At the dawn of philosophy its dreams were not yet dispersed, and
philosophers were often in peril of being as imaginative as poets. The
arid abstractions of the schoolmen were succeeded by the fanciful
visions of the occult philosophers; and both were but preludes to the
experimental philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the metaphysics of
Locke. The first illegitimate progeny of science were deemed occult and
even magical; while astronomy was bewildered with astrology, chemistry
was running into alchemy, and natural philosophy wantoned in the
grotesque chimeras of magical phantoms, the philosophers themselves
pursued science in a suspicious secresy, and were often imagined to know
much more than the human faculties can acquire. These anagogical
children of reverie, straying beyond "the visible diurnal sphere,"
elevated above humanity, found no boundary which they did not pass
beyond--no profundity which they did not fathom--no altitude on which
they did not rest. The credulity of enthusiasts was kept alive by the
devices of artful deceivers, and illusion closed in imposture.
Shakspeare, in the person of Prospero, has exhibited the prevalent
notions of the judicial astrologer combined with the adept, whose white
magic, as distinguished from the black or demon magic, holds an
intercourse with purer spirits. Such a sage was
--------transported,
And rapt in secret studies;
that is, in the occult sciences; and he had
Volumes that he prized more than his dukedom.
These were alchemical, astrological, and cabalistical treatises. The
magical part of _The Tempest_, Warton has observed, "is founded on that
sort of philosophy which was peculiar to JOHN DEE and his associates,
and has been called 'the Rosicrucian.'"
Dr. DEE was a Theurgist, a sort of magician, who imagined that they held
communication with angelic spirits, of which he has left us a memorable
evidence. His personal history may serve as a canvas for the picture of
an occult philosopher--his reveries, his ambition, and his calamity.
Dee was an eminent and singular person, more intimately connected with
the patronage of Elizabeth than perhaps has been observed. It was the
fate of this scholar to live in the reigns of five of our successive
sovereigns, each of whom had some influence on his fortunes. His father,
in the household of Henry the Eighth, suffered some "hard-dealing" from
this imperious monarch injurious to the inheritance of the son; the
harshness of the sire was considered by the royal children, for Edward
granted a pension; Mary, in the day of trial, was favourably disposed
towards the philosopher; and Elizabeth, a queen well known for her
penurious dispensations, at all times promptly supplied the wants of her
careless and dreamy sage.
That decision of character which awaits not for any occasion to reveal
itself, broke forth in his college-days. His skill in mathematics, and
his astronomical observations, had attracted general notice; and in his
twentieth year, Dee ventured on the novel enterprise of conferring
personally with the learned of the Netherlands. In the reign of Henry
the Eighth, little experimental knowledge was to be gathered out of
books. Like the ancient, our insular philosophers early travelled to
discover those novelties in science which were often limited to the
private circle; there were no Royal or Antiquarian Societies, no
"Transactions" of science or the arts. Robert Fludd, the great
Rosicrucian, who became more famous than Dee in occult studies, before
he gave the world his elaborate labours, passed six years in his travels
in France, Germany, and Italy.
Our youthful sage on his return to his college presented them with
several curious instruments of science which were not then always
procurable in the shops of mechanics. Philosophers often made as well as
invented their implements. The learned Mercator was renowned for his
globes; and mathematical instruments, of a novel construction, were the
invention of the scientific Frisias.
Our young philosopher, already suspected of a dangerous intimacy with
the astral influences, did not quiet the murmurs by his improved
dexterity in mechanics. In the elation of youth, he astounded the
marvelling fellows of his college. Dee has himself confessed, that "his
boyish attempts and exploits scholastical may not be meet to repeat." In
a lecture, Dee executed a piece of mechanical invention which now would
have been pantomimical, but was then necromantic. When a greater
magician, Roger Bacon, by his art, had made the apparition of a man to
walk from the top of All-Hallows steeple in Oxford to the top of St.
Mary's, this optical illusion had endangered his life; and another great
occult philosopher set forth a compassionate apology for the science of
optics, but could only allege it was not magical, though it seemed so.
Two centuries and a half had not sufficed to enlighten the fellows of a
college at Oxford.
Dee has suffered hard measure from those who have only judged of him in
the last days of his unprotected distress. In his age, if we except
mathematics, there were few demonstrable truths in science; disguised as
it was by rank fables and airy hypotheses; nature was not interpreted so
often as she was misunderstood. The ideal world seemed hardly more
illusive than the material. While his sovereign, and the nation, and
foreigners were looking up to the solitary sage, may we not pardon the
honest egotism which once declared, that if he had found a Maecenas,
Britain would not have been destitute of an Aristotle? BACON had not yet
appeared; and however we may deem of his aspiration, we cannot censure
his judgment in discovering there was yet a vacant seat for him who was
worthy to fill it.
