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Elected

John Dee was born in London, on July 13, 1527.

Only thirteen years earlier, in 1514, Copernicus had drafted his unpublished heliocentric model, and Hieronymus Bosch completed the harrowing triptych now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, a vision of the Creation, Eden, hell, and damnation that still torments the Western imagination. In 1517, Luther had hammered the Ninety-Five Theses into the door of All Saints’ Church. The following year, England established its first scientific institution, the Royal College of Physicians—and the year after that, Magellan embarked on the first circumnavigation of the globe. This is the world that Dee was born into, and these are the themes that would dominate his life.

Dee was raised in Mortlake, a small village to the southwest of London, which sits upon the Thames, where he would reside for much of his adult life. Dee’s father, Roland, a textile merchant, traced his ancestry to Welsh nobility—the Dee name had been anglicized from the Welsh Du or Ddu, “black.”¹ Though Dee would later claim Arthurian descent, his ancestors were probably yeoman cattle farmers.²

Roland Dee’s attempts to raise himself from poverty included taking menial work that put him at arm’s length from the king, as well as marrying Jane Wilde, the daughter and heiress of William Wilde of Milton-next-Gravesend in Kent.³ Yet though the Dees remained of modest means, Roland Dee would ensure his son the education and connections that would propel him into government service, while his mother would grant him his home at Mortlake. Dee’s home would later become one of the greatest centers of learning in England, and form a kind of womb for Dee and his activities throughout his life, sheltering him from the economic storms caused by his later failure to ride court politics and secure consistent income for himself.

An exceptionally gifted child, Dee displayed an aptitude for math from an early age; additional exposure to his father’s textile business would give Dee a solid grounding in practical mathematics.⁴ In 1537, Dee began a Catholic education at the Chantry School at Chelmsford, Essex, where he learned Latin, and very likely served as an altar boy. After his initial education, Dee entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, at the age of fifteen, in November 1542. He later claimed (perhaps exaggerating) that he slept only four hours a night, rested two, and spent the remaining hours studying, avoiding carousing altogether.⁵

St. John’s, then only thirty years old and still tiny, was dedicated to Catholic humanism, despite the new cultural influence of the Protestants. There, Dee gave himself to studying the core curriculum of Aristotelian logic and philosophy—and, following Aristotle’s own line of thinking, the occult.

Dee was tutored extensively by John Cheke, who had an interest in astrology and may have introduced Dee to very rudimentary occult ideas, on which there was no formal ban at universities.⁶ Alchemy and the search for the philosopher’s stone were in high fashion, and would have fired Dee’s imagination. The young Dee also befriended John Hatcher, a Fellow of the school who was exploring angelic magic.⁷

Following Erasmus, the educational curriculum had changed from logic and Latin to grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, ethics, Greek, and Hebrew. Renaissance humanism was concerned with the study of antiquity, and aimed to create an engaged citizenry by imparting what are now called the humanities. With Europe only beginning to emerge from the Dark Ages, Europeans had to look to antiquity—particularly Greece—for knowledge and guidance beyond the doc-trines of the Church. Still to come was the sense that Europe could construct its own future through the new discipline of science.

Yet while Dee assessed his undergraduate studies, immersing himself in the remains of antiquity, the wheel of the aeon was turning, and preparing the new light that was to come. In 1543, when Dee was six-teen, two monumental works were published: On the Structure of the Human Body, by Andreas Vesalius, and On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies, by Copernicus. The first work initiated biological investigation into the inner space of the human body, while the second looked to outer space, and reoriented our conception of the solar system from a geocentric to a heliocentric one—then the height of heresy. Together, these two works marked the beginning of the scientific revolution.⁸ John Dee’s life would span the early years of this revolution, which would reach its next major acceleration point with the development of telescopes in the Netherlands in 1608, a year before Dee’s death, with microscopes following on in the 1620s.

Copernicus’s revelations would be ignored by Rome, denounced by Martin Luther, and, for the most part, fail to be noticed by the public whatsoever (the book didn’t even sell out its four-hundred-copy print run). One of the few places Copernicus’s work was fully appreciated, however, was among the English intellectual elite,⁹ including John Dee. Though Dee never published on Copernicus’s work himself, the first individual who did, expounding on Copernican theory for the first time in English, was Dee’s young ward, Thomas Digges. Digges was an orphan; his father, Leonard Digges, a friend and colleague of Dee’s, had invented an early version of the telescope before passing. Dee offered to look after his friend’s son, and Digges would grow up under Dee’s care and tutelage at Mortlake, absorbing Dee’s wisdom and massive library before becoming a great astronomer in his own right, and one of the first great popularizers of science.¹⁰

Fig. 1.1. London in 1543. From Anthony van den Wyngaerde, London, Westminster, and Southwark in 1543.

