The Book of the Dead

realize. They made a contented and generous couple, and if their infatuation seemed desperate at times, it should be remembered that in the seven years of their relationship, they spent only two and a half years together.

Emma Hamilton’s reputation has recovered considerably since the Victorians. During World War II, Churchill calculated that the morale-boosting film Lady Hamilton (1942), starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, was worth four divisions. And although she died in penury, Emma Hamilton was a remarkable woman. As the Morning Post obituary reminded its readers at the time: “Few women, who have attracted the notice of the world at large, have led a life of more freedom.”

If Emma Hamilton was destroyed by love and war, Dr. John Dee (1527–1609) was reduced to poverty by magic. One of the most brilliant men of his age, he would have called himself a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and seeker after truth. History remembers him as the archetypal magician, the model for countless fictional characters from Prospero in The Tempest to Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. And he certainly looked the part.

He had a very faire cleare rosie complexion; a long beard as white as milke. He was tall and slender; a very handsome man…. He wore a black gowne like an Artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves and a slitt.

The seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey got this description from an old woman who knew Dr. Dee in his final years. Add this to the personal possessions he left behind—conjuring table, crystal ball, gold amulet, obsidian mirror—and it’s easy to see how he got his reputation. But just because John Dee looked like a wizard, it doesn’t necessarily mean he was one.

Today we would call him a scientist, though the word science didn’t exist then, and didn’t appear in anything like its modern meaning until 1725. In the sixteenth century, those who sought to identify the rules of nature were called natural philosophers. Like Pythagoras, John Dee believed that the universe was written in the language of mathematics (which he called a ravishing persuasion). His most important “scientific” legacy was to edit and introduce (in 1570) the first English translation of the most successful textbook ever written, Euclid’s Elements.

Dee was a Neoplatonist. He thought that everything—both matter and spirit—was interconnected and that the physical world was merely the external manifestation of an intangible realm of “forms,” in which all real chairs, for example, emanate from the idea of a chair. Dee called these ideal forms the pure verities, and he thought that if the laws by which they operate could be found, a universal religion, uniting all people in a single faith, would follow.

For Dee and many of his contemporaries, scientific inquiry, pure and applied mathematics, philosophy, and what we would call magic were all aspects of the same search for truth. Like modern physicists, Dee was looking for a Theory of Everything: something that made sense of all the observable facts. For men of his age, alchemy (forerunner of chemistry) and astrology (indistinguishable in Renaissance times from astronomy) were just as “scientific” as geometry. And before pointing out the “obvious flaw” that these things aren’t “true,” remember that it was men like Dee, probing the unknown in search of invisible forces, who laid the groundwork for Newton and Faraday, without whom we would have no understanding of gravity or electricity.

The challenge, then as now, was how to fund a life of pure research. Dee lived in an age of superstition and paranoia. He was a devout Protestant at a time when the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe was at its height and the fledgling Church of England still in turmoil. Any new ideas might easily be denounced as witchcraft or blasphemy and punished by imprisonment or death. Royal patronage was essential and young Dee was luckily well placed to take advantage of this. His father was a cloth merchant and “gentleman sewer” at the court of Henry VIII, so Dee was educated well, at Chelmsford grammar school and St. John’s College, Cambridge. He performed brilliantly, especially in mathematics and Greek, establishing the work pattern he would maintain throughout his life: eighteen hours of study, four hours for sleep, and two set aside for meals. It was at the university that he was first, quite absurdly, accused of witchcraft. For a production of Aristophanes’ comedy Peace he had built an impressively realistic giant mechanical beetle that carried one of the actors up to the “heavens” in the Great Hall at Trinity College, terrifying some of the more unsophisticated members of the audience. Dee cleared his name but left Cambridge in disgust, determined to pursue his studies abroad.

