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I Am the Daughter of Fortitude, and Ravished Every Hour

MYSTERIORUM DIVINORUM MEMORABILIA. ACTIO TERTIA

The Daughter of Fortitude

In 1587, with Dee, Kelly, and their spouses still in Třeboň, the actions took a new turn—marked by a shocking eruption of eroticism.

With the sessions progressing, Dee and Kelly were told by the voice of Zebaoth, the Lord of Hosts, that people worshipped riches as their gods, rather than realizing that riches themselves had been created by God as a tool to glorify him with. Likewise, an accounting was to be made of how Dee and Kelly had used the spiritual gifts granted to them, and they would pay “even unto the uttermost farthing.”¹

Kelly was told that he had taken a wife against the angels’ wishes (despite the earlier exhortation to marry against his wishes!), and therefore the angels had made her barren. Yet the blessings of heaven were immense, the two men were told, and Dee and Kelly had been made free.

With a psychically broken Kelly now showing signs of blowing out for good, Dee had begun preparing his son Arthur (later to become a prominent alchemist in his own right) to take Kelly’s place. Assumed to be virginally pure and also pure of mind, children were thought to make superb scryers, and often featured in medieval grimoire literature. On April 15, 1587, Arthur Dee had some scrying success, seeing various figures appear, and two days later, Dee formally asked Madimi, Ilemese, and Uriel to assist Kelly in transferring his office to Arthur Dee. The boy’s visions proved to be suited only to the mental capacity of a child, however, and on April 18, Kelly was back to scrying. Kelly witnessed all of the angels appear, then fade, save for Madimi—who now appeared naked. Kelly and Dee assumed that they were being tempted by a demon—but Madimi assured them otherwise.

“What is sin?” Madimi asked.

“To break the Commandment of God,” Dee replied.

“Set that down, so,” she returned. “If the self-same God give you a new Commandment taking away the former form of sin which is limited by the Law; What remaineth then?”

Madimi reassured them that whatever they had seen was from above, “for that I touched thy Son, might also have taken away his breath”²—Arthur had fallen sick after Kelly saw an angel in a white garment act as if he would smite the boy. Yet though he had been afflicted by the angels, he had survived—proof, Madimi explained, that the angels were not evil (this could not have been comforting to a beleaguered parent). Madimi elaborated that even the righteous were punished for their sin—but by God, not by malediction. The Apostle Paul himself was the chief of sinners, after all. God’s heavens, and ways, were incomprehensible, but Dee and Kelly were to be glad that they were in divine hands. If they were to forsake the ways of God, however, evil would enter their houses, and their wives and children would be carried away before their faces. Kelly was next shown a white crystalline pillar with four heads on it—representing Dee, Kelly, and their wives, with their necks making up the pillar.

“Nothing is unlawful,” they were told, “which is lawful unto God.”³ Dee and Kelly were not to resist God, but instead to shut out Satan. They had already been delivered the secrets of Liber Loagaeth; now they were to assemble every seventh day to be taught further.

The next day, Madimi told Kelly that he and Dee were to share their wives in common. Dee and Kelly were unsure if Madimi meant spiritually or carnally; a scroll appeared to clarify, reading, “I speak concerning both.” Madimi explained that—as with the angel that commanded Abraham to kill his son—the direct orders of the angels trumped scripture, for “if I were to say to a man: ‘go and kill your brother,’ and he did not do it, he would be the son of sin and death. For all things are possible and permitted to the godly.”⁴

This sent Dee into a panic of questioning his very faith, and gave Kelly good cause to forsake the angels altogether. Their wives were appalled. Kelly claimed that Madimi’s pronouncement terrified him. To comfort them, a small spirit named Ben appeared, and said that they would be helped “to pass the marvelous great dangers of the Sea.”^*63

After the message had been delivered, they each returned to their individual beds; Dee told Jane Dee that the wife sharing had to occur; there was no other way.