Ultimately, humanism held only limited appeal for Dee’s expansive mind, and he longed for the technical skills of alchemy, Cabala, Hermeticism, operative magic, and mathematics. It was in these heady days of undergraduate enthusiasm that Dee began to formulate the theoretical underpinnings of what would become his working approach to natural philosophy and even magic.

Hermeticism and operative magic were as seductive as they were dangerous—then, as now, what might make for a thrilling conversation between brilliant and daring undergraduates could lead to accusations of demonism in the broader world. Dee’s Hermeticism stuck out like a sore thumb in the school’s humanist climate, especially when Protestant intellectuals were lashing out at the magical thinking inherent in Catholicism. Nonetheless, Henry VIII appointed Dee a founding junior Fellow of his newly created Trinity College in December 1546.¹¹

Though he would not attempt operative magic until much later, Dee’s reputation for sorcery started early—prompted not by his actual occult interests, but by his enthusiasm for optical trickery. During a Cambridge stage production of Aristophanes’s Pax, Dee employed optics to create the illusion of a flying scarab with a man on its back, which terrified the audience so badly that they assumed Dee was employing the dark arts.¹² The accusation stuck—and such accusations were severe.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1546, at nineteen, Dee would teach logic and sophistry, and read Greek, at Trinity College. With patronage from Catholic scholars at Trinity, Dee would continue his study at the University of Louvain, a Catholic institution in the Netherlands, beginning in May 1547. Rather than the humanities, Dee would study in his true passions: mathematics, geography, navigation—and with them, astrology. Dee sought out mathematicians Gaspar à Mirica, Antonius Gogava, and Gemma Frisius,¹³ under whom he learned trigonometry and triangulation; in Frisius’s cartographer and geographer Gerardus Mercator, Dee found his primary mentor. Mercator, then thirty-six, was working hard to develop a new map of the world that incorporated the information brought back from the New World (we now remember him for creating the “Mercator projection,” our standard world map). Gone were the crude imaginings of Dark Ages maps, full of biblical references and monsters; in their place were the beginnings of an accurate depiction of the planet.

Fig. 1.2. Gerardus Mercator. Engraving by Frans Hogenberg, from Mercator, Atlas sive Cosmographicae meditationes.

“It was the custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three whole years,” Dee later wrote, “neither of us willingly lacked the other’s presence for as much as three whole days.”¹⁴

Dee was at this time a tall, skinny, good-looking, healthy young man, who appeared wise beyond his years. Yet while his status as a promising intellectual was growing, his family was falling on hard times. When power shifted from Henry VIII to the nine-year-old boy-king Edward VI upon Henry’s death in 1547, Roland Dee lost his job. He attempted to maintain his income by pretending to still be employed and, finally, through outright fraud—by stealing and selling gold altar plate from St. Dunstan’s, where the elder Dee was senior churchwarden. Even when caught, Roland Dee refused to return the money or give up the names of the people he had sold the gold plate to—one of whom was his son John, who had purchased stolen brass candlesticks from his father. Roland and Jane Dee fled to Jane’s family home in Gravesend, Kent, to hide under the protection of the local magnates.¹⁵

The shame of his father’s deeds—with which Dee was publicly associated—would follow the scholar throughout his life, as would the financial difficulties imposed by his father’s collapse. Compounded with the sorcerer’s reputation he had garnered at Cambridge, the shame that surrounded Dee’s family provided the first of many blocks to the progress of Dee’s career. Dee would remain indigent, and often dependent upon meager support from the Crown, for the rest of his life.

Following his short stay in the Low Countries, Dee returned to Cambridge in 1548 to take his master’s. As a gift to his home university, he brought back with him two globes created by Mercator, as well as a brass astronomer’s ring and staff devised by Gemma Frisius.¹⁶ Master’s in hand, Dee returned once more to Louvain—just in time to escape his father’s troubles.

