John Dee
John Dee (July 13, 1527–1608 or 1609) was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer and consultant to Elizabeth I. He was also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy.
In Renaissance fashion, Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic. On one hand, he was an early and important promoter of mathematics, especially to those outside the universities. He was also one of the leading experts in navigation, training many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery. On the other hand, Dee immersed himself deeply in Christian angel-magic and Hermetic philosophy, devoting the last third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits. For Dee, as for many of his contemporaries, these activities were not contradictory, but fit into a consistent world-view.
Biography
Early life
Dee was born in London of a Welsh family, the surname deriving from the Welsh du ("black"). Dee's father was a merchant and minor courtier. Dee attended chantry school in Essex, then, from 1543 to 1546, St. John's College, Cambridge. His great abilities were recognized, and he was made a founding fellow of Trinity College. In the late 1540s and early 1550s, he traveled in Europe, studying at Louvain and Brussels and lecturing in Paris on Euclid. He studied with Gemma Frisius and became a close friend of the cartographer Gerardus Mercator. He returned to England with and important collection of mathematical and astronomical instruments.
Dee was offered a readership in mathematics at Oxford in 1554, but he declined; he was dissatisfied with the emphasis on rhetoric and grammar over philosophy and science in the English universities.
In 1555, Dee was arrested and charged with "calculating" for having cast horoscopes of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth. The charges were expanded to treason against Mary. Dee appeared in the Star Chamber and exonerated himself, but instead of being freed, Dee was turned over to the reactionary Catholic Bishop Bonner for religious examination. Again Dee cleared himself; indeed, he soon became a close associate of Bonner's. This entire episode was only the most dramatic in the series of attacks and slanders that would dog Dee through his life. Dee's strong and lifelong penchant for secrecy may have made matters worse.
Dee presented Queen Mary with a visionary plan for the preservation of old books, manuscripts and records and the founding of a national library in 1556. His proposal was not taken up. Instead, he built up his personal library at his house in Mortlake, tirelessly acquiring books and manuscripts in England and the Continent. Dee's library became the greatest in England, attracting scholars and becoming a center of learning outside the universities.
Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, and Dee became her trusted advisor on astrological and scientific matters. Dee himself chose the date for Elizabeth's coronation ceremony. From the 1550s through the 1570s, Dee served as an advisor to England's voyages of discovery, providing technical assistance in navigation and ideological backing for the creation of a British Empire. (Dee was the first to use the term.) Dee was acquainted with Humphrey Gilbert and was close to Sir Philip Sidney and his circle.
In 1564, Dee wrote the Hermetic work Monas Hieroglyphica (the Hieroglyphic Monad), an exhaustive Cabalistic interpretation of a glyph of Dee's own design, meant to express the mystical unity of all creation. This work was highly valued by many of Dee's contemporaries, but the loss of the secret oral tradition of Dee's milieu makes the work difficult to interpret today.
Dee published a "Mathematical Preface" to Henry Billingsley's English translation of Euclid's Elements in 1570. It argued for the central importance of mathematics and outlined the way mathematics touched the other arts and sciences. It was intended for an audience outside the universities, and proved to be Dee's most widely influential work. It was reprinted frequently.
Later life
By the early 1580s, Dee was growing dissatisfied with his progress in learning the secrets of nature and with his own lack of influence and recognition. He began to turn towards the supernatural as a means to acquire knowledge. Specifically, he sought to contact angles through the use of a "scryer" or crystal-gazer, who would act as an intermediary between Dee and the angels.
Dee's first attempts were not satisfactory, but in 1582 he met Edward Kelley, who impressed Dee greatly with his abilities. Dee took Kelley into his service and began to devote all his energies to his supernatural pursuits. These "spiritual conferences" or "actions" were conducted with an air of intense Christian piety. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could brink to mankind. (The character of Kelley is harder to assess: some have concluded that he acted with complete cynicism, but delusion or self-deception are not out of the question. Kelley's "output" is remarkable for its sheer mass, its intricacy and its vividness.) The angels laboriously dictated several books to Dee this way, some in a special angelic or Enochian language.
In 1583, Dee met the visiting Polish nobleman Albert Laski, who invited Dee to accompany him on his return to Poland. With some prompting by the angels, Dee was persuaded to go. Dee, Kelley and their families left for the Continent in September, 1583. Laski proved to be bankrupt and out of favor in his own country. Dee and Kelley began a nomadic life in Central Europe, but they continued their spiritual conferences, which Dee recorded meticulously. Dee had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II and King Stephen of Poland in which he chided them for their ungodliness and attempted to convince them of the importance of his angelic communications. He was not taken up by either monarch.
