John Dee

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In 1546 the newly founded Trinity College, Cambridge, staged Aristophanes’ Peace, and its under-reader in Greek built the effect that stole the show: a great mechanical scarab that flew a man up from the boards and out of sight. The audience could not explain it, and some preferred not to explain it innocently. The builder was John Dee, nineteen years old, a founding fellow of the college — and from that night the word conjuror followed him through six decades of mathematics, navigation, imperial planning, and, at the last, recorded conversation with angels. Like his Oxford contemporary Thomas Allen, he would learn that in Tudor England deep learning was itself a suspect instrument of magic.

The making of the Queen’s philosopher

John Dee was born on 13 July 1527 in the Tower Ward of London, son of Rowland Dee, a textile merchant and gentleman server at the court of Henry VIII. The family was Welsh — the name is the Welsh du, “black” — and Dee in later life drew himself a pedigree running back to Rhodri Mawr, prince of Wales, with a flattering branch toward the Tudors. From the grammar school at Chelmsford he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1542, took the BA in 1545/46, and passed to Trinity at its founding. Then the Continent finished him: at Louvain around 1548–1550 he studied with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator, the great mathematician-cartographers of the age, and in 1550 he lectured on Euclid in Paris with celebrated success. Offered a permanent Paris lectureship in 1551 and an Oxford post in 1554, he declined both, holding out for service to the English crown.

That service nearly destroyed him at the first attempt. Under Mary I he worked as an astrologer, and in 1555 he was arrested on a charge of “calculating” against the queen — casting figures upon her life, an accusation in which mathematics, divination, and treason made a single suspicion. He was examined and cleared. From the same year he advised the Muscovy Company on navigation and polar charts for the search for a Northeast Passage, and in 1558 he published his first major book, the Propaedeumata Aphoristica, an aphoristic treatise on the radiation of celestial virtues, dedicated to Mercator. When Elizabeth came to the throne that November, Dee was asked to elect by the stars an auspicious day for her coronation — a choosing of times in the manner descended from Hellenistic astrology. The queen called him “my philosopher.”

A library and a program

By the mid-1560s Dee had settled at Mortlake on the Thames, conveniently near the palace at Richmond, and begun to assemble one of the largest private libraries in England. He himself claimed, by the 1590s, some 3,000 printed books and 1,000 manuscripts; the reconstruction of his own 1583 catalogue by Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson counts 2,317 printed books and 368 manuscripts. On either figure it was a research collection of European rank — a center of learning outside the universities, with working laboratories attached, where navigators, antiquaries, and natural philosophers came to consult the books and the man who knew what was in them.

Three works carry the program he built there. The Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564), written in a reported twelve days and dedicated to the Emperor Maximilian II, presents a single composite glyph — built from the planetary signs, the point, the line, the circle, and the cross — that Dee taught as the one hieroglyph of creation: a written key in which astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, optics, music, and the Kabbalah of letters resolve into a single figure, and whose unfolding would renew all of them. Of its composition he wrote that he was “the pen merely” of God. The Mathematicall Praeface to Henry Billingsley’s first English Euclid (1570), finished under the printer’s deadline on 9 February of that year, lays out a “Groundplat” of the mathematical arts — from arithmetic and geometry through navigation, architecture, and perspective, upward to “thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine” — the clearest statement of his conviction that number is the bridge between the material, the celestial, and the supercelestial worlds. And the General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), its title page showing Elizabeth at the helm of an imperial ship, argued for a standing navy and maritime supremacy under a phrase the book did much to fix in the language: the “British Empire.” Dee popularized the term rather than coined it — the Welsh antiquary Humphrey Llwyd had used it in 1568 — but it was Dee who armed it, grounding English title in the legend of Prince Madoc and the ancient British past, and supplying the crown with the legal-cosmographical argument in his manuscript Brytanici Imperii Limites. For three decades he instructed the captains of the discovery voyages, Richard Chancellor and Martin Frobisher among them, and Elizabeth’s court treated him as a one-man college of the mathematical arts.

The actions of the stone

Around 1581 Dee concluded that human learning could not reach the truths he wanted. The books, on their own testimony, ran out before nature did. He turned to what his diaries call “actions”: sessions in which a scryer gazed into a shewstone while Dee, who saw nothing himself, questioned, listened, and wrote. After an unsatisfactory first scryer, Barnabas Saul, there arrived at Mortlake on 10 March 1582 a young man calling himself Edward Talbot — Edward Kelley — and with him the conversations began in earnest.

What the angels delivered, as the diaries record it, was an entire sacred furniture and an entire language. They prescribed the Holy Table on which the work rested; the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, an engraved wax Seal of God’s Truth that supported the stone; a heptarchy of planetary kings and their ministers; an angelic alphabet; and the Liber Loagaeth, the “Book of the Speech of God,” dictated into vast grids of forty-nine squares by forty-nine. From this material came in time the forty-eight Claves Angelicae, the Calls or Keys of the “Angelical” tongue — a language with its own letters, grammar, and lexicon, delivered letter by letter so that nothing of it would rest on the men’s invention. Dee understood none of this as conjuring. In his own frame the actions were the recovery of the speech Adam spoke before the Fall, the true reading of a decaying Book of Nature, and a commission in the last age of the world. The materials he worked from were on his own shelves — the angelology of Cornelius Agrippa, the angelic cryptography of Trithemius, the consecrated furniture of Solomonic ritual, the letter-arts of Christian Cabala — yet the system the diaries record matches no prior source, and it descended to later centuries as Enochian magic, where its tables, Watchtowers, and thirty Aethyrs are treated in their own right. Every word of it, it must be said, came through Kelley at the stone. The Victorians called him a rank impostor; modern scholars observe that he repeatedly tried to abandon the scrying, and that the record does not read like a simple confidence trick.

