As Jesus said, ‘if any man come to me, and hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’1 Jesus’s disdain for domestic life is the reason why Catholic priests are celibate, and presumably why on 4 April 1587 at Třeboň the angel that appeared before Dee and Kelley felt obliged to curse those who love their families above God. ‘Woe be unto you that so do: and woe be unto the generations that shall follow you.’ Dee would have been familiar with this doctrine, but the reason why it emerged so forcefully now would only gradually become apparent.
‘Be obedient,’ the spirit commanded. ‘Be full of humility, and abandon pride. Bow thine ears unto the poor. Be often sorry for thy days misspent. Be strong in me.’ There was a pause. Then the spirits said to Dee: ‘Thy wife is even at the door of sickness: But behold, I am even he, that is the Lord of Health.’ Then the spirit turned its attention to Kelley. ‘As unto thee, barrenness dwelleth with thee, because thou didst neglect me.’ This is the first explicit reference in Dee’s records to Kelley’s failure to have children.
Since the beginning of Lent (which that year was on 11 February) Kelley had prayed each day ‘to be made free’ of his skrying duties so that he could have time to enjoy his newfound wealth and status. ‘O foolish man,’ said the spirit. ‘By how much the heavens excel the earth, by so much doth the gift that is given thee from above excel all earthly treasure.
‘Thou art made free,’ the spirit continues. ‘And the power which is given thee of seeing shall be diminished in thee, and shall dwell upon the first-begotten son of him that sitteth by thee.’ In other words, Dee’s seven-year-old son Arthur was to take over from Kelley as Dee’s skryer, to complete the spiritual mission of receiving the holy books. In fourteen days, they were all to return, when Kelley was to hand over the magic powder and cease practising. ‘Behold, thou art a stumbling-block unto many,’ the spirit added.
Over the coming days, Dee did his best to prepare his son. He asked Kelley for help, but he refused. So Dee tried to train the child himself, making him recite prayers and stare into the stone set upon the table of practice. The idea of using a child as a skryer was not an unusual one. Skrying was a task best performed by a receptive sensibility, by a malleable mind unburdened by the limitations of rationality. That is why Kelley, with his juvenile tantrums and uncontrollable passions, seemed such a convincing candidate.
Arthur, however, proved less capable. Over the coming weeks, Dee subjected him to a punishing schedule of three sessions a day. Arthur tried valiantly to do his father’s bidding, but saw very little, and for hours on end nothing at all. To Dee’s immense relief, on 17 April, the day before the two-week deadline appointed by the spirit, Kelley turned up ‘by extraordinary good fortune – or perhaps by divine will’, and resumed his position before the stone.
With Arthur still present, Kelley beheld a message written as if on the side of a distant globe which ‘turneth so swiftly that I cannot well read it.’ The message read: All sins committed in me are forgiven. He who goes mad on my account, let him be wise. He who commits adultery because of me, let him be blessed for eternity and receive the heavenly prize. The following day, the meaning of this disturbing phrase became clearer. Once again, Arthur was in attendance. Madimi appeared, at first with the other angels, then on her own. She parted her cloak, to reveal that she was naked beneath, ‘and showeth her shame’. Dee told her to go.
‘In the name of God, why find you fault with me?’ Madimi asked.
‘Because your yesterday’s doings and words are provocations to sin, and unmeet for any godly creature to use,’ Dee replied.
At some point during these erotically charged proceedings, poor Arthur fainted, perhaps because he had been fasting in preparation for the action, perhaps because, as Madimi suggested, he had been ‘touched’ by her.
There followed a vision of four heads upon a pillar: the heads of Dee and Kelley and their wives Jane and Joanna. Madimi produced a half moon brought from the heavens, bearing an inscription: Nothing is unlawful which is lawful unto God. She went into an orchard, where she cut off the branches of one tree, and grafted them together.
Dee interpreted this to mean that the four of them were to be united ‘after the Christian and godly sense’. But Kelley offered a different interpretation, one he claimed so utterly to abhor he could have nothing more to do with the spirits. They were, he told Dee, to share their wives. Dee did not understand. Share in what sense? he asked – in the sense of ‘carnal use (contrary to the law of the commandment) or of spiritual love and charitable care and unity of minds, for the service of God advancing’?
