4

The Elizabethan Ascension

On May 1558, the childless Mary’s health began to fail, likely due to ovarian cysts or uterine cancer;¹ she died on November 17 of the same year, during an influenza epidemic in which Dee also fell ill and was expected to die. Upon Mary’s death, Elizabeth became her begrudgingly accepted successor, the final Catholic hold on England vanished, and the Anglican Elizabeth ascended to the throne, marking the opening of one of the most culturally and militarily expansive periods of English history. Elizabeth would soon implement Dee’s work in naval strategy and optics to transition England into an empire. Dee would later come to compare himself and Elizabeth to Merlin and King Arthur, respectively—even suggesting that they were the reincarnations of that legendary syzygy.

Elizabeth, though nominally a Protestant, had a coldly realpolitik view of faith, seeing religions as tools of the state in keeping social order. While she made shows of adherence to the new Anglican Church publicly, she had little time for religious convention or dogma privately. Instead, she quietly maintained an interest in Hermeticism and alchemy, the latter primarily for reasons of finances and health. The Anglican Church, she hoped, would at least somewhat help quell conflict under her regime. By rejecting Rome’s control, it would satisfy Protestants, and by holding to Rome’s rituals, she hoped, it would satisfy Catholics. Like her later dangling of her “virginity” to the monarchs of Europe, she held out her uncertain religious affiliations to the public as a tactic of manipulation and control.²

Fig. 4.1. Queen Elizabeth I. Portrait attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, circa 1573–75.

Yet despite Elizabeth’s own cold view of religion, her government was indeed a Protestant one, and on that front, Dee had amends to make. However brilliant Dee was, he also had a keen awareness that he was always one slip or accusation away from torture on the rack or death at the stake, and as such had consistently acted to save his own skin by swearing allegiance to whoever happened to be in power at the time, flip-flopping between Protestantism and Catholicism. Dee, of course, was neither fully Protestant or Catholic, but Hermetic. Nevertheless, Dee had deliberately sworn allegiance to Mary, and then been passed to the Catholic Bishop Bonner, after being held in the Tower of London.

While Dee’s personal religious beliefs remained consistent, the religious turbulence of his period and his own efforts to maintain his own scholarly career meant that Dee often had to play whatever social game was in effect at the time—and the game was constantly changing. Dee’s early career, writes György Szőnyi, “was characterized by a deeply religious, but denominationally neutral, interconfessionalist attitude, a hallmark of many humanists . . . if one examines the particular doctrinal beliefs of the humanists, one can see neither uniformity nor a consequent attachment to one set of religious dogmas. One reason for this flexibility may be found in their scholarly self-assuredness, according to which they were inclined to think that narrowly defined rules and beliefs were for the general populace but not for the select few of intellectuals.” Such intellectuals, Szőnyi explains, considered themselves free to navigate through belief structures, just as they navigated court politics—including by syncretizing Christian and pagan beliefs in their search for more light. Such a cavalier attitude to the boundaries of faith was not always appreciated.³

Yet despite the problem of Dee’s shifting allegiances, he was considered too useful to dispense with, and the context of his hasty alliance with Bonner to save his own life understood. Dee already had a preexisting relationship with Elizabeth, and evangelical leanings. Most importantly, his intelligence, connections, and magical ability made him a valuable component of Elizabeth’s arsenal, far too knowledgeable to let slip into Catholic control.

Elizabeth was inheriting a bankrupt country, with enemies infesting her court and the wolves of Spain and Rome at the door. Domestically, the idea that a woman could rule England was not met without resistance—John Calvin even suggested that Elizabeth’s coronation was a breach of the natural order and a punishment from God.⁴ In addition, England was still between two-thirds and three-fourths Catholic; only England’s southern ports and towns, including London, held fast as Protestant strongholds.⁵ Elizabeth would need all the help she could get. Consequently, Dee was introduced at court by Elizabeth’s close companion Robert Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke; his first assignment was casting a horoscope for the already-selected date of Elizabeth’s coronation.⁶ Like spymaster Francis Walsingham, John Dee could provide an advantage that could help make the difference between the queen’s reign continuing and a Spanish conquest.

In 1994, the CIA described Elizabethan intelligence at this time “as a cold war practice by interventionists. The process gained its impetus from a sense of impending engagement or conflict with foreign states and a desire to be well prepared for that battle . . . [particularly] with Spain and the ongoing conquest of Ireland.”⁷

It was the beginning of what might be described as an occult cold war. Along with Elizabeth’s succession, France had already been pushing the visions of its own court wizard, the Roman Catholic Nostradamus, who had foreseen failure for Elizabeth’s religious reforms. The French prophecies anticipated (or, more likely, encouraged) widespread civil revolt against the new administration.⁸

The incoming Elizabethan court had another magical threat to contend with: the alchemist, conjuror, and con man John Prestall, who would become Dee’s long-running magical nemesis. On November 17, 1558, Prestall was arrested along with Anthony Fortescue and Thomas Kele for conjuring, just as Dee himself had been only a few years earlier. This would not be the last time that Elizabeth heard from Prestall; the Catholic conspirator would be arrested again in 1562 for summoning spirits and casting horoscopes against Elizabeth, and continue to rear his head over the next three decades, often coming into direct magical conflict with Dee.⁹

Whereas Protestants had long suffered under Mary’s regime, now it was Catholics who would face persecution and be driven underground. Over the coming decades, they would resort to a number of conspiracies to restore Catholic power (of which Guy Fawkes’s 1605 Gunpowder Plot is the most famous). Magic was, perhaps ironically, one of the methods of conspiracy, and Prestall was frequently tapped for aggressive conjuring.^*3 Yet while he was employed by Catholics, Prestall himself supported no cause but his own financial gain and accumulation of power. He was the archetypal “cunning man,” occult grifter, or low sorcerer—a common profession in Elizabethan England, which Dee’s later associates Barnabas Saul and Edward Kelly would also hail from.

Elizabeth’s life was in danger from the time of her birth, exponentially so when she ascended to the throne, and assassination could come by either physical or spiritual means. Magical threats had to be quashed with as much ferocity as physical ones, and in such an environment of paranoia, nothing could be dismissed as coincidence—particularly when sorcery, which operates by the engineering of coincidence, was involved. To further complicate matters, Elizabeth’s administration was too financially strapped to effectively suppress Catholicism in the country.¹⁰ This meant that the threat of assassination could never be fully circumvented, making John Dee’s services in protecting against magical attack as critical as Walsingham’s in espionage.

While magical specialists like Dee and Prestall stand out as exceptionally colorful characters, they were by no means unique in their belief in and use of magic. Magic formed the context of Elizabeth’s world, and it is probable that not only Catholics used magicians for assassination and to gain astrological knowledge of the future, but that much of Elizabeth’s court did as well. Just as Dee’s occult activities were later dismissed and whitewashed out of history, so were the occult activities of Elizabeth’s courtiers, who often employed the aid of conjurors to covertly achieve their social and political objectives, rather than getting their own hands dirty.¹¹ Sorcery (as opposed to Dee’s later high magical explorations of God’s architecture) is fundamentally about power, stripped of any kind of moral considerations. In this, it often makes comfortable bedfellows with politics, and with those who seek to take or maintain power by any means necessary—using tactics that today might be called psyops or psychological warfare. In such an environment, gutter-level occult warfare may have taken up far more time than the romance of high espionage and statecraft. Dee and Prestall were not unique in their use of sorcery; they simply have the benefit of being remembered by history.

Within a month of Dee’s being recommended to Elizabeth by Dudley, he had been taken fully into Her Majesty’s service; one of his first acts was to cast the horoscope for Elizabeth’s (already-chosen) coronation day, with preventing occult calamity foremost in mind. Dee’s horoscope (unlike, of course, Nostradamus’s predictions) foretold a long and healthy reign for the new queen.

Why was the casting of horoscopes, or “calculating,” seen as so contentious and even dangerous? Astrology, like sorcery, is about defining the narrative of reality. Considering astrology even from a purely propaganda angle, the power to guide reality in any way other than that sanctioned by the state is a precarious business, especially when prophecies often have a way of becoming self-fulfilling. For instance, Nostradamus’s prediction of Elizabeth’s fall could have caused fear and distrust in the population, undermining Elizabeth’s actual power to command. To the Elizabethan mind, there was little difference between divining the meanings of the stars and controlling them—and, in truth, there is little difference, because astrology operates in the realm not of actual observed phenomena but of the human mind and the meanings it attaches to observed events. Magicians, astrologers, and prophets can often appear to have changed objective reality, when all that has truly changed is the subjective way in which events are being perceived, a skillful manipulation of confirmation bias.^*4

This made Dee useful both offensively and defensively; with royal support, Dee was soon considered one of the most learned men in England, and certainly had the largest library—his private collection of manuscripts at Mortlake was much more substantial than the collections at both Oxford and Cambridge. (To briefly note how much our access to information has increased in the past several centuries, consider that during Dee’s life, Cambridge possessed only 451 books and manuscripts; Oxford, 379. Dee probably had about 2,000 books and 198 manuscripts at Mortlake, though he later claimed he had owned 4,000 in total before his library was ransacked.)¹²

