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Chapter I

Birth and Education

"O Incredulities, the wit of fooles
That slovenly will spit on all thinges faire,
The coward's castle and the sluggard's cradle,
How easy 'tis to be an infidel!"

- George Chapman

It seems remarkable that three hundred years should have been allowed to elapse since the death of John Dee in December, 1608, without producing any Life of an individual so conspicuous, so debatable, and so remarkably picturesque.

There is perhaps no learned author in history who has been so persistently misjudged, nay, even slandered, by his posterity, and not a voice in all the three centuries uplifted even to claim for him a fair hearing. Surely it is time that the cause of all this universal condemnation should be examined in the light of reason and science; and perhaps it will be found to exist mainly in the fact that he was too far advanced in speculative thought for his own age to understand. For more than fifty years out of the eighty-one of his life, Dee was famous, even if suspected and looked askance at as clever beyond human interpretation. Then his Queen died. With the narrow-minded Scotsman who succeeded her came a change in the fashion of men's minds. The reign of the devil and his handmaidens - the witches and possessed persons - was set up in order to be piously overthrown, and the very bigotry of the times gave birth to independent and rational thought - to Newton, Bacon, Locke.

But Dee was already labelled once and for all. Every succeeding writer who has touched upon his career, has followed the leaders blindly, and has only cast another, and yet another, stone to the heap of obloquy piled upon his name. The fascination of his psychic projections has always led the critic to ignore his more solid achievements in the realms of history and science, while at the same time, these are the only cited to be loudly condemned. The learned Dr. Meric Casaubon, who, fifty years after Dee's death, edited his Book of Mysteries - the absorbing recital of four out of the six or seven years of his crystal gazing - was perhaps the fairest critic he yet has had. Although he calls Dee's spiritual revelations a "sad record," and a "work of darkness," he confesses that he himself, and other learned and holy men (including an archbishop), read it with avidity to the end, and were eager to see it printed. He felt certain, as he remarks in his preface, that men's curiosity would lead them to devour what seems to him "not parallelled in that kind, by any book that hath been set out in any age to read." And yet on no account was he publishing it to satisfy curiosity, but only "to do good and promote Religion." For Dee, he is persuaded, was a true, sincere Christian, his Relation made in the most absolute good faith, although undoubtedly he was imposed upon and deluded by the evil spirits whom he sometimes mistook for good ones.

It may be well here to remark that this voluminous Book of Mysteries or True and Faithful Relation (fol. 1659), from which in the following pages there will be found many extracts, abounds in tedious and unintelligible pages of what Casaubon calls "sermon-like stuff," interspersed with passages of extraordinary beauty. Some of the figures and parables, as well as the language used, are full of a rare poetic imagery, singularly free from any coarse or sensual symbolism. Like jewels embedded in dull settings, here and there a gem of loftiest religious thought shines and sparkles. There are descriptive touches of costume and appearance that possess considerable dramatic value. As the story is unfolded in a kind of spiritual drama, the sense of a gradual moving development, and the choice of a fitting vehicle in which to clothe it, is striking. The dramatis personae, too, the "spiritual creatures" who, as Dee believed, influence the destinies of man, become living and real, as of course they were to the seer. In many respects these "actions" were an exact counterpart of the dealings inaugurated by psychical scientists 275 years later, if we omit the close investigation for fraud.

Casaubon's successor in dealing with the shunned and avoided subject of John Dee was Thomas Smith, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who, in 1707, wrote the first connected Life of him, in a book of the Lives of Learned Men. It was based upon some of Dee's autobiographical papers, and out of a total of a hundred pages, gave fifty to letters already printed by Casaubon.

After this no sustained account of Dee's romantic career is to be found outside the pages of biographical dictionaries and magazine articles, or among writers upon necromancy, hermetic philosophy, and alchemy. Many of these decorate their collections with apocryphal marvels culled from the well-worn traditional stories of Dee and his companion, Edward Kelly. Thus, throughout his lifetime and since, he has continued to run the gauntlet of criticism. "Old imposturing juggler," "fanatic," "quack," are mild terms: in the Biographia Britannica he is called "extremely credulous, extravagantly vain, and a most deluded enthusiast." Even the writer on Dee in the Dictionary of National Biography says his conferences with the angels are "such a tissue of blasphemy and absurdity that they might suggest insanity." Many more such summary verdicts might be quoted, but these will suffice for the present.

It has been said that no Life of Dee exists. And yet the materials for such a Life are so abundant that only a selection can be here used. His private diary, for instance, if properly edited, would supply much supplementary, useful, and interesting historical information.

It is the object of this work to present the facts of John Dee's life as calmly and impartially as possible, and to let them speak for themselves. In the course of writing it, many false assertions have disentangled themselves from truth, many doubts have been resolved, and a mass of information sees the light for the first time. The subject is of course hedged about with innumerable difficulties; but in spite of the temptations to stray into a hundred bypaths, an endeavour has been strictly made to do no more than throw a little dim light on the point where the paths break off from the main road. If, at the end of the way, any who have persevered so far, feel they have followed a magnetic and interesting personality, the labour expended will not have been in vain. With a word of apology to serious historical readers for the incorrigibly romantic tendency of much of the narrative, which, in spite of the stern sentinel of a literary conscience, would continually reassert itself, the story of our astrologer's strange life may now begin.

John Dee was the son of Rowland Dee; he was born in London, according to the horoscope of his own drawing, on July 13, 1527.

His mother was Jane, daughter of William Wild. Various Welsh writers have assigned to Dee a genealogical descent of the highest antiquity, and the pedigree which he drew up for himself in later life traces back his family history from his grandfather, Bedo Dee, to Roderick the Great, Prince of Wales. All authorities agree that Radnor was the county from whence the Dees sprang.

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