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John Dee

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   A sixteenth century portrait of John Dee, artist unknown. According to
   Charlotte Fell Smith, this portrait was painted when Dee was 67. It
   belonged to his grandson Rowland Dee and later to Elias Ashmole, who
   left it to Oxford University.
   Enlarge
   A sixteenth century portrait of John Dee, artist unknown. According to
   Charlotte Fell Smith, this portrait was painted when Dee was 67. It
   belonged to his grandson Rowland Dee and later to Elias Ashmole, who
   left it to Oxford University.

   John Dee ( July 13, 1527- 1608) was a noted British mathematician,
   astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultist, and consultant to Queen
   Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination,
   and Hermetic philosophy.

   Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were
   becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his time, he
   had lectured to crowded halls at the University of Paris when still in
   his early twenties. He was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a
   respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, having trained
   many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery (he
   coined the term "British Empire"). At the same time, he immersed
   himself deeply in magic and Hermetic philosophy, devoting the last
   third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits. For Dee, as
   with many of his contemporaries, these activities were not
   contradictory, but particular aspects of a consistent world-view.

Biography

Early life

   Dee was born in Tower Ward, London to a Welsh family, whose surname
   derived from the Welsh du ("black"). His father Roland was a mercer and
   minor courtier. Dee attended the Chelmsford Chantry School (now King
   Edward VI Grammar School (Chelmsford)), 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 travelled in Europe, studying at Leuven and Brussels
   and lecturing in Paris on Euclid. He studied with Gemma Frisius and
   became a close friend of the cartographer Gerardus Mercator, returning
   to England with an important collection of mathematical and
   astronomical instruments. In 1552, he met Gerolamo Cardano in London:
   during their acquaintance they investigated a perpetual motion machine
   as well as a gem purported to have magical properties.

   Dee was offered a readership in mathematics at Oxford in 1554, which he
   declined; he was occupied with writing and perhaps hoping for a better
   position at court. In 1555, Dee became a member of the Worshipful
   Company of Mercers, as his father had, through the company's system of
   patrimony.

   That same year, 1555, he 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 was turned over to the reactionary
   Catholic Bishop Bonner for religious examination. His strong and
   lifelong penchant for secrecy perhaps worsening matters, this entire
   episode was only the most dramatic in a series of attacks and slanders
   that would dog Dee through his life. Clearing his name yet again, he
   soon became a close associate of Bonner.

   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, but his proposal was not taken up. Instead, he
   expanded his personal library at his house in Mortlake, tirelessly
   acquiring books and manuscripts in England and on the European
   Continent. Dee's library, a centre of learning outside the
   universities, became the greatest in England and attracted many
   scholars.

   When Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, Dee became her trusted advisor
   on astrological and scientific matters, choosing Elizabeth's coronation
   date himself. From the 1550s through the 1570s, he served as an advisor
   to England's voyages of discovery, providing technical assistance in
   navigation and ideological backing in the creation of a "British
   Empire", and was the first to use that term. In 1577, Dee published
   General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of
   Navigation, a work that set out his vision of a maritime empire and
   asserted English territorial claims on the New World. Dee was
   acquainted with Humphrey Gilbert and was close to Sir Philip Sidney and
   his circle.
   Dee's glyph, whose meaning he explained in Monas Hieroglyphica.
   Dee's glyph, whose meaning he explained in Monas Hieroglyphica.

   In 1564, Dee wrote the Hermetic work Monas Hieroglyphica ("The
   Hieroglyphic Monad"), an exhaustive Cabalistic interpretation of a
   glyph of his 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.

   He published a "Mathematical Preface" to Henry Billingsley's English
   translation of Euclid's Elements in 1570, arguing the central
   importance of mathematics and outlining mathematics' influence on the
   other arts and sciences. Intended for an audience outside the
   universities, it proved to be Dee's most widely influential and
   frequently reprinted work.

