John Dee's Language of the Angels

in whatever someone's old books might have to say. She had work to do. But as she baked her pies atop the pages she was using as parchment paper, the smell of caramelized sugar spinning in the air, it was hard to ignore an uncomfortable feeling stirring in her gut. When she looked at the books pages. They were strange. Yes, they contained words and dated entries, as she might have expected, But the pages also contained diagrams and signs and symbols

that she didn't understand. Unnerving symbols, triangles inscribed inside circles, intricate stars that pointed toward what might have been Greek letters, maps of what might have looked like planets, complex mathematical symbols that could only be witchcraft. She quieted her mind. She lifted the surely devilish pages one by one, and one by one let them blacken in the fire beneath her baking pies.

fascinating characters in all of Elizabethan court history. He was a learned mathematician and also a magician, an astronomer, and an astrologer. He was a trusted political advisor to the Queen. He was a scientist, a cartographer, and even a special effects technician. He was also an angelologist, a Christian lawmanser, an occultist and a dabbler in alchemy. He was a student of Hebrew and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.

In addition to Christianity, he believed he spoke with angels, both angels from the Old Testament and some of his own discovery. He recorded completely credulously his angelic conversations with the likes of the angels Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. It may seem impossible to us now that someone so invested in the occult in sorcery could have had such a serious political career in a royal court. But it

was the fifteen hundreds, the Renaissance. The classic Renaissance man did it all in part because it all was not so neatly divided into branches as it is today. Math, magic and miracle were not entirely distinct from each other. Politics were ordained by God, after all. Queen Elizabeth herself believed in the royal touch, the magic of her fingertips

upon her subject's next to heal their ailments. The latest optical science was recognizing that light could bend it separated into rainbows through lenses and mirrors and crystals, where was the line between that science and the idea that gazing into a crystal ball might reveal concealed dimensions of God's creation, just as it revealed the different bands of color concealed

within light. John Dee was a man who studied the heavens, and in fifteen seventy two he looked up as all of England cowered at a new star that suddenly appeared in the night sky, followed by a range comet. In fifteen seventy seven, and under the light of that comet, the Conjuror John d made a political plan for his queen. He encouraged Elizabeth to follow the path laid by King Arthur one thousand years earlier, to expand England into a term he coined, a British Empire. But the Great Conjurer

would also do something else. Under the light of that mysterious comet. He would allow a man using a false name into his home, a man who would ultimately be his downfall. This was a man who would intercede with D's angelic conversations and put a wedge between d and the court life he was enjoying with Queen Elizabeth. When the Great Conjurer looked up into the sky and calculated the positions of the planets. It seems he couldn't have seen just how tenuous his own position was. I'm Danish

schwartz and this is noble blood. John Dee was born in or around London on July thirteenth, fifteen twenty seven, during the reign of King Henry the Eighth. He was the son of a merchant who served within the king's court. If you're into astrology, you're in luck. With this episode, Dee mapped his own birth chart, as well as the astrological positionings of many of the events that took place

throughout the sixteenth century. According to D's calculations, Jupiter and the Sun were strong together in Cancer at the moment of his birth. I'm sure some of you listeners can interpret those signs better than I can. Biographer Benjamin Woolley notes that the moon and the Sun were in opposition in d'cas charts, and even I could tell you that symbolically, at least in literary terms. That suggests some internal conflict

that might have been brewing inside him. And so we begin today's episode appropriately in astrology, a field with plenty of adherents still today a realm that draws on astronomical science and then, at least in my estimation, heads into the direction of belief. By fifteen forty seven, John d was nineteen and England was transitioning from the reign of King Henry the Eighth to that of his short lived only son, King Edward. At that time John Dee was in the midst of some personal drama of his own,

and I mean drama in the quite literal sense. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he was putting on a play. It was a play called Peace by an ancient Greek playwright, Aristophanes, and it called for a dung beetle to fly with an actor on its back. This was the fifteen hundreds. D did not have the benefits of electricity in staging his play, let alone projectors, lasers or drones. And yet the actor on stage instructed his scare a beetle to lift him into the sky,

