On Saturday 18 April 1587, in a chamber of the Rožmberk household at Třeboň in southern Bohemia, the angel Madimi spoke through Edward Kelley as he scryed into a polished crystal on the table. She instructed John Dee and Edward Kelley to share their wives in common. Four people were present for the sessions that followed: Dee himself, fifty-nine years old, six years into these conferences; his wife Jane Fromond Dee, twenty-eight years his junior; Kelley, thirty-one, with a reported earlier conviction for forgery or coining; and Kelley’s wife Joanna.
The angel Raphael returned on 20 April urging a formal covenant. On 21 April Dee drew up the contract, in English with Latin phrases at the close, and all four signed it. The covenant survives. It is in the British Library today, Cotton Appendix MS XLVI, in Dee’s own hand, alongside the rest of the Bohemian record.
Seventy-two years later, an English churchman published the page in London with a long preface arguing that Dee and Kelley had been conversing with demons impersonating angels all along. The book fixed Dee in English memory as a learned man ruined by false angels. It was supposed to be read as a warning against believing your own visions.
What the diary page actually says
The Madimi episode is recorded over several entries in the Bohemian diary. The angel had been preparing the household for it for weeks. On Saturday 18 April 1587 Madimi told Kelley that Dee and Kelley were to be brothers, that all things between brothers were to be held in common, and that the wives were a thing held. Dee read this back from the diary to Jane and to Kelley and to Joanna in the days that followed. Jane Dee wept. Dee wrote her weeping into the diary, and the words he tried to use to comfort her, in a hand and a tone that have not changed from his other entries.
On 20 April the angel Raphael returned, urging Dee to consent to the covenant. On 21 April Dee drew up the contract. The covenant is preserved in Casaubon’s 1659 printing on pages 15 to 19 of Book V of the Actiones cum Spiritibus, with the dated header “Aprilis 21.” It opens with the four parties presenting themselves under “one Chryftalline Crown,” and lays down terms: that none of the four would be jealous, that none would speak of the matter outside the household, and that the natural relations of the marriages would resume after God’s purpose had been worked out. The body of the document is in English, with closing Latin formulae. Four signatures sit at the foot of the page: J.D., E.K., J.D., J.K., for John Dee, Edward Kelley, Jane Dee, Joanna Kelley.
Jane Dee is the recorded protagonist of the household’s reaction. Dee wrote her weeping into the entries, her objection that she had not consented when she married, her appeal to him to push back against the angel. Joanna Kelley barely speaks in the record. The diary does not preserve her words on this day. The covenant has her signature.
Two months later Jane Dee was pregnant. Theodorus Trebonianus Dee was born at Třeboň on 28 February 1588. Dee recorded the birth in his diary in his usual neutral hand. The timing makes Kelley a plausible father; the diary does not settle paternity. Theodorus survived the household’s return to England and died in childhood at Manchester at some point after Dee took up the wardenship there in 1596.
The covenant entry sits in the diary as one passage among many. To Dee, it was one episode in a six-year continuous record. To Casaubon, in 1659, it would be the centrepiece of his case that the angels had been demons all along. To the modern reader it is the moment that has to be processed by every honest account of Dee’s life.
Who Dee was before the page
John Dee was born in London on 13 July 1527, in Tower Ward, the son of a Welsh mercer attached to Henry VIII’s court. He matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1542 at fifteen, and was elected one of the founding fellows of Trinity College when Henry chartered it in 1546. He read Greek under the Regius Professor John Cheke. In 1548 he travelled to the Old University of Leuven to study with Gemma Frisius, the Flemish mathematician and cartographer, and with Frisius’s young apprentice Gerard Mercator. In 1550 Dee was in Paris, twenty-three years old, lecturing on Euclid at the Collège de Reims. He declined an offered chair at the university and went home; Cambridge had no chair to give him.
The next decade was difficult. In May 1555 Dee was arrested on a charge of casting horoscopes of Mary I and Elizabeth, an act read at the time as compassing the Queen’s death. He was held in the Tower of London with a fellow prisoner named Bartlet Green, who would later be burned at Smithfield in 1556. Dee was released without conviction. After 1555 he handled political astrology with greater caution.
Elizabeth came to the throne in November 1558 and asked Dee, on the recommendation of Robert Dudley, to choose her coronation date by astrological calculation. He chose 15 January 1559. From that day on he was a quiet figure at the court.
In 1564 Dee published the Monas Hieroglyphica in Antwerp, dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. The book is twenty-four short theorems on a single hieroglyphic figure that combines the standard symbols of the seven classical metals, the four elements, and the cross of the four directions into one composite sign. Dee presented the Monas as a key through which the order of nature could be read. The figure became one of the most reproduced symbols in early-modern occult printing, and we cover it in detail in the Monas Hieroglyphica bestiary entry.
Six years later, in 1570, Dee wrote the long preface to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid, the first time Euclid appeared in English. Dee’s Mathematicall Praeface was a programme for the application of geometry to navigation, surveying, optics, fortification, music, and architecture. The preface was as influential as Billingsley’s translation, and London printers used Dee’s name to sell the book.
In 1577 he printed General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton. The book is one of the earliest published sources for the phrase imperium Britannicum, “British Empire,” with Humphrey Llwyd’s Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum (1568, posthumous) carrying an earlier Latin use. Dee’s argument was that Elizabeth held an inherited claim to the islands and coastlines of the North Atlantic by virtue of King Arthur’s mythical conquests and a lost twelfth-century Welsh discovery. The historian Glyn Parry, in The Arch-Conjuror of England (Yale, 2011), has shown that Lord Burghley used Dee’s memorandum directly to justify Frobisher’s expeditions and the Atlantic policy of the next two decades. The map Dee drew to accompany the imperial argument survives in the British Library as Cotton MS Augustus I.i.1.
By 1582, when Edward Kelley walked up his garden path, Dee was fifty-five years old, a leading applied mathematician of his generation, and the keeper of the largest private library in England. The 1583 catalogue of the Mortlake library, edited by Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson for the Bibliographical Society in 1990, lists 2,337 printed books and 378 manuscripts. The library was open to scholars and to the court; William Cecil, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Queen herself visited.
The William Sherman reading of Dee, in John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Massachusetts, 1995), is that Mortlake was the first modern think tank, with marginalia evidence of Dee writing policy memos on imperial expansion and on the navigation Frobisher needed for the Northwest Passage. On this reading, the angel sessions that began in 1582 came after Dee’s political work had stopped giving him the certainty he wanted.
Who Kelley was, and how the sessions worked
On 8 March 1582 a young man knocked at Dee’s door in Mortlake and asked to speak with him. He gave his name as Edward Talbot. He said he had a powder, found in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, that he believed was the philosopher’s stone. He had heard that Dr Dee was the only man in England who could test it. He had walked from Worcester.
Dee invited him in. Within a week Edward Talbot, who soon dropped the alias and admitted his real name was Edward Kelley, was scrying for Dee in a small crystal globe Dee had on a shelf. Dee had tried to scry himself. He could not see anything in the crystal. Kelley could see figures and hear voices the moment he sat down with it.
The sources for Kelley’s early life are thin and the surviving reports are hostile. He was twenty-six in March 1582, born 1 August 1555. Later reports say he had been punished for forgery or coining and had lost part of his ears at the pillory; he grew his hair long for the rest of his life and wore a cap. He drank, and he had a wife back in Worcester whom Dee had not yet met. None of this disqualified him in Dee’s eyes. Dee had been searching since 1581 for a scryer, and his earlier candidate Barnabas Saul had failed.
The first session was on 10 March 1582. Within weeks Dee had built a working ritual table. The Holy Table, as he called it, was made of sweet wood, eighteen inches square, raised on four small legs. On each leg sat a small wax seal called a Sigillum Aemeth, inscribed with the names of God and the angelic hierarchy. A larger central seal sat on the table itself, and on that the scrying stone. Wax seals from the Holy Table survive in the British Museum, registered under accession 1838,1232.90.
The scrying procedure was specific. Dee sat at one side of the table with his diary and pen. Kelley sat across from him, looking into the stone. Kelley described what he saw. Dee transcribed it, often in a mixture of Latin and English. Sometimes Kelley reported voices and Dee wrote down the words; on other sessions Kelley described what he saw as figures behind glass. Dee asked questions through Kelley and the figures answered.
One of the crystals Dee gave Kelley to scry into at Mortlake was a small sphere of polished quartz set in a metal mount. It is dated 1582 by the Science Museum Group, accession A127915, on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust. The stone is the size of a small egg. It is one of several scrying objects associated with Dee’s records.
Later, in Bohemia, Kelley would also work with a black polished obsidian disk almost twenty centimetres across. The mirror is now in the British Museum, accession Am1966,10.1, displayed in the Enlightenment Gallery. A 2021 study in Antiquity led by Stuart Campbell of the University of Manchester, with Jago Cooper of the British Museum among the co-authors, traced its obsidian source to the Pachuca quarries north of modern Mexico City. The mirror was Aztec in origin, polished in the workshops of Tenochtitlan in the late fifteenth century, and reached northern Europe through one of the early Spanish-Habsburg cabinet networks. Dee identified it as a Saxon stone.
Why Bohemia mattered
Dee first heard of a Polish nobleman named Olbracht Łaski in March 1583, and Łaski arrived at the English court by 15 June 1583. Łaski was Palatine of Sieradz, a Catholic with money problems and a serious interest in alchemy and astrology. Dee met him in Greenwich and within weeks was holding scrying sessions in which the angels recommended that Łaski take Dee and Kelley back to Poland with him. The angels also said that Łaski was descended from English royalty and would one day be King of Poland. Dee accepted the message. Łaski did not become king. By September 1583 the Dee household had set out for the continent: Dee, Jane, three small children, the Kelleys, two servants, and a string of crates containing a portion of the Mortlake library.
The crates that did not travel suffered. While Dee was abroad, a Mortlake mob broke into the house and looted it. They believed Dee was a sorcerer and that his books carried dangerous magic. By the time he returned in 1589, around ten percent of the library had been destroyed and a number of his mathematical instruments were gone. Most of the books were eventually recovered.
Dee and Kelley moved through central Europe in a sequence of patrons. They reached Cracow in March 1584. On 20 June 1584 in Cracow Kelley reported a vision of four castles arranged at the four cardinal points, with an angel at each gate. Dee transcribed the vision over several pages of his diary, and later commissioned the design as a gold disk roughly nine centimetres across, hallmarked in London 1589 when he was finally home. The disk survives in the British Museum, accession 1942,0506.1.
In August 1584 they were summoned to Prague to meet the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Rudolf had been told that Dee carried a message from the Almighty. Rudolf was thirty-two, a melancholic and scholarly emperor. He had moved his court from Vienna to Prague to be closer to the alchemists and astrologers he was assembling at Hradčany Castle. The audience took place on 3 September 1584. Dee delivered, in Latin, a speech in which he said the angel Uriel had instructed him to warn the emperor to repent. Rudolf was politely impressed and did nothing about repenting.
The Bohemian welcome was not stable. Rudolf’s tolerance for occult natural philosophy was real, but Catholic ecclesiastical authority around the imperial court was watching the angelical work with alarm. The papal nuncio in Prague, Filippo Sega, eventually brought formal pressure against Dee and Kelley as suspected conjurors. In May 1586 the Emperor issued an expulsion order on Dee from the Habsburg lands, and the household had to leave Prague. They were saved by Wilhelm of Rožmberk, the richest nobleman in Bohemia, who took them under his protection and installed them at Třeboň in September 1586. From that point the angel sessions, the alchemical demonstrations, and the entire household ran on Rožmberk’s patronage.
Rožmberk’s interest was alchemy. Kelley, by this point, claimed to have produced gold by the projection of a red powder, and several Bohemian witnesses including Rožmberk himself signed depositions to that effect. What they saw is unrecoverable. Lawrence Principe has shown, in The Aspiring Adept (Princeton, 1998) and The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago, 2013), that early-modern adepts could produce dramatic metallic effects with antimony and mercury alloys that look, to a witness expecting transmutation, exactly like gold appearing where there was none before. That comparative context matters even though the most famous later case Principe documents, the New England chymist George Starkey, belongs to the seventeenth century rather than to Kelley’s own. The historian Jennifer Rampling, in a 2012 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science article, has documented that Dee was promoting English alchemical theory at the imperial court throughout this period, citing Roger Bacon and George Ripley, and that the Bohemian alchemists treated him as a serious authority on the medieval English tradition.
