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Memories of a Dark Past: A Note on John Dee in Enlightenment Historiography By the eighteenth century the original transactions of the angel sessions had found their way into archival oblivion in Oxford and London, and Casaubon’s edition had finally cemented Dee’s unfavorable reputation. As the age of Enlightenment dawned Casaubon’s theologically founded condemnation of magic was replaced with accusations of irrational superstition and folly. When Dee was remembered in Enlightenment historiography, it was mostly to remind the bright minds of the age of the misguided thinking of those that came before them. Together with the belief that society and the human intellect had progressed to more sophisticated levels came a number of misrepresentations of the past. Anything “occult” or “Hermetic” was per definition backward, sharing an almost mystical affinity of irrationality.1 Thus, an entry on John Dee appearing in James Granger’s Biographical History of England in 1774 started by stating that “John Dee was a man of extensive learning, particularly in the mathematics, in which he had few equals; but he was vain, credulous, and enthusiastic.” It is with some surprise that we continue to read that the doctor was also “strongly tinctured with the superstition of the Rosicrucians, whose dreams he listened to with great eagerness, and became as great a dreamer himself as any of that fraternity.”2 As is well known, there was no Rosicrucianism prior to the publication of the Fama Fraternitatis in 1614, about five years after Dee had passed away. What is more, there were no real Rosicrucian fraternities either until possibly the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, this association between Dee and Rosicrucianism would be repeated in later works of history as well—including by Edmund Burke.3 As we shall see later in this chapter, the Rosicrucian connection would 3 Victorian Occultism and the Invention of Modern Enochiana 43 44 a rguing w ith a ngels only grow much stronger by the time of the occult revival at the end of the nineteenth century. Another significant account of Dee’s work was published in 1834 by the British radical political philosopher and journalist William Godwin (1756–1836). Godwin was married to the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft , and was the father of Mary Shelley, author of the classic gothic novel Frankenstein. Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers nicely illustrates the attitude to the esoteric inherent to Enlightenment historiography.4 Here he had gathered information on a large variety of various mystics and magicians, and presented a standard attack on these deluded subjects. His interpretation was fairly in the line of Casaubon’s, describing Dee as “a mystic of the most dishonourable sort,” adding that he was “induced to believe in a series of miraculous communications without common sense.”5 In the spirit of the Enlightenment Godwin asserts Dee’s story to be “strikingly illustrative of the credulity and superstitious faith of the time in which he lived.”6 Nevertheless, Godwin’s treatment of Dee is noteworthy also because it suggests that Godwin had a fairly good overview of the sources (which is much more than can be said of Granger and Burke), referring to his copious magical notes “still existing in manuscript” in addition to Casaubon’s “well-sized folio.”7 Because he took the trouble to track down obscure sources Godwin in fact points toward the developments that concern us in this chapter, namely the rediscovery of Dee’s manuscripts, and other related magical papers discussed in the previous chapter. Just as Casaubon’s debunking had sparked a revival of interest in Dee from a practitioner’s point of view, Godwin’s exposé (which went through several editions in the 1830s, and one more in 1876) was followed by new appropriations of the angel conversations from crystallomancers, at the heart of the enlightened nineteenth century. This is where the story of modern Enochiana really begins. Crystallomancy and Early British Occultism The rediscovery of Dee’s angelic conversations ran more or less parallel to the crazed interest in spiritualism and mediumistic phenomena of the Victorian era. One important student of the Dee manuscripts was the collector and crystallomancer Frederick Hockley (1808–1885). We have little verifiable information about Hockley, and he remains a quite obscure figure.8 Most of what we know about him and the network of magicians and occultists working in England around mid-century comes from the correspondences of Francis George Irwin (1828–1892), preserved in the London archives...

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