by Mark Booth
John Dee was born into a Welsh family living in London. A brilliant young scholar he was teaching Euclid in Paris in his twenties and became a friend of Tycho Brahe. In the late 1570s he formed a circle called the Dionisii Areopagites with Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, whose poem The Faerie Queene is famously replete with Rosicrucian and other esoteric imagery. A memoir of Sidney talks of him as ‘seeking out the mysteries of chemistry led by Dee’.
Dee had built up a magnificent library, said to be second only to that of the celebrated French historian de Thou. The Cabala was central to all his studies. He believed in the mathematical foundation of all things, a set of unifying principles he believed he could discern in the teachings of the ancients. He embodied these principles in his highly complex glyph, the Monas Hieroglyphica.
Paracelsus and his swordstick. One of the popular legends about Paracelsus was that he carried in the pommel of his swordstick a portion of the ‘azoth’. A small thing missed in The Devil’s Doctor, the excellent, recent biography of Paracelsus by Philip Ball is that there is a sly joke in all of this. The azoth was the name given to the secret fire of the alchemists, a fire that would liberate the soul from the body. It is contained in a seed. We may be reminded that in Indian alchemy Mercury is sometimes called the semen of Shiva. The sword of Paracelsus, then, is one that has been forged in the heat of sexual desire. It is a fleshly sword and the azoth that issues from the top of it is the philosophical Mercury. In the natural course of things there is a quality in semen that is like a net in which a spirit may land and then be incarnated. Paracelsus also knew of some unnatural practices, secret sexual techniques performed before going to sleep, that could loosen the vegetable body from the material body and could also help other kinds of spirits to come to earth and appear to him in dreams.
Dee’s reputation was such that the young princess invited him to choose a date for her coronation as Elizabeth I by means of his astrological calculations. Dee also helped direct Elizabethan foreign policy, both in Europe and as regards the settling of America. It is a little known fact, but documented, that at the height of his fortunes Dr Dee owned a charter granting him ownership of the vast landmass called Canada, and his vision of a British Empire — a phrase he coined — helped inspire and guide the nation’s voyages of discovery.
The Monas Hieroglyphica. My friend, the esoteric scholar Fred Gettings, has deconstructed this glyph, revealing a layer of meaning to do with the evolution of the two parallel universes — we might call them the Baconian and the Shakespearean — we discussed in the previous chapter.
In 1580, evidently craving more direct, spiritual experience, he decided to hook up with a medium.
Dee’s dreams had been disturbed. There had been strange knocking sounds in his house. He had employed a medium called Barnabus Saul, who said he could see angels in his magic crystal, but Dee had dismissed him after six months. Then in 1582 he met Edward Kelley, a strange man who apparently wore a skull cap to hide the fact that his ears had been cut off as a punishment for coining. Kelley claimed to be able to see the Archangel Uriel in Dee’s shewstone, and so began hundreds of séances. These enabled Dee to learn how to decipher the speech of the angels which he called the Enochian language.
The great magus’s decline can be traced from this association with Kelley. The man whose dreams of empire would help shape the globe was beginning to explore the more discreditable byways of esoteric speculation and practice.
On a trip to Prague, Dee told the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II that he had tried for forty years to find what he wanted and no book had been able to tell him. He had therefore decided to call upon angels to intercede for him with God, in order to ask the secrets of creation. He told Rudolf he used a stone for this and always made sure the spirits he dealt with were good and not demonic.
Was Kelley always so scrupulous? On the same trip the pair boasted to Rudolf that they could transform base metals into gold. They were forced to flee when they were unable to do so. It seems Kelley was abusing the older man by this time, forcing him into a humiliating wife-swapping. Many suspected Kelley of being a fraud, of only pretending to receive responses to the Enochian invocations.
Then in 1590 Kelley seems to have received a message in the Enochian language that so terrified him that he ceased operating the system and cut off relations with Dee altogether. Translated from the Angelic language into English it reads as follows:
‘The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet… my lips are sweeter than health itself, I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. Purge your streets, O ye sons of men, and wash your houses clean…’ Did Kelley see in this the Scarlet Harlot of Revelation and a vision of the imminent end of the world?
Dee was left back in England in Lear-like penury, unable to support his family, ranting and raving, grandly paranoid, seeing everywhere conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. After his death a cult of Dr Dee emerged and many, including the diarist John Aubrey and the eminent Freemason Elias Ashmole, supposed him to have been a Rosicrucian.
That, anyway is the ‘pop’ story of Dee. A deeper layer of meaning — and Dee’s real motivation in all of this — concerns the history of humanity’s relations with the spirit worlds.
As we have seen Christians were experiencing a withdrawal of the spirit worlds. The Church seemed unable to provide direct spiritual experience or personal contact with spiritual realities. The people demanded wonders and only the secret societies knew how to provide them.
Dr Dee had also told the Holy Roman Emperor that if his occult techniques of ceremonial magic were introduced, every church in Christendom could enjoy apparitions every day of the week. It would be a return to the spiritual fervour of the early Church, the Church of Clement and Origen where cabalistic and hermetic elements were not excluded. The world Church would again become a magic Church.
This was Dr Dee’s great evangelical vision.
It might seem outrageous to modern sensibility, but it’s important to see it in the context of Church practice at the time. As we have seen, it was impossible to draw a clear line between priestcraft and witchcraft. Yet to Dr Dee the magical, spirit-invoking practices of the parish priests seemed mere superstitious folklore, lacking in intellectual rigour, sophistication and a systematic approach.
The neoplatonic drive to think systematically about spiritual experience and the spirit worlds had been spreading up from Southern Europe, influencing scholars like Trithemius, Agrippa and Dee. The German Johannes Reuchlin formulated a Christianized Cabala. He proved the divinity of Jesus Christ using cabalistic arguments, showing that the name of Jesus was encoded in the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of God.
Dee was undoubtedly interested in all these theories, but, as we have seen, he craved experience. His approach was experimental as well as systematic. Dee was proposing reasoned application of techniques to produce spiritual phenomena on a controlled, regular, predictable basis. In Dee as in Bacon we see early stirrings of the scientific spirit. The development of the mental faculties that would be needed to devise modern science evolved partly in an occult context.
What Dee was whispering into the Holy Roman Emperor’s ear was that if he fasted for a set length of time, performed this breathing exercise for a prescribed number of times and at prescribed intervals, that if he engaged in this sexual practice and pronounced this formula at this astrologically pre-determined time, he would enter an altered state of consciousness in which he could communicate in a free and reasoned way with denizens of the spirit worlds. All this had been established by repeatable experiment and the precedent of thousands of years of practice and led to predictable results.
Dee’s mission, then, was to introduce something entirely new into the stream of history. It is always the aim of initiatic brotherhoods like the Rosicrucians to h
elp spread newly evolving forms of consciousness, appropriate for the changing times. Michael Maier, a contemporary commentator writing with apparent insider knowledge of the Rosicrucians, said ‘the activities of the Rose Cross are determined by the knowledge of history and by knowledge of the laws of evolution of the human race’.
These ‘laws of evolution’ operated both in history and in individual human lives. They are the laws that describe the paradoxical nature of life that we earlier called the deeper laws. They are described in the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda as ‘subtler laws that rule the hidden spiritual planes and the inner realm of consciousness… knowable through the science of yoga’. Formulations of these laws can be found scattered throughout Rosicrucian literature:
Heaven is never where we believe it to be.
If you cease to limit a thing within yourself, that’s to say by wanting it, and if you withdraw from it, it will come to you.
That which kills produces life. That which causes death leads to resurrection.
Rosicrucian conceptions of these laws would shortly surface in the mainstream of history and transform the culture of the West.
