For a clinching example of how the heady mixture of Cabalistic and Hermetic ideas came to be formed into a variety of occult ‘science’ in the period before the collapse of such thinking in the seventeenth century – leaving aside the last great aficionados such as Newton – none is better than that afforded by the egregious Dr Dee, model for Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero, and the inspiration for the beliefs and efforts that resulted in the beginning of the end of occult thinking, which the seventeenth century witnessed. In his story one sees the third of alchymia, cabala, magia – namely, magic – attempting its utmost.
Dee was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, and was appointed one of the first Fellows of Trinity College, then just founded by Henry VIII. At that time Cambridge was in a state of chaos and decline, largely as a result of Henry’s reforms; there were only about thirty students enrolling each year, the University was in debt and having to pawn its candelabra, the departure of the religious orders following the dissolution of the monasteries left buildings empty and decaying, the University and the town were at expensive legal loggerheads which obliged the University to borrow considerable sums of money. Henry’s reforms prescribed which subjects and texts could be studied and which could not, abolished a number of degree courses, and obliged dons to fill various University administrative offices for double the usual period of time because there were so few of them to undertake the work.
This debacle followed a period when the University was just beginning to flourish after a previous long period of stagnation. Erasmus twice stayed at Cambridge, the second time as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. In 1516, after his first visit, he wrote,
It is scarcely thirty years ago when all that was taught in the University of Cambridge was Alexander, the Little Logicals (as they call them), and those old exercises out of Aristotle, and quaestiones taken from Duns Scotus. As time went on, polite learning was introduced; to this was added a knowledge of mathematics, a new or at least a regenerated Aristotle sprang up; then came an acquaintance with Greek, and with a host of new authors whose very names had before been unknown even to their profoundest doctors.1
Erasmus himself was among those responsible for the diffusion of the new interests that were percolating slowly into England’s universities.
By the time Dee arrived, however, the tumult of the reforms and Reformation had taken their toll, the advances praised by Erasmus had been reversed, and Cambridge was a very depleted place. It is a mark of Dee’s brilliance nevertheless that he was elected at the early age of nineteen to be reader in Greek and Fellow of the newly founded Trinity College.
It was not Greek that was Dee’s passion, however, but mathematics, and he relished the quadrivium – the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and harmonics. In two ways these interests fed directly into his subsequent career as a magus. Astronomy was indistinguishable for him from astrology. Mathematics was regarded with suspicion by the authorities, who from time to time burned mathematics textbooks as ‘conjuring books’ because of the association of maths with ‘black arts’. The terms ‘calculating’ and ‘conjuring’ were often used interchangeably.2 The connection between mathematics and magic was clearest in the occult science of numerology. In his Oration Pico della Mirandola had cited Pythagoras with approval; this was because Pythagoras was regarded not only as a founder of mathematics but as a magician also, who had recognised the mystical power of numbers and how the simplest of them – the first four positive integers 1, 2, 3, 4 – underlay the fundamental structure of the universe, respectively representing the point, the line, the triangle and the solid, and the harmonic ratios both of music and of the universe itself.3
The beginnings of Dee’s reputation as a magus rested on his use of mathematics to create an amazing theatrical illusion in a performance of Aristophanes’ Peace at Trinity College. The main character in this comedy, Trygaeus, wishes to get to heaven to consult Zeus on a military matter, and having failed to do so by ladder decides to conjure a flying creature to get him there. Instead of a handsome winged horse like Pegasus he is scooped up by a maniacal giant dungbeetle which gives him a hair-raising ride. This would be a tricky effect to stage, not least in the dining hall of a Cambridge college; but Dee achieved it to the astonishment and even terror of his colleagues and students, some of whom were convinced he had used supernatural means.
In a work he published in 1570, a Mathematical Preface to Euclid’s Elements, Dee wrote of what he called ‘thaumaturgy’ or ‘an art mathematical . . . which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived and of men greatly to be wondered at’. This is a very early use of the word ‘thaumaturgy’ which standardly means ‘magical trickery’. It suggests that his stunning visual effect at Trinity was achieved by mathematically aligning the audience, on one side, with the props and machinery working his tricks, on the other side, so that by concealing the mechanism involved it really looked as if the beetle were flying freely about the room with Trygaeus on its back.
