Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => General Discussion => Topic started by: sedetrad on July 15, 2012, 02:30:48 PM
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LaramieHirsch, please share your John Dee info when you come to that part in your book. This will be a John Dee discussion thread.
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*LOL* I was thinking you meant John Deere :farmer:
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Darn...my first dislike critic
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Shakespeare based the character of Glendower in Henry IV on John Dee. I've seen the 1979 BBC version of the play and the performance is pretty funny. He's portrayed as a self-absorbed blowhard.
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:reading:
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Doctor Faustus in Marlowe also was supposedly based on John Dee -- and James Bond ( Her Majesty's Secret Service, a sort of spook working for the occult queen ).
The Spanish Armada was allegedly defeated because John Dee was in Spain around that time, collecting information, and then smuggled a book giving away information about the Spanish to the English. The book appeared to be a harmless egghead alchemical tract; it was really cipher, code, giving away the plans of the Spanish, how many ships they had, things of this nature. How else could Elizabeth's pukey navy defeat the mighty navy of Spain, which was a wonder of the world?
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Okay, will do.
I've given this thread a bookmark, and you've given me the impetus I need to push through to that chapter. (Jones' writing is so thick and academic, compared to a lot of stuff I read.) I am hoping I can get to it in a week's time.
Once I'm at the chapter, I'll begin the explication.
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Okay. Made it to the "John Dee" chapter.
In regards to the chapter I read before, all I have to say is: Man, those Anabaptists were crazy.
I'll probably have a chunk of "John Dee" chapter read by tomorrow evening, and I'll be able to explicate a bit.
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Okay, so, first the setup.
The John Dee chapter starts off in England in the mid-1500s. Jones describes how King Henry VIII and many powerful families in England managed to confiscate an enormous amount of wealth from the monasteries:
the loot went on at an appalling rate. When [Edward] died and Mary came to the throne, it was nearly completed. A mass of new families had arisen, wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the older England had known, and bound by a common interest to the older families which had joined in the grab.
The money stolen from the Catholic monasteries was utilized to set up a system of usury, newly embraced by the new rulers of England, and the money was also used to supress Catholicism from ever rising again in England.
Now, this chapter about the English is different from the other few chapters before it. Before, when we read about the different Protestant revolts throughout Europe, we see groups of people succuмbing to orgiastic dionysian parades, riots, long-winded justifications for lust and debauchery. And all of these revots are violent, and have to be put down with a military hand because they are so crazy. Jones refers to the actions of these groups (Hussites, Anabaptists, the Peasant Revolt) as judaizing, which means the act of taking Christians into behavior that is supposedly toward the Old Testament. For example, the justification of polygamy, justified warfare from peasants, comparisons to King David--things which sound like what a cult leader today would preach.
However, England is different. England is not so crazy as the previous examples. England is sophisticated in its transformation.
Together with the Cecils and the Russells, [Thomas] Gresham helped make England the model for the modern nation. England would turn finance into a weapon more powerful than Philip's armies. Revolution in Muenster meant communism; in England it meant capitalism. As Marx understood, the beginning of capitalism was the theft of Church property. The former wealth of the Church was put in the service of Mammon when the wealthy English families contested the Jєωιѕн monopoly on usury.
...
Under Gresham's guidance England created the wretched proletariat for which it became infamous through Dickens' novels. Under Gresham's leadership:
"A whole class of decent Englishmen, of whom too little has been remembered in history, was swept off the church lands and doomed to poverty, vagabondageand often crime: mostly small farmers and farm laborers with their families, dispossessed because the new owners found it more profitable to raise sheep."
Jєωιѕн involvement was obvious. The English took Jєωs as their mentors. Though they expelled the Jєωs officially in 1290, only 16,000 actually left. The unprincipaled majority of Jєωs remained in England to subvert and poison and influence. These were the marranos of England, and they provided a network for other Jєωs to return to England, and these returning Jєωs were disguised as Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian merchants.
The Lobards, who practiced usury on Lombard Street in London, were probably crypto-Jєωs. As in Spain, many English Jєωs went underground to preserve their fortunes. When Jєωs expelled from Spain in 1492 joined them, the time was ripe for expansion of Jєωιѕн influence over English culture under the guise of the reformed faith.
Jones cites Barbara Tuchman who noticed that England changed sometime during the 1500s, "...when the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became the English God," and the "heroes of the Old Testament replaced the Catholic saints."