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 angels 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 (then going under the name of Edward Talbot), who impressed him
   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, always after periods of purification, prayer
   and fasting. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could bring 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.) Dee
   maintained that the angels laboriously dictated several books to him
   this way, some in a special angelic or Enochian language.

   In 1583, Dee met the visiting Polish nobleman Albert Łaski, who invited
   the Englishman 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, but Łaski
   proved to be bankrupt and out of favour in his own country. Dee and
   Kelley began a nomadic life in Central Europe, but they continued their
   spiritual conferences, which Dee recorded meticulously. He 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 the two men 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 and 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. He sought support from
   Elizabeth, who finally made him warden of Christ's College, Manchester
   (now Manchester Grammar School) in 1592. However, he could not exert
   much control over the Fellows, who despised or cheated him. Early in
   his tenure, he was consulted on the demonic possession of seven
   children, but took little interest in the matter, although he did allow
   those involved to consult his still extensive library. He left
   Manchester in 1605 to return to London. 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, forced to sell off various of his possessions to support
   himself and his daughter, Katherine, who cared for him until the end.
   He died in Mortlake late in 1608 or early 1609 aged 82 (there are no
   extant records of the exact date as both the parish registers and Dee's
   gravestone are missing).

Personal life

   Dee was married twice and had eight children. Details of his first
   marriage are sketchy, but is likely to have been from 1565 to his
   wife's death in around 1576. From 1577 to 1601 Dee kept a meticulous
   diary. In 1578 he married the twenty-three year old Jane Fromond (Dee
   was fifty-one at the time). She was to be the wife that Kelley claimed
   Uriel had demanded that he and Dee share, and although Dee complied for
   a while this eventually caused the the two men to part company. Jane
   died during the plague in Manchester in 1605, along with a number of
   his children: Theodore is known to have died in Manchester, but
   although no records exist for his daughters Madinia, Frances and
   Margaret after this time, Dee had by this time ceased keeping his
   diary. His eldest son was Arthur Dee, about whom Dee wrote a letter to
   his headmaster at Westminster School which echos the worries of
   boarding school parents in every century; Arthur 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."

Achievements

Thought

   Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply
   influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were
   pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that number was the basis of
   all things and the key to knowledge, that God's creation was an act of
   numbering. From Hermeticism, he drew the belief that man had the
   potential for divine power, and he believed this divine power could be
   exercised through mathematics. His cabalistic angel magic (which was
   heavily numerological) and his work on practical mathematics
   (navigation, for example) were simply the exalted and mundane ends of
   the same spectrum, not the antithetical activities many would see them
   as today. His ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world
   religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and
   Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the
   ancients.

Reputation and significance

   About ten years after Dee's death, the antiquarian Robert Cotton
   purchased land around Dee's house and began digging 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 their author, 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 and a half centuries, of Dee
   as a dupe and deluded fanatic.

   Around the same time the True and Faithful Relation was published,
   members of the Rosicrucian movement claimed Dee as one of their number.
   There is doubt, however, that an organized Rosicrucian movement existed
   during Dee's lifetime, and no evidence that he ever belonged to any
   secret fraternity. Dee's reputation as a magician and the vivid story
   of his association with Edward Kelley have made him a seemingly
   irresistible figure to fabulists, writers of horror stories and
   latter-day magicians. The accretion of false and often fanciful
   information about Dee often obscures the facts of his life, remarkable
   as they are in themselves.

   A re-evaluation of Dee's character and significance came in the 20th
   century, largely as a result of the work of the historian Frances
   Yates, who brought a new focus on the role of magic in the Renaissance
   and the development of modern science. As a result of this
   re-evaluation, Dee is now viewed as a serious scholar and appreciated
   as one of the most learned men of his day.

