Esoteric Histories: Secret Wizard Man
Dr. Dee, I presume.
As usual, if you’d like a refresher, please review the previous entries:
So, when we left off we determined that the Rosicrucians would be sending missionaries into the world to spread their gospel of progress and rationality. Today will look at one of these, who in his person and life story, ties together several of the threads we have previously touched on.
The man in question is Dr. John Dee. The English Connection in the flesh. This is where we go from generalities and abstractions to particulars and peculiars. For example, the source of the money behind the printing of the numerous pamphlets driving the Rosicrucian Fervour in the minds of 16th century Continental intelligentsia is perhaps less mysterious when we consider that the Rosy Cross itself;
for instance, is plausibly explained as an allegorical reworking of the Tudor Rose and Cross which are notably among the symbols of the English Order of the Garter, which James I bestowed on his new son-in-law Frederick, and which had recently been given to the prince of Württemberg.
John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. He was also an advocate of England's imperial expansion
Dee was a serious mathematician and a notable statesman. He is sometimes credited, perhaps with a measure of exaggeration, with founding the British Secret Service. He was interested in the natural world as such; and to use Francis Bacon’s later phrase, he hoped to use natural knowledge for the relief of man’s estate. He was also quite chatty with Angels, with whom he conversed with the assistance of crystals, mirrors, and other scrying stones and from whom he received the magical hieroglyphic language of Enochian.
As one of the most learned men of his age, he had been invited to lecture on the geometry of Euclid at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties. As a leading expert in navigation, he trained many of those who would conduct England's notable voyages of discovery in the use of the stars and geometric principles in course-making over global distances. He also immersed himself in the worlds of magic, astrology and Hermetic philosophy.
He devoted much time and effort in the last thirty years or so of his life to attempting to commune with angels in order to learn the universal language of creation and bring about the pre-Babel unity of mankind so as to inaugurate a new age (see our previous discussion of Joachim of Fiore). As a student of the Renaissance Neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, Dee did not draw distinctions between his mathematical research and his investigations into Hermetic magic, angel summoning (note bene: fallen angels are also angels) and divination. Instead he considered all of his activities to constitute different facets of the same quest: the search for a transcendent understanding of the divine forms which underlie the visible world, which Dee called "pure verities".
In his lifetime Dee amassed one of the largest libraries in England. His high status as a scholar also allowed him to play a role in Elizabethan politics. He served as an occasional advisor and tutor to Elizabeth I and nurtured relationships with her ministers Francis Walsingham and William Cecil.
We should also note that Dee's influence later would spread to the New World through John Winthrop, Jr., a noted alchemist himself and a follower of Dee's writings; Winthrop used Dee's 'monas hieroglyphica' as his own personal mark or magical signature.
Which brings us to that Great Work of Dee's, not just a cryptic and mystical sigil diagramming the cosmos by combining sun, moon, mercury, venus, woman, gold, silver, the material world, and fire, but also the title of his treatise on Alchemical Hermeticism, Natural Philosophy, and Rosicrucian Escatology, Monas Hieroglyphica.
In his Monas Hieroglyphica, Dee tried to unite all these themes in a synthesis whose ambitions are at least as great as, say, Thomism, or the search for a Theory of Everything. Empirical science was an element of what Dee sought to promote, but as a component of a grander structure whose focus was elsewhere.
We should note again that both the treatise and the sigil Monas Hieroglyphica links Dee directly to Rosicrucianism on the continent, but in what exact way remains somewhat obscure. The Hieroglyph appears, of course, on a page of the Rosicrucian Manifesto, Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
To return to the general analysis of the Rosicrucian outlook. magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematic- mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mechanics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world. One cannot leave out the angels in this world view, however much it may have been advancing towards the scientific revolution. The religious outlook is bound up with the idea that penetration has been made into higher angelic spheres in which all religions were seen as one, foreshadowing that hobgoblin of western counter-tradition, Masonic indifferentism (everything is true, nothing is forbidden).
Then we have Dee's legacy in the realm of practical and real politics. During Dee’s stay in Europe in the 1580s he seems to have been attempting to forge a political link between England and the Palatinate that the marriage of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart would later achieve.
In any case, by the time of the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth, the Rosicrucian movement had become less generically reformist and more specifically anti-Catholic, or at least anti-Counter-Reformation. At the same time, its focus on the improvement of the secular world had become more emphatic. The Rosicrucian manifesto may now take a somewhat wider meaning. It calls for a general reformation because the other reformations have failed. The Protestant Reformation is losing strength and is divided. The Catholic Counter Reformation has taken a wrong turning. A new general reformation of the whole wide world is called for, and this third reformation is to find its strength in Evangelical Christianity with its emphasis on brotherly love, in the esoteric Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, and in an accompanying turning towards the works of God in nature in a scientific spirit of exploration, using science or magic, magical science or scientific magic, in the service of man.
The later story of the Rosicrucians links in obscure ways to the other obscure beginnings of the 17th century. It had something to do with beginning of the Freemasons (of the real Freemasons, as distinct from the bogus lineage that runs from the Temple of Solomon through the Templars). It also had something to do with the foundation of the Royal Society in 1659. That august institution is, perhaps, the Invisible College made visible, however much its founders sought to distance themselves publicly from all the occult sciences, and especially from any taint of association with John Dee. The important link here is Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the statesman and philosopher who is sometimes credited, not altogether accurately, with the discovery of the scientific method. But, dear reader, that is a thread we will have revisit later.
But what exactly was Dr Dee up to during his grand Continental visitation in waning years of the 1580s? Well aside from attempting (and failing) to launch a coup in Poland against the last Jagiellonian king Stephen Bathory (he married into the once great house, also, yes, that Bathory, she was through her mother niece of the Polish King Stephan IX.) on behalf of Olbracht Laski, who perhaps oversold Dee on his claim to the throne and undersold his own Ottoman Turk connections, and summoning an Angel to teach the final secrets of the Ur-Language, he spent a great deal of time in the Court of the Emperor, Rudolf II Hapsburg, himself a devotee and patron of occult arts and learning and champion of "science" and "progress" and Renaissance humanism.
But that's a story for another time.