“Thereupon she fell in a weeping and trembling for a quarter of an hour,” Dee recorded, “and I pacified her as well as I could; and so, in the fear of God, and in believing of his Admonishment, did persuade her that she shewed herself prettily resolved to be content for God his sake and his secret Purposes, to obey the Admonishment.”⁵

On April 20, Dee wrote that he had found “much halthing and untruth” in Kelly’s reports to him of the utterances of spiritual creatures,⁶ that Dee himself had not been present at. Because Kelly’s memory was bad, and he was easily tempted by evil spirits, Dee was suspicious of some of his new revelations. Several more creatures had appeared to Kelly in his private chamber, but Kelly stated that he had kept his mind fixed on resisting and discrediting them. One, however, told him to join the tables of Enoch, and renumber the squares. This would be the “Reformed Table of Raphael,” a new ordering of the Watchtowers that would seem of rather suspect provenance given the circumstances. The new reordering of the tablet seems to have greatly convinced and cheered Dee with its mathematical precision, however, and he consequently resolved to obey the new doctrine. This version of the Watchtowers also now forms the standard ordering that is presented in books on the angelic system.

On April 21, a wife-swapping agreement was drawn up. Kelly made a declaration that he had hated the spirits. Though they had been comforted by the godliness of the prior spirit actions, Dee and Kelly’s wives still found the new push toward polygamy disturbing, as it was against God’s prohibition of adultery. The group resolved to abstain from meat and fish, and occupy themselves with fasting and praying, until such time as a new action gave clarification or confirmation on what was to be done.

On April 24, that clarification came. A great flame appeared in the stone, and a spiritual creature entered through the south window of the chapel, heaved the scrying stone into the air and then set it down again. Afterward, a man appeared with his nether parts in a cloud, and with spread arms came toward Kelly. The creature took up the stone and frame of gold, and mounted up and away. Kelly grabbed for it, but couldn’t touch it. The scryer was seized with fear and trembling—and revealed that the spirits had lately been giving him heart palpitations from fright. Dee, however, was “very glad and well pleased.”⁷

A man on fire appeared with flaxen hair hanging down over him, naked to the paps, with blood spots on him. If the angels had planned to destroy them, the apparition said, the seas would have long ago swallowed them. The angel, apparently speaking for God, confirmed that he was indeed the God of Abraham, who was Alpha and Omega, and who gave all. Just as Moses’s leadership of the Jews had also been a time of prosperity for the gentiles, “even so shall those days to come be unto the Nations and Kings of the earth. I am a law for ever.”⁸

The angels’ doctrine itself was not to be published, but was to be Dee and Kelly’s alone; the sharing of wives, the angel confirmed, was meant to unify Dee and Kelly as one being, which would complete the first phase of the Apocalypse: “Walk before me as the sons of my Father, in all righteousness,” the angel told them. “And follow you that which you call unrighteousness even with gladness: for I can make you whiter than snow. Your unity and knitting together is the end and consummation of the beginning of my harvest.”⁹

A covenant was subsequently drawn up in writing by all four parties; on May 6, Dee wanted to ascertain that he would be rewarded for the affair, and so he and Kelly prayed at the table in their chapel, and the covenant they had composed was read to the angels. Within fifteen minutes, Madimi appeared with an infinite number of spiritual creatures standing behind her, as if in a half moon; a second head sprouted from her head, sporting three eyes, with one eye going into the other, which Dee believed confirmed the agreement and their deal.

On May 20, Kelly cut the contract into two parts, with one part going with Kelly and his wife and the other with Dee. An angel appeared and stated that he had made Dee and Kelly free from all men in preparation for meeting God. Yet because they had not consummated their contract, he condemned their willfulness, and stated that they would be thrown out from town to town, as they had forsaken God. The threats were now coming nonstop—Kelly remarked that “I thought we should have nothing else, but threats.”¹⁰ Yet “he that pawneth his soul for me, loseth it not,” an angel told them, and though Dee and Kelly were to be “brought forth before men in your latter dayes, and . . . overthrown and slain,” they would be resurrected to eternal life. After they had completed the wife sharing, they would be restored to God’s full grace, “and you shall grow every day, wise and mighty in me.”¹¹

The next day, as Dee and Kelly were walking in an orchard along a river, Kelly saw two children about the same age as Arthur Dee fighting with swords. One said, “Thou hast beguiled me,”¹² which Dee took to be indicative of his conflict with Kelly. They returned home to find their scrying stone replaced underneath Jane Dee’s pillow.

Thus fully persuaded, the foursome consummated Madimi’s plan on May 22—or at least two of them did. Kelly had intercourse with Jane Dee, but Dee himself could not carry out the deed, and instead spent the night chastely alongside Joanna Kelly.

