The Occult Philosophy in
the Elizabethan Age

Frances
Yates
‘She has raised questions which will occupy scholars
for decades to come. . . . It is a very great book. A
crowning achievement, one might say.’
Christopher Hill

‘Among those who have explored the intellectual world
of the sixteenth century, no one can rival Frances Yates.
Wherever she looks, she illuminates. . . . No one has
done more than she to recreate, from unexpected
material, the intellectual life of past ages.’
Hugh Trevor-Roper

Christian Cabala and Rosicrucianism

Chapter 16


It was certainly not called a ‘Rosicrucian’ philosophy in
Giorgi’s time. How then did it acquire that name and the associations
which go with it?
Many suggestions as to the origin of the name have been
made,5 but in moving along the historical line which we are following
the suggestion which seems most likely is that the Giorgi
type of Christian Cabala acquired this name when it became
associated with Elizabethanism, with the Tudor Rose, with Dee’s
scientific British imperialism, with a messianic movement for
uniting Europeans against the Catholic-Hapsburg powers.
With the Giorgi type of Christian Cabala was associated in
the Dee movement the Agrippa type, more deeply magical,
alchemical as well as Cabalist. The Agrippa movement may have
been a secret society type of movement from the start. The
Dee movement as a whole took on an English and Protestant
flavour, Protestant in the sense of a movement of protest of
the Renaissance occult traditions against the Catholic reaction.
The epic poem which celebrated this movement was
Spenser’s Faerie Queene. A central character in that poem is the Red
Cross Knight. Spenser’s poem, I would suggest, is already a
Rosicrucian poem, with Red Cross as the moving spirit of occult

Protestantism. In fact we know that later German Rosicrucian
writers associated Spenser’s poem with their movement.
Thus Rosicrucianism was present in England in the form
of Spenserianism, before the name ‘Christian Rosenkreutz’
appeared in Germany as the central character of the German
Rosicrucian manifestos, published in 1614–15.
How did the English knight, Red Cross, turn into the German
‘Christian Rosenkreutz’? The transition is fairly clear and has
been indicated in my book.6 The German Rosicrucian manifestos
reflect the philosophy of John Dee which he had spread
abroad in the missionary venture of his second, or continental,
period. One of the Rosicrucian manifestos contains a tract which
is closely based on Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica. Thus the Dee philosophy,
which lies behind Spenser’s poem, when carried abroad
by Dee would quite naturally translate Red Cross into Christian
Rosenkreutz.


We discovered in an earlier chapter that a valuable guide to the
meaning of Dee’s monas is Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi with its
abstruse combintations of numerology, astrology, and Cabala.
Suggestions concerning ros (dew) and crux which have been
made to explain the name ‘Rosicrucian’ can be found in Giorgi’s
work. Hence the intuition which sees in Giorgi’s philosophy the
root of Rosicrucianism is vindicated.7 Giorgi is a source of Dee
who is the source of the Rosicrucian manifestos. The Dee
movement, the Spenserian movement, the Rosicrucian
movement, are closely related.
In what I have called ‘the Elizabethan revival in the Jacobean
age’,8 the Dee tradition revives, and of this revival Prospero is the
symbol, symbol of the magical Renaissance philosophy reviving
in a milieu which attempted revival of the Elizabethan outlook.
Its bold affirmation of that philosophy makes of The Tempest
almost a Rosicrucian manifesto, made, it is true, several years
before the printed German manifestos,9 but expressive of the
occult philosophy in its Elizabethan manifestation.



Much of this I have said, or hinted, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays.
It needs to be emphasised here because the history of the
occult philosophy in the Elizabethan age is really the history of
Rosicrucianism, though not called by that name. It acquires that
name when it is exported, when, as a result of Dee’s mission, it
spreads on the continent, when it becomes associated with the
unfortunate Winter King and Queen of Bohemia. It is strangely
significant that The Tempest was acted before that couple on the eve
of their departure. Shakespeare gave them the blessing of his
Rosicrucian manifesto; Prospero represents the Elizabethan
occult philosophy, revived, and about to be exported as
Rosicrucianism.
I have described in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment the atmosphere
and culture of the court of Frederick and Elizabeth of the Palatinate
at Heidelberg, and have endeavoured to convey its culture as
‘Rosicrucian’, an export of the Elizabethan occult philosophy to
Germany. Utterly crushed by the armies of the reaction and by
the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, the exported Rosicrucian
culture was also subjected to terrible witch-hunting. The secret
society aspect would have become important under the pressures
of persecution, but this story has not yet been unravelled.
In fact, the whole later history of the occult philosophy, both in
England and abroad, is profoundly obscured by the convulsions
of the religious conflicts and propaganda.
One can better understand the hatred and horror which this
movement aroused in its enemies when one remembers that
Christian Cabala, as understood by its earlier adherents, was a
form of evangelical Christianity supported by a philosophy
‘more powerful’ than scholasticism, the occult philosophy. It
represented a powerful spiritual force, associated with Christianity,
but opposed to the forces of reaction, whether Catholic or
Protestant. As such it was violently detested and hounded as
diabolical, to be exterminated like the witches it encouraged,
blackened as abominable and satanic.

































Yet it was, in its origins, the occult philosophy of the
Renaissance which had inspired some of the most exquisite
productions of Renaissance culture.
In 1623, Marin Mersenne published in Paris his Quaestiones in
Genesim, one of the key works marking the transition out of
Renaissance modes of magical thinking into those of the scientific
revolution. In this Genesis commentary, Mersenne fiercely
attacks Renaissance Neoplatonism and its allied occultist tendencies,
mentioning by name and with strong disapproval the
famous Renaissance philosophers associated with this outlook –
Ficino, Pico, and many others, and particularly Francesco Giorgi
who comes under attack both for his De harmonia mundi and for his
Problemata. Mersenne devoted a whole work, published in 1623,
to refuting Giorgi’s Problemata; and he severely attacks the De
harmonia mundi at many points in the Quaestiones in Genesim.10
Mersenne’s attitude reminds one of that of Bodin, who
objected so strongly to the association by Pico (and still more by
Agrippa) of astral and Hermetic magic with Cabala. By placing
his attack within the context of a commentary on Genesis,
Mersenne may possibly be intimating disapproval of the traditions
of Christian Cabala as a degradation from true religious
Cabala.
Much happened between 1580, when Bodin published his
Démonomanie, and 1623, when Mersenne published his attack on
Renaissance philosophies. In that interval the whole development
of the Elizabethan age had taken place, the whole extension
of the Dee philosophy and its stimulating power on that age – all
this had happened and was over by the time Mersenne wrote.
Not only that, but the extension of that movement as a Rosicrucian
mission on the continent had taken place and was over by
1623, the German Rosicrucian movement crushed, the Palatine
and his wife fled, and the Counter-Reformation, led by the
Jesuits, was spreading over the whole area.

The year 1623 marks the hour when it might well appear that
the Counter-Reformation had triumphed throughout Europe,
when rumours of a union of Protestant princes against it were
heard no more, when, with these disasters, the philosophies of
the Renaissance were also overwhelmed, wiped out in the tides
of witch-hunting which followed the victors.
That Mersenne was well aware of the contemporary relevance
of his attack on Renaissance philosophies is shown by the fact
that he devoted particular attention to the attack on Giorgi’s
philosophy, and also that a large part of his polemic is aimed
against Fludd and the Rosicrucians.
The early seventeenth century advances amidst clouds of

witch-hunting which still make it difficult for the historian to
trace what is really going on. The Mersenne controversies come
at the moment when those clouds are thickest, which is also
the moment when the ‘scientific revolution’ is getting under
way.
In an article11 published several years ago I compared
Francesco Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi with Mersenne’s Harmonie
universelle:
Giorgi’s Harmony of the World is full of Hermetic and Cabalist
influences. . . . Mersenne is a seventeenth century monk, friend
of Descartes. . . . Mersenne attacks and discards the old
Renaissance world; his Universal Harmony will have nothing to
do with Francesco Giorgi of whom he strongly disapproves.
Mathematics replaces numerology in Mersenne’s harmonic
world; magic is banished; the seventeenth century has arrived.
And I suggested that ‘the emergence of Mersenne out of a banished
Giorgi’ is one of those transitions from Renaissance to
seventeenth century which are fundamental turning points in
the history of thought. I added that ‘to understand Mersenne and
Mersenne’s rejection of Giorgi, one must know where Giorgi

came from. He came out of the Pythagoro–Platonic tradition
plus Hermes Trismegistus and the Cabala.’
The studies in the present book may add a little more to our
understanding of the historical circumstances surrounding
Mersenne’s controversy with Fludd and the Rosicrucians. Rosicrucianism
was a movement which vindicated Renaissance
occultism against the attacks of the Counter-Reformation and so
became involved in the witch scares. Mersenne writes from an
atmosphere of horror and dread of ‘the Rosicrucians’ whom
Jesuit propaganda had depicted as frequenters of witches’ sabbaths12
– a similar kind of atmosphere to that raised by Christopher
Marlowe in his devil-infested Doctor Faustus. Mersenne’s
attack on Giorgi, Fludd, and the Rosicrucians is an attack on
Christian Cabala with its heretical associations, and which
appeared in a very different light to Mersenne to that with which
it had been invested by Spenser and the Elizabethan poets. Compare
the universal harmony echoed by Shakespeare in The Merchant
of Venice, and inspired by Giorgi, with Mersenne’s banishment of
Giorgi from his version of harmony.
By eliminating Giorgi and all that he stood for in Renaissance
tradition, Mersenne banished the astral linkings of universal
harmony, cutting off at the roots the connections of the psyche
with the cosmos. This appeased the witch-hunters and made
the world safe for Descartes, which was what Mersenne was
nervously trying to do.
I have argued in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment that Francis Bacon’s
movement for the advancement of learning was closely connected
with the German Rosicrucian movement, having a similar
mystical and millennial outlook, and continuing in England
the movement which, exported to Germany, was to be so disastrously
checked in 1620.13 I emphasised that Bacon’s New Atlantis,
published in 1627, a year after his death, is full of echoes of the
Rosicrucian manifestos, that Bacon is, in fact, defending the