Mortlake soon bustled with activity, becoming an informal scientific academy for the country, open to scholars and engineers; Elizabeth would regularly ride to Mortlake to visit Dee and his stacks. Dee’s network of contacts continued to encompass scientists, intellectuals, and foreign courtiers from across the British Isles and Europe. He kept company with many of the era’s leading lights, including the explorers Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, Abraham Ortelius (creator of the atlas), Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, and the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe, among many others. Dee likely used this network to gather intelligence for Elizabeth—Dee, who also aided in the creation of the British intelligence service, signed some of his correspondence “007.”¹³

Despite the importance of Dee’s new role at court, he was exceedingly poorly compensated. Elizabeth initially promised Dee that she would double his payment under Edward, stating “where my brother hath given him a crowne, I will give him a noble,”¹⁴ yet this probably never came to pass. If this was, indeed, all that Dee was compensated, it must have seemed a painful humiliation in the light of his loyal refusal of court positions on the Continent, and all that he had already suffered upon returning to his home country. Dee may have been important to Elizabeth, but he wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things, and was clearly far down on the list of courtiers expecting government positions. In addition, his prior ties to Bonner, missing clerical training, association with the dark arts, and even his winged beetle stunt while still a student made Dee unwelcome, no matter how hard he fought for attention and court favor.¹⁵

Consequently, Dee had to take a second job as the rector of St. Swithin Church, Leadenham, in Lincolnshire, over 120 miles north of London, where he spent the next two years. This appointment was only a consolation after he had been denied the mastership of St. Catherine’s Hospital in London; Elizabeth had nominated him for St. Catherine’s herself, but the appointment had been blocked by court politics. Once it became clear that Elizabeth’s promised funding would never manifest, Dee departed back to the Continent in order to scour libraries for information on his newest interest: Kabbalah. His mind had also turned to once again seeking Continental patronage. Dee carried with him only £20, the equivalent of about £4,800 or $6,000 in 2017—though poor, he was determined to continue his quest, writing to William Cecil (first Baron Burghley, then secretary of state, and Elizabeth’s chief adviser, who would regularly be in an authority and supervisory role over Dee) that in his pursuit of learning “my flesh, blood and bones should make the merchandise, if the case so required.”¹⁶

Despite Dee’s minimal recorded pay, it is possible to speculate that some of his compensation may have been sub rosa. Dee was an intelligence agent, frequently on trips abroad, and furthermore, was sitting on the largest collection of information in the country. Since many of his activities were classified, funding would have been classified as well. Dee was also often compensated in books or other favors for successful intelligence work, such as uncovering a network of disloyal agents set up by the Duke of Norfolk that passed secret messages between each other in bottles of wine.¹⁷ Yet even secret payments, if there were any, must not have been substantial—after all, even Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster and the father of British intelligence, died in debt after having self-financed much of his own work when Elizabeth’s funding ran short.¹⁸ To rectify its financial situation, Elizabeth’s administration would shortly be sinking funds into a mad quest to unlock the secrets of alchemy. This too would prove fruitless. In the end, it was not alchemy that would so spectacularly bring England out of poverty, but John Dee’s later plans for building a naval empire. Yet even if Dee was not paid well, he was still owned. From the moment he entered the employ of the Crown, if not before, Dee had become a resident of the shadow world, the lunar court of occultists and intelligence agents. Like the occult, intelligence work requires supreme secrecy, heavy cryptography, and the erasing of the personal identity—and in Dee’s time, slips on either the intelligence or occult front would have been punishable by death.

Fig. 4.2. William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley. Portrait by anonymous English School artist from the early seventeenth century.

At Antwerp, in February 1563, Dee made a critical discovery: a copy of Trithemius’s three-volume Steganographia, a fearsome manuscript that held the secrets of conjuring angels and demons, which was lent to him by a Hungarian nobleman.¹⁹ Under a time limit, Dee labored day and night to make a hand copy.