The angel sessions continued through all of this. Each of the named voices had a regular role in the work and a distinct personality. Madimi was one of the most memorable, in part because of what would happen in 1587. She appeared to Kelley as a young girl, sometimes as a child and sometimes older. Uriel, Galvah, and Nalvage spoke at length on other sessions; Michael and Gabriel appeared at intervals. Over weeks the voices dictated a language. Later occultists call it Enochian; Dee and Kelley themselves called it the Angelical or the Adamic speech, the language Adam was said to have used to name created things before the Fall. The first product, the Liber Loagaeth (now British Library Sloane MS 3189, written in Kelley’s hand), is forty-nine tables of letters with no consistent grammar yet revealed. Between April and May 1584 Nalvage dictated a second body of material: forty-eight short ritual invocations in the Angelical with English translations, the Calls or Keys, recorded in Sloane MS 3191. For the Keys, Kelley called out letters from a grid the angel showed him in the crystal and Dee wrote them down in reverse order, because the angel had warned them that to write the words forward would unleash effects they could not control.
How seriously to take the language is a separate question. The British linguist Donald Laycock argued, in his 1978 introduction to the Complete Enochian Dictionary, that the Angelical shows the syntactic structures of Kelley’s native English, with a vocabulary that is, in his view, the linguistic profile of glossolalia. The Hermetic scholar Egil Asprem has argued, in Arguing with Angels (SUNY, 2012), that even if the language was generated by the human imagination, its structural coherence was good enough to support a complete ritual system, and that Kelley was not making it up at random. The diaries themselves, which Dee kept in detail in Latin and English on every session, leave the reader the option of either reading.
Why did Dee obey the angels at all? He believed, on the basis of standard sixteenth-century Christian angelology, that genuine angels could only be sent by God; that they had to be tested by their fruit and by their consonance with Scripture; and that, once tested, an angelic command was binding even when it conflicted with natural reason. Dee tested the voices throughout the sessions. He cross-questioned them on points of theology, on Latin grammar, on the names of God. Madimi answered to his satisfaction. Once the testing held, the obedience followed. The covenant of 21 April 1587 was an unusual instruction, but in Dee’s frame it was not a different kind of instruction. It was the same kind of instruction he had been obeying for six years.
What happened after April 1587
Dee did not stop the angel sessions after the covenant. In the months that followed, he and Kelley continued to take dictation from Madimi, with Uriel and Galvah still speaking on the heaviest sessions. Dee continued to send messages back to England via diplomatic couriers, including to Lord Burghley. Jane Dee continued to manage the household. The diary entries of the months after April 1587 do not register the rupture that the modern reader expects them to register. Dee kept the angels’ instruction and kept writing.
In March 1589 the Dee household left Bohemia. The break was not the wife-sharing covenant. It was a falling-out between Dee and Kelley over Kelley’s claim that the angels were now telling him to keep the alchemical work to himself, without sharing it with Dee. Dee saw this as Kelley breaking the partnership the angels themselves had established. They split. Kelley stayed at Třeboň. Dee took Jane, the surviving children, and the gold lamen that would later get its London hallmark, and went home, reaching England later in 1589.
After Dee left Bohemia, Kelley’s gold-making demonstrations to Rudolf II turned to threats of imprisonment. Rudolf arrested him in May 1591 on suspicion of fraud and on a duel charge after Kelley killed an imperial official in a duel. Kelley was held in the castle of Křivoklát, then released, then arrested again and held at Hněvín. In late 1597 or early 1598 he tried to escape from a tower window using a rope of bedsheets. The rope broke and Kelley fell from the tower; he did not survive his injuries. He was forty-two when he died.
Dee, back at Mortlake, found his patrons at court dead or in decline. Dudley had died in 1588 and Walsingham was failing in health. His political utility to Burghley and to the Queen had decayed in the six years he had been on the continent. Elizabeth received him kindly and gave him a stipend. It was not enough. In November 1592 Dee submitted to two of the Queen’s commissioners a long autobiographical document, the Compendious Rehearsal, in which he set out his career, his services to the Crown, his expenditures, and his current poverty, asking for a salaried position in keeping with his standing. The text survives in the Bodleian as Ashmole MS 1788, and is one of the most detailed self-accounts left by any Elizabethan.
In 1595 he was given the wardenship of Christ’s College in Manchester. He took up the post in early 1596 and held it for nine years. The position turned out badly. The Manchester fellows resented an Elizabethan magus parachuted in over them. Dee resented their refusal to accept his authority. He failed to balance the college accounts. His wife Jane died of plague at Manchester in March 1604 or 1605, with several of his servants and one of his daughters. Dee returned to Mortlake the following year, surviving Jane by four to five years. He died at Mortlake in late 1608 or early 1609, in serious poverty, aged eighty-one or eighty-two.
The four people who had signed the covenant were all dead by 1610. The diary they had left behind sat in private libraries for the next fifty years.
Casaubon, 1659
Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. By the spring of 1659 the Protectorate under Richard Cromwell was visibly failing. The Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 was about a year away but already widely anticipated. England’s Anglican churchmen were preparing to resume their public role.
In this interval, in 1659, the classicist Meric Casaubon, son of the more famous Isaac Casaubon, published in London a folio volume of more than five hundred pages titled A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee… and Some Spirits. The title page records the imprint “Printed by D. Maxwell, for T. Garthwait, and sold at the Little North door of S. Pauls,” and that the manuscripts came “out of the Original copy, written with Dr. Dees own Hand,” then in the library of Sir Thomas Cotton (grandson of the antiquary Robert Cotton). The manuscript Casaubon worked from is now British Library Cotton Appendix MS XLVI.
Casaubon’s preface to the volume runs to over fifty pages. He states his intent plainly: “the end that I propose to my self… is not to satisfie curiosity, but to do good, and promote Religion.” His target was double. He wanted to discredit the materialists who denied that spirits could exist at all, and the Civil War’s enthusiast preachers who claimed direct private revelation from God. Dee served both ends.
To the materialists, Casaubon offered Dee as proof that spirits do exist, since they had so unmistakably entered into Dee’s life. To the enthusiasts, he offered Dee as proof that spirits do not always come from God, since they had clearly destroyed Dee. The covenant of 21 April 1587 was at the centre of the case Casaubon built. He printed the contract Dee drew up alongside the entries of the days that followed, with his own marginal glosses. He wrote that Dee had been personally pious, of “Humility, Piety, Patience,” but had been deceived by demons impersonating angels because he lacked the discernment of spirits to tell the difference.
Restoration churchmen used the volume. Joseph Glanvill drew on parts of it in Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). Eighteenth-century philosophical histories then largely passed Dee over in silence. By the time James Orchard Halliwell brought out the marginal almanac diary in 1842, Dee had been a footnote for a century and a half.
The damage was specific. Casaubon had not denied that Dee was a real Elizabethan figure. He had argued that Dee’s career as a mathematician and natural philosopher was genuine, and that this very genuineness made the Bohemian episode tragic. The man who had picked Elizabeth’s coronation date had ended his life listening to demons in a Bohemian household and sharing his wife with a forger. Casaubon’s framing shaped later English references to Dee. For two and a half centuries, every English-language reference to John Dee began with the True and Faithful Relation, and most readers took the wife-sharing covenant as the defining episode of his life.
Casaubon, intending to use Dee as a moral exhibit, also became Dee’s involuntary publicist. Without him, the Bohemian diaries would not have reached print. The angelical conferences would have been a manuscript curiosity in the Cotton library. He shaped Dee’s reputation, but he also preserved it.
Four readings of the same five pages
The modern academic recovery of John Dee began with Frances A. Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and continued through her Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979). For Yates, Dee belongs at the centre of an English Hermetic-Cabalist tradition descending from Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Hermetic Corpus through Pico della Mirandola and Cornelius Agrippa to Dee at Mortlake. The Monas Hieroglyphica of 1564 is, on this reading, a Christian-Cabalist talisman containing in one figure the structure of created nature. The angel conferences extend the same project. The Madimi diary records a magus’s ascent through powerful signs toward the original language of creation. The covenant is a moral failure, but it does not invalidate the project; it shows the cost.
The Yates reading dominated for a generation. It was challenged in 1988 by Nicholas H. Clulee in John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (Routledge). Clulee argued that Yates had imposed a unified Hermetic Dee on what is in fact a phased thinker. Clulee traces Dee through three or four distinct intellectual periods. The early Dee is a follower of Roger Bacon’s optics. The middle Dee absorbs Agrippan ceremonial magic and produces the Monas. The late Dee, after about 1581, breaks with this tradition and turns to angel-mediated revelation in pursuit of the Book of Nature he had failed to read by other means. On Clulee’s reading, the Madimi diary is the record of a final phase, distinct from what came before.