Rosicrucian movement and seeing his own movement for the
advancement of learning as in continuity with it.
On re-reading the New Atlantis after the studies in this book,
one is more than ever struck by the Rosicrucian echoes in the
work. And, moreover, the whole situation in Bensalem, the ideal
city described in New Atlantis, now stands out much more clearly.
The ideal state or city which Bacon describes was a Christian
Cabalist community. They had the sign of the Cross (a red cross)
and the Name of Jesus, but their philosophy was not normal
Christian orthodox philosophy, of any persuasion. It was the
occult philosophy, half suspected of being magical, really goodangelical,
and more powerful than normal philosophies. Yes,
certainly more powerful because it is the Baconian science. The
programme of learning and research set out in half-mythical,
half-mystical, form in the New Atlantis is really the Baconian programme
for the advancement of learning which finds a congenial
setting in what one can now recognise as a Christian
Cabalist utopia.

The New Atlantis is thus a basically important text for the study
of the Christian Cabalist movement in relation to the growth of
science. And it is very important in another way which I will try
to hint at briefly.
The visitor to Bensalem, the city in New Atlantis, became
acquainted with a merchant of the city, who was a Jew and
circumcised, for the inhabitants have some Jews among them
whom they leave to their own religion:
Which they may the better do, because they are of a far differing
disposition from the Jews in other parts. For whereas they hate
the name of Christ, and have a secret inbred rancour against
the people amongst whom they live; these [i.e. the Jews of
Bensalem] give unto our Saviour many high attributes and love
the nation of Bensalem extremely.
And for the country of Bensalem, this man [the Jew] would

make no end of commending it, being desirous by tradition
among the Jews there to have it believed that the people thereof
were of the generations of Abraham, by another son . . . and
that Moses by a secret cabala ordained the laws of Bensalem
which they now use, and that when the Messiah should come,
and sit on his throne at Jerusalem, the King of Bensalem
should sit at his feet. . . . But yet setting aside these Jewish
dreams, the man was a wise man and learned, and of great
policy, and excellently seen in the laws and customs of that
nation.


The long discussion about the Jew of Bensalem, and of how,
though remaining unconverted, he assimilated completely to the
country, is of great importance in the sequence of studies in this
book. I suggest that the reason why he was able to assimilate
with such enthusiasm was because Bensalem was a Christian
Cabalist country.
The New Atlantis thus throws light on the importance of
Christian Cabala in effecting new and better relations between
Christians and Jews. This new and better feeling may even be
the continuation of attempts in Elizabethan times to soften with
Christian Cabala the rigidities of the Shylock situation.
There is a marked contrast between the atmosphere surrounding
the growth of Baconian science in England and that surrounding
the contemporary development in France of the
Cartesian mechanism encouraged by Mersenne. Baconian science
grows in a warm and friendly Rosicrucian atmosphere.
Mersenne is afraid of the heretical associations of Rosicrucianism
which he earnestly tries to avoid.
I draw attention to this contrast without attempting to analyse
it further, merely emphasising the importance of the history of
Christian Cabala for the understanding, both of Mersenne’s reactions,
and of the constructive Hebraism of the Baconian
movement.


introduction 91
8
JOHN DEE:
CHRISTIAN CABALIST
The subject of John Dee’s thought, science, position in the Elizabethan
age, is, at the time at which I am writing this, in the
melting pot.

New factual material is constantly turning up; many
scholars are trying to assess his scientific thought; the old prejudices
against him as a ludicrous figure still subsist, though very
much diminished in force as it becomes more and more apparent
that Dee had contacts with nearly everyone of importance in
the age, that his missionary journey to Bohemia had enormous
repercussions, that, in short, the life and work of John Dee
constitute a problem the solution of which is not yet in sight.
Under these circumstances my plan in the present chapter is
to avoid, as far as possible, the unsolved problems, and to concentrate
on bringing together indications that the label ‘Christian
Cabalist’ might cover his outlook, or the greater part of it. If
this can be done at all convincingly a step will have been taken
towards the solution of the general problem of Dee, and his
place in the history of thought, even though many factual
matters are left untouched, and great gaps, awaiting the new
synthesis, will have to be evaded.


I believe it to be most important to distinguish carefully
between the three periods of Dee’s life. I therefore divide this
chapter into three parts, corresponding to the three periods.
DEE’S FIRST PERIOD (1558–83): THE LEADER OF
THE ELIZABETHAN RENAISSANCE
John Dee (1527–1608),1 was the son of an official at the court
of Henry VIII. He was thus born into the Tudor world at a time
immediately before the break with Rome, when the divorce
issue was looming. His connections and patrons during the early
part of his life were the noblemen whose families had been
influential in the Tudor Reformation. He was particularly close
to the Dudley family, strong adherents of radical reform. Robert
Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester and favourite of Queen
Elizabeth I, had been Dee’s pupil when a child; throughout his
life he encouraged Dee and his enterprises. Dee’s memories
went back to the time of Edward VI and the radical reform of
that reign; and he served with zeal the last of the Tudors, Queen
Elizabeth I, promoting with enthusiasm the Elizabethan
expansion.


He was of Welsh descent, and believed himself to be descended
from an ancient British prince, even claiming some relationship
to the Tudors and to the queen herself. He associated
himself intensely with the Arthurian, mythical, and mystical side
of the Elizabethan idea of ‘British Empire’.
Among the thousands of books in Dee’s library2 were the
writings of the authors with whom we have been concerned. He
had a considerable collection of Lullist works. He possessed the
works of Pico della Mirandola and of Reuchlin. He owned
several copies of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia. He had the 1545
edition of the Latin version of Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi. There is
john dee: christian cabalist 93
no doubt that he was fully conversant with these works and
with many others of similar tendency. Though such works may
have formed the core of Dee’s library, and filled the centre of
his mind, that library and that mind also included a vast wealth
of scientific knowledge of all kinds, and of literary and historical
material. It was the library of a man of the Renaissance,
bent on assimilating the whole realm of knowledge available in
his time.












This library was at the disposal of friends and students. Here
came courtiers and poets, like Sir Philip Sidney (nephew of the
Earl of Leicester), navigators and mathematicians, historians and
antiquaries, all learning from Dee’s stores.
The manifesto of Dee’s movement was his preface to Henry
Billingsley’s translation of Euclid, which was published in 1570.
I have been through this preface from




various points of view in
other books. It is now available in a facsimile reprint.

