ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 12
The Death of Simon Forman
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According
to the story repeated in nearly every account of his life, the Elizabethan
astrologer, alchemist, and herbalist Simon Forman told
his wife on a warm Sunday afternoon in September 1611 that he would die the
following Thursday night. Monday passed. Tuesday passed. By Wednesday his wife
was needling him about it. On Thursday, September 12th, he ate his dinner,
rowed out onto the Thames toward some building work he had underway at Puddle
Dock, collapsed in the boat with the words “An impost, an impost,” and died
exactly as he'd predicted. It's one of the most famous self-fulfilled
prophecies in occult history. It's also a story we only know because of a
single source, written down decades after the fact by someone who was nine
years old when it supposedly happened.
That
gap between the event and its telling is worth taking seriously before
repeating the story as settled fact…
The
entire anecdote traces to William Lilly, the
astrologer who would go on to become the most famous practitioner of his era,
in his autobiography William Lilly's History of
His Life and Times. Lilly was born on May 1st, 1602, meaning he
was a nine-year-old child in rural Leicestershire, nowhere near London, when
Forman supposedly made his prediction and died. Lilly's memoir wasn't written
until near the very end of his own life; he composed it at sixty-six years old,
at his home in Walton-upon-Thames, and it wasn't published until after his
death in 1681, roughly seventy years after the events it describes. Lilly never
claims to have witnessed any of it himself; the account almost certainly came
to him secondhand through the London astrological community he later became
part of, a community that had every reason to keep the story alive as a
flattering demonstration of their craft's genuine predictive power. That
doesn't make the story false. It does mean a tale routinely presented as
established biographical fact rests on a single elderly man's decades-old
secondhand recollection rather than any contemporary record, and even Forman's
own death date carries some genuine uncertainty in the historical record, with
a handful of sources citing September 5th rather than the 12th.
Forman's
posthumous reputation suffered a far more consequential distortion than a
single embellished deathbed story. Four years after his death, he was
posthumously implicated in the Overbury Scandal,
one of the great Jacobean court sensations, accused of having supplied Frances Howard, Countess of
Essex, with magical means to win the affections of King James's
favorite Robert Carr. The
scandal broke in 1615, years after Forman could offer any defense of his own
conduct, and it permanently reshaped how he was remembered; writers from Ben
Jonson to, centuries later, Nathaniel Hawthorne
recast him as either a buffoon or a genuinely sinister magician in league with
the devil.
The
actual documentary record tells a considerably more grounded story. Forman's
own casebooks, now digitized and studied in detail through Cambridge University's Casebooks
Project, survive from 1596 to 1603 and document up to two
thousand consultations a year, an overwhelmingly mundane practice treating real
patients for real illnesses, casting charts to time letters to patrons, and, in
one memorably unglamorous entry, trying to locate his own missing socks. That's
the working reality behind the “evil magician” reputation later centuries
preferred: a busy, unlicensed physician-astrologer, repeatedly fined by
London's medical establishment for practicing without formal training, who nonetheless
built a genuinely popular practice among rich and poor alike, and who happened,
years after his death, to have his name dragged into a scandal he never lived
to answer for.
None
of this diminishes Forman's genuine significance to the history of astrology
and Renaissance medicine; his casebooks remain one of the richest surviving
windows into everyday Elizabethan and Jacobean life, right down to some of the
only surviving eyewitness accounts of Shakespeare's own plays in performance.
It simply means the two most famous things “everybody knows” about him, the
eerily precise self-prophesied death and the sinister court poisoner, both
deserve the same treatment: real interest, and real scrutiny about exactly
when, and by whom, each story was actually first told.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the working
astrological practice Forman's own casebooks reveal beneath the later legend,
we're recommending a modern guide to the same living discipline.
The
Complete Book of Spiritual Astrology
By
Per Henrik Gullfoss | Crossed Crow Books
Per
Henrik Gullfoss, widely regarded as one of Norway's most respected working
astrologers, offers a genuinely comprehensive modern guide to the signs,
planets, houses, and aspects that formed the working toolkit of practitioners
like Forman himself, translated and revised for contemporary English-language
readers. Where Forman's own casebooks reveal astrology as lived, applied daily
practice, tracking real clients' real questions about health, timing, and
fortune, Gullfoss's book offers a structured, accessible path into that same
working tradition for a modern audience. The
book's real strength lies in treating astrology as a genuine tool for
self-understanding and spiritual growth rather than either mere entertainment
or rigid predictive fatalism, walking readers from foundational chart
components through to a coherent framework for actual interpretation, suitable
for complete beginners while offering real depth for those with years of prior
study.
This
is a general introduction to natal and spiritual astrology rather than the more
specialized horary tradition Forman himself practiced, and readers wanting that
specific historical branch of the craft will want a dedicated text on horary
technique. But for readers of this magazine curious what the working discipline
behind Forman's own casebooks actually involves, stripped of both scandal and
prophecy, Gullfoss's guide is a genuinely solid modern entry point.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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