The Trinity flight of Trygaeus might not have been as difficult to achieve as it sounds; in that same century statues were made to talk and move by hydraulics – a great example is the statuary in the gardens of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, which thrilled and unnerved Descartes when he first saw them – and theatres built in the following century had stage mechanisms capable of producing visually stunning effects which, by then, amazed audiences without making them think that magic was involved.4 In his Preface Dee cited non-magical examples of ‘thaumaturgy’ such as the wooden bird that the ancient Greek founder of mechanics, Archytas, constructed and successfully flew, and the speaking head of bronze said to have been made by Albertus Magnus. Dee saw himself as mining the same vein when he wrote of pneumatics, mirrors, springs and pulleys to illustrate how mathematics (applied in the form of mechanics) could be used to achieve effects that seemed as wonderful as the miracles of God.
In causing such amazement in the audience at Trinity with his flying beetle, however, Dee quickly came to be a figure of speculation among his contemporaries, not a few of whom described him outright as a magician, for they could not believe that he had made use of natural means only. Dee sought to defend himself in his Preface against the imputation of being a magician, in at least the bad sense of one who is aided by ‘wicked and damned Spirits’. ‘For these and such like marvellous Acts and Feats, Naturally, Mathematically and Mechanically wrought and contrived; ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher be counted and called a Conjuror?’ he plaintively asked; ‘Shall that man be (in hugger mugger) condemned as a companion of the Hellhounds, and a Caller and Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits?’ The answer to the first of these two rhetorical questions is of course Yes: that is precisely how the enquirers of the sixteenth century were regarded by many, often enough – thinking wishfully – including themselves. The answer to the second question was more equivocal; there was a widespread suspicion that the answer must surely also be Yes – not least by religious authorities of whatever persuasion – but Dee and others were strident in their insistence otherwise. In the case of some (such as Giordano Bruno) this insistence did not save them from the pyre.
Dee was avid for ‘thaumaturgy’ in his sense of the term, and astrology, and any knowledge he could gather. In 1548 he travelled to the Netherlands, ostensibly to read law at the University of Louvain but in fact to join the group around the mathematician Gemma Frisius. Famous for his development of geometrical techniques of land-surveying, Frisius had also instituted a workshop for the production of accurate measuring instruments. In that workshop Dee met Gerard Mercator, the geographer, and the two became friends. Mercator gave Dee a beautiful and extremely expensive pair of globes, one of the earth and the other of the sky; in return Dee dedicated his book Propaedeumata Aphoristica (Preliminary Aphoristic Teachings) to him. There were other enquirers and savants in the Netherlands for Dee to meet, and he spent most of his time with them rather than with the English residents, but he became friends with one of the latter, Sir William Pickering, the Ambassador to the Court of Charles V at Brussels. This association caused him a problem later.
After nearly three years in the Netherlands Dee travelled to Paris where he lectured on Euclid, with great success. Gossip about his ‘Aristophanes Scarabeus’ had reached the city, and helped to fill to overflowing the halls in which he lectured. On the wings of this success, his reputation already great though he was still only in his twenties, he returned to England in 1551 to present the boy King Edward with two astronomical treatises he had written. The reward was a royal pension, later exchanged for a rectorship which he held as an absentee. His seemingly unstoppable rise was furthered by becoming adviser and astrologer to the Duke of Northumberland, and tutor to his sons. This was Dee’s apogee in terms of worldly career for the time being; when Edward died and Mary came to the throne, inaugurating a harsh turn to the re-Catholicisation of England, his association with Northumberland and his reputation as a conjuror at first acted against him.
He was arrested on a warrant of the Privy Council in May 1555. He was under suspicion of communicating with rebels in exile abroad, one of them the aforementioned Pickering. Worse, he was suspected of the ‘lewd and vain practices’ of ‘calculating’, ‘conjuring’ and ‘witchcraft’. It was held against him that he had cast horoscopes of Mary and her consort King Philip of Spain – an illegal act, because it suggested the possibility of hexes and spells being cast, or preparations for assassination – and indeed this led to a really serious charge, made by two informers claiming to have secure evidence for their accusation, that he had tried to kill Queen Mary with just such enchantments. One of the informers claimed that Dee had blinded one of his children, and tried to kill another, by the same means.