Jones cites Tuchman:
"With the Puritans came an invasion of Hebraism transmitted through the Old Testament." Tuchman adverts to the notion that Scripture is a front for appetite, saying the Puritans "followed the letter of the Old Testament for the very reason that they saw their own faces reflected in it." But she takes the idea no further. Puritanism meant the end of Christian morality and the importation of "Jєωιѕн habits." According to Cunningham, as cited by Tuchman, "The general tendancy of Puritanism was to discard Christian morality and to substitute Jєωιѕн habits in its stead." The natural consequence was "retrogression to a lower type of social morality which showed itself at home and abroad." The first manifestation of that moral retrogression was the widespread poverty characteristic of English life for centuries thereafter.
Heresy, looting, usury, judaizing. That seems to be the backdrop for our figure, John Dee.
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A little bit more about England, mid 1500s.
The one thing I forgot to mention in the last post was that Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, was a Catholic who wanted to restore property to the Church. She found no support, not even from her husband. Her advisors did not support her either. In 1555, she began burning heretics who were against the Catholic Church, but things in England had changed since the Inquisition, and "the enemies of the Church had grown much more sophisticated in psychological warfare." About three hundred Englishmen died from her Inquisition.
On May 29, 1555, an arrest warrant for a particular secret Protestant cell was issued. This cell had links to Mary's half-sister, Elizabeth. One of the conspirators was John Dee.
...now we get to it.
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John Dee
There is not much known about his religious background or early family life. No information as to whether or not he was baptized. Jones says this of him:
More than Tyndale's translation of the Bible, Dee is responsible for turning England into THE Judaizing nation par excellence: Dee created the philosophy that allowed England's new rulers to integrate their lust for gain, their judaizing, their imperialism, and their penchant for magic into a more or less coherent whole. His enemies accused him of casting spells. He did a horoscope of the royal wedding between Mary and Philip, and informants later claimed that, in casting that horoscope, Dee had "endeavored by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary." His role ranged from casting horoscopes to assign propitious dates for momentous occasions, for example, Elizabeth's coronation, to advising on matters geographical and political. By the time of his death in 1608, the tide of reaction was running against him, but by then he had left an indelible mark on what would become the world's premier Protestant empire and foremost promoter of revolution.
I found the following interesting:
While a student at Cambridge in 1546, Dee put on a performance of Aristophanes' play "Peace," during which a mechanical scarab beetle leapt off the stage in flight to the palace of Zeus. No one could explain how Dee accomplished this.
After Cambridge, Dee went to Mainland Europe to a few centers of learning. He ended up in the Spanish Netherlands in a place called Louvain, where a lot of ideas collided together. Think of Louvain as New York City's Greenwich Village of the 20th century. Everything came together there, from Anabaptist thought, to radical Protestantism, to Renaissance science, navigational discoveries, and of course, Jєωιѕн Cabala.
Dee did not seem to have religious views. Neither Protestant nor Catholic. So, he fit well in either locale. He could thrive among either Catholics or Protestants, since he did not have allegiance to either. Jones proposes the supposition that Dee may have actually become a priest--though it is unclear--under the employment of Bishop Bonner. This would make him a priest who practiced magic and uncanny arts, and Cardinal Allen suspected him of trafficking in spirits and double-dealing.
According to Jones, Dee was a believer in an alternative to both Catholicism and Protestantism, the "occult philosophy in the Elizabethan Age."
The clearest expression of his beliefs came later with publication of his Monas Hieroglyphica. The Monad was his symbol for the key to understanding the universe. It was intimately related to the language God spoke when He loosed the divine force that caused the universe to come into existence and then stay in orderly motion. Magic, as Dee understood it, involved "the human ability to tap this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology." Neither Protestant nor Catholic, Dee believed in magic, and he was willing to work with whichever regme was willing to pay for his services...Magic determined his politics, which determined his religion.
Dee returned to England in 1522 and wrote, "Everywhere statues were destroyed in the churches. The great crucifix ... on the altar of St. Paul's was a few days ago cast down by force of instruments, several men being wounded in the process and one killed... There is not a single crucifix now remaining in the other churches." Some acquaintances helped him to join the household of Northumberland that year. He was an Inquisitor for Queen Mary until 1558, when Mary died. Then, after that, his allegiance changed. It came off that John Dee was not truly Catholic at all, but a double agent. In May of 1555, when John Dee was arrested, it came out that "Dee was really working for Cecil and Elizabeth" all along. Then, a little later, in order to prove he was actually working for the Protestant royalty, he used the stars and the queen's birthday to decide the date of the queen's coronation.
