I liked this book, although it could use a bit of additional structure. It came across my radar from a podcast conversation between Rick Rubin and Jason Louv about the book. Although it exaggerates and studies Dee in arguably too much depth, it paints a fascinating picture of the Elizabethan age.

Dee's life began at the start of the Lutheran Reformation. In 1543 when Dee was sixteen, two monumental works were published: On the Structure of the Human Body, by Andreas Vesalius, and On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies, by Copernicus, but the Royal Society was still a century away. In 1608, a year before Dee's death, Hans Lippershey invented the first telescope. Dee's was a liminal life in a transitional age. Quoth the book:

Dee is an inexhaustible subject. In life, he stood at the crossroads between magic and science, between the medieval and the modern, between Protestantism and Catholicism, and between the terrestrial and celestial worlds themselves.

Dee himself had some scientific contributions, and wrote extensively on optics, astronomy, mechanics, inventing a pulley system for moving heavy weights that would gain popular use later in the century. Dee's interest in optics led him to a reputation for sorcery after he "conjured" an illusion of a flying scarab with a man on its back, terrifying his audience.

In Dee's work Propaedeumata, he proposes that the universe is a vast machine, foreshadowing works to come like Newton's Principia. Dee suggested that God created the universe using mathematics, and that by understanding mathematics (God’s ways in the world), one could work with or even guide the forces of creation. Since man stands between God and the Creation, and is made in God’s image, he is suited to work with God as an intermediary, and mathematics is the ideal science for doing so.

Dee used Copernicus' calculations to determine that eleven days and fifty three minutes should be removed from the new Gregorian calendar, but wisely left out Copernicus' heliocentric model from his report. This was his last major scientific contribution.

Eventually Dee moved on from science and cast himself as an adept rather than just a math professor, in hopes of finding a monarch that would shelter him. However the thing Monarchs actually wanted was the same thing as usual... money and power. And so Elizabeth was busy with her own alchemical experiments, and Dee repackaged his book Monas to portray himself as an alchemist, including critiques of sham alchemists of the day, with intimations that Dee might know how to produce the philosopher's stone. Simultaneously he was writing the the “Mathematicall Praeface” to Henry Billingsley’s massively successful and influential first English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.

Critique: overly bombastic

Following Dame Francis Yates' "The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age", Louv makes bombastic claims that Dee and Kelly's influence on the western world was central to European, English, and American spirituality, geopolitics, and empire.

The influence of Dee and the angelic system he and Kelly delivered to the world can be found in an astonishing number of the major turning points of Western history since Dee’s death—in the birth of modern science, in the creation of the secret societies that liberalized Europe and gave America its spiritual calling, in the creation of the state of Israel and its subsequent centrality to American foreign policy, and even in the genesis of the United States space program.

These statements are highly specious and reductive. Louv writes:

Indeed, just as the work of St. Paul is responsible for turning the ideas of a Jewish messianic sect into a Holy Roman Empire, so is the work of Dr. Dee responsible for turning those of the Protestant dissenters into a global Empire of Angels.

St. Paul was one of very many contingent links for Jesus Christ to reach the prominence required to have Constantine convert the Holy Roman Empire. I don't think Louv's simplistic causal characterization is at all fair.

The Great Chain of Being

Louv does a good job of providing context for the pre-enlightenment world Dee was born into. The canonical classification of divine and profane beings comes to us from the sixth century Christian Pseudo-Dionysius. He scaffolded the order of the world as follows:

Angels of presence, praising God: - Seraphim speculate on the order and providence of God. - Cherubim speculate on the essence and form of God. - Thrones also speculate, though some descend to works. Angels of government, spreading light: - Dominions, like architects, design what the rest execute. - Virtues execute, and move the heavens, and concur for the working of miracles as God’s instruments. - Powers watch that the order of divine governance is not interrupted and some of them descend to human things. Angels of revelation, able to communicate with humans: - Principalities care for public affairs, nations, princes, magistrates. - Archangels direct the divine cult and look after sacred things. - Angels look after smaller affairs, and take charge of individuals as their guardian angels. Non-divine - Humans are in the unfortunate position of being able to commit both spiritual and physical sins—unlike angels and animals, who are either fully spiritual or fully physical. - Animals, ranked within various orders—mammals, avians, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects. - Plants, ranked in order from trees to fungus. - Minerals, ranked by gems, metals, stones, and so on.

