Dee’s case almost to the point of mania. The diary contains detailed, cryptic records of her periods, carefully logging not only when they occurred but also how heavy they were, whether the “show” was “small” or “abundant.” He also noted down when they had sex, giving not just the date, but also the time. But much more damaging is the revelation in the diary of Dee’s developing fixation with “angelic communication.”
In 1578 Dee’s beloved mother died, bequeathing him her house in Mortlake. He was an only child and they had lived under the same roof for most of his life. Perhaps as a result of this loss, and inspired by a sequence of strange and powerful dreams, he became entranced by the ethereal otherworld. Using his “scrying” mirror of polished black obsidian, rumored to be an Aztec treasure stolen by the conquistador Hernan Cortes himself, he attempted to make contact with the spirits. Nothing materialized. “I know I can not see, nor scry,” he confessed to his diary. A crystal he had tracked down from a collector of curiosities in Glastonbury seemed to provide tantalizing glimpses, but he struggled to “see” anything at all. So in 1582 he began using the services of a medium called Edward Talbott. Talbott was an unprepossessing man from Lancashire who always wore a cowl over his head to hide the fact that his ears had been cut off for counterfeiting. He had a basic grounding in alchemy from his time as an apothecary’s assistant and claimed to have the gift of divination. Almost at once, Talbott was able to summon up richly detailed visions for Dee. Most of them came via an “angel” called Madimi, who spoke a language called Enochian. According to Dee, she was “a spiritual creature, a pretty girl of seven to nine years of age, half angel and half elfin.” For Dee, there was nothing “occult” or un-Christian about these proceedings; indeed, he prepared for each session with prayer and fasting. He was delighted with the results and the two men formed a partnership, Talbott renaming himself Kelley to shroud his checkered past.
In the meantime, Dee continued at court as a successful practical scientist. In 1583 he devised a scheme to bring the English calendar into line with the astronomical one. It was even more accurate than the one Pope Gregory XIII had recently imposed on the rest of Europe, and the neatness of Dee’s math was widely admired, but the Archbishop of Canterbury blocked it: He saw it as capitulation to Rome. Later that year, the queen introduced Dee and Kelley to Prince Albrecht Laski, a visiting Polish diplomat. He was keenly interested in the occult and invited them to bring their “philosophical experiments” to his country. Encouraged by the positive endorsement of their spirit guides, Dee, Kelley, and their families set off for Poland.
Over the next six years, the two Englishmen practiced astrology, alchemical experiments, and spiritual divination in the grand palaces of Europe. The king of Poland and the eccentric Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II (an ardent alchemist himself) were enthusiastic patrons. Dee and Kelley finally settled at the court of Count Rosenberg in Bohemia. Here, their waiflike angelic interlocutor Madimi suddenly evolved into Uriel, a full-breasted siren. She instructed Kelley that no further progress toward mystical enlightenment would be made until the two men shared everything, particularly their wives. Dee’s diary records his distress, not least because Jane had always professed to dislike Kelley, but he allowed the matrimonial exchange to take place as instructed. Soon afterward the spirit conversations ceased, the partnership broke up, and the Dees returned to England in 1588.
At first sight, it looks as if Kelley manipulated the whole thing. By playing on the spiritual ambitions of the elderly Dee, he had his way with his partner’s pretty young wife and then managed to be rid of them both. Certainly he got rich quite quickly after Dee left; for ten years he conned European monarchs into believing he could manufacture gold at will. In recognition of his work, he was even made a baron by Rudolf II. Eventually, however, the lack of any actual gold became something of an issue, and he died in 1589 attempting to climb out of a tower where the emperor had imprisoned him. But Dee’s diary tells a different story. Five weeks after what he called his Covenant with Kelley, Jane found she was pregnant. When the baby was born, the Dees and the Kelleys were reunited at the christening and the child named Theodore—“beloved of God.” Far from falling out, Dee and Kelley continued to correspond and Dee’s diary records his great sorrow on hearing of Kelley’s death. If that were not sufficient evidence, the Dees named their next daughter Madimi.
