Edward Kelley (1555-1595) is best known as the crystal scryer employed by the Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee. Between 1582 and 1587 Dee and Kelley were almost inseparable partners in the most romantic, incredible, and arguably the most important ritual working in the history of Western magic.

On a regular basis Kelley would establish contact through Dee's crystal ball with a hierarchy of spiritual beings who identified themselves as the angels that had instructed the patriarch Enoch in the occult wisdom of heaven. Dee would then ask these angels questions concerning the system of Enochian magic, and would write down in meticulous detail everything that was said or done by the angels, as reported by Kelley. The result was a transcript of over five years of angelic teachings that included the Enochian language, the Enochian Calls, and the Great Table of the Watchtowers, along with numerous other fragments of Enochian magic.

As fascinating as Kelley's role in the transmission of Enochian magic may be, Kelley had a life and a fame apart from John Dee. Kelley was renowned as an alchemist, and for a time after his death, his fame eclipsed that of his erudite employer.

Kelley was born at Worcester. His father was probably an apothecary named Talbot -- at his first meeting with John Dee, Kelley used the alias Talbot to disguise his identity. It is possible that Talbot was the alchemist's true name and Kelley an assumed identity. Very little of Kelley's early life is known, but it seems likely that he acquired his interest in alchemy while studying chemistry in his father's shop. He had at least one brother, who was known as Thomas Kelley at the time the alchemist was in Dee's company.

It is no more than speculation, but it is possible that Kelley's natural father died, and that his mother remarried. This would explain the confusion of the two names -- Kelley would be the alchemist's birth name, and Talbot the name of his step-father the apothecary.

At age seventeen Kelley traveled to Oxford and registered under the name Talbot at Gloucester Hall. He stayed at university only a short period and left abruptly, possibly under a cloud. It is tempting to speculate that he was expelled for the study and practice of necromancy, but there is no record of his doings at school.

Two years later he took up the profession of law at London, and later at Lancaster. His work seems to have involved property law, such as the drawing up of title deeds and the settlements of land claims. Here occurred the infamous incident that was to haunt Kelley's reputation for the rest of his life, and continues to demean him in the eyes of many even to the present day.

One night Kelley along with his friend, Paul Waring, and a serving man hired for the task, dug up the corpse of a recently buried pauper from the graveyard attached to Law Church at the park of Wotton-in-the-Dale (sometimes known as Walton Ledale) in the county of Lancaster. Kelley had been paid by a young nobleman in the district to animate the corpse with the arts of necromancy in order to learn details regarding the nobleman's future prospects. According to the antiquarian Ebenezer Sibley, Kelley and Waring animated the corpse in order to discover the whereabouts of treasure that was supposed to have been hidden by the dead man.

Whatever the truth, rumors of the violation began to be whispered around Lancaster. Even though nothing could be proven against the young Kelley, his career as a scribe and lawyer was irredeemably tainted. Kelley must have suffered an unhappy few years struggling to earn a meager living at law while secretly practicing magic and alchemy, which were his primary passions. In 1580 Kelley was accused of forging title deeds for one of his clients, and is fabled to have been publicly pilloried.

Around this same period it is reputed by some authorities that Kelley had his ears cropped -- that is, cut off -- for the crime of coining. Coining was the Elizabethan equivalent to counterfeiting. It involved the manufacture of coins with less than their required content of gold or silver. None of the portraits of Kelley show him without ears, so it is likely that this sentence, if passed, was never carried out. A. E. Waite believed that Kelley escaped his punishment by fleeing to Wales.

While traveling on the road to Wales, Kelley is reported to have purchased at little cost from an innkeeper an alchemical manuscript with many inscrutable images that was called by Kelley The Book of St. Dunstan. He also bought two small boxes, one of which held the red powder and the other the white powder. The red powder is a concentrated alchemical substance that has the power to transform base metals such as iron or lead into gold. The white powder is a less potent substance that has the power to turn base metals into silver. The box containing the red powder was broken when Kelley got it, and only a little of the precious powder remained inside.

The manuscript and the two boxes were supposed to have been taken out of the tomb of a Catholic bishop that had been broken into by local villagers just prior to Kelley's arrival at the village. Some say this tomb lay in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. This was a time in living memory of the closing of all the abbeys throughout England by order of Henry the Eighth, as a punishment on the Pope and the Church for refusing to grant Henry a divorce from his first wife so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Feelings against Catholics were strong throughout England, which explains why the tomb of a bishop might be desecrated.

Kelley spent a year or so experimenting with the powders, and trying without success to understand the Book of St. Dunstan. At this time he worked briefly as a secretary to Thomas Allan, an occult scholar and magician. He was convinced that if only he could decipher the meaning of the strange images in the manuscript, he could manufacture more of the red powder, and could learn how to better use the small amount of powder already in his possession. But the manuscript defeated all his efforts to make sense of it.

Kelley made the fateful decision to go to the house of the great scholar John Dee, which was located in the little village of Mortlake on the River Thames not far southwest of London. Kelley was staying in lodgings at Islington, a burrough of London, at the time. He rode to Mortlake by horse. On the way, spirits came to Kelley and warned him that he would be "pulled in pieces" if he took his powders and Book of St. Dunstan to Dee, but Kelley defied them. He met Dee on March 8th of 1582, using the assumed name Talbot to disguise his identity, just in case his talk of alchemy and magic offended Dee and caused the scholar to report him to the authorities.

For exactly one year to the day Dee had been receiving communications from spirits. These so intrigued the great mathematician and scholar, he had embarked on a series of seances to communicate with them, using the mediumistic skills of a crystal gazer named Barnabas Saul. Saul certainly possessed some ability -- on October 9th of the previous year he had complained to Dee of being tormented by a spirit around midnight while sleeping in Dee's hall. However, Dee's scryer was not nearly so highly skilled as the alchemist. Upon his first meeting with Dee, Kelley received the psychic impression that Saul was intent upon cheating Dee, and was persuasive enough in communicating this impression to Dee that Dee dismissed Saul from his employ.

Kelley was not overly keen on acting as Dee's scryer. He did not regard spirits as his friends, or as beings that could be trusted. His relations with spirits as a necromancer has been of an adversarial kind. He forced them to do his bidding, and the spirits resented him because of it. Kelley had come to Dee with the hope that Dee could make sense out of the Book of St. Dunstan.

Dee immediately recognized the medium he had been seeking for a year in Kelley. He persuaded Kelley to try some experiments with the crystal. The results were so spectacular that he asked Kelley to stay on and serve him as a scryer for the sum of fifty pounds per year. This Kelley reluctantly agreed to do, because he recognized that if he was to have the advantage of Dee's spectacular library of occult and philosophical books, as well as Dee's own expertise, in learning how to make more of the red powder, he must remain in Dee's company for an extended period.

Over the next seven years Dee and Kelley were in almost daily communication with the Enochian angels. Kelley established communication with these angels on his first attempt, and thereafter was never long out of contact with them. The angels instructed Dee how to make all the ritual tools and furniture which they declared necessary to receive their most important messages. When these things were made, they proceeded to transmit through Kelley the complex system of Enochian magic. This was revealed in bits and pieces of information out of their proper sequence over a span of years. Dee painstakingly recorded everything, and then arduously put it together and made sense out of it.

Kelley always hated and mistrusted the angels. At times Dee had to beg him to continue the scrying sessions. Kelley had no strong interest in what the angels were saying, and was convinced that in any case they were deceiving him and Dee. The angels intimated to Dee that Dee was to be the prophet who would spread their message among mankind. What their message was is not clear, but it appears to have had something to do with the coming apocalypse. Dee had been selected because of his great wisdom and piety, the angels said, to teach the wisdom of Enoch to the human race before the final judgement.

Kelley continued to hope that the angels would reveal to him the secret of the red powder. Numerous times he asked about it, and caused Dee to ask the angels about it. The angels always put Kelley off, saying that in time they would reveal all the secrets of his book and powder, but for the present the transmission of Enochian magic was more important than Kelley's personal interests.

The truth is that the angels held Kelley in open contempt. They actually insulted him through his own lips and mocked him. Kelley was forced to repeat their insults to Dee, who copied them down in his diaries. The angels looked upon Kelley as a kind of psychic telephone through which they could reach Dee's consciousness. To the angels, Kelley was important only as a means for reaching Dee. The angels declared that they had heightened Kelley's psychic abilities, and that without their agency his psychic power would be negligible.

Before long the angels were ruling the lives of the two men. Dee believed them to be the holy messengers of God and would never have considered defying them. Kelley, for his part, was more than a little afraid of them, particularly when they threatened to curse him and Dee if they dared to disobey.

On April 29th, 1582, the angel Michael told Kelley that he must betake himself to the world. By this cryptic comment, Kelley understood that the angel meant for him to marry. Kelley had no desire to take a wife. He considered himself married to his art of alchemy, and believed that if he took a wife his alchemical abilities would be greatly weakened. The angels were unrelenting. On May 4th they ordered Kelley to get married. Kelley was counseled by Dee to obey them. Shortly thereafter he took as his wife a nineteen year old girl named Joan Cooper, from the little village of Chipping Norton.

Kelley's married life was stormy. His wife fought with him. Dee and his own wife Jane were constantly patching things up between the Kelleys. Jane Dee liked Kelley's wife, and Dee for his part had practical reasons for wishing Kelley to remain happily at Mortlake.

In June of 1583 a legal attachment was issued against Kelley for the crime of coining. Dee staunchly defended Kelley against the charge, which he believed to be groundless. Kelley came very near to being sent to prison, but in the end escaped the punishment of law.

On July 4th Kelley had an enormous fight with Joan. When her friends criticized Kelley as a coiner, she refused to defend him. This infuriated Kelley, who reasonably enough felt that the least his wife could give him was loyalty. Dee and Kelley were living at Mortlake at this time. Jane Dee persuaded her husband to smooth things over again. That night Dee's Enochian familiar, Madimi, exorcised the demon Barma and fourteen lesser demons out of Kelley, who probably needed it. This made the Kelleys life together a little less turbulent for a time.

Unhappy with his wife, who probably refused his advances in the bedroom, Kelley began to invoke a female spirit as his lover. In spite of his recent exorcism, Kelley continued to be tormented by the demon Belmagel, whom Kelley characterized as "the firebrand who has followed my soul from the beginning."

The angels decided that Dee was needed to preach their message in the courts of the kings of Europe, particularly to the German Emperor Rudolph II at Prague. Dee and Kelley had no wish to leave England, but the angels informed Dee that plots were being hatched by his political enemies, and that if he did not leave England he would end up in prison on a charge of treason. Even though he could not afford the journey, and it was extremely inconvenient for him, Dee agreed, and persuaded Kelley to leave England with him.

On September 21st, 1583, Dee and Kelley, along with their wives, Dee's children, and servants, left England. They spent the next three years living in central Europe. They continued their Enochian scrying sessions. It was during this period that much of the most important Enochian material was received. Dee was forced at intervals to seek audiences with various kings, including Rudolph himself, and preach the message of the angels concerning the evils of mankind and the coming of the apocalypse.

Rudolph must have thought Dee mad. He saw him only once, but he did not have Dee arrested. Rudolph was fascinated with magic and alchemy. Instead, he tried to trick Dee into giving him the Enochian diaries and the scrying stone. This Dee always refused to do. At the end of his partnership with Kelley, Dee was tricked by Kelley into lending Kelley one of his crystals, which Kelley immediately gave to Rudolph to curry the Emperor's favor. This act of betrayal always bothered Dee later in life.

In 1587 Kelley began to be seduced by the wealth and power of Rudolph's court. The Emperor asked Dee and Kelley to find the secret for making the red powder. This Kelley had always longed to do in any case. Dee regarded it as a distraction from his main work with the Enochian angels, but he was losing his control over Kelley. The alchemist was dazzled at the prospect of having the unlimited resources of the Emperor at his disposal for alchemical research.

Dee and Kelley drifted apart. Though they were both living in Bohemia in 1587, Kelley stayed at the palace of the Emperor while Dee kept his own house in Prague. They saw each other at increasingly distant intervals.

The break between the two friends was precipitated by a final, strange command of the Enochian angels that Dee and Kelley must share their wives in common -- that is, must engage in the supposedly modern practice of wife-swapping. Perhaps this was the final attempt by the angels to unite Dee and Kelley together. If so, it had the opposite effect. Jane Dee was horrified. When she heard that she must sleep with Kelley, she began to weep. Her husband consoled her, telling her there was no help for it, that they must obey the commands of the Enochian angels, which Dee regarded as only once removed from the mouth of the Almighty.

Kelley was also horrified. Despite his alchemical and necromantic experiments, he thought of himself as a good Christian. At first he refused to even tell Dee what the angels wanted them to do. Then when he revealed the message, he declared that he absolutely refused to obey the angels. Only after much argument and pleading was Dee able to convince Kelley to go along with the will of the angels, and to form a covenant between the men and their wives and the angels.

The Covenant, drawn up by Dee and his wife, with the input and approval of the Kelleys, was an agreement with the angels stating that after the four humans fulfilled the angels latest bizarre order, the angels would at last communicate the missing key to the working of the system of Enochian magic. It was signed on April 18, 1587. Dee wrote:

"The foresaid Covenant being framed by me John Dee, as near as I could according to the intent and faith of us required, to be notified and declared by the works of unity both spiritual and corporal. Now it was by the women as by our selves thought necessary to understand the will of God and his good pleasure, whether this Covenant and form of words performed, is and will be acceptable and according to the well liking of his Divine Majesty: and that hereupon, the act of corporal knowledge being performed on both our parts, it will please his Divine Majesty to seal and warrant unto us most certainly and speedily all his divine, merciful and bountiful promises and blessings; and also promises us wisdom, knowledge, ability and power to execute his justice, and declare and demonstrate his infallible verity amongst men, to his honour and glory."

Dee's magical diaries break off abruptly shortly after this divinely-sanctioned wife-swapping episode. This is not evidence that the wife-swapping went badly. There is simply nothing written down by Dee or Kelley concerning its details. We do know that Kelley and Dee ceased to spend time together after the Covenant was fulfilled. Kelley went to the palace of Emperor Rudolph and received large sums to fund the expenses of his alchemical experiments.

In 1588 Dee wrote two letters to Kelley and his wife, indicating that the men were living at some distance from each other. Later that year Rudolph grew impatient with Kelley and threw him into a dungeon for a period of time in the castle of Zobeslau. On December 4th Dee loaned Kelley his cherished crystal, which years earlier he had shown to Queen Elizabeth to her wonder and delight. Kelley used it to get back into the good graces of Rudolph, and Dee never saw the crystal again.

Joan Kelley had by this time lost all faith and love for her husband. Perhaps her experiences in bed with Dee convinced her that she might find something better than Kelley in the way of a man. In the summer of 1589 she left Kelley toiling over his alchemical furnace in Prague and returned to England alone. Rudolph made Kelley a baron of the kingdom of Bohemia as a reward for his efforts, but shortly after Kelley was imprisoned again by Rudolph. Queen Elizabeth finally grew weary of Dee's absence from the English count and commanded Dee to return to England. This Dee was probably ready to do in any case. He left Kelley in Bohemia, alone save for Kelley's brother, Thomas, who stayed with the alchemist.

Queen Elizabeth was interested in Kelley's alchemical experiments, the news of which had reached England ahead of Dee from a variety of sources. Kelley was rumored to have transformed a circle of iron cut from a frying pan into pure gold. Dee's eldest son, Arthur, told of playing on the floor of Kelley's chamber in Bohemia, surrounded by gold bars which he used for blocks. Dee himself was certainly not poor when he returned to England. It is very possible that Kelley lent him gold for the journey.

If we were to believe in the possibility of the alchemical manufacture of gold, it may be that the Covenant between Dee and Kelley and the angels was fulfilled, at least in part, and that the angels taught Kelley how to make the red powder. This would explain Kelley's sudden extravagant wealth, and Dee's unexpected windfall.

In January of 1590 Kelley's brother, Thomas, returned to London to prepare for Kelley's reception before Queen Elizabeth. Thomas lent Dee ten pounds in gold, showing that Kelley was in favor with Rudolph at this time. Kelley failed to return to England. Perhaps he feared he could not live up to his reputation before the critical eye of Elizabeth, who was not a monarch to be put off with empty promises.

Finally losing all patience and faith in Kelley, in 1592 Rudolph cast the alchemist into prison on charges of sorcery and heresy. While under arrest, Kelley wrote two of his alchemical tracts, the Stone of the Philosophers and the Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy. On October 4th, 1593, Dee noted in one of his diaries that Kelley had been set free by Rudolph. By Christmas Kelley was once again hard at work as Rudolph's royal alchemist.

It was not to last. Once again Rudolph imprisoned the alchemist. Queen Elizabeth decided that if Kelley would not come to her, she would have him forcibly removed to England. Her efforts to intercede for Kelley with Rudolph by letter failed. She sent one of her agents, Captain Peter Gwyn, to talk Kelley into returning to England. This he willingly agreed to do. England must have seemed preferable to more years wasted in Rudolph's dungeons. Kelley and Gwyn hatched a plot to break Kelley out of prison.

The escape began well enough, but when Kelley, who was only aged forty at the time, was attempting to climb down the wall of his prison, he fell and broke both his legs. He had put on weight during his stay in Bohemia, and this may have made him less agile. Shortly thereafter he died. Dee wrote in his diary entry for November 25th, 1595: "the news that Sir Edward Kelley was slayne."

So ended the life of one of the most remarkable rogues and alchemists in English history. Dee always defended Kelley's honor from the slurs and attacks of his enemies, and always regarded the alchemist as his true friend. He never gave up hope that Kelley would return to England and resume his work as crystal scryer for the Enochian angels.

A mention must be made of Kelley's supposed knighthood. Kelley was not properly speaking a knight, but was given the title by Rudolph of eques auratus which Dee interpreted as a baronage. None the less, it was the universal practice of later writers to refer to Kelley as Sir Edward Kelley.

Did Kelley find the secret to the red powder? Arthur Dee always swore in later life that he had succeeded in making gold in Bohemia. Did the Enochian angels fulfill their part of the Covenant and teach Kelley the secrets of his Book of St. Dunstan? Is this why Kelley suddenly lost interest in continuing the Enochian scrying sessions as Dee's crystal gazer? And did the angels teach Kelley more, did they reveal the hidden keys to Enochian magic that Dee so desired to obtain, and did Kelley conceal these keys from Dee because of his hatred for the angels? We will never know the answers to these questions, unless at some future time another scryer contacts the Enochian hierarchy, and the truth is finally revealed.