Dee was an eminent mathematician, but the early bent of his mind was
somewhat fanciful; an inextinguishable ambition to fix the admiration of
the world worked on a restless temperament and a long vagrant course of
life; and his generous impulses burst into the wild exuberances of the
reveries of astrology, alchemy, and the cabbala.
The restlessness of a mind ever escaping from the bounded present to the
indefinite future, directed his flight to the University of Louvain;
there he attracted a noble crowd from the court of Brussels, whom he
charmed like a new oracle of science. Then he rambled to Paris, to
lecture on his favourite Euclid, explaining the elements not only
mathematically, but by their application to natural philosophy, like
another Pythagoras. A professorship was offered him on any terms; and
the curious may still decide on his skill by a remarkable English
preface which Dee furnished to the translation of Euclid by Sir Henry
Billingsley. Admiration seemed more real to Dee when he attracted it on
different spots. Preceded by his reputation, with a name which had
received the baptism of fame, he returned homewards, where he had potent
friends, in Sir John Cheke and in Cecil, and others who had been his
auditors or his pupils; and he was pensioned by the youthful Edward.
In the jealous reign of Mary, he gave umbrage by a correspondence with
the confidential servants of the Princess Elizabeth; and Dee had now
grown into such repute for his occult sciences, that there was little
difficulty in accusing him of practising against the queen by
enchantments. Cast into prison, the magician witnessed his "bedfellow,"
a meek religious man, dragged to the flames, an incident which long
after he could not remember without horror. The spirit of the sovereign
fails not to betray itself in each succeeding reign. Mary bound men to
the stake, Elizabeth sent them forth into new seas and new lands, and
the pacific James, turning them into babbling polemics, only shed much
human ink. The inquisitors unexpectedly detected no act of treason; but
as possibly he might stand in peril of heresy, they recommended that he
should be placed under the surveillance of Bishop Bonner, which probably
was a royal protection. It is evident that Mary was as favourably
disposed towards the philosopher as were her brother and her sister; and
the literary memorial Dee addressed to the queen showed that he had no
leisure to become an heresiarch.
Dee proposed "the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and
monuments." These had been lamentably dispersed and wasted by the
spoilers of the dissolved monasteries. The moment was favourable for the
acquisition, not only by obtaining manuscripts, but by procuring
transcripts of all which their possessors would not part with. In this
memorial Dee has recorded, that Cicero's treatise "De Republica"
perished at Canterbury, and it was the single copy which authenticated
its existence. With such a collection, he proposed to erect "a library
royal"----a future Vatican, or a British Museum! A noble design, when as
yet no national institution for general learning existed. This glorious
opportunity was lost! Governments rarely comprehend those prescient
minds which anticipate wants posterity cannot always supply.
The early intercourse of the Princess Elizabeth with our philosopher
suffered no interruption, as we shall have occasion to show, during her
protracted reign, notwithstanding the ill fame of his awful skill in the
occult sciences. We must throw ourselves into his times to judge of the
calamity of this celebrity. This, and the succeeding age, were troubled
by the faith of omens, meteors, and of "day-fatality," combined with the
astral influences, malignant witchcraft, and horrible magic. It was only
at the close of the seventeenth century, in 1682, that Bayle ventured
anonymously in his "Thoughts on Comets," cautiously to demonstrate that
these fugitive bodies in the heavens had no influence whatever over the
cabinets of princes! Our own historian, Arthur Wilson, in describing "a
blazing star," opined that it was not sent as "a flambeau" to usher in
the funeral of the simple queen of James the First; the Puritan had no
notion that heaven would compliment royalty; but he was not the less
alarmed for the Protestant interest, as it concerned "the war then
breaking out in Bohemia;" and so difficult was it to decide between the
two opinions, that Rushworth, who wrote long afterwards, very carefully
chronicles both. Such was the philosophy of the Elizabethan age, and
truly much later, in France as well as in England.
It was therefore in the spirit of the age that the minister of Elizabeth
held a formal conference with Dr. Dee to fix on a fortunate day for the
coronation, and which the sage opened to them on "the principles of the
most ancient astrologers;" and the Privy Council punctually placed the
crown on the head of the Queen of England. Nor was this the only occult
lore for which his protection of the queen's safety was earnestly
sought. Dee one morning was hastily summoned to prevent a sudden
mischief impending over her majesty's person. A great puppet of wax,
representing the queen, was discovered lying in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields,
with a huge pin stuck through its breast. Dee undertook to quiet "Her
Majesty and the Lords of the Honourable Privy-Council" within a few
hours, but first insisted that, in the solemn disenchantment, Mr.