Louvain had by this time become a refuge for Catholics fleeing Edward’s Protestant reforms. Though Dee had been a sworn Protestant at Cambridge, he now took an oath to live under the rule of the pope. Dee may have been pursuing his own agenda, swearing what oaths he needed to gain access to the knowledge he sought. In this, he was similar to the Rosicrucians to come in the next century, who pledged to pursue their Hermetic and magical studies while living in accord with the customs of their local areas, without arousing undue attention. Such attention could be deadly, especially for a man like Dee, who was already exploring far outside the comfortable bounds of orthodoxy. Or he may have been intellectually fickle, unable to settle on a dogma that suited him.¹⁷

Despite the controversial nature of his studies, Dee was following in the footsteps of his forebears—Louvain had been the stomping ground of Cornelius Agrippa, the great codifier of the ceremonial and folk-magic traditions of Europe, whose work exercised a lifelong influence on Dee, and who laid out the basic operating procedures that Dee would follow in the angelic conversations. Dee had become enraptured by the siren song of magic, but his mathematical mind tempered his interest with cold reason: Dee’s motto, while studying in the Low Countries, was “Nothing is useful unless it is honest.”¹⁸

At Louvain, Dee also studied law, which would serve him well in days to come, both in Elizabeth’s court and in her employ as an intelligence agent. He also studied astrology at length, which he would use in Elizabeth’s court, and for nearly everything in his life, including the later angelic conversations and even the conception of children with his wife.¹⁹ It was his astrological knowledge—especially as applied to medicine—that earned him the sobriquet “Dr. Dee,” to which he did not object. (He did not, however, earn an actual doctorate.)

Following his education, Dee began traveling and lecturing on the Continent, and though he was perpetually broke, his talks on Euclid at the age of twenty-four are recorded as phenomenally successful—Dee later claimed that his lectures at Rheims were given to consistently full houses, with students climbing the walls to listen to him through open windows; Dee felt that the lectures created a far greater sensation than the uproar over his flying scarab.²⁰ Dee may well have exaggerated the popularity of his lectures—the science historian J. L. Heilbron points out that no contemporary references to them can be found outside of Dee’s 1592 Compendious Rehearsal, written at the end of his life as a last-ditch effort to attain assistance from the government, in which he sought to inflate his achievements and downplay his failures.²¹

Dee was not an innovator in mathematics, but he was an apt teacher, passing on basic mathematical concepts to the general public—and was “accounted of the learned Mathematicians throughout Europe ye prince of Mathematicians of this age.”²² Dee was a great nurturer of the younger generation, who would far surpass him in their achievements, thanks to the care he had invested in them. This included not only his ward, Thomas Digges, but many of the foremost mathematicians of the late sixteenth century, who learned their art from Dee.²³

While on the Continent, Dee would make a great number of contacts, with whom he would keep in regular correspondence after his return to England.²⁴ Dee also continued his occult studies under the polymath Guillaume Postel, the most accomplished Cabalist of his time, who impressed Dee with the study of Hebrew as a divine language, its mathematical construction, and his theory that all languages stemmed from the Hebrew letter Yod. Under Gogava, he also studied the I Ching, which must have appealed to his mathematical outlook. Math, for Dee, was the primary way of understanding the laws of nature and the mind of God. And while we today take for granted that the world can be measured and predicted by mathematical formulae, even that the world corresponds to mathematical constants, for Dee and his contemporaries this revelation was still fresh, unveiling a heretofore unseen world of divine planning and order just behind the apparent chaos of the world’s façade.²⁵

Postel is centrally important to the development of Dee’s thought in that he gave the younger man a why. Beyond the technical disciplines Dee was learning, Postel initiated Dee into his grand eschatology. Postel believed himself to be “Elias Artista,”²⁶ the alchemical messiah, a mythological figure central to the beliefs of natural philosophers during the Renaissance, who Paracelsus had prophesied would restore the totality of art and science before the end of the world.²⁷ As such, Postel was a proponent of a new, universalist religion that would unite the warring religious factions of Christendom, as well as Judaism and Islam, in a single Hermetic whole based upon the Gospel and the uniting force of love. Postel’s zeal for global restitution was informed at least in part by the prophetic utterances of “Mother Zuana,” a mystic in her fifties at the time Postel knew her, who Postel believed was the living incarnation of the Shekinah, the female divine presence, and whose soul he believed entered his own body after Zuana’s death.

