John Dee is one of the most fascinating figures in all of English history, yet very few people other than Elizabethan scholars or students of Enochian magic know anything about him. This is the result of centuries of deliberate neglect on the part of historians. Dee was a magician, and because of this, he was dismissed as a fringe figure by those who documented the Elizabethan Age and its heroes, on the general principle that anyone who could seriously study magic must be a fool or a lunatic.

Dee was born at London on July 13, 1527, the son of Roland Dee, a "gentleman sewer" to King Henry VIII. A sewer, or server, was someone who arranged the dining table, seated guests, carved the meat, and tasted the food to determine if it was fit to set before the King. Roland was a wealthy wine merchant descended by blood to the ancient kings of Wales.

By age ten Dee had already mastered Latin and embarked on his lifelong study of the classics. At age fifteen he attended St. John's College at Cambridge, where he was taught astronomy and mathematics. He pursued his schooling single-mindedly for the next three years, allowing himself no more than four hours of sleep a night so that he would have more time to learn.

In 1546, while still at university, Dee designed a stage effect for Aristophanes' play Peace involving a mechanical beetle that carried one of the actors up into the heavens on its back. So astounding was this machinery for its day, rumors soon began to spread that Dee was a sorcerer. We may suspect that the rumors were not completely groundless, and that Dee's nocturnal activities while at Cambridge played a part in their dissemination, but about Dee's occult studies while at university we known nothing.

After university Dee traveled over Europe studying, lecturing, and generally astounding all those who met him with his keen intellect. He was also, by all accounts, a handsome man in his youth. Aubury described his appearance in his more mature years as "of a very fair, clear sanguine complexion, with a long beard as white as milk -- a very handsome man -- tall and slender. He wore a goune like an artist's goune with hanging sleeves." Dee also adopted the black skullcap of a scholar in later life. You can see it in his portrait at the top of this page.

Dee acquired both scientific and occult knowledge while on the Continent. In later years he was invariably referred to as Doctor Dee, but there is no solid evidence to prove that he ever received his doctorate of philosophy or theology from any European university. The title may have been honorary.

Upon his return to England he had the good sense, or good fortune, to attach his career to the young princess Elizabeth rather than to her rival Bloody Queen Mary Tudor. This resulted in Dee being arrested for witchcraft and treason during Mary's repressive reign. For a time both he and the princess daily expected their lives to end under the executioner's sword, but after Mary's death, Elizabeth ascended to the throne and Dee's favor at Court was assured.

He became the Court astrologer and personal advisor to Queen Elizabeth. His council was sought concerned geographical and historical questions of English sovereignty, but also matters of magic and political intrigue. On one occasion, when a witch doll in the likeness of Elizabeth was discovered with a pin thrust through its heart, the Queen sent for Dee to consult about what course of action to take. What Dee advised her has not been preserved. There is circumstantial evidence that Dee served Elizabeth as a political spy for England during his many journeys to the Continent, but this cannot be proved.

He was also frequently consulted by the great English navigators of the day, such as Frobisher and Drake, who needed his extensive knowledge of geography and cartography in their voyages of discovery in the New World and the Far East. Dee was the most skilled cartographer of the time, having studied under the great Mercator himself while in Europe. In 1580 the explorer Humphrey Gilbert promised Dee title to all the lands he discovered in the New World that lay north of the 50th parallel -- in other words, most of Canada. Unfortunately for Dee, Gilbert was drown on the voyage.

Dee was also sought out by those wishing to use his private library. In the time of Elizabeth there was no public library in England. Dee spent his personal fortune collecting books and manuscripts over a period of decades. The library at his family estate at Mortlake was the largest collection of scientific and philosophical books in the nation, consisting at its height of more than 4000 books and manuscripts. By contrast, the Library of Cambridge University possessed only 451 books. Dee himself was regarded as an authority on mathematics, history, genealogy, geography, cartography, medicine, cipher codes, astronomy and its related science of astrology, and of course, magic. Learned men traveled from all across Europe to meet with him at his home, and to use his library.

