The next part in the John Dee chapter gets real exciting. We will see references to a bit of our traditional literature, as well as witness foreshadoing of Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ. Jones even talks about the Templars a bit, but I'm having trouble pinning down their relevance in this chapter.
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It starts off after Elizabeth's coronation in 1559. After that moment, John Dee heads back to the European Continent. He learns Hebrew, though it is unknown who teaches him. Why learn Hebrew? So that he can intimately study the Cabala in order to practice magic. Hebrew was not taught at the university, and Hebrew was not taught by the rabbis in England. So it is likely he learned Hebrew in the Spanish Netherlands.
Someone familiar with Cabalistic magic was seen as the ideal man of that era, strangely enough. Jones states that Elizabeth's advisor William Cecil
sent John Dee to the Continent to learn the Cabala, because both believed Cabala was "the cutting edge of the new science and the new intelligence technology." Instead of learning about essences for the sake of truth, "Cabala delivered tangible results like gold and power."
Here, Jones will quote a lot from a Frances A. Yates, who wrote
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Yates maintained that Dee was the characteristic philosopher of his age. John Dee would have received this quality from his experiences with Cornelius Agrippa (a student of Reuchlin, it so happens). Yes, John Dee was acquaintanced with the famous Cornelius Agrippa, the alchemist who was obsessed by the Philosopher's Stone. And indeed, Agrippa was a student of of the same Reuchlin who had debated and argued his cause with authorities in order to justify his practice of the Cabala. Reuchlin wrote his first book on Cabala in 1492, the year Jєωs were expelled from Spain, and the same year Columbus found America.
Jєωs brought the Cabala directly to England, helping to form that nation into one heavily influenced by Judaism. With such influences, Dee intended to break away from the "Middle Ages" mindset. Yates considers Dee a brilliant mathematician and geographer who believed he was an ardent reformed Christian who conjured angels. Yates calls Dee a "Christian Cabalist," though it becomes clear that Dee is actually involved in Judaizing. Jones says that "Cabala, not Tyndale's translation of the bible, marked the beginning of England as the philosemitic nation. Cabala was the lens through which Dee saw all of the trends the new government was interested in, from usury to "intelligence," thus redefining what the now Protestant country would promote."
The Mass was gone. What England was left with was imperialism, magic, usury, and occult science.
"Dee's is certainly following Agrippa's outline in the De occulta philosophia and that was a work founded on Renaissance Magic and Cabala. Also he hints in the Preface at higher secrets which he is not here revealing, probably the secrets of angel-magic." Dee's Christian Cabala would link the messianic politics of the Hussites and Anabaptists with the cabalistic arcana of Renaissance magic, and out of that marriage England would emerge as the messianic Protestant nation. Its main literary propagandist in the Elizabethan age would be Edmund Spenser. John Milton followed the lead of Edmund Spenser, and Milton would become the literary propagandist for the Puritan age. The common denominator shared by messianic politics and renaissance magic was тαℓмυdic Judaism, which sank its tenacious tendrils into English soil.
The Protestants of John Dee's time believed that they were justified and clear to practice their magic. To them, "Christian Cabala" was not a euphanism for judaizing Protestantism. Rather, "Christian Cabala" meant good white magic. John Dee insisted he only spoke with good angels during his conjurings. Dee was allowed to continue on believing this sort of thing because Catholicism was banned from England. "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 conjurer of devils" (Yates). But the Catholic position has always been that if a man attempts to summon angels, only fallen angels will respond, and then only if he puts his soul in jepordy.
Michael Jones discusses how Yates considers Dee's angel summoning activities are interlinked with his mathematic skill, but Jones retorts that John Dee's mathematic skill was in spite of his angel-summoning.
Science and Magick, with John Dee...The change in thought in England that Dee promised through Cabala was not unlike what Karl Marx promised 300 years later. Before men used philosophy to describe the world, but now Dee, as master of Cabala, would change the world through magic. The principle was simple: Hebrew was the language spoken by God himself. It was by the divine word that the world came into being and continued to function. So any man who knew those words could bend the universe to serve his will, just as God could. One technique was known as Gematria, which involved learning the numerical significance of Hebrew words, each letter of which had a numerical value. Cabala was related to the Pythagorean idea that reality was ultimately number. But another feature of Cabala was its preoccupation with angels. Copernicus' De Revolutionibus appeared in 1643, but Dee was still living in a universe in which things were in motion because an intelligent spirit was moving them. The spirits that moved the stars and planets were known as angels. One preoccupation of Cabala was learning the names of angels, as well as figuring out just how many there were (301,655,172, according to one set of calculations). If a man, through magic, could learn their names, he could, like God, comnmand them to do his bidding. According to contemporary thought--thought which Dee accepted completely--the Heavenly bodies determined the existence of minerals in the earth. The fact that Mercury was both a planet and an element was just one indication of this correspondence. The moon was silver. The sun corresponded naturally to gold, and so gold was normally found in the tropics, where the sun was strongest. By learning the names of the angels who moved planets like the sun, Dee would become the master of the elements, able to change lead into gold, as well as the master of intelligence, able to send messages (aggelos meant messenger) back and forth without cipher. Dee would actually come up with a way of using angels as a form of communication. In an age when the King of Spain, England's archenemy, owned the gold mines of the new world, all of this had political and military implications, which is most certainly why Dee went to the continent to learn тαℓмυdic technology and most probably why he went there as Cecil's agent.