For these heretical and millenarian views, Postel was expelled from Venice in 1549. In his quest to establish the new divine order, he made connections with Ignatius of Loyola in Rome and attempted to enter an early incarnation of the Society of Jesus; the Jesuit founder was not impressed, and had Postel investigated for heresy. While in Rome, he was told of the book of Enoch by an Ethiopian priest, and attempted to press upon the pope the importance of Enoch, the biblical apocrypha, and even the Zohar in interpreting scripture.²⁸ After meeting Dee in Paris, he was interviewed by the Inquisition, who found him “not evil, but mad,” and imprisoned him until 1564. Following his release, he recanted his prior beliefs.²⁹

Postel’s ideas would live on in his student John Dee, who sought their universal key in his Monas hieroglyphica. They would be echoed within his angelic conversations in the 1580s, when Edward Kelly delivered the practical blueprint for the new world religion. The seed was planted by Postel, but it would take three decades to bear fruit in the work of his most brilliant student.

Dee had studied magic in Agrippa, medicine in Paracelsus, Cabala with Johann Reuchlin, and eschatology with Postel.³⁰ Yet these interests as of yet existed in scattered and embryonic form in Dee; they would not come together in the angelic sessions for almost thirty years, and it was highly unlikely that this was how Dee planned his life to go. A more probable reading might be that Dee fell back on his interest in operative magic and the grandiose and messianic dreams of Postel after his real government career collapsed.

Following the conclusion of his education and his triumphant lecture tour, a patriotic Dee turned down a potentially lavish but provisional offer to become a mathematical reader at the court of Henri II in France. Other offers could have placed him in the employ of a range of French nobles, as well as the ambassador to Suleiman I, the Ottoman sultan; these he also refused, expecting to find a court position in his home country instead.³¹ However, Dee returned to England to discover no offers of employment and no money. He also found Edward’s reforms in full swing, with Dee recording in his diary the destruction of church statues and even the tearing of crucifixes from churches, including the great crucifix at St. Paul’s, which wounded several individuals and killed one when it was clumsily torn from its altar.³²

After presenting the young king with copies of his astronomical works, Dee was given a pension (which may never have been honored), afterward seeking private employment with William Herbert, the first Earl of Pembroke, as well as John Dudley, the Earl of Northumberland. He also worked to set himself up as a teacher and private tutor,³³ and as a navigational consultant in Edward’s court. Here, he assisted in the first major English maritime expedition, Richard Chancellor and Hugh Willoughby’s 1553 search for the northeast passage to Cathay.³⁴ (The expedition was unsuccessful, but the pair did reach Russia, where they made trade agreements with Ivan the Terrible.) Around this time, Dee worked on inventing the paradoxical compass for the Muscovy Company, which he completed in 1557 and which would become a useful instrument in Dee’s later imperial planning.³⁵ Dee would also be appointed rector of Upton-upon-Severn, a politically expedient move that enraged the bishop of Worcester, who held astrology to be a violation of God’s law.³⁶

Despite Dee’s Catholic education—and the oaths he had sworn while abroad—he was already making a name for himself as an intellectual par excellence within the Protestant elite. Fame, fortune, and royal favor seemed just within reach. Unfortunately, Edward’s reign was not to last long—the young king died of lung disease in July 1553, possibly brought on by poisoning, potentially by the Duke of Northumberland or by Catholic agents, and the government descended into chaos as factions vied for the throne. Before Edward’s death, the Duke of Northumberland had pushed Edward to support the Protestant Lady Jane Grey instead of the Catholic Mary as his successor, in which he was likely successful; upon Edward’s death, Northumberland set to work installing Lady Grey on the throne. One of his aides was Roland Dee. When Northumberland’s plot failed, the duke was publicly executed, and Roland Dee was imprisoned in the Tower of London with the rest of Northumberland’s forces. The elder Dee, his reputation tarnished by treason as well as theft, was a broken man. His further deeds and the date of his death are unrecorded.³⁷

Roland’s reputation hung over John Dee like a heavy cloak, and Dee himself was hardly above suspicion. Roland’s fall also meant that the inheritance John Dee had expected to receive was no longer on the table. Instead, he would have to scramble to curry favor with power and stay alive by his wits. Seeking to stay on the good side of Mary’s incoming Catholic regime and leaning into his Catholic education to right his fortunes and reputation, Dee had himself ordained as a priest—taking all six degrees, from tonsure to full priesthood, in one day. In the short term, at least, the ordination helped him garner the good graces of the new administration.³⁸

