Noble Blood - John Dee's Language of the Angels

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Alchemist, magician, astronomer, astrologer - John Dee served as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, interpreting the stars for her. And when a comet crossed the sky, he told her that it portended the birth of something he came up with the name for: the British Empire.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion advised. The year was 1662 and the owners of a little sweet shop in London were running their fingers over their newest acquisition, an antique cedar chest. Their fingertips found a strange opening in the body of the chest, a hidden drawer, perhaps. They used a knife to pull at it. The drawer opened, and inside, not the treasures they may have dreamt of, but a beaded necklace, a cross, and some handwritten books. The sweet shops made wasn't especially interested in whatever someone's old books might have to say.

She had work to do, but as she baked her pies atop the pages she was using as parchment paper, the smell of caramelized sugar spinning in the air, it was hard to ignore an uncomfortable feeling stirring in her gut. When she looked at the book's pages, they were strange. Yes, they contained words and dated entries, as she might have expected, but the pages also contained diagrams and signs and symbols that she didn't understand, unnerving symbols, triangles inscribed inside circles, intricate stars that pointed toward what might have been Greek letters,

maps of what might have looked like planets, complex mathematical symbols that could only be witchcraft. She quieted her mind, she lifted the surely devilish pages one by one, and one by one let them blacken in the fire beneath her baking pies. But it didn't take long before other people started noticing the strangeness of the pages that hadn't been burned. One antiquarian realized that these pages weren't, just some devil's unhinged ramblings. They were the lost diary of Renaissance England's greatest

conjurer, the occultist once employed as astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I, a man named John D. John D. John D. was one of the most fascinating characters in all of Elizabethan court history. He was a learned mathematician and also a magician, an astronomer, and an astrologer. He was a trusted political advisor to the queen. He was a scientist, a cartographer, and even a special effects technician. He was also an angelologist, a crystallomenser, an occultist, and a dabbler in alchemy. He was a student of Hebrew and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah in addition to Christianity. He believed he spoke with angels, both angels from the Old Testament and some of his own discovery. He recorded, completely credulously, his angelic conversations with the likes of the angels

Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. It may seem impossible to us now that someone so invested in the occult, in sorcery, could have had such a serious political career in a royal court. But it was the 1500s, the Renaissance. The classic Renaissance man did it all, in part because it all was not so neatly divided into branches as it is today. Math, magic, and miracle were not entirely distinct from each other. Politics were ordained by God, after all. Queen Elizabeth herself believed in the royal touch,

the magic of her fingertips upon her subjects' necks to heal their ailments. The latest optical science was recognizing that light could bend. It separated into rainbows through lenses and mirrors and crystals. Where was the line between that science and the idea that gazing into a crystal ball might reveal concealed dimensions of God's creation, just as it revealed the different bands of color concealed within light? John D. was a man who studied the heavens, and in 1572, he looked up as all of England cowered at a new star

that suddenly appeared in the night sky. followed by a strange comet in 1577. And under the light of that comet, the conjurer, John D, made a political plan for his queen. He encouraged Elizabeth to follow the path laid by King Arthur a thousand years earlier, to expand England into, a term he coined, a British empire. But the great conjurer would also do something else under the United. the light of that mysterious comet. He would allow a man using a false name into his home, a man who would ultimately be his downfall. This was a man who would intercede with Dee's

angelic conversations and put a wedge between Dee and the court life he was enjoying with Queen Elizabeth. When the great conjurer looked up into the sky and calculated the positions of the planets, it seems he couldn't have seen just how tenuous his own position was. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. John D. was born in or around London on July 13, 1527, during the reign of King Henry VIII. He was the son of a merchant who served within the king's court. If you're into astrology, you're in luck with this episode. Dee mapped his own birth chart as well as the astrological positionings of many of the events that took

place throughout the 16th century. According to Dee's calculations, Jupiter and the Sun were strong together in cancer at the moment of his birth. I'm sure some of you listeners can interpret those signs better than I can. biographer Benjamin Woolley notes that the moon and the sun were in opposition in these charts. And even I could tell you that symbolically, at least in literary terms, that suggests some internal conflict that might have been brewing inside him. And so we begin today's episode appropriately in astrology,

