Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioIn September 1583 a Polish aristocrat slipped out of England after four months of banquets, borrowed money, and conversations with angels. His name was Olbracht Laski, Albert Laski in the English sources, Palatine of Sieradz, and without him the most famous magical diary in the English language would probably not exist in the form we…
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In September 1583 a Polish aristocrat slipped out of England after four months of banquets, borrowed money, and conversations with angels. His name was Olbracht Laski, Albert Laski in the English sources, Palatine of Sieradz, and without him the most famous magical diary in the English language would probably not exist in the form we have it. When Meric Casaubon published the angel conversations of Dr. John Dee in 1659 as A True and Faithful Relation, the record opened abruptly in May 1583: his arrival, his ambition, and eventually his empty purse form the narrative spine of the first two volumes of that book.
Casaubon introduces him with a flourish that is worth slowing down over: Dr. Dee, he writes, was "lately grown into great league and confederacy with Albert Lasky, (or à lasco rather) a great man of Polonia." The confederacy had begun quickly. According to G. Parry's study of the three men, Dee finally met Laski in Leicester's chambers at Greenwich Palace on 13 May 1583, and ten days later he was already questioning the angels on the Pole's behalf. Deborah Harkness confirms the pace: "The association between Dee and Laski was cordial from the beginning, and on 18 May 1583 Laski visited Dee at Mortlake." A meeting at court on the thirteenth, a visit to Dee's house on the eighteenth, angelic consultations by the twenty-eighth. The diary Casaubon inherited begins on 28 May 1583, and Casaubon himself noted that fifteen months of earlier sessions were missing from his manuscript. The printed record, in other words, begins at the exact moment Laski enters the story.
What kind of man made this bet? Casaubon's portrait is the fullest we have, and it comes with a warning label: he published in 1659 as a polemicist arguing against both atheism and religious enthusiasm, and his preface is an argument, not a biography. Still, his assessment of Laski has the ring of observed truth: "It seems, though nobly born, and to great dignity, yet his thoughts did aspire much higher; and though no rich man, for a man of his rank and quality, yet expecting such matters from Dr. Dee and his Spirits, as he did, he could finde money enough to supply their wants upon occasion." Read that carefully. The romantic image of Laski as a fabulously wealthy Polish prince bankrolling genius is a later simplification. Casaubon says plainly that he was not rich for his station, and other evidence shows him already drowning in debt. What he had was ambition running ahead of his balance sheet, and a willingness to keep finding money for a project he believed would repay everything.
The sessions themselves were theatrical in a restrained, scholarly way. Dee, the learned mathematician and astrologer, would pray at his holy table; Edward Kelley, his scryer, who by Casaubon's account earned fifty pounds a year for the office, would gaze into a shew-stone, and report what the angels showed him. Dee recorded everything. Laura Sangha's overview of the conversations notes that they ran from 1583 to 1587 and produced an angelic alphabet, instructions for ritual apparatus, and catalogues of angelic hierarchies.
Laski was not a passive sponsor standing outside the room. Casaubon states flatly that "Albert Lasky, the Polonian Palatine saw as well as Kelley." The palatine had his own eyes on the stone. And the angels, or whatever spoke through Kelley, knew their customer. Casaubon's account of their strategy is blunt: "The Spirits were very glad of the occasion, and did what they could to cherish him according to his humor: Being then at that very time upon deliberations, that much depended of Alb. Laskey and his good opinion; among other things, his Pedegree, which must needs please a vain man very well, was taken into consideration." An angelically endorsed family tree. This is Casaubon's demonological interpretation, written seventy years after the fact, and it should be held as interpretation rather than fact. But even a skeptical modern reader can see the dynamic he is describing: a message that depends on a patron's goodwill has a way of flattering that patron.
There is one further detail from the preface that catches the Laski period exactly. Kelley, early in his association with Dee, "proffered to raise some evil Spirit before the Polish Prince Palatine, Albert Lasky ... for a proof of his Art. But Dr. Dee would not suffer him to do it in his house." Dee, the scrupulous Christian philosopher, drawing a line in his own home between prayerful angelic conversation and the necromantic stunt his scryer offered up as entertainment for a prospective patron.
The English leg of the story is documented by William Camden, whose Latin annal Casaubon quotes in his preface. In translation: in the summer of 1583 there came to England from Poland Albert Laski, Palatine of Sieradz, a learned man, splendidly bearded and dressed, "received graciously by the Queen and the nobility with great honour and magnificence, and by the University of Oxford with learned entertainments and various spectacles; after four months, oppressed by debt, secretly departed." Four months of royal receptions and Oxford pageants, paid for on credit, ending in a quiet exit. Count back four months from the September sailing and he must have landed by late spring, slightly at odds with Camden's "this summer", and no printed source pins the week of his arrival. The exit, at least, is exact. Dee's own diary records it: "Sept. 21st, we went from Mortlake, and so the Lord Albert Lasky, I, Mr. E. Kelly, our wives, my children and famille, we went toward our two ships attending for us, seven or eight myle below Gravessende." Casaubon alludes to danger and preservation at Gravesend when the party "first, here related, went out of the Realm," a hint of how precarious the departure felt.
The wager did not pay. The party moved to Laski's territories in Poland, then to Prague, where on 3 September 1584, by Casaubon's account, Dee appeared before Emperor Rudolf II and told him "That for these two years and a half Gods holy Angels had used to inform him." Casaubon counted Laski, along with Puccius and Prince Rosenberg, among those "long of the Society," and King Stephen of Poland among those admitted for a while. Laski's own fortune was spent, and the angelic promises never took any form a creditor could bank.
The record of Dee's angel conversations survives because an over-extended aristocrat kept paying for them. Read Casaubon's preface as polemic if you like, but notice what it preserves: a vivid man betting credit he did not have on knowledge he could not verify.
For readers approaching the 1659 volume today, Laski explains its strangest structural feature. Casaubon conceded the problem himself: "the first Action here, beginneth 28 May, 1583. According to this reckoning, it must be, that above a year and three Moneths before, began the first Apparition: The account then of fifteen Moneths from the first Apparition, we want." Fifteen months of sessions, the entire early history of the conversations, were simply missing from his manuscript. Joseph H. Peterson's editorial note on the digitized text records that the earlier records turned up in 1682 and are now British Library manuscripts Sloane 3188 and 3189. Casaubon never knew of them. So the book he published, and the book you can now read in the publisher's editions of Volume I and Volume II, begins in medias res with a Polish lord in the room, because he is the reason the surviving record begins there at all.
Casaubon, for his part, wanted his readers to understand that this was no fringe affair. The conversations, he insisted, were "no other then what with great tendernesse and circumspection, was tendered to men of highest Dignity in Europe, Kings and Princes, and by all (England excepted) listned unto for a while with good respect." Kings and princes. And, first among the titled believers, a Palatine of Sieradz who arrived in England with a long beard, a longer pedigree, and debts longer still, and who chose to spend what remained of his credit on angels.
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