The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  The possibility of making contact with angels.

  The possibility of predicting the future based on an analysis of cosmic principles.

  The relativity of the material creative order : its finitude, its capacity for spiritual imprisonment and its general ambivalence towards the divine Will while Time lasts.

  The belief that Time is an inferior projection of eternity and that time and space are dissolvable, leaving a ‘new heaven’ and (possibly) ‘a new earth’. (Note the alchemical parallel).

  That the destiny of the individual depends on the degree to which he or she lives in consistency with the Divine Plan.

  That knowledge of the Divine Plan is in itself liberating.

  The key apocalyptic texts, for our purposes, are those bearing the name of the prophet Esdras : I & II Esdras of the Apocrypha, (also known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as III & IV Ezra). Esdras is described in these books as a priest, living in Babylon during the reign of the Persian King Artaxerxes13. According to I Esdras VIII.9ff, Artaxerxes gave the priest Esdras the right to embellish the Temple in Jerusalem with all manner of gifts to be taken from Syria and Phoenicia for the worship of God, and to support this worship with the proper exercise of the Levitical Law. The whole corpus is a eulogy to the establishment of YHWH's Law in the Temple and among the people, accompanied by visions of the consequences for disobeying the Law and the certain judgement of wrongdoers. These visions were vouchsafed courtesy of a visitation from the angel Uriel. I & II Esdras have been dated between the time of the Maccabaean Revolts of the mid-second century BC to the first century AD.

  There must be something quite archetypal about this literature, for we find it being employed with great fervour and astonished reverence throughout the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similar psychological conditions applied : frustration with the world, horror at inhuman wickedness, social confusion, religious breakdown, a longing for better times and the security of knowing what was really going on. Esdras speaks to both the inner and outer dimensions of human experience. Due to this conflict of interests between political or social turmoil and the urge to turn inwards to the purely spiritual, (anxieties addressed in the Rosicrucian Manifestos with their assertion of imminent revelation and illumination of divine secrets hidden in the life of the earth), mysticism (direct and inward approach to God) and apocalyptic became virtually inseparable. The result was a strange (to us) penetration of the timeless into the temporal, analagous to that odd intermediate psychic territory between the soul and the world of nature explored and experienced in alchemy.

  There is a fatigue with the ‘wicked world’ and its turning away from the knowledge of itself : analagous to the rejection of Rosenkreuz on his return from the East, further expressed in the idea that new knowledge of the world represents a prelude to the End - what the Fama calls “the last light”:

  Verily we must confess that the world in those days was already big with those great commotions, labouring to be delivered of them; and did bring forth painful, worthy men, who broke with all force through darkness and barbarism, and left us who succeeded to follow to follow them : and assuredly they have been the uppermost point in trigono igneo [an astronomical event to be discussed in due course], whose flame now should be more and more bright, and shall undoubtedly give to the world the last light.

  The release of the spiritual light (the mercury of Paracelsus) is then at once mystical, alchemical, and apocalyptic. The operation of this liberation, on the Hermetic principle of “As Above, so Below” was expected to be paralleled by events in the material sphere : in the stars and in politics14.

  Testimony to the significance of Esdras comes at the same time as the Hermetic revelation hits the intellectual life of Europe in force. None other than the extraordinary Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was moved to see in Esdras the authority for taking the Jewish Qabalah very seriously as authentic and pristine divine wisdom15. In 1542, David Joris, a radical Flemish reformer who took refuge in Basle, wrote the influential T'Woender Boek and used Esdras as part of his vision of a truth revealed only to a select group of believers, coupled with the notion of an inner word received in the heart. This book was very popular among the followers of the radical reformers Valentin Weigel (1533-1588) and Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1556). The idea of a secret spiritual fraternity is implicit in this view.