a field with plenty of adherence still today, a realm that draws on astronomical science, and then, at least in my estimation, heads into the direction of belief. By 1547, John D. was 19, and England was transitioning from the reign of King Henry the 8th to that of his short-lived only son, King Edward. At that time, John D. was in the midst of some personal drama of his own, and I mean drama in the quite literal sense. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge,

and he was putting on a play. It was a play called Peace by an ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, and it called for a dung beetle to fly with an actor on its back. This was the 1500s. D did not have the benefits of electricity in stages. his play, let alone projectors, lasers, or drones. And yet, the actor on stage instructed his scarab beetle to lift him to the sky. And it did. There was a gasp in the audience. Nex cranes cranesed backward to watch in awe. How was it possible? The flying beetle on stage was like a miracle.

or else some thought like magic. Or, as some whispered as the play went on, it was witchcraft. D must have dealt with the devil. Only a few people in the crowd recognized that the beetle must have been some application of mathematics. D probably used some combination of pulleys, mirrors, springs, and pressurized air or gas. to create the illusion of a flying bug. But this was a time when mathematics as a discipline were viewed as essentially indistinguishable from conjuring.

Dee was cast under suspicion. In another life, we can imagine that Dee might have gone on to become the best practical effects guy of the Elizabethan age. We can easily imagine a Dee who went on to be an artist of the theater, what Dee himself called Art Mathematical. Of course, his beetle was considered wizardly. After all, what is special effects technology today, but something we call movie magic.

But aside from a brief stint when he was a student, Dee wasn't really interested in the theater. For Dee, the mathematical was only in service of his true aim, which was the revelation of some universal, godly truth through the use of sciences that shaded without distinction in his mind into magic. And eight years later, that lack of distinction between the occult and the approved came home to Dee in the form of a court order. It was 1555 and Dee was under arrest. This was during Queen Mary's reign. D stood accused of witchcraft, a serious charge under the new Catholic rule, which was definitely not opposed to burning heretics at the stake.

D was also officially accused of two other crimes, calculating and conjuring. Again, in that language, you can see the closeness of math and magic. To this day, the word we use for solving a math problem, calculating it, means, something very different when applied to a person. A calculating person implies that they're sly, bad, scheming. And John D. stood accused of doing the very thing that so many astrologically inclined bridesmaids do for their friends today, that is mapping the horoscopes of Mary and her husband, Philip, to see if they made a good match. Kind of touchingly, D. found in favor of of Mary and Phillips Union.

It's pretty sweet, actually. His calculations suggested that their marriage took place under an auspicious rising sign for a new couple. But of course, Catholic Queen Mary, defensive about an unpopular marriage, didn't exactly take the Zodiac as a fun activity for a bridal shower.

Luckily for Dee, he escaped the fate of the heretics and outlived Mary, who died in 1557. That was when Mary's younger, Protestant, half-sister Elizabeth came to the throne. 25-year-old Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII and the beheaded Anne Boleyn. She was the second woman ever to ascend to a throne that had been, until recently, only occupied by men, and she needed to secure her reign. She appointed her favorite Robert Dudley to advise her, and Dudley, needing the good graces of not only the earthly but heavenly realms as well,

as he put together Elizabeth's coronation, decided that he needed the one man in England who could read the planets better than anyone else. Robert Dudley called upon John D. When John D.E. agreed to choose the date for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, it was the beginning of a major life change for him. After being arrested under Queen Mary's reign, now he was not only set free, but he was welcomed into Elizabeth's court.

As his first order of business, Dee consulted the stars. He measured and mapped the angles between the planets, the positions of major constellations, the 12 astrological houses and rising signs. At last he decided that January, 15, 1559, would be the most heavens-approved date for the beginning of the Elizabethan age. Obviously, Mars was in Scorpio that day.

After the coronation, history loses track of Dee for about five years. I like to imagine the stage magician's sleight of hand here, de-ducking into a cleverly designed setpiece through which the audience of history can't see him. But he was somewhere all along studying the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. He was seeking the secret names of God, learning the Hebrew language and its mystical numerology, the alphabet arranged around the first letter Aleph, middle mem, last tauve, spelling out Emmet, the Hebrew word for truth. He was seeking divine truth in increasingly more mystical modes.