In 1995 William Sherman, in John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Massachusetts), proposed a third frame. Sherman read Dee’s marginalia in the surviving Mortlake books and showed that Dee’s working life was shaped by political service to the Elizabethan state. Mortlake was the first modern think tank, full of policy memos on Atlantic exploration and on the legal claims of the English crown. The angel sessions, on Sherman’s reading, are the late departure of a politically frustrated intellectual whose patrons were dying and whose public utility was declining. The Bohemian years are the breakdown of an intelligencer who had run out of customers. The covenant is the moment a tired man stopped pushing back against a partner whose visions he could no longer test.
The fourth major reading came from Deborah E. Harkness’s John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999). Harkness reads the diaries from the inside as the working notebooks of a natural philosopher who genuinely expected the apocalypse. Dee thought the End was near. The Book of Nature was corrupted, the Adamic language had been lost at the Fall, and the only way to recover what mattered before the End was to ask the angels directly. The covenant is the document of this project at the moment its method collided with a household. Madimi’s instruction in 1587 is part of an angelic call to return to a kind of prelapsarian community of goods, an Edenic state in which jealousy had no place. Dee took the instruction in the same spirit he took every other angelic instruction.
A strong reading of Dee has to account for why each of these positions can draw real evidence from the same archive. Dee carried something of all four on the night of 21 April 1587. He was Yates’s Hermetic magus and Clulee’s phased thinker. He was Sherman’s politically formed intelligencer and Harkness’s apocalyptic natural philosopher. The same diary page can support more than one account of his last great project.
What survives, what was disputed
The manuscripts followed a quiet path back into circulation. After Dee’s death in 1608 or 1609, his books and instruments were sold off. A cedar chest of papers passed from Dee’s estate through several intermediaries to the surgeon John Woodall, then to the confectioner Robert Jones of Lombard Street in 1642. After Jones’s death in 1664, his widow Susannah, having remarried the Tower warder Thomas Wale, brought the chest’s papers to the antiquary Elias Ashmole. On 20 August 1672 Ashmole recorded in his own diary the acquisition of Dee’s holograph manuscripts of the angel conferences. Ashmole bequeathed his collection to Oxford, and Dee’s almanac diaries are now Bodleian Ashmole MSS 487 and 488, with the Compendious Rehearsal and related material at Ashmole MS 1788. The Bohemian spirit-action diary that Casaubon had printed remained at the British Library as Cotton Appendix MS XLVI, separate from the Ashmole acquisitions.
The wider world had to wait. James Orchard Halliwell edited the marginal almanac diary as The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee for the Camden Society in 1842, with what he himself called numerous omissions. Charlotte Fell-Smith published the first scholarly biography in 1909, devoting nearly half the book to the scrying while protesting against the “necromancer” caricature. Frances Yates began the academic rehabilitation in 1964. Harkness, Sherman, Clulee, and Szőnyi built it out over the four decades that followed; Glyn Parry’s archival biography in 2011 is the most recent major contribution.
Three modern claims about Dee’s larger influence circulate widely. Each deserves a separate verdict.
The Voynich Manuscript. A widespread story holds that Dee sold the Voynich Manuscript, now Beinecke MS 408 at Yale, to Rudolf II for six hundred ducats during the Bohemian years. The story descends entirely from Wilfrid Voynich’s 1921 lecture at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in which he combined a 19 August 1665 letter from Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher (which mentions a 600-ducat sale by an unnamed previous owner) with Dee’s known presence in Prague, and concluded that Dee was the seller. Dee’s own diaries contain no entry recording such a sale. The archival work of Rafał Prinke and René Zandbergen, presented in their introductions to The Voynich Manuscript: The Complete Edition (Watkins, 2017), points instead to a 1599 transaction in the Prague imperial accounts with Carl Widemann, an Augsburg Paracelsus-manuscript dealer, as the only matching figure for the 600-gulden sum. The Dee-as-seller claim is almost certainly fiction.