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Very interesting, Laramie! I have to get my hands on that book.
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Jones takes another step out of John Dee’s life for a short segment, and returns to the world stage, setting the reader up for later developments in the chapter.
A LOT happens in the world of John Dee.
Jєωιѕн world conspiracy in Europe...
And a lot happens around Europe with Jєωs. When the Spanish exiled the Jєωs from their country during their Inquisition, the Jєωs ended up relocating, and created perhaps the first world conspiracy network. Jєωs functioned as sophisticated spy networks that kept anti-Spain and anti-Catholic forces of the world informed about how to subvert Catholic Spain politically and militarily.
Several Spaniards later regretted the expulsion of Jєωιѕн financiers in 1492; in the seventeenth Century Spanish writers first claimed the growing wealth of countries like Holland was due to converso capital flowing into Amsterdam. Later, the mythical decline of Spain and the triumph of its enemies were blamed on the international Jєωιѕн conspiracy. Among the first to take this line was the poet Francisco de Quevedo, who claimed Jєωιѕн elders from all over Europe had held a meeting at Salonika, where they drew up secret plans against Christendom. Quevedo and others accused the count duke of Olivares of planning to invite the Jєωs back into Spain to undo all the consequences of 1492.
Where did the Jєωs go to in order to spread their mischief? Everywhere. But Jones concentrates on about 6 areas: Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands (or, just the Netherlands, as we know them today), Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Turkey, and Rome. Back in Spain, since the Inquisition was so potently effective, the Jєωιѕн-supported heresies "took on a quietist tinge and became Illuminism" of the sort practiced by Gnostics and the earlier heretical Albegensians.
But here is what happened in each of these areas:
Spanish Netherlands: After the Spanish expulsion, the Jєωs moved here and perfected their skill in international trade. They centralized in Antwerp, "whose citizens percieved the financial advantage of admitting these well-connected merchants." Gradually, they built up a spy network throughout Europe with this new power. They would come in to Antwerp posing as merchants, generally. After controlling the spice trade, they would reinvest profits into the printing trade, and soon they were quickly printing out Protestant bibles. At the end of the 1500s, they were able to throw off their "Catholic cloak" and form their own Jєωιѕн communities.
Germany: So-called "Catholic" Jєωs colluded with the German protestants. Up in the north, Jєωs were able to expose themselves more, and they found an alliance with the Calvanist Protestants. "Disaffected Catholics who had lived double lives as clerics now made common cause with the Jєωs who had led double lives after converting to Catholicism to preserve their wealth." The Protestant-Jєωιѕн alliance was a "binary weapon," as Jones puts it. Jєωιѕн wealth and expertise in finance and publishing aided the Calvanists and their protectors, the princes. Cultural warfare was waged against the Catholic Church and Spain.
Poland: Jєωιѕн political influence increased, fueling eastern Polish imperialism. It was a crime to be disobedient to predatory Jєωιѕн tax farmers. Soon, "cultural drift in Poland led to an explosion of the sort the Inquisition prevented in Spain." This led to Polish decline a century and a half later. (I guess the Spanish Inquisition wasn't so bad after all, if it prevented Spain from the decline Poland experienced.)
Bohemia: Jєωs were passing military intelligence to Turks to fight the Christians. As a result, Austrian Hapsburgs banished all Jєωs from Bohemia. The area was still red hot from Peasant Revolts, the Anabaptists, and the Hussite Rebellion--all rebellions were Jєωιѕн in nature, and all of these past incidents mixed too well with the Jєωιѕн sensibility to revolt against the Christian order of the time. Hence, Jєωιѕн banishment.
Turkey: Marranos from Spain and Portugal were secretly shipping arms to Turkey to assist the Muslims in their centuries long quest to destroy Christianity.
Rome: On May 5, 1527, Lutheran German mercenaries sacked Rome. Jєωs took it as if the messiah were coming. The leader's name was Solomon Molkho; he was a marrano. He was later burned at the stake in Italy in 1532. This obvious and clear aggression against the Church has embarrassed Lutheran theologians ever since, and it opened the way for Calvanist influences, since Lutheranism was going to take a back seat from this point onward in the Protestant world.