Scientists on the woo spectrum

Many great scientists work on the frontier of the known. Thus they encounter plenty of ideas which are not tested and confirmed by the scientific community. As a forward thinking explorer of the unknown, some of your swings may end up as mega-hits, while others might be complete misses. As you do the work, they all look promising. It is only in retrospect that you can separate the scientific contributions from the occult tendencies:

Person	Scientific contribution	Occult tendency
Isaac Newton (1643 — 1727)	Calculus, light waves, laws of motion.	Alchemy and Rosicrucianism
John Nash	Game Theory contributions	Aliens
Srinivasa Ramanujan	Number Theory contributions	The goddess Mahalakshmi
John Whiteside Parsons	Solid-fuel rockets	Thelemite occultism

Louv writes eloquently about the occult's relation to science and religion:

The occult occupies a treacherous liminal zone between the competing discourses of science and religion, both of which reject it. It is tiny, decentralized, largely overlooked by modern culture, unpoliced by the processes of licensing or peer review, and concerned with entirely subjective aspects of the human experience, making it a no-man’s land where scientists, if not angels, fear to tread.

Related to Science and religion are deeply compatible.

Dee's Mortlake library was extensive and frequented by Queen Elizabeth

Dee pitched the concept for a national library to Queen Mary but it was rejected. Instead he expanded his personal library at Mortlake, which grew to be the greatest in England and attracted many scholars.

During Dee’s life, Cambridge possessed only 451 books and manuscripts; Oxford, 379. Dee probably had about 2,000 books and 198 manuscripts at Mortlake.

Elizabeth would regularly ride to Mortlake to visit Dee and his stacks. Dee’s network of contacts continued to encompass scientists, intellectuals, and foreign courtiers from across the British Isles and Europe. He kept company with many of the era’s leading lights, including the explorers Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, Abraham Ortelius (creator of the atlas), Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, and the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe.

Upon his return from Eastern Europe, Dee found his collection ransacked and destroyed.

Catholics vs protestants

Queen Mary (ruled 1553 - 1558), a devout catholic was named Bloody Mary by her protestant opponents. She attempted to reverse the English reformation and was not an intellectual.

Mary's successor Elizabeth I (ruled 1558 — 1603), nominally a Protestant, had a "coldly realpolitik view of faith". She was a child prodigy who grew up to be one of the greatest monarchs in English history. Dee became her astrological and scientific advisor, advocating for England's voyages of discovery and colonization, and coining the term "British Empire". Dee signed his letters to Elizabeth "007". The two circles symbolized the eyes of Queen Elizabeth (for your eyes only) and seven was the alchemist’s lucky number.

Dee himself vacillated between Protestantism and Catholicism depending on the political headwinds. Seeking to stay on Mary's good side, he became an ordained priest in one day. Louv observes the fierce battle between Catholicism and Protestantism, noting the relative tameness of Dee's more deeply held Hermeticist leanings.

Alchemy and sorcery permeated society, but reality itself was also a battle ground between two metamagical systems—Catholicism and Protestantism. Beyond shared religious mythology, Catholicism had its saints, fetishes, sacraments, rituals, inter-cessionary prayer, and other magical technologies; while Protestantism had its evangelical fury and emphasis on individual relationship with Christ. Next to such intense systems of belief, whose wars extended to torture and mass murder, Dee’s Hermeticism looks positively sober—the forerunner of the science that would begin to emancipate humanity.

Dee often found himself in trouble over his religious beliefs, found by the French inquisition to be "not evil, but mad" and imprisoned briefly in 1564.