The charges could not be substantiated, and after a series of examinations Dee was bound over to keep the peace and deprived of his rectorship – which meant that he was deprived of his livelihood. But Mary’s officers appeared not to be content; they next charged him with heresy, and required that he be examined by Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, infamous for sending so many to the stake in the Marian persecutions. Known as ‘Bloody Bonner’ for his ferocity in this respect, he earned from Foxe in the Book of Martyrs these lines: ‘This cannibal in three years space three hundred martyrs slew; they were his food, he loved so blood, he spared none he knew.’ By any measure it would seem that Dee was in serious trouble – but here the record of his life degenerates into confusion, for instead of becoming one of the Bishop’s victims he was somehow transmogrified into what Foxe called Bonner’s ‘chaplain’, and came to assist in the interrogation of some of those brought to Bonner’s attention.
How did this happen? Biographers of Dee appear not to know what to make of it, and speak instead of the fact that Dee not only was neither Protestant nor Catholic in his sympathies, but appeared to have his own distinct and separate views about religion. This would not be surprising for someone keen on Cabala and Hermeticism and the latter’s implication of a prisca theologia. But the scant evidence seems to suggest a more prosaic explanation: that Dee knew how to save his skin, and did it effectively both in relation to the serious charges preferred against him regarding Mary, and likewise in the presence of ‘Bloody Bonner’. Perhaps his individual views on religion made this equally easy and rational – why die for something to which you are anyway indifferent? It did not mean that he was not pious in his own way; his diaries are full of heartfelt religious sentiment, and they record long earnest sessions of private prayer and meditation. But he was definitely a survivor; when Elizabeth I succeeded Mary he was as safe from trouble as he had been in Bishop Bonner’s palace in Fulham, and flourished under her reign just as well.
However one interprets Dee’s escape in the reign of Mary, it was a complete one. He was soon writing to Mary herself proposing a national collection of books in the form of a Royal Library. He was himself an avid bibliophile, and built a magnificent library of his own, eventually the greatest in England. Among the books he sought were those he needed to help him restore the fortunes of astrology, at that time waning in England because of lack of mathematical knowledge and the correlative rarity of ephemerides (tables of the heavenly bodies), which had to be expensively imported from the continent.5 Dee’s interest was not just the standard astrological one in personal horoscopes, but in how the heavens influenced the sublunar realm in general. The work he produced in this vein was his Propaedeumata Aphoristica – the book dedicated to Mercator – in which he introduced a concept, symbolised by a sign he invented for the purpose, denoting the unity of the universe. This was the ‘monad’, a mystical symbol in the form of the Greek delta ‘Δ’ destined to play a role in his own later work and that of those influenced by him.
Key to Dee’s view was that all things emanate rays, which affect both the souls and bodies of human beings. These rays can be magnified, concentrated, reflected or deflected by lenses and mirrors, and captured and made visible by crystals as in the crystal balls or the ‘showstones’ of fortune-tellers and ‘skryers’ or spirit mediums. The rays were derived from the original force imparted to the universe in its creation by God, and Dee thought of the science of these rays as natural magic in contrast to the supernatural magic that involved consort with demons and wicked powers. He wanted to understand this force, and to be able to harness it: in this general sense he was no different from what we would now call a ‘true’ scientist, though his premises and methods were ninety degrees different.
They were not ninety degrees different in all respects, however. His interest in cartography and navigation made him an important adviser to merchant adventurers planning attempts on the north-east and north-west passages. He provided them with maps and navigational instruments, and instructed the sailors in the latter’s use. He translated Euclid. After Elizabeth I’s accession he became one of her intermittent advisers, for example being consulted by her on the legal basis for the foundation of a colony in North America. Indeed he had ambitions for the greater glory of Elizabeth and her realm; he coined the name ‘Britannia’, dreamed of a global British Empire, and drew up plans for a magnificent navy to gain it and thereafter control it. In the midst of these endeavours he continued his occult and astrological interests as before, for example casting a horoscope to determine the best day for Elizabeth’s coronation, and casting a spell on the Spanish Armada and taking credit for the storms that destroyed it – one of the reasons why Shakespeare took him as a model for Prospero.
