Dr. Dee and the Endurance of Alchemy

Portrait of Dr. John Dee (Wikimedia Commons)

‘This yellow matter, amber droplets shaken from my breath, are these the only gold wrought by my alchemy?’ So asks Dr. John Dee in Alan Moore’s libretto for an unfinished opera which dramatizes the dying alchemist. Now improvised, much of his family perishing to the plague, Dee questions his own quest into the deep mysteries of the cosmos.

Dee, an alumnus of Trinity College, is a fascinating Cambridge figure: he was both a mathematician and magician; an alchemist attempting to transmute base metals into gold coins and the coiner of the term the ‘British Empire’; a visionary at the level of angels and angles; a polymath who attempted to encapsulate the whole universe itself into a symbol… Yet, Dee also bears the very human story of a fallen genius, which Moore’s line evokes in all its terrible pathos; Dee went from being a top scientific advisor to Elizabeth I, to an impoverished genius buried in an unmarked grave. What is so relevant today about Dee’s legacy is how his thinking and works span both the scientific and the occult – two areas which nowadays seem firmly opposite, indeed antithetical. Yet in Dee’s own time of the Renaissance, much of what we think of as ‘magic’ today was classed as part of the sciences – a professional, and respected, discipline.  

In The Mathematical Preface (1570), Dee divides creation into the earthly world, which consists of physical things, and the heavenly world beyond. Dee believed numbers occupied an intermediary space between these two spheres, being at once both definite and intangible; we as humans can grasp a number like 2 in our mind, but the concept of infinity eludes us. Maths thus becomes a tool in the quest for the understanding of the divine forms that underlie our visible world; numbers are God’s language. A mathematical quest was therefore also a spiritual quest – an attempt to understand the workings and design of God.

Henry Gillard Glindoni, ‘John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I (Wikimedia Commons)

Significantly, The Mathematical Preface was written in English. Most learned works were composed in Latin at the time. Dee’s vernacular choice shows the flip-side to Dee’s interest in the spiritual potential of mathematics. The Preface argues for the practical, civic benefits of the mathematical arts in interdisciplinary areas such as music, navigation, mechanics and the calendar system. Dee at his height had amassed a library of over 3000 printed books and 1000 manuscripts. In fact, in 1556 Dee had approached Queen Mary in the hope of founding a national library, to no avail. His own library could be considered such a national library, attracting many scholars who he allowed to browse his collection. Trinity College still houses a catalogue of Dee’s library at Mortlake. In 1582, Dee met co-alchemist (and fraudster?) Edward Kelley. They went to the continent, conversing with angels in what they called the Enochian language. They moved around various European courts showing off their learning. Kelley eventually got recruited as an alchemist, Dee with less luck returned to England. After six years abroad, he returned to his library vandalized with books and instruments stolen.

Coinciding with this was James I’s ascent to the throne meaning the court atmosphere had turned hostile towards the study of the occult. Men like Francis Bacon, pioneering the scientific method, were in, people like Dee, out. Dee had faced accusations of sorcery throughout his career, a very different, and nefarious, distinction to his learned work as a mathematician and alchemist. In fact, in 1604 Dee wrote to James I pleading for the King to withdraw the accusation that he was a ‘Conjurer, or Caller, or Invocator of Devils, or damned Spirits’. Conversing with angels then was a fine, and sometimes dangerously confused, line – the angel could easily be the devil. Dee would become more and more isolated, eventually having to sell of more books from his already ransacked library to starve off poverty. He died in 1609.

If The Mathematical Preface was Dee’s practical book on maths, his Monas Hieroglyphia (1564) was his occult one. Stephen Johnston has described it as attempting to create a new ‘alphabet of nature’, drawing together the disciplines of astronomy, the kabbalah, numerology, alchemy and magic. In the Monas, Dee relates the alchemical process on earth with the astrological system above us. Again, Dee is working in that intermediary space between the terrestrial and divine. Alchemy becomes, in N. H. Clulee’s words, an ‘earthly astronomy’. The whole work is a deciphering of a monad, or symbol, which Dee believed encapsulated the whole of creation. By understanding the glyph, one could manipulate the alchemical process here on earth – that meant big money!

