The House of Doctor Dee (19 page)

Once upon a time I was afraid of libraries. Those shelves of books formed a world which had, almost literally, turned its back upon me; the smell of dust and wood, and faded pages, induced in me a sense of melancholy loss. Yet I began to repair my life when I became a researcher and entered the past: then one book led to another book, one document to another document, one theme to another theme, and I was led down a sweet labyrinth of learning in which I could lose myself. It has been said that books talk to one another when no one is present to hear them speak, but I know better than that: they are forever engaged in an act of silent communion which, if we are fortunate, we can overhear. I soon came to recognize the people who also understood this. They were the ones who always relaxed as they walked among the shelves, as if they were being comforted and protected by a thousand invisible presences. They seem to be talking to themselves but, no, they are talking to the books. And so I am a subscriber to the English History Library in Carver's Square, which, of all London libraries, is the most curious and dilapidated; the passages are narrow, the stairs circuitous, and the general atmosphere one of benign decay. The books here are often piled up on the floors, while the shelves can hardly bear the weight of the volumes which have been deposited on them over the years. Yet, somewhere among this ruin, I hoped to find John Dee.

In fact, to my surprise, there were two books devoted to him in an alcove labelled, in old-fashioned Gothic script, 'The History of English Science'. The most recent was
John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion
by Nicholas Clulee, and as soon as I took it down from the shelf I realized that this was not the history of a black magician; there was a bibliography of thirty-four pages and it was clear, even from my brief examination of the chapters, that this was a serious account of mathematics, of astronomy, and of philosophy. Beside this volume was another,
John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus
by Peter French; and when I took it down, he stared at me. He was depicted on the cover, and in my sudden fright I almost dropped the book. I had not expected to see him so soon, and it took me a moment before I could look at the painting again. The eyes were slightly too large, as if the artist had not known how to capture their brightness, and there was something about his expression that disquieted me. His capacious forehead was framed by a black skull cap; he had a medium-length grey beard, which spilled over his white ruff, and he seemed to be wearing a black gown. And yet what was wrong with his expression? He looked both menacing and confidential, as if he harboured some secret of great importance which he might or might not reveal to me. But his eyes were so wide, and so steady, that I could not help but meet his gaze.

I carried these books back to Cloak Lane, and placed them on the table beneath the window. I suppose that this was for me the strangest part of all – to leave these books about Doctor Dee in the same room where he had once walked. I felt as if I were some magician, trying to conjure him into existence from the grave. And then suddenly it occurred to me that he might have died in this house. I could have opened one of the books to discover the truth of this, but instead I turned and left the room.

I opened the front door and went out into the garden. It was a humid summer evening after another humid day, and I was peculiarly tired and nerveless. I do not think I would have noticed even if the spectre of John Dee had suddenly risen up before me: I felt too much of a ghost myself. I walked slowly over to the side of the garden, where a narrow passage still filled with weeds separated my house from a high public wall. I had never properly examined this narrow space, largely because it was filled with the kind of stray profuse vegetation which might harbour living things. But I walked through it now, and ran my hand across the old wall; it was cold, and some of its crumbling texture adhered to my fingers. I licked it, and it tasted like ancient salt.

It was then I noticed how, near the level of the ground, large black marks were painted across the stone; at least that was how it seemed to me for a moment, but when I knelt down I realized that these stains had deeply impregnated the stone itself. They looked like scorch marks. I turned to the wall of the house, and patches of blackened stone were also visible. Something had burned here. Or the house itself had been touched by fire. And if the original upper storeys of the house had been destroyed, it would explain the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century additions. It could not have happened in the Great Fire, since Clerkenwell was not part of the area of burning London. No, this had occurred at some earlier time.

