The Arch Conjuror of England (11 page)

Dee combined angelic studies with kabbalistic reading of the exceptional collection of books in Hebrew, ‘Chaldean’, Aramaic and Syriac that he now began collecting. Because he could barely understand these languages, like Postel he spent more time contemplating each letter of their alphabets as a profound hieroglyphic symbol or sign. His first purchase at Louvain promoted such contemplation. Jacques Gohory's
Book of the Use and Mysteries of Signs
attributed magical powers to hieroglyphs, including a Monad created through numerology.
¹⁴
Dee also bought Johann Widmanstetter's groundbreaking Syriac New Testament (Vienna, 1555), with secret contributions by the learned Postel. Like the notorious Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Widmanstetter and Postel believed Syriac to be Christ's holy language, concealing profound meanings in the very shapes of its letters.
¹⁵

In 1562, at Paris, Dee wrote an ambitious treatise, a now lost ‘Compendious Table of the Hebrew Kabbalah’. It summarised his twenty years of hard labour in alchemy since his days at St John's.
¹⁶
He combined those alchemical conclusions with the results of the last five years’ kabbalistic theorising about the hieroglyphic Monad's symbolic summation of Creation. Probably influenced by Postel, who was just then enjoying a brief interlude of freedom, and even sanity, in Paris, Dee applied Kabbalah not just to Hebrew but to all languages created by God. However, he tried to outdo even Postel's ‘vulgar’ Kabbalah, which only dealt with spoken languages. His Parisian treatise allegedly explored the still more profound ‘real Kabbalah’ hidden in the very framework of Creation, which God had revealed to Adam. To recover this lost ‘alphabet’, Dee derived the ‘real’ Kabbalah's ‘signs and characters’ not from alphabets but, by kabbalistic geometry, from visible and invisible things in Nature, which his
Monas
later called the Kabbalah ‘of that which is’.
¹⁷

Both Postel and Dee confidently expected an imminent ‘restoration of all things’ to their first perfection, partly because they believed they could apply universal mathematical principles to the reform of all knowledge. About the time of Dee's visit to Paris, Postel began describing himself as a ‘cosmopolite’, a French word he coined for a citizen of no country but Christ's imminent kingdom. Dee would use the same word for himself in his
Monas
and in his writings foreseeing Maximilian II's, and later Elizabeth's, apocalyptic empire.
¹⁸

While Dee's European travels began shaping his later
Monas
, they also introduced him to the profound mysteries of Paracelsian alchemy. Paracelsus also prophesied a magical, apocalyptic restoration of debased human knowledge. Dee eventually owned ninety-two editions of books
by Paracelsus or Paracelsians, grouped on his library shelves at Mortlake for ready reference, whether as a Paracelsian doctor or teacher.
¹⁹
Dee connected the reformed alchemy promised in his
Monas
with Paracelsus's claim to have revived lost Elect alchemy, first revealed to the Prophet Elijah. Thus Dee wrote into one of his earliest Paracelsian purchases the names of good angels who revealed Elect knowledge: ‘Anchorus, Anachor, Anilos’.
²⁰

Supported by Cecil, Dee resumed his travels, visiting the famous physician and alchemist Konrad Gesner at chilly Zürich in April 1563.
²¹
From Zürich he rode south through Splügen, threading the rugged Lago di Montespluga pass between six-thousand-foot peaks to Chiavenna, noticing in the snow a giant wooden hand pointing to the warm sunshine of Italy. Arriving at Padua on 20 May, by early June he had reached Venice, the ancient republic secure in its lagoon behind its formidable navy. Travelling 150 miles further south across the stifling, unhealthy marshes between Venice and Ravenna, Dee visited Urbino about mid-summer. Along the way he studied alchemical books, consulted alchemists, and wrote copious notes about oriental alphabets.
²²
By July another journey of 150 miles had brought him across the Apennines to Rome, to be introduced to scholars and shown the titanic western facade of St Peter's, newly completed by the aged Michelangelo, the dome still shrouded in scaffolding. As in Antwerp and Louvain, his Catholic priesthood helped to open doors.
²³

