DEE 1 - TESIS

Chapter 1: The Philosophy and Practice of John Dee’s Angel Magic

It might be so if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.1 

In his outline of the history of magic and exaltation to the divine, Szönyi highlights the furies of Plato’s Phaedrus.2 In Phaedrus, Socrates praised the madness that comes as a gift from the Muses, which Szönyi equates to an occult knowledge only available to the ‘hypersensitive elect’.3 

As mentioned before, Méric Casaubon praised John Dee’s Christian piety and goodness (though he also regarded Dee as deluded and a bit gullible) throughout the preface to his True & Faithful Relation.4 French neatly illustrated the fall of Dee’s reputation in the centuries after his death and illustrated how Casaubon’s perception of pious delusion was further degraded into ‘execrable insanity’ by Thomas Smith in his Vita Joannis Dee (1707).5 By the nineteenth century, the character of Dee had devolved from Casaubon’s misled, pious scholar to an immoral conjuror of spirits6 and a necromancer fit for sensationalist fiction.7 Calder aptly noted that the nineteenth century likely viewed all sixteenth century science as ‘devil-ridden superstition’ and quoted a treatment of Dee by an anonymous writer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1842):

The majority of them were in all probability half mad and those who were whole mad of course set the fashion and were followed as the shining lights of the day.8 

Regarding Dee in comparison to his assistant, Kelly, the article stated, ‘Dee was more respectable, because he was only half a rogue; the other half was made up of craziness.’9 Dee seemed to be possessed by this Platonic, divine madness and eschewed the orthodox Aristotelian assertion10 that science was to be the deduction of causal demonstrations on the basis of self-evident principles that could only be intuited and not demonstrated within a given discipline.11 The undercurrents of Neoplatonism that accepted magical practice within Arabic Aristotelianism provided a framework through which Neoplatonic philosophy, and thus Hermetic philosophy, could be combined to form a perspective that allowed the practice of magic to be considered a viable applied science.12 

John Dee’s angelic conversations were not the casting off of his high learning, but the very application of it in a context of divine madness. The next section will examine the Hermetic background of Dee’s angel magic. 

Ficino and Pico: The Hermetic Roots of Dee

This dissertation cannot effectively present Dee’s Hermetic philosophy without addressing Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the translator of the Corpus Hermeticum, and the author of De religione Christiana, De Triplici Vita, Libri Tres, Theologica Platonica, and Epistolae,13 and a densely annotated Omni Divini Platonis opera (1532), all of whose books sat on Dee’s shelves.14 In a time when the age of a work lent it greater authority,15 Ficino, and all other scholars of the Renaissance, believed Hermes Trismegistus to have been a very real figure and a pre-cursor to all Greek wisdom: 

Of the sources for his magic to which Ficino himself refers the most are the Asclepius and, of course, Plotinus. The Asclepius, like the Orphica, had great authority for Ficino because it was a work of Hermes Trismegistus, a priscus theologus even more ancient than Orpheus, indeed contemporary with Moses; Plotinus was merely a late interpreter of this antique Egyptian wisdom.16

Ficino applied the Hermetic writings as the basis of Neoplatonic philosophy. He believed the Plotinian lemma ‘De Favore Coelitus Hauriendo’ to be an expansion on the ability of man to create gods in the making of statues as described by Hermes in Asclepius 24 and 37.17 The similarities to Christianity present in Platonic and Neoplatonic texts assisted in their assimilation into Ficino’s theology18 and provided a fine vehicle for his Hermetic Christianity.19 While this section deals with the philosophy behind Dee’s angel magic, Ficino’s own theological magic is deeply rooted in his theological philosophy and must be examined.

 Ficino’s Hermetic-Christian magic was transmitted through the Stoic and Aristotelian elements of the stellar influences on man,20 a philosophical framing of magic that Dee shared.21 Like the Greek sources it drew on, Ficino’s Christian supercelestial magic was ‘daemonic’ (not to be confused with the Christian invective ‘demonic’).22As Ficino states:

[...] every person has at birth one certain daemon, the guardian of his life, assigned by his own personal star which helps him to that very task to which the celestials summoned him when he was born. Therefore anyone having thoroughly scrutinized his own natural bent [...] by the aforesaid indicators will so discover his natural work as to discover at the same time his own star and daemon. Following the beginnings laid down by them, he will act successfully, he will live prosperously; if not, he will find fortune adverse and will sense that the heavens are his enemy.23

Furthermore:

Now remember that you receive daemons or, if you will, angels, more and more worthy by degrees in accordance with the dignity of the professions, and still worthier ones in public government; but even if you proceed to these more excellent [levels], you can receive from your Genius and natural bent an art and a course of life neither contrary to, nor very unlike, themselves.24

Ficino’s cosmos are composed of a hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ daemons assigned to the planets and the houses of the zodiac whom are responsible for communicating the will of the Anima Mundi to the inferior spheres.25 Ficino believed
that through astrological interaction with nature, ‘celestial goods’ can descend to the pious magus’ ‘rightly prepared spirit’ to receive fuller gifts from beneficial daemons.26 Interestingly, Ficino outlines a talismanic imagery in order to connect with his astral daemons that is clearly influenced by the Picatrix.27 We shall use the planet Mercury as
our example:

For example, if anyone looks for a special benefit from Mercury, he ought to locate him in Virgo, or at least locate the Moon there in an aspect with Mercury, and then make an image out of tin or silver; he should put on it the whole sign of Virgo and its character and the character of Mercury. [...] The form of Mercury: a man sitting on a throne in a crested cap, with eagle's feet, holding a cock or fire with his left hand, winged, sometimes on a peacock, holding a reed with his right hand, in a multicolored garment.28

The Picatrix states the following of the stones proper to each planet and the formation of figures: 

Of the metals, Mercury has quicksilver and part of tin and glass, and of stones it has emerald and all stones of this type has part of azumbedich. [...] The image of Mercury according to Hermes is the image of a man with a rooster on his head, sitting in a throne; his feet look like those of an eagle and in the palm of his left hand he has fire and under his feet are the signs stated before. This is its form.29 

Dee’s magical practice likewise exhibited angels that corresponded to the planets through the metals associated with them30 and the respective days of the week.31 However, Dee owes much of the structure of his seals and talismans to Giovanni Pico, discussed later in this section. 

Supplied with the basis of ancient, newly unearthed lore anterior to the Neoplatonists and Arabic astrological magic, Ficino’s theology was drawn from this long-forgotten, secret wisdom worthy of the title prisca theologia (Ficino’s idea of a primordial faith from which all faiths stem).32 33 The next section of this chapter will address in detail just how influential the quest for a singular, united faith was to Dee.
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28 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, pp. 332-7.
29 The Latin Picatrix: Books I & II, ed. and trans. by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (USA:
Renaissance Astrology Press, 2009), pp. 103-6.
30 John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic, ed. by Joseph Peterson
(York Beach, ME: Weiser, 2003), pp. 134-5.
31 Dee, ‘Cap. 7: Some Recitall, and Contestation by the Peculier Offices, Words, and Dedes, of the 7
Heptarchicall Kings and Princes, in Theyr Peculier Dayes, to be Used’, in De Heptarchia Mystica
of Dr. John Dee, ed. by Joseph Peterson ([n.p.]: [n.pub], 1997), <http://www.esotericarchives.com/
dee/hm.htm> [accessed 17 July 2011].
32 Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London: Equinox
Publishing Ltd.), pp. 56-9.
33 Faivre, ‘Hermetic Literature IV: Renaissance-Present’ , in DGWE, p. 534.
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In 1614, a mere six years after Dee’s death, a long debate on the authenticity of

Corpus Hermeticum’s antiquity came to an end. Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), Méric

Casaubon’s father, correctly identified the Corpus Hermeticum as having been written

in the second and third centuries C.E.34 Still the Hermetic (and intrinsically Platonic and