Secretary Wilson should stand beside him to witness that Dee only used
"godly means." It is not in our histories of England that we learn the
real occasion of the coronation-day of Elizabeth, nor of the panic of
"the Privy-Council" on the incident in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields; yet such
domestic annals of a people enter into the national character, and have
sometimes strangely influenced it.[1]
Though Dee was imbued with the occult sciences of his age, he ardently
cultivated arts and literature which would have honoured him in the
present. He had formed a great library, rich in Irish and Welsh and
other ancient manuscripts, which probably no other person then
possessed;[2] an observatory where he watched, to read in the volume of
the heavens; a laboratory of chemistry where the furnace rarely ceased;
and a collection of philosophical instruments, too many of which were
deemed magical. All these attested his energetic pursuits, to the
manifold injury of a very moderate fortune, and the carelessness of a
life of abstraction and reverie.
But his ambition had accomplished its proud object; and on all public
events wherein science was concerned, recourse was had to the sage of
Mortlake. Camden refers to Dr. Dee's astronomical observations of a new
star which had gradually vanished, though the celestial apparition had
spread great fears and doubts; but our philosopher entertained the Queen
the length of three days with the phenomenon. A more important labour
was his reformation of the Gregorian Calendar, which even later
mathematicians have deemed correct. The versatility of the pursuits of
this scientific man was as remarkable as their ingenuity. In that reign
of maritime enterprise many of our adventurers had taken nominal
possession of many new countries, and the Queen had expressed a wish to
learn their sites. One day, in her garden at Richmond, Dee unrolled to
the royal eye a spacious scroll, hydrographical, geographical, and
historical, where the rivers were tracked, and the coasts indented, and
the authorities of the records inscribed on its page, by which the
sovereign founded her title to dominions of which she had not always
heard the names.[3] The genius of Dee was as erratic as the course of
life he shortly fell into, but it kept great objects in view; and, as he
projected a national library under Mary when literature itself seemed
lost, under Elizabeth, when "this incomparable islandish monarchy" was
menaced by the foreigner, he investigated "the art of navigation," and
proposed "the perpetual guard and service of a petty navy royal,
continually to be maintained without the Queen's charges or any
unpleasant burdens to the Commons." Our inventor was anticipating our
future national greatness, and such minds are only comprehended when
they can no longer receive our gratitude.
Our author published eight or ten learned works, and left unfinished
fifty, some far advanced.[4]
The imagination of Dee often predominated over his science; while both
were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm
the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult
sciences, (which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever
remains occult ceases to be science,) Dee lost his better genius.
The mathematician whom the sage Burleigh had valued for his correction
of the vulgar calendar must have amazed that statesman by a proposal to
search for a mine for the royal service! claiming for his sole
remuneration a letter patent granting him all _treasure trove_, as, in
the barbarous law-French, is termed all wealth hidden in the earth,
which, no claimant appearing, becomes appropriated by the sovereign. The
mysterious agency of the _virgula divina_, or the divining rod, was to
open the undiscovered mine, and to detect, in its progress, for the use
of the bearer, the unsunned gold or silver which some had been foolish
enough to inter, and not extract, from the earth.[5]
The luminous genius who had illustrated the demonstrations of Euclid was
penetrating into the arcane caverns of the cabbalists, and in a state of
spiritual elevation fell into many a dreamy trance. The soul of the
mystic would have passed into the world of spiritual existences, but he
was not yet blessed with theurgic faculties, and patiently awaited for
the elect. If Dee had many reveries, he had also many disciples both of
rank and of name. Whatever a mind thus preoccupied and predisposed
earnestly seeks, it usually finds; its own infirm imagination aids the
deception of the artful. The elect spirit, long expected, was at last
found in the person of Edward Kelley, a young apothecary, but an adept
in the secret sciences: his services were engaged at a moderate salary.
Kelley had to make his fortune.
This KELLEY, who afterwards became an English alchemist, renowned among
the votaries of the hermetic art, and of whom many a golden legend is
recorded with which I dare not trust the reader, it appears, once lost
his ears at Lancaster for coining; the judges not perhaps distinguishing
the process by which the alchemist might have transmuted the baser into
the precious metal. This neophyte, moreover, was a wizard--an aspirant
in more supernatural arts--an incantator--a spirit-seer! Once with
impious temerity he had ventured on questioning the dead! This "deed
without a name" was actually perpetrated amid the powers of darkness in
the park of Walton-in-the-dale, in the county of Lancaster. A recent
corpse was dragged forth from the churchyard; whether the erected
spectre made any sign of resuscitation is not recorded, but it probably
did--for it spoke! A voice was heard delivering its short but awful
responses, sufficient for the evil curiosity of the guardian of a ward,
eager to learn the doomsday of that frail mortal's existence.
