Artes Mathematicall: The Diviner John Dee

Mind from housetop work dot com. There is, gentle reader, nothing the works of God, only set apart, which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man, as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences. Many arts there are which beautify the mind of man, But of all none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called and mathematical, unto the knowledge of which no man can tane without perfect knowledge and

instruction of the principles, grounds and elements of geometry. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger. And if last episode sounded like we were invoking a ritual to summon angels or demons, this sounds like we are teaching ap calculus. Yeah, that those are the words of Dr John D. Those are from his preface, his mathematical preface

to the fifteen seventy translation of Euclid's Elements. Now at this point we should we should mention that if you did not listen to our previous episode on John D, you definitely need to go back to that one, because that that is the episode where we we really dove into his timeline and discussed in broad strokes the major events of his life. Yeah, we also focused on the sort of magical occult aspects of John these beliefs and

life in that episode. This episode, we're really going to focus on his scientific education, his ability with mathematics, um, how he participated in state craft in England and in fact advocated for expanding the British Empire and especially developed cryptography as we know it today. Yeah, and it's it's interesting too, and that even though you know, in a sense the last episode was magic and this one is the is the science. This is more rooted in the

real world. John D was not so firmly rooted. He seemed to to live simultaneously in the mathematical and the magical world. He did not really see a division like like the spiritual, the mathematical, the magic. It was all part of the world as he perceived it. Yeah, so get ready, as we're talking about this stuff, it may seem like, oh, we're going over some historical science here, and then all of a sudden, you know, Merlin will

pop up, or may be some angelic influence here there. Yeah. Now, it's it's really important to note here too, though, that as unique as he was, this mixing of magic and math, this suspicion of math even was it was not unique to him, it was it was very much a part of the day. Uh, mathematics was regarded in some circles with suspicion at the time. During the Tutor era, mathematical books were sometimes burned as alleged conjuring books. This according

to seventeenth century antiquarian John Aubrey. And it was and it was still very much associated with the dark arts. I mean, you have to think to think Pythagoras Key in the history of mathematics, was also considered a magician. Uh. Numbers had inherent powers, and this is a theme that ran through the works of Kepler, Newton, Euclid and others. So there was a long tradition of mathematics and and

magic kind of sharing the same space. One of the things that I read was a mathematics were considered disreputable and connected to witchcraft because they were associated with numerology. And I mentioned this in the last episode the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. Uh And we're gonna talk about the cryptography stuff in a minute. But tri Themius, who wrote the book that D really worked off of

to create his version of cryptography. That guy was also suspected of wizardry, so this had a long standing tradition. Uh D. For his part, though, in terms of mathematics, his lectures on euclid were wildly popular, as he was seen as a leading scientific figure of his day. I'm picturing that he's like the Neil degrass Tyson, right Like he's he's giving lectures. Everybody's really interested. Uh These lectures earned him an offer to join the faculty at the

Sorbonne in Paris in fifteen fifty one. We mentioned that real briefly last time, But he turned stuff like this down because he was hoping to obtain an official position with the English crown. He was also Robert read from this at the beginning, but it's worth pointing out the editor of the first English translation of Euclid's Elements, and in that he added his preface, which what Robert read

came from. This preface argued for the usefulness of mathematics, like people didn't regard mathematics as being important at that time, and in fact, this was the first time the public were introduced to the symbols plus minus, x, fra, multiply, and the little dot uh dash dot for division. Yeah. In this uh this, this preface, the mathematical preface, he proposed an arts mathematical that he compared to thomaturgy, which

is a the use of magic for religious purposes. So he saw mathematics, rather than magic, as the key to thomaturgical wonder Men's work could rival the gods if they could utilize mathematics correctly. And and in this you know you say d was correct. I mean, we may disagree on whether math is a human invention or human discovery, but it has thus far proven to correspond to the inner workings of the cosmos. It's our our best tool. Essentially.

He saw this reflected in the creation of automatons, those of Alberta's magnus uh and others. So you know, all these various mechanical devices that mimicked the the the appearance of life, and the movement and the and and the willfulness of life. And in fact, that's where that his FX work in fifty six comes into play. That's what he was essentially dabbling in. Yeah, we talked about this in the last episode. He apparently created this giant automaton.

Reportedly it was a mechanical flying beetle. I don't know if it actually flew or not, but apparently it was. It was so impressive that people thought that it was magic. Yeah, and that was very much in keeping with his view of what math was and what what science was was capable of doing. That it could replicate the wonders of nature by manipulating the same properties. And he saw he saw things like automatons and even his own special effects

work UH as proof of that. He saw the optics of his special mirror is kind of reverse mirror that he would wow people with. He saw that as an example of look, the these amazing feats are possible through optics, through mathematics, through science, and Ultimately, his mathematics led to him advocating for the expansion of the British Empire, and

he reportedly is the one who coined the term British Empire. Yeah, which is crazy, and it's also it's it's sometimes you forget like it's it's hard to think back to a time where the British Empire wasn't a thing, not only in in actuality but even in concept. So we're traveling back to seventy seven here, and this is kind of what was going on at the time. Sir Francis Drake

was preparing for an epic voyage around the globe. Um Washingham spies had exposed another plot against the British crown, and he had noted a significant problematic comment amid the meaning saturated stars. And on November twenty eight, amid all of these excitements, he comes and he proposes this concept, this idea to the Queen of England that she should challenge Spain's imperial claim to the New World. Yeah, and a lot of this was based around how do I

put this? He so on top of being a brilliant mathematician, he was able to apply that to cartography and mapping out routes or understanding the geography of the New World. Yeah, it's you mentioned cartographers here. We mentioned in the past episode that that he uh he'd learned from and was

in correspondence with with noted cartographer um Garatis Mercator. Yeah, and uh Mercator is apparently the guy who filled him in a about this idea, that that there was a precedence for the British Empire set by a legendary incursion into the northern in drawing seas around the Pole by King Arthur in the year five thirty lands that had hence been claimed by Iberian nations. This is where he got the whole idea. He being d got the whole idea for him being the modern day Merlin and Elizabeth

being the modern day Arthur. He actually presented Elizabeth with a treatise on Britain's imperial limits at one point, and it suggested that the America's had actually been discovered by King Arthur centuries before. Yeah, and and and also that the British Empire was already a thing. This this concept is not something that that England could claim for itself, but reclaimed. This was a This was part of its identity already. Yeah, so you might be wondering what's a

courtier anyways. Right, it's a lot of people when they're describing d they just say, well, was a court here. I don't know what that means. Apparently it is a man that is concerned with the operation of the Royal Court and by extension, the Kingdom, of which it was an effective ruling body. So it was in his interests to make sure that the ruling body of Britain expanded. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the court as well, because the court at the time was was was lavish and uh,

you know, rather impressive to behold. But at the same time he was horribly in debt. The likewise, the the English military was weak, the political condition was far from stable, where England was a relatively poor nation, and the idea of challenging Spain, Imperial Spain in such a manner was was highly ambitious, if not outright ridiculous. Remember, at the time there was a there was a papal bull uh

dividing the Americas between the Spanish and the Portuguese. So it wasn't just that England should challenge Spain, it was that English England should challenge the papacy's division of the globe. This was this was this was not just hey, we're we're we're pretty awesome. We should go over and claim this.

It's like, no, we This involves a leveling up of the nation that might not be practical, and it worked um And for his part, the way that d assisted was with his knowledge of cartography and mathematical modeling, so he instructed captains and pilots and the principles of mathematical navigation. He would prepare maps for their use and he furnished

them with various navigational instruments. In the fifties and fifties he actually advised Richard Chancellor's expedition through the North Sea so that he could establish a trade route between England and Moscow. And there's there's some evidence that D was, I guess uh financially involved in that as well, like he had he had something to gain from this um trade route. In fIF teen seventy two, a new star

appeared and it was visible for seventeen months. Now today we know that this was a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. Uh D saw this as the signal for the beginning of the English Protestant Empire. And so he also instructed an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage to China in fifteen seventies six. Now, I've talked a lot about Northwest passages before the or d Northwest Passage and expeditions through it before on the show, because I've done research on

the past. Um, you know, like like almost all of these, it was totally fruitless, but it did lead to English settlements in Canadian North America. And this is where it gets crazy. Deformed his own company to colonize the Americas, and there's some evidence that he was the intellectual force behind Francis drake circumnavigation of the globe, and D would be awarded rights to any new newly discovered land that

was north of the fiftieth parallel. If Drake had gone any further north than Oregon, this basically would have given him all of Canada. So D would have like, if this had all worked out, D would own Canada. How different might Canadian history be if it had been founded by a wizard right exactly? Um, And you know we talked about this in the last episode. Uh, you know, D moved his family to crack up Poland and three.