  Schwenckfeld and Weigel were in their turn highly influential on the thought of the gnostic Jacob Böhme of Görlitz in Lausitz. Esdras was also particularly helpful to sixteenth and seventeenth century Calvinists who battled with the Calvinist idea of predestination, since the Books of Esdras stressed the importance of the individual's free will in choosing the path of salvation. But perhaps the strangest instance of the influence of Esdras - apart from the Rosicrucian manifestos - lies in the rôle they played in the ‘angelic conversations’ held between the highly influential English magus John Dee, his ‘scryer’ or seer Edward Kelley, and a number of what Kelley purported to be angels, from whom Kelley claimed to receive direct messages in the 1580s. Not only did these angels seem to have a thorough and respectful acquaintance with the Books of Esdras, but Esdras's own guide, the angel Uriel, appeared to Kelley with instructions recorded in John Dee's quite astonishing spiritual diaries. These strange séances directly affected Dee's career and may have influenced, by the strangest of routes, the course of European history.

  John Dee - Apocalyptic Prophet

  For John Dee, as for many others in the sixteenth century, magia, the art of the magi, was a vehicle for spiritual salvation. The split in the Catholic Church with its ensuing violence and hostile invective had left many genuine believers with a feeling of being cut off from the spiritual resources of the old universally practised eucharist. Magic, in its aspect of divine and mystical illumination (made respectable in Neoplatonic writings), was held to be a valid route for divine influences to enter into the life of man to heal his heart. Therefore magia was deeply associated with Reformation movements and, necessarily, with apocalyptic prognostications. Men such as Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and the phenomenal Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) believed that a deeper and more powerful reforming movement could be enacted by revitalizing the magical basis of religion. This view provides a basis for understanding John Dee's fervent desire to make contact with the angels of the supercelestial sphere. These angels seem to have had more than a passing acquaintance with the Books of Esdras and their (ie : Edward Kelley's) interpretation of the books stressed that they applied directly to the late 16th century, and that they promised a magical reunion of the Christian Church as well as a necessary overturning and reforming of the contemporary order. Compare for example the following communication of the angel ‘Madimi’ with Dee16 to II Esdras and the Fama Fraternitatis:

  Madimi: And lo, the issue which he giveth thee is wisdom. But lo, the mother of it is not yet delivered. For, if woman know her times and seasons of deliverance : Much more doth he [God], who is the Mother of all things. But thou mayest rejoice that there is a time of deliverance, and that the gift is compared to a woman with childe.

  II Esdras IV.40: Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she hath fulfilled her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her.

  Fama Fraternitatis: ..for Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who shall stand in need of a great godfather's gift.

  Uriel to Dee : These are the days wherein the prophet said, No faith should be found on the earth. This faith must be restored again, and men must glorify God in his works. I am the light of God.

  URIEL : When you have the book of God before you, then I will open these secrets unto you.

  In order to re-establish “the faith”, Uriel instructs Dee and Kelley to read II Esdras IX.7 and VI.28. The texts from Esdras read as follows :

  And everyone that shall be saved, and shall be able to escape by his works, and by faith, whereby ye have believed, Shall be preserved from t
he said perils, and shall see my salvation in my land, and within my borders : for I have sanctified them for me from the beginning.

  As for faith, it shall flourish, corruption shall be overcome, and the truth, which hath been so long without fruit, shall be declared.

  This is, according to Uriel : That my kingdom may be One. Another angel, Jubanladace by name, re-iterates the same message with tiresome repetitiveness :

  For I will establish One Faith.. Moreover I shall open the hearts of all men, that he may have free passage through them.

  And there must be One veritie. And Hierusalem shall descend with an horn of glory to the end.

  Other angelic prophecies reveal that the Antichrist's arrival was scheduled for 1587; that “the Turk” (the Ottoman Empire) would be destroyed by a ruler in central Europe and, generally, that those who fail to respond to the prophetic call shall be destroyed. Amid all this heaviness, there are lighter moments. The New Age which the angels usher in promises a spiritual joy, then currently being enacted by the radical reformers, such as some Anabaptist sects, persecuted by Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists alike. The angels put themselves in spiritual communion with the bright and often crazy spirit of the new churches. In Dee's shewstone (which can be seen in the British Museum) Kelley sees and hears a luminous figure declare :

  There is a God, let us be merry. E.K. [Kelley] He danceth still. There is a heaven. Let us be merry. E.K. Now he taketh off his clothes again.