Bohemia

On 21 September 1583 Dee, Kelley, and their families left England with Albrecht Łaski, the Polish palatine whose royal ambitions the angels had encouraged. The road ran through Kraków — with an audience before King Stephen Báthory — to the imperial court of Rudolf II at Rudolfine Prague, where Dee presented the Monas to the son of the emperor it had been dedicated to. Rome was less patient than the emperor: pressed by the papal nuncio, a Habsburg decree expelled the household in 1586, and Vilém of Rožmberk, the greatest magnate in Bohemia, installed them that September at Třeboň. There Kelley’s fortunes crossed over Dee’s. In December 1586 his red powder yielded the transmutation that made his alchemical name, and the scryer began to outgrow the master.

At Třeboň came the episode that has shadowed the diaries ever since. On 18 April 1587 Kelley reported an angelic command, associated with the spirit Madimi, that the two men should hold all things in common — their wives included. Dee, after anguish, construed it as God’s will; his diary records the covenant fulfilled on 21 May 1587 with the words “pactum factum.” Jane Dee, his much younger wife, is recorded as weeping and trembling before she consented. Yet the partnership did not break over the covenant. It broke in 1589, over gold: Kelley announced that the angels now directed him to keep the alchemical secret to himself. Dee turned for home and reached England late that year to find the Mortlake library despoiled in his absence — books scattered, instruments broken or stolen. Kelley stayed, rose to a knighthood and property under Rudolf, then fell, imprisoned by the emperor whose gold he could not multiply on demand, and died, probably late in 1597, of injuries from an attempted escape.

Manchester and the lost grave

The 1590s gave Dee petitions and poverty. The one preferment that came was the wardenship of Christ’s College, Manchester, in 1595, where the fellows despised or cheated him and where he was consulted, with little appetite, on a case of demonic possession. He returned to Mortlake around 1604–05; his wife Jane and several of his children died there of plague in 1605. James I, no friend to the occult arts, refused his 1604 petition to be tried and cleared of the slander that he was “a conjuror, or caller, or invocator of spirits.” Dee died in poverty at Mortlake late in 1608 or early in 1609, cared for by his daughter Katherine. The exact date is unrecoverable — the Mortlake parish register and his gravestone are both lost — so the tradition of December 1608 stands beside an argued March 1609, and his age at death is given as 81 or 82 accordingly. John Aubrey preserved the look of him: tall and slender, a handsome man in an artist’s gown, with “a long beard as white as milke.” The portrait of Dee at sixty-seven by an unidentified painter, now in the Ashmolean Museum, shows the same face in black cap and ruff; it is reproduced at Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Dee_Ashmolean.jpg).

Editors, enemies, and historians

Dee’s afterlife began with a hostile editor. In 1659 Meric Casaubon — son of the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon — printed the surviving diaries as A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits, framed expressly to present a pious scholar cozened by demons and to discredit the enthusiasms of the Interregnum. The frame held for two centuries of Victorian dismissal, until Charlotte Fell Smith’s biography of 1909 protested that “there is perhaps no learned author in history who has been so persistently misjudged.” In the same era the Golden Dawn rebuilt a working Enochian system out of the Casaubon volume and the manuscripts, and Aleister Crowley carried its thirty Aethyrs into his own visionary record — reconstructions made for purposes Dee never held, and treated in their own entries.

The modern scholarship divides along a famous line. Frances Yates set Dee at the center of her account of the Renaissance magus as forerunner of science, and J. L. Heilbron answered for the skeptics that in his occult studies Dee “moved off the high road of the scientific revolution.” The revision came with Nicholas Clulee’s John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (1988), which traced Dee’s thought to medieval optics and Roger Bacon more than to Renaissance magic’s Hermetic canon; the book and its reception are indexed at PhilPapers (https://philpapers.org/rec/MORNHC). William Sherman’s John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (1995) turned to the archive itself — the marginalia, the library, the working papers. Deborah Harkness’s John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), the central study of the actions, reads them as the culmination of his natural philosophy rather than its ruin (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/john-dees-conversations-with-angels/1AA428CFF578B7D705FA8ED8EDF2F36D). Glyn Parry’s The Arch-Conjuror of England (Yale, 2011) restored the court politics that made and unmade him; Parry introduced its argument at the Yale University Press blog (https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2012/05/02/the-real-dr-dee-author-article-by-glyn-parry/). For the navigational and imperial Dee, Royal Museums Greenwich — whose Caird Library holds a published edition of his diary — keeps a concise account (https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/john-dee), and Joseph Peterson’s Esoteric Archives maintains the Monas Hieroglyphica of 1564 in Latin and English hypertext (https://www.esotericarchives.com/dee/monad.htm). The spiritual diaries themselves are in the British Library — Sloane MSS 3188, 3189, and 3191, with the Cotton manuscript Casaubon printed — and historians of Western esotericism now treat them as the best-documented case of learned magic in early modern Europe.

The library Dee built was never reassembled, but its pieces are identifiable across the great collections, and the largest single group — more than a hundred volumes, many annotated in his hand — stands today at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — 'The Cup or Monad,' the Hermetic stream behind Dee's glyph · Westcott — Sepher Yetzirah (1911) — the letter-cosmology behind the Cabala Dee studied

→ Related: Enochian Magic · Rudolfine Prague · Cornelius Agrippa · Crystal Gazing · Golden Dawn Lineage · Renaissance Magic