During a spiritual conference in Bohemia in 1587, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered that Dee and Kelley should share their wives. Kelley, who by that time was becoming a prominent alchemist, and was much more sought-after than Dee, may have wished to use this as a way to end the spiritual conferences. The order caused Dee great anguish, but he did not doubt its genuineness. Dee apparently allowed it to go forward, but broke off the conferences immediately afterwards and did not see Kelley again. Dee returned to England in 1589.
Final years
Dee returned to Mortlake after six years to find his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Dee sought support from Elizabeth, who finally made him warden of Christ's College in Manchester in 1592. Dee, who by now was widely reviled as an evil magician, could not exert much control over the Fellows, who despised him. Dee left Manchester in 1605, By that time Elizabeth was dead, and James I, unsympathetic to anything related to the supernatural, provided no help. Dee spent his final years in poverty at Mortlake, where he died in late 1608 or early 1609 (the parish registers and Dee's gravestone are missing).
Reputation and significance
About ten years after Dee's death, the antiquarian Robert Cotton began digging in fields around Dee's house in search of papers and artifacts. He discovered several manuscripts, mainly records of Dee's angelic communications. Cotton's son gave these manuscripts to the scholar Méric Casaubon, who published them in 1659, together with a long introduction critical of Dee as A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their Reignes) and some spirits. As the first public revelation of Dee's spiritual conferences, the book was extremely popular and sold quickly. Casaubon, who believed in the reality of spirits, argued in his introduction that Dee was acting as the unwitting tool of evil spirits when he believed he was communicating with angels. This book is largely responsible for the image, prevalent for the following two centuries, of Dee as a dupe and deluded fanatic.
By the early twentieth century there was a reevaluation. Dee was, in fact, a serious scholar and one of the most learned men in England. His personal library at Mortlake was the largest in the country, and was considered one of the finest in Europe. Dee was an astrological and scientific advisor to Elizabeth and her court. He was an early advocate of the colonization of North America and an early visionary of a British Empire stretching across the North Atlantic.
Dee promoted the sciences of navigation and cartography. He studied closely with Gerardus Mercator, and he owned an important collection of maps, globes and astronomical instruments. Dee was an advisor to the English voyages of discovery, and personally selected pilots and trained them in navigation.
He believed that mathematics (at that time never far from mysticism) was central to the progress of human learning. (The centrality of mathematics to Dee's vision makes him to that extent more modern than Bacon, though some scholars believe Bacon purposely downplayed mathematics in the anti-occult atmosphere of the reign of James I.) His "Mathematical Preface" to Euclid was meant to promote the study and application of mathematics outside the universities, and was very popular among the "mecanicians," the new and growing class of technical craftsmen and artisans.
Dee was a friend of Tycho Brahe and was aware of the work of Copernicus earlier than most. Many of Dee's astronomical calculations were based on Copernican assumptions, but he never openly espoused the heliocentric theory. Dee applied Copernican theory to the problem of calendar reform. His sound recommendations were not accepted, however, for political reasons.
Personal life
He was married three times and had eight children. His eldest son was Arthur Dee, who was also an alchemist and hermetic author. John Aubrey gives the following description of Dee: "He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist's gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit.... A very fair, clear sanguine complexion... a long beard as white as milk. A very handsome man."
Artifacts
The British Museum holds several items once owned by Dee and associated with the spiritual conferences:
- Dee's Speculum or Mirror (an obsidian Aztec cult object in the shape of a hand-mirror, brought to Europe in the late 1520s). This item was once owned by Horace Walpole.
- The small wax seals used to support the legs of Dee's "table of practice" (the table at which the scrying was performed).
- The large, elaborately-decorated wax "Seal of God," used to support the "shew-stone," the crystal ball used for scrying.
- A gold amulet engraved with a representation of one of Kelley's visions.
- A crystal globe, six centimeters in diameter. This item remained unnoticed for many years in the mineral collection; it likely was the one owned by Dee, but the provenance of this object is less certain than that of the others.
Fictional books about Dee
Peter Ackroyd's novel The House of Doctor Dee (1994) tells the story of a man who inherits a house previously inhabited by Dee; the story of Dee becomes woven with that of the contemporary owner. ISBN 0140171177
A series of books by Armin Shimerman fictionalizes Dee's life by providing a science fictional basis for his supposed magic.
The Queen's Fool (2004), a novel by Philippa Gregory, is a fictionalized account of the 1550s that includes John Dee as a minor character.
References
- Calder, I.R.F. (1952). "John Dee Studied as an English Neo-Platonist." University of London Dissertation. Available online.
- French, Peter J. (1972). John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Smith, Charlotte Fell (1909). John Dee: 1527 - 1608. London: Constable and Company. Available online.
- Woolley, Benjamin (2001). The Queen's Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
External link
- The J.W. Hamilton-Jones translation of Monas Hieroglyphica from Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica