Prague gave the world Kafka and the robot.1 Both are icons of mechanised modernity, and both had their origins in the city that Dee and Kelley now journeyed towards. The capital of Bohemia pulsated with mad machines, capricious powers and hidden influences, where a skeleton standing nonchalantly next to the Town Hall’s astrological clock marked time with the yank of a rope and the turn of an hourglass; where Rabbi Loew was said to be at work in the Jewish ghetto building the Golem, a figure of clay that he would bring to life by placing a tablet inscribed with the name of God in its mouth; where Rudolf II, great-grandson by two lines of descent to the Spanish queen Joan the Mad, sat in isolated grandeur in his castle on the hill, while around him visitors and ambassadors circulated in maddening labyrinths of courtly ritual.
Prague became a focus of power when Rudolf moved his court there from Vienna in 1583. The spirits called this remote, melancholy Emperor ‘Caesar’, harking back to the pagan Roman Emperors whose authority he was supposed to have inherited. He was joint leader of the all-powerful Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled most of continental Europe: in the west, Philip, King of Spain, champion of Catholicism and one-time husband of Queen Mary of England, had dominions that now stretched across the Atlantic to the New World, and in the east Rudolf, Holy Roman Emperor ruled over Austria, Germany, Hungary and Bohemia.
Rudolf was the product of the loveless marriage between cousins Emperor Maximilian and Maria of Spain. Spending his teenage years in the Spanish Royal Household, he was trained by his stern uncle Philip II in Catholic discipline and Castilian manners. He grew up a sombre and cautious prince, with an unusually good command of the languages (if not the peoples) of his dominions.
At his father’s death in 1576, he inherited a patchwork of principalities and palatines so loosely knit as to threaten continual disintegration.2 It was also riddled with religious dissent, thanks to the policy of theological lenience fostered by Maximilian, whose free thinking attitude Dee had celebrated by dedicating the Monas Hieroglyphica to him.
Through the lofty windows of Rudolf’s recently modernised castle, all the chaos and confusion was reduced to a distant uniformity. Yet it would be through these very windows in 1618 that rebellious forces now stirring in the city below would throw out – literally – the Catholic governors appointed over them by his successor – the famous ‘defenestration of Prague’ which was to initiate the Thirty Years War, the ‘first total European war’.3
Perched on the edge of this precipice, Rudolf became increasingly inscrutable, in Philip Sidney’s estimation, ‘sullen of disposition, very secret and resolute, nothing the manner his father had in winning men in his behaviour’.4 He retreated from practical matters, and instead started to dabble in more cerebral ones – science, art, collecting, spiritualism, Hermeticism and alchemy.
On 1 August 1584 Dee left Krakow with his servant Edmund Hilton, Kelley and Kelley’s brother Thomas. Joanna Kelley, Jane Dee and the children were left behind in the house on St Stephen’s Street. The date of departure was a significant one for Dee. This, the spirits had promised, was when the first book of revelations would be delivered to Dee, assuming they were using the new calendar: 1 August would fall in another ten days by the old reckoning. Either way, Dee’s arrival in Prague coincided with a momentous point in his spiritual mission.
It took eight days by coach to complete the three-hundred mile journey. They followed the course of the Vistula river, skirting the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, through the rolling landscape of Moravia, to Prague. They entered a city in some respects similar to Krakow, its streets falling under the shadow of a hill topped by a castle and cathedral, the indomitable Hrad. But the heart of the city lay not on the hill, but on the other side of the sluggish Vltava river. There, in the medieval streets of the Old Town, Prague’s maverick, mysterious character could be seen seeping out through architectural details – petrified bells, rams, skeletons and stars, odd dioramas and mysterious allegories in stone and sgraffito, a form of wall painting peculiar to Bohemia. Celetná Street, the main thoroughfare to the Old Town Square, and the serpentine alleys and dark passages that disappear into the city’s interior, were once lined with taverns named after mysterious creatures and strange objects – the Unicorn, the Stone Table, the Blue Star, the Vulture, the Spider, suggesting that visitors were entering not just a foreign city, but a fabulous other world.
