In 1583, a Polish nobleman watched the most learned man in England kneel before a crystal ball and ask an angel named Madimi whether he should abandon his wife and flee to Poland. The angel said yes. John Dee, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, packed his books and went.
John Dee (1527–1608/09) was an English mathematician, astronomer, cartographer and occult philosopher who served as a trusted adviser to Queen Elizabeth I while simultaneously conducting a decade-long project to converse with angels through a crystal scryer. He was the first person to use the term “British Empire,” and he signed his letters to the queen with a cipher that only she could read.
Who Was John Dee, Really?
Dee was born in 1527 in London’s Tower Ward, the son of a minor court official. He entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, became a founding fellow of Trinity College, and later studied at Louvain with the great cartographer Gerardus Mercator. By his mid-twenties he was lecturing on Euclid in Paris to audiences so large they broke the windows of the hall.
He was, by any measure, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He owned what was then the largest library in England, over 4,000 books and manuscripts, more than either Oxford or Cambridge held at the time. He advised navigators on the mathematics of longitude, coined the phrase “British Empire” in a 1577 treatise, and was consulted on everything from calendar reform to the question of whether England should adopt the Gregorian calendar (he said no, and England stayed on the Julian calendar until 1752).
But the same man who corrected Ptolemy’s geography also spent his evenings staring into a polished obsidian disc, trying to get demons to teach him the language of creation. Both activities were, to Dee, the same pursuit. Mathematics was divine. The angels were mathematics.
How Did a Royal Adviser Become an Angel Summoner?
The turning point came in the 1560s, after Dee’s first wife died and his patron, the Earl of Pembroke, passed away. He had already cast horoscopes for Queen Elizabeth, choosing the date of her coronation in January 1559 through his astrological calculations. But he wanted more than the movements of planets. He wanted certainty.
In 1581, Dee recorded in his spiritual diary, the Mysteriorum Libri Quinque, that he had attempted to contact angels on his own. He failed. The angels, he wrote, required a “server” or “scryer,” a person with the natural gift of seeing visions in crystals. Dee himself was not a seer. He was a scholar. He needed a medium.
He found one in 1582: Edward Kelley, a man with a criminal record for counterfeiting, who had reportedly had his ears cropped as punishment. Dee either knew or did not care. Kelley could see things in the crystal that Dee could not, and that was enough.
For the next seven years, Dee and Kelley conducted hundreds of “spiritual conferences.” Dee would pray, purify himself, and kneel before the crystal. Kelley would describe what he saw: angels, castles, complex geometric diagrams, and a language that the angels called Enochian, supposedly the tongue spoken before the Fall of Man.
What Did the Angels Actually Say?
The angelic conversations, recorded in Dee’s diaries and published in the 17th century as A True and Faithful Relation, are a strange mix of theology, alchemy, and practical instruction. The angels dictated a complex system of magic: 49 “calls” or keys, a 21-letter alphabet, and a set of tablets that mapped the universe into four watchtowers.
They also gave a great deal of mundane advice. The angels told Dee which books to read, what to eat, and whether to trust his servants. They told him that his wife Jane was pregnant before she knew it herself. They gave him a new name, “Enoch,” and told him he was the successor to the biblical prophet.
Some of the angelic messages were political. In 1583, the angels instructed Dee to leave England and go to Poland, where Emperor Rudolf II was said to be interested in the occult. Dee and Kelley traveled across Europe, demonstrating their scrying sessions to nobles and scholars. They were received at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, where Dee presented himself as an ambassador of the angelic realm.
The mission failed. Rudolf was interested but cautious. The Polish king Stephen Báthory was hostile. Dee and Kelley spent years moving between courts, running out of money, and arguing with each other. The angels, meanwhile, gave increasingly strange instructions.
The Problem of the Wives
In 1587, the angels made a demand that broke the partnership. They told Dee and Kelley that they must share everything, including their wives. Dee, desperate to obey, agreed. Kelley, who had his own reasons, went along. The two men signed a pact of “holy communion” and exchanged wives.
The episode lasted less than a month. Dee’s wife Jane was horrified, and the arrangement collapsed. Dee blamed the angels, or rather, he began to suspect that Kelley had been lying all along. In 1589, the two men parted ways. Dee returned to England, and Kelley stayed on the continent, where he was eventually imprisoned and died in 1597 or 1598 after attempting to escape from a tower by climbing down bedsheets.
Dee’s own end was quieter. He returned to a country that had largely forgotten him. He was appointed warden of Manchester College, a post he held for several years, but he was never again consulted by the queen. He died in 1608 or 1609, in poverty, at his house in Mortlake. His library had been ransacked while he was abroad, and he sold books to survive.
Was Dee a Charlatan or a Believer?
The question is the wrong one. Dee was both, in the sense that all serious practitioners are both. He was a believer in the reality of the spirits he contacted. He was also a man who knew that his reputation depended on Kelley’s visions, and he had every reason to interpret those visions favorably.