Dee laboriously retraced his steps through Ravenna and Venice to Graz, determined to witness Maximilian of Habsburg's coronation at Bratislava in early September as King of Hungary.
²⁴
For eight centuries Europeans had cherished prophecies of an heroic Last World Emperor, increasingly identified with the Habsburgs. Many attending his coronation hoped that Maximilian would prove such an imperial ‘cosmopolite’, healing broken Christendom before ushering in global peace and prosperity. The celebrations made heavy use of apposite symbols, defying the reality that just a few miles away most of Hungary lay under Ottoman rule.
²⁵

Back in Antwerp, Europe's greatest trading city, his mind teeming with new alchemical and kabbalistic ideas, stirred by the aching desire amongst his new scholarly friends for some way to heal a divided Christendom and
reform corrupt polities and societies, in January 1564 Dee sat down to write a remarkable book. For his
Monas
aimed at nothing less than the solution to all the world's problems. It offered Maximilian ‘cosmopolitical theories’ to usher in this ‘fourth, great, and truly metaphysical revolution’ of universal empire, an idea he borrowed from Postel.
²⁶
Monas
also proved Dee's philosophical superiority, at least to his own satisfaction, because he was the one man in a billion who could explain ‘the supracelestial virtues and metaphysical influences’ to a ruler already versed in ‘the stupendous mysteries of philosophers’. Dee's blatant play for patronage also employed political flattery. His Monad combined Habsburg symbols representing the Sun, the Moon, the Cross and Aries, which had been displayed at Maximilian's coronation to symbolise his inheritance of universal empire.
²⁷

For twelve days Dee wrote feverishly, feeling that divine revelation offered him glimpses into the hidden secrets of Nature. His virtue meant that ‘our IEOVA’ had chosen him alone to receive ‘this sacred art of writing’, the Monad, knowledge that had been lost since God revealed it to Adam. Because all grammars expressed ‘one science’, one underlying truth, fundamental laws governed the placing of Hebrew, Greek and Latin letters in their alphabets, their ways of joining, their numerical values, and even ‘the shapes of the letters’. Only the rarest philosopher could uncover these laws.
²⁸

The
Monas
certainly challenges modern assumptions about rational argument. The reader may choose whether to follow Dee in his flights of alchemical speculation, the particle physics of his time, or to read in the next chapter how Dee acted on his thoughts. Dee's belief that his hieroglyphic writing uncovered the divine language of things hidden in the world at Creation owed less than he claimed to divine inspiration. He derived it from his contemporaries, as he did the idea that his hieroglyphic writing transformed all supposedly different disciplines by illuminating their essential unity.

As so often, Dee was applying well-worn ideas in novel ways.
Monas
drew on centuries of learned speculation about the underlying unity of Creation, the geometry of alphabets, and recent kabbalistic teachings by
Agrippa and Postel that alphabets had divine, not human origins. It also incorporated his own musings about the Monad since 1557, including his 1562 first draft written in Paris. Superficially Dee's search for the original divine language seems far removed from the
Propaedeumata's
geometric optical study of rays. However, Genesis linked God's language and light at the Creation: ‘And God said, let there be light’ (Genesis 1:3). Moreover, Dee's reading emphasised this connection. Al-Kindi's
On Rays
claimed that magic could redirect the effects of celestial rays. Fully a third of
On Rays
applied ray theory to the ‘power of words’ in magical prayer, figures, diagrams, talismans and symbols.
²⁹
Since everything resonated with ‘rays’, including people, writing and symbols, contemplation of a hieroglyph could produce magical effects.

Dee deeply admired ‘Joachim the Prophesier’, the twelfth-century mystic who, he believed, could foretell the future because he had penetrated to the ‘formal numbers’ by which God sustained Creation, and which gave rise to the profound meanings hidden in the very shapes of the Greek
alpha
and
omega
.
³⁰
Dee collected books by Joachim of Fiore's many followers, who developed his diagrams and symbols into prophecies of spiritual triumph under a Last World Emperor.
³¹
Dee had been captivated by Postel's enthusiasm for Joachim's imminent golden age and his teachings about the hidden meanings within alphabets.

Agrippa had speculated about the intrinsic magical powers of languages, alphabets and numbers in his scandalous but influential
Three Books on Occult Philosophy
. Dee probably read
Occult Philosophy
quite early in his career.
³²
Like many occult books it camouflaged knowledge aimed at adepts under verbiage designed to mislead the casual reader. The informed reader could uncover a hidden, carefully graduated programme of magic, as did Hugh Plat, the English occult philosopher and Dee's relative by marriage. Different levels of Agrippa's magic corresponded to the different forms of language powerful in the natural, celestial and divine worlds. Agrippa's Book III illustrated how Kabbalah and ritual could harness the language of demons and angels in the divine world, to achieve magical effects.

