Edward Kelley

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In Dee’s spiritual diary the man is at first not Kelley at all but a stranger named Edward Talbot, arriving at the riverside house at Mortlake in the spring of 1582 with a recommendation and a faint air of trouble already trailing him. Within days he was seated at the table that held the crystal, reporting what moved inside it. The older scholar had been straining for years to hear the angels and had heard almost nothing. The newcomer looked into the stone and the silence broke. For the next seven years the two men were rarely apart, and almost everything posterity would call the Dee–Kelley record passed through the eyes of the younger one.

A man out of Worcester

The documented facts of Edward Kelley’s early life are thin and shadowed, which is itself a fact about him. He was born at Worcester, the standard accounts give the date as 1 August 1555, and he was trained as an apothecary — a trade of powders, distillations, and the handling of strange substances that sits close to the alchemy he would later profess. Beyond this the record thins into rumor almost at once. The antiquary Anthony à Wood supposed that a young man of the name Talbot at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, in the early 1570s was the same person, but the identification is a guess, and Kelley took an MA degree from no university that can be confirmed.

What attaches to him instead is an accusation. The earliest biographical notice, hardening into the standard one through the Dictionary of National Biography, holds that about 1580 Kelley stood in the pillory at Lancaster and had his ears cropped — the punishment for forgery, said in one version to be the forging of ancient title-deeds, in another the coining of base money. The story belongs to the contested register: it is reported by hostile sources, it cannot be cross-checked against court records that survive, and it may be partly a slander attached to a man whose later reputation made any disgrace plausible. Yet it is not idle. It would explain the alias, the long hair he is supposed to have worn, and the close-fitting cap that contemporaries noticed; and a charge of forgery clings with a certain dark aptness to a man whose whole later life would turn on the question of whether what he reported was true.

A second story of the same kind follows him into Dee’s service. About a year after he joined the work, Kelley produced an old book and a quantity of red powder, said to have been recovered from the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey — the lost book of the alchemist-saint Dunstan, and the powder that was the seed of the philosophers’ stone. The provenance was first set down in print by Elias Ashmole in the next century and is flatly at odds with Dee’s own diaries, which describe the materials differently. As a piece of documentary history it does not stand. As a measure of how Kelley was already being read — as a man who arrived carrying secrets whose origins no one could quite verify — it is exact.

The seer at the table

Dee had been attempting angelic conversation before Kelley came. The procedure was simple in its furniture and demanding in its theology. A polished stone or crystal — a “showstone” — rested on the Holy Table, ringed by the engraved wax disk Dee called the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Seal of God’s Truth. The scholar prayed; the seer gazed; and what the seer saw and heard, the scholar wrote down. Dee himself never claimed to see the visions. He was the recorder and the questioner. Kelley was the eye.

From inside the work, the arrangement was not a performance but a division of grace. Dee held that the deepest truths of nature could not be reached by human study alone, that the language Adam spoke before the Fall had been lost along with the clarity of creation, and that God might restore both through chosen instruments. The angels who appeared in the stone — Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, the child-spirit Madimi, and many more — came, in this understanding, to dictate the means of a universal reform, in an age that widely expected the world to end soon. Kelley’s gift was that he could see them. That he was, by his own frequent account, reluctant and frightened, repeatedly trying to quit the actions and being drawn back, only confirmed for Dee that the visions used him rather than the reverse.

Out of the sessions came a body of material without real precedent. There was the Liber Loagaeth, written in Kelley’s hand, page after page of great square grids, forty-nine letters by forty-nine, said to be the Book of the Speech of God. There was an alphabet of twenty-one characters and, derived later, the forty-eight Calls or Keys in an “Angelical” tongue — the language posterity would call Enochian — each with its own lexicon and grammar, dictated letter by backward letter so that, as Dee believed, the power of the words could not be loosed before they were complete. There were the four elemental Watchtowers and the system of thirty Aethyrs. The early phase, the heptarchic kings and their ministers, resembled the older Solomonic magic any learned reader of the age might know; what followed in the letter-tables and the Keys resembled nothing, and remains, even now, incompletely coherent.

The engraving from Ebenezer Sibly’s A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences (c. 1790) that fixed Kelley’s later image: the magician within a graveyard circle, raising a shade. The scene is invented; the reputation it served was real. — Engraved by John Ames after Ebenezer Sibly, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Across the continent

In September 1583 the whole company — Dee, Kelley, and their families — left England for central Europe in the train of Albrecht Łaski, a Polish palatine whose hopes for a throne the angels had been encouraging. The years that followed carried the scrying table from Kraków, where they were received at the Polish court, to the Prague of the Emperor Rudolf II, a sovereign whose appetite for alchemy and the marvelous made his court a magnet for adepts from across Europe. The party was not welcome everywhere. A papal nuncio pressed for their expulsion as suspected necromancers, and in 1586 a Habsburg order drove them out of the imperial lands.

They found refuge with the greatest magnate in Bohemia, Vilém of Rožmberk, who installed them at his castle of Třeboň in the south of the country. Rožmberk’s interest was not in angels but in gold, and here the balance between the two Englishmen began to shift. In December 1586 Kelley claimed a successful transmutation by means of the red powder, and his fame as an adept began to rise as Dee’s faded. The seer was becoming the alchemist.