  Kelley frequently has his angels recommend ‘free love’ as a fruit of the spirit. It is hard to imagine that such stuff should form the basis of a practical political programme, but that would be severely to underestimate the conviction of authenticity in which Dee held these communications. These revelations would take Dee and Kelley off to central Europe on a mission to save the world.

  Frances Yates in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) held the view that Dee's activities were instrumental in bringing about the Rosicrucian movement, and that the movement had an essentially English basis. This can no longer be held to be the case. Germany and Bohemia had sufficient magi (if not so universally brilliant as Dee) of their own to initiate their own movement. However there is little doubt that Dee and Kelley's time spent abroad in the 1580s and 1590s - combined with the political configurations of the period (wherein England was seen as a bastion against the Habsburgs) - was a significant influence on the alchemico-magico-apocalyptic reforming philosophy, and Dee certainly contributed to and reinforced the growing expectation of great events soon to be fulfilled in which gnostic influences would play such a significant (if unspoken) rôle. More important than Dee's angelic seances whose prophecies were already widespread in Europe, was the contribution of his book Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) which laid out a complex theory of cosmic unity whose aim was to integrate all knowledge in a cosmic spiritual/mathematical system : an aim implicit in the Rosicrucian endeavour. Dee's Monas symbol became a staple symbol in the works of Rosicrucian apologists and even appeared in the 1616 edition of Johann Valentin Andreae's alchemical story, The Chymische Hochzeit.

  Saving the World

  “YOU ARE BECOME PROPHETS, AND ARE SANCTIFIED FOR THE COMING OF THE LORD”.

  With these words, the angel Uriel launched John Dee and Edward Kelley on what must be one of the strangest adventures of all time. The adventure got off the ground through a strange co-incidence. In June 1583 the Polish Prince Albert Laski was taken by the poet-adventurer Sir Philip Sydney to witness an academic debate held at Oxford University. The principal speaker was none other than ‘the Nolan’, Giordano Bruno (of Nola), gnostic Dominican with a mission to return the world to the (in his eyes) pure Egyptian “religion of the world” : the worship of the divine immanent principle, the basic magic power to be found in an heliocentric system as part of an infinite universe. The debate went badly for Bruno who was laughed at, ridiculed and unjustly accused of plagiarism from the de vita triplici of Marsilio Ficino by the “grammarians and pedants” of Oxford (as he called them).

  Sydney suggested Laski might like to meet England's greatest intellectual luminary, John Dee, at the latter's house in Mortlake. Dee obliged Laski with some angelic conversations. Kelley's angels siezed the opportunity to suggest that Laski was the European prince who could fulfill the role of harbinger of a new age. He would defeat the Turk and bring the “One veritie” to the whole wide world. Laski seems to have found the prospect agreable, and so Dee and Kelley packed their bags and returned to the continent with the Polish prince. Laski was probably most moved by Kelley's contention that the angels held the key to alchemical transmutation : gold.

  Laski proved not to be quite what the angels really had in mind, and their attention turned towards the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, whence Dee and Kelley's expansive train moved. On 3 September 1584, Dee finally got his audience with the Emperor. In the full panoply (and doubtless folly) of his new prophetic rôle, Dee announced to Rudolf that “The Angel of the Lord hath appeared to me, and rebuketh you for your sins. If you will hear me, and believe in me, you shall Triumph : if you will not hear me….” Rudolf heard Dee, but found it practically impossible to step into the rôle Dee's angels had in mind for him, which was in effect to take practical spiritual and political advice direct from John Dee. Rudolf was interested however in Kelley's vaunted alchemical skills - and so was Queen Elizabeth of England who tried to get Dee - and especially Kelley - back to England to serve their country. But Dee now saw himself as a trans-national figure in the care of God alone. He even celebrated Mass in a Catholic church to demonstrate his eirenicist intentions. He consulted with the Catholic Hannibal Rosseli in Cracow on how to employ the Corpus Hermeticum (on which Rosseli was writing a massive commentary) to unite the Christian churches behind the banner of the (Neoplatonic) One. Dee was in an incandescent state for some years. It seemed to him that his message was indicated in the stars, and by the knowledge of the time, he had reason to do so, as we shall see shortly.