and it did. There was a gasp in the audience next craned backward to watch in awe. How was it possible the flying beetle on stage was like a miracle, or else some thought like magic or as some whispered as the play went on, it was witchcraft. D must have dealt with the devil. Only a few people in the crowd recognized that the beatle must have been some application of mathematics. D probably used some combination of Pulley's mirrors, springs, and pressurized air or gas to create the illusion of

a flying bug. But this was a time when mathematics as a discipline were viewed as essentially indistinguishable from conjuring. D was cast under suspicion. In another life, we can imagine that D might have gone on to become the best practical effects guy of the Elizabethan age. We can easily imagine a D who went on to be an artist of the theater what D himself called art mathematical.

Of course, his beatle was considered wizardly. After all, what is special effects technology today but something we call movie magic. But aside from a brief stint when he was a student,

D wasn't really interested in the theater. For D, the mathematical was only in service of his true aim, which was the revelation of some universal godly truth through the use of sciences that shaded without distinction in his mind into magic, and eight years later that lack of distinction between the occult and the approved came home to D in the form of a court order. It was fifteen fifty five and d was under arrest. This was during

Queen Mary's reign. D stood accused of witchcraft, a serious charge under the new Catholic rule, which was definitely not opposed to burning heretics at the stake. D was also official accused of two other crimes, calculating and conjuring. Again, in that language, you can see the closeness of math and magic to this day. The word we use for solving a math problem calculating, it means something very different when applied to a person. A calculating person implies that

they're sly bad scheming. And John Dee stood accused of doing the very thing that so many astrologically inclined bridesmaids do for their friends today. That is, mapping the horoscopes of Mary and her husband Philip to see if they made a good match. Kind of touchingly, de found in favor of Mary and Philip's union. It's pretty sweet, actually, His calculations suggested that their marriage took place under an

auspicious rising sign for a new couple. But of course flick Queen Mary, defensive about an unpopular marriage, didn't exactly take the zodiac as a fun activity for a bridal shower. Luckily, Forde he escaped the fate of the heretics and outlived Mary, who died in fifteen fifty seven. That was when Mary's younger Protestant half sister, Elizabeth, came to the throne. Twenty five year old Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry

the Eighth and the beheaded Anne Boleyn. She was the second woman ever to ascend to a throne that had been until recently only occupied by men, and she needed to secure her reign. She appointed her favorite Robert Dudley to advise her, and Dudley, needing the good graces of not only the earthly but heavenly realms as well as he put together Elizabeth's coronation, decided that he needed the one man in England who could read the planets better

than anyone else. Robert Dudley called upon John d. When John d agreed to choose the date for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, it was the beginning of a major life change for him. After being arrested under Queen Mary's reign. Now he was not only set free, but he was welcomed into Elizabeth's court. As his first order of business, D consulted the stars. He measured and mapped the angles between the planets, the positions of major constellations, the twelve astrological houses, and rising signs.

At last, he decided that January fifteenth, fifteen fifty nine would be the most Heavens approved date for the beginning of the Elizabethan Age. Obviously, Mars was in Scorpio that day. After the coronation, history loses track of D for about five years. I like to imagine the stage magician's sleight of hand. Here D ducking into a cleverly designed set piece through which the audience of history can't see him. But he was somewhere all along, studying the Jewish mystical

tradition of Kabbalah. He was seeking the secret names of God, learning the Hebrew language and its mystical numerology, the alphabet arranged around the first letter olive, middle mem, last tav, spelling out emmett, the Hebrew word for truth. He was seeking divine truth in increasingly more mystical modes, but D was far from done with politics. Once history catches up with him again, he steps out from behind the curtain.

