You shall have knowledge to move every Gate
Despised only by the wicked and foolish, but is praised and admired by the wise
John Dee never spoke to angels. He’d been through several seers, most recently Barnabas Saul, a preacher, who lost contact with the spirits shortly after being acquitted of an unknown charge at Westminster Hall. Edward Kelley entered Dee’s life within days. Precisely what the 27-year-old Worcester-born mystique had been up to prior to approaching Dee isn’t entirely clear, having been employed as a notary by some accounts, and working in an apothecary, per others.
While he had previously had a run in with the law, the nature of transgressions has not been determined – forging documents or counterfeiting money, perhaps. His punishment, on the other hand, appears to be a matter of record. Kelley wore a hat for the remainder of his life, said to disguise his cropped ears.
He believed himself to be a man of many talents, but it was his work as a scryer – skilled in reading spiritual messages through a crystal – that ingratiated him to Dee. Kelley, initially operating with the surname Talbot, convinced Dee that his predecessor had been a charlatan. He soon found himself in the astrologer’s employ and in direct contact with angelic forces.
“He settled himself to the Action, and on his knees at my desk, setting the stone before him, fell to prayer and entreaty, etc.,” Dee notes in his journal. “In the mean space, I in my Oratory did pray and make motion to God and his good creatures for the furthering of this Action. And within one quarter of an hour (or less) he had sight of one in the stone.”
Kelley’s first contact was Uriel, who, along with fellow archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, would prove instrumental in the men’s communications. Kelley and Dee purified, prayed and fasted before embarking on their spiritual conferences. After a messenger burst in on a session, one of the angels convinced Dee that further communications must occur in secret.
The partnership proved extremely prolific. The angels dictated volumes of text through Kelley. They delivered divine knowledge to the pair that had also been lost to human sin, including descriptions and hierarchies of their own kind in heaven and Earth. In March of the following year, the spirits began to confer a new language. Angelic (later Enochian) was spoken by Adam in paradise, but had gone unknown to humankind for millennia. The grids that comprise the Book of Enoch spell out the language, which would be used to dictate further volumes.
Within months, Count Albert Laski of Poland began a correspondence with Dee, the two men warming to one another over a shared passion for alchemy. Soon Laski joined both he and Kelley, participating an angelic conversation. These spirits convinced the Count that he was destined to take over control of his home country from King Stefan I. The three left England for Krakow.
It was here Nalvage offered more insight. “I am therefore to instruct and inform you, according to your Doctrine delivered, which is contained in 49 Tables,” the angel explained. “In 49 voices, or callings: which are the Natural Keys to open those, not 49 but 48 (for one is not to be opened) Gates of Understanding, whereby you shall have knowledge to move every Gate.”
Dee and Kelley were not in Poland long, however. Despite Laski’s continued financial support, the two men journeyed to Prague, in hopes of entering the good graces of Emperor Rudolf II. The monarch was largely unimpressed. The Catholic church was even more antagonist, as word spread of the men’s occult work. Bishop Germanico Malaspina reportedly sought defenestration for the two men – a practice of tossing people out windows that was in vogue at the time – but settled for their expulsion for the city instead.
Dee and Kelley relocated once again, this time 90 miles away in Trebon. Soon after, orders arrived from the angels that the men should share all aspects of their lives – including their respective wives. Under new patronage, a wife-swapping Kelley reported his first alchemical transmutation. As word spread, Rudolf II knighted Kelley, but soon turned on the alchemist, imprisoning him first for the reported murder of an official during a duel and then for his inability to create gold.
“Though I have already twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia,” Kelley wrote, “an indignity which has been offered to me in no other part of the world, yet my mind, remaining unbound, has all this time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised only by the wicked and foolish, but is praised and admired by the wise.”
Kelley died, attempting to escape — effectively defenestrating himself from one of the prison’s upper windows. Dee returned to England, where his own claims of alchemy once again gained him the support of Queen Elizabeth I. Her successor, James I, found little reason to fund Dee’s work, however, leaving the occultist destitute in his final years.
Sources:
John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature by Deborah E. Harkness
True and Faithful Relation of What Passed between Dr. Dee and Some Spirits; Tending, Had it Succeeded, to a General Alteration of Most States and Kingdoms in the World by John Dee
John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion by Nicholas H. Clulee
John Dee by Charlotte Fell Smith