The morning after, while scrying, Kelly saw a purple circle in the circumference of the holy stone. Next appeared a great man in a bright harness, sitting on a beautiful milk-white horse, with a fiery spear first in his left hand, now in the right—likely representing either Christ or the first horseman of the Apocalypse (who, in some readings, is the Antichrist). A long sword hung by his side, with a steel target on his back that hung from his neck on a blue lace, upon which were painted circles of cherubim, with faces like burning gold. The horseman asked Kelly if the deed had been done:

HORSEMAN: “Kelly, was thy brother’s wife obedient and humble to thee?”

E.K.: “She was.”

HORSEMAN: “Dee, was thy brother’s wife obedient unto thee?”

DEE: “She was obedient.”

HORSEMAN: “Even as you were one obedient unto another, even so shall the Lord deal with you.”¹³

A green woman appeared, and also asked Dee if he carried out the deed—Dee confirmed that he did not. (This exchange was scratched out of the diaries by Dee, and so was not reprinted in Casaubon’s original edition of A True & Faithful Relation.)¹⁴

A new presence now appeared to Kelly: a goddess or angel with attire “like beaten gold; she hath on her forehead a Cross chrystal lyne, her neck and breast are bare unto under her dugs: She hath a girdle of beaten gold slackly buckled unto her with a pendant of gold down to the ground”—the Whore of Babylon.^*64 Her harrowing speech is the most famous passage of the entire spirit actions.

“I am the Daughter of Fortitude,” she began,

Fig. 13.1. BABALON. Panel from Jacobello Alberegno, Polyptych of the Apocalypse, 1360–90.

and ravished every hour, from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and Science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me, they covet and desire me with infinite appetite: few or none that are earthly have: embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Sonne, and covered with the morning Clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in my self. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am defloured, and yet a virgin: I sanctified, and am not sanctified. Happy is he that imbraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many Cymbals, and my lips sweeter than health it self. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not: For lo, I am loved of many, and I am a lover to many; and as many as come unto me as they should do, have these entertainments. Purge your streets, O you sons of men, and wash your houses clean; make your selves holy, and put on righteousness. Cast out your old strumpets, and burn their clothes; abstain from the company of other women that are defiled, that are sluttish, and not so handsome and beautiful as I, and then will I come and dwell amongst you: and behold, I will bring forth children unto you, and they shall be the Sons of Comfort. I will open my garments, and stand naked before you, that your love may be more enflamed toward me. . . . ¹⁵

This speech, which is spoken from the point of view of Babylon the Great, rather than the antagonistic view of Revelation, bears many similarities to Gnostic texts pertaining to Sophia, Wisdom, particularly “Thunder: Perfect Mind,” which nearly matches the “Daughter of Fortitude” passage for theme and even tonality. “Thunder” was not available to Dee and Kelly, as it is part of the Nag Hammadi codices discovered in a buried jar in Egypt in 1945, one month before the beginning of Jack Parsons’s Babalon Working. Yet compare a sample of its text:

I am the first and the last.

I am the honored and scorned.

I am the whore and holy.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and daughter.

I am the members of my mother

and the barren one with many sons.

I have had a grand wedding

and have not found a husband.

I am a midwife and do not give birth.¹⁶

Reading both texts side by side, it is hard not to see overlap in lines like “I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not,” from Kelly, and “I am the whore and holy, I am the wife and the virgin” from “Thunder.”

Dee and Kelly, as the angels now told them, had attained to wisdom—wisdom indeed being Sophia in Greek, and Chokmah in Hebrew.^*65

“No man is illuminated, that is not sanctified: neither is there any man perfectly sanctified, that is not joyfully illuminated,” the angels explained.¹⁷ Dee and Kelly were the chosen of the last days, and would present themselves every seventh day for the next hundred days to attain to further wisdom.^†66 If they did this, the angels counseled, they would be spared a remembrance to history as sorcerers, and their reputations would be repaired. Judging by how both men have been treated in the official histories, they must not have succeeded in this final working. If anything, it seems that sharing wives was too much for Dee and Kelly’s friendship to bear; they parted ways shortly thereafter.

And with this, the recorded spirit actions, and one of the most crucial spiritual partnerships of the second millennium, trailed off into awkward silence.