A lot of it had to do with the whole angela communication thing and Lasky and and Kelly as we previously described, but some believed that the whole reason he was there was actually to act as a spy. Uh. And when the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second suspected D that's when he was banished from the empire, and he went to a small town called Trebonn in at what the time was southern Bohemian I imagine now it's probably part of the Czech Republic or maybe Slovakia. But

um uh, this is fascinating. That's what gets him kicked out when, as we know from last episode, he just basically went up to Rudolph and was like, hey, angels told me you're possessed by demons. And Rudolph was like whatever. But then he's like, maybe this guy's a spy and he gets rid of him. Now here's a really fun factor. You're ready, everybody. D signed his letters to Elizabeth as double O seven. Yeah, a secret sign of cipher that

at least looked like double os. Yeah. So I mean I'm wondering if that's where um uh Ian Fleming got the idea for double seven from or if it's maybe an actual has a historical precedence. So I've read two different versions of this. One is that Ian Fleming was reading about John D at the time directly got this, uh, this idea from these writings. And I've also read some people cast doubt on this whole connection that oh, well,

actually John D didn't really use double A seven. So um, I'm not sure exactly where the truth lies there somewhere in the middle. But but we will get back to this whole spying thing, this whole espionage thing, because as incredible as everything has been thus far, um, it really gets crazier in the episode where we're not even talking about angelic communication all that weight. Okay, why don't we take a quick break and when we come back, we're

gonna talk about the cryptography aspects of the career. What happens to our digital lives when we're gone? Could our online personalities be brought back to life? What could artificial intelligence do when combined with saved digital memories. A new podcast from ge podcast theater Impanoply, the creators of last

year's award winning The Message, explores those very questions. The story follows Ross Barnes, at low level employee at the FBI who spends his days conversing online with his wife, Charlie, who died eight months ago. But the technology behind this digital resurrection leads Ross down a dangerous path that threatens his job, his own life, and maybe even the world. The title of the series is Life After. That's all one word. It's ten episodes in length. Listen, subscribe and

download it today. Alright, we're back. So cryptography the the study, the creation and the breaking of codes and ciphers. Yeah, so we we've already covered this slightly. But D was taken with the work of German abbot Trithemius uh and he was an important figure in the history of cryptography as well as occultism. And in fifteen sixty four, while D was in Antwerk, he tracked down a copy of truths most famous work, The stick I'm gonna get this wrong,

the Stagana of Grafia and copied it. Now, you were telling me that there is this like whole weird thing about the copying of it. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's pretty strange. So certainly Trithemius was a big deal again, important figure in the history of cryptography and occultism and uh and and D was already a fan. He owned several copies of his of his book Polygraphia, which was the first printed book about the subject of cryptography. Uh, not to say, you know, certainly not the first book.

It's also worth noting that there was there was an Arabic book that that was already out there in the world, and this book was by a man by the name of al Kindy. But this was the first that was, you know, certainly the first Western tone dealing with cryptography. Uh. They were twelve rotating paper, a cipher discs embedded within the pages, and even today they're in remarkably good condition. They still turn. Uh. So it was a pretty phenomenal book.

I'm kind of thinking of I don't think you've seen this movie yet, but that Doctor Strange movie came up. You saw it, Yeah, you know, the library and that that's what I'm imagining. Yeah, yeah, very much. Yeah, And certainly there's a lot of like circular devices and and glyphs that should pop up in that movie that that feel right at home in the world of John D. Except not glowing and spinning in the air, right unless you're talking to Edward Kelly and he will say, yeah,