But Dee was far from done with politics. Once history catches up with him again, he steps out from behind the curtain on June 14, 1564, when he and Queen Elizabeth are walking together at Greenwich Palace on the south bank of the River Thames. Dee was holding something in his hands, a slim book, and he was brimming with excitement, and perhaps a little bit of fear. He was about to show the queen the work of his soul, his monos hieroglyphica.

Listener, allow me to tell you, the monos is truly wild. It's a whole book dedicated to explaining a mystical symbol of divine revelation that Dee invented himself. It looks kind of like a cross between the artist formerly known as Prince Symbol and Harry Potter. deathly hallows. D's glyph symbol was a melange of Latin wordplay, alchemy, numerology, celestial calculations, and, you know, his idea of the unity of all things. So D. was no doubt excited, but nervous as he walked alongside the queen, no doubt remembering how he had been arrested for doing a queen's horoscope years before. Elizabeth had taken D.'s astrological advice for her coronation date, though. Perhaps she would be open to his new book

of divine celestial work, or perhaps she would have him arrested on the spot. He offered her the book. Elizabeth paused for a moment, observing the symbol. Dee's pulse pounded. Then he saw Elizabeth's eyes light up in curiosity. I will be your scholar, she told Dee, if you, you'll be your scholar. If you you explain this work to me. And so John Dee sat with the Queen of England and described to her his special invented brand of mysticism. John Dee and the Queen went on to have a good relationship. She paid him occasional visits at his home. She consulted with him about whether she should marry one of her suitors, the Duke of Anjou. He said she shouldn't and she didn't. But the greatest cause D'i advocated with Elizabeth and the one that would mark ultimately the end of his close relationship with her at court was a bit of political fortune-telling that would ultimately come to pass in a big way.

It was D's deep belief that Elizabeth should set out to create a British empire. D wasn't just fortune-telling when it came to this idea of empire. He was actively promoting it. As Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe, Dee was coining the term British Empire. He was hearkening back to King Arthur a thousand years before, arguing that the British right to an extensive empire had been established a millennium ago.

He encouraged Elizabeth to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese claims to the new world, especially Spain's claims in North America. His suggestions were even more persuasive than usual, because just as Dee was petitioning Elizabeth on the idea of expansionism, there was a strange thing going on in the world, something that could seem like a message directly from the heavens, something no one in all of Britain, in all of Europe, could possibly miss. All anyone needed to do was step outside and crane their necks back, as they had years ago to gaze at John D's Flying Beetle on stage. But this time, the magic was taking place on a much bigger stage, the night sky itself. And if anyone looked up to the night sky in November of 1577, there it would be the great, glittering, terrifying thing.

the bright light with a luminous tail, a comet. Many believed that the cosmic event signaled some vexation from God, some calamity to befall mankind, or, thought many of the English, to specifically befall England or the Queen. But Elizabeth wasn't going to believe just anybody's fears about this strange celestial happening. She was going to consult one man, when it came to the skies, John D.

The comet is nothing to fear, he advised her. It is not important of approaching doom, but of your approaching greatness. Perhaps the bright light with the tail that arcing through the sky is a sign of England's destiny, to be the bright light with a long tail that is a global empire.

Of course, D's vision for English expansion, The expansionism is exactly what would happen. The English would defeat the Spanish armada in 1888 when Dee was not yet 60 years old. But ultimately, Dee had nothing to do with Elizabeth's actions, as she set out in favor of the empire that he had initially encouraged. The comet lit the sky and Dee's eyes were drawn heavenward. He lost interest in court. He had begun his life with one interest, and,

it was not the earthly realms of battle and conquest and bloodshed, though his concept of empire would inevitably contain all three. The comet faded from the sky, and John Dee left his influence at court behind. From there, the rest of Dee's life became ever more involved in the occult. He worked closely with scryers, people who divined things via the use of objects like crystal balls. some, or I might say all, of these were frauds. Dee's closest scryer was a man who first entered his life calling himself Edward Talbot. Talbot would later re-enter Dee's life using his real name Edward Kelly, which goes to show the type of upstanding honesty we're dealing with here.

