SIR FRANCIS BACON: Prophet of Science, Keeper of Secrets
The Cycle of Re-Synthesis – Part I
Examining Sir Francis Bacon’s life and works we clearly see the genius of a far-sighted polymath yet from a twenty-first century perspective we are also confronted with something of a paradox. On the one hand we have an individual profoundly influenced by Medieval magic and cabala1 and a committed exponent of alchemy (though deeply critical of some alchemists and their methods). On the other, we have an arch-pioneer of empirical rationalism, who, basing his conclusions on the observation of external things, founded and popularised deductive scientific methodology2 and thereby laid the bedrock of the scientific revolution which was to follow.
We have in Bacon a visionary and a conduit between the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan period, whose radical synthesis shaped and dominated scientific inquiry for subsequent centuries. We see a man inhabiting two separate worlds.
Dubbed the Father of Empiricism, Bacon enjoyed a prominent, influential and diversified career as a parliamentarian (serving as MP, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor) jurist and author but who was plunged into disgrace when prosecuted as a major league debtor. A patron of democracy and editor of the King James Bible, he is widely credited as the author of William Shakespeare’s plays, the pivotal influence behind secret societies and a man who faked his own death in order to carry on his work from the shadows.
Bacon’s big project, the Great Instauration of Science, was ‘directed towards a return to the state of Adam before the Fall, a state of pure and sinless contact with nature and knowledge of her powers’3. And Frances Yates, a prominent Renaissance scholar, also makes the crucial point here that ‘Bacon’s science is still, in part occult science’, encompassing magic, astrology and alchemy.
This grand plan was conceived as a ‘step-by-step restoration of paradise upon earth, but coupled with the illuminations of mankind’4. This attempt to understand the universe was based on the great truth and law of love and would increase cycle by cycle.
‘...the Great Instauration concerns the acquisition of all knowledge (Bacon’s stated goal), for entirely philanthropic or charitable purposes, and therefore includes knowledge of the human psyche and human ethics as well as knowledge of the nature and operations of divinity within all manifest life, physical and metaphysical. All too often Bacon is called materialistic and utilitarian (in the materialistic sense), which is a travesty of the truth...’5
From the modern perspective Bacon’s role is somewhat ambiguous and remains cluttered with elements of controversy. The modern Rosicrucian movement AMORC (Ancient & Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) openly claims that Bacon revived the order in Germany with the publication between 1614 and 1616 of the three Rosicrucian manifestos, Fama Fraternitatis, Confessio Fraternitatis and The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz6. Bacon’s posthumously published utopian novel New Atlantis (1627) is also widely recognised as being a rich repository of Rosicrucian ideas and ideals.
The German Rosicrucian tracts, which sparked a flap across Europe, are normally attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran pastor and mystic from Würtemberg. But according to Manley P. Hall and others they were in fact crafted by Bacon. Hall suggests that Andreae may well have permitted his name to be used by Bacon as pseudonym for these tracts7. He asserts that not only was Bacon a Rosicrucian but the Rosicrucian – and therefore a pivotal and influential figure in the subsequent rise of Freemasonry8.
Moreover, Hall is among a large and vocal group which also attributes the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays to Bacon who incorporated a wide range of Rosicrucian ideas into the texts.
‘Sir Francis Bacon knew the true secret of Masonic origin and there is reason to suspect that he concealed this knowledge in cipher and cryptogram. Bacon is not to be regarded solely as a man but rather as the focal point between an invisible institution and a world which was never able to distinguish between the messenger and the message which he promulgated.’9
‘Sir Francis Bacon was a link in that great chain of minds which has perpetuated the secret doctrine of antiquity from its beginning. This secret doctrine is concealed in his cryptic writings.’10
Hall subscribes to another persistent rumour about Bacon, namely that he faked his own demise in 1626. Officially Bacon caught pneumonia while scientifically testing whether cold could preserve foodstuffs by stuffing a chicken with snow. But Hall asserts that Bacon underwent a ‘philosophic’ rather than physical death. ‘He feigned death and passed over into Germany, there to guide the destinies of his philosophic and political fraternity for nearly twenty-five years before his actual demise.’11
Hall also believes that Bacon was of the same status as that other death-defying man about town with Rosicrucian and Freemasonic inclinations, the Comte de St.-Germain. These two individuals ‘are the two greatest emissaries sent into the world by the Secret Brotherhood in the last thousand years.’12 And he further asserts: ‘The cryptic writings of Francis Bacon constitute one of the most powerful tangible elements in the mysteries of transcendentalism and symbolic philosophy.’13
Other writers highlight the fact that Bacon’s ideas actually pre-date the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos especially those contained in his seminal The Advancement of Learning (1605). Some highlight the paradoxical and perhaps unsavoury aspects of Bacon’s character.
