John Dee

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Sacred geometry always begins with a point. In Hindu yoga it's called bindu, which is a vanishing point. That is to say it has a dimensionless quality to it, vanishing into itself and disappearing from phenomenal time-space. So that the object of any yoga is to establish in oneself the bindu, the vanishing point. So that it is the other side, in parallel, to what a black hole might be in contemporary cosmology which means that we have an experience of the definite curving in towards a center which vanishes from phenomenal view to some other realm. And for lack of vocabulary we call it a transcendent motion. This point was the sacred beginning of Euclidean geometry. And in the Pythagorean understanding of number, this point was not one but was a unity and was called classically by many names. And in the West when it was rediscovered John Dee called it the monad. So that the monad is not one, but is that infinity which precedes any cardinal sequencing of numerical lines of development. This means that geometry esoterically and any structure built using geometry has in its occult understanding a non-dimensional matrix for its engendering. This point can be demonstrated graphically by a philosopher, as opposed to a teacher or a scholastic, by the simple gesture of declaring space of holding the two hands open in a motion indicating that the point also aside from vanishing from phenomenal reality establishes a quality which we can call presence, and that therefore Presence with a capital P has the quality of the universal matrix. If we use but one hand to gesture we describe motion. And in geometry the movement of a point makes a line. The line can be straight or it can be arcing. Generally in terms of geometry, because one is using very clear thought, coherent thought, the motion is described and noted mentally as a straight line so that we have the point and we have the line. And with these two axiomatic conditions we may construct any architecture that we wish. John Dee in his Hieroglyphic Monad begins in just this way but far more disguised than I have given. And he shows how if you take the point extended to the line and rotate it one full rotation, one then has a circle. And in fact if one retains the point and the circle one has the alchemical symbol of the sun. If one then develops this hieroglyphic basis and adds the moon to the sun the moon being a half circle. If you add this half circle looped into the circle of the sun you get a very interesting intersection. The vesica piscis form that is made by the intersection of the sun symbolically and the moon symbolically is an entrance threshold of interpenetration of sun and moon and is a primordial creative condition. It also receives in terms of Neoplatonic emanation the qualities that could be emanated out of the bindu, out of that center point. So it has somewhat of the creative matrix available to it. If we then increase the structure by depending from the interpenetration of sun and the half circle of the crescent moon, a primordial cross - it can either be a Saint Andrew's cross or tilted 90 degrees or a regular cross - we have an interpenetration on two different levels. We have two straight lines which form as John Dee uses the term a copulative center point making thus a sacred triad of forming natures, two lines and the point which they established by their crossing. But we also have four 90 degree angles that meet together in a common center so that the cross is a ternary and at the same time quaternary making a total of a septenary occult figure. If this cross is dependent, hung below, visually the interpenetration of the sun and the moon, one need only add one more symbolic figure that of the sign of Aries which is really two semicircles that meet at one point so that one has a cross, above it a circle with a point in it, intersecting it a half circle forming a vesica piscis in its intersection, and down at the base of the cross two half circles and one line which is touching the lower end of the cross. With this figure, which John Dee called the hieroglyphic Monad, one may construct all of the astrological signs for the basic planets. So that in one universal figure beginning as Euclid began his geometry, one has constructed an occult understanding of form and force and energy and its manifestation into a hierarchy. This book by John Dee which runs to about 74 pages was written in 12 days flat in January of 1564. And that fact in this book more than anything else identified John Dee as one of the greatest intellects of all time. He is absolutely on one of those gigantic capacity levels. One can scarcely credit one individual with having so much talent. Now this individual comes into the scene July 13th, 1527. He was born in England. He was born in London. He was born at court. His father Roland Dee was a gentleman server to Henry the Eighth. His mother's name was Johanna Wild. And Johanna Wild and Roland Dee, very much favored at court, and later on John Dee who loved genealogical puzzles would trace his family back and decide that they had been descended from the Princes of Wales many centuries before and that in fact the family went back to the great magician Merlin. And John Dee very early in life recognised in himself a reincarnation of Merlin. He further recognised in Elizabeth the First, who was distantly related to John Dee through his genealogical researches, that she was in fact descended from King Arthur and that he held a mystical relationship almost on an archetypal level as we would say today to Elizabeth the First which she recognised, hard as she was, tough as she was. Almost all of her life she considered John Dee a very special person and one who was able to have her ear in the most delicate issues as you will see and very often in order to keep this from anyone else she would go riding on horseback, separate herself from the party, and meet John Dee out near the fence of his estate up the Thames River outside of London. And the two of them alone would talk sometimes for hours on end. Now Dee, when he was born in 1527, arrives on the English scene in a very peculiar state of civilization. One writer trying to search around to find a phrase to describe what was happening in England used the most curious but apt term. He called England at that time an Anglo-Saxon Israel. The English had taken into their heart through the great efforts of John Colet, Henry Moore, the Saint Paul's Cathedral School, Oxford and Cambridge, many other learning centers, had taken into their heart the very serious study of languages of Greek and Latin and of Hebrew and in the generation that John Dee grew up Hebrew was increasingly one of the learned languages which you would expect someone of culture to know. And in fact, in John Dee's lifetime there were many families where all the children and the parents spoke and read