Soon, Mary had completed a political marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, and managed to convince others, and perhaps even herself, that she was pregnant at the improbable age of thirty-eight. Because Philip was not allowed to interfere in succession, the future of the Crown now hung on Mary’s pregnancy, and legal and political maneuvering over who would succeed Mary began immediately. If Mary and child were to die in labor, then Philip, Spain, and the Catholics would lose all power in England, whereas if the child alone died, succession would pass to Elizabeth. A military buildup between Philip’s father, Charles V, and Elizabeth began at once.

Elizabeth, caught between appearing loyal to Mary and preparing to have to take and defend the throne, asked Dee to divine the future. On May 28, 1555, Dee was arrested for attempting magic in a rented room and was interrogated under suspicion of casting horoscopes of Philip, Mary, and Elizabeth. Astrology, or calculating, an art he had studied under his mentors at Louvain, was one of Dee’s primary trades after leaving the academic world. Here it was seen as evidence that he was conspiring with Elizabeth to unseat Mary. Conjuring, calculating, witchcraft, and even having a “familiar spirit” were the leveled charges.³⁹

Dee had been caught based on information from two informers, George Ferrers and Thomas Prideaux—only a few days after Dee’s arrest, one of Ferrers’s children was dead, the other blind, stoking fears that Dee was a sorcerer, and sending a pang of raw dread through Mary, who was terrified that Dee would use magic against her own unborn child. Under duress, Dee confessed to calculation and conjuration.⁴⁰ The admission was enough to stir Mary’s camp up into a frenzy of paranoia. Rumors now circulated that Dee had created voodoo dolls of Philip and Mary to work magic against them, that he conjured demons, and that there was a vast occult conspiracy against Mary.

Dee was accused of treason, had his papers searched and his residence in London sealed.⁴¹ He was next imprisoned in the Tower of London, where his father had been confined two years earlier; he may have been tortured on the rack in the Tower dungeon. At the Tower, Dee shared a cell with Bartlet Green, a heretical convert whom Dee took kindly to before he was burned alive for treason.⁴² Dee soon confessed of whatever the Privy Council (Mary’s advisory inner circle) wished to hear, which would only further mar his career prospects.

After his imprisonment, Dee was turned over to Edmund Bonner, the greatly feared Catholic bishop of London, for examination. Working in Bonner’s household, Dee tried to restore his status by assisting the bishop with his tract A profitable and necessarye doctryne, with certayne homelies, which levied blanket condemnation against magical activities—including the folk rituals of Catholicism, like using sacramentals to banish evil, as well as Dee’s forays into “optical science,” despite Dee’s best efforts to set it apart from folk superstition.⁴³ Bonner’s tract would soon be read from every pulpit in England; Dee’s assistance in publicly denouncing his own beliefs, as well as hiding behind Catholic power (including assistance in examining heretics), was a clear effort to save his own skin from the current regime. Meanwhile, Dee used his time in Bonner’s household to expand the personal library he had begun assembling while abroad, already consisting of European and Arabic works on astronomy, geography, alchemy, Neoplatonism, and angel magic. Books on mathematics and astrology dominated Dee’s new purchases. But by 1556, Dee’s interests had shifted more fully toward optics and, for the first time in a serious way, alchemy, with Roger Bacon being a primary focus of his study.⁴⁴

Bacon, a thirteenth-century philosopher and Franciscan friar, was an early exponent of both the scientific method and of operative alchemy. Feared as a sorcerer in his own day and still regarded as a demonic conjuror in Dee’s, Bacon had suggested that true science was dependent not only upon external observation but upon inner illumination. That illumination, Dee suspected—as have generations of seekers to come—could be induced by ceremonial magic.⁴⁵ For Bacon, the Great Chain could be reascended and mankind’s original unity with God could be recovered through the growth of moral virtue, by study, by divine illumination, and by understanding the divine grammar underlying Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.⁴⁶ Bacon believed that this original, divine knowledge had been handed down in unbroken lineage from the beginning of mankind—from Noah to the Chaldeans to Abraham to the Egyptians to Moses to the Greeks, and from thereon unto the current world period.⁴⁷

Fig. 1.3. Roger Bacon in his observatory at Merton College, Oxford. Oil painting by Ernest Board. Courtesy of Wellcome Images.