Meanwhile, on their return to Mortlake, the Dees found their house had been ransacked: many books and instruments had been stolen and a maid had used a collection of Dee’s scientific papers to line pie tins. The queen’s enthusiasm for Dee had cooled, doubtless fanned by gossip from the Continent, and the best position she could offer him was the wardenship of Christ’s College, a religious institution in Manchester. Not only was his income much reduced, but he found his authority with the Fellows undermined by constant mutterings about his being a conjuror. In 1603 Elizabeth died, and was replaced by James I, a man famously averse to witchcraft in all its forms. The following year Dee wrote to him professing his loyalty and reassuring him that “none of all the great number of the very strange and frivolous fables or histories reported and told of me are true.” The king didn’t even bother to reply.
The next year, plague swept though Manchester, pitilessly claiming the lives of Jane Dee, Theodore, Madimi, and all of John Dee’s younger children. He returned sorrowfully to Mortlake with his surviving daughter, Katherine. For the next four years, until his death, aged eighty-two, he lived in desperate poverty, selling his books one by one in order to eat. His only solace was to get back in touch with the angelic domain through a new medium called Bartholomew Hickman. It was at this point, at the very end of his life, that Goody Faldo of Mortlake (the old lady who described Dee to John Aubrey) met him when she was a young girl and fixed him forever as the white-bearded, black-gowned sage of legend. She told Aubrey he was the model for Ben Jonson’s
Posterity is a fickle thing. Had John Dee’s diary and his book of spirit conversations,
One such occultist, also a brilliant scientist, was born almost four hundred years later. Jack Parsons (1914–52), the maverick pioneer of American rocket technology, invoked Satan for the first time when he was only thirteen. He was born in Los Angeles on October 2, 1914, on the exact date that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had predicted the Apocalypse. Named Marvel by his father, Captain Marvel Whiteside Parsons of the U.S. Army, his mother always called him John or Jack. She had caught his father having an affair while she was pregnant and he played very little further role in the boy’s upbringing. Jack had a lonely childhood. His only real friend was Edward Forman, who shared his obsession with fireworks, science fiction, and the arcane. Together they pored over old books of incantations, enacting spells to jinx older boys who bullied them at school.
Jack and Edward dropped out of high school to join the Hercules Powder Company, a Californian armaments manufacturer. Jack’s unique talents as a self-taught explosives chemist soon got him a job with the “suicide squad,” a bunch of rocket-obsessed misfits at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. By the outbreak of World War II this had evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, backed by substantial military funding. Wernher von Braun later said it was not himself but Parsons who was the real father of the U.S. space program. Still only in his midtwenties, Jack created solid fuels that would be used in the Apollo space missions, and liquid binders later employed in the propulsion of Polaris missiles. He was regularly called as an explosives expert at courtroom trials. In the meantime, still fascinated by the black arts, before each experiment he would invoke the spirit of Pan, the horned pagan god of fertility.
When Parsons was twenty-eight, he and Forman and four colleagues formed their own rocket corporation, Aerojet Engineering. Parsons left after the war, selling his shares for just $11,000. Aerojet is still a major player in the industry, making the propulsion units on NASA’s space shuttle. Had Parsons kept his shares, he would have been a multimillionaire in less than a decade. Instead, he used the proceeds to start a Laundromat chain, which failed.
Parsons was never good with money and he was even less adept at managing his personal life. His relationship with his mother was intense and very probably incestuous. He was extremely good-looking, tall, and promiscuous, working his way through the secretarial pool at Aerojet, even though he had a physiological disorder that caused him to sweat profusely. He dealt with the resultant chronic body odor by dousing himself liberally in strong-smelling cologne. Opinions about Jack were divided. To some he was the office clown, “a delightful screwball”; to others he was dangerous, possibly even psychotic.