What is Hermeticism

I once attempted a lecture about Gnosticism. I quickly abandoned it. Yet here I managed to glean some details about what Hermeticism was all about:

Protestantism was only one of the belief structures challenging or running parallel to Catholicism. The others were Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and operative magic—three distinct yet intertwining schools of thought that informed the literate elite’s direct quest for divine knowledge, beyond the rote teachings of the Church.

Hermeticism itself was a long-standing school of philosophy drawn from the study of the Corpus hermeticum, the magical texts attributed to the Egyptian priest, king, and philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, believed to be a contemporary and spiritual equal of Moses, which thus formed a source of wisdom on par with the Old Testament itself.

Primary among these texts is the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, a book first appearing in Arabic sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries, and translated into Latin in the twelfth, which contains the root precepts of the entire genre.

By the sixteenth century, interest in Hermeticism and Neoplatonism was growing among the European intellectual elite. And while Hermetic texts had long been jealously guarded and carefully written in code, the printing press was undoing much of that secrecy, bringing alarming new ideas to receptive minds.

To use a modern metaphor, if the universe is a computer with its own finely ordered operating system, file structure, and languages, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism sought to understand the workings of the computer, while operative magic sought to program it.

Christian Zionism and specious claims

Louv draws a direct causal link from modern American Christian Zionism to Dee's occult beliefs and practices. It feels to me like Dee's role here is exaggerated, but I think the ideological causality is right.

According to a Pew poll, one in three Americans believes that the state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy of Christ's return.

Louv claims that Christian Zionists believe:

that Britain’s failure to work toward a full Jewish state, and America’s urgent insistence on doing so, is responsible for the collapse of the British Empire and the transfer of global imperial primacy to America.

During Dee's time, Protestant groups practiced “Judaizing” by leaning into the Old Testament. The Puritans in particular rejected the residual Catholicism of the Church of England and wanted to live like God's original chosen people. When they left for American shores, they became American evangelicals.

Louv writes that during World War II,

many Christian Zionists saw Hitler’s persecution of the Jews as a part of the divine plan to push Jews toward returning to Palestine and converting to Christianity. They therefore saw little need for America to intervene to prevent the Holocaust from occurring.

!Quotes I like#^59adb2

I'm intrigued by the ideology of Christian Zionism. Although they are some of the strongest defenders of Jews in the US, there is also a dark anti-semitic undercurrent, in that their concern is less about the well-being of the Jewish people as much as their use in bringing forth the apocalypse to ultimately "de-Judaize" them.

I found nothing to confirm Louv's claim that:

Remarkably, John Dee’s fellow magus Isaac Newton predicted 1948 as the year of the Jews’ return to Palestine.

Having said that, Newton did predict the end of the world in 2060. Hopefully I'll live to see it. Wait I mean...

The "British" Empire

At the time, Spain was the dominant Empire, extracting massive amounts of silver from its New World colonies. This in part led to the obsession about alchemy: to tip the balance of economic power.

The only credible challenger to Spain at the moment was Portugal, who had split the New World along the line determined by the Treaty of Tordesillas (see Late Middle Ages). Dee suggested the Queen make some changes:

Dee, with his back pocket full of superior knowledge of geography, navigation, and optics, would soon suggest Elizabeth contest this, and expand into the New World not just to rival Catholic domination, but for economic growth.

Dee masterminded Drake's mission which resulted in a landing at Drake's Beach north of San Francisco. Further expeditions included one by Frobisher, where two ships, the Gabriel and Michael, named after two prominent archangels, were sent and discovered a sample of black ore which was believed to contain gold. This spurred an additional voyage which returned with 200 tons of it, but the ore turned out to be pyrite, a worthless fool's gold.

In November 1577, Dee presented a new imperial plan to Elizabeth, suggesting that England wrest control of the New World from Spain. Dee argued that Britain needed a continually operational navy, and that it also had natural advantages for the maritime trades.