Then suddenly, in the early 1580s, Dee plunged yet more deeply into occultism, and turned his back on his career as a Court adviser. There was a trigger for this: he was introduced to a new and highly promising skryer – there were any number of these individuals doing the rounds, making a living out of the credulity of the age – on the very day after he had seen a portentous astronomical event: the appearance of a comet, which he took to be the last in a series of signs that something momentous was about to happen, and for which he had been waiting.
The significance of the comet, now known to astronomy as Comet C/1582J1, was that it served as confirmation for Dee that the great thing about to happen applied not just the universe but to him personally too. There was no mere coincidence in the occurrences: the comet alerted him to the fact that the means was at last at hand for him to penetrate the secrets of the universe – the means in question being the skryer who appeared the next day – and it also served as the last and final sign in a series of signs leading up to a highly significant astrological moment of change, in the form of a ‘Fiery Trigon’.
The skryer who was to transform his life was a man at first calling himself Edward Talbot, but who soon confessed to the name that subsequent history knows him by: Edward Kelley – one of the most extraordinary and successful liars and charlatans ever to have entered the human record.
The proximate background to this turn in Dee’s life stretches back to a point ten years earlier. Late in 1572 a supernova became visible in the constellation Cassiopeia, glowing more brightly than Venus in the night sky. It was observed by many people around the world, and recorded in detail by Tycho Brahe (it is now known as Tycho’s Nova, SN1572).6 It is one of only eight supernovae ever to have been accurately recorded by observers on earth, and it had a seminal effect on astronomy and science, not least by disproving Aristotle’s view that the heavens are unchanging – for if a new star comes into existence among the constellations, how could the stars be eternal and immutable? This meant that a new model of the universe was needed, requiring better observations of the skies, and better and more accurate instruments with which to make them. Such was the effect on astrologers and astronomers. More importantly still, and more generally, sixteenth-century beliefs were presented with a crisis by the appearance of the astonishing new star: for, as just noted, either it implied that the received cosmology of both religion and the sages of antiquity was wrong, or if that cosmology were right after all, then the new star’s appearance meant that something enormous and unthinkable, and probably disastrous, was about to happen. One can imagine the disquiet this caused in the midst of the Reformation’s struggles.
Dee was among those who recorded the appearance of the new star. On this occasion it was not him but the astrologer John Allen who was consulted by Elizabeth I as to the implications. Dee published his observations in 1573, and it is likely that he and Brahe corresponded. The nova remained visible until 1754. Like Brahe, Dee was sure that they had not witnessed a comet with an invisibly small tail appearing in the lower heavens, but a genuine star or star-like object in the remote heavens (the idea that comets appear in the ‘lower heavens’ is correct – as we now know, by travelling through the solar system in their passage around the sun). Only two ‘new stars’ had ever been claimed before, once by Hipparchus in 125 BCE – so Pliny claimed; it might have been a genuine supernova – and once in the guise of the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ in the New Testament. Consequently the phenomenon was a rich and troubling source of speculation.
Dee not only took the appearance of the new star to support the Copernican model, then still officially treated as an heuristic rather than a factual description of the heavens, though unofficially treated by many astronomers as literally correct; but he inferred from the star’s variable brightness a theory that was equally revolutionary: that the star was moving freely in space. The implication of this is that the stars are not fixed to crystalline spheres rotating majestically far from the earth, itself supposed to be lying at the focus of their concentricity, but that they exist at different distances from each other and the earth, like – as one contemporary of Dee’s put it – motes suspended in a vast ocean.7 The variable brightness was also hypothesised to be the result of the earth moving as it swung round the sun, first away from and then towards the star; but this promising suggestion was shown to be incorrect when the new star faded away altogether in 1574.
But the heavens were busy. The next drama to occur in them came soon afterwards, in 1577, with the appearance of the Great Comet (now catalogued as C/1577V1). It passed close to Venus, and therefore not far from earth itself, and was again seen and recorded by many. Brahe’s detailed observations of the comet – he made thousands of them – were important to Kepler in the latter’s work on the planetary orbits, not least in working out that they are elliptical. A notable feature of Brahe’s notes is that they show his recognition that the comet flew above the earth’s atmosphere, though he did not know how far above it, and that its coma or head faced away from the sun. Another feature is that in drawing the path of the comet Brahe represented the earth lying at the centre of the orbits of the sun and moon; he was not a Copernican, but a would-be reconciler of Copernicus and Ptolemy, for in his picture of the universe the sun and moon orbit earth but the other planets orbit the sun.