Hebrew perfectly well as well as Greek and Latin and the European languages. They felt that in this realm of historical repatterning that England had inherited the right to carry on the sacred destiny of building a history upon the biblical foundations and therefore the characterizing phrase in Anglo-Saxon Israel is a very apt and imaginative way to describe conditions at the time. The ultimate push of this feeling-toned realization, and intellectual capacity, was the production of the King James Bible which, although it was published in 1611, was worked on as early as the 1570s. Almost all of those individuals who produced that work were educated by John Dee. He was the great tutor for two successive generations of English genius. And so if you're searching for a way to describe John Dee to somebody who's never heard of him, tell him that he's the father of the King James Bible among other things. He was a childhood prodigy. As a youngster he was given the regular education in Latin at the courtside fireside educational classes. There were indications that he really was sharp witted but of course many young boys especially seem bright and shiny. He was sent to Cambridge University very young and he soon established himself as a character and as a teenager they were putting on a production of Aristophanes piece, the Pax, and John Dee built a mechanical contrivance that literally flew up from the stage to the ceiling of the auditorium. No one understood the mechanics of the outfit and he was immediately branded a magician by everybody - the students, the faculty - and Dee as a teenager became very disappointed with the astonished quality at Cambridge because he had gone there to learn and not to become a spectacle at the age of 15 to all these people. Dee left England and went to the University of Leuven. He felt somehow that with the French-Dutch-Belgian culture that he would be more at home. And in fact he found himself the object of attention there. And, after several years of study at the University of Leuven, John Dee began to give lectures at the University of Paris. And at the age of 20 he astonished the intellectual world in Paris and his lectures were filled to the rafters. There are testimonies from the time that people were literally hanging on the windowsills, that they were crowded outside the halls out on the grass and every seat was filled in, the aisles were filled. What was he lecturing on? What had he found at the ripe age of 20? He had rediscovered in a way that the genius of the Hermetic tradition had not only flowered in the generation preceding him but it had a brilliant flowering in the 13th century, some 200 years before him and in fact Dee was present at the University of Oxford when the scholastic tradition had taken over the faculty's minds, and the University of Oxford was throwing out all the alchemical texts especially those works of Roger Bacon. By the wheelbarrow full John De rescued these books from the junk heap from the bonfires and wheelbarrowed these volumes to his rooms and later on they formed the beginning nucleus of his great library. The library of John Dee was described in detail by him and it contained several hundred manuscripts, not books, manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts. And it is John Dee's copy copies of many of the basic works of Roger Bacon, of Albertus Magnus, of Raymond Llull, of all Arnold of Villanova the geniuses who made the Hermetic tradition. It's their works saved in John Dee's own library bearing his stamp and that of his son Arthur Dee and some of them incidentally made their way to the United States. The early Hermetic Adept John Winthrop, the first Governor of Connecticut, was a hermetic alchemist has 7 or 8 of John Dee's volumes in his own library which now I think repose in the Yale University Library in one of their collections. Aside from the manuscripts Dee's library had thousands of volumes of books. It was the major library in England. It outshone Oxford, it outshone Cambridge, and was in fact the, literally the Royal Library. Two generations of English genius were tutored by Dee and he used his library as the basic instrument by which to do this. Now he came back from the European continent and he went to Cambridge and he spent a couple of weeks there and he threw up his hands. He said I have nothing to learn from my countrymen. They are foolish children. They are interested in bickering about details that have no relevance to the task on hand. And what was the task on hand? The task was that man had reached a state of maturity that he was no longer an adolescent wondering what to do in the universe that he in fact had found his true calling. And his true calling was to understand the physical universe in all of its ramifications to knit together that understanding, not only in books, but in a projected civilization which should express in all of its manifoldness the qualities of integration of which man was finally capable of. Central to that recognition, in the 1550s, was the increasing realization on Dee’s part that if the key to transformation lay inside of man not only for the performance of the opus of the alchemical works but in the sense that was later just ten years later to be expressed in the bindu point of the Hieroglyphic Monad then there should be some way by which man could pass on not simply in an adept tradition to one or two other individuals but to create an educational structure a school by which many individuals could be given these heretofore secrets and therefore a spiritual civilization engendered. Now Dee, among other things, became in his 20s - 22, 23 - the greatest astrologer in England and very soon almost everybody at court because they had seen him grow up were coming to John Dee to have their horoscopes done to have their charts. And Dee kept a record of the individuals coming to him in this professional capacity. We have about two pages of his listing of various individuals who come and then we notice that the listings start to change after the Hieroglyphic Monad is published. In fact it becomes what is described now as John Dee's diary. From an appointment list for astrological purposes. He begins to record, in little vignettes and clever concealments, the progressive education of a generation and the development of a master plan on his part of reforming the nature of man and the nature of civilization. He in fact is often credited - I think now - with the development of what we now know as the Elizabethan Renaissance. Now I need to give you just a little bit more background in order to appreciate the dangerous quality of what he was doing, what he was up to. In any time, even in our time, it's dangerous to have good ideas. It's dangerous to be right consistently to outshine one's peers. It raises the hackles of jealousy and the jealousy sours into suspicion. And that very quickly solidifies into a non-professional