Neoplatonic)35 influences on the culture and science of the Renaissance and the

Enlightenment —while controversial36— are arguably visible.37

The importance of the blend of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy that

amalgamated the Great Chain of Being as represented by Ficino (further supported by

Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, discussed later) cannot be

overlooked.38 The Great Chain of Being as a concept predates Greek thought and was

vitally important in the forging of cosmologies.39 As Lovejoy40 and Szönyi41 both

pointed out, Proclus used Cicero to succinctly summarize the idea and metaphor of the

Great Chain of Being connecting all things to God:

Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises, and from Mind, Soul, and since this in turn creates all

subsequent things and fills them all with life, and since this single radiance illumines all and is

reflected in each, as a single face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all

things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the

attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of

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34 Ibid., p. 534.

35 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 73.

36 Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, p. 17.

37 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964), p. 447-50.

38 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 25-30.

39 Jean-Pierre Brach & Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘Correspondences’, in DGWE, pp. 275-9 (p. 276).

40 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p.

63, <http://books.google.com/books?

id=ByHNG8GzUeAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 6 July 2011].

41 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 25.

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things, mutually linked together without a break. And this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he

says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.42

The Hermetica alone supplies no means through which to interact with the entities

above Man in this Great Chain, and so Ficino developed his methods from Arabic and

mediaeval medicine, matter theory, physics, and metaphysics all based upon his studies

in Neoplatonism.43 Copenhaver gives special attention to Proclus in the formation of

Ficino’s magic, an idea and further acknowledged and corroborated by Clulee44 and

Szönyi.45 The most significant connection in regards to the connection of Neoplatonism

to the Hermetica is Proclus’ statement

Thus all things are full of gods [...]. The authorities on the priestly art have thus discovered how to

gain the favor of powers above, mixing some things together and setting others apart in due order.46

Ficino thought this to be Hermes Trismegistus’ understanding of the cosmos as

relayed by Proclus,47 as exemplified in Asclepius in Hermes’ discourse on the ensouled

gods created by man in the forms of statues.48 Thus, man can form a way to interact

with intermediary entities by creating the images of gods. Proclus suggested the practice

of a ceremonial magic in mentioning that through consecrations and divine services

practitioners could achieve ‘association with the [daemons], from whom they returned

forthwith to actual works of the gods’.49

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42 Macrobius, The Great Chain of Being, p. 63.

43 Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, p. 130.

44 Ibid., pp. 128-35.

45 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, pp. 64-5.

46 Proclus, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 65.

47 Ibid.

48 Asclepius: The Perfect Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus, ed. and trans. by Clement Salaman (London:

Duckworth, 2007), p. 77.

49 Proclus, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 65.

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Ficino derived the natural ingredients of his magic from Proclus’ De Sacrificio,50

which he included in his De Vita:

Under the Solar star, that is Sirius, they set the Sun first of all, and then Phoebean daemons, which

sometimes have encountered people under the form of lions or cocks, as Proclus testifies, then similar

men and Solar beasts, Phoebean plants then, similarly metals and gems and vapor and hot air. By a

similar system they think a chain of beings descends by levels from any star of the firmament through

any planet under its dominion. If, therefore, as I said, you combine at the right time all the Solar things

through any level of that order, i.e., men of Solar nature or something belonging to such a man,

likewise animals, plants, metals, gems, and whatever pertains to these, you will drink in

unconditionally the power of the Sun and to some extent the natural power of the Solar daemons.51

Ficino clearly felt the weight of what he perceived as a monumental discovery of

a tradition of theology and philosophy that had remained unbroken from Hermes to

Plato.52 The assertions of a world full of gods by Hermes, the Stoics,53 Plato, and the

Neoplatonists clearly impressed themselves on Ficino, but, with the further connection

of Arabic medicine and Hermes’ fortunate student being none other than Asclepius (the

Greek god of medicine of healing), it seems a matter of course that so pious and learned

a theologian would craft a magical system when it was so neatly assembled before him.