The response by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was completely lackluster. Jones really sums it up nicely when he quotes a historian named Walsh who said that "Charles seemd unaware, most of his life, that he was surrounded by the agents of an international conspiracy to destroy everything that his heart loved and revered." Charles V's ignorant decisions led to the Jєωιѕн consolidation of power. He promised the expelled Jєωιѕн conversos that they could settle in the Spanish Netherlands as long as they did not revert to Judaism or Judaize. But they did it anyway. They transformed Antwerp in to "the center of that commercial system which was soon to be superseded by a large international life ... a stately and egotistical city" which was then the center of the Jєωιѕн money power, driven from Spain three quarters of a century before. Along the river were massive warehouses, stuffed with treasures from the eands of the earth." It was with this kind of power that Jєωιѕн subversive powers were enabled to aid in the growing Calvinist plots, among others. Charles V learned in 1545 that Marranos from Spain and Portugal were sending secret arms shipment to Turkey, and so four years later, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, expelled the Marranos from Antwerp. However, many of the Jєωs remained as Catholics, while others simply converted and ran over to England. Yet:
Despite expelling the Jєωs from Antwerp, Charles was at a loss deciding how to deal with so subtle an enemy. Perhaps passion clouded Charles' judgment. According to Walsh, 'If the Emperor had put on the strong armor of sanctity which the Church, his wife and his conscience had often urged upon him the result might have been different, but a Charles dallying with lusty Barbara Blomberg between fits of gout and spurts of gluttony was no match for the Jєωs.
Way to go Charles. Thanks a million.
Church action, and Jєωιѕн-Protestant relations...
The Council of Trent reconvened in 1561, though the English bishops were not there. Queen Elizabeth, in good ol' persecution mode, was not allowing papal delegates in to the country to announce the council. Nevertheless, the Church tied up 17 years of loose ends with the Council of Trent, and the council provided the church leaders with a blueprint that would help to reverse much of the damage of the last 100 years. Jones describes how Pius IV "took a knife to his own household," and soon a Counter Reformation ensued. Jesuits were working in the New World at this point, and much zeal was spread there. We might also want to thank the Holy Virgin Mary for her appearence to the Aztecs at that time. However, the seeds of Protestantism in Europe had taken root, and Jєωιѕн involvement was obvious to everyone.
This great passage I'm about to type is from page 341 of the book, and I thought the entire page was worth noting. Statements in brackets are my additions for your further enlightenment.
The evidence that Protestantism was Judaizing was there for all to see. Graetz and Newman [Jєωιѕн historians] agree the Jєωs played an important role in the Protestant revolt. Walsh quotes Cabrera, a Spanish Marrano, who claims "most of the heresiarchs and heretics of this present Century have been of those people," i.e., the Jєωs. "It is beyond question," he continues, citing another Jєωιѕн historian, that "the first leaders of the Protestant sects were called semi-Judaei, or half-Jєωs, in all parts of Europe," and "men of Jєωιѕн descent were as conspicuous among them as they had been among the Gnostics and would later be among the Communists."
Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were all students of Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan monk of Jєωιѕн descent who lived in the 14th Century. Nicholas got his ideas from Raschi, who was teh conduit that allowed the тαℓмυdic scholarship of his father, Isaac of Troyes, to flow directly into Protestantism. Reuchlin was another conduit [see chapter seven if you folks are interested in the Reuchlin topic; he was fascinated with the Cabala, and so he debated with a genuine Jєωιѕн convert named Pfefferkorn, and he justified Jєωιѕн books to the authorities. Corruption won the day for Reuchlin]. When Pfefferkorn accused Reuchlin of being in the pay of the Jєωs to disseminate their propaganda, the essential truth of the charge caused Reuchlin to issue a violent denial in his pamphlet Augenspiegel. Reuchlin's battle with the Cologne Dominicans was the diversion that allowed Luther to issue his 95 theses with impunity. In each instance, Protestantism exhibited not an advance over Catholic thought, but "one long retrogression toward the moribund Judaism of the Pharisees of the time of Christ."