One of the men who came to Dee's door in the spring of 1582 was a man calling himself Edward Talbot. He was introduced to Dee by a mutual friend, and in a roundabout way let it be known that he was interested in magic and alchemy. Indeed, the man whose true name was Edward Kelley was an alchemist who had come to Mortlake to seek Dee's help in understanding an alchemical manuscript that had recently come into his possession. Perhaps to hold Dee's interest, he let it be known that he had the gift of second sight.

Dee was immediately fascinated by his strange and uncouth visitor. The alchemical manuscript held his attention in an abstract way, as any recondite esoteric document would, but his primary concern was Kelley's abilities as a seer. For some months Dee had been engaged in what would come to be called in the nineteenth century seances with a medium named Barnabas Saul. Dee was convinced that spiritual intelligences, or angels, were trying to reach him on some vital matter, and was using Saul's limited abilities in an attempt to communicate with them through a crystal ball.

Significantly, the angels had made first contact with Dee exactly one year to the day prior to Kelley's arrival at Mortlake. Kelley came to consult with Dee on March 8, 1582. On the same date in 1581 Dee heard strange rapping noises in his bed chamber shortly before midnight. He wrote in his personal diary: "March 8th, it was the 8 day, being Wensday, hora noctis 10, 11, the strange noyse in my chamber of knocking; and the voyce, ten tymes repeted, somewhat like the shrich of an owle, but more longly drawn, and more softly, as it were in my chamber."

One of the first psychic messages Kelley gave Dee was the news that Saul was a fake and was intent upon robbing and deceiving Dee. Convinced of Kelley's power after a few preliminary experiments, Dee dismissed Saul and promptly employed Kelley to act as his seer for the sum of fifty pounds per year.

Over the next five years Dee and Kelley scried together in the crystal almost on a daily basis. While Kelley sat in front of a small table that supported the crystal ball on its stand and narrated both what he saw in the crystal, and what the angels and spirits appearing in the crystal said, Dee sat at a desk with paper and pen and recorded Kelley's narrative word for word.

The angels that communicated with Kelley in the crystal identified themselves as the same group of angelic beings who had instructed the biblical patriarch Enoch after Enoch was carried alive up into heaven. Because of the myth that Enoch had never died, but had been taken into heaven while still alive, over the centuries numerous occult books had been written that were attributed to his authority. The most famous of these is the Hebrew Book of Enoch, which is mainly concerned with the fall of the rebel angels from heaven.

The angels informed Dee through Kelley that Dee had been chosen to receive the true heavenly magic that had been taught by them in ages past to Enoch, in order that Dee could transmit their system of magic to human being who might be worthy to receive it.

The angels then dictated, in bits and pieces that are out of their correct sequence, an incredibly complex system of ceremonial high magic that is based on a set of magic squares containing a mixture of letters and numbers. This system of Enochian magic has come down to the present thanks to the miraculous preservation of Dee and Kelley's occult diaries. The story of how Dee's manuscripts were preserved over the centuries is almost too fantastic to believe, but they did survive and are preserved today in the British Library, along with Dee's magical tools and pentacles, which are kept in the British Museum.

Enochian magic is not complete. Dee and Kelley parted company partially in 1587, some five years after their initial meeting, and their connection was broken completely in 1589 -- after this date Dee never saw Kelley again. Kelley stayed in Bohemia, where he and Dee had been living, and attempted to manufacture gold alchemically for the German Emperor Rudolph II. At the insistence of Queen Elizabeth, Dee returned to England.

However, enough important sections of Enochian magic are preserved that they can be used for ritual magic. This was the practice of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which incorporated the most important parts of Enochian magic into its own magical system. These parts include the Enochian alphabet, the Enochian Calls or Keys, and the Great Table of the Four Watchtowers.

The Enochian angels transmitted a complete angelic language with its own alphabet to Dee and Kelley in the form of 48 hauntingly beautiful evocations. Of these, eighteen are distinct and unique from each other, and thirty consist of the same text with thirty different names inserted in the first sentence. These latter thirty Keys are known as the Call of the Thirty Airs. Each name inserted into the evocative Enochian text is the name of one of thirty concentric dimensions or levels of reality. Each Call summons the ruling angels of one of these worlds. Aleister Crowley scried all thirty of these realities. You will find his visions in his book The Vision and the Voice. The Enochian angels dictated the Enochian text of the Keys backwards to Kelley, then at a later time dictated an English translation of the Keys.