With Kelly's help, Dee communed with the angels in a special language called Enochian. D. and Kelly conversed with some of the people you may have learned about in religious schools like Raphael and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel. In his diaries, D earnestly recorded these angelic conversations. Uriel would say things like, quote, we cannot visit thee now, at the 12th hour thou shalt use us. Then at the 12th hour, Michael would say something like, quote, divide the seven parts of the circle, every one into seven. By seven, all government is. To my understanding, it's not exactly a clear message. Sometimes Dee worried that he and Kelly were communicating with devils instead of angels. But for the most part, Dee believed in Kelly. He and Kelly even traveled to

Poland and Prague together, where they wound up banned up banned by the Holy Roman Emperor. Rudolph II on suspicion of necromancy. Eventually, Kelly received a message that he and Dee should share not only spiritual experience, but something a little closer to home, their wives. This experiment in sister-wifing lasted only about one night. It seemed like a horrible incident for Dee's wife, Jane, and in the end it sat very badly with Dee as well. Shortly after, his relationship with Kelly finally broke down. Still, the timing of the wife swapping did throw the paternity of one of Dee's sons into doubt.

To Dee's credit, he treated the boy as his own. He was an involved father to all of his children with Jane, who was his third wife. He was such an involved father that he even asked one. one of his sons to be a scryer for him, which ultimately wound up as a failed experiment. By the final years of Dee's life, he had outlived Jane and five of their eight children. He had also outlived Queen Elizabeth. He died in December 1608 at the age of 81. His hidden diaries would be baked under the sweet shop pies 54 years later.

Dee may have been the inspiration for a lot of canonical characters who are well known to English lit majors. William Shakespeare's magician Prospero, Christopher Marlowe's necromancer Faust, Edmund Spencer's meditative old sage in the House of Temperance in the Fairy Queen. But above all, Dee's legacy is as a figure who strived earnestly for divine revelation. often in ways that seem profoundly unscientific to us today. And yet, even today, the great contemporary mathematician Edward Frankel went on Lex Friedman's podcast this April to discuss the present state of math. They talked about contemporary physicists and the so far in vain quest for a grand unifying theory of everything.

And they joked about, when you show up and meet God and there's one equation on the board and the two of you just chuckle. Unlike D, scholars today have separated math and science from religion. Yet the image of God's chalkboard is still there, even metaphorically. There's still some sense that when we try to derive the mathematical and physical underpinnings of the world, we are dealing with something bigger than ourselves. John D, for all he foresaw and failed to foresee about the future, probably would be happy about that. That's the story of Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer John D.

But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about his astrological birth chart. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?

I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers

as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.

Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me, from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, for all of you, astrology buffs out there, let's dig some more into Dee's birth chart. First of all, Dee wrote his chart in the form of a square,

more like the Vedic-style natal chart than the typical circular charts you might see today. In a box at the center of Dee's chart, his careful script recorded the following. His birthday, 1527, July 13th, his birth time, four hours and two minutes in the afternoon, and his birthplace, latitude 51 degrees, and 32 seconds north latitude. We don't know what Dee made of his own chart. Surely he read a lot of meaning into it, but None of that made its way to us today, which leaves many modern biographers and podcasters a lot of interpretive wiggle room. Biographer Benjamin Woolley notes that the star Antarys in the planet Mars

were together on D's chart, which in his interpretation was a disturbing or threatening sign. We reached out to a friend who's an amateur chart reader, and with no knowledge of whose chart this was, she looked at the 11th house and said, ruled by Mercury and reflects the archetypes of Aquarius, so futuristic ideas thinking about innovation and the future, sort of space alien stuff.

But a different friend replied that astrology is pseudoscience and no place to end a historical podcast. Although, to be fair, one could argue that historically during this period in question, astronomy was thought of as a science. But for those who think like the second friend and, to be blunt, think like me, one final cold hard fact. The astronomy in D's chart is remarkably correct. Using Ptolemy's formulas, decalculated the positions of the known planets at the time of his birth with extreme accuracy, within a few 30th of a degree. The least accurate, calculation he made was for mercury, and even then, with the science of the 16th century, he was only off by two degrees. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio, and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and Rima Il K. Ali with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show. about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.