Sometime in the 1610s or 1620s, the antiquarian and collector Sir Robert Cotton decided to excavate the fields around Dee’s house at Mortlake. What prompted this is unknown, but he found a rich stash of documents. They were badly damaged by damp, but still legible.
They mouldered away for years before Sir Robert’s son, Sir Thomas Cotton, gave them to the scholar Meric Casaubon, urging him to copy them before they disintegrated.1 Meric did as asked, and discovered that they contained detailed transcripts of Dee’s spiritual conversations, including every sensational detail about Dee’s audience with Rudolf, and the ‘cross-matching’ agreement with Kelley. After consulting the Bishop of Armagh on the theological implications of releasing such apparently diabolical dialogues, Casaubon decided to publish the papers. They appeared in 1659 under the title A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits.
The True and Faithful Relation brought Dee’s spiritual activities to public notice for the first time, and set the seal on his reputation. ‘What is here presented unto thee (Christian Reader),’ Casaubon’s preface began, was a book ‘that might be deemed and termed A Work of Darkness’.2
Casaubon believed that Dee was deluded rather than evil, and justified the publication of his mystical actions on the grounds that they would act as a warning against ‘presumptuous unlawfull wishes and desires’ being entertained by other philosophers. Dee’s delusion did not lie in his belief in the spirits’ existence. For no learned man, in Casaubon’s opinion, ‘can entertain such an opinion (simply and seriously) that there be no Divels or Spirits.’ Dee’s ‘only (but great and dreadful) error’ was that he ‘mistook false lying spirits for Angels of Light, the Divel of Hell (as we commonly term him) for the God of Heaven.’
Subsequent opinion was less sympathetic. In his burlesque poem Hudibras, the poet and satirist Samuel Butler wrote:
Kelly did all his feats upon
The Devil’s looking-glass, a stone,
Where playing with him at bo-peep
He solved all problems ne’er so deep.3
Thomas Smith, author of the first biography of Dee, published in 1707, considered his subject insane, while the historian Anthony á Wood found himself ‘overwhelm’d with melancholy’ when contemplating Dee’s spiritual adventures.
From there, it was further downhill. In the eighteenth century Dee was dismissed as ‘extremely credulous, extravagantly vain’, in the nineteenth as ‘weak and wrongheaded… all but an idiot withal’, in France he was accused of fourberie (trickery), in Germany of being a ‘Dummkopf (blockhead).4
Such a Dummkopf deserved no place in history, and Dee would subsequently be erased from the annals of Elizabethan policy, geography, mathematics and astronomy. The message contained in the surviving books of mysteries – if they contained one – remained undisclosed.
The one place Dee’s reputation thrived was in the world of modern mysticism. He has been credited with being a founder of the Rosicrucian movement, a secret brotherhood claiming to possess esoteric wisdom handed down from ancient times. In the nineteenth century he was declared an English Nostradamus, and the prophet of an earthquake that would destroy London in 1842, and of a devastating plague expected in 1899.5 He was adopted by the Victorian ‘Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’; hailed as the originator of ‘Enochian magic’; brought back to life by Gustav Meyrink in his novel The Angel from the West Window; and commemorated by Aleister Crowley, who considered himself to be, among many strange things, the reincarnation of Kelley. ‘’Tis magic, magic that hath ravish’d me,’ cried Marlowe’s Faust at the moment he submits to the forces of the occult. And so it had Dr Dee’s reputation.
In more recent years, various researchers have attempted to rescue Dee from the hard-headed rationalists and muddle-headed mystics. Most influential has been the eminent historian Dame Frances Yates, who argued that Dee was the true Renaissance man. Yates showed that Renaissance thinking, far from being overcome with rationalism, was suffused with magic, and Dee embodied this better than any other English thinker. ‘John Dee has to the full the dignity, the sense of operational power, of the Renaissance magus,’ she proclaimed. ‘And he is a very clear example of how the will to operate, stimulated by Renaissance magic, could pass into, and stimulate, the will to operate in genuine applied science.’6 In other words, natural magic as practised by Dee did not forestall the coming scientific revolution, but rather enabled it to happen. It is certainly true that most of the figures now associated with the foundation of modern science had similar interests. Copernicus cited the mystic prophet Hermes Trismegistus to justify his heliocentric universe; Tycho Brahe wrote treatises on the astrological significance of his astronomical discoveries; Johann Kepler devised his theory of elliptical orbits in an effort to confirm Pythagorean notions of cosmic harmony; and Isaac Newton tried to discover the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.