I can see those disks probably. Uh so, Yeah, he finds out there's a copy of Steganographia out there, which was a rare book. It was an essentially an an abandoned work of the Athenius is because it dealt with, at least on the surface, dealt with angelic communication. It dealt with communing with spirits and using spirits to relay messages over vast distances. Okay, hold on a second, I think I've got a theory here. Let's see if this

plays out as we're talking more about Trithemius. What if so we know that D was really into Trithemius, and then he gathered all of this information before he met Edward Kelly. What if Edward Kelly was using Trithmius to create his version of a Nokian that eventually D wrote down and and and hearkened as the angelic language. Yeah, maybe that's it. It sounds it sounds compelling to me. I guess I should probably say a little more about Trithemius before I by go any any further here. But

this guy alone was pretty fascinating. This was the man who served as advisors to emperors, was among the most erudite German book collectors of his time, author of more than fifty books himself, and the founder of scientific bibliography. He was, as previously noted, the first printed author on

the subject of cryptography in the West. And um and yet then here's this book, this seems to be devoted to angelic magic that he was forced to and in writing because he was talking to other people about it and they were like, Oh, I don't know about about this book you're working on Acthemius. Uh. Even as he was making writing it, he made claims that the text would enable communication over vast distances, to communicate one's thoughts

by fire and other claims. So basically, like like other individuals hearing about this, they were like like, well, this means this makes it sound like either you're lying or you're a demonic sorcerer, right smiled upon Yeah, not so much in the uh, in the church. So the crazy thing is that over the centuries, it's been revealed that all three volumes of this work are concerned with cryptography,

the most and most recently volume three. So pretty early on commentators figured out, all right, well, these first two books are only like surface level about angelic magic. They're really about cryptography and codes and ciphers. But they thought for the longest, well, this third book, though, this just seems to be about magic. There's no code here. Um and that's kind of a fitting read for the life of John d. The idea of like, at what point does the magic become the main thing? But here's the

crazy part. This only this a view of the third book of Steconographia only lasted until the late nineteen nineties. That's when two individuals experienced unrelated breakthroughs and cracking it German linguist Thomas Ernst and Jim Reid's, who is working in the mathematics and cryptography research department at A T and T. That this is Wait, so A T and T paid for somebody to research this old book on Angela communication and cryptography. Well, it's uh, I don't know

if he did. I'm not certain if he did. This part on the A T and D died, but reads is a guy who's subsequently written a few different books on this and other D related works. Um and uh. He he wrote about about this particular work in summing it up with the following uh, which is I think rather illuminating as we continue to look at these obsessions quote. The question now is why did Trimetheus so thoroughly embrace the rhetoric of magic for such a non magical as

we regarded purpose. Did he regard cryptography as inherently magical or was his choice of the language that language a solution to the stylistic problem that all authors of cryptographic exposition have to solve, how to sustain the reader's interest through example after example of usually tedious plain texts, possibly tedious explanations of cryptographic techniques, and always tedious cipher texts. Trimetheus use of angel language might thus be a rhetorical

strategy to engage the reader's interest. If so, he was vastly successful, even if he completely miss calculated how his book would be received, because this basically, like I said that, he was an important figure in in occult circles because for the longest like, that's what these books look like, That's what those books mean. If you're not breaking the crowd the code and sort of finding the deeper symbolism

that the deeper purpose of the text. Yeah, so he's he's thinking along the lines of I'm gonna write this really groundbreaking, uh piece of linguistic science, but that's not really sexy, so I'll tell everyone it's about angels. Yeah, or it's like it's kind of thinking. You think about it like this. If you have you have a grammar lesson, what kind of sentence are you gonna use? You're gonna use a boring sentence or an exciting one. So in a sense, he used the exciting sentence. Uh, he put

he put a dog in a sentence. So another okay, another theory. And again I'm no d scholar, and I know there's lots of people out there who have poured through his diaries, but maybe D was doing the same thing. Well that that that becomes the the crazy thing to try and figure out, like where where we're what we're D's interest here? Was he interested in the magic? Was he interested in I mean, clearly he was interested in cryptography. He'd read his other book, That's why he sought out

this one. There was the whole wife swapping thing though, so there is a certain amount of him actually believing angels are telling him to do things he doesn't want to do. It makes one think, like, at what point in studying cryptography through the language of magic, do you become kind of ensourcefuled by the magic, by the language of of of of magic. Uh yeah, it's crazy. Now now back to this whole expedition where he ends up

finding this copy of this rare book. So, as Benjamin Willy points out in his book, this was no small accomplishment. It was a really difficult book to steal a peek at it was. It was banned. It was actually actually the Church had placed it on the Index Liberalum Prohibitorum in sixteen o nine and it remained there until nineteen hundred. So this was this was a this was a band book. This was like a dark book and uh magic, Yeah,

