John Dee published a diary and several autobiographical writings; he was a recognized authority in the field of mathematics and the Greek and Latin authors, and the first to translate the Theorem of Euclid in English. He was very interested in the art of navigation, designed the basic idea for the meridian of Greenwich, proposed a strategy for the colonization of America and did research on optical techniques.  His knowledge of astronomy led to a reform of the calendar. He was the astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I, and as a philosopher and a physicist he also studied of course alchemy, this noble art of turning base metals into precious metals. Some said he even was on an endless quest to find the potion that would give him and his clients eternal youth.

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John Dee was born in 1527. He was barely fifteen when he was admitted to the University of Cambridge. As a brilliant student, he usually worked 18 hours a day. He was nineteen when he designed for a theatre performance of a work by the Greek author Aristophanes an ingenious flying machine in the form of a beetle, that created some panic among the spectators. It was said that such an unidentified flying object could only have been created by means of black art, by a friend of the hell hounds. This accusation would weigh heavily on the further career of the young magician, who was excluded from the university.

In 1547, John Dee taught geography at the University of Louvain in Flanders. It seems that Mercator provided him with a globe and a bunch of navigational instruments. The young “Doctor Dee” already had the reputation of being a political and industrial spy, who worked in the service of the English crown. His occult practices would only have been a cover for his espionage work, as was also said of that other famous astrologer, Nostradamus.

John Dee was, indeed, often forced into politics. A Protestant by conviction, he was constantly threatened to be crushed between the Catholic and Protestant powers that ravished England. The Catholic Queen Mary imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth in the castle of Woodstock, because of her Protestant sympathies. Elizabeth was afraid she would be poisoned. Coincidentally, her maid was a cousin of Dee. With the maid as an intermediary, Dee made a carefully optimistic astrological prediction for Elizabeth, saying that the situation was critical, but her life was not in danger. There even was a chance that one day she would become the Queen of England.

The horoscopes that John Dee made for Elizabeth were intercepted by secret agents of Queen Mary, and Dee was promptly accused of heresy, a magical conspiracy against the life of the Queen and the transmission of confidential documents, such as the horoscope of Queen Mary and her husband Philip II of Spain he also had made in order to consolate his client, Elizabeth. Dee was thrown in prison and only after several months and due to lack of evidence, he was exonerated of all accusations – but still was sanctioned with house arrest. This ended after Mary’s death, in 1588, when Elizabeth was called to the throne of England.

Queen Elizabeth I immediately began to consult John Dee regularly on various astrological matters. For instance, Dee set the date of her coronation. Despite the feelings of esteem that Elizabeth undoubtedly must have cherished, her friendship was never publicly shown. Dee deeply regretted this. Perhaps Elizabeth thought that she, as the Queen of England, was not supposed to work together with a man who had already been accused twice of sorcery.

Elizabeth commissioned Dee with some mysterious tasks on the continent. He seems to have obtained a part of his information in the normal way, but often he also used occult practices to frustrate the plans of England’s enemies. Nevertheless, John Dee lived in fear that one bad day his head would be severed from his body by the sword of the executioner in the Tower of London.  

In  1563, John Dee was in Antwerp, at that time one of the largest cities and one of the greatest intellectual centers of Western Europe. As a friend of Erasmus, he was immediately at home in the house of the printer, publisher and bookseller Christophe Plantin, who sold him quite a few prints, maps, mirrors, globes and astronomical instruments. Presumably in the shop of Plantin, John Dee found an incomplete copy of the notorious “Steganographia” of Trithemius. This work had the reputation to be a horrible masterpiece of the occult, but it was in fact a collection of rare and, for that time, very modern systems of encryption. John Dee completed the work and even seems to have designed a new method that was as efficient as those of the mysterious abbot Trithemius.

His fame rose to a climax now. “Doctor Dee” – as he was called now by almost everyone – lectured at the universities of Louvain, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge; he was the author of some very learned books; he had his own laboratory and a library of approximately 4,000 works. What could he desire more? Occasionally, he was even visited, in secret, by Queen Elizabeth!

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But Doctor Dee desired Wisdom. He yearned for Knowledge. Years had passed in study and experimentation, but in his own eyes he still had made no progress whatsoever. He wasn’t ready to recognize the limitations of the human spirit and had to deal with a severe mental crisis, for he knew he would not find Wisdom and Knowledge in this little village of Mortlake on the Thames, where he occupied his mother’s house. And he would not find these things with the lovely Jane Fromond either, whom he had married after losing his first wife.

The technique of predicting the future by use of the crystal ball – or shew stone – was very popular in those days. The Church saw no difference between the crystal balls and the mirrors used by the witches, but for Doctor Dee they provided the means to enter the world of the ghosts and the realms of the supernatural. His “Private Diary, the True and Credible Story of What Happened over Many Years between Doctor Dee and Some Spirits”, published half a century after his death by Meric Casaubon in London, still offers the reader an excellent idea of the real dangers  - not so much of an occult, but of a psychological nature – of looking into the shew stone. For days Doctor Dee stared in the humid depths of the crystal, listening to odd noises, hearing strange voices, dreaming weird dreams.