Establishing such a navy would make Britain nigh-on invincible (it did), and expansion of the British Navy and colonization of the New World not only had historical precedent but would surely raise vast riches for the Crown (it did).

Dee wrote explicitly that the Petty Navy Royal should have sixty 120-200 ton "tall ships", and twenty small warships staffed by thousands of men funded by taxation. Dee argued that this would pay for itself, as the wealth gained by taxation would trickle down to the English people.

Arthurian New World?

Dee held the bizarre belief that America had been colonized by King Arthur and that his still-existing Arthurian colonies might be found in the Northwest Passage. Dee drew up maps on the foundation of the Arthurian claim to the New World sprawled from Florida to Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.

Mercator himself had written to Dee that King Arthur had sent an expedition of four thousand men into the seas near the North Pole, and that some of the members of the team had survived, with their descendants appearing at court in Norway in 1364. Also of interest was the Welsh legend of Madoc, a prince who supposedly explored the New World in 1170;

Dee’s use of the term "British" Empire long predated the use of the word British to mean the British Isles; it referred instead to Arthur’s legendary Britain.

Of course, voyages to the New World would fail to turn up any evidence of Arthurian settlements, undermining Dee’s claims.

Hebrew and Enochian

Like Postel and Bacon, Dee thought the forces of creation were encoded into Hebrew, although even Hebrew would be an echo of the hypothesized primal language.

The angelic language, Sledge argues, “begins to exist somewhere between being created and being discovered by Kelly under a state of increasingly pronounced epistemological inclusivity between the angelic revelation, his own thoughts, and the dizzying array of alterations in his consciousness brought on by the effects of the sessions themselves and/or mental illness.”

As part of the process of transmitting the forty-nine calls, and elsewhere in the diaries, the angels delivered fragments of the angelic language itself—often referred to as Enochian (this is a later conceit, not contained in the original spirit diaries). This was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden; when Adam was corrupted by the demon Coronzom in the form of the serpent and exiled east of Eden, he had to invent the Hebrew language instead, which contained an echo of the angelic language—though without the true forms or pronunciation.

Dee's Enochian alphabet

Dee and Kelly's scrying sessions

Dee and Kelly's scrying sessions were bizarre. They often featured angels and archangels appearing in their midst and providing divine prophecy. The archangel Gabriel spoke to them on June 2, 1584. The archangel Uriel manifested a crystal out of thin air, to be used by Kelly as his scrying device. Through this medium, Dee and Kelly were given complex instructions for building temple furniture and other very detailed rituals:

A gold ring upon which is written the name “PELE” that is to be worn by the working magician and corresponds to the Seal of Solomon, the ring said to be worn by King Solomon, who appears in 1 Kings, and used to command the demons with which he built his temple.

The sessions ranged from comical:

However, Michael was still unimpressed. On April 28—five weeks since the previous action—he chided Dee and Kelly for their slackness in carrying out his instructions. Dee pleaded that he hadn’t had money to buy materials to make the lamen, ring, or Sigillum.

To completely psychedelic:

Two birds reappeared, as big as mountains now, flying toward space. The first bird took stars into his bill, while the second took the stars from the first and put them back into the sky; they quickly repeated this process throughout the heavens. These birds now flew over cities and towns, breaking up the clouds and causing dust to fall from the walls and towers, thereby cleaning them. In the streets were “diverse brave fellows”—bishops, princes, and kings—that the wings of the birds struck down, while beggars, the infirm, children, women, and the elderly were left untouched.

Now the birds lifted the corpses of four men from the ground, each of them wearing crowns, one of which was a child. Upon being raised into the air they parted into the four cardinal directions. Coming now to a great hill, the birds squeezed metals from the ground and threw them out; next tossing the withered head of an old man between their feet until it cracked open, revealing a stone the size of a tennis ball colored white, black, red, and green—the colors of the Watchtowers that would be later transmitted, and of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Upon eating the stone, the birds became two men with bright white paper crowns, with gold teeth, hands, feet, tongues, eyes, and ears. On each were twenty-six gold crowns, and they carried bags of gold that they sowed upon the earth like seeds.