this is this is this is a dangerous text. Uh. So d had to spend money to travel, He probably had to pay bribes, and he worked with a mysterious nobleman of Hungary who required that the in turn quote pleasure him with such points of science as he requireth that that sounds filthy. I hope it's not. I hope

it's not. Maybe he was just like performing scientific tricks like I don't know, fire like or it kind of sounds like you have like in this case with the nobleman of Hungary, kind of like a rich science fanboy who has access to something amazing and then therefore uses it and as as an excuse to make the real

scientists slash magician hang out with him. And then on top of this, so I mean these whole thing was not only to look at it, not only to read it, but to copy it so he would have his own cop And this was a difficult book to copy because it's it's full of tables and charts, moving parts, apparently meaningless names, angelic language, and uh he only had ten days to get it all copied down, likely with this Hungarian guy just standing over over him the whole time

trying to make a small talk. Oh wow, Then you really feel for John do when you dive into the details here, you know, I mean, yeah, he wasn't the greatest guy in the world. He did, you know, make his young wife sleep with his squire at one point, but he really seemed to be doing his best to try to gather this information up for the benefit of I guess, like as he saw it mankind. Yeah, yeah, I increasingly sympathize with d through through all these adventures

and misadventures, increasingly more misadventures than an adventure. Right, So, yeah, we're forced to try to understand the role of this book really in Indeed's life and what his his obsession with this book tells us about his life. A book that is at once both concerned with purely with codes and also concerned with with very strange magical concepts, with very esoteric concepts. I imagine he kept this in the internal part of his uh, his sanctum sanctis was this

was definitely an inner library product. Here. Now, according to to contemporary cryptologists Simon singh Um, it's important to note here that UH that you know, encryption had been around for a while. He particularly mentions that al Kindi book that I mentioned earlier, UH in the simplest forms, encryption is about swapping letters for symbols and the use of frequency analysis to break it. And by the Elizabethan era,

UH cryptography was already getting a bit more advanced. This was again a time of plots, espionage, deep political intrigue, and encryption UH was was an important tool. Code making and code breaking was very much a part of the the actual game of thrones of the day. One example that seeing it throws out is just considered the intrigue

surrounding Mary, Queen of Scott's. She wanted to take the English throne, so Elizabeth imprisoned her, but she used But then Mary used coded messages that she sent out to her co conspirators looking to work with the Spanish to put her on the throne instead of Elizabeth. Chief codebreaker Thomas Phillips. Uh, this is Elizabeth's. A codebreaker came along. He broke this code she was using, and he broke it easily because she was using an outdated, simple form

of cipher. So Mary was found out, she was tried, she was executed in seven So this serves as an example that the codes, the making of the use of codes, and the breaking of them was life and death. Yeah, especially when you consider, like how much of this story that we've already told has involved political actors traveling around Europe. Uh, suspected of being spies, but you know, basically just saying like either like oh, I'm just here to see the sites or I'm here to scrib crystals and talk to

angels or whatever. Right, Um, So, code and cryptography would be essential to them passing messages back and forth either from their home countries or to their associates in these these other empires. That's right, So we're going about to take another break. Uh. But as we take the break, think to yourself, which which is better? Is you're out traveling around continental Europe to be found out and accused as a spy or a magician? Which which is the

more dangerous scenario? Hey, everybody, with the holidays almost here, you don't have time to go to the post office. There's traffic, there's parking, It's going to be packed with everyone mailing holiday gifts and packages. So you need to do what we do here at how of Works. You need to use stamps dot com Instead. With stamps dot com you can avoid all the hassle of going to the post office during the busy holiday season. Everything you can do from the post office you can do right

from your desk. Buy in print official US postage using your own computer and printer print posted for any letter or package the instant you need it. Then just mail it, give it to the mail person they'll pick it right up. It's easy and convenient. We use stamps dot com here at how stuff works. We need to send out the odd bit of merch or correspondence, and we want you to try it as well. So right now, sign up for stamps dot com and use the promo code stuff stuff.

