OK we’re a bit late for this but John Dee was born on the 13th of July, in 1527. Probably. We’re not really sure since things like calendars were up in the air, and the leap year wasn’t quite nailed down yet, but it should be sometime in there. I thought it might be a good time to write up a quick overview and hopefully stoke the interests of people who haven’t caught the Dee bug yet.
Dee is about the final place in history we can pin “magic” and “science” as co-existing. This is really a darn shame since there’s more than a few tricks up Mother Nature’s sleeve. A good example of that is the folk belief where putting things out in the rain will purify them. It’s not just a folk belief, we’ve recently discovered that there’s actual science behind that effect. Science, in Dee’s time, was alchemy.
Alchemy was a mixture of scientific effects and spiritual effects. In The Secrets of Alchemy, the author reviews several alchemical experiments from the perspective of science. The author focuses principally on Europe, but alchemy as a practice can trace its roots back to antiquity. Imagine, for a moment, if you mixed two innocuous powders together, and suddenly putting a spark to it produced a flash and a bang. It would seem like a miracle to the layperson, who’s excitement was mostly confined to slow moving fires and woodworking. However this captures the imaginations of many people around the world that there’s something else out there.
Now let us imagine for a moment that you take a bit of sulfur, which stinks and it’s yellow. It also can be found on the ground and in the washings from burnt coal. Into that you mix some charcoal, hardwoods are best. Also, you pee on the whole mess. In fact you might accidentally make this mixture burning down the local outhouse by accident. Say, if you lit a careless pipe to smoke in there while doing your business to cover up the dreadful smell. What is the result? Gunpowder! We understand the recipe from modernity, and we understand the chemical composition and effects. We are so good at making the stuff that we blow up large quantities of it in celebration. Rewind to Dee’s day, though, and this is magic. Alchemists might look at the fact that this is mostly human waste, and they might surmise that some human energy has been put into the muck. They might notice that the crops grow really well when given manure and sulfur. This further reinforces the idea that there is energy put into that poop. Finally notice that this explosion happened from the chthonic realms. Daemons live in the underworld, and this explosive mix happened from a hole in the earth, and so perhaps it was made with the aid of spirits? Since two of the elements are earthy (solid), and one of them is watery (liquid), then we can surmise that in some cases combining them leads to air (smoke), and explosions (fire).
This is how Dee distinguishes natural magic, which is to say something like the willows making aspirin as a well known folk remedy, with theurgic magic, which would be communing with spirits for making what we think of as potions. There is not a clear “this came first” when it comes to natural magic, especially in Europe, or what we would think of as folk magic or witchcraft. In Dees day, Agrippa’s writings were published as the Three Books of Occult Philosophy (see also the Tyson version as being excellent), and Agrippa had even gone so far as to make tables of things which Dee relied on heavily. The Three Books have classifications of natural orders – a three leaf clover, for instance, is ruled by the number three for the number of its leaves, but also the color green. For the ancients, green and yellow were about the same color, although they would have said the sun was green for the most part and yellow was reserved for the colors of onions – sort of a papery white. Reproducing a page from the Tyson version of Three Books of Occult Philosophy:
Well, there’s most of a clue, why is a four leaf clover considered lucky? The folky answer is simply that it’s rare. It is lucky to find one so possessing something preserves that luck. However that wouldn’t have satisfied Dee. Dee would have noticed that under certain circumstances that the sun produced four “sun dogs”. Those sun dogs would have lined up with the four leaf clover, being governed by “four”, and the fact that the clover was green, and a plant. All this solary goodness would have impressed upon Dee that the four leaf clover not only was fortunate, being related to the sun, but also had all the properties generally observed with solary things.
Dee also knew of the writings of the Greeks, and the Platonists. Dee’s world is not merely made up of comparing the leaves on plants with the numbers we all know from the Tarot. Dee would have read the Greek classics in his time at the University of Cambridge. The tetractys makes an appearance in Agrippa (Tyson edition, pp 252-253). Dee uses this when composing his Monad:
ALTHOUGH THE ONENESS OF THE POINT OF A CHIRECK REMAINS MOTIONLESS AT THE APEX, it is still not contrary of us to embrace a trinity of consubstantial monads, which appear to the ONENESS OF THE IOD ITSELF; THAT TRINITY BEING FORMED FROM ONE STRAIGHT LINE AND TWO DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE CIRCUMFERENCE.
SACRED SYMBOL OF ONENESS pp 4-5
This is really the foundation of Dee’s thought, and the Monad is the work he is most proud of. He would gift it to Kings and noblemen. Importantly, Dee does not start at Natural Philosophy, he enters the magical stage with a college education and a spiritual view shaped by Christianity but not beholden to it. For Dee, the pendulum didn’t start at the observation of the natural world, but what he knew from history and his college theological training. Cambridge shaped Dee’s efforts and their culture made a positive impact. Back 500 and some change years ago, it was certainly possible to know literally everything about a topic. A Summa Theologica was something which would have been in everyone’s library who was interested in theology, and it would have been possible, if not encouraged, to actually commit it to memory. The Summa Theologica is everything Europe knew about theology with respect to Christian theology. Where does a college educated man like Dee go after knowing everything about theology? For Dee, it was no longer sufficient to study scripture, he sought direct contact with the spirits and the divine.