Dee’s glyph from the Monas. The monad part is the dot surrounded by a circle at the top. (Wikimedia Commons)

The monad has various planetary, alchemic, numerical (incorporating Pythagoras) and, I suspect, Christian associations (the Crucifix at the centre). The fundamental text informing Dee’s thinking is the ancient Tabula Smaragdina, or Emerald Tablet, of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (where we get Hermeticism from). The key line, derived from none other than Isaac Newton’s translation housed in King’s College Library (another cross-over of the scientific and occult), runs thus:

That which is below is like that which is above and the which is above is like that which is below.

This line postulates the structural correspondences between the cosmic and the microcosmic – heaven and earth; the world and each human being. As Clulee notes, the practice of alchemy thus becomes an imitation, a miniature version, of divine creation. Dee relates the Emerald Tablet to the concept of monad in Pythagoras’ thinking which represents the totality of all things, the Absolute. As Clulee has shown, through the example of Pythagorean tetractys (1+2+3+4 = 10), Dee’s monad symbolically unfolds to track, and understand, the process of God’s creation. It is interesting to note that a tetracty is also a condensed poetic form. The original lines from the Emerald Tablet in fact adapt well, and so I composed the following:

As (1 syllable)
Above (2)
So below: (3)
The sun, father; (4)
The moon, mother, all born from this one thing. (10)

Even if Dee’s work does not allow us to create the philosopher’s stone and alchemy has become obsolete (dying in childbirth to modern study of chemistry) the legendary maxim ‘as above, so below’ could still be transmuted into something powerful… What we need today is a new alchemy. And Dee is here to inspire it – at Cambridge and beyond. Perhaps there is indeed something in that recent, often-mocked, TikTok astrology fad. The whole idea of alchemy stresses the fact that our earthly materials are corresponding to, and dependent upon, the cosmos, the micro on the macro, the flesh on the dirt that holds it. As we witness the environmental crisis around us, we must remember: ‘as above, so below’. Dee’s monad could become the symbolic expression of a new environmental consciousness which understands the interrelation of us and all.

Or we can think about this new alchemy in another way. The alchemic quest for infinite riches is still very much alive. It is a quest now for black gold – oil. Finite fossil fuels are treated by international corporations like infinite treasures to be profited from eternally. There is a delusional idea that we can drill forever, infinitely transmuting black gold into monetary credit. Even in the quest for green energy, it is often these corporations which are fuelling the crisis which are the one’s now, ironically, fuelling alternative energy sources. This blurs the moral landscape of the environmental crisis – when the “villains” are the one’s funding green solutions – but one can be cynical in seeing such a move as a precaution of such energy companies hoping to jump ship the moment fossil fuels are inevitably banned or run out.

We need a new alchemy to support new forms of green energy, not in the name of a profit motive, but in the realisation that: ‘as above, so below’. Dr. Dee’s alchemy therefore provides a delightful (and to use the language of alchemy, perhaps the quintessential) energy for the environmental movement in a time of crisis. For new thinking we need to look to the past as much as the future, to the spiritual as much as the sciences, to find new fuel for thought. Indeed, Alan Moore’s opting for the form of opera to explore Dee’s story – which was bizarrely taken up and produced by Blur frontman Damon Albarn in 2011 – is linked to the historical fact that many Renaissance alchemists used the new operatic form to express their ideas and ideals surrounding alchemy. Again, alchemy and the figure of Dee illuminate how the sciences and arts are inextricable in history. Dee is a key Cambridge figure who traverses these, often separated, areas of the sciences, arts and spiritualism, and perhaps we should follow his example.

A letter from Dee to Elizabeth I from 1588 held in the British Library (Wikimedia Commons)