During Rudolf’s reign, this sense of unreality intensified, as a host of ‘charlatans, knaves and blowhards’ were drawn to the city’s gates by the promise of rich pickings and lax regulations. In came people like the Greek Mamugna of Famagosta, who passed himself off as the son of an Italian martyr and paraded the city streets pulled by a pair of black mastiffs, and Geronimo Scotta, ‘especially known for his diabolical legerdemain’, who arrived in a train of three red carriages drawn by forty horses and ended up in the town square ‘selling salves, stag-horn jelly, vitriol of Mars and cassia pulp’ from a wooden stall. Such characters seemed to stand on each street corner and wander every sentence of the city’s literature, becoming more fantastic with each reappearance.5 It was into this Bohemian brew that Dee and Kelley now immersed themselves.
Dee found lodgings in the home of Thaddeus Hajek, Rudolf’s physician. Hajek’s house stood on a corner of Bethlehem Square in the Old Town, near the Bethlehem Chapel, where the fifteenth-century Czech martyr Jan Hus had preached against the corruption of the Catholic Church.6
Hajek had inherited the property, the ‘House at the Green Mound’, from his father, the alchemist Simon Bakalar.7 Bakalar had decorated the walls with strange inscriptions and motifs, including his own name rendered in Latin, Simon Baccalaureus Pragensis, majestically imprinted in letters of silver and gold, surrounded by hieroglyphs, pictures of birds, fishes, flowers, fruits, leaves. Over the door was written the verse:
Immortal honour and equal glory are due to him
By whose wit this wall is adorned with colour.
And high up, on the south side of the room:
This art is precious, transient, delicate and rare. Our learning is a boy’s game, and the toil of women. All you sons of this art, understand that none may reap the fruits of our elixir except by the introduction of the elemental stone, and if he seeks another path he will never enter nor embrace it.8
Dee was in his element – once more in the continental intellectual environment he had so enjoyed in his youth. His host was the foremost astronomer of Central Europe and they shared very similar interests.9 Hajek’s observations of the Nova of 1572 were among the most accurate made, and he had kept detailed records on the passage of the comet of 1577. He investigated the use of clocks to measure celestial positions; published a series of astrological ephemerides; drew up a report on alternative calendars following the introduction of the Gregorian system; and wrote on metoposcopy, the study of assessing a person’s character and fortune from their face. He was also a Protestant, a follower of Jan Hus, belonging to the moderate ‘Utraquist’ faction.
Dee could not have hoped for a warmer welcome. He and Hajek had probably corresponded since the discovery of the Nova, and Hajek gave his guest generous access both to his home and his network of imperial contacts. It is unclear whether Hajek knew of Dee’s mission, but he evidently allowed Dee and Kelley the privacy they needed to continue their work in his father’s old study.
On 15 August, their first Prague action began with an extraordinary series of alchemical visions: a furnace with an opening the size of four or five city gates belching a ‘marvellous smoke’; a seething lake of black pitch, from which emerged a creature with seven heads and the body of a lion, a great hammer with a seal embedded in its striking surface. Madimi appeared, ‘bigger than she was’. No longer was she the skittish girl or humble ‘wench’ Kelley had described before. She was in apocalyptic mood: ‘Woe be to women great with child, for they shall bring forth monsters. Woe be unto the Kings of the Earth, for they shall be beaten into Mortar. Woe be to such as paint themselves…’ The list went on and on. ‘Woe be unto false preachers, yea seven woes be unto them, for they are the teeth of the Beast… Woe unto the Virgins of the Earth, for they shall disdain their virginity, and become concubines for Satan. Woe to the merchants of the earth… they are become the spies of the earth, and the dainty meat of Kings… Woe to the books of the earth, for they are corrupted.’
Worse was to come. Satan was in a great rage, and set upon overthrowing Dee. ‘He seeketh the destruction of thy household, the life of thy children,’ Madimi warned. ‘Yea, he tempteth thy wife with despair, and to be violent unto herself.’ To prevent such terrible happenings, Dee was instructed to bring his family to Prague, and write immediately to Rudolf, ‘saying that the Angel of the Lord hath appeared unto thee and rebuketh him for his sins’.10
Dee was left in turmoil by these terrifying revelations. Over the coming days, he asked the spirits repeatedly about the welfare of his family, and agonised over how he could deliver to Rudolf, the all-powerful emperor in whose domain he was now so vulnerably placed, the angelic revelation and reprimand required.
On 20 August, following another plea for help with drafting the letter to Rudolf, Uriel appeared. The angel was in as doleful a mood as Madimi, and chastised the failures of those who considered themselves wise, those who ‘dig into Nature with dull mattocks’ in a vain attempt to understand it. ‘You have received this Doctrine in chambers and in secret places. But it shall stand in the great City, and upon seven hills and shall establish herself as truth.’ In other words the doctrine delivered to Dee should one day be accepted even in Rome, the home of the Catholic church.