bitterness. And the nitpicking very quickly establishes the dimensions of a KGB and pretty soon your persona non grata for the very reasons that you thought would cheer everyone up. On top of that natural jealousy and bitterness and suspicion, which seems endemic in unreformed human nature, English society was suffering from a criss-cross of opposing forces of spiritual onslaught at the time. One force can best be characterized as Tudor Puritanism. Now Puritanism was a way of asserting that the individual has a right to read his Bible. That you do not in every case have to queue up in a church to listen to a priest give you the okay. That an inner asceticism for the individual is possible, in fact, is what should be the natural human right. This of course developed at this time in England and under the Stuarts following Queen Elizabeth who was the last Tudor. This development ballooned up and created a tremendous cultural influence especially on early America. The second current related to it but somewhat different in the European mode was the development of the Anabaptist controversies. This also came about the same time and the basic initial contention was that there should not be the baptism of infants, that one should be a mature adult in order to participate actively in this transformative ceremony, that the sacrament of baptism was extraordinarily important and had no bearing upon infants. In fact in the Anabaptist controversy the notion of baptism became one of individual emphasis. The careers of the early Anabaptists were often very short. One of the most interesting figures, a man named Jacob Hutterite, who after several years 3 or 4 years of being shunted around in back rooms trying to flee from authorities that were trying to arrest him. He and his wife were arrested In 1535 around Christmas time and by February of 1536 he was burnt at the stake. Hutterites still exists today. I visited a Hutterite community up in southern Canada about eight years ago. It was a flourishing community after 400 years. They had plenty of members. They had wonderful farms and they still had the same ideals and the same social structure that they had had 400 years later. So that there was this continuity of purpose all the way through. Another one of the famous Anabaptists was Menno Simons from which the term Mennonites comes from and Menno Simons who had been a very successful priest, he said in one of his writings when I was a priest I had plenty of money and I slept on a pillow and when I found the true religion and became a real Christian I had to flee for my life in every city that I lived. These kinds of currents were in the air Puritanism and Anabaptism. The individual Christianity seeking for the true religion in an individual relationship to divinity. At the same time was our Hermetic tradition which was quite distinctly different because it had as its focus the transformative capacity available in human nature so that one did not go to school in the scriptures alone. One did not go to the New Testament alone. One did not go to the figure of Jesus alone as an individual, but that individual quality was transformed and heightened by a participation in the Hermetic tradition and that that tradition was largely based on a Greek psyche, a Greek language revelation, and it had been brought back into play in Western civilization by Ficino, Pico, and the individuals that we've been talking about. Its emphasis was on the transformative qualities of human nature so that one did not go to school in the scriptures alone, but in fact one went to school in one's transformative qualities in a large sense. John Dee became the inheritor of the Hermetic tradition but he spent all of his life being very cautious about not stepping too far out of the traditions of the Puritans on the one hand, of the traditions of the Orthodox Church on the other. He was sandwiched in his time between this powerful current of orthodoxy and the likewise powerful current of the unorthodox. And yet he belonged to neither. He was really in that vibration in between, that lightning flash of the Kabbalistic third way, a third stream, in the Hermetic tradition. His fame as a court astrologer brought him into contact with the court of Elizabeth very quickly. He was acquainted with almost everyone at that court personally. When Thomas Tallis composed the 40 part motet for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, John Dee's conversations with Tallis were very influential in convincing him that even though the human ear could not hear a 40-part motet it nevertheless would have spiritual repercussions to have it played on such an occasion. He also was extremely interested in developing what came to be the naval power of England. Not so much to build naval power but because he saw in the exploration of the entirety of the globe a truer basis upon which human life could be formulated. That in fact the world was not flat and by limiting man's experience with nature, with the earth, to Europe, North Africa, and perhaps Persia and England that all of this still limited ourselves to a flat earth in the sense that we didn't have the fullness of the experience of the whole sphere. So all of the early English mariners were personal friends of John Dee. And when they came back to England shortly after reporting to Elizabeth they would hightail it out to Mortlake - which was just outside of London on the Thames - where John Dee held court. And as the quality of English sailing depended upon accurate navigation Dee and his friend Mercator, who was doing maps at the time, emphasized the navigational instruments, tried to get the quality raised, tried to get the quality of maps refined. And in this regard an epochal book was published in 1577 and it was one of the great publications of its day. And John Dee did a tremendous preface to this navigational work. His whole idea was that he was dealing with fullness, wholeness, the geometry of the sphere. And what could be a more poignant lesson for man than to finally have a geography of the entire globe? So that Dee's library had a very large section on accruing information on the entirety of the globe. And in fact one of the early visitors to Dee's library there's only one reference in John Dee's Diary, Sir Francis Bacon at the age of 19, in Dee's words came out to Mortlake. And of course, Bacon's lifelong interest in the New World, both Americas, in the Pacific Ocean. For instance Bacon's New Atlantis starts off the coast of Peru. Dee was instrumental in bringing the conception of the entirety of the world before man's mind and emphasizing the fact that this was not simply a vision but was in fact a practicality. that the ships were going out and not only going out with exploration in mind but going out, with carrying the fullness of this developing civilization so that he conceived of himself in a way as the dynamic center of a