by J H Brennan
A veritable orgy of spirit communication began, with Kelley as its medium. Following the initial success with the crystal, Dee and Kelley’s first full-scale experiment took place on November 21, 1582. The result was an appearance of a spirit named King Camara who told Kelley they needed a particular type of “most excellent” sanctified stone to ensure their success. The spirit promised they would have it forthwith. Kelley looked toward the study window and reported the presence of a smallish angel who was offering Dee a bright, clear, glistening jewel about the size of an egg. Camara commanded Dee to go and take it. Dee, who could see nothing of the stone, the angel, or Camara, obediently walked toward the window. When he was about two feet from where the stone was supposed to be, he noticed a shadow on the ground. He reached down and found a crystal. “Keep it sincerely,” the spirit Camara instructed. “Let no mortal hand touch it but thine own. Praise God.”6
A spirit evocation in process. The conjurers within the magic circle are Dr. John Dee and (possibly) his medium Edward Kelley.
This apport, as it would be called in Spiritualist circles, was the closest Dee ever came to the physical materialization of something from the spirit world, and it is all too easy to imagine that the rascally Kelley may have left it on the floor for him to find. Later séances concentrated largely on philosophical discussions with the spirits, and these would have been even easier for Kelley to fake. When we learn that the angels eventually instructed the pair that they should “hold their wives in common” it is difficult to repress the conclusion that Dee, for all his learning, lacked the common sense to protect himself against the machinations of an obvious scoundrel. However, there are problems with any suggestion that Kelley simply made up his conversations with the angels.
From notes in his spiritual diaries,7 it is clear that Dee relied heavily on Agrippa’s work in constructing the rituals he hoped would persuade the blessed angels of God to visit his study.8 Dee also owned a manuscript copy of the thirteenth-century Sworn Book of Honorius,9 which contains the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, a complex symbol used in evocation. But as his work with Kelley progressed, Kelley’s visionary angels gave instructions for the creation of equipment and formulas that were even more complex. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series of séances throughout June 1583 during which an angel called Ave dictated a collection of Calls or evocations to the “Watchtowers of the Universe.”
On angelic instructions, the two magicians created more than a hundred large tablets, each measuring about forty-nine by forty-nine inches, filled with a grid pattern of letters. When contact was made, Kelley typically reported sight of the angel in a crystal, along with the angel’s own copies of the tablets. Using a wand, the angel would then point to certain letters on the tablets. Kelley would call out their position. Dee would then locate the letter in the same position in his tablet and write it down, gradually building up a written evocation. As a further complication, the Calls had to be dictated backward so their power would not be accidentally unleashed.10 The result of such a system should have been gibberish, but it was not. As the Victorian students of the Golden Dawn later discovered, the Calls represented “a true language … [with] … syntax and grammar of its own and the invocations … are not mere strings of words, but sentences which can be translated, not simply transliterated into English.”11 It is (just) possible Kelley invented it, for artificial languages have certainly been created: Esperanto is a modern example. But it would have required a massive investment of time and effort, and since he was by then Dee’s constant companion, it is difficult to imagine how he could have managed the work without arousing Dee’s suspicions. Furthermore, having invented an entire language, Kelley would then have had to memorize the Calls—there are forty-eight of them—so perfectly that he was able to dictate them backward, letter by letter. If nothing else, the Calls suggest there was something going on at Dee’s séances other than tricks played on a gullible old man.
But if Kelley seems to have shown some genuine mediumship, relations between the two were far from placid. Despite his marriage to a local girl, Kelley found it difficult to settle down and was forever sneaking off to London taverns and brothels. The spirits frequently denounced him to his employer, but Dee put up with it—and with Kelley’s bad temper—because he badly needed a psychic.
The year Kelley joined him, Dee had another of his own isolated visions. He saw an angel floating outside his window holding an egg-shaped crystal. The archangel Michael appeared and commanded the doctor to take this gift and use it. Although the crystal is today displayed in the British Museum, most historians dismiss the story of its origin. But whether or not we feel the communications were genuine, Dee certainly believed in them.