This departure from education is what makes Dee interesting. At the time (1500 to 1600AD), hermeticism had gripped the European intelligentsia but it had not yet been formalized within broad organizational structures like Freemasonry (1717AD). Grimoires from the Middle East were starting to become available in book form, as were books of charms and magic from Ireland and Scotland. The Greek material was always present, but the spice and tea trade brought books from Persia to France, where they were translated into French, and from there into English. It’s important to remember that these things didn’t just start existing when they were committed to paper – these are things which persisted through time and were deemed worthy enough to be written on an expensive medium. Consider something we take for granted: paper. In grimoires, it’s a common charge to use virgin parchment, or even vellum. Back in the 1500s, both paper and vellum were frequently re-used by washing the ink off. Today recycled paper is the norm. In the 1500s, washing was typical. The grimoires knew about the washing, and required the use of freshly made paper and vellum. The same for wax: only fresh wax was permitted for the use of magic candles.
If you want to start a fight in the grimoire community – ask if “virgin wax” means “wax that was never used as a candle or seal” or if it means “before the bees have had a chance to use it”. After becoming a beekeeper, I am in the latter camp.
It’s likely that Dee comes into practicing magic the same way jokingly accuse people of being interested in witchcraft after watching The Craft. Dee is arrested early on for the crime of calculating. In 1555 Dee had cast horoscopes of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth. This attracted a religious inquiry, but Dee explained how calculating the path of the stars was merely mathematics. Nevermind the entire idea of stars governing someone’s path through life – math or no. The charges were raised to Treason until they were dropped, and the examination from Bonner earned him a friend with a mystic Christian view. Bonner himself was caught between mysticism and Christianity (a largely political force in Europe), and would eventually be sentenced to prison for his beliefs. Ironically the Protestants campaigned for his release more loudly than his Catholic friends. Once Dee is exonerated, he feels encouraged to tour Europe, and returns with “astrological equipment” per his shipping manifest.
I speculate that the “astrological equipment” Dee brings back is really a collection of magical tools. Given the overlap of science and magic in the era, and Dee’s approach to magic, and the books Dee had such as the material that would become the Picatrix and The Sworne Book, the tools themselves would have been used for astrological magic. Dee immediately applies himself to the creation of a Summa Theologica, but with magic. Dee’s work would eventually be carried on by Dr Rudd and his attempt to reconcile even more magic into a coherent Summa Magica.
Enochian itself gets discussed to death in the Llewellyn’s catalogue, but I want to discuss where there’s practical magic performed by Dee and Kelley. Kelley himself encourages Dee to keep the magic grounded. While Dee is an intellectual, and a philosopher, and always looking at the stars, it is Edward Kelley who takes a keen interest in what they would think of as demonology. Demons, in Enochian, aren’t the Devil and Satan but rather seen more like blind, primitive machines of the universe. This means that they are not intrinsically evil, but something like “the devil gives coin, the angels give you a mine”. The Devil, in this case, would have represented simple greed.
Kelley himself has his ears cropped and wears a floppy hat, as a result of fortunetelling. His procedure was to take the hat off, peer deeply into it, and prognosticate. Kelley also had unrestricted access to Dee’s library, and it is a popular idea to accuse Kelley of being the source of the “wicked spirits” in Dee’s work. The reality is that Dee himself doesn’t maintain much in terms of magical cleanliness in the early work, and oftentimes simply doesn’t follow instructions. While Kelley is working through the content in the Goetia or other magical books, Dee is usually found fishing. This comes to a head when Dee starts running out of money, and starts resorting to treasure spirits. The fact that this is even in Dee’s playbook I think is a tell – both Dee and Kelley are believers in magic, and in spirits, but maybe not in Enochian spirits.
Dee’s earliest turn to “low magic” comes when he’s seeking healing for Jane Dee: “Sept. 10th, my dream of being naked, and my skyn all overwrowght with work like some kinde of tuft mockado, with crosses blew and red; and on my left arme, abowt the arme, in a wreath, this word I red – sine me nihil potestis facere: and another the same night of Mr. Secretary Walsingham, Mr. Candish, and myself” (ref). Mockado is conspicuous because it’s not native to England, but would later show up as one of the main exports of the colonies as an inferior fabric. This might have been something Dee would have been in possession of, but much more likely it was a nod towards the establishment of the colonies in the new world.
Another example of functional low magic occurs late with the sinking of the Spanish Armada. Dee knows the armada is coming, but unlike the low magic before of simply wrapping the body in a specific cloth with specific colors and patterns, Dee literally builds the planet. After predicting that the English navy should not engage the Spanish, again by calculation, Dee then conspires to summon a storm. The exact phrase seen in accounts of the storm are that “God blew and they were scattered“. From what amounts to thirdhand accounts – we suspect that Dee took a globe (“a brasse vessel”) and walnut hulls, filled the half-globe with water and floated the walnut hulls on the water. My exposition is that the water would have been seawater, and it is likely the brass bowl had a map of the English channel engraved on it. Walnut is straightforward as hardwoods were the preferred material of ships. What happens in ritual was not recorded (or lost) but given how well realized this ritual was compared to the simple “dreaming” at the beginning of Dee’s career – I am sure that Dee summoned his spirits and blew the Spanish ships out of the channel. Dee had no love for the Spanish, and the political agents of the Spanish crown cause problems for Dee as he notes in his diary. Before the sinking of the Armada, the Spanish monarchy has identified Dee as the Queen’s sorcerer, and sends an ambassador to attempt to bribe him away.
If you’re interested in learning more about Dee, and his philosophy, and the shady dealings of “Edward Kelley” and the political games that ensued, I would encourage you to seek out historical sources. Skinner’s second edition of John Dees diaries is an excellent read. The same for Skinner’s treatment of the Great Table. Finally Peterson’s translation of the Five Books of Mystery rounds out the Dee basic reading list. If you enjoy history, philosophy, and political intrigue, I very much encourage you to pick up those copies.
Ceremonial Magick Musings 