The following
résumé is therefore only the briefest possible outline
made from the point of view of this book.
With the opening invocation to ‘Divine Plato’ we are at once
in the world of ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’. The subject of the
Preface is the importance of number and of the mathematical
sciences, and this is confirmed by quotation from one of Pico
della Mirandola’s Mathematical Conclusions: ‘By number, a way
is had, to the searching out and understanding of every thyng,
hable to be knowen.’ Dee’s outlook is that of Renaissance Neoplatonism
as interpreted in Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis.
And Dee’s Neoplatonism is associated with Renaissance Cabala,
for the outline of the Preface is based on Agrippa’s De occulta
philosophia on the three worlds. Like Agrippa, Dee thinks of the
universe as divided into the natural, the celestial, and the
super-celestial spheres. The tendency of the movement towards
concentration on number as the key to the universe, which is
apparent in Agrippa and in Giorgi, and which Reuchlin had
accentuated through his emphatic association of Pythagoreanism
94 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
with Cabala, is carried forward by Dee in a yet more intensely
‘mathematical’ direction.
Dee’s mathematics were applied in the practical sphere
through his teaching and advice to navigators, artisans, technicians.
He also had a grasp of abstract mathematical theory, particularly
the theory of proportion as taught in the work on architecture
by the Roman architect, Vitruvius. The Preface contains
many quotations from Vitruvius; Dee follows Vitruvius on architecture
as the queen of the sciences and the one to which all
other mathematical disciplines are related.4
Dee’s numerical, or numerological, theory is closely related
not only to Agrippa’s basic statement about number, but also to
the more extended treatment of this theme in a Cabalist setting
by Francesco Giorgi. Dee does not mention Giorgi in the Preface –
the only Cabalist whom he mentions is Agrippa – but he had
Giorgi’s work in his library and there is no doubt that he had
studied the De harmonia mundi carefully. Yet Dee seems to be coming
to his subject of proportion in relation to number more
through Agrippa and the Germans than through Giorgi and the
Italians. Giorgi’s architectural symbolism was related to his
knowledge of Italian architectural theory. As we have seen he
applied the theory of architectural harmony to the plan for a
Franciscan church in Venice. Dee, however, refers for the theory
of proportion to the German artist and theorist Albrecht Dürer.
It is significant that, at the point in the Preface at which Dee
advises the reader to consult Vitruvius on theory of proportion,
he also advises him to consult, on the same subject, Agrippa and
Dürer.5 Thus the reader of the Preface would look at the diagrams
in the De occulta philosophia on proportion in relation to the human
figure, and also at the same diagrams in Dürer’s basic Four Books of
Human Proportion (Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion, 1528) which
transferred to the north the Italian art theory on proportion.
Dee and his readers are coming to theory of proportion
through Agrippa, the occult philosopher and Cabalist; he cites
john dee: christian cabalist 95
the German artist, Dürer, as the exponent of the theory. This is
an interesting indication that Dürer’s work was known to Dee,
and presumably to the English readers whom he is addressing,
and it suggests that Dee’s artistic theory, which was one form of
his concentration on number, came to him through the German
Renaissance rather than the Italian, though he would find the
same theory in the Italian tradition on which Giorgi depended.
Like Reuchlin, Agrippa, and the Christian Cabalists generally,
Dee was intensely aware of the supercelestial world of the angels
and divine powers. His studies in number, so successful and
factual in what he would think of as the lower spheres, were, for
him, primarily important because he believed that they could be
extended with even more powerful results into the supercelestial
world. In short, as is well known, Dee believed that he had
achieved, with his associate Edward Kelley, the power of conjuring
angels.6 In one of the descriptions of his séances with Kelley,
Dee speaks of the book of Agrippa as lying open on the table,
and there is no doubt that Agrippa was Dee’s main guide in such
operations. The sensational angel-summoning side of Dee’s
activities was intimately related to his real success as a mathematician.
Like the Christian Cabalists generally, he believed that such
daring attempts were safeguarded by Cabala from demonic
powers. A pious Christian Cabalist is safe in the knowledge that
he is conjuring angels, not demons. This conviction was at the
centre of Dee’s belief in his angelic guidance, and it explains
his pained surprise when alarmed and angry contemporaries
persisted in branding him as a wicked conjuror of devils.
The angel-conjuring is not apparent in the Preface, which can
be read as a straightforward presentation of the mathematical arts.
The underlying assumptions are, however, indicated in the fact
that Dee is certainly following Agrippa’s outline in the De occulta
philosophia and that was a work founded on Renaissance Magia and
Cabala. Also he hints in the Preface at higher secrets which he is
not here revealing, probably the secrets of the angel-magic.
96 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
The extremely complex nature of Dee’s mind and outlook
baffles enquirers, many of whom have begun to become aware
of his importance and are impressed by the Preface, but would
like to forget the angel-magic. Real progress in the understanding
of the past cannot, however, be made on obscurantist lines.
The facts about Dee must be faced, and one fact certainly is that
this remarkable man was undoubtedly a follower of Cornelius
Agrippa and attempted to apply the ‘occult philosophy’
throughout his life and work.
Another very important aspect of Dee’s mind was his belief in
alchemy. The studies prosecuted with Kelley included not only
the angel-magic, but also, and above all, alchemy. Kelley was an
alchemist and was believed, according to some rumours, to have
succeeded in effecting transformations and in making gold. Practical
Cabala and practical alchemy thus seemed to go together in
the Dee–Kelley partnership.
I am faced here with a historical question. What place had
there been in the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition, stemming from
Ficino and Pico, for the Hermetic science of alchemy? The Ficinian
outlook, with its emphasis on astral correspondences, would,
one would think, have been a philosophy favourable to application
as alchemy. Little has, however, as yet been heard of
alchemy as an interest of Ficino or of Pico, and their followers.
Yet there is a point at which alchemy does enter this tradition,
and that very decidedly, and that is with Cornelius Agrippa.
In Agrippa’s mysterious travels he was in contact with
alchemists in many different places.7 Sometimes he is heard of
performing alchemical operations in a laboratory; he certainly
sought out alchemical books and was deeply interested in the
subject. He cannot, surely, have been the only Cabalist to be
interested in alchemy. Was there a Cabalist alchemy, or an
alchemical Cabala, which represented some new kind of combination
of such interests already formed in the time of Agrippa?
This is at present an unanswered question. Here I am only
john dee: christian cabalist 97
concerned to state that some close connection between alchemy,
Cabala, and his other interests, existed in Dee’s mind.
A curious diagram, to which Dee attached the greatest
importance as a statement of his whole philosophy, was the
Monas hieroglyphica (Plate 10), published in 1564 with a dedication
to the Emperor Maximilian II,8 and an explanatory text which
leaves the reader thoroughly bewildered. Dee’s monas is a combination
of the signs of the seven planets, plus the symbol for the
zodiacal sign, Aries, representing fire. It must have some astral
significance; alchemical operations seem implied through the
fire sign; it is also some kind of mathematics or geometry; but
above all it is Cabala. It is related to ‘the stupendous fabric of the
Hebrew letters’. It is a ‘Cabalistic grammar’. It can be mathematically,
cabalistically, and anagogically explained’.9 It is a
profound secret which Dee wonders whether he has sinned in
publishing.
There are no Hebrew letters in the monas sign itself, yet one
gathers that the parts of the planetary signs of which it is composed
were to be manipulated in a manner analogous to the
manipulation of Hebrew letters in Cabala. There is also a mathematical
process going on, though the mathematical side is not
so prominent in the Monas hieroglyphica as it is in the Aphorisms,10
a work published by Dee a few years earlier (1558) with which
he states that the Monas hieroglyphica is closely connected. The
Aphorisms, in which the monas sign appears, would seem to be
stating in a more obviously mathematical form the Cabalist
meaning of the Monas hieroglyphica.
I would suggest that an important source in which to study
the mode of thought out of which Dee evolved his monas sign is
Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi. Here he would have found numerological
theory combined with Cabalist theory as the double key
to the universe in a manner which is closely analogous to the
double meaning of the monas, numerological and Cabalist. Giorgi
begins with the One, or the monas,11 out of which, as expounded
98 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
in the Timaeus, the numbers one to twenty-seven proceed to form
the universal harmony in both macrocosm and microcosm.
Combining Pythagoro–Platonic theory with Cabalist lettermysticism,
Giorgi arrives at his synthesis. Dee’s mind would
work in a similar way in the monas. His composite planetary
symbol would imply a composite Cabalist symbol. Behind its
planetary cosmology would be the ‘tremendous structure’ of the
Hebrew alphabet.12
The monas symbol includes a cross. It is a Christian Cabalist
symbol, no doubt believed by its creator to have great magical
power.
Dee was not only an enthusiast for scientific and mathematical
studies, in the strange contexts in which he saw them. He
wished to use such studies for the advantage of his countrymen
and for the expansion of Elizabethan England. Dee had a
politico-religious programme and it was concerned with the
imperial destiny of Queen Elizabeth I.
I have discussed in my book, Astraea. The Imperial Theme in the
Sixteenth Century (1975) the nature of Elizabethan imperialism. It
was not only concerned with national expansion in the literal
sense, but carried with it the religious associations of the
imperial tradition, applying these to Elizabeth as the representative
of ‘imperial reform’, of a purified and reformed religion to
be expressed and propagated through a reformed empire, the
empire of the Tudors with their mythical ‘British’ associations.
The glorification of the Tudor monarchy as a religious imperial
institution rested on the fact that the Tudor reform had dispensed
with the Pope and made the monarch supreme in both
church and state. This basic political fact was draped in the mystique
of ‘ancient British monarchy’, with its Arthurian associations,
represented by the Tudors in their capacity as an ancient
British line, of supposed Arthurian descent, returned to power
and supporting a pure British Church, defended by a religious
john dee: christian cabalist 99
chivalry from the evil powers (evil according to this point of
view) of Hispano-Papal attempts at universal domination.
Though these ideas were inherent in the Tudor myth, Dee had
a great deal to do with enhancing and expanding them. Believing
himself to be of ancient British royal descent, he identified
completely with the British imperial myth around Elizabeth I
and did all in his power to support it.
Dee’s views on the British-imperial destiny of Queen Elizabeth
I are set out in his General and rare memorials pertayning to the Perfect
art of Navigation (1577). Expansion of the navy and Elizabethan
expansion at sea were connected in his mind with vast ideas
concerning the lands to which (in his view) Elizabeth might lay
claim through her mythical descent from King Arthur. Dee’s
‘British imperialism’ is bound up with the ‘British History’
recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth,13 based on the myth of the
hypothetical descent of British monarchs from Brut, supposedly
of Trojan origin, and therefore connecting with Virgil and the
Roman imperial myth. Arthur was the supposed descendant of
Brut, and was the chief religious and mystical exemplar of sacred
British imperial Christianity.
In the General and rare memorials there is a complicated print (Plate
11), based on a drawing in Dee’s own hand,14 of Elizabeth sailing
in a ship labelled ‘Europa’, with the moral that Britain is to grow
strong at sea, so that through her ‘Imperial Monarchy’ she may
perhaps become the pilot of all Christendom. This ‘British
Hieroglyphick’, as Dee calls the design, should be held in mind
at the same time as the Monas hieroglyphica, as representing a
politico-religious expression of the monas in the direction of
a ‘British imperial’ idea.
Much of the material on Dee which I have here resumed is
familiar but Dee and his activities may appear in a somewhat
new light when viewed in relation to the studies in this book. In
what light would this deep student of the sciences of number,
100 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
this prophetic interpreter of British history, have been seen, both
by himself and by his contemporaries?
I suggest that the contemporary role which would exactly fit
Dee would be that of the ‘inspired melancholic’.15 According to
Agrippa, and as portrayed by Dürer in the famous engraving, the
inspired melancholic was a Saturnian, immersed in those sciences
of number which could lead their devotees into great
depths of insight. Surely Dee’s studies were such as to qualify
him as a Saturnian, a representative of the Renaissance
revaluation of melancholy as the temperament of inspiration.
And after the first stage of inspiration, the inspiration coming
from immersion in the sciences of number, Agrippa envisages a
second stage, a prophetic stage, in which the adept is intent on
politico-religious events and prophecies. And finally in the third
stage, stage of inspired melancholy, the highest insight into
religion and religious changes is revealed.
It may seem suggestive that not only was Dee’s programme
for the advance of science based on Agrippa on the three worlds
in the De occulta philosophia, but also that the stages of his prophetic
outlook might be clarified from the same source. First Dee as
Saturnian melancholic studies the sciences of number; then he
gains prophetic insight into British imperial destiny; and finally
vast universal religious visions are revealed to him. Yet all the
time he was, like Agrippa, a Christian, a Christian Cabalist with
leanings towards evangelicalism and Erasmian reform.
It must be remembered that Dee’s ideas, which we have to try
to piece together from scanty and scattered evidence, would have
been known to contemporaries through personal contact with
this man, who was ubiquitous in Elizabethan society and whose
library was the rendezvous of intellectuals. And there were many
works by Dee passing from hand to hand in manuscript which
were never published. In his Discourse Apologetical (1604), Dee
gives a list of his writings, many, indeed most, of which are
unknown to us but which may have been available to his
john dee: christian cabalist 101
contemporaries in manuscript. From that list I select the following
titles of lost writings by Dee:







Cabala Hebraicae compendiosa tabella, anno 1562.
Reipublicae Britannicae Synopsis, in English, 1565.
De modo Evangelii Iesu Christi publicandi . . . inter infideles, 1581.
The Origins and chiefe points of our auncient British histories.
Through these lost titles, we catch glimpses of Dee studying
Cabala, immersed in his ‘British History’ researches, and interested
in missionary schemes for publishing the Gospel of Jesus
Christ to the heathen.
Dee is not a person who can be lightly dismissed as a sorcerer,
in accordance with the labels affixed to him in the witch scares.
He must have been one of the most fascinating figures of the



Elizabethan age, appealing to that brilliant world for his learning,
his patriotism, and for the insight associated with Christian
Cabala.
DEE’S SECOND PERIOD (1583–9): THE
CONTINENTAL MISSION
In 1583, John Dee left England and was abroad for six years,
returning in 1589.16 During these years on the continent Dee
appears to have been engaged in some kind of missionary venture
which took him to Cracow, in Poland, and eventually to
Prague where the occultist emperor Rudolf II, held his court. It is
possible, though there is no evidence for this, that when in
Prague, Dee was in contact with the Rabbi Loewe, famous Cabalist
and magician, who once had an interview with Rudolf (see
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 228). Dee stayed for several years in
Bohemia with a noble family the members of which were interested
in alchemy and other occult sciences. His associate, Edward
Kelley, was with him, and together they were fervently pursuing
102 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
their alchemical experiments and their attempts at angelsummoning
with practical Cabala.
To this period belong the séances described in Dee’s spiritual
diary,17 with their supposed contacts with the angels Uriel and
Gabriel and other spirits. Dee was moving now on the more
‘powerful’ levels of Christian Cabala through which he hoped to
encourage powerful religious movements.
The evidence about Dee’s continental mission is somewhat
obscure and incomplete. It is referred to thus by a contemporary
observer:
A learned and renowned Englishman whose name was Doctor
Dee came to Prague to see the Emperor Rudolf II and was at
first well received by him; he predicted that a miraculous
reformation would presently come about in the Christian
world and would prove the ruin not only of the city of Constantinople
but of Rome also. These predictions he did not cease to
spread among the populace.18
Dee’s message appeared to be neither Catholic nor Protestant but
an appeal to a vast, undogmatic, reforming movement which
drew its spiritual strength from the resources of occult
philosophy.
In the context of the late sixteenth century in which movements
of this kind abounded, Dee’s mission would not have
seemed incredible or strange. Enthusiastic missionaries of his
type were moving all over Europe in these last years of the century.
One such was Giordano Bruno, who preached a mission of
universal Hermetic reform, in which there were some Cabalist
elements.19 Bruno was in Prague shortly after Dee; he had been
in England preaching his version of Hermetic-Cabalist reform,
and was to go on into Italy, where he met the full force of the
Counter-Reformation suppression of Renaissance Neoplatonism,
and its allied occultisms, and was burned at the stake in
john dee: christian cabalist 103
Rome in 1600. Dee was more cautious, and was careful not to
venture into Italy.
For Dee’s mission, the Monas hieroglyphica is probably the most
important clue, for it contained in the compressed form of a
magic sign the whole of the occult philosophy. And it had reference
to contemporary rulers who were to be the politicoreligious
channels of the movement. The first version of it had
been dedicated to the Emperor Maximilian II, Rudolf ’s father.
Dee may have hoped that Rudolf would step into his father’s
role, and accept the monas as his occult imperial sign. In England,
Dee had transferred to Queen Elizabeth I the destiny of occult
imperial reform, signified by the monas.
There is some kind of congruity between the ideas associated
with Rudolf and those associated with Elizabeth. As R. J. W. Evans
has said: ‘Both the unmarried Emperor and the Virgin Queen
were widely regarded as figures prophetic of significant change
in their own day, as symbols of lost equilibrium when they were
dead.’20 It is perhaps in some such sense of occult imperial destiny
linking Elizabeth and Rudolf that the true secret meaning of
Dee’s continental mission may lie. On the more obvious level it
would seem to have been a movement antagonistic to the repressive
policies of Counter-Reform, and as such it would have made
dangerous enemies.
The emperor did not enthusiastically support Dee, and when
he returned to England in 1589 it must have been far from clear
to the queen and her advisers whether he had accomplished
anything at all, beyond making extremely dangerous enemies.
However he had sown powerful seeds which were to grow to
a strange harvest. It has been shown that the so-called ‘Rosicrucian
manifestos’, published in Germany in the early seventeenth
century, are heavily influenced by Dee’s philosophy, and that
one of them contains a version of the Monas hieroglyphica.21 The
Rosicrucian manifestos call for a universal reformation of the
whole wide world through Magia and Cabala. The mythical
104 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
‘Christian Red Cross’ (Christian Rosencreuz), the opening of
whose magical tomb is a signal for the general reformation, may
perhaps, in one of his aspects, be a teutonised memory of John
Dee and his Christian Cabala, confirming earlier suspicions that
‘Christian Cabala’ and ‘Rosicrucianism’ may be synonymous.
DEE’S THIRD PERIOD (1589–1608):
DISGRACE AND FAILURE
When Dee returned to England in 1589, he was at first received
by the queen, but his old position at the centre of the Elizabethan
world was not restored.22 During his absence, the Armada victory
of 1588 had occurred, and this, one would think, might
have been seen as the triumph on the seas of the patriotic
movement in which Dee had had so large a share. On the other
hand, the Earl of Leicester’s movement for landward extension
of the Elizabethan ethos in his military expedition to the Netherlands
in 1586 had failed; his nephew Philip Sidney lost his life in
that expedition; and the whole enterprise was checked by the
queen who withdrew Leicester from his command in disgrace.
Leicester never got over this; he quietly died in 1588. Thus
Leicester and the Sidney circle, Dee’s supporters in the old days,
were no longer there except for some survivors, such as Edward
Dyer, Sidney’s closest friend, who had been in touch with Dee
and Kelley in their recent adventures.
Shunned and isolated, Dee was also confronted with a growing
witch-hunt against him. The cry of ‘conjuror’ had always
been sporadically raised but in the old days the queen and
Leicester had protected his studies. Now the enemies were
increasingly vocal. Dee felt obliged to defend himself in a letter
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, printed in 1604 but written
earlier. It is illustrated with a woodcut (Plate 12) which shows
Dee kneeling on the cushion of hope, humility, and patience
with his head raised in prayer to the cloudy heavens wherein can
john dee: christian cabalist 105
be seen the ear, eye, and avenging sword of God. Opposite to
him is the many-headed monster of lying tongues and unkind
rumour, its heads malevolently turned in his direction. He earnestly
assures the archbishop that all his studies have been
directed towards searching out the truth of God, that they are
holy studies, not diabolical as his enemies falsely assert. From his
youth up it has pleased the Almighty
to insinuate into my hart, an insatiable zeale, and desire to
knowe his truth: And in him, and by him, incessantly to seeke,
and listen after the same; by the true philosophical method and
harmony: proceeding and ascending . . . gradatim, from things
visible, to consider of things inuisible; from thinges bodily, to
conceiue of thinges spirituall: from thinges transitorie, and
momentarie, to meditate of things permanent: by thinges mortall
. . . to have some perceiuerance of immortality. And to conclude,
most briefeley, by the most meruailous frame of the
whole world, philosophically viewed, and circumspectly wayed,
numbred, and measured . . . most faithfully to loue, honor, and
glorifie alwaies, the Framer and Creator thereof.23
One hears in these words the voice of the pious author of the
Mathematical Preface, rising with number through the three
worlds. But the admired Dee of other days, mentor of
Elizabethan poets, must now defend himself from being a black
conjuror of devils.
The implications of the angel-conjuring side of Dee’s doctrine
had come out more prominently during his continental mission;