From 1548 to 1551, Dee built a reputation as one of Europe’s leading scholars. His lectures on Euclid in Paris attracted large and appreciative audiences. He met the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who told him of the revolutionary theories of Copernicus, and he became close friends with the cartographer Gerard Mercator, working with him to develop a new set of tools for making accurate maps. He also began to collect books; this would remain a lifelong passion. Dee amassed more than four thousand volumes, the largest library of any kind in Europe, and twenty times as many books as were held at Cambridge University. The breadth of his interests is astonishing. From magic to mathematics, subjects included the Church in Armenia, botany, chastity, demonology, dreams, earthquakes, Etruria, falconry, games, gymnastics, horticulture, Islam, logic, marriage, mythology, the nobility, oils, pharmacology, rhetoric, saints, surveying, tides, veterinary science, weather, women, and zoology.

Dee was offered the job of scholar-in-residence at several European courts but turned them all down to return to England as the teenage King Edward VI’s special adviser on “philosophical” (i.e., scientific) matters. This came with an annual pension of a hundred crowns and guaranteed him lucrative additional work tutoring the sons of senior courtiers, such as the Duke of Northumberland. This was the perfect outcome for Dee, providing financial security to enable him to continue his studies, and a position at the center of things with a chance to put his theories into practice. This happy state of affairs lasted just two years. The accession of the Catholic queen Mary brought a wholesale purging of the court’s inner circle, and in 1555 Dee was arrested and charged with casting horoscopes for the queen’s sister, Princess Elizabeth, and “conspiring by enchantment” to subvert the queen herself. His main accuser was George Ferrers, once a rival stage designer and no doubt jealous of Dee’s talent. Soon after Dee’s arrest, one of the Ferrers children dropped dead and another was struck blind. This hardly helped Dr. Dee’s reputation as a practitioner of the dark arts, but he defended himself eloquently and Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, cleared him of heresy. Dee was released, and eager to prove himself a scholar not a sorcerer, he made a detailed proposal to the queen for establishing a national library, gathering together all the books and manuscripts scattered during her father’s dissolution of the monasteries. It was a bold and ambitious plan and would have turned England into the research powerhouse of Europe. Mary listened politely but declined.

Meanwhile Dee’s father, Rowland, had lost his position at court and all his assets had been stripped, leaving his son without an inheritance. Dee returned to Europe, where his services as an astrologer could be charged at a much higher premium than in England. At the same time, he discovered the works of the hermetic philosopher Cornelius Agrippa, which quickened his interest in alchemy. When Mary died in 1558, Queen Elizabeth offered him his old job back, though at a substantially lower rate of pay, which caused Dee great annoyance. He came back all the same, becoming one of her most trusted advisers, and even casting the horoscope to select the date for her coronation.

Over the next decade Dee made many practical contributions to public life. He was the first person to apply geometry to navigation and trained many of the great navigators of the age both to read maps and to make them. He also prepared the intellectual and legal case for Britain’s expansion into the New World, coming up with justifications that stretched back into the mythical past, in particular the supposed discovery of North America by the Welsh prince Madog in 1170. He was the first person to use the phrase “British Empire,” and the first to suggest a voyage to map the Northwest Passage that was believed to link the Atlantic and the Pacific. And he became a spy for the queen, going on secret missions to Europe and communicating by means of elaborate codes of his own devising. He signed his letters to her “007.” Dee was also summoned to the royal presence whenever something out of the ordinary occurred; on one occasion he was asked to comment on a wax effigy stuck with pig bristles that was found in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and on another he was asked to explain a “blazing star” that had appeared in the sky. His job under these circumstances was always to come up with plausible explanations that reduced rather than encouraged superstitious speculation.

We know very little of Dee’s personal life until 1577, when he started to keep a diary. It is one of the many paradoxes running through Dee’s life that the very scrupulousness that made him such a good scientist also furnished the evidence that was to damn his reputation. The diary is meticulous. From it we know that he was married for the second or (possibly) third time in 1578, to Jane Fromonds, a lady-in-waiting at Elizabeth’s court. He was fifty-one and she was twenty-three and she bore him eight children. The couple seem to have been devoted, in