On June fourteenth, fifteen sixty four, when he and Queen Elizabeth are walking together at Greenwich Palace on the south bank of the River Thames. D was holding something in his hands, a slim book, and he was brimming with excitement and perhaps a little bit of fear. He was about to show the Queen the work of his soul, his Monas Hieroglyphica. Listener, allow me to tell you the

monas is truly wild. It's a whole book dedicated to explaining a mystical symbol of divine revelation that D invented himself. It looks kind of like a cross between the artist formerly known as Prince Symbol and Harry Potter's Deathly Hallows. D's symbol was a millage of Latin wordplay, alchemy, numerology, celestial calculations, and you know, his idea of the unity of all things. So was no doubt excited but nervous as he walked alongside the Queen, no doubt remembering how

he had been arrested for doing a Queen's horoscope. Years before, Elizabeth had taken D's astrological advice for her coronation date. Though perhaps she would be open to his new book of divine celestial work, or perhaps she would have him arrested on the spot. He offered her the book. Elizabeth paused for a moment, observing the symbol. D's pulse pounded. Then he saw Elizabeth's eyes light up in curiosity. I will be your scholar, she told D if you explain

this work to me. And so John D sat with the Queen of England and described to her his special invented brand of mysticism. John D and the Queen went on to have a good relationship. She paid him occasional visits at his home. She consulted with him about whether she should marry one of her suitors, the Duke of Anjou.

He said she shouldn't, and she didn't. But the greatest cause De advocated with Elizabeth, and the one that would mark ultimately the end of his close relationship with her at court, was a bit of political fortune telling that would ultimately come to pass in a big way. It was D's deep belief that Elizabeth should set out to create a British empire. D wasn't just fortune telling when it came to this idea of empire, he was actively

promoting it. As Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe, D was coining the term British empire. He was hearkening back to King Arthur a thousand years before, arguing that the British right to an extensive empire had been established a millennium ago. He encouraged Elizabeth to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese claims to the New World, especially Spain's claims

in North America. His suggestions were even more persuasive than usual, because just as D was petitioning Elizabeth on the idea of expansionism, there was a strange thing going on in the world, something that could seem like a message directly from the heavens, something no one in all of Britain, in all of Europe could possibly miss. All anyone needed to do was step outside and crane their necks back as they had years ago to gaze at John D's

flying beetle on stage. But this time the magic was taking place on a much bigger stage, the night sky itself, And if anyone looked up to the night sky in November of fifteen seventy seven, there it would be the great, glittering, terrifying thing, the bright light with a luminous tail, a comet. Many believed that the cosmic event signaled some vexation from God, some calamity to befall mankind, or thought many of the

English to specifically befall England or the Queen. But Elizabeth wasn't going to believe just anybody's fears about this strange celestial happening. She was going to consult one man when it came to the skies, John D. The comet is nothing to fear, he advised her. It is not important

of approaching doom, but of your approaching greatness. Perhaps the bright light with the tale that arcing through the sky is a a sign of England's destiny to be the bright light with a long tail that is a global empire. Of course, D's vision for English expansionism is exactly what would happen. The English would defeat the Spanish Armada in fifteen eighty eight, when D was not yet sixty years old.

But ultimately D had nothing to do with Elizabeth's actions, as she set out in favor of the empire that he had initially encouraged. The comet lit the sky, and D's eyes were drawn heavenward. He lost interest in court. He had begun his life with one interest, and it was not the earthly realms of battle and conquest and bloodshed, though his concept of empire would inevitably contain all three. The comet faded from the sky, and John D left his influence at court behind. From there, the rest of

