- A Life of John Dee, Part 1.
- A Life of John Dee, Part 2.
The John Dee of Part 1 was shining success. Son of a “gentleman
server” to Henry VIII he attended quality schools: St. John’s and Trinity
Colleges, Cambridge, University of Louvain. After Louvain he taught at the
University of Paris. He returned to England where he settled in Mortlake and wrote
highly touted books on astronomy.
The first sign of the dangers of practicing secular sciences was his
arrest by the council of Queen Mary I. The charges were magic and treason. He
was freed without penalty. With the accession of Elizabeth — with whom he already
had exchanged letters — he found it safer to pursue his secular disciplines.
Edward Kelley — alias Talbot — clipper, coiner, forger, and
thief, now appears upon the scene, and the aspect of things, becomes very grim.
This man was Dee’s evil genius. Their connection is one of the most astonishing
and perplexing circumstances of his history. How Kelly could have acquired such
complete ascendancy over his patron is almost inexplicable. Kelley was a
first-class ne’er-do-well, a lover of loose company and of strong waters, and a
consummate liar. He professed to be a clairvoyant, a skryer, or crystal gazer,
and Dee’s passion for occultism was such that no tale of mystery or message
from the spirit world was too gross or outrageous for him to swallow, as his
own records of their séances demonstrate. Dee was an operative alchemist of no
mean reputation, and the supposition is that Kelley sought to worm himself into
Dee’s confidence in order to gain information concerning the manufacture of the
philosopher’s stone about which Dee never professed any knowledge. It is
impossible here to go into any details of the extraordinary partnership into which
th pair entered, or to tell how they were induced, mainly at the instigation of
a Polish adventurer, to wander, with their wives and Dee’s children, on to the
Continent, through Holland, North Germany, Poland, and eventually to Prague,
where Kelley took service under Rudolph II., the “Hermes of Germany.”
The story of that morose, half-witted, loose-living,
fanatic, who secluded himself for years in his gloomy palace at Prague,
occupying himself with atrology, thaumaturgy, alchemy, necromancy, and every other
form of aberration of which the human mind was then capable, is one of the most
striking chapters in the book. Here Kelley was in a congenial atmosphere; he
became wealthy — how is not very clear — flourished, in fact, like the bay
tree, and was ennobled, only to fall more rapidly than he rose. He had
previously shaken off Dee; he had no further use for him. The poverty stricken,
disillusioned man, after six years wandering over Europe, now set his face once
more towards Mortlake, only to find that, in his absence, his precious library
of 4000 volumes had been rifled, and his indtruments and apparatus broken by
his neighbors. Well might he exclaim:
Have I so long, so dearly, so farre, so carefully, so
painfully, so dangerously, fought and travailed for the learning of wisdom and
atteyning of virtue, and in the end am I become worse than when I began? Call
you this to be learned? Call you this to be a philosopher and a lover of
wisdom?
Could anything be more dramatic? The peaceful home on the banks of the Thames, into whose “silver” stream Dee’s children occasionally tumbled without risk of being poisoned by the filth of Brentford; the surprise visits of the Queen; the advent of Kelley, and with him all the ghastly, skrying, crystal-gazing business — just as it is done today in Bond Street — communings with Annael,
Anachor, Anilos, Uriel the Spirit of Light, Bobogel,
Michael with his fiery sword, Gabriel, Raphael, Il, Ave, and the rest. Then
comes Madimi, the first of the females angels who appeared to the pair,
sometimes as “a pretty girl of seven or nine years attired in a gown of Sey,
changeable green and red, with a train,” and at other times as “a wench in
white,” and who had learned Greek, Arabic, and Syrian on purpose to be useful.
Next enters the Mephisto of the story — Laski, the Polish adventurer,
introduced by an angel named Jubanladec — whi enjoined him to “live better and
see himself inwardly.” At his solicitation the pair decide to go with him to
Poland. Then comes the journey across Holland, and among the devious
peat-coloured waterways of East Friesland and out to sea by the islands up to
Embden, and so to Oldenburg, Bremen and Lubeck. Thence to Cracow, and
eventually to Prague, where we have the mad Emperor, and all the diabolical doings in chicanery and fraud
which bring the cropped-eared Kelley to his end. Lastly, we have the return of
Dee — a ruined man, cheated by those he trusted, shunned by his acquaintance,
scorned by his enemies — to the wrecked house at Mortlake he called home.
What a phantasmal tragedy it all seems! And yet it is sober
history, capable of being verified in detail, and Miss Fell Smith demonstrates
in her vivid, scholarly, and deeply interesting narrative.
T.E. Thorpe
[1] T.
E. Thorpe. “John Dee.” Nature. December 2, 1909. 121-2.
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