John Dee

Elizabeth I's astrologer, the man who coined "British Empire", and a first-rate mathematician who spent his last decades taking dictation from angels through a convicted forger.

Who they were

John Dee (1527–1608 or 1609) was among the most learned men in Elizabethan England: mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, navigator, antiquary, and adviser to the Crown.

He owned the largest private library in England — something like four thousand volumes and manuscripts at a time when university libraries held hundreds — and it functioned as a national research institution.

He is also the clearest case on this site of a genuinely first-rate mind devoting decades to something that produced nothing checkable.

Where they came from

Born in London to a Welsh family, educated at St John's College, Cambridge, and at Louvain, where he studied with Gemma Frisius and Mercator and returned with instruments and continental mathematics.

He advised the Muscovy Company and the voyages seeking the northeast and northwest passages, supplying navigational instruction and charts, and he cast the electional chart for Elizabeth I's coronation date.

His real achievements are substantial. He wrote the Mathematicall Praeface to the first English translation of Euclid (1570), a major argument for the practical value of mathematics addressed to craftsmen and navigators rather than scholars, and one of the important documents of English scientific culture. And he coined the phrase "British Empire", in the course of arguing for a claim to territories in the New World.

At the time, and in his own understanding, none of this was separate from the magic. As the astrology–astronomy split sets out, the categories that make one half of his career respectable were drawn afterwards.

What they taught

From 1582, the angelic conversations. Dee had long wanted direct instruction from higher intelligences, and lacked the ability to scry himself. He engaged a succession of scryers, the last and most consequential being Edward Kelley — a man with a criminal record, who had reportedly been pilloried and had his ears cropped for forgery, and who arrived at Dee's house in 1582.

For seven years Kelley gazed into a crystal or a black obsidian mirror and reported what he saw and heard; Dee wrote it down, meticulously, with dates and conditions. The records survive and run to thousands of pages.

What emerged was the Enochian system: an angelic language with its own alphabet, grammar and substantial vocabulary; a set of complex tables of letters; the "Watchtowers" of the four quarters; and long invocatory Calls. It is one of the strangest documents in European history — a constructed language of considerable internal consistency, dictated letter by letter, often backwards, over years.

They travelled the continent, spending time at the court of Rudolf II in Prague. In 1587 Kelley reported an angelic instruction that the two men should share their wives. Dee, by his own record, was appalled, prayed over it, and complied. The partnership did not long survive it.

Dee returned to England to find his library looted and his instruments stolen. He died in poverty at Mortlake.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the mathematics and navigation were real and important, and that he is a significant figure in English intellectual history independent of the magic.

We can say the records are extraordinarily valuable regardless of what one makes of them. Dee kept the kind of notes a good experimentalist keeps — dates, conditions, exactly what was said, his own doubts — and the result is the most detailed surviving account of Renaissance magical practice as it was actually done. Historians use it as evidence about the period whatever they think about angels.

We can say the obvious explanation is available and is probably right. Kelley was a documented forger with a strong financial incentive, the sole channel of communication, and the only person who saw anything. The wife-swapping instruction is not subtle, and the sequence — Dee's reluctance, Kelley's angelic authority, Dee's compliance — is a recognisable structure that this site describes at length under the guru problem.

We can say the counterweight honestly. The Enochian material's scale and internal consistency are difficult to attribute to improvisation by an uneducated man over seven years, and scholars who have worked through it have generally found it more coherent than a fraud needed to be. That is not evidence of angels. It is evidence that Kelley, whatever else he was, was remarkable.

We can say the influence was long-delayed and enormous. Enochian sat unused for three centuries until the Golden Dawn built it into their system from Dee's manuscripts in the British Museum, and it is now a standard component of Western ceremonial magic.

We cannot say what Dee thought at the end. He was a devout Christian who believed he was in conversation with the angels of God, and he died having received, by any external measure, nothing at all.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading