Cozy Ancient Mysteries: John Dee & The Man Who Spoke to Angels

[00:00:03]Hello there and welcome to Sleepy Nights. This is Kevin and tonight we'll hear the mysteries of John D.

[00:00:30]There is a house on the bank of the tames, a little way up river from London.

[00:00:38]And inside it is the greatest library in England.

[00:00:43]Not the greatest private library, the greatest library.

[00:00:49]Full stop.

[00:00:52]More books than Oxford holds.

[00:00:56]more than Cambridge.

[00:00:59]Thousands of volumes gathered from across all of Europe by a single man over a single lifetime.

[00:01:11]books on mathematics and astronomy and navigation, on medicine and history and the movements of the stars and on certain shelves in certain locked cases.

[00:01:30]books on subjects that his neighbors would have been very frightened to know that he owned.

[00:01:42]This is the house at Mort Lake and the man who built that library is the cleverest man in England.

[00:01:56]And one night while he is away a mob comes for it.

[00:02:06]They have decided he is a sorcerer, a conjurer, a man who speaks with the devils.

[00:02:21]And so they break into his house and they begin to tear the library apart, burning, smashing, scattering a lifetime's collection along the muddy bank of the river.

[00:02:43]By the time it is over, a great part of the most important collection of knowledge in the country is gone.

[00:02:57]And here is the strange thing.

[00:03:01]The mob was not entirely wrong because the man who owned that library was the queen's trusted advisor.

[00:03:12]astrologer to Elizabeth herself and the scholar she turned to a mathematician whose work guided England ships across uncharted oceans.

[00:03:28]And he was also by the end of his life a man who spent his evening staring into a polished stone, writing down the words of angels dictated to him by a convicted criminal.

[00:03:50]How does one man become both of those things at once?

[00:03:55]the most learned mind of his age and a devil in the eyes of his own street.

[00:04:05]That is the question we are going to follow tonight.

[00:04:09]The story of John D.

[00:04:12]scholar, spy, sorcerer, or fool.

[00:04:17]The one voice he wanted so badly to be real that it cost him everything.

[00:04:30]To understand how far he fell, you have to understand how high he stood.

[00:04:37]And he stood very high indeed.

[00:04:42]John D was born in London in 1527.

[00:04:47]the son of a minor official at the court of Henry.

[00:04:53]And from boyhood it was plain that his mind was something rare.

[00:04:59]He went up to Cambridge as a teenager and worked by his own account 18 hours a day.

[00:05:10]Four for sleep, two for meals, 18 for study.

[00:05:16]which does not quite add up and tells you everything about how he wished to be remembered.

[00:05:27]He was so accomplished that he was made a founding fellow of Trinity College while still barely an adult.

[00:05:39]But England today was a small and provincial place and the real learning was on the continent.

[00:05:49]So he crossed to the low countries and threw himself into the company of the greatest scientific minds of the age.

[00:06:01]He studied with the map maker Geratus Marcata, the man whose way of drawing the world we still use today.

[00:06:13]And he came home carrying instruments and globes and a knowledge of mathematics and navigation that almost no one else in England possessed.

[00:06:28]And this is the part that matters, the part that should sit underneath everything stranger that follows.

[00:06:38]D was not a crank.

[00:06:41]He was one of the genuine intellects of the 16th century.

[00:06:47]He understood mathematics at a level his countrymen could barely follow.

[00:06:53]So much so that ordinary people assumed that anyone who could do such things must be doing them with the help of spirits.

[00:07:04]Because what other explanation could there be?

[00:07:10]He helped lay the groundwork, the intellectual groundwork for English exploration, advising the navigators who would push out across the Atlantic in search of a northern passage.

[00:07:28]He is also credited with coining a phrase to describe what England might one day become, the British Empire.

[00:07:41]He held in his head much of the practical knowledge that would build the nation's reach across the world.

[00:07:52]When young Elizabeth came to the throne, it was John D she trusted to choose the date of her coronation, to read the stars and find the most favorable day for a reign to begin.

[00:08:11]Think about that. The future of a kingdom, the most important date of a generation, placed in the hands of this one scholar and his astrology.

[00:08:25]That is how completely the age believed in him.

[00:08:30]That is the height from which the rest of this story descends.

[00:08:41]He was in the fullest sense that the period allowed a magus.

[00:08:49]A word that meant not a stage conjurer but a wise man.

[00:08:56]A master of hidden mathematics that ran beneath the visible world.

[00:09:04]And today there was no wall between the science we recognize and the magic we would not.

[00:09:14]Astronomy and astrology were one study.

[00:09:18]Mathematics and the secret architecture of creation were one subject.

[00:09:24]He did not see himself as crossing from knowledge into superstition.

[00:09:30]He saw one single vast body of truth.

[00:09:34]And he meant to learn the whole of it.

[00:09:37]Every last part, including the parts that no living human was supposed to know.

[00:09:45]The ambition is the seed to everything.

[00:09:51]Hold on to it.

[00:09:59]For a time, a long time, he was untouchable.

[00:10:05]D was not merely the queen's astrologer.

[00:10:08]He was something closer to her private scholar, a man she would visit, a man whose council she sought on matters far beyond the stars.

[00:10:21]When a wax figure of Elizabeth was found in a field with a pin driven through its heart, an apparent act of witchcraft against the crown.

[00:10:32]It was D who was called upon to counter the curse when a fearful comet blazed across the sky and the whole country trembled at the omen.

[00:10:49]It was D the queen summoned to tell her what it meant.

[00:10:56]He stood at the very center of the kingdom's secret life.

[00:11:01]The man who read the signs the rest of the court could not.

[00:11:07]And there is a thread here that has grown over the centuries into one of the most enduring legends attached to his name.

[00:11:19]So let me give it to you and then tell you honestly how much of it to keep.

[00:11:29]See the legend says that John D was a spy.

[00:11:35]But as he traveled across Europe he gathered intelligence for the English crown and sent it home in secret.

[00:11:46]And it says that he signed those secret reports with a private mark.

[00:11:54]A number [clears throat] meant for the queen's eyes alone.

[00:11:59]Two small circles like two eyes followed by an elongated stroke.

[00:12:08]The two eyes, the story goes, meant for your eyes only.

[00:12:15]And the whole symbol, this number 07, was his signature as the queen's own confidential agent.

[00:12:33]Centuries later, the legend insists a writer borrowed it for a fictional spy.

[00:12:42]And so the cleverest man in Elizabeth and England became the secret ancestor of James Bond.

[00:12:56]It is a wonderful story treated gently.

[00:13:00]The truth underneath it is real enough.

[00:13:03]de genuinely traveled widely, genuinely had the queen's confidence, and genuinely operated in a world where a scholar abroad and an intelligencer abroad were often the same man.

[00:13:21]But the neat tale of 007 signature is mostly the work of later writers, polished into legend long after the fact.

[00:13:33]What we can say plainly is this.

[00:13:36]He was close to power, trusted with secrets, and moved through the courts of Europe with the quiet authority of a man who answered to a queen.

[00:13:51]So picture him at his height, the royal favor, the vast library, the instruments and the globes, the most learned man in the land consulted by the throne.

[00:14:10]His name spoken with a mixture of awe and unease the length of the kingdom.

[00:14:19]He had almost everything a mind like his could want.

[00:14:24]Almost.

[00:14:27]There was one door still closed to him.

[00:14:31]The largest one, the one his entire life had been a slow approach toward.

[00:14:40]He had mastered the knowledge that men could teach. He had read it seemed every book worth reading and it was not enough.

[00:14:51]There was a deeper knowledge he could not reach by study alone.

[00:14:57]The knowledge of the angels, the secret language in which God had made the world.

[00:15:10]and there was no book that contained it.

[00:15:15]If men could not teach him, he would have to ask something higher.

[00:15:25]And to do that, he would need someone who could see what he could not.

[00:15:39]This is the turn.

[00:15:42]Everything before it is the ascent.

[00:15:46]Everything after it is the long strange fall.

[00:15:54]By the early 1580s, D was a man in his 50s, brilliant, restless, quietly desperate.

[00:16:05]He had spent decades trying to reach the divine knowledge he believed lay just beyond human learning.

[00:16:13]And he had tried on his own to make contact with the spirit world, staring into crystals, praying, waiting for a voice.

[00:16:27]Nothing came.

[00:16:30]He did not have the gift of sight himself.

[00:16:34]He needed a scrier, a man who could gaze into a polished stone or a mirror and see the spirits that dee could only long to reach.

[00:16:53]Then in 1582, such a man arrived at his door.

[00:17:02]His name was Edward Kelly, though that may not have been the name he was born with, and almost everything about him should have set the alarm bells ringing.

[00:17:19]He was younger than D, sharp, persuasive, and trailing a dark history.

[00:17:27]By many accounts, his ears had been cropped, a punishment for forgery, the mark of a convicted criminal carried for life.

[00:17:41]He was rumored to have dabbled in necromancy, in raising the dead to tell the future.

[00:17:49]He was in short exactly the kind of man a wise person keeps at arms length.

[00:17:58]D took him into his home.

[00:18:05]And so the seances began.

[00:18:14]Kelly would kneel before the show stone crystal sphere and later a disc of polished obsidian, a black Aztec mirror that had somehow found its way to England.

[00:18:36]And he would describe what he saw.

[00:18:42]Angels, figures of light, a child spirit named Madame who appeared as a little girl.

[00:18:56]And D, the great scholar, sat beside him with his pen, writing down every word, recording these conversations in meticulous detail, treating each session as the most important research of his life.

[00:19:16]What the angels delivered over months, then years was extraordinary.

[00:19:26]They dictated through Kelly an entire language, a tongue they called the speech of angels, the language Adam had spoken in Eden, the words in which God had spoken creation into being.

[00:19:47]We call it Enochian today after the biblical Enoch who was said to have walked with God.

[00:19:59]It had its own alphabet, its own grammar, its own great tables of letters that the angels dictated square by square, sometimes backwards, to prevent the dangerous words from taking effect.

[00:20:18]as they were transcribed.

[00:20:24]It was a complete intricate internally consistent system.

[00:20:32]And to this day, people argue about where it came from.

[00:20:37]Because here is the honest difficulty.

[00:20:42]Edward Kelly was almost certainly a fraud.

[00:20:48]The evidence points that way and always has. A forger by record, a man entirely dependent on a wealthy patron, producing visions that conveniently kept the patron enthralled.

[00:21:08]The simplest explanation is that he invented it all.

[00:21:14]Spinning out angelic theater to keep a roof over his head.

[00:21:19]The great man's faith fixed upon him.

[00:21:24]And yet the Inoian system is so elaborate, so strange, so unlike a quick confidence trick that even skeptics have struggled to explain how an unschooled forger improvised it night after night without contradiction.

[00:21:52]So we are left with the unsettling shape of it.

[00:21:59]The most learned man in England who could see through any argument and master any book sitting at the feet of a corrupt eared criminal writing down his every word as gospel.

[00:22:17]The genius and the fraud locked together and the genius could not would not see it.

[00:22:31]That is the thing about wanting something badly enough.

[00:22:36]It does not make you stupid. It makes you blind.

[00:22:42]D could navigate empires.

[00:22:45]He simply could not look directly at the one man. He most needed to be telling the truth.

[00:23:02]Then in 1583 the two men left England.

[00:23:08]A Polish nobleman passing through London became fascinated by D and his angelic conversations and invited the whole strange household to the continent.

[00:23:24]And so D packed up his family and Kelly packed up his.

[00:23:31]And together they began years of wandering across Europe and turmoil.

[00:23:37]Chasing patronage, performing their seances for any noble who would listen.

[00:23:44]Always moving, always hoping the next great man would be the one to fund the work.

[00:23:56]They made their way to the courts of central Europe and eventually into the orbit of one of the most extraordinary rulers of the age, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolfph II, who held his court at Prague.

[00:24:19]Rudolph was a man after D's own heart and D's own weakness.

[00:24:25]An emperor obsessed with the occult, with alchemy, with astrology and strange machines and the secret workings of nature.

[00:24:36]who filled his castle with magicians and astronomers and seekers of the philosophers stone.

[00:24:47]To a wandering pair of angel talkers, it should have been the perfect harbor.

[00:24:59]des seccured an audience with the emperor and delivered to him a warning straight from the angels that Rudolph must reform his life, must turn from his sins or face divine judgment.

[00:25:21]It was not perhaps the most politic thing to say to an emperor.

[00:25:28]The reception cooled and there was the constant circling suspicion of the church which watched these two foreigners and their crystal and their talks of spirits with deep unease.

[00:25:45]They were nearly always one accusation away from real danger.

[00:25:50]Through it all, the seances continued.

[00:25:54]Kelly's angels grew more powerful, more demanding, and conveniently more inclined to elevate Kelly himself.

[00:26:08]He was by now increasingly drawn to alchemy, to the pursuit of the stone that would turn base metal into gold.

[00:26:18]And there were claims that he had actually done it, that he possessed a mysterious red powder that could perform the transmutation.

[00:26:35]Whether anyone ever truly saw gold made, we cannot say, but Kelly's star was rising and de slowly was falling.

[00:26:48]The master becoming dependent on the servant, the scholar increasingly at the mercy of the scrier's visions.

[00:26:58]And then came the command that broke it.

[00:27:02]In 1587, Kelly reported a new instruction from the angels, one so shocking that even D recoiled at first.

[00:27:14]The angels decreed that the two men should hold all things in common.

[00:27:22]All things, including their wives.

[00:27:31]We do not know everything that followed.

[00:27:35]We know that D was horrified, that he even agonized over it, that he searched his conscience and his faith.

[00:27:48]And we know that in the end he appears to have submitted to it, convinced or half convinced, that to refuse an angel is a greater sin than to obey one.

[00:28:03]It is one of the most uncomfortable episodes in the whole story.

[00:28:08]And it is the moment the seances curdle from wonder into something darker.

[00:28:16]The point at which a reasonable observer can no longer avoid the obvious reading.

[00:28:26]that Kelly was a manipulator who had bent the brilliant man entirely to his will and was now testing how far that control could be pushed.

[00:28:40]It was the beginning of the end between them.

[00:28:45]Soon after the partnership shattered, Kelly, his promises of alchemical gold, was the one the emperor wanted.

[00:28:59]He stayed in Bohemia and was made a knight and grew rich in the expectation of the gold he could never quite deliver and died years later in disgrace in prison, reportedly trying to escape.

[00:29:18]and D the great scholar gathered up what remained of his household, turned for home, cross a continent toward the house by the river he had left so many years before.

[00:29:42]He [snorts] came back to Mort Lake in 1589 to find it ruined.

[00:29:50]The library, that vast, irreplaceable library, the labor of his whole life, had been broken into and plundered during the years he was away.

[00:30:05]Many of the books were gone.

[00:30:09]The instruments were gone.

[00:30:12]The great collection that had made him the most knowledgeable man in England lay scattered, sold, or destroyed.

[00:30:21]The mob's work, the slow theft of years had hollowed out the heart of his life's achievement while he chased angels across Europe.

[00:30:37]and the world he returned to had changed its mind about him.

[00:30:44]The royal favor that had once made him untouchable had cooled.

[00:30:51]He was older now, poorer, trailing a reputation that had curdled from all into suspicion.

[00:31:09]Whispers of sorcery never far from him had hardened.

[00:31:19]He petitioned the crown for help for some position that might restore him and was eventually granted a post far away in Manchester.

[00:31:35]a warden ship that brought him little comfort and less money among colleagues who seem to have distrusted him thoroughly.

[00:31:52]When Elizabeth died and a new king came to the throne, things grew worse still.

[00:32:04]James was a man with a genuine terror of witchcraft.

[00:32:10]He had written a book on the subject, hunting the very thing D was suspected of.

[00:32:18]And there was no place in that court for an old man with a history of talking to spirits.

[00:32:31]deep pleaded near to the end to be cleared of the charge of being a conjurer, asking to be tried so that he might prove his innocence.

[00:32:48]No trial came.

[00:32:53]The accusation simply hung over him unanswered for the rest of his days.

[00:33:05]He died at Mort Lake around6008 or609.

[00:33:12]The exact date is uncertain, which is its own quiet cruelty for a man who had once chosen the most important date in the kingdom by the stars.

[00:33:29]He died poor.

[00:33:32]In his final years, the story goes, he was reduced to selling off his remaining books one by one.

[00:33:42]The last of that great library, going piece by piece to buy food.

[00:33:51]The cleverest man in England.

[00:33:54]The queen's own conjurer ended his life selling his knowledge by the volume to keep from going hungry and was buried in the church at Mort Lake in a grave whose exact location was in time lost.

[00:34:19]It is the shape we have seen before.

[00:34:25]great mind, dazzling height, and then a slow fade [music] to poverty.

[00:34:34]The world he had served so brilliantly.

[00:34:38]Let him go without a sound.

[00:34:53]So what do we make of him?

[00:34:58]We could call him a fool.

[00:35:02]A brilliant scholar. Gulled by a cheap forger who threw away his library, his favor, and his good name, chasing visions in a black mirror.

[00:35:18]There is a version of the story that ends exactly there, and it is not a foolish version.

[00:35:29]The evidence for Kelly's fraud is strong.

[00:35:34]The angels asked for too many convenient things.

[00:35:41]Simplest explanation is usually the true one.

[00:35:47]And the simplest explanation is that a desperate aging genius was deceived by a man who saw exactly how to deceive him.

[00:36:01]But sit for a moment in the harder version.

[00:36:06]Because the thing that makes John D linger is not the fraud.

[00:36:12]It is the wanting.

[00:36:16]Here was a man who had learned everything a man could learn.

[00:36:22]Who had mastered mathematics, read the libraries, advised the throne, mapped the roots for empires.

[00:36:30]who had stood at the absolute summit of human knowledge in his age and found when he got there that it was not enough.

[00:36:44]That there was still a door he could not open in knowledge he could not reach.

[00:36:52]A voice he could not hear no matter how he strained for it.

[00:37:01]And so he gave the rest of his life and his fortune and his reputation to the hope that someone somehow could put him in contact with the thing on the other side of the door.

[00:37:25]That is not the story of a stupid man.

[00:37:29][clears throat] That is the story of a man cursed with a hunger too large for the world to feed.

[00:37:38]The same hunger that made him great is the hunger that destroyed him.

[00:37:45]He could not stop at the edge of the known.

[00:37:49]The way wiser and smaller men do.

[00:37:54]He had to lean out past it and past it in the dark waiting.

[00:38:02]Was Edward Kelly and his crystals and his angels telling him at last exactly what he had spent his old life desperate to hear.

[00:38:17]Of course, we will never know for certain what he was hearing in those long sessions by a candle light.

[00:38:29]a fraud's invention, the wanderings of his own brilliant, exhausted mind, or this is the possibility he died believing something real, something that genuinely spoke in a language older than the world.

[00:38:55]What we do know is this.

[00:38:58]The man clever enough to navigate the courts of empires could not navigate the one voice he wanted to be true.

[00:39:11]The cleverest man in England and done not by a lack of knowledge, by the one thing knowledge could never give him.

[00:39:23]the certainty that on the other side of the silence someone was listening back.

[00:39:38]He spent his life leaning toward that silence, asking it to speak.

[00:39:49]And the great unanswered question of John D.

[00:39:53]The question his neighbors could not answer when they burned his books.

[00:39:58]The question we cannot answer now is whether anything ever truly answered him.