A vision Kelley then beheld in the stone settled the matter: ‘Upon a scroll, like the edge of a carpet, is written: “I speak of both”.’
‘The one is expressly against the commandment of God: neither can I by any means consent to like of that doctrine,’ Dee cried. ‘Assist me, O Christ. Assist me, O Jesu. Assist me, O Holy Spirit.’
Another inscription appeared, another holy writ:
If I told a man to go and strangle his 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. Nor are sexual organs more hateful to them than the faces of every mortal. Thus it will be: the illegitimate will be joined with the true son. And the east will be united with the west, and the south with the north.
The action was over, leaving Dee in a state of ‘great amazement and grief. He could not believe that angels he had always assumed to be good could propound ‘so unpure a doctrine’.
Kelley had never so much as hinted that his visions were fabricated. But he repeatedly cast doubt on their veracity. He often told Dee that they were produced by devils rather than angels, and even suggested that they might be evidence of Satanic possession.
During their first months together, there were clear signs that Dee, too, entertained suspicions, not as to whether or not the spirits were from God, but whether Kelley saw spirits at all. However, his suspicions were somehow dispelled. Dee became and remained utterly convinced that Kelley was really seeing something. This was partly because Kelley’s performance was so convincing. His very body seemed to be a medium for spiritual communication. Before and during his visions, he often reported physical sensations – pangs, heart palpitations, ‘a great stirring and moving’ of the brains, things running in his head, and his belly being ‘full of fire’. Some encounters even left marks: on one occasion Dee discovered ‘two circles as broad as groats very red’ imprinted on Kelley’s arms where a demon had ‘nipped’ him.2
Today these visions would be perceived as hallucinations with perhaps psychotic or neurological roots, but such conditions were unknown in Dee’s time. There was no concept of an internal subconscious agency or even of a nervous system that could produce such symptoms. They were seen as the product of celestial as well as physical forces at play in a sensitive instrument.
Ultimately, however, Dee’s faith in the actions rested not on the quality of Kelley’s performance, but on the visions themselves. The material he had received may have sometimes been incomprehensible, but it seemed too compelling, too philosophically sophisticated, intricate and elaborate to be invented. It fitted perfectly the patterns he had witnessed through his work and his life: the Nova and comets, the ecclesiastical schisms and bloody wars, the acclamations and denunciations, the ancient texts and new worlds, the arrests, the burnings, the loss of friends and making of enemies, the spying, ciphers and secrets. The world was on the brink. Such an outpouring of spiritual activity was inevitable.
But not this. This idea of sharing wives did not fit at all.
‘Your own reason riseth up against my wisdom,’ Madimi told Dee. ‘Behold, you are become free. Do that which most pleaseth you.’ He had become free. Throughout his career, Dee had struggled to reconcile reason with wisdom, understanding with faith. The angels had apparently provided him with the means of reconciling the two. His faith had delivered the message, his understanding would enable him to make sense of it.
Many years later the kind old crone of Mortlake, Goodwife Faldo, would hail Dee as a great peacemaker. But he could make no peace here. He must choose. ‘Your own reason riseth up against my wisdom. Do that which most pleaseth you.’ It was a test of his faith. Dee had to decide whether it was a divine instruction, which his faith must lead him to believe, or an elaborate deception, as his reason might otherwise conclude.
In undertaking the actions, Dee had ‘offered my soul as a pawn’, as he put it – sold it, in other words, for the gift of divine knowledge. But who was the pawnbroker? Was it God, or Kelley? Angels or demons? Was he a prophet being primed to deliver a divine message, or a philosopher whose selfish yearning for knowledge was driving him to sell not just himself but his own wife to the devil? Was he Enoch, the patriarch? Or was he Faust – whose story was this very year popularised by the publication of Johann Spies’s The History of Dr Faustus, the Notorious Magician and Master of the Black Art?
Dee knew the strong feelings his wife aroused in Kelley. Was the entire episode an invention of Kelley’s, a means of escaping the actions and his skrying duties – or, worse, of fulfilling his wanton lust? ‘Assist me, O Christ! Assist me!’ But no such assistance was or could be given. Dee was alone, and must decide for himself. ‘Behold you are free.’ A lifetime was focused on this decision, like a beam of light projected into a darkened room.