For this special offer, you'll get a four week trial plus a hundred and ten dollar bonus offer that includes postage and a digital scale. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot com before you do anything else. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in stuff that stamps dot com, Enter stuff and start mailing things. All right, we're back. Okay. So we asked which was better to be accused of being a spy

at the time or a magician. Now, given what we know about how many people accepted quote magic as being a part of not I wouldn't say daily life, but like, uh uh the sciences. Probably being accused of being a

spy was worse. I think there's there's less ambiguity, isn't there Because if you can you imagine you're you're accused of, oh you're trying to speak to angels and you have all this angelic language, you know, depending on some individuals would certainly be very quick to condemn you and say, well, you're practicing horrible magic and this is bad, but there's seems like you have a certain amount of wiggle room there. Yeah, well,

I mean consider d zone case. Right. He goes to the Holy Roman Emperor and he says, angels told me you're possessed by demons, and the guy was like whatever. But then they think he might be a spy. Kick him out of the country. Yeah at least, right, I mean, or or throw him into a dungeon, execute him, etcetera. So so that's the the the the question that one

raises here was John the a spy? The answer kind of varies because it seemed undoubtedly he played a role in introducing some some concepts in cryptography to his Elizabethan masters. He had a great cover story. Yeah, he did a cover story. That's the other thing. To what extent is this a guy who end up buying into his cover story, like he went so deep cover that he himself had vast difficulties uh re emerging and returning to Relizabeth in England.

Uh Yeah, It's it's difficult to piece it together because we have a guy here who seems to have been a pretty serious Christian, but he was also engaged in

all of this, Uh, these occult interests. We have a guy who believed mathematics was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, who studied cryptography, who advised Queen Elizabeth the First, who traveled rather extensively throughout Europe during a time of plots, political unrest, in war, and so yeah, this has led some his stories to ponder weather, uh well, not really whether, but to what degree John d was

engaged in the espionage of the day. As early as the seventeenth century English polly math Robert Hoke suggested that these Book of the Spirits was actually a book of code rather than an account of angelic conversations, and that it would be to go back to our our previous question, that it would be far better to be charged with being a quote, pretend enthusiast rather than a real spy. Yeah, you know, I'm starting to lean more and more towards

that as a theory. Here's another interesting, uh tidbit. Following these um copying of the Steganographia in fifteen sixty three, he certainly wrote to William Cecil that's Queen Elizabeth's key minister at the time, uh, and who was just beginning to put in place the espionage network that, under his predecessor, the spy master Francis so Walshingham um would become one of the most formidable and effective um uh spy systems,

sp and our systems in Europe. So we're talking about the origins of M I. S X. Basically, basically, yeah, like the he he he wrote in writing to Cecil, he's writing to one of the one of two key individuals, Yeah, and laying the groundwork for a vast network of spies,

a vast coded network of spies. It depended on Coats d wrote to Cecil, apparently with great enthusiasm, telling him that this book was quote the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men's travails recovered, and that it would benefit quote the advancement of good letters and wonderful divine and secret sciences. So Benjamin Woolley and his book notes that that Cecil was a very practical conservative sort of fellow, and not the kind of guy to

put a lot of stock in occult rituals. He was religious. He probably believed in spirits, you know, in kind of an abstract sense of the word that he wasn't gonna go rattling off a list of angel names or anything. So the secret sciences that we're talking about here might very well refer to interest far more earthly, uh, far more espionage related than anything to do with you know,

angelic communication. So maybe D was duping Kelly. Yeah, like he used a known occultists, alchemist criminal as his companion for ten years, possibly so that he could travel around and pretend like he was doing these rituals when in fact he was up to something a little bit more concrete. Yeah, it's I think one of the difficult things in trying to figure out someone like D is we kind of look for this not certain not maybe not a simple interpretation,

but we want to a solid interpretation. And I guess the the way I keep trying to make sense of it is to think, all right, every one of us has a fairly complex worldview, a lot of contradictions, a lot of I we believe in various ideas simultaneously even though they don't match up, and we all have you know, I'm just gonna generalize here, and let's say, let's say we all have very fairly normal brains, and D had

an abnormal brain. D was a brilliant man, one of the most brilliant men of his day, and therefore perhaps his contradictions were just that that much greater, that much stranger, that much more out of proportion to what the rest of us live with. Yeah, I think I can see where you're going with this, That there's there's a little

bit of truth to all of this. Yeah, that's that's that's where I keep coming coming back to, because it's it's tempting to say, oh, well, he was only in it for the he was only in it for the codes. He was a spy the whole time. He wasn't duped by this this this weird Edward Kelly character. Uh, he was. He was the secret the secret master the whole time.

