic spell, recorded by the British polymath John Aubrey around 1680, instructs you to begin by acquiring the severed head of a man who has committed suicide. You then bury the head, together with seven black beans, on a Wednesday morning before sunrise, and water the ground for seven days with fine brandy. On the eighth day, the beans will sprout, whereupon you must persuade a little girl to pick and shell them. Pop one into your mouth, and you will turn invisible.

If you don’t have eight days to wait, you can, instead, gather water from a fountain exactly at midnight (invisibility spells are fetishistic about time management), bring it to a boil, and drop in a live black cat. Let it simmer for twenty-four hours, fish out whatever remains, throw the meat over your left shoulder, then take the bones and, while looking in a mirror, place them one by one between the teeth on the left side of your mouth. You’ll know you’ve turned invisible when you turn invisible.


It is hard not to see Aubrey's use of the term invisible as a diminishing of the power of religion-- that source, previously but then recently, of order, and clues to reality. Aubrey in effect turns the attention of the reader away from the truly, significantly, invisible.  John Aubrey himself remains an exemplar of a search for real knowledge in unlikely places, and the source of our knowledge of many things.