The comet of 1577 terrified all Europe even more than the new star had done, not least because it was far more obvious, it moved across the sky, its very appearance was ominous. Pamphlets appeared, wild in their speculations: the comet was shaped like a Turkish scimitar, which meant the Ottoman hordes were about to ravage Europe. It had appeared in the Seventh House of marriage and partnerships, which implied that religious disunities would deepen, or that the then proposed marriage of Elizabeth I and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II would not take place. The comet had appeared in the west, suggesting something major was about to happen in the New World, though as Brahe observed, its tail pointed east, which suggested that it would instead scatter poison and plague, dissent and division upon the Russians and Tartars.
Dee recorded in his diary that Elizabeth’s Court was ‘in great fear and doubt’ because, like everyone else, the general belief was that the comet signified bad news. He himself linked the comet to the nova, noting in his diary that it had appeared five years almost to the day after the new star had first been seen. Something was in train, he felt; matters were warming towards a highly significant outcome. If further proof were needed, it was supplied in Easter week 1580 in the form of an earthquake felt across the whole of England though seemingly centred on London, whose church bells rang out for two whole minutes with the force of the tremors.
This earthquake is the largest known to have affected northern France and the British isles. Geological investigations during the excavation of the Channel Tunnel suggest that it had a magnitude of about 5.6, and that its epicentre lay south of Calais, about thirty kilometres into the earth’s crust – which is very deep, explaining its widespread effects. Cliffs along the south coast of England crumbled into the sea and the sea boiled, buildings shook and some fell. Naturally it was a hair-raising event for those affected, and it added to the general apprehension felt by most – though, for Dee, it was not so much apprehension as excitement. When therefore, a few years later, on that March evening in 1582, he saw the bright light in the sky, and then met Edward Kelley the next day, he felt that The Moment he had been anticipating was imminent.
The Moment in question was the inception of the ‘Fiery Trigon’. A trigon is one of the four groups of three signs (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc.) which together make up the zodiacal wheel. Every twenty years the planets Saturn and Jupiter fall into an alignment known to astrologers as a ‘Great Conjunction’ or (more picturesquely) a ‘Grand Copulation’. Each twenty years the Grand Conjunction occurs in a different sign; successive Grand Conjunctions stand at 120 degrees from the two preceding, each three Grand Conjunctions in a sixty-year cycle thus forming a triangle. In every ten Grand Conjunctions the signs in which Saturn and Jupiter align belong to the same trigon, though there are never more than four alignments successively in the same sign. But as the cycle repeats, the alignments shift somewhat, so when they recur it is only in the approximate vicinity of the alignment that occurred sixty years before. The occurrence of a Grand Conjunction in a new trigon, which happens every 200 years, is therefore considered important; greatly more important still is the inception of a new cycle after all four trigons have been visited. This happens every 800 years.
And this is what was scheduled to happen in 1583, the last of the Watery Trigon and the entrance of the Fiery Trigon (the trigons being named for the four elements). And of course so great an event was expected to have suitably apocalyptic implications. Such was the general anxiety that a papal bull had to be issued against divination; when twenty years passed – that is, by 1603 – and nothing extraordinary had happened among the usual disasters and conflicts that are mankind’s lot, interest in the Fiery Trigon evaporated.8
But for Dee in 1582 expectations about the Fiery Trigon were vivid, and the co-occurrence of the comet and Kelley’s arrival seemed to him confirmation that he was at an epoch in his life. The secrets of nature – knowledge of which meant access to control over it – and of the future seemed to be within his grasp. And the route to this knowledge lay through what Edward Kelley, by means either of a crystal ball or of a black flat showstone that Dee had acquired, was able to promise him, and seemed almost immediately to deliver: nothing less than regular conversations with angels.9
To that point Dee had failed to construct a system which gave him what he wanted; he was frustrated by the insufficiency of the various methods of enquiry he had tried, including those we would recognise as examples of empirical science. So the chance of learning directly from the angels seemed, quite literally, a godsend.10
On many occasions over the next four years Dee and Kelley conversed at length with the angels. They began each session by praying earnestly in the chapel in Dee’s house, and then Kelley relayed to the eager Dee what the angels said to him. Kelley was not the first skryer Dee had employed; as early as 1581 he reported a session with one Barnabas Saul who gazed into a large crystal globe and said that he saw an angel called Anael. This was a prodigious encounter, too prodigious even for Dee who therefore reacted sceptically, for Anael was one of the seven angels of creation and, at the time of appearing in Dee’s crystal globe, was governor of the entire universe as God’s lieutenant. Dee tried another showstone, a flat black stone set in a frame, and this time the archangel Michael was named as available for consultation, ‘but not until after Christmas’, Anael told him.