But as as Willie Wright said, D didn't see uh the steganographia as a purely diplomatic or political tool like based on his writings, he he clearly considered it to have far more esoteric uses. He believed that the cryptography could help him decipher other ancient texts, such as the Book of Siga, an anonymous tone that he believed to have been written in the in the the Anochian language, and another was a book that was attributed to Roger Bacon,

the Voiage Manage, which is still yet to be deciphered. Yeah. Voyage Manuscript is something that comes up a lot around here. Um yeah, I I know several of our other shows here have done episodes on it and how stuff works, like a pretty long Windage Manuscript article as well. Um yeah, so maybe maybe d Then he's playing all sides for his own and interests, you know, like he believes in the angel stuff, but he's also playing it out for

this code stuff. He has interests in mathematics and discovering the origins of the universe, in bettering the English Empire, and all of those coincide with talking to angels and spycraft and assisting trade agencies and being a courtier to the queen. It's all it's all very I mean, it's alien to us from present day perspective. Yeah, but it does it does seem seem to be the case that

it was all connected to him. Yeah. This was this was the world that he lived, and he lived in a world in which the British Empire had great things ahead of it, that things were cosmically aligned for it that he himself was kind of the the second coming of Merlin, that that that mathematics was the key to to understanding and manipulating the forces in the world around him, and that you could you could use some of these properties to communicate with essentially extra dimensional beings who would

reveal the secrets of science to you. It's not like he was looking to cast fireballs and lightning bolts. He just wanted to know how the world worked. He was he was he was endlessly curious. Huh. And that's John d the Good Doctor. So you know, he's got this reputation now that's endured as an astrologer and a magician. But I think you know what we should get out of these two episodes should be remembered that D was an accomplished mathematician and he influenced the field as well

as physics, music, philosophy, optical theory, and mechanical engineering. I mean he really Robert and I were talking about this outside of the studio. I mean, he was very influential in the history of the world in a lot of ways. Uh. We remember him as being this deluded guy who could talk to angels, but he contributed to your European Intellectual History. There's actually an organization called the John D Society, uh

that I found in my searching around. It's an organization dedicated to producing standard editions of his work, and they're trying to reconstruct his library. So they're assembling an archive of this material as they find it on microfilm, although I imagine, uh that they're probably scanning it in digitally

at this point. And I'd like to leave us with a quote from one of the books that I was consulting by R. W. Baron, is called a reputation History of John D. The Life of an Elizabethan Intellectual, and he says, four centuries after his death, we are still debating and wrestling with where D's work fits into the Elizabethan world picture and what contributions, if any, he made to those intellectual advancements. So there we have it. I mean,

he's a fascinating fellow. He seems to have influenced our sciences. He's perfect for for stuff to blow your mind. You know. He's got a little bit of the weirdness of the bizarre, bringing it into his understanding of the world, bringing wonder to these things, and then simultaneously using things that we now consider every day like optics or cartography or or

or just basic math. Uh, in the same respect. Yeah, and it's it's it's just amazing that he's one of these guys that we know a fair amount about, and yet you the more you read about him, the more you just ask who who was this guy? You know what he was? He he really liked what what what was the world he saw when he looked out the window, you know? And uh, yeah, it's just just an amazing character. So it's been a great pleasure to to research him

and discuss him here on the podcast. Yeah, I for one, next time I'm in London, I am definitely gonna go to the British Museum and trying to get a look at some of those occult artifacts. And I'd really like to visit the site of more Lake. I kind of see what it's like to from looking at Google Maps, doesn't seem like it's that far southwest of London. So, uh, hey, anybody out there, have you been there? Have you seen

this stuff in the British Museum? Maybe you know? Uh, Like I said at the top of all of this, there's so much research into John d that maybe you know there's stuff that we don't know about that we missed here. Maybe there's something you'd like to add that

we could read in a future listener mail episode. Uh, you can hit us up on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram, and don't forget to visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, which is our landing site where we'll have images of the company of this episode, as well as all of the blog posts and all of the videos and all the other podcasts that we do here. Oh and real quick, on a personal note, I just want to thank my my cousin father be Price, for suggesting

research into these life and studies. Yeah, thank you, y. This was this was really a pleasure, all right. So if you want to get in touch with the old fashioned way, put aside the your your very scrying instruments, put aside the magic mirror, and to simply send us an email I blow the Mind and how stuff Works dot com for more on this than thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot Com? Remember