The study was quiet: a pair of double doors firmly shut out the noise of a busy household and of Dee’s young children, two-year-old Arthur and his infant daughter Katherine. The room was furnished with a desk, several chairs, including a ‘Saracen’ upholstered in green silk,1 and a cedar chest. Inside the chimney breast Dee had hidden secret manuscripts, sealed in a ‘capcase’, a travelling bag.2 The floor was covered with mats and haphazard piles of books. Light shone in through a large west-facing window.
In one corner stood the ‘great perspective glass’ given to him by Sir William Pickering. Anyone who ‘foined’ or lunged at it with a dagger or sword found their reflection, ‘with like hand, sword or dagger’ lunging back at them, an effect so unsettling that many claimed it must have magical powers. Dee used it to demonstrate how such effects could be explained by the mathematics of perspective.
Dee seems unlikely to have used this mirror for any sort of occult practice, though he did use another, a ‘speculum’ made of polished obsidian, a dense, dark, glassy form of volcanic rock.3 He also had at least two crystal balls, and it was in one of these that ‘Talbot’ now claimed to see a vision of a good angel, who he identified as Uriel.
Uriel is mentioned several times in the Pseudepigrapha, a collection of ancient writings which, like the Apocrypha, had once formed part of the Bible. According to one of the books in the Pseudepigrapha, the Life of Adam and Eve, Uriel and the archangel Michael together buried Adam’s body; while the ‘Book of Enoch’ identifies Uriel as the angel who warned Noah of the Flood.4 But perhaps most interesting to Dee was Uriel’s role in revealing the astrological secrets of the ‘heavenly luminaries’ (the stars and planets) to Enoch. Enoch was the seventh patriarch of Genesis (seven generations down from Adam) and father of Methuselah. Only living a third as long as his famously durable son (three hundred and sixty five years), he prophesied the Day of Judgment when God would ‘convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness which they have committed in an ungodly way.’5
Enoch also had a more contemporary significance. In 1553, a French scholar Guillaume Postel had published a book called De Originibus in which he related a meeting with an Ethiopian priest. This priest told Postel of a Book of Enoch which had been lost for centuries to Europe but was known to the Ethiopians. It contained Enoch’s own record of the language God had taught to Adam, which he had used to name all the beasts and the birds.
This Adamic language was one that had been rumoured to exist since ancient times, but was long forgotten. It was of enormous significance, as it had come straight from the mouth of God and had yet to be corrupted by the Fall.6 Whoever rediscovered that language would rediscover the key to divine knowledge.
Dee owned a copy of De Originibus, which has survived.7 The sections concerning the Ethiopian priest’s testimony are particularly heavily annotated.
Dee had been expecting a minor spirit from the great hierarchy of the heavens, and he had an archangel before him, one with an apparent direct line to Enoch and perhaps the Adamic language Enoch had recorded. His reaction was immediately to ask Uriel about The Book of Soyga.
The Book of Soyga was particularly precious to Dee. His only mention of it before had been in a diary entry earlier that year, reporting having the volume fumigated to prevent mildew.8
In 1583, the book went missing from Dee’s library, but he managed to recover it a decade later. Following Dee’s death, it passed into the collection of the Duke of Lauderdale, but then went missing once more. It was finally rediscovered in 1994 by the Dee scholar Deborah Harkness, in both the Bodleian and British Libraries, but catalogued under an alternative title Dee had mentioned, Aldaraia.9 Both copies are anonymous sixteenth-century manuscript copies of a (presumably) lost original. It is likely that the copy in the British Library was the one owned by Dee, the very work that was now in his study and the focus of his intense curiosity.
The book is full of lists and tables. There are lists of spirit names, of astrological conjunctions, of spells and invocations – the very sort of Cabalistic codes that had filled Trithemius’s Steganographia.
Dee’s first question to Uriel, communicated via ‘Talbot’, was an anxious enquiry about the status of this work. ‘Is my Book of Soyga of any excellency?’ he asked.
‘That book was revealed to Adam in paradise by the good Angels of God,’ Uriel replied.
This was a revelation, and not just to Adam. Dee must have now dared to think that this book was of divine importance – perhaps a copy of that Book of Enoch. Perhaps its tables and lists were a coded version of the very language Adam had been given by God.
‘Will you give me any instructions, how I may read those tables of Soyga?’ Dee asked.
‘I can,’ Uriel replied, tantalisingly. ‘But only Michael can interpret that book.’
This reply can hardly have been unexpected, as it was Michael he had previously attempted to contact in this stone through Saul. ‘What may I, or must I do, to have the sight and presence of Michael, that blessed angel?’ Dee asked. ‘Summon and invoke our presence with sincerity and humility,’ Uriel replied, with what must have been maddening serenity. ‘Michael is the angel who lights your way. And these things are revealed in virtue and truth, not by force.’
At that point, the conversation was interrupted by ‘Talbot’ reporting the appearance of a new vision in the stone, a triangular talisman engraved in gold. Worn on the chest, Uriel promised, this device would protect its bearer ‘at every place and time and occasion’.10
Then the session ended. Dee spent the afternoon musing on what had happened. At five, the two of them were back in Dee’s study. After saying their prayers, ‘Talbot’ managed to summon Uriel up again. Dee pressed more about the Book of Soyga. ‘Peace,’ Uriel replied, ‘you must use Michael.’ ‘I know of no means or order to use in the invocating of Michael,’ Dee replied.