Shakespeare’s Prospero. Frances Yates argued, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (1975) and her New York Review of Books essay “A Great Magus” of 25 January 1973, that Prospero in The Tempest (c. 1611) was modelled on Dee. The structural parallels are real: an exiled scholar-magus, a famous library, a spirit servant, control over weather, a final renunciation of magic. The textual evidence is missing. The Tempest contains no direct reference to Dee, and there is no document linking Shakespeare to Dee. In the 1973 essay Yates was actually summarising Furio Jesi’s argument, not making the claim in her own voice; she granted that Prospero “belongs to the kind of outlook exemplified in England by Dee,” not that Prospero was Dee. The reading is unsupported but plausible. Dee is one available cultural template Shakespeare would have known, alongside Cornelius Agrippa and the contemporary Bermuda pamphlets.
The Rosicrucian connection. Yates argued in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) that Dee’s Bohemian travels seeded the Rosicrucian manifestos that appeared in Germany between 1614 and 1616. The Fama Fraternitatis (1614) and the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) were printed at Kassel; the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616, attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae) was printed at Strasbourg. The Chymical Wedding reproduces Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica sigil on the invitation passage of the First Day. That visual borrowing is real. The manifestos themselves do not name Dee. The historian Brian Vickers, in his 1979 article “Frances Yates and the Writing of History” (Journal of Modern History 51, no. 2: 287-316), dismantled the Yates chain in detail, showing the manifestos were drafted in a Tübingen Lutheran circle around Andreae and Tobias Hess, with sources in Paracelsus and Joachim of Fiore. The reading is split. The Monas glyph influenced the Chymical Wedding iconography. Dee as founder or covert member of the Rosicrucian fraternity is almost certainly fiction. We treat the Rosicrucian manifestos in their own context in The Invisible College: An Introduction to Rosicrucianism.
The pattern repeats. Where the documentary chain leads through Dee’s hand, the connections hold. Where it requires Dee at a meeting we have no record of him attending, the connections do not.
What is in the diary
The covenant page is still in the British Library, Cotton Appendix MS XLVI. The Latin header “Aprilis 21” stands above the English text, and four signatures sit at the foot of the page. The crystal Edward Kelley used in Mortlake is in the Science Museum in London, dated 1582, accession A127915, on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust. The Aztec obsidian mirror Dee identified as a Saxon stone is in the British Museum, accession Am1966,10.1, and the 2021 Antiquity study by Stuart Campbell and colleagues traced its source to Pachuca, north of modern Mexico City. The mirror was polished in the workshops of Tenochtitlan in the late fifteenth century and was used in the Aztec divination practice in which Tezcatlipoca, the smoking-mirror god, was consulted by polished obsidian. It crossed the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century in a Spanish-Habsburg cabinet, and ended up in Dee’s possession by the early 1580s.
Two scrying traditions met in Dee’s hands. Tezcatlipoca’s mirror, made for one cosmos, was used by Dee and Kelley to consult the messengers of another. Dee did not know the mirror’s history. He did know that the work was serious. The diary is the record of what he did with the meeting.
After Casaubon, after Yates, and after the four scholarly readings of the diary, the surviving record forces the two halves of Dee’s life onto the same page. Dee picked Elizabeth’s coronation date and went on to print the first English imperial theory. Twenty years later he was listening to angels in a Bohemian household and drafting a covenant under their instruction, and his wife signed it. He wrote it all down, in his own hand, in Latin and English, on every session for six years. The Bohemian diary, the Mortlake crystal, the Pachuca mirror, and the gold lamen with the London hallmark are the surviving traces of what he did.
Image Sources
- Hero (Třeboň, the Holy Table, 1587): original dark-romanticism interpretation by The Crazy Alchemist, generated with Google Gemini 3 Pro Image (Nano Banana Pro), May 2026.