The more interesting question is what Dee thought he was doing. He did not see himself as a magician in the folk sense, someone who conjures demons for power or wealth. He saw himself as a priest of a higher order, restoring a pure, angelic religion that had been corrupted by the Catholic Church and the Protestant reformers alike. His angelic magic was, in his mind, a form of prayer.
This is why his work matters to the occult tradition. Dee did not invent angel magic, but he systematized it. His Enochian system, with its complex tables, calls, and alphabets, became one of the foundational texts of Western ceremonial magic. It was picked up by the Rosicrucian movement in the 17th century, by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 19th, and by Aleister Crowley in the 20th. Crowley called the Enochian system “the most powerful and sublime” of all magical systems, and he used it extensively.
What Is the Enochian System, Actually?
The Enochian system, as dictated through Kelley, consists of several interlocking parts. The core is a set of 19 “calls” or “keys,” which are invocations in the Enochian language, each governing a different level of reality. The calls are recited in a specific order to open the “gates” of the four watchtowers, which are themselves represented by large tablets inscribed with grids of letters.
Each tablet contains the names of angels and spirits, arranged in a complex pattern that maps onto the elements, the planets, and the zodiac. Practitioners use the tablets to contact specific intelligences, to travel astrally, or to gain knowledge of the past and future.
The Enochian language itself is a constructed language, with its own grammar and syntax. Whether it is genuinely angelic, as Dee believed, or a product of Kelley’s subconscious, as skeptics argue, is a matter of faith. What is certain is that it is internally consistent, and that it has been studied, translated, and used by magicians for over 400 years.
The system is not for beginners. It requires intense concentration, a working knowledge of ceremonial magic, and a willingness to engage with forces that are, by their nature, unpredictable. The Golden Dawn reserved Enochian work for advanced initiates, and even Crowley, who mastered it, described it as dangerous.
How Did Dee’s Work Survive?
Dee’s manuscripts had a strange afterlife. After his death, his library was dispersed. Some of his angelic diaries ended up in the hands of Robert Cotton, the antiquary, and were eventually deposited in the British Library. Others were bought by Elias Ashmole, the founder of the Ashmolean Museum, who was himself a practicing alchemist.
The key text, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, was published in 1659 by Meric Casaubon, a scholar who intended the book as a warning against demonic delusion. Casaubon included Dee’s diaries verbatim, complete with prayers, angelic messages, and the infamous wife-sharing episode. The book became a bestseller among occultists, who read it as a manual rather than a warning.
The Enochian system was revived in the 19th century by the Golden Dawn, whose founders, including S.L. MacGregor Mathers and W.B. Yeats, studied Dee’s manuscripts in the British Library. They reconstructed the system, added their own interpretations, and passed it on to generations of practitioners.
What Do People Get Wrong About Dee?
The most common misconception is that Dee was a fraud who used Kelley to fool the queen. In fact, Dee’s angelic work was largely private. Elizabeth was aware of his interests, and she visited his house at Mortlake in 1575, but she never participated in his scrying sessions. Dee’s role at court was as a mathematician and geographer, not as a court magician.
Another misconception is that Dee was a “dark” magician, a devil worshipper. He was, in fact, deeply religious, a devout Protestant who prayed before every session and who believed that his angelic contacts were a form of divine revelation. He was horrified by the idea that he might be dealing with demons, and he repeatedly asked the angels to prove their divine origin.
A third misconception is that Dee’s work was all nonsense, a product of superstition and credulity. This ignores the fact that Dee was also a serious scientist, whose work on navigation and mathematics was respected by the greatest minds of his age. He was not a fool. He was a man who believed that the universe was a coherent, rational system, and that its secrets could be discovered through study, whether that study was of the stars or of the angels.
FAQ
Did John Dee really speak to angels? Dee believed he did, through his scryer Edward Kelley. Whether the angels were real, or products of Kelley’s imagination or fraud, is a question that has divided scholars and practitioners for over 400 years.
What is the Enochian language? The Enochian language is a constructed language that Dee and Kelley claimed was dictated by angels. It has its own alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary, and it is used in ceremonial magic to invoke angelic forces.
Was John Dee the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero? Many scholars have suggested that Dee was a model for Prospero in The Tempest, as well as for Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. There is no direct evidence, but the resemblance is striking.
Did John Dee have a magic mirror? Yes. Dee used a polished obsidian disc, now in the British Museum, as well as a crystal ball and other “shew-stones,” as his scrying tools. The obsidian disc is of Aztec origin and was likely brought to Europe after the conquest of Mexico.
Dee’s life is a study in contradictions: the rationalist who sought certainty in crystals, the courtier who died in poverty, the man who coined “British Empire” and then tried to found an angelic commonwealth. His work remains a cornerstone of Western ceremonial magic, and his diaries remain the most detailed record of angelic communication ever produced. For those who practice, they are scripture. For those who study, they are a window into a mind that refused to accept the boundary between science and spirit. Explore more in our guide to occult history, or read about the Enochian keys and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.