It was a time of miracles and much soul-searching. Historians who consider Kelley a charlatan ignore the many indications of his mediumistic makeup. As such, he was prey to doubts. In Kraków, he had already told Dee bluntly that their “teachers” were deluders who had wasted their time for years. Later, Dee was to record, “There happened a great storm or temptation of E.K. of doubting and misliking our Instructors and their doings and of contemning and condemning any thing that I knew or could do. I bare all things patiently for God his sake.”
But Kelley’s problem was whether the spirits were good or evil, not whether they actually existed. He had little enough doubt on this point at the best of times, and less still when one of the spirits revealed a map of the world that he later found to agree with the mystical geography outlined by Cornelius Agrippa. The event shook him so much, he decided to ask the evil spirits of his black magical days to help him escape but then had a change of heart and confessed the whole thing to Dee instead. Nevertheless, he continued to question the validity of the messages they were receiving. Dee had no such doubts, largely, it appears, because the language of the spirits was pious enough for a sermon. But the content often concerned temporal matters. The spirits wished the map of Europe altered. They required some states changed, others destroyed altogether. There can be little doubt that Dee used every ounce of his influence to have these requests made political reality.
While Dee was concerned with changing the world, Kelley had his own problems. The archangel Gabriel appeared in the crystal to order him to burn his magical books. Kelley grudgingly compromised by burying them a week later. The spirits seemed to take this as a moral victory, for they pressured Dee into burning his books on April 10, 1586 (or, rather, having Kelley burn them for him). While the pair were with Count Rosenberg on April 30, however, all the volumes were miraculously restored intact. Those of a suspicious disposition might see the hand of Kelley in this miracle.
Despite lip service to the spiritual principles of his employer and apparently genuine, if brief, periods of conversion, Kelley generally labored under the weight of an old obsession: how to persuade the spirits to bring him treasure, or at the very least show him how to manufacture gold. Occasionally, desperation would drive Dee in the same direction, but all that he got were promises. When he pressed the matter too far, presumably by pointing out that he could not wait forever, Gabriel snapped back: “To talke with God for money is a folly; to talke with God for mercy is great wisdom. Silver and gold I give not, but my blessing is above the substance of the earth.” Kelley became so upset by this that he refused to scry and Dee’s young son Arthur was pressed into service as a medium. He saw lions, men with crowns, and various other visions but heard no voices. There was nothing else for it. Kelley had to start again.
Kelley stared into the crystal, saw the spirit-child Madimi, and received the revelation that he and Dr. Dee should henceforth “share all things in common,” including their wives. It took Kelley some time and many protestations before he could bring himself to pass the message on. When he did, Jane Dee, who had viewed him with loathing from the day they met, was understandably upset. For a quarter of an hour she lay on the floor, trembling and weeping, after which she “burst forth into a fury of anger.” John Dee did not take mu
ch to the suggestion either and went so far as rebuking the spirit for delivering unfitting advice. But he seems to have gotten used to the idea, for on May 3, 1587, the four people concerned signed a document binding themselves to angelic commandments. Even so, the women were not entirely happy and demanded a further scrying session to clarify the question of who should sleep with whom. Kelley piously refused. The original communication had to stand.
Regrettably, there is no record of how the experiment in partner-swapping went, but the Kelleys parted from the Dees soon after. Whether this was due to the strain of the situation or simply to Kelley’s refusal to scry, is a matter of conjecture. On parting with his learned employer, Kelley drifted back into alchemy, and even took up scrying again, apparently with some success, for his reputation grew. But he was unable to control his worst instincts, and he eventually fell foul of the law and died in prison.
Dee returned to England, where he was received by the queen. But despite this initial indication of royal favor, he was actually embarking on a downward slide toward the end of his career. Vandals had broken into his Mortlake home and ransacked it, destroying many of his books and astronomical instruments. He petitioned the queen for employment but received nothing until 1595, when he was granted the wardenship of Christ College, Manchester. Judging by his records, it was not a post he particularly enjoyed. The city must have lost whatever little appeal it had for him when his wife died there of the plague.
