Francis Barrett

LC name authority rec. n87131016

LC Heading:Barrett, Francis

Biography:

Barrett, Francis (fl. 1780–1814), writer on magic and demonologist, described himself as a ‘Professor of Chemistry, Natural and Occult Philosophy, the Cabala, etc.’ (Barrett, Magus). His dates of birth and death, and his antecedents, are unknown. A dated manuscript translation of part of Georg von Welling's Opus mago-cabalisticum (1719) shows that Barrett was active in 1780, while a Times report of his inept attempts at ballooning in Greenwich and Swansea in 1802 refers to him as an apothecary who had once owned a shop in Walworth. He was married with one son.

In 1801 Barrett published The Magus, or, Celestial Intelligencer, in which he advertised private instruction on occult philosophy at 99 Norton Street, Marylebone. A frontispiece captioned FRC (Frater rosae crucis, Brother of the rosy cross), portrays a dark-haired, romantic-looking individual. Composed in the Christian tradition, The Magus was a farrago of Renaissance alchemy and natural and talismatic magic that fitted contemporary Gothic taste, and which was typical of the interests of late eighteenth-century Rosicrucian brotherhoods in Germany. The book's most startling feature was a set of gargoyle-like portraits of demons conjured up in ritual magic ceremonies. Barrett was almost certainly also the author of the anonymous Lives of the Adepts in Alchymical Philosophy (1814) which John Ferguson dismissed as ‘superficial and superstitious’ (Ferguson, 41).

Rumours that Barrett founded a sodality in Cambridge appear unfounded and his one known pupil, John Parkins of Little Gonerby, Grantham, was the subject of criticism for dissolute behaviour. Interest in Barrett's ritual magic in the 1860s was due to the tea merchant and occultist Frederick Hockley (1808–1885), who reprinted The Magus in 1870. However, this did not succeed in rehabilitating Barrett's reputation in the eyes of late nineteenth-century writers on occultism who regarded him as a ‘credulous amateur’ (Barrett, Lives, 1888, 5).

W. H. Brock