- John Dee, c. 1594: anonymous British School, oil on canvas, 76 × 63.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA1898.18). Painted when Dee was sixty-seven. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Edward Kelley engraving, 1781: illustration from Thomas Pennant’s extra-illustrated A Tour in Wales (Downing, 1781), with drawings by Moses Griffiths and others. National Library of Wales. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- John Dee’s gold disc (Vision of the Four Castles), 1584/1589: the lamen Dee commissioned from Kelley’s Cracow vision of 20 June 1584, hallmarked in London 1589. British Museum, accession 1942,0506.1. Photographed by Vassil. Public domain (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Dee, John. Mysteriorum Libri Quinque. British Library, Sloane MS 3188 (spiritual diary, 22 December 1581 to 23 May 1583)
- Dee, John, and Edward Kelley. Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus / Liber Loagaeth. British Library, Sloane MS 3189 (1583, in Kelley’s hand)
- Dee, John. Sloane MS 3191 (compiled angelical texts, 48 Calls or Keys, Liber Scientiae, De Heptarchia Mystica, Invocations). British Library
- Dee, John. Bohemian Spiritual Diary 1583-1607. British Library, Cotton Appendix MS XLVI, parts I and II (Dee’s holograph; the manuscript edited by Casaubon in 1659)
- Dee, John. Compendious Rehearsal (1592). Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1788
- Dee, John. Private Diary, in marginalia of two quarto almanacs. Bodleian Library, Ashmole MSS 487 and 488
- Dee, John. Manuscript map of the North Atlantic and east coast of North America, c. 1580. British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I.i.1
- Dee, John. Monas Hieroglyphica. Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1564
- Dee, John. ‘Mathematicall Praeface’ to Henry Billingsley (trans.), The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara. London: John Daye, 1570
- Dee, John. General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. London: John Daye, 1577
- Casaubon, Meric (ed.). A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee… and Some Spirits. London: Printed by D. Maxwell for T. Garthwait, 1659
- Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard (ed.). The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. London: Camden Society, 1842
- Roberts, Julian, and Andrew G. Watson (eds.). John Dee’s Library Catalogue. London: Bibliographical Society, 1990 (facsimile of Dee’s 1583 catalogue, 2,337 printed books and 378 manuscripts verified)
- Peterson, Joseph H. (ed. and trans.). John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Boston: Weiser, 2003
- Whitby, Christopher (ed.). John Dee’s Actions with Spirits. New York: Garland, 1988, 2 vols. (PhD Birmingham, 1982)
- Fell-Smith, Charlotte. John Dee, 1527-1608. London: Constable, 1909
- Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London / Chicago: Routledge & Kegan Paul / University of Chicago Press, 1964
- Yates, Frances A. Theatre of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969
- Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972
- Yates, Frances A. Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975
- Yates, Frances A. ‘A Great Magus.’ The New York Review of Books, 25 January 1973 (review of Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus)
- Yates, Frances A. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979
- French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972
- Clulee, Nicholas H. John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion. London: Routledge, 1988
- Sherman, William H. John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
- Harkness, Deborah E. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Szőnyi, György E. John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004
- Clucas, Stephen (ed.). John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought. Dordrecht: Springer (International Archives of the History of Ideas 193), 2006
- Parry, Glyn. The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011 / 2012
- Rampling, Jennifer M. (ed.). ‘John Dee and the Sciences,’ special issue, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43, no. 3 (2012)
- Rampling, Jennifer M. ‘John Dee and the alchemists: Practising and promoting English alchemy in the Holy Roman Empire.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43, no. 3 (2012): 498-508
- Forshaw, Peter J. ‘The Hermetic Frontispiece: Contextualising John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad.’ Ambix 64, no. 2 (2017)
- Laycock, Donald C. The Complete Enochian Dictionary. London: Askin, 1978; rev. ed. Boston: Weiser, 2001
- Asprem, Egil. Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012
- Vickers, Brian. ‘Frances Yates and the Writing of History.’ Journal of Modern History 51, no. 2 (1979): 287-316
- Prinke, Rafał T., and René Zandbergen. ‘Introductions.’ In Stephen Skinner (ed.), with Rafał T. Prinke and René Zandbergen, The Voynich Manuscript: The Complete Edition. London: Watkins, 2017
- Mowat, Barbara A. ‘Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus.’ English Literary Renaissance 11, no. 3 (1981): 281-303
- Principe, Lawrence M. The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998
- Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013
- Campbell, Stuart, Elizabeth Healey, Yaroslav Kuzmin, and Jago Cooper. ‘Mirror, Magus, and More: Reflections on John Dee’s Obsidian Mirror.’ Antiquity 95, no. 384 (2021): 1547-1564 (Pachuca, Mexico, source confirmation)
- British Museum. Aztec obsidian mirror, accession Am1966,10.1 (Enlightenment Gallery)
- British Museum. Sigillum Aemeth wax seals, accessions 1838,1232.90.a, b, c
- British Museum. ‘Vision of the Four Castles’ gold lamen, accession 1942,0506.1 (Kraków vision 20 June 1584, London hallmark 1589)
- Science Museum Group. Crystal scrying stone, inventory A127915 (dated 1582; on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust)