One question remained: how does one make this daemonic, astrological magic

compliant with Christianity? Dee faced a similar question in his conversations with

angels, though Ficino chose a much different solution.

Where Ficino drew on nature to connect with the planetary daemons, Dee drew on

the planetary daemons to connect with nature.54 All of Dee’s sigils, talismans, and

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50 Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino’,

in Renaissance Quarterly (1984), 37: 4, pp. 523-554 (p. 551), <http://www.jstor.org/stable/

2860993> [accessed 4 July 2011].

51 Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 311.

52 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 15.

53 Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1985), pp.

23-4.

54 Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversation with Angels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999), pp. 157-8.

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orations came from the angels themselves in compliance, rather than reliance, with

esoteric literature available to him.55 It seemed Dee believed he had found a path that

reconciled celestial magic with Christianity more aptly than Ficino’s daemonic

astrology; a path less ‘daemonic’ and more ‘angelic’.

Ficino relied on the ancient Christian authority of Lactantius (c. 240-320).

Lactantius, a Christian apologist, utilized Hermes Trismegistus’ Asclepius in

reconciliation with Christianity as the ‘original faith of mankind’ in his work Divinae

Institutiones (304-313).56 While this text is not a directly supportive work of

Hermeticism,57 it shows a precedent for Hermetic philosophy to be used as a method of

reconciling differing patterns of belief. Ficino found this argument a viable counterbalance

to St. Augustine of Hippo’s (354-430) objection to Asclepius in Book VIII of

De civitate Dei (415-417).58 Ficino also found Lactantius’ argument in support of his

idea of the prisca theologia.59 These arguments linking Christianity to Hermeticism are

certainly felt in Dee’s reworking of grimoire magic into a profoundly Christian, prayerbased

practice at its inception.60

Plato’s key role in Ficino’s cosmology also necessitated a Christian sanitization.

Here again, we find Plato’s four furies, the ‘divine madnesses’, but combined with the

theology of the Christian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, wherein each madness

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55 TFR, pp. 158-9.

56 Caroline Nicholson and Oliver Nicholson, ‘Lactantius, Hermes Trismegistus and Constantinian

Obelisks’, The Journal of Hellenistic Studies, 109 (1989), pp. 198-200 (p. 200), <http://

www.jstor.org/stable/632052> [accessed 13 December 2009].

57 Paulo Lucentini and Vittoria Perrone Compagni, ‘Hermetic Literature II: The Latin Middle Ages’, in

DGWE, pp. 499-525 (p. 501).

58 Lucenti and Compagni, DGWE, p. 500.

59 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 36.

60 John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, pp. 53-4.

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(prophetic, religious-mystical, poetical, and love) brings the aspirant closer to unity with

God.61

In the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), Dee seems to have agreed with Ficino

on the stars indeed having powers that mankind can benefit from, but through the use of

mirrors rather than the agency of daemons.62 Clulee compares the Propaedeumata to

Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) stating that where the Propaedeumata presents

man’s interaction with the cosmos as a mechanically physical fact, the Monas sought to

illustrate the power of symbols over that which the symbols represent.63

Thus, Dee more clearly illustrates his acceptance of Ficino’s Neoplatonic-

Hermetic theological philosophy within the Monas.64 In the Neoplatonic paradigm,

Calder underlines Proclus (and ancient mathematicians such as Theon and Nicomachus)

as a figure of important influence on Dee’s philosophy in the Monas Hieroglyphica in

terms of the notion of One, or Unity.65 Proclus posed a problem wherein the One, or

God, can only be approached by analogy or negation and supplies the analogy that

‘[t]he One is like the sun’s light which illuminates the world and radiates far and wide

while it remains undiminished at its source’.66 Dee seems supremely confident of his

attempt to communicate the One in a single symbol rife with countless analogies:

Though I call it hieroglyphic. he who has examined its inner structure will grant that all the same there

is [in it] an underlying clarity and strength almost mathematical, such as is rarely applied in [writings

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61 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 88.

