John Napier's Wizardly Ancestors

[Mighty_Emperor]

Napier's wizard roots

WILL SPRINGER

HE WAS considered a brilliant man. His role in Scotland and the impact he had across the Continent were great. He was a mathematician, inventor, laird, as well as a devoted and deeply religious family man.

He was also a noted wizard.

In fact several members of John Napier’s family – respected and wealthy participants of Edinburgh society - were commonly known to be wizards or sorcerers. Their necromantic power was feared by nobles as well as peasants from far and wide.

Digging through the digital archive of The Scotsman, one comes across a story from 1910 that is steeped in mystery, magic and intrigue. It involves the Napier family of the 16th and 17th centuries, a time in Scotland’s history when superstitions and the occult were popularly accepted. The newspaper account of the Napiers' magical links makes for interesting reading, even if it was written more than 200 years after the fact.

The family wizardry started with Napier's father, Sir Archibald, seventh Laird of Merchiston, who successfully predicted when Mary, then the former Queen of Scotland, would leave Lochleven Castle, where she was imprisoned. The story goes: "Claude Nan, the Queen's secretary, wrote that 'the Laird of Markyston (Sir Archibald), who had the reputation of being a great wizard, made bets with several persons to the amount of five hundred crowns, that by the 5th of May Her Majesty would be out of Lochleven." Mary escaped on 2 May 1568 – and the senior Napier was presumably wealthier for his prediction.

Sir Archibald married Janet Bothwell, sister of Adam, Bishop of Orkney, who the paper said was "a notorious necromancer", so that their son, the future mathematician, inherited "a double inclination towards the magic arts". This might explain some of John's odd behaviour.

Tenants who lived on the vast Merchiston estate south-west of Edinburgh thought John to be a bit mysterious at times. As the paper reported, Napier would be seen many evenings wearing a long gown, pacing outside his tower chamber, a private work area where he often would pass many long hours alone.

John was recognised by his fellow lairds as being a man of extraordinary powers. Logan of Restalrig offered Napier a challenge to find a hidden treasure reputed to be on Logan's grounds in Berwickshire. The project apparently was never undertaken, but it reveals the respect Napier had earned with people of his generation.

Another Napier - John’s nephew, Richard - was known as the Warlock of Oxford. Richard, in his role as rector of Lynford, Buckinghamshire, is said to "cure" his sick parishioners through the powers of his magical, eye-catching rings. It is also reputed that several years earlier Richard successfully predicted the hour of his death in 1634.

Meanwhile, the mantle of wizardry was passed from John to son Robert, an author and mathematician like his father. No other family members carried the torch of wizardry, ending a mysterious period in the Napier family but no doubt leaving an indelible and mysterious mark on those associated with them at the time.

This article: http://heritage.scotsman.com/myths.cfm?id=41962005

 

[rynner2]

How very strange that none of this was mentioned on my OU History of Mathematics course!

For info, John Napier was the inventor of logarithms. This may not mean much to the younger generation, but they were the main means of computation when I was at school. I still have a book of 5-figure logs on my desk right now, for old times sake.

Logs are still an important part of modern maths, although their use for computation has now been taken over by - er - computers!

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Scots genius who paved way for Newton's discoveries

IAN JOHNSTON

HE was said to be a magician who travelled with a black spider in a small box and a black cockerel as his animal familiar.

But "Marvellous Merchiston" - real name John Napier - was actually one of Scotland's greatest scientists, and a man who has been compared to Archimedes.

The philosopher and mathematician, who lived from 1550 to 1617, is credited with inventing the logarithm - although Islamic scholars may have actually beaten him by at least three centuries - the decimal point, and a mechanical calculator. He also developed a screw and axle to drain mines and suggested using salt as a fertiliser.

A number of "secret inventions" were described by his contemporaries, including a round chariot that was an early version of a tank, giant mirrors which could burn the sails of enemy ships, a submarine and an artillery piece that could apparently destroy a whole field of soldiers.

Napier was born in Merchiston Tower in 1550, the son of the seventh laird of Merchiston who was just 16 at the time. At the age of 13, Napier went to study at St Salvator's College in St Andrews. He dropped out without graduating and went off to travel in Europe at the age of 16. There is a suggestion that he continued his studies in Paris and Holland during the turmoil caused by the dethronement of Mary Queen of Scots. His first wife Elizabeth died after a year and he remarried in 1572 to Agnes Chisholm. They had five sons and five daughters to add to one son from his first marriage.

Napier's work on logarithms is seen as essential in creating the ground work for Isaac Newton's extraordinary breakthroughs and other scientific discoveries in the fields of physics and astronomy in particular.

A paper he wrote on multiplication, called the Rabdologiae, contained a design for a machine using metal plates to multiply and divide large numbers.

This is the earliest known mechanical device that could be used to calculate the square root of large numbers and makes Napier the inventor of what would centuries later become a modern calculator.

His "secret inventions" are more obscure as most of his papers were lost at sea.

But Sir Thomas Urquhart, who has been described as "eccentric", told of a demonstration of the devastating artillery he devised against the threat of invasion by Spain.

"He gave proof upon a large plaine in Scotland to the destruction of a great many herds of cattel and flocks of sheep, whereof some were distant from other half a mile on all sides and some a whole mile," Sir Thomas wrote.

Napier wrote extensively about religion. He predicted the Apocalypse would take place between 1688 and 1700, and in a paper on the Book of Revelation he wrote that its symbols could be explained by mathematics.

Much of his writing is vehemently anti-Catholic even by the standards of the time.

However he had several close friendships with Catholics and even dedicated the Rabdologiae, which was published in the year of his death, to Alexander Seton, the Earl of Dunfermline, who was secretly Catholic.

One his most vitriolic anti-Catholic papers was published shortly after his second wife’s father was implicated in the "Spanish Blanks" plot to help a Spanish invasion and may have been a necessary expedient to put some distance between himself and the plotters.

Napier is also thought to have secretly dabbled in alchemy, divination and the occult, all highly dangerous activities at a time when witches could be burned at the stake. He died in 1617 and is buried in St Cuthbert's Churchyard in Edinburgh.

Today Merchiston Tower, where John Napier was born, lies at the centre of the campus of Napier University in Edinburgh, which was named after him when it was founded as a college in 1964.

Source

 

[EnolaGaia]

Another Napier - John’s nephew, Richard - was known as the Warlock of Oxford. Richard, in his role as rector of Lynford, Buckinghamshire, is said to "cure" his sick parishioners through the powers of his magical, eye-catching rings. It is also reputed that several years earlier Richard successfully predicted the hour of his death in 1634.

Richard Napier was affiliated with Simon Forman - another astrologer / healer of the period. Forman and Napier's works are the subject of this thread:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...zarre-medical-cases-from-400-years-ago.65839/