Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture

Chapter 1: The Magus and the Seer

A Colloquium of Angels For almost thirty years, a good one-third of a long and productive life, the Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer, alchemist, and natural philosopher John Dee (–/) experimented with magic. The goal of these experiments was to make contact with the angels. From around  until his death in the winter of / Dee employed at least five different “scryers,” or crystal gazers, to aid him in this pursuit. Of these ongoing experiments with various seers, it is the series of sessions with Edward Kelley (–) that stands out. The relationship between Dee and Kelley, a trained apothecary who had probably been convicted of coining, took place over seven intense years, from  to , variously against the cultural settings of London, Krakow, Prague, and various other Bohemian cities. It was a Europe marked by political intrigue, growing religious conflict, and strong apocalyptic fervors. Against this background, Kelley introduced Dee to a gallery of angelic beings and heavenly landscapes, ostensibly appearing to him in the crystal, pouring out drops of divine and esoteric secrets to the eager philosopher. Among the wonders were the lost language of Adam, knowledge of the angelic hierarchies, and secrets regarding the imminent apocalypse. In itself, there was nothing new about scrying. Catoptromantic and crystallomantic practices, that is, the use of reflective surfaces, such as mirrors or crystals to contact spiritual entities, were folk traditions that could easily be traced back to the Middle Ages. In Elizabethan England, crystal gazing had become something of an institution, with wandering scryers taking up residence with patrons for shorter periods, to provide their sought-after supernatural services. What seems new and surprising with Dee’s experiments is rather the contents and setting.  1 The Magus and the Seer What was the motivation for one of Renaissance England’s brightest minds to immerse himself in angel magic? This question has caused much trouble for historians. For a long time, Dee appeared as a somewhat two-faced figure: at the one hand stood his ultimately intelligible work in Renaissance mathematics and natural philosophy; on the other stood the magician. One response, taken by such an influential scholar as Frances Yates, has been to neglect Dee’s “sensational angel-summonings” altogether, focusing instead on more “respectable” parts of his work. This tendency led Nicholas Clulee to lament that the angel conversations had provided “rich resources for romantic biography and writers of occult sympathies but something of an embarrassment to any attempt to consider Dee as a significant figure in the history of philosophy and science.” That shortcoming he sat out to mend, showing how Dee’s interests in natural philosophy were reproduced and continued in the course of the angel conversations. John Dee and Renaissance Natural Philosophy Seeing the crystal-gazing “colloquium of angels” on a continuum with the more readily explicable natural philosophy has proved a fruitful strategy. Clulee’s approach was notably taken up and expanded by Deborah Harkness, who produced what is currently the best full-length monograph study of Dee’s angel conversations. When we take this view, it seems plausible that Dee initially found the rationale for his attempt to make contact with the divine messengers in his quest for understanding nature. As a natural philosopher, Dee had produced three major works which, with hindsight, all help to put the angel magic in context of Renaissance intellectual life. On the whole, Dee’s intellectual project is situated in distinctive Renaissance habits of thought, what we might call the Renaissance episteme, primarily associated with the rise of the humanists and their intellectual struggles with the “scholastic” tradition. A foundation for Dee’s work is the view that God revealed his mysteries through three “books”: the human soul, revealed Scripture, and “the Book of Nature.” The intellectual task of the natural philosopher largely consisted in deciphering , reading, and interpreting the Book of Nature. Setting out on this course more than half a century before Galileo famously asserted that the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics, Dee belonged to a generation that searched passionately for the right key to reading nature’s language. Variously, he found cues in optics, kabbalistic hermeneutics, emblematics, mathematics, astrology, and magic.  a rguing w ith a ngels  the m agus a nd the seer In his first major work, Propaedeumata aphoristica (), Dee contemplated the metaphysics of light and the prospects for an optical science to properly understand the cosmos...