Trithemius, a German Benedictine abbot, humanist, adviser of emperors, cryptographer, lexicographer, chronicler, and magician who died in 1516, had been the mentor not only of Paracelsus but of Cornelius Agrippa, whose Three Books of Occult Philosophy—drawn from Trithemius’s work—became the central text of Western occultism, exerting a heavy influence even into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, notably over Aleister Crowley²⁰ and Austin Osman Spare.²¹ Trithemius’s 1518 Polygraphia would also become a foundational text of modern cryptography, following on from the earlier work of Roger Bacon.²²

The Steganographia was at least apparently concerned with using spirits for long-distance communication, and with sending telepathic messages that could be received within twenty-four hours—the political importance of which, obviously, was immense. After precise astrological calculations, an operator was to write a message on a piece of paper and invoke angelic couriers to read the text; a receiver performed a similar ritual and was supposed to receive the contents of the message on their end. Such occult devices, were they found in the hands of Catholic fifth columnists or even commoners, would be grounds for imprisonment, torture, or execution. But in the hands of the state, grimoires became jealously guarded troves of technological secrets. Dee excitedly wrote of his find to Cecil, who was sufficiently impressed to lend Dee the support and funds to continue his quest until June 1564.²³

The Steganographia contains extensive sections on the ranking and order of spirits, associating them with directions, times, planets, and constellations—the template from which the tables of correspondences that litter modern books on magic are drawn. Invocations to these spirits fill the Steganographia’s pages. Like Dee, Trithemius would rebuke accusations of demonism by stating that his magic was a pure, spiritual, religious quest for divine knowledge;²⁴ also like Dee, he would state that the universe was ruled by numbers, manifesting from unity to trinity to the tenfold Pythagorean tetractys.²⁵

Fig. 4.3. Detail of tomb relief of Johannes Trithemius, Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, c. 1516.

There was only one problem—the Steganographia and its occult tables are largely cryptography. In 1606, the Steganographia was fully published (to the ire of the Church, which placed it on its list of prohibited books, where it would remain for three centuries, until 1900),²⁶ along with the Clavis or key to its contents, which revealed the code for the first two of its three books, showing that they were not about magic at all. The third book remained encrypted until it was solved by two researchers working independently, without knowledge of each other—in 1996 by Thomas Ernst, a professor of German in Pittsburgh, and in 1998 by Jim Reeds, a mathematician at AT&T Labs in New Jersey. Both cracked the Steganographia cypher, demonstrating that the third book of the Steganographia is cryptography masked as tables for angelic summoning.²⁷

Despite all this, the meaning of the Steganographia remains unclear: even when deciphered, the resultant plain text is still unintelligible. For scholars, however, the fact that the manuscript is in code is enough to dispel its worth as an actual occult text. As magic, Cabala, and alchemy are themselves codes for conveying complex meaning between initiates (so-called twilight language, which cannot be read by enemies or the profane), and magicians are almost invariably concerned with cryptography, it is odd that scholars would consider the Steganographia an either/or problem. Just because it contains cryptography does not rule out the book also containing magic—in fact, nearly all works of magic may be said to include some form of cryptography.

Large sections of the book are similar to (or possibly copied from) the scattered manuscripts that would become The Lesser Key of Solomon, a text on angelic and demonic evocation; other sections are indeed pure cryptography disguised as tables of astrological information. Yet if the cryptographic messages are meant for espionage, it makes little sense that they would be hidden in a tract on demonic conjuration that brought enough attention to Trithemius to destroy his career. Occult writer Joel Biroco speculated in 2002 that the Steganographia may have been a series of nested codes, with a further encoded layer of occult information hidden underneath the first enciphered layer. In this way, the first encoded section could serve as plausible deniability, a way for Trithemius to state that the document was only cryptography were he caught. Biroco cites Trithemius’s own statement in the third book of the Steganographia: “This I did that to men of learning and men deeply engaged in the study of magic, it might, by the Grace of God, be in some degree intelligible, while on the other hand, to the thick-skinned turnip-eater it might for all time remain a hidden secret, and be to their dull intellects a sealed book forever.”²⁸

The Steganographia may have held such value for Dee because the young scholar hoped it would contain the secrets of both magic and cryptography—which may also explain Cecil’s excitement and quick dispensing of further funds.²⁹ The seventeenth-century natural philosopher Robert Hooke (one of the founders of the Royal Society) believed that Dee used the Steganographia to develop cryptographic codes for use between courtiers and even with Elizabeth.³⁰

If the Steganographia was merely a text of cryptography, that’s not how Dee reacted to his discovery; he wrote to Cecil that the book was an initiated work treating of “formal numbers,” “mystic weights,” and “divine measures,” and “the most precyous juell that I have yet of other mens travailes recovered.” By God’s grace and his own initiated wisdom, Dee assured Cecil, he would soon decipher its occult secrets.³¹

Dee’s study of the Steganographia, combined with his previous intellectual synthesis in the Propaedeumata and his new obsession with the Kabbalah would result in his 1562 treatise “Compendious Table of the Hebrew Kabbalah,” written in Paris.³² This book is no longer extant, but it would presage Dee’s masterpiece: 1564’s Monas hieroglyphica.