The Secret History of the World

found in the canon’s favour, and Paracelsus’s friends advised him to flee.

He spent years wandering. Nature, he said, was his teacher. ‘I desire neither to live comfortably, nor do I wish to become rich. Happiness is better than riches and happy is he who wanders about, possessing nothing that requires his care. He who wants to study the book of nature must wander with his feet over its leaves.’

You might think that this eminently sane philosophy, combined with a down-to-earth, practical methodology, might lead to something approaching modern medical science. But some of the writings of Paracelsus are wild and strange…

He wrote, for instance of the Monstra, an invisible being that may arise from the putrefaction of sperm. He also talked about Mangonaria, a magical power of suspension by means of which heavy objects could be lifted into the air. He said he knew of certain localities where large numbers of Elementals live together, adopting human clothing and manners.

Paracelsus also had strange and wonderful ideas about sleep and dreams. He said that during sleep the sidereal body — the animal spirit — becomes free in its movement. It may rise up, he said, to the sphere of its ancestors and converse with the stars. He said that spirits wishing to make use of men often act on them during dreams, that a sleeping person can visit another in his dreams. He talked of incubi and succubae feeding on nocturnal emissions.

Paracelsus was also a prophet and in his later years took to prophesying the return of Elijah, who would come and ‘restore all things’.

However, as well as these magical practices, Paracelsus did indeed make the discoveries and advances we will touch on later that have led some to call him ‘the father of modern experimental medicine’.

In this paradox lies the key to understanding the secret of our age.

SOMETIMES ALSO SAID TO BE A Rosicrucian, though he nowhere made the claim himself, the great English magus Dr Dee was motivated by an overwhelming desire to experience the spirit worlds directly.

Dr Dee is perhaps the greatest archetype of the magus since Zarathustra. The image of Dee has entered popular mainstream culture. Here is the black-gowned, skull-cap-wearing wizard with a long white beard working in a laboratory surrounded by alchemical instruments. Amid flashes of lightning, he summons disembodied spirits by means of pentacles and other devices drawn on the ground with chalk.

John Dee was born into a Welsh family living in London. A brilliant young scholar he was teaching Euclid in Paris in his twenties and became a friend of Tycho Brahe. In the late 1570s he formed a circle called the Dionisii Areopagites with Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, whose poem The Faerie Queene is famously replete with Rosicrucian and other esoteric imagery. A memoir of Sidney talks of him as ‘seeking out the mysteries of chemistry led by Dee’.

Dee had built up a magnificent library, said to be second only to that of the celebrated French historian de Thou. The Cabala was central to all his studies. He believed in the mathematical foundation of all things, a set of unifying principles he believed he could discern in the teachings of the ancients. He embodied these principles in his highly complex glyph, the Monas Hieroglyphica.

^{Paracelsus and his swordstick. One of the popular legends about Paracelsus was that he carried in the pommel of his swordstick a portion of the ‘azoth’. A small thing missed in The Devil’s Doctor, the excellent, recent biography of Paracelsus by Philip Ball is that there is a sly joke in all of this. The azoth was the name given to the secret fire of the alchemists, a fire that would liberate the soul from the body. It is contained in a seed. We may be reminded that in Indian alchemy Mercury is sometimes called the semen of Shiva. The sword of Paracelsus, then, is one that has been forged in the heat of sexual desire. It is a fleshly sword and the azoth that issues from the top of it is the philosophical Mercury. In the natural course of things there is a quality in semen that is like a net in which a spirit may land and then be incarnated. Paracelsus also knew of some unnatural practices, secret sexual techniques performed before going to sleep, that could loosen the vegetable body from the material body and could also help other kinds of spirits to come to earth and appear to him in dreams.}

Dee’s reputation was such that the young princess invited him to choose a date for her coronation as Elizabeth I by means of his astrological calculations. Dee also helped direct Elizabethan foreign policy, both in Europe and as regards the settling of America. It is a little known fact, but documented, that at the height of his fortunes Dr Dee owned a charter granting him ownership of the vast landmass called Canada, and his vision of a British Empire — a phrase he coined — helped inspire and guide the nation’s voyages of discovery.

^{The Monas Hieroglyphica. My friend, the esoteric scholar Fred Gettings, has deconstructed this glyph, revealing a layer of meaning to do with the evolution of the two parallel universes — we might call them the Baconian and the Shakespearean — we discussed in the previous chapter.}

In 1580, evidently craving more direct, spiritual experience, he decided to hook up with a medium.

Dee’s dreams had been disturbed. There had been strange knocking sounds in his house. He had employed a medium called Barnabus Saul, who said he could see angels in his magic crystal, but Dee had dismissed him after six months. Then in 1582 he met Edward Kelley, a strange man who apparently wore a skull cap to hide the fact that his ears had been cut off as a punishment for coining. Kelley claimed to be able to see the Archangel Uriel in Dee’s shewstone, and so began hundreds of seances. These enabled Dee to learn how to decipher the speech of the angels which he called the Enochian language.

The great magus’s decline can be traced from this association with Kelley. The man whose dreams of empire would help shape the globe was beginning to explore the more discreditable byways of esoteric speculation and practice.

On a trip to Prague, Dee told the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II that he had tried for forty years to find what he wanted and no book had been able to tell him. He had therefore decided to call upon angels to intercede for him with God, in order to ask the secrets of creation. He told Rudolf he used a stone for this and always made sure the spirits he dealt with were good and not demonic.

Was Kelley always so scrupulous? On the same trip the pair boasted to Rudolf that they could transform base metals into gold. They were forced to flee when they were unable to do so. It seems Kelley was abusing the older man by this time, forcing him into a humiliating wife-swapping. Many suspected Kelley of being a fraud, of only pretending to receive responses to the Enochian invocations.

Then in 1590 Kelley seems to have received a message in the Enochian language that so terrified him that he ceased operating the system and cut off relations with Dee altogether. Translated from the Angelic language into English it reads as follows:

‘The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet… my lips are sweeter than health itself, I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. Purge your streets, O ye sons of men, and wash your houses clean…’ Did Kelley see in this the Scarlet Harlot of Revelation and a vision of the imminent end of the world?

Dee was left back in England in Lear-like penury, unable to support his family, ranting and raving, grandly paranoid, seeing everywhere conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. After his death a cult of Dr Dee emerged and many, including the diarist John Aubrey and the eminent Freemason Elias Ashmole, supposed him to have been a Rosicrucian.

That, anyway is the ‘pop’ story of Dee. A deeper layer of meaning — and Dee’s real motivation in all of this — concerns the history of humanity’s relations with the spirit worlds.

As we have seen Christians were experiencing a withdrawal of the spirit worlds. The Church seemed unable to provide direct spiritual experience or personal contact with spiritual realities. The people demanded wonders and only the secret societies knew how to provide them.

Dr Dee had also told the Holy Roman Emperor that if his occult techniques of ceremonial magic were introduced, every church in Christendom could enjoy apparitions every day of the week. It would be a return to the spiritual fervour of the early Church, the Church of Clement and Origen where cabalistic and hermetic elements were not excluded. The world Church would again become a magic Church.