Others have emphasised Dee’s more practical, political side. William Sherman criticised the portrayal of Dee as a ‘Merlin at the Tudor court’ and offered instead a less picturesque but more realistic image of ‘the first English think-tank… a retailer of special (often secret) knowledge, an “intelligencer” in the broadest sense.’7
But even the most matter-of-fact assessment cannot completely dispel the aura of mystery. An understanding of Tudor political discourse, even of Renaissance magic, may shed light on Dee’s work, his intellectual legacy and philosophical milieu, but makes no sense of his eager embrace of Kelley’s astonishing phantasmagoria. Many Renaissance thinkers dabbled in magic, some even conjured up spirits, but only Dee claimed to summon the divine secrets of the universe from angels and archangels.
On 8 May 1583, Kelley had a vision of a beautiful palace out of which came a ‘tall well-favoured man, very richly apparelled with a brave hat and a feather on his head’, followed by ‘a great number, all like courtiers’. The man said: ‘How pitiful a thing is it, when the wise are deluded.’ Perhaps this was a teasing reference to Dee.
Plenty of evidence shows that Dee had to some extent fallen under Kelley’s spell. But so did men like Dyer, Cecil, Rozmberk and Rudolf. However, Dee’s faith in Kelley cannot be solely ascribed to the skryer’s charms. The sophistication of the Enochian language, the huge cast of spiritual characters, the flamboyant personalities and the sheer quantity of material, all conjured up from a stone, without recourse to prompts or prewritten scripts, were compelling.
It was not just the intensity of Kelley’s visions that made them so bewitching. It was the way they fitted into their context. There was the local setting: the room, the ritual, the light, the magical apparatus, the intense aura of piety produced by Dee’s rituals, prayers and supplications. And there was the global context, to which Dee could rightly claim to be, at least in England, uniquely sensitive. His collection of books and scientific instruments, his contacts with Europe’s most powerful monarchs and courts, his philosophical, geographical, political and mystical works, his imprisonment, his religious struggles, his involvement with ciphers and spies – all of these meant that he could see as well as anyone, perhaps better, that the entire world was in a state of transformation, and the angels captured this perfectly.
‘Behold, these things shall God bring to pass by his hands whose mind he hath now newly set on fire,’ the spirit Medicina Dei had said. ‘The corners and straights of the earth shall be measured to the depth: and strange shall be the wonders that are creeping in to new worlds. Time shall be altered, with the difference of day and night. All things have grown almost to their fullness.’8 Dee had seen with his own eyes the world spill off the edge of the map, and the universe burst out of its shell. And as the cosmos had spread into infinity, so he had seen his and everyone’s position in it correspondingly reduced. For the first time in over a thousand years, anyone with the learning to see (and there were still very few) beheld a universe that no longer revolved around the world, and a world that no longer revolved around humans.
Dee’s magical journey with Kelley can be seen as a response to this traumatic demotion. Magic was the way people could be reconnected with an alienated cosmos. It was the hidden mechanism by which God operated in the world, the invisible force that joined the spiritual realm to the material one. It was the continuum between life and death, the ‘strange participation’, to use Dee’s phrase, in which the body and spirit, the natural and the artificial, the real and the imagined were engaged.9
Dee had hoped that science – in particular mathematics – would reveal the mechanism of this strange participation. Maths would, he thought, correct the cosmic misalignment and restore the divine order. His proposals for calendar reform, synchronising human time with divine ‘radix’ of time, the birth of Christ, were a practical example of this.
‘O comfortable allurement, O ravishing persuasion,’ he wrote in his preface to Euclid, ‘to deal with a Science, whose Subject is so Ancient, so pure, so excellent, so surmounting all creatures, so used of the Almighty and incomprehensible wisdom of the Creator, in the distinct creation of all creatures: in all their distinct parts, properties, natures, and virtues, by order, and most absolute number, brought, from Nothing to the Formality of their being and state.’10
But, as Dee himself came to realise, not even the ‘ravishing persuasion’ of mathematics was equal to the task. As he told Emperor Rudolf, he had spent forty years ‘with great pain, care and cost’ trying to discover the secrets of the universe, and mankind’s position within it. ‘And I found (at length) that neither any man living, nor any book I could yet meet withal, was able to teach me those truths I desired and longed for.’
There was only one other way to turn, to God himself in the hope that through his angels, he would guide humanity back to the universe it was leaving behind. This was Dee’s hope, and Kelley’s promise. Together, they would navigate a Northwest passage to universal truth before – with the onset of the modern, mechanistic age his own work helped to inaugurate – unity would become irrecoverable, and the magic would go out of the world for ever.
‘If mankind had to choose between a universe that ignored him and one that noticed him to do him harm,’ warned the great scholar of Elizabethan literature, E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘it might well choose the second. Our own age need not begin congratulating itself on its freedom from superstition till it defeats a more dangerous temptation to despair.’11