For this tale our antiquary WEEVER has been quipped by our antiquary
ANTHONY a WOOD, for his excessive credulity, as if Anthony would infer
that he himself was incredulous on all supernatural disclosures! The
authority was, however, unquestionable, for it came from the agent
himself in this dark work, the opener of the grave, the spectator of the
grim vaticinator, the listener to the sepulchral voice. He had often
related this violation of "God's acre" to many gentlemen in Lancashire,
as well as to the faithful scribe of our "Ancient Funeral Monuments."
Many strange unexplained accounts have come down to us where _Voices_
have been introduced, and it has been too usual at once to suppose that
the attestations were nothing more than what Butler deems "solid lying."
Leibnitz, a philosopher who seems to have delighted in the wonderful,
gives an account of a dog who spoke different languages; the evidence is
undeniable; and certain it is that the docile animal at his master's
bidding opened his mouth--and good French or Latin was distinctly heard.
When the astrologer Lilly assures us of one of the magical crystal
globes or mirrors from whence the spirits absolutely gave responses, he
has described their tones: "They speak, like the Irish, _much in the
throat_." "This, if it proves nothing else, will serve to show that the
Irish was the primitive language," sarcastically observes Gifford; but
his acumen might have discovered that "it proved" something else, and
that Lilly here really delivered a plain truth in this description of
the _voices_ which gave the responses of the spirits.
The art of the ventriloquist to convey his voice to the place he
wills--into the gaunt jaws of a dead man's skull--into the moveable lips
of a tutored dog, or into the invisible spirits of a magical globe--may
be easily recognised. Ventriloquism has been oftener practised than has
been known to the listeners. Speaking _much in the throat_ identifies
that factitious voice, which, drawing the air into the lungs, proceeds
out of the thorax, and not from a lower region, as the ancient etymology
indicated. The Pythonesses of the oracles exercised this faculty, and it
was not less skilfully practised by Edward Kelley.
In the theurgic mysteries Dee would not deviate from what he deemed "the
most Christian courses;" fervent orisons and other devotional ceremonies
were to hallow the cabbalistical invocations,[6] and the astrological
configurations and hieroglyphical cakes of wax, and other magical
furniture. Among these was "a showstone," or an angelical mirror, placed
on a pedestal.[7] By patient inspection at certain more blessed hours,
the gifted seer could descry the apparitions of spirits moving within
its cloudless orb; for at other times less propitious the surface was
indistinct, as if a misty curtain hung over it.[8]
By what natural progress of incidents the bold inventive genius of
Kelley worked this fascination on the fatuity of the visionary might be
curious to develope; but he who himself probably had been a dupe was the
better adapted to play the impostor. Strange as this incident may appear
to us, it was not rare at that day. A communion with invisible spirits
entered into the general creed throughout Europe, and crystal or beryl
was the magical medium; but as the gift of _seeing_ what was invisible
to every one else was reserved for the elect, it was this circumstance
which soon led to impostures. Persons even of ordinary rank in life
pretended to be what they termed _speculators_, and sometimes women were
_speculatrices_. Often by confederacy, and always by a vivacious fancy,
these jugglers poured out their several artful revelations. We now may
inscribe as an historical fact in the voluminous annals of human folly,
from which, however, we have hardly yet wholly escaped, imaginary
beings, and incantation of spirits, and all spectral apparitions.
Kelley was now installed into the office of _Skryer_; a term apparently
of Dee's invention. Listening to the revelations of angelic spirits and
to the mysterious secret, the alchemist inflamed the cabbalistical faith
of the visionary. It is certain that Dee now abandoned his mundane
studies, and for many a year, through some thousands of pages, when
Kelley was in the act of "skrying," sate beside "the show-stone," the
eager scribe of those imagined conferences with "the spirits," received,
to use his own words, "through the eye and the ear of E. K." Kelley was
a person of considerable fancy, which sometimes approached to a poetical
imagination; the masquerade of his spiritual beings is remarkable for
its fanciful minuteness. Voices were at times audible to Dee; but the
terrific noises of supernatural agency which sometimes accompanied the
visions could only have been heard by the poetical ear of Kelley, though
assuredly they shook the doctor. I will give the reader a notion of one
of these scenes.
E. K. looking into the show-stone, said, "I see a garland of white
rose-buds about the border of the stone: they be well opened, but not
full out."
[Delta] "The great mercies of God be upon us; we beseech him to increase
our faith."
E. K. "Amen! But while I consider these buds better they seem rather to
be white lilies."
[Delta] "The eternal God wipe away our blackness, and make us purer and
whiter than snow."
E. K. "They are 72 in number (angels), seeming with their heads
_alternatim_, seeming with their heads one towards me and one towards
you. A voice cometh shouting out from the lilies, and all the lilies are
become on fire. I hear a sound as though it were of many waters poured
or streaming down in the clifts of great rocks and mountains. The noise
is marvellous great; I hear it as afar off, and through the stone, or as
it were of a thousand water-mills going together."