‘To modern eyes, Bacon presents something of a sinister figure. In his public life, he pursued a policy of ruthless opportunism, gaining a number of important posts and rising to the peerage as Lord Verulam and then Viscount St. Albans. His fall came when, as Lord Chancellor, he was convicted of taking bribes and was banished from Parliament and the court.’14
The irony is that despite being the great architect of clandestine cabals with a deep-seated fetish for codes and ciphers, Bacon actually deprecated secrecy in scientific methods. Although interested in many aspect of alchemy, he was especially vitriolic about the ‘long tradition of the alchemists of concealing their processes in incomprehensible symbols.’15
Equally, Bacon disapproved of ‘the pride and presumption of the Renaissance magus’ and issued potent warnings particularly against the Luther of Modern Medicine, Paracelsus, who was himself a prophet for the Rosicrucian system.16
In Bacon, then, we have a number of intriguing and conflicting influences. We have a cutting-edge thinker and reformer who craved democracy, enlightenment and a return to pristine purity. But we also have a man who created the routines of rationalistic and deterministic science, whose key paradigms and methods have moulded and reinforced the almost exclusively materialistic perspective of reality in the West for more than three centuries. As we shall explore later, it is only in recent decades that a more non-physical perspective has filtered into the laboratory yet these ideas have only a tenuous hold in much of the wider scientific community.
This still novel non-materialistic approach to explaining the make-up of the universe followed the re-emergence of portions of the ancient wisdom in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was under the aegis of the Theosophical Society formed in 1875 in the United States by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Colonel Henry S. Olcott and William Q. Judge. Scepticism and materialism were the twin enemies of theosophy and the accompanying secret teachings they wished to reintroduce to a world hurtling more and more rapidly away from its divine connections and origins. The true relationship between spirit and matter as a unity rather than duality was at the core of the age-old wisdom elaborated by Blavatsky. In her monumental and often impenetrable magnum opus The Secret Doctrine (1888) she leaves us in little doubt that when it comes to materialism Bacon is clearly guilty:
‘Bacon was one of the first to strike the keynote of materialism, not only by his inductive method (renovated from ill-digested Aristotle), but by the general tenor of his writings.’17
Quoting from his essay Of Truth, she accuses him of inverting the order of mental evolution when he claims that ‘the first creature of God in the works of his days, was the light of the sense; the last, was the light of reason; and his Sabbath work ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit.’
Blavatsky’s life is in many ways even more fascinating and convoluted than Bacon’s. Like Bacon she was a synthesiser of knowledge. After a lifetime of wandering across four continents, imbibing the lost wisdom from sages and adepts along the way, Blavatsky garnered a treasure-trove of occult knowledge from almost innumerable sources. She not only revived but subsequently globalised the ancient knowledge once the preserve of the Mystery Schools of old. Her resolute opposition to materialism was the unshakeable belief that this was the principal obstacle to mankind’s spiritual evolution. For this reason she heaps scorn on most of the scientists and philosophers of her day who embraced purely mechanistic models of the universe.
🔒 To read Part II – where we explore how Theosophy reignites ancient wisdom and reweaves science, spirit and philosophy – please subscribe.
To explore these ideas further, Tim Wyatt’s body of work continues to offer both intellectual rigour and spiritual depth. His documentary The Myth of Death — rooted in the Theosophical view of consciousness and rebirth — has been officially selected for seven international festivals and has won multiple awards, including Best Documentary at Global Shorts LA and Best Research – Eco at the Hermetic International Film Festival.
His next film, The Eternal Thread: A Brief Esoteric History of the World, will be released in September 2025. Like his earlier work, it reflects his ongoing commitment to making the Ageless Wisdom accessible through informed, visually engaging storytelling.
Follow or connect with Tim:
X
Instagram
Facebook
Bluesky
His books Everyone’s Book of the Dead and Cycles of Eternity are available at his
Online Shop – Tim Wyatt
Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 158.
Manley P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, New York, Tarcher/Penguin, 2003, p. 32.
Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 158.
Peter Dawkins, 1999, quoted on the Francis Bacon Research Trust website http://www.fbrt.org.uk
Ibid.
Rosicrucian Questions and Answers, San José, The Rosicrucian Press Ltd, 4th ed., 1947, pp. 120-121.
Hall, Secret Teachings, p. 461.
Ibid, pp. 240 and 461.
Ibid, p. 548.
Ibid, p. 549.
Manly P. Hall, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, New York, Tarcher/Penguin, 2005, p. 444.
Hall, Secret Teachings, p. 657.
Ibid, p. 558.
Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians, San Francisco, Weiser Books, 1997, p.39.
Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 159.
Ibid, p. 158
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Adyar, The Theosophical Publishing House, 7th. ed., 1979, Vol. I, p.481.