62 Ibid., p. 158.

63 Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, p. 117.

64 Ibid., p. 166.

65 I. R. F. Calder, ‘Chapter VI: Numbers - Logistical, Formal and Applied (The Ground of Artes - The

Monas - Alchemy; 1558-1564)’, in John Dee Studied as an English Neo-Platonist ([n.p.]: [n.pub],

1952), <http://www.johndee.org/calder/html/Calder6.html> [accessed 9 July 2011] (para. 24 of

74).

66 Lucas Siorvanes, Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1994), p. 180, <http://books.google.com/books?

id=2_iuy9GeHHEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 9 July 2011].

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on] matters so rare. Or is it not rare, I ask, that the common astronomical symbols of the planets

(instead of being dead, dumb, or, up to the present hour at least, quasi-barbaric signs) should have

become characters imbued with immortal life and should now be able to express their especial

meanings most eloquently in any tongue and to any nation?67

The recent scholarly opinion regarding the Hermetic element of Dee’s philosophy

as illustrated in the Monas is unified and agreed upon by Walton, Clulee, Szönyi, and

Harkness68 in the following:

Since the Creator made the whole cosmos, not with hands but by the Word, understand that he is

present and always is, creating all things, being one alone, and by his will producing all beings.69

Ficino’s reconciliation of his philosophy, magic, and Christianity were highly

formative to Dee’s justifications for his questionably heretical angelic conversations.

However, Dee also incorporated Kabbalistic elements Ficino eschewed. Ficino’s friend,

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, artfully reconciled Kabbalah with Platonic and

Hermetic philosophy, as well as Christianity.70 The connection of the divinity of the

cosmos and man’s ability to connect with them through images is granted new depths

when combined with the power of names presented in practical Kabbalah, as written by

Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), and further linked with Hermeticism and Christianity

through Pico. Pico’s contribution to the Hermetic-Kabbalistic philosophy most certainly

piqued Dee’s interests, as exemplified in his Hermetic-Christian definition of the ‘real

Cabbala’ in his Monas Hieroglyphica.71

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67 John Dee, ‘A Translation of John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica”’ (Antwerp, 1564), with an Introduction

and Annotations by C. H. Josten’, in Ambix (1964), 12, 84-221 (p. 121).

68 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 166.

69 The Way of Hermes: New Translations of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Definitions of Hermes

Trismegistus to Asclepius, trans. by Clement Salaman and others (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions,

2004), p. 31.

70 Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 19-20.

71 Dee, ‘Monas Hieroglyphica’, pp. 133-5.

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It is fascinating and highly relevant to this essay that Pico proclaimed Ramon

Llull’s works, or the Ars Raymundi, to be Kabbalistic.72 Ramón Llull (1232/3-1316)

channeled the idea of the Great Chain of Being in his assertion of the capacity of man to

ascend the scala naturae, or the ladder of nature, through intellectual contemplation.73

Llull used the combination of a series of nine letters (B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and K)

representing ‘absolute attributes’, to which nine relations, nine questions, nine subjects,

nine virtues, and nine vices were added.74 75 The resulting number of binary

combinations was calculated to be 17,804,320,388,674,561, which Llull explored with

the use of geometrical figures meant to enumerate the terms and generate combinatorial

pairings of the aspects of reality.76 The acceptance of pseudo-Llullian alchemical and

Kabbalistic works as authentic in conjunction with his mystic, mathematical diagrams

only served to make the Ars Raymundi all the more appealing to Dee.77 Pico argues that

Llull’s usage of combining letters of the Hebrew alphabet was not unlike Kabbalistic

techniques78 and relied on Llull’s Ars Combinatoria for his own system.79

Regarding Pico’s own system, in his Nine Hundred Theses (1486), he succinctly

states his thoughts on Kabbalah and Platonism:

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72 Ibid.

73 Stephen C. Bold, Pascal Geometer: Discovery and Invention in Seventeenth-Century France (Geneva:

Librairie Droz, 1996), p. 155, <http://books.google.com/books?

id=3aV8VytdAkkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 10

July 2011].