probably rumours of this, and of Jesuit opposition to it, had
reached England. Elizabeth and her advisers, always nervous of
committing themselves to the rash projects of enthusiasts, would
now be understandably nervous of Dee. Elizabeth had withdrawn
her support from Leicester’s continental enterprise;
Leicester and Sidney were both dead. No wonder that Dee’s
106 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
position in England was very different from what it had been
before his continental journey and that many people might now
refuse to believe that the famous mathematician was a Christian
Cabalist, and not a conjuror of devils.
Of Dee’s three periods, the first one, the successful one, has
been the most explored. We are all now familiar with the idea
that John Dee, dismissed in the Victorian age as a ridiculous
charlatan, was immensely influential in the Elizabethan age, an
influence which is far from being, as yet, fully assessed or understood.
Of the second period, the period of the continental mission,
we are beginning to know a good deal more than formerly,
enough to realise that it had some very large religious or reforming
scope, and that its influence long persisted in ways difficult to
decipher. The third period, the period of failure verging on persecution
of this once so admired and important figure, has been
the least studied of all. What I now say about it must be provisional,
awaiting further much-needed research. For the third
period is most essential for the understanding of Dee as a whole.
Dee was very poor after his return and in great anxiety as to
how to provide a living for his wife and family. A former friend
with whom he was, apparently, still in contact was Sir Walter
Raleigh, with whom Dee dined at Durham House on 9 October
1595.24 Raleigh, however, was himself out of favour, and would
be unlikely to be able to help him to a position. At last, in 1596,
he was made warden of a college in Manchester, whither he
moved with his wife and family. It was an uncomfortable place
and he had difficulty with the fellows of the college. In fact the
Manchester appointment seems to have been something like a
semi-banishment where he was, for reasons not quite clear,
unhappy.
One of his activities when at Manchester was to act as adviser
about cases of witchcraft and demonic possession. He had books
on these subjects in his Manchester library which he lent to
enquirers investigating such cases. One of the books which he
john dee: christian cabalist 107
thus lent was the De praestigiis daemonum by Weyer,25 the friend of
Agrippa, in which it is argued that witchcraft is a delusion,
witches being only poor, melancholy old women. Another book
which Dee lent was the Malleus maleficarum, a work which is very
positive as to the reality of witches.
It would seem strange that the conjuring suspicions against
Dee should have taken the form of turning him into an expert on
demonology to be consulted in trials, but such seems to have
been the case.
The reality of witches and witchcraft was being forcibly
maintained in these years by no less a person than the King of
Scotland, soon to succeed Queen Elizabeth as James I. In his
Daemonologie (1587),26 James is profoundly shocked by the
‘damnable error’ of those who, like Weyer, deny the reality of
witchcraft. He refers the reader to Bodin’s Démonomanie where he
will find many examples of witchcraft collected with great diligence.
And for particulars about the black arts the reader should
consult ‘the fourth book of Cornelius Agrippa’. This was the
spurious fourth book of the De occulta philosophia which James
accepted as genuine (Weyer had said that it was not by Agrippa).
James has much more to say about ‘the Divel’s school’ which
thinks to climb to knowledge of things to come ‘mounting from
degree to degree on the slippery scale of curiosity’, believing
that circles and conjurations tied to the words of God will raise
spirits.27 This is clearly ‘practical Cabala’ interpreted as a black
art, a fruit of that tree of forbidden knowledge of which Adam
was commanded not to eat.
James’s work, if read in Manchester, would not have helped
Dee’s reputation.
Dee appears to have been away from Manchester from 1598 to
1600; eventually he returned to his old house at Mortlake, living
there in great poverty, though still partially in touch with ‘great
persons’.
The accession of James I in 1603 boded little good for the
108 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
reputed conjuror. Nevertheless Dee made desperate appeals to
the new monarch. In a printed pamphlet, dated 5 June 1604,
John Dee appeals to the king asking that those who call him a
conjuror should be brought to trial: ‘Some impudent and
malicious forraine enemie or English traytor . . . hath affirmed
your Maiesties Suppliant to be a Conjuror belonging to the
most Honorable Priuie Counsell of your Maiesties most famous
last predecessor. . . .’28 Note that Dee suspects foreigners or
traitors of fomenting the rumours against him, and that he
hints that such rumours might implicate the late queen and
her council.
All was in vain. Dee was not cleared. He died in great poverty
at Mortlake in 1608.
The last act of Dee’s extraordinary story is the most impressive
of them all. The descendant of British kings, creator (or one of
the creators) of the British imperial legend, the leader of the
Elizabethan Renaissance, the mentor of Philip Sidney, the
prophet of some far-reaching religious movement, dies, an old
man, in bitter neglect and extreme poverty.
I am not interested here in the sensationalism which has gathered
round Dee’s story and which has tended to obscure his real
significance. That significance, as I see it, is the presentation in
the life and work of one man of the phenomenon of the disappearance
of the Renaissance in the late sixteenth century in
clouds of demonic rumour. What happened in Dee’s lifetime to
his ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’ was happening all over Europe
as the Renaissance went down in the darkness of the witchhunts.
Giordano Bruno in England in the 1580s had helped to
inspire the ‘Sidney circle’ and the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance.
Giordano Bruno in 1600 was burned at the stake in
Rome as a sorcerer. Dee’s fate in England in his third period
presents a similar extraordinary contrast with his brilliant first,
or ‘Renaissance’, period.
john dee: christian cabalist 109
The Hermetic–Cabalist movement failed as a movement of
religious reform, and that failure involved the suppression of
the Renaissance Neoplatonism which had nourished it. The
Renaissance magus turned into Faust.

The Elizabethan world was populated, not only by tough seamen, hard-headed politicians, serious theologians, it was a world of spirits, good and bad, fairies, demons, witches, ghosts, conjurors. This fact about the Elizabethans, reflected in their poetry, is too well known to need elaboration. The epic poem in which the aspirations of the age found expression evolved around a ‘fairy’ queen; one of the most significant figures in the poem is an enchanter. And the greatest plays of the greatest poet of the age are suffused in the atmosphere of the occult. Macbeth meets witches; Hamlet is haunted by the ghost. Was this preoccupation with the occult derived solely from popular traditions or influences? Or did it have some deep-seated connection with the philosophy of the age?

…the dominant philosophy of the Elizabethan age was precisely the occult philosophy, with its magic, its melancholy, its aim of penetrating into profound spheres of knowledge and experience, scientific and spiritual, its fear of the dangers of such a quest, and of the fierce opposition which it encountered.

The characteristic philosopher of the Elizabethan age was John Dee…

As a representative of the inspired melancholy with its three stages of insight as expounded by Agrippa, he would see Christian Cabala, the ‘more powerful’ philosophy which was to supersede scholasticism, as potentially a world-wide movement of reform, to be applied not only in Elizabethan England.

…truly a man of the late Renaissance developing Renaissance occult philosophy in scientific directions, involved in the religious and reforming side of the movement, but overtaken by the reaction of the later sixteenth century.

…on the continent, the reaction against Renaissance Neoplatonism and its associated occultisms was growing greatly in intensity as part of the counter-Reformation…

The building up of Queen Elizabeth I as a Neoplatonic heroine by Spenser was in itself a challenge to the Catholic Counter-Reformation powers and their attitude to Renaissance philosophy.

Spenser’s Neoplatonism is of the Hermetic-Cabalist variety, expressive (so I shall argue) in poetic form of the Dee outlook and the Dee patriotic occultism. I believe that a major influence on Dee and Spenser may have been the work of the Cabalist Friar of Venice, Francesco Giorgi.