The words echoed scriptures that Dee had been pondering, which he had copied into the opening pages of the notebook recording the Prague actions. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul had appealed to fractious followers to unite. ‘Is Christ divided?’ he had demanded. ‘Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of his age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’11
After much agonising, Dee finally completed a letter for Rudolf, and was apparently rewarded on 21 August with news from Krakow that his wife and children were well. His letter to the emperor was couched using the conventional obsequies: ‘To the serene and potent Prince and Lord, Rudolf by the grace of God, Emperor of the Romans ever august, and of Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, &c’. Dee offered to present himself ‘at the feet of your Caesarean Majesty abjectly to kiss them, extremely happy if in anything I shall be able to be pleasing and useful to so great an Emperor of a Christian republic’.
He made no mention of the angels, nor of Rudolf’s need for reformation. Instead, he pointed out that he had known Rudolf’s predecessors: his grandfathers Charles V and Ferdinand I, meeting the first ‘when I was young’ at the court in Brussels, and the second in Pressburg, Hungary. ‘And I began to take a particular delight in the most clement Emperor Maximilian, the father of your Caesarean Majesty,’ Dee noted, a man ‘worthy of immortal glory’ – perhaps, Dee implied, for his religious tolerance.
Dee also mentioned the Montis Hieroglyphica, which was dedicated to Maximilian, pointing out that ‘in the protracted performance of this work, my mind had a presentiment of the House of Austria,’ i.e. that the Hapsburgs would produce one ‘in whom, for the benefit of the Christian polity, the best and greatest thing would, or might, become actual’ – a veiled suggestion of expectations that Rudolf would preside over the reunification of the church. ‘Therefore,’ Dee concluded, ‘to your Caesarean Majesty, the fourth of the Roman emperors from the noble family of Austrian princes who were flourishing in my lifetime, here am I, also the fourth letter of each of the three alphabets’ – Greek, Roman and Hebrew.
Dee chose an unlikely, potentially dangerous intermediary to deliver this fateful epistle: Don Guillén de San Clemente, the Spanish Ambassador. San Clemente was a powerful figure in Rudolf’s court, representing the emperor’s uncle, Philip II. San Clemente had every reason to distrust Dee. A Dutchman dining at his table had leaned over to whisper into the ambassador’s ear about Dee’s reputation as a conjuror and a ‘bankrupt alchemist’. Dee might also have been a spy, sent by Walsingham to foment trouble in the Hapsburg heartland.
Despite this, San Clemente developed a real and abiding fondness for Dee. He invited the philosopher to his residence on several occasions, and became godfather to Dee’s child Michael, born in Prague the following year. Dee even showed San Clemente the crystal used to summon the angels, and two of his notebooks recording the actions, which San Clemente perused approvingly, commenting that he was descended from one who would appreciate the true meaning of this strange Cabala, the great Spanish mystic and poet Ramon Lull.
On 24 August, St Bartholemew’s day, Dee sent Emericus Sontag, a secretary of Laski’s assigned to work for Dee, to the ambassador with the precious missive. Three days later, several letters arrived: one from the elusive Laski, another from Dee’s wife Jane, and another from her brother Nicholas Fromonds, bringing news from England of how Adrian Gilbert, Charles Sledd and the bookseller Andreas Fremonsheim had ‘used me very ill in divers sorts’ – Dee’s first direct indication of the damage being done to his home and library in his absence. And after sunset, another letter arrived. It was from San Clemente: he had delivered the letter to Rudolf, and was promised a response in three or four days.
Ten days later, the response came, written by one of Rudolf’s secretaries:
To the noble and most excellent master – master most deserving of respect:
The Emperor has just signified to the Spanish Ambassador that he will summon your Lordship to him at two of the clock, when he desires to hear you. If your Lordship is able to come at the aforesaid hour, you will be admitted at once to the Noble Octavius Spinola, who is his Imperial Majesty’s Stall-Master and Chamberlain. He will introduce your Lordship to his Majesty. For the rest, I commend myself to your Lordship with the utmost possible devotion.