And then, on May 25, 1581, John Dee triumphantly noted in his diary: “I have seen a vision in the crystal!”

Later he would add that for many years, in places far and near, and in uncountable books in various languages, he had searched a glimpse of Truth and Reality. “I have read how good angels were sent to the earth, in God’s command, to learn, to inform and to help mankind. So I think that now I’ve studied enough.  For I am convinced that Wisdom can not be found by a human being, but can only come from You, o God.”

Like other pious investigators of hidden wisdom, and despite the vision of May 25, Dee thought he had not sufficient qualities to make some progress as a seer. He needed a specialized seer, an agent of God who would be sent to him in the form of an angel. The good doctor found a “medium” in the person of one Barnabas Saul, but presumably he was a spy of Dee’s enemies, because there promptly started a true defamation campaign against the doctor. Some time later he stumbled upon Edward Kelly, who was 27 years younger than the doctor, already had been accused of forgery of documents, and thus had lost both of his ears. The black hood he wore was meant to hide the scars, but contributed to his sinister reputation. There were rumours that Kelley practiced “the terrible art of necromancy” – the questioning of the dead by diabolic means, in order to gather knowledge of future events. Kelley possessed also a famous alchemical manual and two indefinite powders, originating from the Abbey of Glastonbury.

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Edward Kelley was not a very reliable partner, but Doctor Dee believed he had the gift. As for the credibility of the events which followed, we only have Kelley’s word. Although Dee questioned the ghosts and took careful notes of their answers, Dee himself never saw or heard them – the spirits only spoke through Kelley. However, I am convinced that Kelley was not only cheating. This point of view is shared by professor E.M. Butler, who in two books published by the academic press of Cambridge in 1948 and 1949, considered these issues in detail. The constant fear of the seer that he summoned evil spirits instead of entities of an angelic nature, his repeated attempts to stop the séances, his outbursts of rage, his threats and often his unwillingness to continue the experiments seem to tell a different story. I believe Kelley had genuine visions too and was afraid of the forms that were appearing, both in and outside the crystal, and the strange voices he heard.

So, Doctor Dee sat next to Kelley and took note. In November 1582, at sunset, Dee saw in the west window of his laboratory an angelic child appear. At last, he too had a vision! Later the apparition was called  ”Uriel, the Spirit of Light”.

Uriel carried a black stone, bright and clear, in the form of an egg, but much larger. The angel asked Dee to take this gift, but he also warned him: “Don’t ever let mortal hands touch this, except for your own!”

The delivery of this “black mirror” did not take place during one of the regular meetings around the table where the ordinary crystal ball of Plantin was placed. Also, Kelley doesn’t seem to have been present at that time in the laboratory, unless – for some – disguised as Uriel. Other scholars –  such as Jacques Bergier – believe that Uriel was no angel and no disguise of Kelley: Uriel was an alien. Anyway, the polished and anthracite-like crystal “mirror” will later come in the possession of Horace Walpole, the famous writer of horror novels, in the best romantic tradition. Later the Black Mirror of Doctor Dee was placed in the British Museum.
With a little help from the crystal ball, Doctor Dee had tried to heal a neighbor and attempted to locate a lost treasure, with no result at all. But his Black Mirror, given to him by Uriel, the Angel of the Light, was something completely different. The way in which Dee and Kelley worked with the mirror might be the same, and again there were spirits appearing in and around the shew stone, but the results obtained by the two magicians were of quite another order! Many forecasts Kelley had made using the crystal ball, were found to be false, and practical questions were answered with banalities. But through this Black Mirror, Kelley seems to have received some genuine prophecies…

In 1583, Dee noted in great detail the decapitation of a tall, beautiful woman by a black man. Subsequent Kelley got a warning for an attack by sea by a foreign power. In his vision the sea was dotted with ships and Uriel said that the safety of England was threatened by a large fleet. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, was executed in 1587 in the manner described by Dee. And the invincible Spanish Armada sailed toward England in 1588…

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One can imagine that the high level contacts of Doctor Dee felt little enthusiasm for giving him top secret information, if they thereby were at risk of losing their head. Assuming that the plans for an invasion of England a few years before the Armada sailed of were known to a small group of Spanish nobility, it would be clear that there was a leak if England suddenly started working overtime at her own fleet. But if a magician with the reputation of Doctor Dee had seen in a vision “a sea dotted with ships”, one had not to go searching immediately for a traitor. One would rather think of information obtained by occult practices. In this way, Doctor Dee indeed could have been a spy in the disguise of a magician…

The true story of Doctor Dee is continued here:

Doctor Dee & His Mirror of Magick

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