Book Review
John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature
Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 252 pp.
Whatever John Dee's considerable renown during his lifetime, within fifty years of his death he had acquired a reputation for self-delusion and charlatanry. This acquisition was largely due to Meric Casaubon's publication in 1659 of parts of Dee's "angel diaries," with the aim of exposing them as records not of conversations with heavenly spirits but of consultations with "false lyingî ones. Dee's other activities as an Elizabethan magus--blending magic, astrology, alchemy, cabala, and mathematics in an eclectic Neoplatonic fusion--have now been rescued from similar disrepute by scholars such as Frances Yates, Peter French, and Nicholas Clulee. But until now, Dee's talking to angels in a showstone (which apparently collected their "rays," seen by professional "scryers") has remained impenetrable. Perhaps understandably so. Where, after all, are the limits of unreason? Can we make sense of everything historically? Harkness, in this new book, evidently thinks that we can do so in the case of Dee. He emerges from her study as a man of his age, sharing in its intellectual traditions. His theory and practice comprised a science, as then defined, though conducted as revealed theology and via spirit experiments.
In a sense, Dee also emerges as very much a man of our times--obsessed with language, textuality, and communication. For him the world was an opaque holy text to be read in the light of the language that had originally created it and given it power: the true cabala of nature, taught him by the angel Raphael. In this language, as Johannes Reuchlin had explained earlier in the sixteenth century, even the punctuation signified. Dee was not always a good learner--he argued [End Page 206] with his angel locutors about the whereabouts of Paradise, saying it must be outside 45 degrees latitude north and south, since otherwise explorers would have found it. In return, the angels told Dee some strange and not altogether elevated things--that he might share his wife with other men, for example--and they debated prophecies about the deaths of contemporary rulers. Nor were Dee's angels always good instructors--they began teaching him the characters, words, and names of God's own language in March 1582 (sometimes at seven hours at a stretch), only for it to emerge that His language conformed to no known rules of grammar, syntax, or pronunciation, and that Dee would not actually be able to utter it until the final days.
For all these claims and experiences, Harkness insists, there can be no single descriptive category, and certainly not "magic"--a testimony to the extraordinary confusion and eclecticism that marked late-sixteenth-century knowledge. Nor can there be any alternative to the wide variations in Dee's reputation, given the relativity of judgments this same confusion produced. But the question of unreason, by sixteenth- or twenty-first-century standards, remains. How to speak an unutterable language--"to talk," as one angel put it to Dee, "in mortal sounds with such as are immortal"? How, indeed, to know an ineffable God?
Stuart Clark
Stuart Clark, professor of cultural and intellectual history at the University of Wales, Swansea, is the author of Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern History and the editor of Languages of Witchcraft.
