The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee

The university and college curricula did not mention occult philosophy, but Dee’s occult studies began at Cambridge, where such knowledge appeared to be a natural continuation of Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotle’s text *On Coming-to-be and Passing Away* gave immense authority to the belief that all matter shared one fundamental substance. Matter differed externally only through varying combinations of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Therefore, by alchemically manipulating those elements, any kind of matter could be transmuted into another. The conjunction of all elements would produce the philosopher’s stone.

Dee’s Cambridge studies in [[perspective]] also laid the groundwork for his later summoning of angels into crystals through light rays. As an undergraduate Dee befriended John Hatcher, a Fellow of St Johns’ who practised angel magic. Dee’s ‘Mathematical Preface’ defined perspective as an element of natural philosophy that demonstrated how both light rays and unseen, occult rays could be measured and manipulated. Perspective therefore underpinned all natural philosophy, especially astronomy and astrology, and the magical effects of ‘Catropic’, or divination using light reflected from polished surfaces.

Dr John Caius, who returned to Cambridge while Dee studied there, owned a manuscript in which ‘Bacon’s experimental art’ included using a young boy as a ‘skryer’ of visions in reflective surfaces.

Nearly forth years later he reminded God that ‘I have found my youth up, desired and prayed unto thee for pure and sound wisdom and understanding of some of thy truths natural and artificial’, hidden ‘in the frame of the world’.

To deceive his critics, in 1570 Dee tried to attribute his reputation for ‘conjuring’ to ‘vain reports’ about his stage production of Aristophanes *Peace* in Greek soon after entering Trinity. In fact, Dee’s use of pulleys and mirrors to create the illusion of ‘the Scarabeus [beetle] flying up to Jupiter’s palace, with a man and his basket of victuals on her back’ derived from rediscovered classical treatises. Precisely because he could explain these stage effects naturally, Dee used them to distract attention from the real source of his reputation, his ‘conjuring’ magic on behalf of Princess Elizabeth in 1555.

Trinity epitomized the impoverished university’s increasing dependence on royal patronage. Henry VIII had established the college to supply humanist intellectuals for political service, not intellectual speculation. Thus Dee developed in an intellectual culture attuned to the practical demands of the monarch and Court. His career would depend on how well he could attract patrons by tailoring his erudition and writing to address political needs.

Dee believed that it was theoretically possible to measure the invisible ‘rays of celestial virtue’ that emanated from the stars alongside their light. Measured geometrically, stellar distances, magnitudes, aspects and movements would determine the power of these rays. Dee claimed to have invented while young a way of measuring ‘those fixed Stars whose Operations in the Air, is of great might’.

Within ‘Archemastry’, Dee alluded obscurely to three subordinate sciences, using esoteric names only recently decoded by Nicholas Clulee. They were ‘Alnirangiat’, the ‘Art of Sintrillia’ – the divination by reflecting celestial rays onto liquid surfaces – and a third ‘chief … OPTICAL Science’ that Dee left nameless. The second and third of these sciences seem ideally suited to the needs of Elizabeth and her supporters. ‘Sintrillia’ enabled seers to divine the past, present and future, by using polished surfaces to reflect celestial rays on to semi-precious stones submerged in three different liquids.