Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioOn the evening of 17 April 1584, in a rented house on Szczepańska Street in Cracow, Edward Kelley stood up in the middle of a session, told John Dee that the spirits they had been talking to for two years were devils, and walked out of the study. Dee stayed where he was and wrote it all down.
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On the evening of 17 April 1584, in a rented house on Szczepańska Street in Cracow, Edward Kelley stood up in the middle of a session, told John Dee that the spirits they had been talking to for two years were devils, and walked out of the study. Dee stayed where he was and wrote it all down. That reflex, the writing, is why we can watch the most serious crisis of the Dee-Kelley partnership unfold day by day: a medium losing his faith, a scholar losing his medium, and a manuscript being negotiated between them in real time.
The dates need a flag first. The Cracow entries are dated in the new Gregorian calendar, ten days ahead of the old-style reckoning still used in England; 17 April in the record is 7 April to a reader in London. With that fixed, the sequence is exact. The 1584 record opens on Tuesday 10 April with the angel Nalvage taking over as instructor. Two days later he laid out the course: a doctrine contained in forty-nine tables and forty-nine "voyces, or callings", the keys to gates of understanding. The same day he set a deadline: "as power is not given unto me beyond the first day of August next, so have you no strength to learn after." Whatever else the sessions were, they now ran on a clock.
Strain showed before the explosion. On 13 April Dee recorded that Kelley "confessed that he had been that day, and some dayes before, dealing by himself after his manner", leaving written questions in his window; Nalvage told him the devil had taken them, and Kelley went downstairs and found it true. Four days later came the break. Dee's entry for Tuesday 17 April reads: "E.K. immediately fell into a new doubting of the verity of these actions, and said he had a Vision by a good Creature the last night, who said these Creatures with which we dealt, would no more appear unto him."
The word "new" is doing quiet work there. Doubt was Kelley's resting state. But this episode had teeth. He declared that both "the last dayes skorner, and these our instructors were all Devils", refused to sit for any more dictation, and proposed a replacement: Dee's boy John could deliver the letters instead. Then, in Dee's flat recording, "He rose, and went away: and left me alone in my Study, appointed for these actions."
Kelley came back, and on Thursday 19 April the break widened. He called the teachers "deluders" who in two years had left them no more able "to understand, or do somewhat", saying he could have learned all seven liberal sciences in that time. He wished himself in England. He said that if the action books were his, "he would out of hand burn them."
Then came the disclosure that stung. Kelley admitted he had written to Dee's patron, the Polish lord Albert Łaski, by the hand of a carrier named in the printed record as "Pirmis", telling him "that he took our Teachers to be deceivers, and wicked, and no good Creatures of God". The printed name is a misprint; the historian Rafał T. Prinke has identified the carrier as Paweł Pernus, a Cracow patrician whose house stood on Floriańska Street at what is now number 11. Dee's note at the foot of the page fixes the timing: the carrier went off on Wednesday 18 April, having collected the letters the previous afternoon. Kelley's resignation was not a mood, it was in the mail.
Dee's own closing line for the day is a small masterpiece of restraint: "So he went from me this second time.... God lighten his heart with knowledge of the truth, if it be his Divine will and pleasure."
By Saturday 21 April Kelley was back at the scrying stone, and the session became something closer to a contract dispute than a trance. He came with six questions "which has bred great doubt in his fantasie". The first, as Dee summarized it: "He would have our spiritual friends to promise him the performance of the Prints."
Gabriel's answer is the theological heart of the episode: "If we were Masters of our own doings, we might well promise: But we are servants and do the will of our master." When pressed, Kelley could not dispute the premise. Asked whether all things are possible with God, he answered, "I do so, and I know so." He still had sarcasm left for the August deadline: "By August next? What if it were a hundred Augusts? you may be a weary before August next, as the Children of Israel were of their Manna." Then the session moved on, into the long discourse on prelapsarian Adam and the demon Coronzom, delivered to Kelley directly.
So the crisis closed, at least on the page. What happened in between, and across the month-long gap in recorded sessions that followed from 25 April to 21 May, sits in the part of the record between pages 93 and 162 of the 1659 edition, which the freely available online transcription skips. The trouble was adjourned rather than settled: when the entries thicken again in June, Gabriel meets Kelley with the record's bluntest opener, "Hast thou not run astray from the Lord, and committed Idolatry?", and sets him at "a Turning where there lieth two wayes", one to his comfort, the other to "his perpetual wo". The full sequence, from Cracow through the move to Prague, is covered in our own A True and Faithful Relation, Volume II.
What the walkout should not obscure is how interactive the ordinary sessions were. Nalvage dictated the calls letter by letter and set the delivery protocol: "they are to be uttered of me, backward: and of you, in practise, forward." Dee checked the angels' word counts and queried them like a proofreader: "Where have I misreckoned, I pray you?" When Gabriel ruled two letters in a call superfluous, Dee answered, "I will then put it out." On 10 April, before any of the trouble, Kelley mentally objected to a point of Latin grammar and thought the word rerum at Nalvage; the angel answered the unspoken objection before Kelley could voice it: "What need I say rerum? The Grammarians will be on my side."
Against that background, the April crisis reads as the same collaborative channel carrying ultimatums instead of vocabulary. Two men who corrected angels on grammar were never going to let a walkout go unrecorded, or unargued.
Everything above has to carry an asterisk: the record is Dee's. Casaubon's 1659 preface states the manuscript "is all written with Dr. Dees own hand". Kelley's visions, Kelley's words, even Kelley's private confessions reach us through the man who had the most to lose if the partnership failed. Dee even wrote some things in Greek characters, English words in Greek script, when he did not want Kelley reading them. The nearest outside check is a letter of 8 January 1586 from Faustus Socinus, who reported the Cracow hearsay plainly: one of the two Englishmen "sees and hears all that, as he claims himself, and informs his companion. That other one diligently notes down and transcribes everything."
Casaubon, who spotted the Greek trick, read the whole partnership darkly, arguing that Kelley "had generally no other opinion of these Apparitions but that they were meer illusions of the Divel" and repeatedly wanted to break with Dee. That is Casaubon interpreting, in 1659, from the same one-sided record we have.
Prinke's more recent reading is different: that Kelley absorbed radical theology in Cracow's antitrinitarian circles, doctrines like the transmigration of souls, and relayed them to Dee as the "wicked spirits" teaching he formally renounced on 8 June 1584. On that day Kelley swore he would abandon the actions and denounced a list of "the manifold and horrible doctrine of theirs", including the proposition "That mans soul doth go from one body, to another childes quickening or animation". Prinke's conclusion is that Kelley was manipulating the Doctor. A third view takes the crises at face value as religious terror in a man who believed what he saw. The events are documented; the motive is not, and every confident explanation is somebody's interpretation.
The 1584 crisis is legible because two men kept negotiating: over sessions, over deadlines, over what would be written down and in what alphabet. The doubt survives in the record because Dee recorded it, and Kelley let him.
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