transformative generation which were developing a civilization that was now covering the globe. And in this regard, geometry and geography intermeshed together and became a single subject. But increasingly for Dee a problem came up which he alone seemed to be aware of. That all of this geometry depended upon an accurate presentation of the center. That since all geometry is formed on the point that man since he was coming into a fullness into a maturity had to make sure of the center of all things. And that meant for John Dee, being a very spiritual, highly religious man, forming a true contact with God. It became for him the sine qua non of the Hermetic experiment. That man had to ascertain a true repeatable experiential contact with divinity. And in this regard Dee became interested in finding a medium. The best medium that could be produced. And he interviewed dozens and dozens of people in his diaries at this time in the 15, late 1570s, show a preoccupation with the question, almost impatiently at times, where is the right person? And the right person came along in the form of a man whose name was Edward Kelly. And Edward Kelly was a prodigy. He was one of the greatest mediums of that age. And John Dee, recognizing in a hermetic fashion that Kelly's qualities and his qualities meeting at this juncture of the turning point of civilization, was a godsend, literally. And that it was a milestone not to be squandered. And so piecing together his actions at this time and the references in his diary at this time, I have reconstructed pretty much what has happened. Dee began to report his findings to Queen Elizabeth personally. She began to have a great interest in the possibility of this obtaining. And of course what would fall out from this would be a tremendous sense of certainty which could be translated into political power. And don't forget that this was an Anglo-Saxon Israel, they were concerned with the fact that if they were to have a world civilization and it was to be English and founded upon mystical beginnings going back to Arthur's time and before to Pythagorean origins and before, that it was their right to pursue this and to manifest it if they could. One of the keys in this whole endeavor was to find an instrument by which Edward Kelley, prized medium that he was, could do his divining. And the instrument came from one of the expeditions to the New World. I personally think it was delivered from the hands of Sir Francis Drake to Dee and I think that it was with Elizabeth's permission that Drake delivered it to Dee, because I think she realized that, royal as she was, it was out of her water. The instrument was an orangish, pink glass about five inches in diameter which had belonged to Montezuma and had been brought back from the New World. And it was a very powerful crystal by which divining could be had. This crystal, the medium Edward Kelly, the genius John Dee, were put together and sensing that this experiment was highly dangerous in England, the men and their families were sent to a prepared place in Europe to do their experimenting. And the place was in Bohemia, in what is today Czechoslovakia, about 100 miles south of Prague. And they went there with the blessings of Elizabeth's court to undertake what we would call today scientific experiments in contacting God. And they were to remain there for a number of years. All the time that they were there the royal courtiers were keeping in contact with the court in England. One of the most famous courtiers of that time was Sir Edward Dyer - D-Y-E-R - Dyer. When he passed on in 1607 was characterized in a contemporary obituary of that date as having been one of the chief Rosicrucians of his age. That was 1607, seven years before the Fama Fraternitatis was published. Dyer in fact had been educated by John Dee, like almost everybody else at court. Dyer was one of England's first great poets. And Dyer's first great friend was none other than Sir Philip Sidney who was also educated by John Dee. And it was Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Edward Dyer, and Edmund Spenser, who formed the first great poetical renaissance in England. Sir Philip Sidney unfortunately died young. I don't think he was much beyond his early 30s when he died. One of the most fascinating figures of the Elizabethan scene. And in fact if one looks at Sir Philip Sidney's translations of the Psalms of David one gets the sense of the first trials at translating, out of the Hebrew, into English and beautiful English it is. And one gets the sense that this is where the King James Bible really gets its first roots is in that generation of genius. And when anyone seeks to create, in this formative powerful elegant fashion, of course the hermetic transformation happens in oneself as well as on the page. One's mind, one's perception, one's quality of sensitivity, likewise change, likewise transmute and so the elegant, beautiful verse of Sir Philip Sidney is also an indication of a quality of mind coming to maturation. And if one looks at Edmund Spenser's great epic dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, The Faerie Queen, one runs across the enormous scope of the revolution happening in human sensibility, in human poetical expressiveness, and in mental capacity to carry an allegory to astronomical proportions. And of course the first book of The Faerie Queene is dedicated to the Red Cross Knight. It is a wonderful book on Spenser, Spenser's Faerie World of Glass. If I can find my copy I'll bring in before this course is over, a few choice quotes. Spenser also was concerned with the Round Table, and later on I'll try and bring some of that information into. Spencer went off to Ireland. Sir Philip Sidney died early but managed to write a number of exquisite works, a defense of poetry, which is very much like Pico Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. And later on when the quality of Sir Philip Sidney and John Dee was re-established in the consciousness and the character of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Second Great Revolutionary Age in England, Shelley also wrote a defense of poetry to try to bring back Sir Philip Sidney's appraisal of man's capacity and very often the two defenses of poetry are printed together. But Sir Edward Dyer survived for quite some time and he was one of the most trusted courtiers. He was a liaison, a link between Francis Bacon, between the court with Queen Elizabeth, between the Earl of Leicester, between Lord Burghley, and John Dee. And he carried a lot of information back and forth between the continent and England. And while he was on the continent, I trace him going to all the major courts in Europe at the time. Now why did he go? Why did John Dee go to Bohemia? For this I need to refer to my own writings because I can't find it anywhere expressed. And so I'm taking a couple of pages out of a chapter of a book that I just finished called Hermetic Roots of America. And I want to give you just a few pages of it to give you a background of why, with the most crucial experiment of the age, with all the heavyweights of the age involved in it, that they chose this spot on the map of Europe to conduct its experiment. It was the safest spot they could find because it was guaranteed by a family which was impeccable. And the family actually is a Polish family and their name is Laski, or sometimes as it's referred to in the literature as Lasko, or with the ‘a’ before it a Lasko, of Lasko. And for three generations this was one of the most powerful esoteric families in Europe and it also sets the tone for a Polish involvement in occult movements. And not only that but a bohemian situation for the key figures controlling the generation of occult movements into a practical world reforming direction. And later on in the 17th century when there is a sense that there is a chance to reform the world again, it's to the rulers of Hungary and Bohemia at that time that the responsibility falls to oversee it. And at that time the family name is not Lasko, but Rakosi. And we'll see that too. Now the Laski family I'm reading from my work because I can't say it any better than what I have done here with Jaroslav Laski, an interesting era of Europe enters the hermetic picture. The Zips Republics. Z-I-P-S. The Zips Republics were seven German speaking towns hidden high and away in the Tatra range of the Carpathian Mountains in Bohemia. At the top of the Hungarian sway country at that time, the Carpathian Mountains make an arc - it now separates Czechoslovakia from Poland - and one of the highest ranges in the Carpathians at that juncture are the Tatra mountains, the resort mountains. They're like our Sierra Nevada mountains with Yosemite and Kings Canyon and Sequoia and so forth. They're not so high that you can't enjoy them, hike around in them, but they're high enough to be really scenic. And on the southern face they have a lot of streams that come out and water the Czechoslovakian-Hungarian plains. There are hot springs there. They were a natural retreat and from the time of Frederick the Great many bands of German freethinkers had migrated to these mountains and had formed little communities and they were called Zips for Zipsters Republics. And they were united together in a loose confederation and for some 500 years the experience of those groups were really utopian experiments with community. And some of the most powerful minds, experientially, that would move from Europe to America were positioned and tutored in those communities. And we'll see that in the 17th century, after the 30 Years War just as it was closing when it looked like Europe would finally have a chance to reform itself, two of the most powerful minds of the age were collected there by the Rakosi family within 60 miles of each other to try and get something going, to rekindle the flame of the Hermetic tradition. But of course as usual the opposition were well informed and trying to keep this from engendering. I'm going to skip over here to Jan Laski the elder had carried out difficult negotiations for King Sigismund the First with the Teutonic Knights, that is the Templars, in 1513. So that at about the time that Trithemius and Colet and Trismosin were operating at their peak, Jan Laski the elder carried out some difficult negotiations for King Sigismund the First, who was the King of Bohemia at that time, with the Teutonic Knights the Templars. He had become, this Jan Laski the Elder, had become the Bishop of Krakow which is just over the Tatra mountains in Poland southern Poland just to the north of the Carpathian Mountains. He was a devoted friend of Erasmus and his circle, meaning that Jan Laski the elder knew Colet, he knew Trithemius, he knew Trismosin, he knew Erasmus, he knew Thomas More, he knew Agrippa, he knew Paracelsus. So there was a network of individuals operating consciously. Jaroslav Laski had become Count of Transylvania and this is the first time that Transylvania energizes and comes into a personage at this time. This is the Laski family. And the next generation will find Albert Laski in England. Jaroslav Laski had become count of Transylvania and protector of the Zips Republics, a position later held by George Rakoczi the First and even later by Ferenc Rakoczi the father of the Comte de Saint-Germain. These were dangerous positions always witnessed Jaroslav's death by poison at Krakow in 1542. So he was poisoned the same year that John Dee began at Cambridge, Trinity College Cambridge. So all of this was current, all of this was fresh news. Jan Lasky the Younger, the Johannes a Lasco who bought Erasmus’s Great Library in 1536. Erasmus had compiled one of the most powerful instruments for learning in Europe, his library. He was concerned with the fact that it be kept together, kept integrated because it was bought as you can imagine by a first rate mind, volume by volume, not just to be an aggregate but to blend together and form like a second brain, a thinking instrument. We would call it a computer today. And it was a very refined instrument and it was bought by Jan Laski the Younger in 1536. John Dee was nine years old. He lived a great adventurous life. He resigned a bishopric and an office of royal secretary from King John Zapolya to live with the woman that he had secretly married his uncle. The archbishop were shocked but the great nephew fled to Germany where in 1543 he ostensibly adopted the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran confession at that time. Then for 13 years this John Laski the Younger wandered Europe in the old pattern preaching the new doctrines. He was protected by the Augsburg Confession in an orthodox way, but he went around seeding by liaison, the Hermetic tradition. It was he who urged Poland to adopt the Lutheran vision especially with the great cultural emendations of Erasmus, Colet, and their circle, and with the hermetic depths represented by Paracelsus, Agrippa, and their circle. In fact, in 1556, during a brief triumph of these doctrines against the Pope's rule John the Younger took part in the Senate of Bresnik in Poland and published a number of important polemical works. John the Younger had in early days around 1515, 1517 studied at Bologna exactly at the most formative years of the Renaissance cumulation. Bologna had a great medical school at that time. And the reformation's initial focus in Basel during 1523 he had lived a year with Erasmus. He lived in his quarters for a whole year. In the 1540s he was in East Friesland as a pastor, only one short break until 15.. Then he went to England at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer in 1548 and was there with only one short break until 1553. So while John Dee went from England to the continent this John Laski the Younger went from the continent to England. Almost at the same