Conversos waiting impatiently to throw off the pretext of Catholicism were in communion with the Jєωs throughout Europe and together they formed the nucleus for the coming international revolt. Their skill in finance and printing made them powerful culture warriors who could influence events in ways their opponents had difficulty understanding, and they were quick to put these skills in the service of Messianic political movements. The constant in Jєωιѕн participation in revolution from Simon bar Kokhba to Trotsky was not race but rejection of Christ. Revolution was a theological project from its inception:
It was their great tragedy that, having failed to understand Who Christ was, (the Jєωs) could not get rid of the messianic consciousness for which they had been chosen and consecrated. Finding closed to them the only spiritual door to salvation, they were constantly driven to seek redemption in the here and now, in the resources of matter, in gold and power, in anything, anywhere but Christ. When all their kindom had turned to dust in their patient hands, and the inevitable scourge of persecution came to scatter them again and again, they still followed leaders who kept them blind, and remained missionaries of what Saint John called "the spirit that dissolves Christ."
Many of the Jєωs expelled from Spain and Portugal fled to cities in France. Many more made their way to the Spanish Netherlands, where Charles allowed them to flourish. Lucien Wolf claims large numbers of English Protestants--"and doubtless the most active in propaganda and organization" --were Jєωs who had become Calvinists in Antwerp where they were active in the Protestant movement and "had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism." There was a natural affinity between the Calvinists and the Jєωs. Both were "enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition." And Calvinism was a form of Christianity similar to Judaism in its attitude toward idolatry and the law. As a result, the Jєωs "became zealous and valuable allies of the Calvanists."
Now we turn back to John Dee's England, aka "Perfidious Albion"...
Apparently, Elizabeth enacted a reign of terror against Catholics in England that I, as an American, was not aware of.
The first act of Parliament under her abolished the spiritual jurisdiction and authority of the pope in England; this was called the Act of Supremacy. Its design was to eradicate the Catholic faith from England. Next, Parliament abolished the Mass, making it a criminal offense to say or hear it. All spiritual jurisdiction belonged to the Queen, and an English citizen had to attend the new worship or suffer fines. Those who refused the new worship were refusers who often were martyred. English bishops did not assent to this, so they were replaced with political opportunists. Those new evil bishops then replaced the loyal Catholic clergy with corrupt clergy.
Queen Elizabeth was becoming a tool of William Cecil a politician, and her advisor, the founder of the Cecil dynasty. The inactivity of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and later Philip II, emboldened Cecil and others like him to hold onto the stolen Catholic monastery treasuries, and they were emboldened to put forth their activism in England. Later in 1559, John Knox returned to Scotland, and after collaborating with Elizabeth's advisor, Cecil, they bought off the Scottish nobility with money stolen from Catholic monasteries, and soon Scotlant had banished the Catholic Faith. Mass attendance became a capital crime, and Mary, Queen of Scots, "became a prisoner in her own country."
With all of Europe in Protestant upheaval, Cecil felt emboldened to antagonize the Holy Roman Emperor. Soon, Elizabeth was in charge of an anti-Catholic crusade. Soon, it seemed as if there were no difference between being English and being Protestant. Elizabeth sought to "press th eadvantage of the 'invisible kingdom of opposition.'" Queen Elizabeth:
sent emissaries to the kings of Denmark and Sweden, the princes of Germany and the rulers of Switzerland "and all States alienated from the Catholic Church," proposing a league "not only for the defense of their religion but for its propagation and to so much for the security of their own affairs as to cause trouble and detriment to the Crown of France." To dispose men's minds to this effect she sent four English preachers, four Germans and one Frenchman, from England to Germany, who, feigning to be moved by religious zeal and ardor, went to visit many cities and princes, sometimes themselves preaching what they thought might most facilitate their object, and sometimes making the local preachers perform the office."
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Again, interesting stuff!
Reading about the hugely influential role the Jєωs have performed in European history, all of it negative, I'd like some Catholic historian to one day write a general history that distinguishes European achievements from Jєωιѕн achievements falsely attributed to Europeans. I bet few Protestants know that their early leaders were basically marranos. It's a form of Judaization to not have a Catholic view of history, since the default histories are basically pro-Jєωιѕн and conceal much.
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Again, interesting stuff!
Reading about the hugely influential role the Jєωs have performed in European history, all of it negative, I'd like some Catholic historian to one day write a general history that distinguishes European achievements from Jєωιѕн achievements falsely attributed to Europeans. I bet few Protestants know that their early leaders were basically marranos. It's a form of Judaization to not have a Catholic view of history, since the default histories are basically pro-Jєωιѕн and conceal much.