With Kelley, however, things were different. Kelley seems to have had an amazing imagination, a gift of the gab, a capacity to track Dee’s interests by reading Dee’s diaries and other writings so that he could feed back to him tidbits that Dee would find credible and exciting. Very early in what was to become an addictive relationship for Dee, Kelley proved his credentials by making contact with the angel Uriel, to Dee’s great excitement because Uriel was the angel who had revealed the secrets of astrology to Enoch, and Enoch was important because there was a tradition that he had written a book explaining the original language in which God had spoken to Adam, and which Adam had used to name the beasts and birds. Dee had a copy of a book called De Originibus by Guillaume Postel, in which Postel claimed to have been told by an Ethiopian priest that the Ethiopians had a copy of Enoch’s Adamic primer. In conversation with Uriel via Kelley, Dee came to hope that a book he owned, The Book of Soyga, was in fact a copy of this primer in code. Dee asked if Uriel would interpret the book to him; Uriel said that only Michael could do that. And in order to invoke Michael, Dee would have to have a particular piece of furniture made.
Such was the beginning of the angel conversations, and Dee’s rapt absorption in them over the following years. They must have been hideously frustrating because the replies recorded in Dee’s diaries are so cryptic and evasive – but often clever, and oftener vivid, given the remarkable talents of the young Kelley, who was only twenty-six years of age when he entered Dee’s employment.11 Dee took the enterprise with immense seriousness. For three days before each session with the showstone he had to avoid sex and over-eating, to wash thoroughly, trim his beard and nails, and then pray. He was rewarded by being told that he would have the Adamic language dictated to him, and that the angels would dig up and deliver to him buried treasure if he would provide small samples of the soil from the places where the treasure lay.
How a man of Dee’s gifts swallowed these and like absurdities not merely day after day but year after year might puzzle one, if one forgets the combination of background and desire that generated such credulity. But it was a credulity shared by a wider world than the Dee household. Dee’s reputation grew as rumours of his angelological activities circulated, and it was a reputation that was international. In 1583 he was visited by Count Albert Łaski, a Polish aristocrat with claims to the Polish throne, and within a short time Dee and his family, complete with Kelley, travelled to Poland with Łaski. They took up residence in Kraków, there to continue contacting angels and spirits and to pursue researches into transmuting base metals into gold – gold on which Łaski’s dwindling (or perhaps nearly non-existent) fortunes depended.
Łaski persuaded Dee to visit Prague, carrying a letter of introduction to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. The prospect of the journey – eight days by coach – was not as bad as the long journey already exhaustingly undertaken from England via the Netherlands and the unkind seas, but need and the spirits required it – for, coincidentally, the spirits told Kelley to tell Dee that he must go to Prague and give Rudolf an important message. Dee did not invariably believe everything that Kelley said the angels and spirits had instructed, but he believed most of it, this included. Although the angelological activities were supposed to be secret, Dee’s ambiguous reputation as savant, astrologer, magician and master of the occult was great and still growing, sending shivers of interest through Polish and Bohemian circles. Comparing Dee’s credulous inner life with the grand presence he had in those parts of Europe makes one conscious of the usual paradox of celebrity. Yet some of the mystical residue that still attaches to places like Kraków and Prague – the mysterious legends of sorcerers, monsters and other dark associations lurking along the narrow crooked streets of those cities, misty and ominous in the dead of night – have to do with the fact that Dee passed there in the late sixteenth century, as if he had left a black trail of magia, cabala, alchymia behind him, of contact with demons and dangerous powers, like footmarks across the cobbles and up the steep flights of steps that are still there today, the very same cobbles and steps as in his day.