time their paths criss-crossed. He took part in important ecclesiastical conferences there and he was the superintendent of the Church of Foreign Protestants in London all this time. Very important position. Religious problems could be a cause of death. So when you were in a foreign country you had to make sure that your bases were covered religiously. So this position was really one of great delicacy and international responsibility and power, because you were keeping people alive by keeping their documents in order. He took part in all the conferences and he lived until 1560. His son was the great friend of John Dee and Queen Elizabeth. And his son was Albert Laski. Now when Albert Laski first came to England he came on the invitation of Elizabeth to negotiate a place for Dee and Kelley to carry out their experiments. And when he came he was taken around by his tour guide, Sir Philip Sidney and his companion Sir Edward Dyer. And after an enormous conference was held in London the Queen let Lasco - Albert Lasco or Albert Laski - use the royal barge and the royal musicians to sail down the Thames to John Dee's place at Mortlake to make an ostentatious show of her blessing the relationships. Almost nobody at the time understood what was going on - the Earl of Leicester understood, Lord Burghley understood, John Dee, Queen Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser, not many more. A handful of people knew what was going on. Now Albert Laski made available the experimental station, and John Dee and his wife, and Edward Kelley and his wife went to the continent but they went by way of northern Germany. They made their first contacts up in northern Germany in the Hamburg area. And later on of course one of the great Hermetic minds Heinrich Khunrath, who is the author of the great Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae which was published just before the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio - it was published in 1609, but finished in 1602, while Dee was still alive. That would contact Dee and one of the last people that he would see on the continent. And later on I will have a number of slides from Khunrath work because in the illustrations to Khunrath work is one of the easiest ways to identify the crossing of all the great hermetic expressions: the chemical marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz, the development of alchemical progressions and transformations, the development of Rosicrucian transformative statements. All of this seemed to come together in Khunrath’s work. Dee then made his way down to the area about 100 miles south of Prague, and there for several years Edward Kelley and John Dee became the resident magus of Europe. Almost everybody of any importance in court life in Europe at the time made a pilgrimage, and Dee's diary records the coming and going of powerful royal figures. Almost every page is filled with dozens and dozens of names. Sometimes they're given in a code, sometimes they're given with sacred names that you need to translate 2 or 3 times. But again and again you get the sense that increasingly the experiment there was being used as a fulcrum for the expectation of the millennium. If they were to be successful they wanted to have a network of international forces ready to receive this power. So that the esoteric leanings of all the major countries of Europe at the time seemed to be formed into a crucible to receive this lightning flash from Dee's experiment. He kept a diary of the experiments, and it's an enormous book, and it was written in English with Latin and Greek thrown in and occasionally with Hebrew thrown in. And it was never to be published, but unfortunately in 1654 later on the son of the overly touted Isaac Casaubon published this book, this diary, of their occult experiments and for three and a half centuries branded Dee as an immoral black magician. And it was the publication of this volume on some relations with spirits that branded Dee and made him persona non grata up until our own time. It was only ten years ago I think, maybe 15 years ago at the most, that anyone in the academic world seriously considered that John Dee was important in the Elizabethan period, if you can imagine because the material I'm giving you shows him clearly to have been the fulcrum of the whole period. And if there's any important individual in English history at that time it is John Dee. He lives until 1608. He lives to be over 80 years of age. So he was there all the time consistently. And if he was talented at 20 that means that for 60 years John Dee was in possession of the integrating focus and the understanding of what it was all about. And it's only near the end of John Dee's life that somebody else comes along to shoulder the burden of overseeing everything. And that person of course we’ll talk about next week - Francis Bacon - who doesn't really publish anything until about 1605 because he realizes that it's time for somebody else to shoulder this because Dee had carried it for three generations at that time. Now the experiments related in Some Spirits and their Relations show that progressively Edward Kelley lost control of the fine line of divination and began to fantasize. As one reads through it carefully and allows for the material to register in oneself you find a skew coming into play and a misinterpretation of energy, of vibratory capacity, begins to enter in. And increasingly Edward Kelley goes off on a tangent and he begins to misinterpret what we would recognize as a cosmic energy and begins to interpret it as a human sexuality and he becomes capable towards the end of this experiment of convincing John Dee that he has received a new doctrine from the Lord. And the doctrine is one of communal living, of sharing lives. And this of course becomes the heretical point upon which critics of John Dee then castigate him for the next 350 years. It's a poignant, tragical story. And as one reads through it one sees that Dee struggles with this, finally realizes that as a scientist they need to experiment with this. And of course the tragic results are almost predictable. And very soon after that the entire pattern of the experimenting unravels as one would expect. The collective capacity of energy becomes frayed and because they were working with such a high powered dynamic it very quickly, within months, turns into a charade. And of course because physical reality always mirrors the inner condition of critics arise all over saying that they were phony alchemists that actually what they were trying to do was to make gold and they either on one hand hadn't made enough gold and there should be therefore should be imprisoned, or that they had made gold and therefore should be in prison. At any rate they should be in prison. And these kinds of critics rose by the dozens. Elizabeth sent Dee a message to get out, to drop everything. He was sent a dozen