Dee immersed himself in Bacon’s worldview; works by Bacon soon multiplied in his library. In 1557, Dee composed a defense of Bacon, stating that his miracles had been attained by natural science rather than with the aid of demons, as his critics had charged.⁴⁸ Not unnoticed was that Bacon’s name before entering the priesthood, Dee believed, was “David Dee.”⁴⁹

Dee became similarly obsessed with Raymond Llull, a.k.a. “Doctor Illuminatus.”⁵⁰ A Franciscan monk who experienced waking visions of Christ, Llull may have written the first European novel (Blanquerna), and he did pioneering work on computation theory—work that would influence Gottfried Leibniz,⁵¹ through him Alan Turing,⁵² and therefore the creation of the modern computer.

Fig. 1.4. Raymond Llull. Portrait by Ricard Anckermann, c. 1870. Ajuntament de Palma.

In 1272, Llull had a vision on Mt. Randa in Majorca, Spain, in which he saw God’s attributes not only mathematically and hierarchically infused throughout all and everything, but also indexed to the letters of the alphabet—the divine Creation as computer.⁵³ This rawly Cabalistic conception of the universe appealed to Dee, whose Real Cabala clearly relates to Llull’s ideas—as does Dee’s angelic magic itself. Traced back far enough, this means we may owe the existence of computers to a mystical vision on a mountain in Spain. (Seven centuries later, Steve Jobs would create the Apple Macintosh following years of pursuing similarly visionary states via Eastern mysticism and LSD.)

Dee’s growing library at Mortlake was immensely comprehensive, beyond the capacity of any other individual or group of scholars then working in Britain. More than a collection of books, Dee’s library was a collection of people, and became the intellectual center and de facto scientific university of an England still too enamored of humanism to officially support scientific research.⁵⁴ And though Dee had assembled his library at high personal cost, he went to just as great lengths to loan his collection out. As Dee’s library grew, it would become one of the jewels of England, a center of learning in its own right that would lay the groundwork for innovations and intellectual movements to come.

Dee’s passion for library building went even further: he used his new displays of Catholic loyalty and association with Bonner to regain favor with Mary, and in January 1556, petitioned her to build a national library. Dee’s plan, if enacted, would have created the British Library two centuries ahead of time. The proposed library would primarily focus on occult documents—which would be hidden from the public.⁵⁵ That such a plan was presented to Mary suggests that, despite efforts to separate the public from nonorthodox beliefs, Dee may have perceived the Catholic government as having some interest in preserving esoteric knowledge for its own covert use.

In his petition to the queen, Dee lamented the destruction of libraries in England and the accompanying loss of works of antiquity; he hoped that the queen would work to recover and preserve them. Dee warned of a time when all knowledge would be destroyed in the Isles, and proposed that a royal library would rectify this situation and allow Mary to “follow in the footsteps of all the famous and godly princes of old time, and also do like the worthy Governor of Christendom in those days: but far surmounting them all.”⁵⁶

Dee’s plan met with complete disinterest. When money was not forthcoming, Dee instead continued to build his own collection, traveling England to purchase rare manuscripts on occult subjects. Dee was known to borrow money and pawn glasswork and silver in order to buy more books, doing extensive copying of manuscripts himself and employing a clerk to copy more.⁵⁷ He would come to spend £3,000 on his collection, the equivalent of roughly £848,000 or $1,064,000 in 2017.^*1 (Dee remained in severe debt for much of his life.)

For the present, Dee spent his time in Bonner’s household studying the works he had already assembled, trying to piece together the vast puzzle of the occult and develop his own synthesis of the traditions he had been immersed in. It was also during this time that he made his first publication, a preface to an ephemeris by the royal astrologer John Field.⁵⁸ Despite humiliation, potential torture, and public capitulation to the Catholic orthodoxy, he was not to be deterred from his quest.

Scouring Bacon, Aristotle, Geber, Avicenna, Arnold of Villa Nova, and more, Dee—like so many before and after him—sought to uncover the formula of the philosopher’s stone. Yet he would soon go still further, combining occult philosophy with his astronomical, mathematical, and optical studies at Louvain to harness the power of light itself to complete the Great Work of restoring all nature to its original perfection.