Henry Gillard Glindoni, John Dee Performing an Experiment Before Queen Elizabeth I (late 19th century). The scrying that made Kelley’s name began in Dee’s English household before it crossed to the courts of Kraków and Prague. — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The covenant of 1587

The most notorious episode of the partnership belongs to the spring of 1587 and to the spirit Madimi. On 18 April, scrying at Třeboň, Kelley reported an instruction that the two men should hold all things in common — including their wives. The proposal sat at the breaking point of everything Dee had built his life on, and the diary records his anguish before it. He treated it, finally, as a trial of obedience: a command from heaven that could not be refused without refusing heaven. A covenant was drawn up and signed by all four — Dee and his much younger wife Jane, Kelley and his wife Joanna — and on 21 May 1587 Dee entered into his diary the two Latin words pactum factum, the pact is made. A son, Theodorus Trebonianus Dee, was born to Jane about nine months later.

The episode invites sensation and rewards restraint. What the record actually shows is narrower and stranger than the legend: a single instruction, a reluctant and grieving compliance, a contract still preserved in Dee’s own hand among the British Library manuscripts. Whether Kelley engineered the command — to extract from Dee a last proof of devotion, or for reasons of his own appetite — or whether he reported in good faith what he believed the stone had shown him, the documents do not settle. It is one of the points on which the question of his honesty rests, and the surviving evidence supports no confident answer. What is clear is that the covenant did not, in the end, break the partnership. That came two years later, over gold.

Knight and prisoner

By 1589 Kelley was claiming that the angels now forbade him to share the alchemical secret with Dee at all. The reservation was, in effect, the dissolution of the work: the seer keeping for himself what the seer had been the channel for. Dee left Bohemia and reached England late that year, to find his Mortlake library plundered and his instruments wrecked. The two men, who had been inseparable for seven years, never met again.

Kelley remained, and for a few years rose spectacularly. Rudolf II valued him for his alchemy as Dee had valued him for his sight, and on 23 February 1590 the emperor made him a knight, with an estate; he is sometimes styled baron, and he held property at the imperial court. He had become Sir Edward Kelley, a man of standing in a foreign country, on the strength of a promise to make gold. The promise was the trap. An adept who claims transmutation owes his patrons transmutation, and Kelley could not deliver at the scale his honors demanded. He was imprisoned, released, and imprisoned again — held at length in the castle of Hněvín above the town of Most in northern Bohemia — for failing to produce the gold his creditors and his sovereign had been led to expect. The accusation of forgery that opened his life had been a small thing of deeds and coins; the failure that closed it was the same crime written across an empire.

He died a prisoner, late in 1597 or in 1598, of injuries taken in an escape attempt. The tradition, recorded close to the events, has him lowering himself from a tower window on a rope or sheets too short for the drop, falling, and breaking his leg or worse; some versions add poison taken in despair. He was about forty-two. The man who had spent his life reporting what could not be confirmed left behind a death that is itself reported in several incompatible forms — the manner uncertain, the date a year wide, the body unrecovered to any marked grave.

A crystal sphere held in the British Museum and traditionally associated with Dee’s angelic actions. Through such a stone Kelley reported the visions and the dictated tongue. — Photograph by Vassil, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Reception and afterlife

Kelley’s reputation has never been able to detach itself from Dee’s, and the two men are received as a single compound figure: the learned mathematician and the dubious medium, the recorder and the eye. Where the appraisal turns harsh it falls hardest on Kelley. The Victorian tradition, and the Dictionary of Welsh Biography after it, called him a rank impostor who imposed on a credulous old scholar — the simplest story, and the one that lets Dee off as a dupe rather than a fool. Modern scholarship has grown more careful. Deborah Harkness, in her study of the angel conversations, and Glyn Parry, in his political life of Dee, both note what a flat charge of fraud has trouble accommodating: that the relationship was intimate and prolonged over seven years, that Kelley tried again and again to abandon the scrying rather than exploit it, and that the diaries do not read like the smooth operation of a confidence trick. The question of his good faith is left open by the people best placed to judge it, which is the only honest place to leave it.

The image that did the most to fix him in the popular mind is a fabrication of a later age: Ebenezer Sibly’s engraving, made around 1790 for a treatise on the occult sciences, showing Kelley in a graveyard circle raising the shade of a dead man — a scene of necromancy nowhere in Dee’s record, attached to Kelley because by then he was the kind of figure to whom such scenes attached. A. E. Waite later used it as a frontispiece, and the necromancer in the churchyard has stood in for the apothecary at the scrying table ever since.

His durable legacy is not the alchemy that killed him but the language he transmitted. The angelic system passed out of the manuscripts and into modern ceremonial magic by way of reconstruction, chiefly the work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century, which rebuilt a working Enochian magic from Dee’s papers and the hostile edition of his diaries. Through that channel the Calls reached the visionary experiments of Aleister Crowley, who used the Aethyrs and Keys in his own scrying, and from there into much of twentieth-century magic. The historiography of John Dee — the long argument running from the magus-and-proto-scientist framing of Frances Yates to the revisionists who returned Dee to his own apocalyptic theology — necessarily carries Kelley along with it, for the actions that scholars dispute are the actions he saw.

There is a particular irony in what survives. Kelley believed, or said he believed, that the great work was the transmutation of metals, and it was the failure to make gold that brought him to a prison tower. What outlasted him was the tongue he never quite admitted to inventing — the twenty-one letters, the backward-dictated Keys, the Watchtowers — a body of language that later magicians took, and take, as a real instrument of the work. The forger’s whole life had turned on whether his reports were true. The verdict the centuries returned was to keep using them.

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