Astrological "Twins": Dr Ebenezer Sibly and the Revd Manoah Sibly

Friday 21 June, 7pm | FREE | Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2TH | Refreshments served | Talk and Q&A

The lecture is based on Professor Susan Sommers’ recently published research on Ebenezer Sibly (1751-99) and his brother Manoah (1757-1840). Born into a family of Nonconformist shoemakers, Ebenezer Sibly became
a leading Freemason, involved in the development of the Degrees of the Royal Ark Mariner and Knights Templar. Manoah was a politically radical shorthand taker for the Old Bailey. He eventually found his calling working for the Bank of England and pastoring London’s most theologically orthodox Swedenborgian congregation.

Both men make frequent appearances in recent histories of eighteenth- century medicine, astrology, magic, Freemasonry, alleged Jacobinism and Swedenborgianism. This lecture will focus on the period in the 1780s and 1790s when Ebenezer and Manoah worked together to produce a number of important astrological publications, including A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology, one of the most celebrated and controversial astrological compendiums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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SUSAN MITCHELL SOMMERS is Professor of History at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA and MA in History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and an MA and Ph.D. in History at Washington University in St Louis. Her publications include Parliamentary Politics of a County and Its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Greenwood, 2002) and Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Sommers’ most recent book, The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England has just been published by Oxford University Press.