The scrying sessions continued in exile in Poland and the Czech Republic with more intense visions:

Uriel transformed into a great spinning wheel of fire; after thrusting out his hands, the wheel appeared full of men’s eyes, with flames shooting out of it in four places. A great white eagle with monstrous red eyes, one the color of fire and one of crystal, now came and perched upon the wheel, carrying a scroll of parchment in its beak. Beneath this eagle appeared a great valley, within which was a great city six times the size of Krakow, full of ruined houses, with a river running by it.

(I want to feed this into a gen AI video maker...)

Wife swapping

At some point in the scrying sessions Kelly was implored to marry. He indeed soon married, though he came to greatly resent his wife.

Later, while in Třeboň, Dee and Kelly were told by Madimi, an angel from their vision, that they must share everything they had, including their wives, in order to complete the first phase of the Apocapylse.

Understandably, their wives were appalled. Dee told Jane Dee that "the wife sharing had to occur; there was no other way". Kelly went through and consummated, but Dee did not. Unsurprisingly, this was the end of the line for Dee and Kelly's friendly collaboration:

Dee, who had already given everything for his cause, and sacrificed all that he had gained for the promise of angelic insight, had now been taken by his partner—for his contacts, his status, his knowledge, his alchemical equipment, and even his wife’s favors, leaving Dee destitute and possibly with a son not of his own parentage.

Dee in literature and legacy

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an example of anti-occult sentiment of the late 16th century. Its titular character is likely based in part on Dee himself. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) was also inspired by Dee’s legend, with both plays casting their respective sorcerers as tragic victims of their own ambitions. Prospero of Shakespeare's The Tempest is also likely to be inspired by John Dee.

Instead of facing a martyr’s death, Dee had been pushed out of polite society and forced to bear the constant humiliation of dashed hopes. Even his neighbors soon refused to offer him loans.

Louv also argues that Dee deeply inspired Francis Bacon, although Dee became untouchable because of his association with sorcery, and was not explicitly mentioned in Bacon's writing.

Bacon nowhere mentions Dee in his two works, though he surely stood on the great educator’s shoulders. He also makes no mention of mathematics, still inseparably connected to Dee in the English mind. These omissions, Yates argues, were not from oversight or lack of debt, but because Bacon feared repeating Dee’s treatment by James I.

And Francis Bacon is the guiding spirit of the Royal Society. Again I find this to be a pretty tenuous link, but as I read this book, I mentally replaced Dee with the je ne sais quoi spirit of the Elizabethan age Dee represented.

Dee's occult descendents

Edward Alexander Crowley founded a modern Magick order called Thelema. His books like "The vision and the Voice" reveals a complex cosmology that sounds intriguing, at least in Louv's retelling, especially as it relates to Negative theology and via negativa.

However the historical details are grim. Crowley appears to be a terrible person individually, while also promulgating a variety of questionable practices: perverse sex, hard drugs, mind control. He is also a self-declared antichrist. In summary, a rather unattractive package, for example:

Crowley’s rather cowardly refusal to help several men trapped by an avalanche during his Kanchenjunga expedition; his decades of cocaine, ether, and heroin addiction and the resultant ugly interpersonal behaviors these drugs engender; his often sociopathic treatment of women, students, and hired help; his extreme racism and anti-Semitism (including a line in his Magical and Philosophical Commentaries, III:11, in which he calls Jews “the parasites of man,” which has been deleted from later editions), and so on . . . and so on . . . and so on

Louv's account of the various offshots of Dee's esoterics is long and esoteric, covering weird persons associated with Crowley's A∴A∴, such as Charles Stansfeld Jones who in Vancouver founded the first Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) lodge in North America.

