John Dee – An Empire Maker

To state that John Dee was a genius is underestimate his impact upon both the physical and metaphysical world.

Dee was a scholar who advised Elizabeth I. At one point, he had the largest library in England with the number of collected volumes surpassing that of both Cambridge and Oxford. He created the mathematical symbols we use for simple equations. He also created the idea of a British Empire, an idea that still has ramifications to this very day.

He is still recognized in modern culture as well. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, used Dee’s official letter signature as Bond’s identification: 007. Dee served as an envoy and spy for Elizabeth I!

Dee put his efforts towards understanding the nature of all things. When he eventually grew tired of not figuring out every secret, he turned to esotericism. Prior to his turn, he was a noted astrologer and alchemist who had worked up horoscopes for both Queen Mary I and her daughter, Elizabeth I.

To understand the metaphysical world, he brought in the services of a coin forger and known alcoholic, Edward “Ned” Kelley. Kelley was blessed with the ability to commune with spirits via scrying. Kelley would receive the visions in his head from using a Shew-Stone and soon something amazing unfolded: communing with angels. Over the course of seven years, Kelley output information to Dee who laboriously copied it all down for permanent reference. The angels conveyed a magical language to Kelley that is still used today in many esoteric traditions, the language of angels also known as Enochian.

He published his methods and Enochian transcripts and laid the bedrock for Enochian Magick.

You can read all about this in his magnum opus that is now part of our library: A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between DR John Dee and Some Spirits Tending to a General Alteration of Most States and Kingdomes in the World.

This PDF is a scan of an original copy of John Dee’s book. While fantastic, it is a beast at 45 megabytes. If you find him as fascinating as we do, we highly recommend purchasing the book here or buying a collectible version here. If you want an amazingly comprehensive and scholarly work on John Dee, we highly recommend Jason Louv’s magical biography of him entitled John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World.