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Read researched articles and historical primers on alchemy, Gnosticism, ceremonial magic, grimoires, and the Western esoteric tradition. Every article connects back to a book.
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Matching John Dee.
Two books sit at the far ends of the esoteric shelf, and they answer the same question in opposite ways.
In the summer of 1552, two of the most restless minds in Europe were, as far as anyone can tell, in the same city at the same time.
Open a modern edition of A True and Faithful Relation and you meet a problem before you meet a single angel.
Open a page of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica at random and you see a strange object: a single compound sign, part astronomical, part alchemical, drawn once…
From Monas Hieroglyphica
There is a shelfmark in Glasgow that every serious student of John Dee eventually learns: Sp. Coll. Hunterian R.6. It holds what the scholar A.
From Monas Hieroglyphica
In the spring of 1576, a forty-eight-year-old mathematician named John Dee spent his days on board a cluster of ships tied up on the Thames, teaching…
In thirteen days of January 1564, John Dee wrote one of the strangest books in the history of science.
From Monas Hieroglyphica
Modern readers who meet John Dee through legend expect a magician. The man who allegedly spoke with angels, folded into every story about Elizabethan…
In February 1570, a printer named John Day pushed through his presses an enormous English translation of Euclid, and pinned to the front of it a long essay…
In 1570, at the back of a book about triangles, one of England's greatest mathematicians paused to defend himself against the suspicion that he was a…
Open any grand history of Elizabethan England and you will find Dr. John Dee holding conversations with angels, naming the British Empire, or lending his…
Every documentary record ends somewhere, but few end as strangely as the angel diaries of Dr John Dee.