§ =59.= =Thomas Vaughan=, who wrote under the name of “=Eugenius Philalethes=,” was born at Newton in Brecknockshire in 1622. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts, and being made a fellow of his college. He appears also to have taken holy orders and to have had the living of St. Bridget’s (Brecknockshire) conferred on him.[80] During the civil wars he bore arms for the king, but his allegiance to the Royalist cause led to his being accused of “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency and bearing arms for the King”; and he appears to have been deprived of his living. He retired to Oxford and gave himself up to study and chemical research. He is to be regarded as an alchemist of the transcendental order. His views as to the nature of the true Philosopher’s Stone may be gathered from the following quotation: “This, reader,” he says, speaking of the mystical illumination, “is the Christian Philosopher’s Stone, a Stone so often inculcated in Scripture. This is the Rock in the wildernesse, because in great obscurity, and few there are that know the right way unto it. This is the Stone of Fire in Ezekiel; this is the Stone with Seven Eyes upon it in Zacharie, and this is the White Stone with the New Name in the Revelation. But in the Gospel, where Christ himself speakes, who was born to discover mysteries and communicate Heaven to Earth, it is more clearly described.”[81] At the same time he appears to have carried out experiments in physical Alchemy, and is said to have met with his death in 1666 through accidentally inhaling the fumes of some mercury with which he was experimenting. [80] See ANTHONY À WOOD: _Athenæ Oxonienses_, edited by Philip Bliss, vol. iii. (1817), cols. 722-726. [81] THOMAS VAUGHAN (“Eugenius Philalethes”): _Anima Magica Abscondita_ (see _The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan_, edited by A. E. Waite, 1888, p. 71). Thomas Vaughan was an ardent disciple of Cornelius Agrippa, the sixteenth-century theosophist. He held the peripatetic philosophy in very slight esteem. He was a man devoted to God, though probably guilty of some youthful follies, full of love towards his wife, and with an intense desire for the solution of the great problems of Nature. Amongst his chief works, which are by no means wanting in flashes of mystic wisdom, may be mentioned _Anthroposophia Theomagica_, _Anima Magica Abscondita_ (which were published together), and _Magia Adamica; or, the Antiquitie of Magic_. With regard to his views as expressed in the first two of these books, a controversy ensued between Vaughan and Henry Moore, which was marked by considerable acrimony. “Eirenæus Philalethes” (1623?-?) and George Starkey (?-1665).