fine horses by the Laski family so that he could pack his belongings and he very quickly left Bohemia and made his way north into Germany stopping a few places along the way, but very soon getting the sense that he was being hounded. And he made his way to Hamburg, one of the major free ports in northern Germany. Lübeck, Hamburg those cities. Even at that time period, very powerful industrial centers. And with the English trade they were safe for a while there. Then Dee came back to England somewhat chastened, reported to court, reported to Elizabeth and she exonerated him, heard the whole story. And sent Dee back to Mortlake. Now when Dee had left Mortlake, his home at Mortlake had been ransacked by vandals. Many volumes in his library had been burned. He had been called a warlock. He had been called a black magician. And when the scandal from Europe began to seep into the English gossip as it would. At court Elizabeth had everything she could do to protect Dee from the mobs. And so Dee very quietly went back to his old position but ostensibly on the surface. Calmed everything down. It's unfortunate that he was somewhat hamstrung at this time because a new figure entering into the scene at this time, very energetically, a great friend of John Dee's, was Sir Walter Raleigh. And Sir Walter was the first one to have a vision of the New World. And he was the first one to have the capacity to finance a number of ships and expeditions sending colonists from England to Virginia. And it is Sir Walter Raleigh through the 1580s who tries to develop the American colonial vision as a hermetic community. But because John Dee was somewhat hamstrung, had to keep things quiet, and any association with him was actually to be detrimental in the long run. Raleigh had bad advice. The individuals that he sent in charge were remarkably stupid. There, when they arrived in the New World, all of the first expeditions were men and they realized that the American Indian, seeing no women among them, identified them somewhat as gods because there were no women or children with them and they played upon this. So that later on, as inevitably an Englishwoman came ashore it was like the veil being torn from their eyes that they had been bilked, they had been conned. And of course these kinds of sudden disenchantments always breed a perpetual residual of bitterness. You are not gods. You are men. And not only that you are liars. This was the way in which the communities were mishandled. I hate to read you some of the pages that I've had to write on this. There were attacks on Indian villages because of misunderstandings. They brought a very intelligent young Indian to England to be educated and they taught him English. And he was to be the translator, the great liaison, like the woman who had helped Cortez - Marina. And when he came back the ship that brought him back within a couple of days through the anger of one of the commanders of that expedition, had attacked the man's own village and killed his family. And of course he left, he was never to be seen again. And the stories went just the other way. So that all through the 1580s Raleigh who was trying to develop this liaison, choosing the wrong figures because he couldn't really have the full help of a man like Dee, and you had to have somebody behind the scene who understood what was going on. You have to have a director, you have to have a president, you have to have somebody who has the vision and the capacity to see it as a unity. You can't build a geometry without the monad. You can't have an interior architecture of the mystical possibilities of man without having the presence of God you can't do it. Your structure will crumble because you have to have a foundation and the only foundation is that presence of the divine, and the only man at the time who really could have done it was John Dee. The lack of Dee was to prove Sir Walter Raleigh's downfall. He ended his days for years as a prisoner in the Tower of London and finally towards the end they began to torture him to get him to divulge who was behind all of these scenes. And not only that, not only did Raleigh's experiments in Virginia go astray, but the Earl of Leicester began to plan an invasion of Holland and it backfired. And the whole cause of international cooperation went up in smoke because the bickering came back to the fore and Elizabeth found herself surrounded by problems and it contributed to her bitterness, her cantankerousness in her old age. All through the 1580s it seemed as if Dee was just being wasted. In the 1590s, to begin the 1590s, Dee wrote an autobiographical sketch called The Compendious Rehearsal, compendious, enormously filled with documents, rehearsal, all the old facts, all the old stories, to clear himself. And the Compendious Rehearsal did that somewhat. Dee was put in charge of a school in Manchester and he began to experiment with forming an educational mode of training yet another generation. But of course there were people taking pot shots at him constantly. And all through the 1590s Dee was somewhat hamstrung. In 1604 Dee was so sick and tired of generations of criticism that he wrote a public letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury illustrating it by a figure of John Dee kneeling before a vision of the Lord in the cloud and next to him was a contemporary Elizabethan hydra, a figure with many heads all recognizable as Elizabethan gentlemen, criticizing Dee. And in between this hydra of critical gentlemen and the supplicant John Dee was coming from the cloud the sword of the Lord in his hand. And of course this is a way of saying that truth will out and we will have clarity we will have truth and I will be exonerated, easy to see. In the 1590s there was also a meeting. The experiments in the early 1580s with John Dee had gone astray but the network was still viable. There had been many congregations of esotericists that had been brought together increasingly through the late 1580s. One of the earliest ones in 1586 was a militant society of Christians which prided themselves on aggressively taking the ball out of the Pope's hands out of the Roman Catholic Church's hands and really making some kind of a Protestant League which would in fact then oversee not only the reformation of man, but the transformation of man. This and succeeding societies were to build up to the great scandal revolution of the age - the Rosicrucian Manifestos of 1614. So that Dee in a way is really the author and the man behind this movement also accruing itself. When he died in 1608 almost no notice was taken. Elizabeth had died early in 1603. Bacon was unable to acknowledge publicly the debt and the fact. He became obscure, increasingly, until the publication of his private experiment diaries on some relations with the spirits in 1654 put the seal of heretic on and everyone forgot about John Dee. No one bothered with him. He seemed