I looked up at the sky for a moment, shielding my eyes from its brightness, and then without thought I lifted my shirt, pulled down my trousers, squatted upon the ground, and defecated. I was so surprised by what I had done that I rose hastily to my feet and stood there for a minute or so, slowly rocking backwards and forwards. Was it in shit like this that the homunculus had grown? I could have stayed there for ever, looking down at the ground, but I was disturbed by a noise behind me; it sounded like laughter, but then turned into a sigh. Had someone been watching me all this time? I pulled up my trousers and ran back into the house.

John Dee was described by Aubrey as 'one of the ornaments of his Age'; Queen Elizabeth called him 'hyr philosopher', and another contemporary said that he was 'the prince of Mathematicians of this age'. Peter French, in his biography, declared him to be 'Elizabethan England's greatest magus'. So much I recognized at once. But then, over the next few days, I began to be surprised by this man who had once inhabited my house; he was an adept in mathematics and astronomy, in geography and navigation, in antiquarian studies and natural philosophy, in astrology and the mechanical sciences, in magic and theology. I consulted other books which chronicled his development: Frances Yates's
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England
by F.R. Johnson, and E.G.R. Taylor's
Tudor Geography, 1485-1583.
All these accounts had very little to do with his reputation as a conjuror or a black magician and, as I read various alternative descriptions in other texts, the only familiar image was the face I now knew so well. Every time I entered the ground-floor room, with its thick stone walls and narrow windows, I took up the book and tried to return his steady gaze.

In Frances Yates's history Doctor Dee was described as a 'Renaissance Magus' who continued in England the same hermetic tradition that encompassed Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. But in his study Nicholas Clulee disagreed, suggesting that a large part of Doctor Dee's inheritance came from medieval sources and particularly from the writings and experiments of Roger Bacon. Where Yates tended to see Doctor Dee as the steady exponent of a European philosophy, Clulee described him as a more eclectic and empirical figure. Yet all my books conveyed the same central theme – that he stood upon that ground where the concerns of his age met and could not easily be distinguished. There was another fact which seemed to be of equal significance. John Dee himself had, in one way or another, belonged to every time. He was in part a medievalist, expounding ancient formulae, but he was also an active agent in contemporary natural philosophy; he was an antiquarian, who speculated about the origins of Britain and the presence of ancient cities beneath the earth, but he was also one of those who anticipated a future scientific revolution with his experiments in mechanics; he was an alchemist and astrologer who scrutinized the spiritual world, but he was also a geographer who plotted navigation charts for Elizabethan explorers. He was everywhere at once and, as I walked about his old house, I had the sense that somehow he had conquered time.

Through these books, too, I came to understand the alchemy in which John Dee placed his faith. He believed the world to be imbued with spiritual properties – with 'signatures' and 'correspondences' that reveal its true nature. The seed of the aconite is used to cure optical disorders because it is in the shape of an eyelid; the breed of dog called the Bedlington terrier resembles a lamb and is thus the most nervous of its species. Each material thing is the visible home of a universal power, or congregation of powers, and it was the task of the enlightened philosopher and alchemist to see these true constituents. He understood from the very successful medicine of Paracelsus, for example, how the stars, the plants of the earth and the human body might be fruitfully combined to effect cures. But there was another truth: God is within man, according to John Dee, and he who understands himself understands the universe. The alchemist finds the perfection or pure will within all materials; he knows that salt is desire, mercury is turbulence, sulphur is anguish. When the alchemist finds that will and idea within the material form, then he is able to bend it to his own will. For this was the truth which John Dee maintained all his life – there is nothing in heaven and earth which is not also in man, and he quoted Paracelsus to the effect that 'the human body is vapour materialized by sunshine, mixed with the life of the stars'. When the astrologer sees the sun rise, according to Dee, the sun within his own self rises in joy. This is the true gold of wisdom.

That, at least, was the theory. But in reading accounts of his life (there was even a novel about him by Marjorie Bowen, entitled
I Dwelt In High Places
), it became clear that he was too concerned with secrets and with mysteries – with numerology, cabbalistic tables, and magical technique. He became infatuated with the poetry of power and darkness, which in turn made him susceptible to the demands of envy and ambition. So there were times when he lost sight of that sacred truth he wished to investigate.