Along with Postel, Agrippa essentially founded Christian Kabbalah. From Jewish Kabbalah he took
gematria
, the numerological interpretation
of words.
³³
Because the ancient Hebrews represented numbers by letters, Kabbalah enabled diligent readers to decode hidden messages in the Torah. Agrippa took this search for hidden meanings several steps further. Like Joachim, he applied to language the ancient Pythagorean and Neoplatonist commonplace that God, the perfect number, had formed the world from ‘formal’ numbers.
³⁴
Unlike commonplace numbers, these ‘formal’ numbers, through their proportions ‘by lines, and points make Characters, and figures’, and ultimately, letters.
³⁵
Therefore the ‘certain order, number and figure’ of letters emerged not from ‘the weak judgement of man’ but ‘from above, whereby they agree with the celestial, and divine bodies, and virtues’. In other words the Hebrew letters, for example, were diagrams of the heavens.
³⁶

Agrippa believed that he outdid Jewish kabbalists by applying their methods to all alphabets, a method Dee took further in
Monas
. Since alphabets derived from the framework of the world, Agrippa could relate them all to the four elements, the seven planets and the twelve zodiacal signs.
³⁷
More profoundly still, since the very shapes of letters symbolised the cosmic structure, they became not just characters but hieroglyphic images. By contemplating these images the virtuous adept could experience sudden, divinely inspired, interpretive leaps to perceive their dense, hidden meanings.

Dee found two consequences fascinating. These powerful magic images symbolised truths inexpressible in fallen human language. Also, the hieroglyph harmoniously vibrated with its celestial influences. Properly constructed, it would draw down and concentrate them. From al-Kindi, Dee derived the consequence that altering the hieroglyph by changing its ‘framing’ would alter the stellar influences with which it vibrated.
³⁸
The most powerful hieroglyphs resonated with the greatest forces. For example, the simplest Hebrew letter, ‘Yod’, signified that ‘Unity’ from which everything derived. From it Postel derived the entire Hebrew alphabet as cosmic diagrams. In Agrippa's ‘exemplary’ or highest world, ‘Yod’ connected to the ‘One Divine Essence’, the fountain of all virtue and power. Below, in the intellectual world of the angels, it harmonised with the ‘soul of the world’, and in the celestial realm with the sun's
power. In the elemental world it represented the philosopher's stone, ‘instrument of all virtues natural, and supernatural’, in the physical world the heart, and in the infernal world Lucifer, the prince of rebellion.
³⁹

Therefore, Dee followed Postel and Agrippa when he showed how God had created the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets from ‘points, straight lines, and circles’. Humans had needed divine help to derive the Hebrew alphabet from the ‘Chireck’, or point, and the ‘Yod’, or line. However, he went further in demonstrating from the same fundamental ideas the mathematical and geometrical language underlying the structure of Creation. The same ‘divine power’ from ‘our IEOVA’ behind alphabets revealed to Dee the secret mathematical language of the cosmos.
⁴⁰

He further explained the Monad as possessing ‘hidden away in its innermost centre’ a terrestrial body. Dee claimed, like Agrippa, that the Monad hieroglyph taught symbolically, ‘without words’, what divine force should activate the ‘terrestrial centre’, to unite it with solar and lunar influences. The hieroglyph achieved this end by combining the rays of all the planets whose symbols it contained, as a talisman. Dee told his Parisian audience that his discovery of a unitary symbol combining all celestial rays had great cosmic significance, for it would produce a ‘metaphysical revolution’, metamorphosing the adept himself.
⁴¹

As a divinely inspired writer, Dee wrote only for adepts. ‘He who does not understand’ must ‘be silent or learn’, warned the title page of
Monas
. Like many occult writers he reserved his mysteries for initiates. This fitted the work to Maximilian, since secret knowledge supported political power. Expecting the ignorant to criticise his ‘lofty mysteries’ as impious demonic magic, he could not be explicit.
⁴²
No one could describe Dee's prose style as limpid, but in the
Monas
he became particularly opaque.