But then he switches gears a bit and catches my attention again with the figure of John Whiteside Parsons, a sci-fi fan, Enochian magician, JPL founder, and inventor of solid rocket propellant.

Parsons straddled the worlds of science and the occult. Like Dee, he saw centuries ahead of his time. Like Dee, his personality was too complex and interests too far-reaching to easily compartmentalize—picture Faust, Elon Musk, Hugh Hefner, and Abbie Hoffman in one man. Like Dee, he would be instrumental in expanding humanity’s horizons, in this case not just to a new continent but to new worlds, for which he would be uncredited, unthanked, and forgotten. Like Dee, he would immerse himself in Enochian magic, working the system with a charlatan associate who would betray and defraud him just as Kelly had Dee. Like Dee, he would lose everything.

Apparently inspired by Greek Fire, Parsons developed GALCIT-53, solid-state rocket fuel, solving problems with previously too-volatile formulations.

In 1939, along with the rest of the Thelema crew, Parsons rented a mansion called Agape Lodge, an experiment in communal living inspired by Parsons' Marxism and Crowley's Abbey of Thelema:

This was a forerunner of the similar experiments of the Beat and hippie generations to come. Parsons was soon reveling in orgies, ritual magic, drug use and abuse, polyamorous hysterics.

He began composing Vogon poetry:

I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote, marihuana, morphine, and cocaine. I never knew sadness but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain.

Parsons short life took a turn for the worse after he met L. Ron Hubbard. Together they begin their own sessions, Parsons acting as evoker and Hubbard acting as the scryer, mirroring the Dee-Kelly partnership. I had previously known of L. Ron Hubbard only for his involvement in Scientology and for his famous bet with Frank Herbert. This adds additional color to the demented man.

Like Dee and Kelly, they ventured deeply into the occult and sexual, with Parsons meeting Marjorie Cameron, a new tenant at the Lodge, who he decided was the Scarlet Woman, also known as Babalon. Meanwhile Hubbard's scrying began to increasingly resemble science fiction writing.

Parsons was like Dee:

• Both responded to the pain of rejection and the collapse of their scientific careers by retreating into the world of the occult.
• Both would be cuckolded, with Dee giving his wife over to Kelly, and Parsons being taken by Hubbard for his young girlfriend Betty.
• Both would be taken advantage of financially. Hubbard convinced Parsons to buy three yachts in Miami, which they would sail through the Panama Canal to the West Coast and then sell at a profit. As soon as Parsons agreed, Hubbard absconded to Miami with his money and Betty, leaving Parsons broke.

L. Ron Hubbard sounds like a total piece of shit. Parson's short life ended in tragedy, at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion in 1952.

Louv has a very specific interpretation of Super Bowl XLIX:

As the personification of female sexual liberation, anti-Christianity, open sexuality, witchcraft, and the occult, Babalon is much more popular in our current world than Christ—so much so that in 2015, Katy Perry appeared as Babalon herself at the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show, the largest and most central spectacle of mainstream American life. Bedecked in scarlet red flames, Perry emerged onto the field riding a towering portrayal of the solar, golden Beast, afterward dancing on a Masonic checkerboard while asking her viewers if they wanted to “play with magic” and telling them, as Babalon does in “Liber Cheth” and “The Book of Babalon,” that “once you’re mine, there’s no going back". This monumental and compelling spectacle, which greatly upset conservative Christians, nonetheless drew over 118.5 million viewers—the largest audience in Super Bowl history, and most certainly for a Thelemic ritual. It is hard to imagine a more definitive symbol of Crowley’s Thelemic worldview, and Babalon herself, winning the culture war. It’s a long journey from the visions of two English alchemists in 1587 to the Super Bowl halftime 428 years later, but then, goddesses presumably think on a long timeline.

I can't tell if Louv is joking. Did the producers of Katy Perry's act think about the Whore of Babalon when the produced it? Did conservative Christians truly react negatively to it?

Anyway, a provocative and intriguing but very esoteric read.