PERHAPS WHAT IS MOST EXTRAORDINARY about Dee’s career is how close it runs to the surface of exoteric history. Not only was he openly installed at the court of Elizabeth I as her resident Merlin, not only did he attempt to introduce ceremonial magic into the Church under the aegis of the Holy Roman Emperor, but he was so well known that playwrights could portray him and expect their audience to recognize him — in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
As we shall see, Dee was only the first of several strange and tragic personalities who tried to introduce esoteric doctrines into public life.
22. OCCULT CATHOLICISM
Jacob Boehme • The Conquistadors and the Counter-Reformation • Teresa, John of the Cross and Ignatius • The Rosicrucian Manifestoes • The Battle of White Mountain
IN 1517 THE POPE DECIDED TO REVIVE the selling of indulgences in order to pay for a new basilica of St Peter in Rome. It was to be the most splendid, lavish building in the world. Martin Luther, a teacher at Wittenberg, nailed his arguments against this selling of indulgences to the door of the local church that acted as a notice board to the community.
When this drew a papal bull excommunicating Luther, he burned this document in front of an admiring crowd. ‘Here I stand,’ he proclaimed. In Northern Europe, Germany in particular, a groundswell of restlessness had been rising, a resenting of the demand for unthinking obedience, a yearning for spiritual freedom. The hero of the hour, Luther escaped burning at the stake, protected by a local lord, and as more German leaders began to join in his protests against the excesses of the Papacy, Protestantism was born.
Some saw Luther as the reincarnation of Elijah whom Malachi and then Joachim had prophesied would come again to herald the new age.
Luther was steeped in mystical thought, the teachings of both Eckhart and Tauler. His closest friend and literary collaborator was the occultist Philip Melanchthon, nephew of the celebrated Cabalist Reuchlin. Melanchthon was an advocate of astrology, who wrote a biography of Faust. Luther himself communicated with the spirit worlds on familiar terms, heard voices guiding him and on one famous occasion hurled an inkpot at a demon who had mocked him.
But was he an initiate of the secret societies? There are intriguing hints. He once referred to himself as a ‘passed master’, a phrase that a Freemasonic initiate of a certain level might use to describe himself. He spoke approvingly of alchemy, praising it for its ‘allegory and secret meaning’ and recognizing, too, that it had a role in the resurrection of humanity.
The interest of some commentators has also been piqued by the fact that Luther adopted the rose as his symbol.
However, Luther’s white five-petalled rose containing a small cross is not the mystic red rose of the Rosicrucians pinned to the great cross of matter in order to transform it. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Luther saw his rose having a layer of meaning concerned with occult physiology.
Although Paracelsus had been an early supporter of Luther, the Swiss magus grew disillusioned when Luther promulgated his doctrine of predestination, which seemed to Paracelsus the old Roman elitism under a new name. Moreover, Paracelsus was a pacifist, and, while Luther was not directly responsible for the massacres of Catholics that took place once he had achieved political power, he could have stopped them. Although Luther had been swept to power on a tide of enthusiasm and mystical fervour, once there he began to fear these things as threats to his authority and all he had achieved. Morbid and paranoid, he seemed unwilling to stop the persecutions carried out in his name.
The Rosicrucians should be seen as the extreme radical left wing of the Reformation, and the way that the Lutheran Church turned on it can be seen in the story of Jacob Boehme.
Boehme’s Mysterium Magnum, a commentary on Genesis, opened up great and dizzying vistas of secret, cabalistic meaning. It lit up the popular imagination in the great age of Protestantism, not least because of its influence on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. His detailed descriptions of the occult physiology of the human body are the clearest evidence for an independent Western tradition of the chakras before the influx of oriental teachings in the eighteenth century. He also gives a near comprehensive account of the correspondences between the heavenly bodies and minerals and plants that had been suggested earlier but in more sketchy form by Agrippa and Paracelsus.