to be one of those individuals who was negligible. But in fact in addition to all of the material that I've brought up for you, Dee was responsible for yet one more gigantic step for man - to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. He was the greatest mathematician of his age and John Dee took all of the scattered mathematical learning of his time and brought it together and made really the basic mathematical science which integrated itself around training in a kabbalistic way to be able to transform itself from arithmetic to mathematics to be able to have that transcendent imaginative scope which higher mathematics has. And so effective was John Dee in this that at the end of the century in which he died two individuals who inherited his work would develop the science of calculus and to go from the Kabbalistic meanderings of the early 17th century to the full theory of differential and integral calculus in one century is really some leap forward. Almost all of that owes itself to the foundations laid by John Dee and one of his great books is actually a preface to a translation of Euclid done as early as 1570, The Mathematical Preface to the Elements of Geometry of Euclid of Madera by John Dee. And it's been reprinted quite recently, I think about four years ago, five years ago. There are three books that I should draw your attention to. These mathematical and hermetic geometry were also influential in designing and structuring the architecture of the times, especially the theater of the times, so that the construction, in London, of the Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames has behind its structure architecturally and mathematically a hermetic design of the philosopher's stone. So that the plays performed there at the Globe Theatre would not only have a quality of expressing in terms of drama and a quality of expressing in terms of allegory and metaphor but by the positioning of the actors and the delivering and the timing of the lines would have an even larger occult architecture in its expressivity and would include the audience in the patterning so that we had a real atomic reactor there in the theater. The man who carried on John Dee's hermetic work in this area was Robert Fludd and there is a book called Theater of the World by Francis Bacon published by the University of Chicago Press. We're starting to get serious in our time about doing something about our history. And on the cover of course is the great symbol of Vitruvian Man spread out in a circle. Leonardo da Vinci used it and many others have used it. It originates in Vitruvius who was of course the esoteric architect for Augustus. At that time period when the Roman emperor wanted to reform the entire world and brought together all the Hermetic Keys under his aegis. So the Theater of the World. The second volume, also by Frances Yates, it’s called The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. And it was published just a few years ago. Dame Frances died about three years ago. Published in 1979. And in it are a couple of chapters on John Dee which I really recommend to you. And I think that you will enjoy Dame Frances’s writing. She was really somebody. There is a biography John Dee: The World of Elizabethan Magus by Peter French and it's a pretty good rundown of the basic facts and their integration in John Dee's life. Unfortunately, Frances Yates was so concerned as a scholar - she was at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. The Warburg Institute was founded in the 30s by Aby Warburg. He was originally in Berlin I believe and he integrated a library so that every floor of the library had a different intellectual integration, so that the library physically was like an integration you could move around and the shelves were arranged so that related items were relational architecturally in the library design. And then he moved it to London because he didn't like what was happening in Germany of the 1930s. She was at the Warburg Institute for years and years and she was concerned with patiently building stepping stones and she was just about ready towards the end of her life to write an overall book. She said all her life she'd been concerned with doing it and she has about 10 or 11 books but they're all the stepping stones and they don't have the overall view which I've sought to try and give you tonight. French's book was originally a Ph.D. thesis and because of that it has this academic quality of trying to prove to somebody who's scrutinizing this that all this links together. And he's afraid to, in a way, reluctant is a better word, to let it balloon out. But also I must say that some of what I've given you tonight is not dependent upon scholarship but dependent upon an interior registering for its shaping. Dee's place in this hermetic tradition is that for the first time we find one man in a Vitruvian manner who integrates in his own life all of the elements and all of the qualities so that we have really in John Dee the ultimate figure of the Renaissance Man - that genius who covers all the bases all the ground. And it's this figure of a man being able to do this and that his work is able to go out and touch every single aspect of life that is a paradigm for the next man to come along and fill those shoes. And that man is Francis Bacon. And it's Bacon, having seen all his life the wonderful effort of Dee, and recognizing that all this could be lost, frittered away, unless somebody stepped in there and worked on this. So Bacon took it upon himself increasingly throughout the 1590s and throughout especially the early years of the 17th century to accept that position. There was literally no one else alive at the time who could have done it. There were individuals in Europe who were in contact. Many of them talented individuals. And we'll look at some of them like Johann Valentin Andrea. But there was no one single person who had the extraordinary intelligence, the quickness of mind, the felicity of expression, the depth of experience, the broadness of actual contacts to do the job. And so Bacon reluctantly, because he was very much alert to the fact that if you stick your neck out one inch too far it'll be gone. He accepted this responsibility. And we'll see that he walked a tightrope but managed to get the job done. And he carries the Hermetic tradition to a new level of insight. And it's almost as if we have a reversal of the old pattern in Greece. We had there Aristotle being Plato's student. And now we have Bacon being Dee’s student. And it's almost like Aristotle coming back as Dee and Bacon coming back as Plato. And in a way it's not so far fetched because the last work of Bacon was about Atlantis and he left it mid-sentence unfinished. And as a coda to his career Bacon also wrote about Atlantis and left it unfinished in mid-sentence as if to say do you recognize the mark? Well we'll look at them next week.