   His personal library at Mortlake was the largest in the country, and
   was considered one of the finest in Europe, perhaps second only to that
   of de Thou. As well as being an astrological, scientific and
   geographical advisor to Elizabeth and her court, he was an early
   advocate of the colonization of North America and a 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. He developed new instruments
   as well as special navigational techniques for use in polar regions.
   Dee served as an advisor to the English voyages of discovery, and
   personally selected pilots and trained them in navigation.

   He believed that mathematics (which he understood mystically) was
   central to the progress of human learning. The centrality of
   mathematics to Dee's vision makes him to that extent more modern than
   Francis Bacon, though some scholars believe Bacon purposely downplayed
   mathematics in the anti-occult atmosphere of the reign of James I. It
   should be noted, though, that Dee's understanding of the role of
   mathematics is radically different from our contemporary view.

   Dee's promotion of mathematics outside the universities was an enduring
   practical achievement. His "Mathematical Preface" to Euclid was meant
   to promote the study and application of mathematics by those without a
   university education, and was very popular and influential among the
   "mecanicians": the new and growing class of technical craftsmen and
   artisans. Dee's preface included demonstrations of mathematical
   principles that readers could perform themselves.

   Dee was a friend of Tycho Brahe and was familiar with the work of
   Copernicus. Many of his 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.

   He has often been associated with the Voynich Manuscript. Wilfrid M.
   Voynich, who bought the manuscript in 1912, suggested that Dee may have
   owned the manuscript and sold it to Rudolph II. Dee's contacts with
   Rudolph were far less extensive than had previously been thought,
   however, and Dee's diaries show no evidence of the sale. Dee was,
   however, known to have possessed a copy of the Book of Soyga, another
   enciphered book.

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), which
       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; possibly the
       one owned by Dee, but the provenance of this object is less certain
       than that of the others.

   In December 2004, both a shew stone (a stone used for scrying) formerly
   belonging to Dee and a mid-1600s explanation of its use written by
   Nicholas Culpeper were stolen from the Science Museum in London; they
   were recovered shortly afterwards.
   John Dee and Edward Kelley evoking a spirit.
   Enlarge
   John Dee and Edward Kelley evoking a spirit.

Dee in fiction

   Dee has become a popular figure in fictional works, particularly
   fiction or fantasy set during his lifetime or which dealing with magic
   or the occult. William Shakespeare may have modelled the character of
   Prospero in The Tempest on Dee; H. P. Lovecraft's short story " The
   Dunwich Horror" ( 1929) credits Dee with translating the Necronomicon
   into English; and John Crowley's sequence of novels Ægypt includes Dee,
   Edward Kelley, and Giordano Bruno as characters. In Umberto Eco's book
   Foucault's Pendulum, Dee is presented as a central character in the
   "Plan" (the overall conspiracy that the book is concerned with) and in
   one of the main character (Belbo)'s fictions concerning it. A series of
   books by Armin Shimerman fictionalizes Dee's life by providing a basis
   in science fiction for his supposed magic, and he is a major character
   in Diana Redmond's time-travel children's book Joshua Cross & the
   Queen's Conjuror (2004).

   Dee is a major character in various fantasy novels set in Elizabethan
   England, such as Robin Jarvis's novel Deathscent. Lisa Goldstein's
   novel The Alchemist's Door features Dee as the main character, who
   works with Rabbi Judah Loew, a mystic who creates a golem to defend
   Prague's Jewish Quarter by preventing the door to the spirit world from
   opening and unleashing demons. Dee's assistant Edward Kelley appears in
   the novel as a villian.

   He appears as a character in various film, television and radio
   productions, such as Derek Jarman's Jubilee; as the father of the
   character Ella in the Sky One TV series, Hex; and in the Doctor Who
   audio drama A Storm of Angels.

   John Dee is the given name of the DC Comics supervillain Doctor
   Destiny, who, in the spirit of his namesake, uses both magic and
   science together to alter, control, and manifest dreams.

   Dee also appears, more or less, as himself in The Science of Discworld
   2, by Ian Stewart, John Cohen and Terry Pratchett.
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