In Prague Dee lodged with the Emperor’s physician, Tadeáš Hájek, at the latter’s ‘House on the Green Mound’ on the corner of Bethlehem Square in the Old Town – the Staré Město. The Old Town lies underneath the castle hill, with the Vltava river flowing close by. Dee’s reputation had very thoroughly preceded him and he was visited and fêted, drawing curious crowds. Although neither Łaski’s letter of introduction nor his own formidable reputation secured Dee an immediate meeting with the Emperor, he was eventually admitted to the presence, and there delivered the message that Kelley had transmitted to him – a message not in the slightest calculated to please the Imperial ear, because it was – put at its barest – ‘If you don’t shape up and stop sinning you will come to a bad end and all your kingdoms with you.’ Dee arrived for this interview late, having had some sort of domestic problem with Kelley beforehand – a typical occurrence: Kelley was often ungovernable and on this occasion had become entangled in a duel. So they were not the best circumstances in which to deliver the message from God, which was as follows:
The angel of the Lord appeared to me, and rebuketh you for your sins. If you will hear me, and believe me, you shall triumph, if you will not hear me, the Lord, the God that made heaven and earth (under whom you breathe and have your spirit) putteth his foot against your breast, and will throw you headlong down from your seat. Moreover the Lord hath made this covenant with me (by oath) that he will do and perform. If you will forsake your wickedness, and turn unto him, your Seat shall be the greatest that ever was, and the Devil shall become your prisoner: which Devil I did conjecture to be the Great Turk.12
On a scale of one to ten in the matter of how to win friends and influence people, this overture seems well below minus one, but the Emperor was gracious at first. Nevertheless he shortly came to feel the impertinence of the event, after he had sent a valued courtier, Jakob Kurtz, to inspect Dee. When Kurtz arrived at Hajek’s House on the Green Mound he said that Dee’s reputation and books were well known to him, so he was pleased to have an opportunity to talk with Dee; an amicable beginning. They spent six hours together, during which Dee explained his ideas and mission to Kurtz, and showed him his recent writings. But when Kurtz left, Dee had an uneasy feeling that he had not made an especially good impression. And sure enough, he was not long afterwards told that Rudolf had taken exception to the ‘message from God’ and that Dee would not again be welcome at Court. Evidently Kurtz had recognised him as deluded in his ideas and therefore as either a charlatan or (more correctly, as it happened) foolishly under the influence of one.
In the city, as rumours about Dee grew, so with them grew an air of mistrust and hostility. A new Papal Nuncio to the Emperor’s court set about discrediting Dee further, with a view to getting the Emperor to deport him. At just that point the spirits and angels intervened again, ordering a return to Kraków. Dee was short of money, his wife had just given birth again and was in need of rest, but the angels – so Kelley said – were insistent. Accordingly they returned to Kraków. Yet not many months later they were back in Prague to meet the Papal Nuncio, who pretended to believe that Dee was indeed in regular contact with angels, and who asked in silky tones if the angels could give some good counsel to the Church, which was much in need of it. It was intended as a trap for Dee, who successfully avoided it by offering blandishments and disavowals in return; but Kelley, ever the loose cannon, annoyed the Nuncio by saying that too many of the princes of the Church lived in a way that brought discredit to the Church, and until they reformed themselves the troubles engendered by the Reformation would continue.
By this time – it was now 1586; the two had been together for four years – Kelley had progressed very far in duping and controlling Dee. Indeed how completely he controlled his employer is illustrated by the ‘cross-matching of wives’ matter, and the incident in which Dee’s books and papers were all burned and then magically restored. Kelley told Dee that the spirits had said that he and Dee should sleep with each other’s wives. Dee’s wife Jane, who was then thirty-one years of age – they had married when she was twenty-three and he fifty-one – had been a lady-in-waiting to the wife of a nobleman at Elizabeth’s court. Dee reluctantly agreed; Jane was even more reluctant, but eventually consented to do as the spirits wished, and may have borne Kelley a son in consequence. It was however Dee who brought the boy up.
