1. Robert Fludd, known as Robertus de Fluctibus, was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests.
21 Facts About Robert Fludd
1. 2.
Robert Fludd is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist, and Rosicrucian.
3.
Robert Fludd had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.
4.
Robert Fludd was the son of Sir Thomas Fludd, a high-ranking governmental official, and Member of Parliament.
5.
Between 1598 and 1604, Robert Fludd studied medicine, chemistry and hermeticism on the European mainland following his graduation.
6.
Robert Fludd became a prosperous London doctor, serving as Censor of the College four times.
7.
Robert Fludd became such an established figure within the College that he was included in seventeenth-century critiques of the college, including those by Nicholas Culpepper and Peter Coles.
8.
Robert Fludd was on good terms with Sir William Paddy.
9.
Robert Fludd was one of the first to support in print the theory of the circulation of the blood of the college's William Harvey.
10.
Much of Robert Fludd's writing, and his pathology of disease, centered around the sympathies found in nature between man, the terrestrial Earth, and the divine.
11.
Robert Fludd was heavily reliant on scripture; in the Bible, the number three represented the principium formarum, or the original form.
12.
Robert Fludd extended this interaction to his conception of disease: the movement of Spirit between the macrocosm and microcosm could be corrupted and invade the microcosm as disease.
13.
Robert Fludd was not a member of the Rosicrucians, as often alleged, but he defended their thoughts as expressed in numerous manifestos and pamphlets.
14.
Robert Fludd produced a quick work, the Apologia Compendiaria, against the claims of Libavius that the Rosicrucians indulged in heresy, diabolical magic and sedition, made in his Analysis confessionis Fraternitatis de Rosea Cruce of 1615.
15.
Robert Fludd returned to the subject at greater length, the following year.
16.
Robert Fludd was well-read in the tradition coming through Francesco Giorgi.
17.
Robert Fludd rejected the syncretic move that placed alchemy, cabbala and Christian religion on the same footing; and Fludd's anima mundi.
18.
Robert Fludd wrote against The Tillage of Light of Patrick Scot; Scot like Mersenne found the large claims of hermetic alchemy to be objectionable.
19.
Robert Fludd defended alchemy against the criticisms of Scot, who took it to be merely allegorical.
20.
In 1618, Robert Fludd wrote De Musica Mundana which described his theories of music, including his mundane monochord.
21.
Robert Fludd's machine worked by recirculation by means of a water wheel and Archimedean screw.