All this is all the more astonishing because Boehme was almost completely uneducated. In some ways he is anticipated by Fludd in his interpretation of the Bible, which sees the story of the creation as a series of alchemical separations, but there is no evidence to suggest he ever read Fludd.
Born in 1575 to illiterate parents, Jacob Boehme was apprenticed to a cobbler. One day a stranger came into the shop, bought a pair of boots, then, as he was leaving, called Jacob by name, asking him to follow him into the street. Jacob was surprised this stranger knew his name, but more surprised when he fixed him with a penetrating stare and said: ‘Jacob, thou art yet but little, but the time will come when thou shalt be great and the world shall be moved at thee. Read the Holy Scriptures where thou wilt find comfort and instruction, for thou must endure much misery and poverty and suffer persecution. But be courageous and persevere, for God loves thee.’ The stranger turned and disappeared, and Boehme never saw him again. But the meeting had made a deep impression upon him.
He became much more serious in a way that some found disconcerting. When his master threw him out, he became a journeyman tradesman, working hard, and eventually he set up his own shop.
One day he was sitting in his kitchen when the sun shining on a pewter plate blinded him. For a while everything grew dim. Then gradually the table, his hands, the walls, everything became transparent. He realized that, although we usually think of the air as being transparent, it is actually quite cloudy. Because now he saw it become truly transparent, like a cloud clearing, and suddenly he saw whole new spirit worlds opening up before him in every direction. He saw that his whole body was transparent and realized that he was looking down on himself, that his centre of consciousness had floated free of his body and was able to move freely into the spirit worlds.
So it was that Jacob Boehme first journeyed through the spiritual hierarchies while still alive, as St Paul, Mohammed and Dante had done before him.
Boehme was generally physically unimpressive, short with a low forehead, but his remarkable blue eyes now began to shine with a special luminosity. People who met him were impressed by his ability to see into their past and their future. He was sometimes able to speak different languages from different parts of the world and different periods.
His second illumination took place while he was walking through fields. He suddenly felt he could experience directly the mystery of creation. Afterwards he wrote: ‘In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been at university for
many years.’ What Boehme had experienced did not contradict his Lutheran, Bible-based beliefs, but it clarified and illumined them, opening up new dimensions of meaning.
What distinguishes Boehme’s writings, though, are his descriptions of these teachings in terms of urgent, personal experiences. He originally wrote his first work, Aurora, as an aide-mémoire to one of his mystical experiences, but when a local nobleman saw it, he had several copies made. One of these fell into the hands of the local pastor of Goelitz. Perhaps jealous of someone who obviously knew so much more than he did of the spirit worlds, the pastor began to persecute the cobbler. He accused him of heresy, threatening prison and finally driving him out of town under threat of being burned alive.
Shortly after his expulsion Boehme called his son, Tobias, to his bedside, asking if he could hear the beautiful music, and asking, too, if he would open the window so they could hear it better.
After a while he said ‘Now I go hence to Paradise’, gave a deep sigh and died.
In response to the question, Where does the spirit go after death?, Boehme had once answered in a way that has something of the Teutonic Zen of Eckhart: ‘It has no need to go anywhere. The spirit has heaven and hell within itself. Heaven and hell are within one another and are to one another as nothing.’
BOEHME AND THE PASTOR OF GOELITZ had looked at each other across the village green with mutual incomprehension. These were two very different forms of consciousness. On the other side of the world the disgust and intolerance that arises when two very different forms of consciousness encounter each other worked itself out on a much greater and more tragic scale.
Less idealistic men had followed in the wake of Christopher Columbus. In 1519 Hernando Cortés had been sailing along the Yucatan Gulf coast when he established a base he called Veracruz. He and his fellow Spaniards had heard rumours of the fabulous wealth of the Aztecs, but they were astonished when an ambassador from their ruler, Moctezuma, approached the base bearing gifts.
