John Dee ::: Project ETERNITY

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.

Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic. One of the most learned men of his time, he was lecturing to crowded halls at the University of Paris in his early twenties. He was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, training many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery. At the same time, he immersed himself deeply in Christian angel-magic and Hermetic philosophy, and devoted 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 aspects of a consistent world-view.

Biography

Early life

Dee was born in London of a Welsh family, the surname deriving from the Welsh du ("black"). His father was a merchant and minor courtier. Dee attended the Chelmsford Chantry School, 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, Cambridge. In the late 1540s and early 1550s, he travelled 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 an important collection of mathematical and astronomical instruments.

Dee was offered a readership in mathematics at Oxford in 1554, but he declined because he was dissatisfied with the emphasis that the English universities put upon rhetoric and grammar (which, together with logic, formed the academic trivium) over philosophy and science (the more advanced quadrivium, comprising arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).

In 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 instead of being freed, he was turned over to the reactionary Catholic Bishop Bonner for religious examination. Again, he 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. His 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, he 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.) In 1577, he published General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, a work that set out his vision for 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.

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. 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 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, 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.) 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 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. 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. 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 in Manchester in 1592. However, he was by now widely reviled as an evil magician and could not exert much control over the Fellows, who despised him. He 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. Unfortunately, both the parish registers and Dee's gravestone are missing.

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 we 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 twentieth 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 most long-lasting practical achievement may be his promotion of mathematics outside the universities. 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.

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."

Artefacts

The British Museum holds several items once owned by Dee and associated with the spiritual conferences:

In December, 2004, both a shew-stone 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.

Fictional books about Dee

References

External links

Dee, John

Dee, John

Dee, John

Dee, John

Dee, John

Dee, John

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