I'm only posting all of this (from another thread), in order to keep a copy of the entire summary together in one thread on its own.  I'll continue the John Dee thread as a separate entity, because more can be discussed of that man outside of Jones' book.


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Chapter 10: John Dee and Magic

In this chapter, I go through it more thoroughly than the other chapters.  I am doing this because someone asked me to extract all the useful John Dee information.  So, chapter 10 is more of an explication than a summary.  I think this chapter is 90 pages long, and we are only halfway through it.

I'm considering doing the same for the chapter about Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ, which I believe is chapter 12.

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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 ####ens' 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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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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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."