Well, I think this book I'm whittling through is basically what yer looking for.
I hope to add some more summary today, but it depends on how busy I will be. The chapter is just now getting interesting, and the John Dee magikal mystery tour is about to begin. We got a whole 50+ pages more, and each page is dense with info. Should be fun.
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Doctor Faustus in Marlowe also was supposedly based on John Dee -- and James Bond ( Her Majesty's Secret Service, a sort of spook working for the occult queen ).
The Spanish Armada was allegedly defeated because John Dee was in Spain around that time, collecting information, and then smuggled a book giving away information about the Spanish to the English. The book appeared to be a harmless egghead alchemical tract; it was really cipher, code, giving away the plans of the Spanish, how many ships they had, things of this nature. How else could Elizabeth's pukey navy defeat the mighty navy of Spain, which was a wonder of the world?
The main reason the Armada was scattered is because of the weather. It is somewhat of a myth that it was defeated. Philips Navy continued to harass the Prots for yrs. Source--- W Walsh
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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
-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
+Durer famously etched Melancholy as a pictoral representation
+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.)
+ 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."
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Marlow had his eyes gouged out-- apparently he had seen too much.
Does Jones think the Templars guilty?
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Marlow had his eyes gouged out-- apparently he had seen too much.
Does Jones think the Templars guilty?
Dunno. Haven't come to that part yet. There is an entire chapter about the Templars up ahead. I can go through that chapter as I have this one, if people want.
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I don't know alot about Jones but have always had the feeling that he is trying to intimidate people. Let me guess re: his op of Templars-- he will say the were innocent.
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I don't know alot about Jones but have always had the feeling that he is trying to intimidate people. Let me guess re: his op of Templars-- he will say the were innocent.
Don't know!
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Pls post latest info re: Jones & Templars
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Pls post latest info re: Jones & Templars
Hey Roscoe.
Sorry. Didn't know if anyone was still interested in my summarization, here.
Should I continue talking about this John Dee chapter?
In regards to Jones' take on the Templars, I will have to get to the chapter on Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ before I can give you any kind of summary on his thoughts.
Let me know what you folks want.
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Pls post latest info re: Jones & Templars
Hey Roscoe.
Sorry. Didn't know if anyone was still interested in my summarization, here.
I am!
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Pls post latest info re: Jones & Templars
Hey Roscoe.
Sorry. Didn't know if anyone was still interested in my summarization, here.
I am!
Okay. Hang on, then.
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I am also.
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Okay. I got a bit more John Dee info today. Don't know if I can get it out today, but that's my goal.
For now, I'm starting a new thread, with a bit about the Freemasons and hints of the Templars, from Jones' point of view in his book I'm going over.
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At page 352, Jones steps away from the John Dee sensationalism and takes another wider look at the world.
Back and forth between England and the Spanish Netherlands...
He discusses a fellow named Thomas Stapleton, a Catholic priest who set sail for the Netherlands. He was to attend the university at Louvain. Dee went to the Spanish Netherlands to learn Cabala from the rabbis, but Stapleton went because England was unfriendly toward Catholics. Stapleton "probably left illegally, with all the risks that entailed."
At this point, the Spanish Netherlands attracted both Calvinist revolutionaries as well as English Catholics because of its proximity to England, and because it was ruled by Philip II. Louvain became a special attraction for learned English Catholics. Jones quotes a historian named Knox, who said:
Treatise followed treatise in defense of the Catholic faith and confutation of Protestant errors. They wrote by preference in English for their object was to address not the learned but the multitudes. The books were printed in Flanders and then smuggled over in large quantities to England: an operation which was not difficult, on account of the continual communication existing between the two countries. As might have been expected, their labors soon bore fruit in confirming waverers and reclaiming many who had fallen away.
Soon, Stapleton teamed up with another Oxford graduate named William Allen. When Allen returned to England after some time in Louvain, he traveled to various Catholic communities, "urging upon them the duty of abstaining from all communication with heretics in the Protestant worship by law established." Many English Catholics were confused between the Anglican and Catholic services. Again, Jones quotes Knox here:
Many priests said mass secretly and celebrated the heretical offices and supper in public, thus becoming partakers often on the same day (O horrible impiety!) of the chalice of the Lord and the chalice of devils. And this arose from the false persuasion that it was enough to hold the faith interiorly while obeying the Sovereign in externals.