This second part of the book opens with an account of John Dee and his thought, divided into three parts to correspond to the three main periods of Dee’s life. I then pass to a re-examination of Spenser’s Neoplatonism, as presented in his poetry, endeavouring to bring out the occult influences on The Faerie Queene.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is seen as belonging to the reaction, to the atmosphere of the witch crazes and the attacks on Agrippa. With the assault on occult philosophy in Faustus was associated the anti-Semitism of The Jew of Malta. Chapman’s Shadow of Night, on the contrary, defends the occult philosophy, and, by implication, the Dee-Spenser point of view, through its subtle exposition of the ‘Saturnian’ inspired melancholy.

Within this framework of the occult philosophy in the Elizabethan age and the controversies it aroused, new approaches are made to Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice is believed to allude to the contemporary issue of the conversion of the Jews by Christian Cabala, and to echo the work on universal harmony by the Cabalist Friar of Vernice, Francesco Giorgi. Hamlet’s melancholy is the inspired melancholy with its prophetic visions. Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the occult, with ghosts, witches, fairies, is understood as deriving less form popular tradition than from deep-rooted affinity with the learned occult philosophy and its religious implications.

King Lear , written during Dee’s third period, the time of his disgrace and poverty, is seen as reflecting Dee himself as an old and broken man, ill-rewarded for having devoted his life to the interests of ‘British Monarchy’, his occultism alluded to through Tom o’ Bedlam’s supposed possession by devils.

In The Tempest, written after Dee’s death and during the period of ‘the Elizabethan revival within the Jacobean age’, Dee is shadowed through Prospero in this most daring play which presents a good conjuror at a time when conjuring was a dreaded accusation of the propaganda of the reaction.

The theme of this part of the book is thus, in many ways, novel and challenging. My aim is to try to penetrate into the Elizabethan age and its philosophy as a period of thought which can be identified and its origins assessed.

Chapter VIII John Dee: Christian Cabalist

79

…his missionary journey to Bohemia had enormous repercussions…

Dee’s First Period(1558-83): The Leader of the Elizabethan Renaissance

80

He was particularly close to the Dudley family, strong adherents of radical reform.

He was of Welsh descent, and believed himself to be descended form an ancient British prince, even claiming some relationship to the Tudors and to the queen herself. He associated himself intensely with the Arthurian, mythical, and mystical side of the Elizabethan idea of ‘British Empire’.

Among the thousands of books in Dee’s library were the writings of the authors with whom we have been concerned. He had a considerable collection of Lullsit works. He pssessed the works of Pico della Mirandola and of Reuchlin. He owned several copies of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia. He had the 1545 edition of the Latin version of Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi.

This library was at the disposal of friends and students. Here came courtiers and poets, like Sir Philip Sidney (nephew of the Earl of Leicester), navigators, and mathematicians, historians and antiquaries…

The manifesto of Dee’s movement was his preface to Henry Billingsley’s translation of Euclid, which was published in 1570.

…opening invocation to ‘Divine Plato’…

…importance of number and of mathematical sciences, and this is confirmed by quotation form one of Pico della Mirandola’s Mathematical Conclusions: ‘By number, a way is had to the searching out and understanding of every thing, hable to be knowen.’

81

Dee’s Neoplatonism is associated with Renaissance Cabala, for the outline of the Preface is based on Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia on the three worlds. Like Agrippa, Dee thinks of the universe as divided into the natural, the celestial, and the supercelestial spheres.

Dee follows Vitruvius on architecture as the queen of the sciences and the one to which all other mathematical disciplines are related.

Giorgi’s architectural symbolism was related to his knowledge of Italian architectural theory. As we have seen he applied the theory of architectural harmony to the play for a Franciscan church in Venice. Dee however, refers for the theory of proportion to the German artist and theorist Albrecht Durer.

82

…Dee believed that he ad achieved, with his associate Edward Kelley, the power of conjuring angels.

A pious Christian Cabalist is safe in the knowledge that he is conjuring angels, not demons. This conviction was at the centre of Dee’s belief in his angelic guidance, and it explains his pained surprise when alarmed and angry contemporaries persisted in branding him as a wicked conjuror of devils.

…undoubtedly a follower of Cornelius Agrippa and attempted to apply the ‘occult philosophy’ throughout his life and work.

Another very important aspect of Dee’s mind was his belief in alchemy.

83

Kelley was an alchemist…

Was there a Cabalist alchemy, or an alchemical Cabala, which represented some new kind of combination of such interests already formed in the time of Agrippa?

A curious diagram, to which Dee attached the greatest importance as a statement of his whole philosophy, was the Monas hieroglyphica, published in 1564 with a dedication to the Emperor Maximilian II, and an explanatory text which leaves the reader thoroughly bewildered. Dee’s monas is a combination of the signs of the seven planets, plus the symbol for the zodiacal sign, Aries, representing fire. It must have some astral significance; alchemical operations seem implied through the fire sign; it is also some kind of mathematics or geometry; but above all it is Cabala. It is related to ‘the stupendous fabric of the Hebrew letters’. It is a ‘Cabalistic grammar’. It can be mathematically, cabalistically, and anagogically explained’. It is a profound secret which Dee wonders whether he has sinned in publishing.

84

I would suggest that an important source in which to study the mod of thought out of which Dee evolved his monas sign is Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi. Here he would have found numerological theory combined with Cabalist theory as the double key to the universe in a manner which is closely analogous to the double meaning of the monas, numerological and Cabalist. Giorgi begins with the One, or the monas, out of which as expounded in the Timaeus, the numbers one to twenty-seven proceed to form the universal harmony in both macrocosm and microcosm. Combining Pythagoro-Platonic theory with Cabalist letter-mysticism, Giorgi arrives at his synthesis. Dee’s mind would work in a similar way in the monas. His composite planetary symbol would imply a composite Cabalist symbol. Behind its planetary cosmology would be the ‘tremendous structure’ of the Hebrew alphabet.

The monas symbol includes a cross. It is a Christian Cabalist symbol, no doubt believed by its creator to have great magical power.

Dee was not only an enthusiast for scientific and mathematical studies, in the strange contexts in which he saw them. He wished to use such studies for the advantage of his countrymen and for the expansion of Elizabethan England. Dee had a politico-religious programme and it was concerned with the imperial destiny of Queen Elizabeth I.

I have discussed in my book, Astraea. The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975) the nature of Elizabethan imperialism. It was not only concerned with national expansion in the literal sense, it carried with it the religious associations of the imperial tradition, applying these to Elizabeth as the representative of ‘imperial reform’, of a purified and reformed religion to be expressed and propagated through a reformed empire, the empire of the Tudors with their mythical ‘British’ association. The glorification of the Tudor monarchy as a religious imperial institution rested on the fact that the Tudor reform had dispensed with the Pope and made the monarch supreme in both church and state. this basic political fact was draped in the mystique of ‘ancient British monarchy’, with its Arthurian associations, represented by the Tudors in their capacity as an ancient British line, of supposed Arthurian descent, returned to power and supporting a pure British Church, defended by a religious chivalry from the evil powers (evil according to this point of view) of Hispano-Papal attempts at universal domination.

85 Though these ideas were inherent in the Tudor myth, Dee had a great deal to do with enhancing and expanding them. Believing himself to be of ancient British royal descent, he identified completely with the British imperial myth around Elizabeth I and did all in his power to support it.

Dee’s views on the British-imperial destiny of Queen Elizabeth I are set out in his General and rare memorials pertaining to the Perfect art of Navigation (1577). Expansion of the navy and Elizabeth expansion at sea were connected in his mind with vast ideas concerning the lands to which (in his view) Elizabeth might lay claim through her mythical descent or King Arthur. Dee’s ‘British imperialism’ is bound up with the ‘British History’ recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth, based on the myth of the hypothetical descent of British monarchs form Brut, supposedly of Trojan origin and therefore connecting with Virgil and the Roman imperial myth. Arthur was the supposed descendant of Brut, and was the chief religious and mystical exemplar of sacred British imperial Christianity.

In the General and rare memorials there is a complicated print, based on a drawing in Dee’s own hand, of Elizabeth sailing in a ship labeled ‘Europa’, with the moral that Britain is to grow strong at sea, so that through her ‘Imperial Monarchy’ she may perhaps become the pilot of all Christendom. This ‘British Hieroglyphick’, as Dee calls the design, should be held in mind at the same time as the Monas hieroglyphica, as representing a politico-religious expression of the monas in the direction of a ‘British imperial’ idea.

86

I suggest that the contemporary role which would exactly fit Dee would be that of the ‘inspired melancholic’. According to Agrippa, and as portrayed by Durer in the famous engraving, the inspired melancholic was a Saturnian, immersed in those sciences of number which could lead their devotees into great depths of insight. Surely Dee’s studies were such as to qualify him as a Saturnian, a representative of the Renaissance revaluation of melancholy as the temperament of inspiration. And after the first stage of inspiration, the inspiration coming form immersion in the sciences of number, Agrippa envisages a second stage, a prophetic stage, in which the adept is intent on politico-religious events and prophecies. And finally in the third stage, stage of inspired melancholy, the higher insight into religion and religious changes is revealed.

