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Suggest pagesEbenezer Sibly
Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1799/1800[1]) was an English physician, astrologer and writer on the occult.
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[edit] Life
He was the son of a mechanic, and brother of Manoah Sibly. He early devoted himself to medicine, and also to astrology. He studied surgery in London, and on 20 April 1792 graduated M.D. from King's College, Aberdeen.[2]
In 1790 he was living in Ipswich, and distinguished himself at the general election by his efforts on behalf of Sir John Hadley D'Oyly, the Whig member.[2]
Sibly is celebrated for the natal horoscope he cast of the United States of America, published in 1787 and still cited. As a student of medicine, he became interested in the theories on animal magnetism of Anton Mesmer, joining Mesmer's Harmonic Philosophical School, and later also Theosophy and Freemasonry.[3]
Sibly died in London about the beginning of 1800.[2]
[edit] Works
He published the New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences in four volumes, from 1784.[4] As an astrologer he is said to have used the Placidian system.[1] As a student of alchemy, he translated Bernard of Treviso (the fountain allegory).[5]
His The Celestial Science of Astrology (London: 1776) appeared in a revised edition posthumously as Astrology, A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences by Ebenezer Sibly, M.D. F.R.H.S., Embellished with Curious Copper-Plates, London, 1806 and The New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology (1817).
His brother Manoah Sibly (1757–1840) was a linguist, Swedenborgian preacher and Bank of England employee. The Sibly brothers published a number of important astrological texts, including a revision of Worsdale's translation of the Tetrabiblos, later known as the "Sibly edition".
Sibly wrote a book called Universal System of Natural History in 1794. In the book, in a form of environmental monogenism, he claimed that the White Race was the first on earth:
“We must consider white as the stock whence all others have sprung, Adam and Eve and all their posterity, till the time of the deluge were white; in the first age of the world no black nation was to be found on the face of the earth.”
Sibly believed that no humans had reached Africa till after the dispersal from the Tower of Babel, that the continent's first inhabitants had been white, and that Africans had become dark only as a result of the actions of the climate there over successive generations.[6]
| Illustrations from Ebenezer Sibly's Astrology | |||||||||
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Debus (1982) gives 1799, the Concise Dictionary of National Biography gives 1800 as year of death.
- ^ a b c
"Sibly, Ebenezer". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. - ^ Debus p. 261
- ^ Volume 4 is available online.
- ^ Debus p.263.
- ^ Colin Kidd, The forging of races: race and scripture in the Protestant Atlantic world, 1600 - 2000, 2006, p. 30
[edit] External links
- Allen G. Debus, Scientific truth and occult tradition: the medical world of Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1799), Medical History 1982 July; 26(3): 259–278. (online text as PDF)
- Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Sibly, Ebenezer". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