D's life became ever more involved in the occult. He worked closely with scriers, people who divined things via the use of objects like crystal balls. Some or I might say all of these were frauds. D's closest scrier was a man who first entered his life calling himself Edward Talbot. Talbot would later re enter D's life using his real name, Edward Kelly, which goes to show the type of upstanding honesty we're dealing with here. With Kelly's help, D communed

with the angels in a special language called Inokian. D and Kelly conversed with some of the people you may have learned about in religious schools, like Raphael and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel. In his diaries, d earnestly record these angelic conversations. Uriel would say things like, quote, we cannot visit thee now at the twelfth hour, thou shalt use us. Then at the twelfth hour Michael would say something like, quote, divide the seven parts of the circle

everyone into seven by seven. All government is to my understanding, It's not exactly a clear message. Sometimes D worried that he and Kelly were communicating with devils instead of angels, but for the most part D believed in Kelly. He and Kelly even traveled to Poland and Prague together, where they wound up banned by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second on suspicion of necromancy. Eventually, Kelly received a message that he and D should share not only spiritual experience,

but something a little closer to home, their wives. This experiment in sister wifing lasted only about one night. It seemed like a horrible incident for D's wife Jane, and in the end it sat very badly with D as well. Shortly after his relationship with Kelly finally broke down. Still, the timing of the wife swapping did throw the paternity of one of D's sons into doubt. To Dee's credit, he treated the boy as his own. He was an involved father to all of his children with Jane, who

was his third wife. He was such an involved father that he even asked one of his sons to be a scrier for him, which ultimately wound up as a failed experiment. By the final years of D's life, he had outlived Jane and five of their eight children. He had also outlived Queen Elizabeth. He died in in December sixteen o eight at the age of eighty one. His hidden diaries would be baked under the Sweet Shop Pies

fifty four years later. D may have been the inspiration for a lot of canonical characters who are well known to English lit majors. William Shakespeare's magician Prospero, Christopher Marlowe's necromancer Faust, Edmund Spencer's meditative Old Sage in the House

of Temperance in The Fairy Queen. But above all, Dee's legacy is as a figure who strived earnestly for divine revelation, often in ways that seem profoundly unscientific to us today, and yet even today, the great contemporary mathematician Edward Frankel went on Lex Friedman's podcast this April to discuss the

present state of math. They talked about contemporary physicist and the so far in vain quest for a grand, unifying theory of everything, and they joked about when you show up and meet God and there's one equation on the board and the two of you just chuckle. Unlike D, scholars today have separated math and science from religion. Yet the image of God's chalkboard is still there, even metaphorically.

There's still some sense that when we try to derive the mathematical and physical underpinnings of the world, we are dealing with something bigger than ourselves. John D, for all he foresaw and failed to foresee about the future, probably would be happy about that. That's the story of Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer John D. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about

his astrological birth chart. All right, for all of you astrology buffs out there, let's dig some more into D's birth chart. First of all, D wrote his chart in the form of a square. More like the Vedic style natal chart than the typical circular charts he might see today.

In a box at the center of D's chart, his careful script recorded the following his birthday fifteen twenty seven July thirteenth, his birth time four hours and two minutes in the afternoon, and his birthplace latitude fifty one degrees and thirty two seconds north latitude. We don't know what D made of his own chart. Surely he read a lot of meaning into it, but none of that made its way to us today, which leaves many modern biographers

and podcasters a lot of interpretive wiggle room. Biographer Benjamin Woolley notes that the star Antaris in the planet Mars were together on D's chart, which, in his interpretation, was a disturbing or threatening sign. We reached out to a friend who's an amateur chart reader and with no knowledge of whose chart this was. She looked at the eleventh House and said, ruled by Mercury and reflects the archetypes of Aquarius, so futuristic ideas, thinking about innovation and the future,

sort of space alien stuff. But a different friend replied that astrology is pseudoscience and no place to end a historical podcast, although to be fair, one could argue that historically, during this period in question, astronomy was thought of as a sign. But for those who think like the second Friend and to be blunt, think like me. One final, cold, hard fact the astronomy in D's chart is remarkably correct.

Using Ptolemy's formulas, decalculated the positions of the known planets at the time of his birth with extreme accuracy, within a few thirtieths of a degree. The least accurate calculation he made was for mercury, and even then, with the science of the sixteenth century, he was only off by two degrees.