74 Yates, ‘The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull's Theory of the Elements’, in Journal of

the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1954), 17: 1/2, 115-73 (p.116), <http://www.jstor.org/stable/

750135> [accessed 9 May 2010].

75 Bold, p. 155.

76 Ibid.

77 French, John Dee, pp. 48-9.

78 Fabrizio Lelli, ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’, in DGWE, pp. 949-54 (p.951).

79 Yates, ‘The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull's Theory of the Elements’, in Journal of

the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1954), 17: 1/2, pp. 115-73 (p.115), <http://www.jstor.org/

stable/750135> [accessed 9 May 2010].

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11>10. That which among the Cabalists is called <[...] Metatron> is without doubt that which is called

Pallas by Orpheus, the paternal mind by Zoroaster, the son of God by Mercury, wisdom by

Pythagoras, the intelligible sphere by Parmenides.80

He then addresses Kabbalah and Christianity:

11>7. No Hebrew Cabalist can deny that the name Jesus, if we interpret it following the method and

principles of the Cabala, signifies precisely all this and nothing else, that is: God the Son of God and

the Wisdom of the Father, united to human nature in the unity of assumption through the third Person

of God, who is the most ardent fire of love.81

Pico’s clear devotion to Hermetic philosophy was illustrated in the dedication of

ten theses to ‘Mercury Trismegistus’ that explicated man’s connection to a living nature,

and thus to a God who is present in that life.82 Pico clearly believed in not merely the

syncretism of faiths, but the reconciliation of seemingly disparate religious,

philosophical, and cultural paradigms.

Johannes Reuchlin boldly deepened the connections between Kabbalah and

Christianity in a time when Judaism was defined as a form of Satanism, perhaps even if

unwitting.83 Pico’s Theses inspired Reuchlin to write De Verbo Mirifico (1494) in

defense of Pico, and the central work on Christian Kabbalah, De Arte Cabalistica

(1517).84 In De Verbo Mirifico, Reuchlin presented what he believed to be the reality

and name of the Christian God made known through the Son in the pentagrammaton,

the five lettered name he believed to signify Jesus Christ.85 De Verbo Mirifico was listed

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80 Ibid., p. 525.

81 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses: The Evolution of Traditional

Religious and Philosophical Systems, ed. and trans. by S. A. Farmer (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State

University, 2003), p. 523.

82 Ibid., pp. 341-343.

83 Massimo Introvigne, ‘Johannes Reuchlin’, in DGWE, pp. 990-4 (p. 990-1).

84 G. Lloyd Jones, ‘Introduction’, in On the Art of the Kabbalah, trans. by Martin Goodman and Sarah

Goodman (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1993), pp. 16-22.

85 Charles Zika, ‘Reuchlin's De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century’, in

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1976), 39, pp. 104-38 (p.130), <http://

www.jstor.org/stable/751134> [accessed 10 July 2011].

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in Dee’s catalogue and it is quite likely Dee was familiar with its material based on the

tone of his magical practices86 and some of the aphorisms in the Propaedeumata

Aphoristica.87 Through Pico and Reuchlin, the idea that the presence of God existed in

images was expanded to include names of power.88 This presentation of the Kabbalah in

a Christian, magical context was a crucial element to Dee’s practice.89

The encoding of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth,90 the Kings and Princes of the

Heptarchia Mystica, and the divine names of the nations of the world and the angels

overseeing them in the Liber Scientiae Auxilii all go to great lengths to identify the

names of the angels.91 Dee presumably considered the use of these names crucial to

contacting the angels in order to achieve divine understanding related to their offices,

though there are no existing records of Dee ever using the names and orations described

in the aforementioned books in such a way.

The significant link between Pico and Dee was the transmission of the combined

Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Platonic ideas through Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia

Libri Tres (1533), especially in regards to the threefold world (elementary, celestial, and

intellectual/supercelestial)92 93 that Dee presents in his Mathematicall Praeface to the

Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570). Dee utilized this threefold world as

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86 French, John Dee, p. 53.