At dinner that evening with Jane and Joanna, Dee mentioned as casually as he could the ‘great grief’ of that day’s actions, ‘the common and indifferent using of matrimonial acts amongst any couple of us four’. Both women thought it strange, and hoped it would prove to have an innocent explanation.
After dinner, Kelley retired to the laboratory and spent four hours alone there. A glass retort bubbled away, distilling wine. The purified alcohol was needed to fuel lamps, experiments and, no doubt, Kelley. The distillation of one spirit seemed to produce another. A creature called Ben a cubit high emerged from the alcoholic fumes and hovered above the still. Ben claimed to be the angel who had led Kelley to the powder. He prophesied the destruction of Elizabeth and England, and an invasion by ‘one of the house of Austria made mighty by the King of Spain his death’ – Rudolf. Furthermore, Francis Garland, who had been sent with his brother Edward to inform Dee of the Russian Tsar’s invitation, was a spy acting for William Cecil. Ben also accused Dee of doing ‘evil’ in requiring ‘proof or testimony now that this last Action was from God Almighty’. Dee should be ‘led prisoner to Rome’ for his lack of faith.
At two in the morning, Kelley emerged from the laboratory and told Dee what he had seen. Dee was sceptical, finding ‘much halting and untruth’ in the report. Dee then went to bed. He found Jane awake, wanting to know what had happened.
‘Jane,’ he said. ‘I see that there is no other remedy, but as hath been said of our cross-matching, so it must needs be done.’
Jane trembled and wept for a quarter of an hour. Dee tried to pacify her, ‘and so, in the fear of God, and in believing of his admonishment, did persuade her’. She resolved ‘to be content for God’s sake and his secret purposes’. Later that night, presumably after many hours spent pondering on what her husband had said, she told him she would do as commanded, but only ‘in one chamber’, so that she could be close to Dee. ‘I trust,’ she added, ‘though I give myself thus to be used, that God will turn me into a stone before he would suffer me, in my obedience, to receive any shame, or inconvenience.’ Later that night they made love.
Two days later, Dee produced a covenant, solemnising the pact, which he wrote out in the book containing the notes of the actions.
We four…do most humbly and heartily thank thee, O Almighty God (our Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier) for all thy mercies and benefits hitherto received, in our persons, and in them that appertain unto us: And at this present, do faithfully and sincerely confess, and acknowledge, that thy profound wisdom in this most new and strange doctrine (among Christians) propounded, commended, and enjoined unto us four only, is above human reason.
Kelley added a disclaimer, saying that he had ‘often and sundry times’ warned Dee to beware of the spirits, and declaring that he would ‘from this day forward meddle no more’ with spirits.3
But only two days later, Kelley meddled. A creature appeared in the stone, surrounded by fire, a man ‘with flaxen hair hanging down upon him’, ‘naked unto his paps’ and splattered with blood. ‘Your unity and knitting together is the end and consummation of the beginning of my harvest,’ he said. ‘For I will not dally with you, but I will be mighty in deed amongst you. And lo, I will shortly open your eyes, and you shall see; and I will say, ARISE, and you shall go out. What I am, I am.’
After the creature had gone, Kelley reported feeling ‘that his body had in it like a fiery heat, even from his breast down unto all his parts, his privities and thighs’.
On 3 May, Dee drew up a new covenant, which he, Kelley, Jane and Joanna all signed. Three days later, as an insurance against demonic contamination, he went with Kelley before the table of practice, which was set up in the castle chapel, and ‘read over the covenant (verbatim) before the Divine Majesty and his holy angels’.
Madimi appeared. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.
‘We are ready,’ Dee replied.
‘It is decided. Make haste. Let everything be in common among you.’
On 20 May, there were still difficulties with the covenant.
‘Behold, I have prepared a banquet for you,’ said a spirit, ‘and have brought you even unto the doors; but because you smell not the feast you disdain to enter.’ The spirit then addressed Dee. ‘He that pawneth his soul for me loseth it not, and he that dieth for me, dieth to eternal life. For I will lead you into the way of knowledge and understanding: and judgement and wisdom shall be upon you, and shall be restored unto you: and you shall grow every day wise and mighty in me.’
The following day, Dee wrote just two words in his diary: ‘Pactum factum’ – pact fulfilled.