The timing was terrible. The previous evening, Kelley had drunkenly threatened to cut off the head of Alexander, one of Laski’s guards. Alexander had responded by drawing his sword and threatening to slice Kelley into pieces. By the following morning both had sobered up, and Dee tried to stage a reconciliation. But Kelley flew into a rage and ‘in his doublet and hose, without a cap or hat on his head’ chased Alexander into the street, where he hurled stones at the soldier and challenged him to fight. ‘Nolo, Domine Kelleie. Nolo!’ the retreating Alexander had cried. The city watchmen warned Dee ‘to have a care of the peace keeping’ – all this was within just a few hours of Dee’s appointment with the Emperor.
Dee, with his secretary Emericus, rushed across the Charles Bridge and up the steep, winding road leading up to the gate of the castle. He was ushered into the ‘Ritter Stove’ or guardroom at the gate. There was evidently some confusion as to who he was, and Dee and Emericus were told to wait. After a while Dee asked Emericus to go and find out the time. As Emericus wandered around the courtyard outside the palace, looking for a clock, he was spotted through a window by the Emperor’s chamberlain Octavius Spinola.
Spinola came down to ask Emericus his business, and was told that Dee was waiting in the guardroom, whereupon Spinola came to offer his greetings. By now it was three, an hour after the time appointed for his audience, another hour to think about the coming ordeal. Spinola returned to the Emperor’s chamber to announce the philosopher’s arrival, and came back to fetch Dee.
Gently taking a fold of Dee’s gown, Spinola led the way through the labyrinthine courts and passages of the palace towards the inner sanctum, as Dee summoned all his courage to deliver to Caesar himself a message he knew his host would not want to hear.12
Next to the moat surrounding the palace, an African lion was imprisoned in a den and its roars echoed across the city.13 It belonged to an assortment of exotic creatures, fantastic art and strange objects that Rudolf had accumulated since his arrival in Prague. Spread throughout the palace, the collection comprised endless cabinets of curiosities. There was a six-foot narwhal bone; the dried remains of a dragon; samples of ‘bezoar’, the strangely formed gastric calculuses of antelopes; the toxic roots of the mandrake plant which had miraculously grown into homunculus shapes; an agate basin in which the veins of the stone formed the word ‘Christ’; dissected frogs; hippopotamus’s teeth; samples of terrae sigillate (or medicinal earth); and an amulet filled with a plague remedy made of toads, virginal menstrual blood, white arsenic, orpiment, dittany, roots, pearls, coral and Eastern emeralds.14
As well as these works of nature and science, there were also wonderful works of art. Rudolf was a generous patron of painters and craftsmen. This was where Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Leonardo of the Rudolfine court,15 designed miraculous hydraulic machines and musical instruments, dabbled with codes, and painted the emperor’s face as a collection of seasonal fruit; where Bartholomew Spranger, Rudolf’s court painter, worked on his erotic couplings of bearded old men and voluptuous maidens; where Albrecht Dürer’s meticulous studies of dead birds hung alongside the exquisite rural vistas of Pieter Brueghel the Elder; and where nests of delicately engraved ‘glyptics’ or gemstones glittered alongside collections of rare coins.16
Rudolf also had an extensive library, rivalling even Dee’s, with such precious volumes as a copy of Trithemius’s Steganographia and Hoefnagel’s Four Elements, with its memorable opening image showing the grotesque Petrus Gonzales, a man afflicted with hirsutism. This, rather than the lands stretching away beneath the palace’s ramparts, was Rudolf’s world, which Dee was now passing through, as he approached the imperial quarters.
The chamberlain led him through a dining hall and into Rudolf’s privy chamber. The Emperor sat behind a table, upon which lay a wooden chest, a silver inkstand, some letters and a copy of Dee’s Monas. Dee craved his majesty’s pardon for presuming to write, and Rudolf replied that he was sure of Dee’s affection. He ‘commended the book Montis’ but had found it too hard for his ‘capacity’; and added that the Spanish Ambassador had told him that Dee had something to say that he would find useful.
‘So I have,’ said Dee, and looked around the chamber to check they were now alone, which they were.
He began by filling in the background, the story of his forty years spent ‘in sundry manners, and in divers countries, with great pain, care and cost’ trying to gain ‘the best knowledge that man might attain unto in the world’, his realisation ‘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’, his decision to look elsewhere for enlightenment, to the angels, to God ‘by whose commandment I am now before your Majesty and have a message from him to say unto you: and that is this:
The Angel of the Lord hath 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.
This my commission is from God. I feign nothing, neither am I an hypocrite, or ambitious man, or doting or dreaming in this cause. If I speak otherwise than I have just cause, I forsake my salvation’.17