87 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p .160.

88 Harkness, John Dee’s Conversation with Angels, 179-81.

89 Ibid.

90 John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, pp. 89-148.

91 The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee, ed. and trans. by Geoffrey James (San Francisco: Weiser

Books, 2009), pp. 29-178.

92 Paul Richard Blum, ‘Pico, Theology, and the Church’, in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. by M.

1. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 37-60 (pp. 56-7), <http://

books.google.com/books?

id=LntTGc5AAykC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 10

July 2011].

93 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. by. Donald Tyson,

trans. by James Freake (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publishing, 2007), p. 3-4.

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the basis of his supercelestial magic dealing with ‘intelligences’ or angels.94 His

treatment of the threefold world in the Mathematical Preface follows:

All thinges which are, & haue beyng, are found vnder a triple diuersitie generall. For, either, they are

demed Supernaturall, Naturall, or, of a third being [...] which, by a peculier name also, are called

Thynges Mathematicall.95

The linkage between the emanations of God in Neoplatonism influencing

Kabbalistic works has been conjectured, but regardless of such a connection,96 the

theological philosophies seemed to have been more separated by the cultures that

espoused them rather than the actual contents of their literature.97 The inclusion of

Kabbalah into the Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy under the auspices of a deeper

Christianity influenced Dee’s thought, and eventually his magical practice. This will be

evidenced and examined in greater depth in the following section treating his angelic

conversations.

__________________________________

1 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett (1994-2009), <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html>
[accessed July 4, 2011] (para. 111 of 410).
2 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2004), p. 22.
3 Ibid.
4 Casaubon, ‘Preface’, TFR, pp. 30-1.
5 French, p. 15.
6 William Godwin, The Lives of the Necromancers (London: Frederick J. Mason, 1834), p. 390.
7 William Harrison Ainsworth, Guy Fawkes; or, the Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance
(Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), pp. 32-39, <http://books.google.com/books?
id=UgwWAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 4 July 2011].
8 ‘Dr. Dee’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January-June 1842, pp. 626-629 (p. 626), <http://
books.google.com/books?id=MfZFAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>
[accessed 4 July 2011].
9 Ibid., p. 629.
10 French, p. 161.
11 Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Aristotelianism’, in DGWE, pp. 97-102. (p. 98).
12 Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 125-42.
13 French, p. 50.
14 Stephen Clucas, ‘Introduction’, in John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies In English Renaissance Thought, by Stephen Clucas, 193 (2006), 1-22 (p. 18), <http://books.google.com/books?id=B5oDcIWv--sC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 4 July 2011].
15 Antoine Faivre, ‘Hermetic Literature IV: Renaissance-Present’, in DGWE, pp. 533-544 (p. 537).
16 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 40.
17 Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 1998), pp. 3-90 (p. 29).
18 Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, p. 128.
19 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 45.
20 Walker, p. 38.
21 Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, p. 41.
22 Kaske and Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Three Books on Life, p. 28.
23 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 371.
24 Ibid., p. 375.
25 Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism, p. 84.
26 Ficino, p. 369.
27 Szönyi, pp. 84-5.
______________________________________________________________________________

94 Harkness, John Dee’s Conversation with Angels, pp. 46-7.

95 Dee, The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (London: John Daye,

1570), <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22062/22062-h/22062-h.htm> [accessed 10 July 2010]

(para. 4 of 103).

96 Harkness, John Dee’s Conversation with Angels, pp. 173-4.

97 Lenn Evan Goodman, Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought (New York: State University of New York

Press, 1992), p. 331, <http://books.google.com/books?

id=m0yhkWuqIqYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 10 July 2011].

98 Geoffrey James, ‘Preface to the Weiser Edition’, in The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee, pp. xi-xii.

99 Joseph Peterson, ‘Introduction’, in John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, pp. 1-46 (p. 2).