Uriel was obligingly specific in reply. He and ‘Talbot’ must recite certain psalms, which will deliver them before the ‘seat and Majesty of God’. They did as instructed, and a ‘rich chair’ appeared briefly in the stone. ‘There must be conjunction of minds in prayer, betwixt you two, to God continually,’ Uriel added. ‘It is the will of God that you should jointly have the knowledge of his angels together. You had attained unto the sight of Michael but for the imperfection of Saul. Be of good comfort.’ Dee’s past failure to discover the secret of Soyga was explicitly revealed as being Saul’s fault. If he now stayed with ‘Talbot’, all would be disclosed.
A detailed specification followed of some of the equipment Dee would need to reach the ‘rich chair’, the ‘seat of perfection, from the which things shall be showed unto thee’. He was to make a table, constructed from ‘sweet wood’, two cubits square (between three and four feet, a cubit being the length of a forearm) and two cubits tall. Each leg of the table was to stand on a Sigillum Dei, a divine seal, made of pure, colourless wax, nine inches in diameter and one and one-eighth of an inch thick. On the back of the seal was to be inscribed the motif that had appeared in the stone: a cross with a circle at the point of intersection and surrounded by the letters AGLA.11
Just such a table appeared to ‘Talbot’ in the crystal ball, as though the space Uriel occupied was a model of Dee’s own study, but refurbished in the manner instructed.
Uriel suddenly changed the subject. Dee’s house was haunted by an evil spirit. ‘He is here now,’ said Uriel. His name was Lundrumguffa, and he had been in the house for some time. It was he who had ‘maimed’ Dee in the shoulder (Dee had reported in his diary the year before suffering a pain in his right shoulder and elbow so extreme that he could not lift his arm more than an inch for a period of two weeks). Lundrumguffa now sought the destruction of Dee’s wife and daughter, and would try to kill the ‘accursed’ Saul. Dee must exorcise him, using ‘brimstone’ (sulphur).
Dee again complained of not knowing how to carry out Uriel’s instructions. He had tried using brimstone once before, when Saul had summoned a demon called ‘Maherion’. But this strategy had failed: Maherion made many further appearances, despite Dee’s repeated commands that Saul should not to dabble with such spirits. ‘The cursed will come to the cursed,’ Uriel replied, indicating again that Saul, rather than the brimstone, was the cause of the problem.
‘Brimstone is the means,’ Uriel concluded. ‘When shall I do this?’ Dee asked. ‘Tomorrow at the time of prayers,’ Uriel replied, and was gone.
Thus Dee’s first action with Edward Kelley came to an end. The experience was quite different from any he had had before. Where Saul could only manage two misspellings, ‘Talbot’ had conjured an archangel, one who understood what Dee wanted, and dangled before him the chance of achieving it.
At three the following day they were at it again, presumably after Dee had ignited brimstone to smoke out Lundrumguffa. As ‘Talbot’ stared into the stone, he beheld a magnificent creature, wearing a long purple robe spangled with gold and a gilded garland around his head. His eyes were ‘sparkling’. Dee showed the notes he had made the previous day on the design of the table, to check their accuracy.
‘They are perfect, there is no question,’ the magnificent spirit replied.
‘Are you Uriel?’ Dee asked.
‘Talbot’ reported the appearance of another creature in the crystal, who threw this glittering spirit to the floor and started beating him with a whip and tearing at his clothes. The spirit was exposed as a hairy, ugly monster: Lundrumguffa, the wicked spirit that haunted Mortlake. Uriel was its assailant, who ‘drew the wicked spirit away by the legs and threw him into a great pit, and washed his hands…with the sweat of his own head’. ‘Lo,’ said Uriel, ‘thus the wicked are scourged,’ and left.
After a short time he reappeared, accompanied by a creature carrying a sword, who was even more magnificent than the disguised Lundrumguffa, whose head had glistened like the Sun. He sat down in the ‘seat of perfection’, the ‘rich chair’ revealed the previous day, and was surrounded by a host of angels. This, Dee realised, must be Michael himself.
Michael made the following pronouncement:
Go forward: God hath blessed thee.
I will be thy Guide.
Thou shalt attain unto thy seeking.
The World begins with thy doings.
Praise God.
The Angels under my power, shall be at thy commandment.
Lo, I will do thus much for thee.
Lo, God will do thus much for thee.
Thou shalt see me: and I will be seen of thee.
And I will direct thy living and conversation.
Those that sought thy life, are vanished away.
Put up thy pen.
Dee did as he was instructed. He did not write anything farther for three days. Then, during another séance, ‘Talbot’ once more saw Michael enter the stone, and sit upon the seat of perfection. This time, the archangel was accompanied by another figure whose face was hidden by a black hood. Uriel went up to him and took off his cloak. He then robed him in silk, and placed laurels on his head. The man knelt down before Michael, who unsheathed his sword and dubbed him. The man stood up and turned so that ‘Talbot’ could see his face. It was Dee.
And so Dee learned of his own anointing by the great archangel Michael: a moment of rapture after so many years of disillusionment. It was confirmation at last that all he had been waiting for was about to occur.