In this book, Jones discusses the difference between magic and prayer. Basically, magic is a parody of prayer. Prayer is a supplication, while magic is a command. "The point of magic is to do away with man's precarious position as supplicant and place him in a god-like position of command. Men could not order around angels.
Yet, if you learned the Cabala, and
if you could order angels around, you become tempted to feel superior to the angels.
John Dee's world of magic, and the Freemasons...Jones traces sources of Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ's origin to a man named Sir Thomas Sackville, who was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge at York. When Elizabeth caught Sackville's secret meetings, it is thought he brought the queen into the club. "A pattern emerged: the leading Protestants were the leading Masons ... The Magnates in England all began as Protestants and ended up as Masons when the revolutionary spirit leapt like a spark from the Protestants to the Masons at the time of the Restoration."
Jones notes the connection between Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ and the тαℓмυd, and notes that if Christianity loses the will to contest the тαℓмυd, then the тαℓмυd will take over.
He also notes how a diffuse Gnosticism took over the Knights Templar. This sort of thinking was different from the spread of magick in England. Yet, the Freemasons like to make a lot of hay over the Templars, and this is evident in later centuries:
When the King of France suppressed the Knights Templar and brought about the death of Jacques (James) De Molay, it looked as though a tradition had ended. And in the ordinary sense it had. But, as Peter Parker in The Murdered Magician notes, the tradition was to be fancifully resurrected. He points out that: "The transformation of ideas about the Templars during the eighteenth century shows how far from stern scientific rationalism the men of the Enlightenment could wander. In the very body of Church history which was the prime target for rationalisation and demystification, eighteenth-century men found the Templars, and turned them into a wild fantasy...". And there were no greater promoters of this "wild fantasy" than the Freemasons. The history of gnosticism, Cabala, тαℓмυd, the Protestant revolt and the Masonic lodges were self-consciously (if not historically) intertwined by eighteenth-century meen opposed to the Church. Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ was always a messianic political movement, an explicit alternative to Catholicism bound up with the rituals of Judaism and Jєωιѕн symbolism. The adept must travel toward the east toward Jerusalem to find Enlightenment; he is going to rebuild the Temple and he is going to find a lost world.
Later, during the 1600s, occult Protestantism became formalized as Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ. Jones quotes Rabbi Benamozegh--Jєωιѕн rabbi, folks--"It is quite certain, Masonic theology is at root nothing else than Theosophy, and that it corresponds to the theology of the Kaballah."
John Dee in Literature and Culture... +
Shakespeare deals with the good and bad changes that Dee had brought into Western Civilization.
-The "good" qualities of Dee's transformational culture:
-the Renaissance man is the English Magus
-such an English Magus appears in the
Tempest and
Midsummer Night's Dream, each full of magic
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Prospero was modeled on Dee; Prospero's island kingdom was "the new occult Protestant England"
- The bad changes:
-the occult philosopher, such as Dee, was saturnine--a characteristic shared with Jєωs
-the occult philosopher was melancholy because of the deep insights occult philosophy gave him
-Hamlet was a dramatic representation of the occult philosopher
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Durer famously etched Melancholy as a pictoral representation
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John Milton followed the lead of Edmund Spenser, and Milton would become the literary propagandist for the Puritan age. The common denominator shared by messianic politics and renaissance magic was тαℓмυdic Judaism, which sank its tenacious tendrils into English soil.
(Now, in regards to Milton, I will tell you that I have studied that man. John Milton is the author for the famous poem,
Paradise Lost, which is absolutely fantastic. I love it. Milton does his best to describe angelic warfare, and not surprisingly, John Dee was a likely influence in Milton's inspiration. Two angels I immediately think of are Uriel, the fourth Archangel, who we stopped acknowledging shortly after Nicea, and then there is Abdiel, who is a protagonist angel hero who the reader can focus on in the midst of the battle for Heaven. Perhaps, after we finish going through Jones' chapter on John Dee, I can provide some supplemental information about Dee and his influences on Milton, from the book
Milton and the Angels.)
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Christopher Marlowe stated the orthodox position about angel/demon summoning--that you will only summon demons--in his work
Dr. Faustus. In
Faustus, he attacks "Dee's cultural hegemony over the new 'England' Dee had created." Dr. Faustus is known to say: "Tis Magick, Magick that hath ravish'd me."
Topic: LaramieHirsch, please share your John Dee info when you come to that part (Read 2506 times)