He remained true to his occult interests, however, writing voluminously and keeping a record of his dreams. He even employed another scryer, Bartholomew Hickman. But this individual seems only to have told him what he wanted to hear, passing on messages from the archangel Raphael that he was on the point of discovering great secrets. Despite the promise, he never did. He died quietly at Mortlake in the fifth year of the reign of James I, a sovereign who had little time for magicians or their spirits.
In his public persona, Dr. John Dee strove hard to appear as a mathematician, scholar, and astrologer. Rather more discreetly, he was, as one academic study concluded, “one of a line of philosopher-magicians that stemmed from Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.”12 But while the Renaissance magic of Dr. Dee was both sophisticated and erudite, there was never a complete break with medieval practice.13 Thus another of his biographers named him simply as the “Queen’s conjurer”14 and with some justification: when an image of the queen was found impaled by a pin in Lincoln’s Inn fields, the Privy Council called on Dee to use his magic to counteract the spell. Dee himself would not have taken kindly to the title. In 1577, he became so impatient with rumors about his activities that he published an advertisement roundly denying “divers untrue and infamous reports” that he was a “conjurer or caller of divels … yea, the great conjurer; and so (as some would say) the arch conjurer of this whole kingdom.”15 If a conjurer is solely defined as a “caller of divels,” then Dee was justified in his denials, but by any broader definition the advertisement was disingenuous. There is no doubt that Dr. Dee was engaged in practical magic, nor is there any doubt that part of his practice was the evocation of spirits.
For Dee, “the existence of spirits was as clear as the existence of God.”16 And while it might be possible to imagine an Elizabethan atheist, the description could never fit Dee. He was an intensely religious man. When, for example, he learned he had made an enemy of the papal nuncio in Prague, his reaction was, “Almighty God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who is our Lord, our preceptor and guide, this God himself will be our protector and liberator.”17 He was closely associated with those members of the court who concerned themselves with the cause of religious reform and, in a Europe riven by the schism between Protestants and Catholics, he stood out as a beacon of ecumenism.18 He considered that a divided Christianity was a disaster for the world and worked hard to heal the rift.
His religious concerns invaded his esoteric pursuits. (It was angelic comments on corruption in the Catholic Church that earned him the displeasure of the papal nuncio.) Indeed, it might be argued that his esoteric pursuits were largely driven by religious and political interests. Where the typical sorcerer of the Middle Ages sought spirit help in finding gold or sex, there is little indication of such mundane concerns in Dee’s records. His early dialogue with the spirit child Madimi sounds in places like a discussion between two theology students. Beyond that, spirit contact was “a way of beholding the universe in all its glory and understanding its manifold and mysterious workings.”19
The influence of his spirit contacts on his political interests was just as obvious. Messages from the Beyond may even have helped create a turning point in history. When the Spanish Armada sailed against England in 1588, it appeared utterly invincible. Spain claimed to be the strongest nation in Europe, with a considerable degree of justification. Her quarrel with England over English sea power had led to a showdown that might well have put paid to Elizabeth’s pretensions of international power. But the English sea defenses proved impregnable. Drake’s ships, aided by a little luck, smashed the Armada completely. And the man responsible for England’s sea defenses at the time, by appointment of the queen, was Dr. Dee, who turned to spirits when he needed advice.
Dee’s political influence was destined to spread beyond his native England. In 1583, the king of Poland’s representative, Count Laski, was impressed by stories of Dee’s conjurations and suggested they should all visit Prague to meet the emperor Rudolf II, himself an enthusiastic occultist. Dee took up the suggestion and in 1885, he and Kelley, their respective wives, and Dee’s three children embarked with Laski for the Continent. Their wanderings were to last four years.