  In 1586, the year in which Johann Valentin Andreae was born, Dee met Francesco Pucci in Cracow. Pucci was an enthusiast for a mystical and universalist faith which he believed the Catholic Church would or should enact. He also shared Dee's views on the coming Apocalypse and final judgement. These consultations with Catholic savants greatly disturbed the Papal Nuncio in Prague. The Nuncio had Dee and Kelley thoroughly investigated, concluding on orders from the Vatican that the pair should be arrested and put to the stake. Rudolf, compromising as usual, ordered Dee and Kelley out of Prague, whence they became guests of Count Rozmberk on his estates at Trebon in Bohemia. Rozmberk lavished his wealth upon them and encouraged Dee in his mission. We also know that Dee visited Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Cassel, where he whipped up the requisite enthusiasm and presented his host with manuscripts on the subject of the secrets of God relating to the Apocalypse. Dee doubtless encouraged other chiliasts, alchemists and dreamers during his journeys about central Europe. All of this took place only twenty-six years before Adam Haslmayr was arrested by the Inquisitor Guarinoni in Innsbruck - well within the living memory of Carl Widemann and Andreae's older friend and guide Tobias Hess. (Hess was sixteen when Dee met the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague in 1584).

  Apart from the ministry of angels, what else made Dee so sure that his mission had such extraordinary and apocalyptic significance?

  The Fiery Trigons

  1584 saw a major astronomical event : a conjunction of three planets in Aires - a fiery trigon or trigonus igneus. This was generally held among students of the stars to signify the inauguration of a “Great Year”, a new epoch or Aion: a vast cosmic time-unit bringing with it a new set of dispensations - a New Age. Dee received his astrological theory of history chiefly from De magis coniunctionibus by Abu Ma'shar (787-836AD), which had been translated into Latin in about 1120. Abu Ma‘shar’s ideas reflect the teachings of the Harranian pagans or ‘Sabians’ who took Hermes Trismegistos for their prophet. Their astrology developed within the context of Aristotle's works
on the natural world : the Physica; De caelo; De generatione et corruptione and De meterologia. Following Abu Ma'shar, it became common to divide the twelve signs of the zodiac into four trigons, corresponding to the four elements. When the superior planets formed a new trigon (as happened in 1584) it was taken to be a sign for such earthly events as the genesis of new empires or new religious movements.

  On cue, Dee set about fulfilling the necessary conditions for a New Age, an endeavour further supported by the influential Astronomisches Schreben by David Herlizius and, most particularly, by Leowitz's De coniunctionibus magnis which Dee had acquired twenty years earlier and had heavily annotated. Leowitz's work had predicted great changes to take place in Bohemia and the Habsburg domains in 1584. Dee believed that the signs for a new movement to establish religious unity - he was heard to say in Prague that he did not care for religions - within the context of new scientific understanding of the cosmos were now more than sufficient to encourage him and anyone with whom he came into contact to rise to the task of ushering in the new aeon. He was certainly not alone in this view.

  The Breaking of the Seals

  One year after Dee's audience with the Emperor Rudolf, Theodor Gluichstein of Bremen published the Mystica et prophetica libri Geneseos interpretatio by the Italian heretic Giacomo Brocardo. Brocardo had escaped the fangs of the Venetian Inquisition in 1568 and had taken his vision of the end of the old order through Basle, Heidelberg, England, Holland, Bremen and, in the early 1590s, to Tobias Hess's home-town of Nürnberg. Brocardo's work was to make a great impact on two men whose lives and work are pertinent to our story. They are the Tübingen doctor Tobias Hess (1568-1614) and Simon Studion, author of the apocalyptic work Naometria (=the measurement of the Temple), who was born in Urach in Württemberg in 1543.