…I select the following titles of lost writings by Dee:

Cabala Hebraicae compendiosa tabella, anno1562.

Reipublicae Britannicae Synopsis, in English, 1565.

De modo Evangelii Iesu Christi publicandi . . .inter infidels, 1581.

The Origins and chiefe points of our auncient British histories.

87

through these lost titles, we catch a glimpses of Dee studying Cabala, immersed in his ‘British History’ researches, and interested in missionary schemes for publishing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen.

Dee’s Second Period (1583-9) : The Continental Mission

In 1583, John Dee left England and was abroad for six years, returning in 1589. during these years on the continent Dee appears to have been engaged in some kind of missionary venture which took him to Cracow, in Poland, and eventually to Prague where the occultist emperor Rudolf II, held his court. It is possible, though there is no evidence for this, that when in Prague, Dee was in contact with the Rabbi Loewe, famous Cabalist and magician, who once had an interview with Rudolph (see The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 228). Dee stayed for several years in Bohemia with a noble family the members of which were interested in alchemy and other occult sciences. His associate, Edward Kelley, was with him, and together they were fervently pursuing their alchemical experiments and their attempts at angel-summoning with practical Cabala.

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In the context of the late sixteenth century in which movements of this kind abounded, Dee’s mission would not have seemed incredible or strange. Enthusiastic missionaries of his type were moving all over Europe in these last years of the century. One such was Giordano Bruno, who preached a mission of universal hermetic reform, in which there were some Cabalist elements. Bruno was in Prague shortly after Dee; he had been in England preaching his version of Hermetic-Cabalist reform, and was to go on into Italy, where he met the full force of the counter-Reformation suppression of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and its allied occultisms, and was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. Dee was more cautious, and was careful not to venture into Italy.

The emperor did not enthusiastically support Dee, and when he returned to England in 1589 it must have been far from clear to the queen and her advisers whether he had accomplished anything at all, beyond making extremely dangerous enemies.

However he had sown powerful seeds which were to grow to a strange harvest. It has been shown that the so-called ‘Rosicrucian manifestos’, published in Germany in the early seventeenth century, are heavily influenced by Dee’s philosophy, and that one of them contains a version of the Monas hieroglyphica. The Rosicrucian manifestos call for a universal reformation of the whole wide world through Magia and Cabala. The mythical ‘Christian Red Cross’ (Christian Rosencreuz), the opening of whose magical tomb is a signal for the general reformation, ay perhaps in one of his aspects, be a teutonised memory of John Dee and his Christian Cabala, confirming earlier suspicions that ‘Christian Cabala’ and ‘Rosicrucianism’ may be synonymous.

Dee’s Third Period (1589-1608) : Disgrace and Failure

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on the other hand, the Earl of Leicester’s movement for landward extension of the Elizabethan ethos in his military expedition to the Netherlands in 1586 had failed; his nephew Philip Sidney lost his life I that expedition; and the whole enterprise was checked by the queen who withdrew Leicester from his command in disgrace. Leicester never got over this: he quietly died in 1588. thus Leicester and the Sidney circle, Dee’s supporters in the old days, were no longer there except for some survivors, such as Edward Dyer, Sidney’s closest friend…

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The reality of witches and witchcraft was being forcibly maintained in these years by no less a person than the King of Scotland, soon to succeed Queen Elizabeth as James I. in his Demonologie (1587), James is profoundly shocked by the ‘damnable error’ of those who, like Weyer, deny the reality of witchcraft. He refers the reader to Bodin’s Demonomanie where he will find many examples of witchcraft collected with great diligence. And for particulars about the black arts the reader should consult ‘the fourth book of Cornelius Agrippa’. This was the spurious fourth book of the De occulta philosphia which James accepted as genuine (Weyer had said that it was not by Agrippa). James has much more to say about ‘the Divel’s school’ which thinks to climb to knowledge of things to come ‘mounting form degree to degree on the slippery scale of curiosity’, believing that circles and conjurations tied to the words of god will raise spirits. This is clearly ‘practical Cabala’ interpreted as a black art, a fruit of the tree of forbidden knowledge of which Adam was commanded not to eat.

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…Dee… ‘Some impudent and malicious forraine enemie or English traytor. . . hath affirmed your Maiesties Suppliant to be a Coniuror belonging to the most Honorable Priuie Counsell of your Maiesties most famous last predecessor . . . .” Note that Dee suspects foreigners or traitors of fomenting the rumours against him, and that he hints that such rumours might implicate the late queen and her council.

All was in vain. Dee was not cleared. He died in great poverty at Mortlake in 1608.

The last act of Dee’s extraordinary story is tee most impressive of them all. the descendant of British kings, creator (or one of the creators) of the British imperial legend, the leader of the Elizabethan Renaissance, the mentor of Philip Sidney, the prophet of some far-reaching religious movement, dies, an old man, in bitter neglect and extreme poverty.

What happened in Dee’s lifetime to his ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’ was happening all over Europe as the Renaissance went down in the darkness of the witch-hunts. Giordano Bruno in England in the 1580s had helped to inspire the ‘Sidney circle’ and the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. Giordano Bruno in 1600 was burned at the stake in Rome as a sorcerer. Dee’s fate I England in his third period presents a similar extraordinary contrast with his brilliant first, or ‘Renaissance’, period.

The Hermetic-Cabalist movement failed as a movement of religious reform, and that failure involved the suppression of the Renaissance Neoplatonism which had nourished it. The Renaissance magus turned into Faust.

Chapter IX Spenser’s Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene

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Of the Elizabethan poets the one who has been placed within a recognizable thought movement is Edmund Spenser, usually described as a Neoplatonist. This label, as formerly used, left out the Hermetic-Cabalist core which modern scholarship has revealed within Renaissance Neoplatonism, as formulated by Ficino and Pico. Notwithstanding the immense literature on Spenser, his Neoplatonism has not yet been tackled on modern lines, though much has recently been brought to light of which the older Spenser criticism never dreamed. Alastair Fowler has argued for intricate numerological patterns in The Faerie Queene , and for an astral or planetary pattern in its themes. Angus Fletcher has drawn attention to the Hermetic-Egyptian setting of Britomart’s vision in the Temple of Isis. Thus there are movements stirring towards new solutions of Spenser’s philosophy, if one can use that word of his outlook.

In this chapter, I make the attempt to place Spenser’s though within the history of the occult philosophy, as outlined in this book. I want to suggest that Spenser inherited much more than Neoplatonism as formulated by Ficino and Pico. He inherited the movement towards reform in later Christian Cabalists, like Reuchlin, Giorgi, Agrippa. He inherited the intensified Cabalist-Neoplatonism, or Cabalist-Neopythagorism, with its emphasis on number, of which John Dee was a leading representative. The inherited the thought of a ‘more powerful philosophy’, leading to a world-wide reforming movement, with Queen Elizabeth I in the leading role in which Dee saw her.

To a very serious Puritan like Edmund Spenser, the reforming side of the occult philosophy would have been likely to make a strong appeal. It will be argued in this chapter that a major influence on Spenser was the De harmonia mundi by the Christian Cabalist and Platonist, Francesco Giorgi.

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The French poets of the period had found Giorgi a most congenial philosopher; his influence would naturally extend to their contemporaries, the Elizabethan poets.

The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590 but the poem had been begun more than ten years earlier, as we know form letters exchanged between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, printed in 1580. at that time, Spenser was in contact with John Dee’s pupils, Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, both of whom are mentioned in the Spenser-Harvey letters. He was thus in touch with the leading poets of the Dee circle and could have become aware in this way of Giorgi’s work.

In the Hymne of Heavenly Beauty, the poet rises through the three worlds; the elemental world; the celestial world, that round ‘sown with glittering stars’ wherewith God has encompassed this All; the intellectual world where the Platonic ideas merge with the angelic hierarchies. In the Hymne of Heavenly Love, he descends through the three worlds, beginning at the top where the Trinity reigns over a host of angels bright. The Hymnes culminate in outpourings of Christian devotion, in a rendering of the Gospel story in poetic language.

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Spenser’s description of the House of Alma (The Faerie Queene, Book II, ix, 22)…

The frame thereof seemed partly circulare,

And part triangulare, O worke divine;

Those two the first and last propotions are,

The one imperfect, mortall, foeminine:

Th’other immortall, perfect, masculine,

And twixt them both a quadrate was the base

Proportioned equally by seven and nine:

All which compacted made a goodly diapase.

The actual figure which Spenser is here describing is difficult to determine, but he general meaning would appear to refer to the three worlds. The cube, or quadrate, is the elemental world of the four elements; the seven is the celestial world of the seven planets; the nine is the supercelestial world of the nine angelic hierarchies, which form into the triangle of the Trinity. All three worlds are present in man as well a in the universe. Hence the geometry and architecture of the House of Alma would be an expression in architectural terms of the little world of man. the geometry of the house as a whole formed a ‘goodly diapase’ or octave. The stanza is fundamental for Spenser on the universal harmony, and for his understanding of its allegorical expression in architecture. Fowler has wrestled with this stanza, using Giorgi in his attempts to interpret it. Those who understand hot to philosophise and Pythgorise by mathematics should be able to see the proportions of the Temple of Solomon rising behind it.

