The Magus of Freemasonry: The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole--Scientist, Alchemist, and Founder of the Royal Society

I gave 4 stars because of the difficult reading if the old English. I would recommend it to those seeking a look at pre-Grand Lodge masonry in England.

This book was full of good information. I recommend reading this book.It will help you get a better grasp on a challenging topic.

150 pages into the book and I don't have the slightest feel for who Ashmole was... not the slightest sense of character. At least 20% of the book is devoted to a painfully elaborate description of Ashmole's hometown. I am wondering - is the book about Ashmole or Lichtfield? Quite the disappointment... I will plod on a bit further - but I recommend Josten's biography. Churton can turn a decent sentence but he is in bad form here.

This could have been a really great biography, breaking ground in a critical and little understood era of European-English history and the history of alchemy and Hermeticism. But instead, it has a biased intent and imposed thesis that little lends it to scholarship.

This is a very complete and detailed Life of Elias Ashmole. It examines all of his interests in considerable depth, and as such there is something to be gained from this book whatever your particular interest. There is plenty of detail about Freemasonry in the seventeenth century, some very interesting insights into Alchemy, some of the reasons behind the founding of the Royal Society and so forth, as well as the basic biographical content.My interest was mainly in the book as a biography, and as I reached the end of it I felt that I had an understanding not only of what Ashmole did and where he spent his life - the sort of information provided by other shorter missives - but because the author attempts to draw sensible conclusions about Ashmole's reasoning as he deals with the various challenges in his life, I also obtained a feeling for his personality. This is not easy to do and the author is to be congratulated on this achievement.At a time when some of the wealthy had their private "cabinets of curiosities", Ashmole created the world's first public museum, and the book provides an intriguing insight into Ashmole's motivation for doing this.If I'm really critical, one aspect that was not so good and that I found annoyed me as I read, was the use of too many metaphors, some of them excruciating - "While Ashmole's wisdom was well rooted and watered in the past, he delighted in the flora of futurity". Or possibly worse, when the author describes something that "...provided the golden thread in the velvet of his life". There are more, but I can't bring myself to repeat them.In my paperback edition, some of the illustrations were too dark, particularly of houses, churches, view across fields and the like - making it difficult to make out any significant detail in them to the extent that the point of including them was lost.However this is minor detail and probably only annoying to me because excessive metaphor usage is a pet hate of mine!Overall a very worthwhile read about a significant seventeenth-century personality who has been neglected in favour of better-known individuals.

An excellent account of a fascinating individual!