Page | 1 Undergraduate Dissertation. © Richard Firth-Godbehere 2011 Is it Possible to Recover the Worldview of Someone who believed in Magic (John Heydon)? Richard Firth-Godbehere The attempt to recover the worldview of people who believed in magic is a common practice in historiography. Some historians have focused on people, others on places and others on magical phenomena such as witchcraft. Some argue against the possibility of ever being able to understand a worldview that is alien to modern understanding and that because such worldviews are so alien, they are open to wild subjective interpretation. This dissertation will argue that this is not the case and that it is possible to recover the worldview of someone who believed in magic – to a degree. It will demonstrate how this is possible by actually attempting to recover the magical worldview of a historical character. As a result, this dissertation has two parts. Part One, Recovering Historiography, will be a philosophical exploration of the subject and Part Two, The Worldview of John Heydon, will be an attempt to recover a magical worldview. The conclusion to this dissertation will briefly assess how successful the attempt to find Heydon’s worldview has been. The dissertation will present a falsifiable model of a worldview that a more detailed study could one day overturn or alter. Until then, the model should stand as a genuine account of the worldview of John Heydon. The first part of this dissertation will begin by asking if history can know anything at all. It will argue that, despite the protests of postmodernists, historiography is a process in which two minds meet in discourse: one from the past and one from the present. The end of this section will look at what a worldview actually is by looking into cybernetics and Karl Popper’s three states of mind. The second section of Part One will examine the tools needed to investigate a historical worldview. It will investigate the merits of Intellectual History, Psychohistory, Cultural History and combinations between these and other disciplines. Finally, it will examine the use of a more scientific approach: the approach that most historians actually use in their day-to- day work lives. Part Two is the self-contained essay. It will investigate the world John Heydon lived in, his writings, his biographical and autobiographical works, his connections to the Rosicrucians and his interest in alchemy and astrology. This part will paint the picture of a man who wished to help offset the fears of the age by presenting the possibility of a more loving, blissful utopia to those around him. The dissertation will then conclude with a short analysis of the success of the endeavour. Recovering Historiography Before we can begin to investigate whether a magical worldview is recoverable, we need to answer two questions. The first and the most complex question is: can a historian recover anything? Postmodernism insists that this is impossible, agreeing with Keith Jenkins’s assertion that historical investigations have ‘absent centres’. 1 Postmodernists fluctuate in their views between Nietzscheism 2 and extreme scepticism. They linger on a scale between the positivist position that ‘God is dead’ 3 – or ‘seeing is believing’ – and the extreme sceptical position that nothing can be absolutely known and so faith, or in their case subjectivity, is all we have. 4 This means that to some, any evidence beyond direct evidence is inadmissible; additional knowledge gained through circumstantial evidence is merely relative. Others reject the possibility of knowledge altogether, assuming it tainted by subjective viewpoints. It is true that subjective reasons influenced the choice of topic for this dissertation. Every word written in every piece of text ever created is ultimately the product of subjective choices. Dissertations do not write themselves from the sources, a human has to get involved 1 Keith Jenkins. Re-Thinking History. (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 63. 2 A similar argument for the role of Nietzchean philosophy in anthropology can be found in Richard A Shweder. Thinking Through Cultures. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 27-112. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (London: Wordswirth Classics, 1997), p. 5. This is the text which best makes his case for positivism. 4 This is something that Keith Jenkins acknowledges, and he suggests that this form of scepticism is ‘variously welcomed’ across our culture. Keith Jenkins. Re-Thinking History. (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 64.