The king of Poland, Stephen Bathory, received them well at Kraków, where he listened with interest to warnings passed on from the spirit world. The restless Kelley may have slipped back into some of his old habits at this time, for his talk of having found a magical gold-producing powder at Glastonbury sounds suspiciously like a con man preparing potential victims for a sting. The party moved on to Prague, where Laski introduced the occultists to Emperor Rudolf. Once again, warnings from the spirit world were passed on, and Rudolf may well have acted on them. But Dee was becoming altogether too well known for his own good. The pope decided he was engaged in necromancy (magical operations involving the use of corpses or communication with the dead), and his nuncio in Prague passed on the accusation to the emperor on May 6, 1586. A few days later, the magicians were ordered to leave. Luck remained with them. The tsar of Russia made Dee the offer of a house in Moscow, a salary of 12,600 rubles a year—a small fortune in those days—and assured him he would be “honorably accounted as one of the chief men in the land.” Simultaneously, Count Wilhelm Rosenberg extended an invitation to his palace in Trebon. Surprisingly, and probably to Kelley’s chagrin, Dee accepted the latter offer. The party spent a peaceful eighteen months as Rosenberg’s guests in Bohemia.
From the foregoing, it becomes clear that, acting through Dee and Nostradamus, the spirits influenced both the crowned heads of Europe and the queen of England. They were not the only channel for such influence, for Keith Thomas assures us Dee’s experiments were in no way unique. “There is enough objective evidence relating to the manufacture of conjuring apparatus and the holding of conjuring sessions to show that spirit-raising was a standard magical activity. Spiritual beings were thought to offer a short cut to riches, love, knowledge and power of all kinds; and the Faustian legend had a literal meaning for its Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences.”20
11. ENLIGHTENMENT SPIRITS
ATTEMPTS TO EVOKE SPIRITS CONTINUED LONG AFTER THE ELIZABETHAN era. Manuscript copies of the Lemegeton (“The Lesser Key of Solomon”) circulated throughout the seventeenth century,1 while Dr. Thomas Rudd’s Goetia is dated to the eighteenth.2 Solomonic traditions not only survived into the nineteenth century, but actually gained currency with the formation of the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, a magical organization that attracted some notable and influential members. Simila
r Solomonic evocations, usually with some modification of the original techniques, continue to the present day, particularly in America.3 But while Elias Ashmole could still record a visit to a conjurer in his diary in 16524—the man, Jo. Tompson, summoned spirits and had responses “in a soft voice”—there was already change afoot.
The great religious upheaval of the Reformation, which began a decade before John Dee was born, introduced a new perception of the spirit world. Until then, the doctrine of purgatory had provided the theological basis for the return to earth of spirits of the dead. But the reformers denied the existence of purgatory and since heaven and hell were both permanent states, there was nowhere from which a spirit might come back. The (Protestant) powers-that-be took care to warn that apparitions should not be taken at face value. Thus the phantom spotted by Sir Thomas Wise during the reign of James I caused controversy between the local archdeacon, who thought it might have been an angel, and the theologian Daniel Featley, who pronounced it an evil spirit.5
But ghostly sightings like this were, of course, the very essence of the problem. Whatever doctrines the theologians propounded about spirits, people still kept seeing them. And given the intellectual currents of the time, it comes as no surprise to discover that among those who made the most influential sightings was a member of a newfangled breed—a scientist.
Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on January 29, 1688. His father was a Lutheran priest who later rose to the rank of bishop. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy mine owner, owned a part interest in several iron mines and in so doing almost certainly helped shape her son’s early career. Emanuel, the third of nine children, proved a highly intelligent youngster. Following home schooling that included study of Latin and probably Hebrew, he entered the University of Uppsala at the early age of eleven and elected to study with the philosophy faculty, which was, at the time, an umbrella discipline for the natural sciences. A year after his graduation in 1710, he sailed for London, England, a city that was, at the time, the frontier of work on the natural sciences. There he studied mathematics, Newton’s newly developed calculus, and applied mechanics while developing close relationships with some of the world’s leading scholars, including the astronomers John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley.
