The Great Instauration

(Frontispiece to the 1640 edition of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning)

Bacon’s brainchild is his Great Instauration, a project he conceived for the step by step restoration of a state of paradise upon earth, but coupled with the illumination of mankind. In other words, whereas mankind was innocently ignorant in the original paradise, in the future paradise all human souls will have reached a state of knowledge of truth. Such illumined knowledge will be one based on experience or practice of the truth, which truth (as all great Masters teach, including Bacon) is love—for it is one thing to speak of love and believe in it, but quite another to really know the truth of it.

A world-wide state of illumination or golden age is an ancient dream and prophecy of all great sages who ever lived on earth, for which they laboured. Bacon’s great gift to the world was his ability to see this anew and to both devise and inaugurate a particular scientific method by which it might be more certainly achieved, suitable for the approaching era. This new method he referred to as an art—the Art of Discovery; whilst the Great Instauration itself he conceived as being comprised of six stages of work, leading to a final stage of rest and enjoyment of the results of the labour—the state of paradise.

Bacon planned his Great Instauration in imitation of the Divine Work—the Work of the Six Days of Creation, as defined in the Bible, leading to the Seventh Day of Rest or Sabbath. He saw his own work, which is itself built upon that of Jesus Christ, his exemplar, as being like the light of the First Day, which would inaugurate and illumine the unfolding of the rest. He also understood that the Seven Days of Creation constitute an eternal archetype for a cyclic occurrence, associated for instance with the seven-day cycle in which the solar wind or ‘breath’ from the Sun bathes the Earth with its light-energy, and then switches polarity for the next seven days, and so on. The Six Days Work of the Great Instauration, and its Seventh Day, is therefore also cyclic, just like life itself, with each cycle building upon the previous one, so that knowledge and ability steadily increases in cycle after cycle, and with there being smaller cycles within greater cycles.

All good teachers practice what they teach, and so Bacon left not just an idea for posterity but also a practical example, a working model for the rest of us to study, learn from and, if necessary, develop further. He provided us with examples of each of the individual parts or stages of the Great Instauration, which he symbolised as individual volumes, seven in all. These volumes may be seen illustrated in this frontispiece engraving to the 1640 edition of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, as well as on the title page illustration to the same publication (see FBRT web page ‘Index’). In some instances there is in fact one particular original volume published for the part of the Great Instauration it illustrates, such as the 1623 De Augmentis Scientiarum to illustrate Part I, the 1620 Novum Organum to illustrate Part II, and the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies to illustrate Part IV; but for Part III several publications comprise Bacon’s example of a Natural History, and not all of them were published in his lifetime.

The design of the Great Instauration is cabalistic and contains great wisdom. By following the treasure trail laid out in this web site, you may discover and learn more about it.

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© Peter Dawkins, FBRT, 1999