William Allen--the one who returned to England--had set many Catholics right about how to handle things. Yet, back in the Spanish Netherlands where Thomas Stapleton remained, there was growing animosity toward Phiilip II. A fellow named William of Orange headed a faction of Calvanists (he was Lutheran before, though Catholic before that). With Jєωιѕн aid, he lead armies of foreign mercanaries on several attempts to drive the Spanish from the Spanish Netherlands.
Then, Philip II (Holy Roman Emperor) decides to withdraw Spanish troops from Dutch soil.
Philip's gesture, compelled by a lack of money, accelerated the revolution by showing what his enemies considered weakness. In September 1562, English troops occupied Calais, and Elizabeth then used the French port closest to England as a staging area to support the Huguenots, who had embarked upon a campaign of savage iconoclasm in France. The Protestant rabble took a lesson from their Hussite forbears by their wanton destruction of the sacred and their desecration of the dead. Sacred hosts and the bones of the dead were scattered in the mud in front of desecrated churches and trampled under foot by men and horses. To this organized thuggery and desecration, Elizabeth contributed 6,000 men and 100,000 crowns; the emboldened Huguenots pillaged their way across Normandy to link up with the English forces. On February 18, 1563, Duke Francis of Guise, upon whom English Catholics placed their hopes, was shot; after a week, he died. Under torture, his assailant admitted he acted as an agent of Beza, Calvin's lieutenant, then laboring to convert the king of France, and Admiral Coligny, another Calvinist sympathizer. This was no logical uprising based on legitimate complaint, but an international conspiracy involving the highest levels of religion and government attempting to overthrow the Catholic hegemony of Spain and put in its place the revolutionary police state of Geneva. Convinced by his three years in England that no half measures would suffice, Allen went on pilgrimage to Rome to interest the pope in a permanent institutional commitment to bring England back to the Catholic fold.
In the meantime, Stapleton was put through a "mock tribunal" back in England. He left for Louvain (in Spanish Netherlands) after that with his family and never returned to England. The Spanish Netherlands became a headquarters for the Catholic publishing industry, and of course, the evil Queen Elizabeth saw this and planned to crush that headquarters.
John Dee's travels...
In 1563, John Dee took up residence in Antwerp, which held a big publishing industry, particularly the publishing house called "Officina Plantiniana," a famous publisher of heretical books. Specifically, Dee was looking for a book by Johannes Trithemius called the Steganographia. Trithemius was accused of trafficking in demons, and he came off as a magician.
The Steganographia discussed using angels as messengers. I've actually looked at this book the other day. I can confirm what Jones says, that Volumes I and II give long angel name lists that talk about the special powers of each angel. (It's written in Latin.) There are conjuring phrases used to call the angels.
"Once an angel--Padiel, for example--appeared, Trithemius would hand over the message; Padiel would take it to the recipient, who would then mutter another incantation, whereupon the original message would be revealed. It was the occult version of the Western Union telegram, except the messengers were angels, and the master of this encryption technology was, if successful, indistinguishable from God."
Dee thought that such "technology" would be extremely helpful to England's cause, and so he would ask William Cecil for money to roam about Europe to seek out books that could deliver these kinds of results. After all, England was small and somewhat insignificant at this time. And Dee was in need of financial assistance. I like what Jones says about Dee's money issue: "One can imagine Dee waiting, excited someone might pay him to collect books on arcane topics, like the mysterious "Book of Soyga," reportedly written in the Adamic language in which God conversed with Adam." There is no record of an answer from Cecil.
Meanwhile, in the Spanish Netherlands...
As of 1563, Philip II was hearing reports of Anabaptists rising up back in Antwerp. Two Anabaptists told the inquisitors that Antwerp was the nexus of their cult, and that they each had four wives who called their husbands "Lord," and that when "one of the elect tired of a wife, an Anabaptist minister would put her to death quietly in the forest." Also, in Antwerp were a profuse amount of Jєωs who lived openly Jєωιѕн; they'd circuмcise themselves, assemble in ѕуηαgσgυєs, and they publicly defied the Inquisition. A lot were Marranos from Spain. Antwerp became a Jєωιѕн paradise thanks to their international trading.
