I have become other than the one who was the chrysalis which now hangs dead from a branch of the tree of life.
This last twelvemonth I have no longer been the marionette, dancing on the strings that came out of the green glass; I am free!
Free for metamorphosis, ascension, empire! Free for the “Queen” and the “Crown”!
That is the end of the notebook in which John Dee recorded his life from his release from the Tower to the year 1581, that is a period of almost twenty-eight years, taking him up to the fifty-seventh year of his life, an age at which most ordinary men look forward to calm repose and the descent into old age.
A vibrancy, an inexplicable excitement, a more than usual involvement in the vicissitudes of this strange career all tell me, John Dee’s descendant, that the real storms, the decisive struggles, the titanic upheavals are only about to begin, they will erupt, seethe, rage – – my God, how is it that I am suddenly filled with horror?! Is it I who am writing? Have I become John Dee? Is this my hand? Not his hand? – Not his? – And my G..., who is that standing there? Is it a ghost? There, there at my desk! – – –
I am tired. I have not slept a wink all night. The shattering experience and the hours struggling to preserve my sanity are now behind me; the raging storm, which brings both devastation and refreshment, has passed over and the landscape is clear and calm once more.
At least now, in the first light of a new day, I am able to set down the external course of last night’s events.
It was about seven o’clock in the evening when I finished translating the Dee notebook with the retrospective of his life. The last words I wrote down reveal how deeply moved I was by his life history, more deeply, perhaps than seems necessary for someone mechanically transcribing old family documents. Were I given to such fancies, I would say that the John Dee that I, as the heir to his blood, bear within me, has risen from the dead. From the dead? Is someone dead who still lives on in the cells of his offspring’s offspring? – – – But I will not attempt to explain this excessive sympathy. It is enough that it is there, that it has taken possession of me.
It went so far that, in a way that is difficult to describe but that was not merely a kind of memory, I shared in all those fluctuations of fortune, shared the life of the the disappointed scholar living in seclusion with his wife and young son at Mortlake; I could not only see the house with its park, rooms and furniture – which, of course, I had never visited – I could see them with John Dee’s eyes and felt attached to them as he had been; but beyond that even, I could sense, with an uncanny, painful and oppressive force, fate looming up on my unfortunate ancestor, an explorer of the soul rather than of the globe; it was as if I could see in my mind’s eye my own inevitable fate, gathering like a dark bank of cloud over a landscape that was the geography of my soul.
I must stop myself from saying more, for I can feel my thoughts beginning to become entangled again and words are starting to slip the leash. It fills me with fear.
I will say no more of the nameless dread of that moment, but record the events as objectively as I can:
As I wrote those last few lines I had a physical vision of John Dee’s future from the point at which the notebook breaks off. It was a vision of such vivid intensity, as if I had lived through those later years with John Dee. What am I saying: with John Dee? I saw it as John Dee, I had become John Dee, of whom I knew, and still know, nothing other than what I have written down on these pages.
And at that moment of certainty when I knew I was John Dee, I felt a vague sensation at the back of my head, as if I were growing a second face there, a Janus head – – – the Baphomet! And as I sat there observing myself and my transformation with an icy, numb detachment, John Dee’s destiny took physical shape and played itself out in the room around me.
Between the desk and the window Bartlett Greene materialised out of thin air, his leather jerkin open at the neck, red hair on the pale skin of his chest, his broad butcher’s face on its thick neck fringed with a fiery beard and showing a wide, friendly grin not two paces from me.
Instinctively I rubbed my eyes and, when the first awful shock was over, examined what was happening in the clear light of reason. But the figure stayed there, standing in front of me, and I knew it was no other than Bartlett Greene.
And then the incomprehensible happened: I was – and was not – myself; I was here and over there at the same time, I was present and