On other occasions, the angels transmitted the strange shapes of the 21 letters of the Enochian alphabet. This alphabet was needed by Dee in the manufacture of some of his ritual talismans and furniture, such as the table that supported his scrying stone (crystal ball). This table was lost over the centuries, although a clear engraving of its inscribed surface exists.

The Great Table consists of four magic squares called Watchtowers, each twelve columns by thirteen rows in size. These squares are linked to the four directions of the compass: east, south, west and north. Each cell of these squares holds a letter. The four Watchtowers are joined together at the points of the compass by a cross of squares, known as the Black Cross, which also contains letters -- the letters on the Black Cross, when collected together in the form of a magic square of four rows and five columns of letters, are known as the Tablet of Union. The Watchtowers were used individually and separately by the members of the Golden Dawn, but were not employed in the form of the Great Table.

By means of techniques communicated to Kelley by the Enochian angels, it is possible to extract the names of angels and spirits from various parts of the Great Table, and to use these beings -- which are assigned specific classes of work in Dee's original record -- for purposes of ritual magic.

Largely thanks to the preservation within the documents of the Golden Dawn of an incomplete and modified form of Enochian magic, the Watchtowers and Keys have come down to the present and are being actively employed by modern occultists. Enochian magic has a reputation for being extremely potent and dangerous. It shares this distinction with another form of magic used by the Golden Dawn, the system of magic squares contained in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, an ancient occult text translated from French to English and published by the leader of the Golden Dawn, S. L. MacGregor Mathers.

After his return to England, Dee attempted to re-establish communication with the Enochian angels, but was unsuccessful. As the angels themselves had stated several times during Kelley's talks with them, both Dee and his scryer Kelley were necessary in the work of receiving the system of Enochian magic. They were two halves of a single entity. As the angels had predicted, neither man prospered alone. Kelley was thrown into prison several times by the impatient Emperor Rudolph, who grew tired of waiting for Kelley to increase his already vast wealth. Dee remained a close friend and confident to Queen Elizabeth but his friendship with her never translated itself into political power or rich gifts and appointments.

On November 25, 1595, Dee recorded in one of his diaries "the news that Sir Edward Kelley was slayne." The circumstances of Kelley's death remain murky. He may have perished in an attempted prison break staged by one of Queen Elizabeth's agents -- Elizabeth was just as interested in Kelley's gold-making abilities as the Emperor Rudolph. Whatever the cause, Kelley's demise ended forever Dee's dream that he and Kelley would be reunited, and would once again commune with the Enochian angels, as they had done of old. Even to the day of Kelley's death, Dee remained his close and genuine friend, writing to the alchemist frequent letters begging Kelley to return to England.

Elizabeth remained true to her promise to Dee, given to him in 1577, prior to his departure from England with Kelley, that for so long as she lived, no one in England would interfere with his occult studies and practices. After her death in 1603, Dee's life became less pleasant. The new king James I was a devout Christian who detested Dee as a sorcerer. He refused to meet with Dee, and threatened to have Dee tried for witchcraft. Dee was forced out of his modest appointment as Warden of Christ College at Manchester, which Elizabeth had conferred upon him in 1596 as a kind of pension in his old age. He was persecuted, off and on, until his death in 1608, and died in extreme poverty.

All and all, John Dee had little to complain about. He was hailed in his youth as a promising young genius, and was consulted in his maturity as the leading authority in England on numerous scientific and philosophic subjects. All his life he moved among circles of nobility, and was on close acquaintance with kings and queens, politicians and scholars, sages and adventurers. Although he was never fabulously wealthy, nor was he poor until the last few years of his life. He married two (or perhaps three) times, and sired eight children to his last wife, Jane Fromonds, a lady-in-waiting to one of the noble women of Elizabeth's royal Court. His wife and most of his children survived him. His eldest son, Arthur, went on to become a famous physician.

In addition to these many blessings, Dee could claim something more than his most fortunate contemporaries. He had talked with the angels of Enoch, and served as their instrument in conveying to mankind the precious and unique legacy of Enochian magic. It is this gift of the angels which, more than any other achievement, distinguishes the long and interesting life of Dr. John Dee.