The Jєωιѕн Spice Trust was a combination of the IRS and the CIA: the Jєωs collected a toll on goods sold all over Europe while engaging in extensive espionage. The Jєωιѕн spy ring stretched from London to Constantinople, and it became a "weapon of the greatest political as well as economic importance."
One story Jones gives is of a converso named Joao Miques aka Joseph Nasi. I'll end this post with this quoted story. This converso, Miques, married into the wealthy Mendes family, who were also conversos--and rather rich. Then,
After growing wealthy through the spice trust and usury, Miques rose to fame as spy minister to the sublime Porte in Constantinople, and after ruining Sulieman the Sot by "leading the prince into all kinds of orgies and excesses," he terrorized Christian princes as the Sultan's chief negotiatior. He orchestrated factions waging war on Philip in Spain. Because of his contacts, Miques, says Graetz (Jєωιѕн historian), relieved the sultan "of the necessity of employing spies," because the Marranos in Antwerp constituted a large spy ring that would "cause anxious hours to many a Christian ruler and diplomatist." When the French royal family refused to pay him, Mendes sent Barbary pirates to seize French ships and confiscate their cargoes, which Mendes sold. Mendes launched the Turkish fleet defeated by Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto, and Mendes urged William of Orange to revolt in Antwerp. Under the direction of Mendes, "All the powers of international Jєωry were allied with, if not actually the motive power of, the vast conspiracy which produced the Protestant revolt." If it weren't for Mendes and Jєωιѕн support, the Calvinists would have become the Dutch version of the Hussites. With Jєωιѕн support, in 1566, they became the manifestation of world revolution.
Such was the fullness of power that the Jєωs had come to, there in the Spanish Netherlands.
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I thought I'd type this out for y'all before bed.
Dee returned to England in 1564. He had just finished his "magnum opus of occult studies," the Monas Hieroglyphica. This work contained "in the compressed form of a magic sign the whole of the occult philosophy."
Dee referred to himself as a "Citizen and Member of the whole and only one Mystical City Universal." The queen would use the Monas as her occult imperial sign.
In summer 1564, Dee and the queen sat together and pored over his baffling but intriguing book. The queen seemed drawn to it, even if she had difficulty understanding it; she also indicated she might put some of its ideas into effect. She may have even considered herself a magus (or maga). She felt she could cure scrofula with her "royal touch," and that the royal power that emanated from her was "magical." She also felt committed to a magical destiny beyond her power to revoke. When a comet appeared in the heavens, Elizabeth was warned not to look because of the "disasters" it might cause. Elizabeth looked anyway, telling her courtiers, "lacta alia est," the die is already cast, indicating that she was intent to follower her "disastrous" career to its conclusion. Dee encouraged her, believing disaster would fall on the Catholics, not Elizabeth, who would triumph over their ruin. She would rise as the paradigm of the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr over the ruins of the old church and the old political order whose destruction would fulfill her destiny. Dee would string her along for years. Four years after Dee introduced her to the Monas, Dee told her he was going to reveal "the great secret for my sake to be disclosed unto her Majesty by Nicolaus Grudius Nicolai, sometime one of the Secretaries to the Emperor Charles V." He never disclosed the secret, but since it involved Grudius, the Belgian poet, it probably involved alchemy to increase gold bullion by transforming base metals, a topic dear to monarchs' hearts.
Ultimately, Elizabeth and Cecil's stinginess overcame Dee's imaginative vision. So Dee, with no prospects at court, moved into his mother's home at Mortlake, an obscure village on the Thames, where he compiled one of the most impressive libraries in Europe. Many of the books were written by Spanish Jєωs, like Johannes de Burgo's Treatise on Magic, which was written in Spanish but in Hebrew letters. Most of them had to do with magic, including Liber Experimentorum by Raymond Llull, another Spaniard. Like Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ, which was made up of exoteric and esoteric doctrines, Dee's library had two levels. Behind the exoteric library, there was an esoteric library, a hidden room Dee called his "Interna Bibliotheca." It housed retorts in which he distilled potions from eggshells and horse dung, the same stills whose vapors would eventually poison him with fumes from toxic metals. The Interna Bibliotheca contained the magical mirror Sir William Pickering had given him, which would so amuse and impress the queen when she visited, and on the same table lay a copy of Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, "which he kept open on the study desk for easy reference."