The second incident involved the angels giving orders through Kelley that Dee’s books and papers should all be burned. With agony of heart Dee agreed, watching bagfuls of his precious work fed into the mouth of a furnace. But a short while later the writings magically reappeared in the garden; Kelley was led to them by a spirit appearing in the guise of a gardener. On some conjectures, the burning of the documents was a ploy by Dee and Kelley to persuade the Nuncio and the Emperor’s spies that incriminating evidence of contact with spirits and angels had been destroyed. On other conjectures, this was a typical Kelley manoeuvre in flexing his hold over Dee.13
But at this point the question of which of these alternatives is correct becomes irrelevant, for the Papal Nuncio and Rudolf’s ministers had lost patience with Dee and his disturbing effect on the city. The former submitted a memorial to the Emperor charging Dee with conjuring, necromancy and other dark arts. Dee urgently sent a plea of innocence, but unsuccessfully; the Emperor issued a decree that he must leave Bohemia within six days.
Here yet another twist in Dee’s much twisting tale is required. It has been suggested with some plausibility that he was spying on behalf of the English government. There would be no great surprise if so; travellers provided their own home teams with information as a matter of course, and many notable figures of the time were engaged in conveying messages, collecting and sending information, making contact with helpful agents, and more. Descartes was probably a spy for the Jesuits and the Imperial interest in the Thirty Years War; Peter Paul Rubens was a spy for the Spanish Habsburgs; Huygens father and son exchanged intelligence between the Netherlands and England.14 During his Prague sojourn Dee made a number of very brief forays to Leipzig and other places to meet English merchants and travellers, suggestive of passing on information or communications. This might well have played a role in his expulsion from Prague.
But Dee was not gone from Bohemia for long. No sooner had his entourage trundled its way into Germany than an encounter with the rich and alchemy-mad William of Rosenberg (Vilém Ro
mberk), a Bohemian nobleman who had held high positions at Court in Prague, brought Dee back again – not to William’s great castle of 
eský Krumlov but to a subsidiary estate, at nearby T
ebo
, where in its alchemical laboratory William wished Dee to produce gold from base metals.
It was however Kelley who turned out to be the leading craftsman in this respect, appearing to succeed in this grail of alchemical endeavour. Their tenure of Rosenberg’s patronage made Tebo a magnet for visitors, including English visitors, most of whom were eager not for Dee’s but, increasingly, for Kelley’s advice, help and tutoring in the magic arts of producing riches from nothing, and desiring a taste of his nostrums and medicines. The English government tried to get Dee and Kelley to return home in the interests of filling the Queen’s treasury with magically produced gold, but the two refused. Soon Kelley’s circle of admirers and clients extended far beyond Bohemia, and he gained the Emperor’s good graces also. His association with Dee weakened, then ceased.
The Emperor was as keen as anyone else to accumulate gold, by alchemical or any other means, but his growing interest in Kelley turned on another matter: the desire to escape death. He was obsessed by the fear of death, and the prospect of immortality in the flesh excited him. This is what he wanted from Kelley. As a result of his patronage Kelley became rich, was knighted, fell from grace and was imprisoned a couple of times – for failing to achieve the required alchemical goals – escaped out of windows and the like, and eventually vanished into legend. One fact about him that speaks volumes is that he had no ears: they were lopped off as a punishment for forgery when he was a young man. He always wore his hair long and a cap with the flaps tied down on either side of his head. Despite this considerable inconvenience, his imagination, power with words, chutzpah, cheek, intelligence, cunning and ability to learn fast and plausibly apply what he learned, made him a success in his own terms – at least until whatever end met him, some time before the year 1600.
Dee himself returned to England in 1589, accepting a medium-ranking appointment from the Crown as Warden of Manchester Collegiate Church. He might have ended his days in semi-retirement there had not the devil visited him in his rooms at the College, and left a burned imprint of his hoof on a table (like the Teufelstritt in the cathedral in Munich, it can be seen to this day). Dee left as a result of disquiet among his colleagues and congregation because of this incident and his general association with everything dark and unsavoury, and he faded from the record (rather sadly, given that Jane and two of his daughters died – of the plague in all three cases – before he did). What he had left, however, was a reputation and an influence, and it was this that helped fuel the last major outburst of occultism as a force in European affairs. This was the ‘Rosicrucian furore’ of the decade following the marriage of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, to the daughter of King James I of England, in 1612 – and which is intimately linked to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.