By a remarkable effort of the imagination, Spenser had absorbed the framework, the groundwork of the type of thought which in the Italian Renaissance was productive of great creative works of art an architecture, the world in which Francesco Giorgi had lived. He expresses these ideas creatively through his poetry. It is his grasp of the basic ideas, his understanding of the numerology of universal harmony, of the perfect templar proportions of the great world of the universe and the little world of man, which gives that Renaissance quality of harmony to Spenser’s poetry.

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Spenser’s unfinished seventh book would presumably have been the missing Jupiter book. The full twelve which were planned must surely have had reference to the twelve signs of the zodiac which shine in the sphere of fixed stars to which corresponds, in Giorgi’s list, the angelic hierarchy of the Cherubim.

But how are we to reconcile this astral interpretation wit the fact that Spenser himself states in the letter to Raleigh printed with the first instalment of The Faerie Queene that he intended the twelve books to portray the twelve private and oral virtues, as defined by Aristotle, and that if these books were well received he might go on to write twelve more on Aristotelian political virtues? These Aristotelian virtues have always given trouble to the critics; Holiness an Courtesy are not Aristotelian virtues; it is not easy to see how this Aristotelian scheme was to be fitted in to the scheme of the poem

The operative word is ‘twelve’. Spenser is thinking numerologically. As Giorgi recounts, following numerological tradition, twelve can include with the signs of the zodiac many other dozens, such as the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the Twelve Apostles. Why not twelve Aristotelian virtues?

Moreover, the appearance of Aristotelian virtues within Spenser’s Neoplatonic an numerological schemes is consistent with Giorgi’s exposition, in the De harmonia mundi of his manner of reconciling the philosophy of Aristotle with that of Plato.

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The suggestion that I would make is that the planetary themes of the poem should be seen as arranged, not in the fixed order of the planetary week (as Fowler has argued) but in an order deliberately selected to express the idea and purpose of the poem, the presentation of an ideal portrait of a religious and moral leader, of Queen Elizabeth I and her imperial reform. That portrait has a variegated planetary and angelic colouring. Lighted by a Sun of Christian religion and Christian Charity (Book I), it includes red glints of Martial firmness (Book II). The white Chastity of the Moon (Book III) expresses the purity of the Virgin Queen’s reform. Mercury (Book IV) includes all colours and can reconcile opposites with spiritual alchemy. The justice of Saturn (Book V) represents the wise rule of Astraea. And with Venus (Book VI) this complex movement, or religion, or personality, takes on the colouring of a courtly cult, a court ruled over by the messianic figure whom the poem as whole celebrates.

The Giorgi influence must somehow have merged with an Arthurian-British element to form a kind of ‘British Israel’ mystique. Such a linkage would be quite possible in the highly charged atmosphere of sacred destiny, of religious mission, with which Elizabethan Englishmen maintained their morale in their dangerously isolated position. And it seems obvious that the circle whence such ideas could have emanated can only have been the circle of John Dee.

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…at about the same time that Spenser was writing his Shepherd’s Calendar, John Dee was exercising his mathematical, astronomical, and astrological knowledge on the project of the reform of the calendar. It seems probable that Spenser was in contact with Dee or members of his circle when composing his Shepherd’s Calendar, absorbing the fund of scientific knowledge which he was to use in The Faerie Queene , and evolving its astral ad numerological allegories.

Seen as a whole, the argument which I am putting forward is that Spenser’s philosophy was based on the Neoplatonic Christian Cabala of Giorgi and Agrippa, but that this had been modified by passage through the influences of the Tudor Reformation. Basically, it was a reflex of the philosophy of John Dee who had expanded these influences in new scientific and politico-religious directions. Dee was the true philosopher of the Elizabethan age, and Spenser, as its epic poet, reflected that philosophy

It been said of Spenser’s epic that it expresses a ‘prophetic moment’, after the Armada victory, when the queen appeared almost as the symbol of a new religion, transcending both Catholic and Protestant in some far-reaching revelation, and transmitting a universal Messianic message. It would seem from the present investigations, fragmentary and incomplete though they are, that an influence of Christian Cabala underlies the profound seriousness of the courtly Puritanism which was Spenser’s religion…

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Whilst in England (when Dee was abroad) Bruno preaches a Hermetic-Cabalist philosophy which ahs some reference to a Messianic role for Elizabeth. Dee and Bruno both visited Prague, whence Bruno went to Rome to his death, and Dee eventually returned to disgrace in England.

…which would also be important for assessing the possibility of an influence of Bruno on Spenser.

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I believe that much in the chilly reception of The Faerie Queene can be explained if it is realised that the poem expressed Dee’s vision for Elizabethan England, an expansionist vision which had become too dangerously provocative by the time it was published. After Dee’s activities abroad, he received no reward on his return home, and was never adequately rewarded for his outstanding contribution to the greatness of Elizabethan England. semi-banishment, ill-success and poverty were to be his fate in his third period. No wonder that a similar fate befell the author of The Faerie Queene.

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the hopes of some vast all-embracing reform through Hermetic-Cabalist influence and particularly through the influence of Christian cabala, belonged to the earlier sixteenth century, though they were never forgotten nor completely discarded amid the disappointments of the later sixteenth century.

The Faerie Queene is a great magical Renaissance poem, infused with the whitest of white magic, Christian Cabalist and Neoplatonic, haunted by a good magician and scientist, Merlin (a name sometimes used of Dee), and profoundly opposed to bad magicians and necromancers and bad religion.

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The label, in terms of European treads which seems to me most applicable to The Faerie Queene is ‘Rosicrucian’, the movement representing the late form of Renaissance Magia and Cabala, of which Dee had been an exponent and which he had been preaching on the continent whilst Spenser was writing his poem. It is not for nothing that the poem opens with Red Cross and Una (the monas). German Rosicrucian writers of the early seventeenth century were aware of deep-rooted connections with De’s monas, and some echoes of Spenser’s chivalric formulation can be detected in that literature.

Chapter X Elizabethan England and the Jews

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…howls of a violently anti-Semitic mob. I have no intention of trying to enter here the dark labyrinth of the Lopez case, though I would suggest that perhaps the case has been studied too much as a local Elizabethan issue, and with too little reference to the general picture of the marrano diaspora.

In contrast to the tragic story of Doctor Lopez, a more pleasing picture of the reception of marrano refugees in Elizabethan England is extant. Unfortunately the story derives form late sources and must be discounted as partly legendary, though Cecil Roth thought that the legend contained an element of truth.

The story relates that in the year 1593 a brother an sister, Manuel Lopez Pereira and Maria Nunez, whose parents had been victims of the Inquisition, left Portugal with their uncle, Miguel Lopez, and a large party of marranos to seek a refuge in northern lands. Their ship was captured by an English ship and brought to an English port. An English nobleman fell in love wit the beautiful Maria Nunez and sought to marry her. Queen Elizabeth, on hearing the story, expressed a wish to see the lady, and was captivated by her beauty. She invited her into the royal coach, drove about in London with her, and ordered her ship and all its passengers to be set free. In spite of this flattering welcome, Maria would not accept the tempting offer she had received. ‘leaving all the pomp of England for the sake of Judaism, as the old record puts it, she pursued her way with her companions to Amsterdam.’ Here in 1598 they were joined by her mother and other members of her family and the famous Amsterdam Jewish community grew in part for this foundation.

This legend is worth pondering over. Queen Elizabeth was not in the habit of putting other ladies forward to her public as beauties, of promenading with them through London as (almost) equal in beauty to herself. The legend does not quite make sense as personal reminiscence, but it would make sense as allegory of philosemitic tendencies in the English queen, of a Jewish spiritual beauty associated with that of the reformed Imperial Virgin.

The most liberal of the northern Protestant countries in its reception of the Jewish refugees was Holland.

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it is not impossible that the reception of the Jews may have been mooted in Elizabethan times by secretly philosemitic influences, but rejected owing to the growth of unfavourable attitudes.

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Were there any Jews in Elizabethan England? the answer is that there certainly were, though probably not very many. If they maintained the practices of their religion, this could only have been done in the utmost secrecy. They would have to have been crypto-Jews, marranos, publicly professing the public form of Christianity in England.

Yet it can be pointed out that Elizabethan England was a power which resisted the persecutors, and that the Elizabethan imperial reform included Christian Cabala as an ingredient of the Elizabeth cult, perhaps making possible for a patriotic English Jew an easy transition to the religion of his adopted country.

Chapter XI The Reaction: Christopher Marlowe on Conjurors, Imperialists and Jews

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In an earlier chapter we saw that Jean Bodin in his Demonomanie associated his attack on witches with his violent disapproval of Pico della Mirandola and Cornelius Agrippa for having made what he considered a bad use of Cabala. Marlowe definitely presents his Faustus as a student of Agrippa. His play belongs into the reaction against Renaissance magic, particularly as formulated by Agrippa.