I knew now the full story of his life – his intense studies as a young man, his travels to Europe where he had acquired his reputation as an extraordinary scholar, his services to Queen Elizabeth, his scientific and mathematical researches, his creation of the largest library in England, his work as an alchemist and a magician. He believed that he spoke with angels, and as yet I had found no reason to disbelieve him. He was a man obsessed with learning, one who spent his entire life trying to resolve the mysteries of nature and, by various means, to achieve a kind of divine illumination. He knew too much to be impressed by the work of his contemporaries, and understood too much to be unduly affected by their malice when he went beyond the boundaries of established theory. He was energetic, ambitious, determined; and yet, as I said, there was a darker aspect to his love of learning. He seemed to want knowledge, and power, at almost any cost to himself or those around him. Something drove him forward, something harried him into that darkness where he spoke to the angels and plotted the restoration of the spiritual world through the agency of alchemy. Many of his contemporaries believed that the Devil was perched upon his shoulder, but how could I believe that as I sat in the room where he had once worked?

And what books had he written here? Had he composed his mathematical preface to
The Elements of Geometrie of the most auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara
as he looked from his window at the quietly flowing stream of the Fleet? Had he paced around this room, as I paced now, while preparing his thoughts for
General and rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation
? Had he laboured upon
Monas Hieroglyphica
and
Propaedeumata Aphoristica
in this house? I spoke the titles out loud, but stopped when it began to sound like the chanting of some priest or nun. After a few moments I took up another book, a modern translation of Doctor Dee's
Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus
; there was a photograph of the original title-page among the illustrations, and on it were inscribed four signs that sent me racing from the room towards the stairs that led under the ground. I switched on the light for the basement and crossed the floor, cautiously approaching the marks which had been scratched above the sealed door; they were the same as the signs in the book, but some other element was missing from them. In the title-page illustration, 'Sunsfor', 'Zosimos', 'Gohulim' and 'Od' had been written underneath each in turn, but these names were not inscribed upon the door. On this old titlepage there was also a picture of a glass bowl, covered with straw, or mud, or some other substance; beneath it I could read the words, 'You will live for ever'. I do not know what happened to me then; I turned and turned under the electric light until I could no longer stand. Then I lay upon the stone floor.

There was a noise in one of the upstairs rooms, and the crash of something falling to the ground. I rolled upon the cold stone, not wishing to leave it yet. But then there was another crash, and unwillingly I rose to my feet: if I hesitated now, I would never be able to remain in this house. When I came to the top of the stairs, by the open door, I heard a sound like rustling coming from somewhere above me; I looked up, but I could see nothing. I crossed the hallway and climbed the stairs to the first landing; the door to my room was open and, as I glanced across my bed, I noticed a white mark upon it like a little globe of smoke. Then something moved across it.

I screamed, and it rose up towards me; I staggered backwards, and would have fallen down the stairs if I had not caught hold of the banister. I thrust out my hands, and they brushed against something very warm. And then there was a fluttering of wings. It was a pigeon. It must have come in through the open window, and was no doubt one of those I had seen clustering around the churchyard of St James. I did not want to touch it: I had a horror of its beating heart beneath my fingers, and of its writhing within my hands. The bird had wheeled back into the room and quietly I followed it, opened my window wider still, and then left it there – beating its wings against the wall – while I closed the door.

There was something amusing about all this. I went back into the room, where the bird was still ineffectually fluttering against the walls and ceilings. There was a book beside my bed – a study of John Dee's alchemical charts – and, with all the violence I could summon with a prayer, I hurled it against the bird. I must have damaged its wing because it slumped down on to the floor and then, with a cry of triumph, I brought my heel down upon its head. I don't know how many times I stamped upon it, but I stopped only when I saw the blood running on to the book which was lying beside the dead bird.