There’s little evidence that the concept of the Glastonbury Zodiac was floated by anybody before Kathryn Maltwood in the 1930s. However, the Dee connection is widely mentioned and given as fact in the late Richard Deacon’s 1968 biography, which quotes Dee’s observation that ‘the starres which agree with their reproductions on the ground do lye onlie on the celestial path of the Sonne, moon and planets, with notable exception of Orion and Hercules… this is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactly married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens which shews that the ancients understoode all which today the lerned know to be factes.’
It has to be said that this is seriously questioned by other biographers, including Benjamin Woolley, author of the excellent The Queen’s Conjuror, some even suggesting that Deacon made it up. But why would he? The great Glastonbury historian, Geoffrey Ashe, who remains unconvinced about the existence of the Zodiac, seems nevertheless to have been the first – in his book Avalonian Quest – to link the line in a Nostradamus quatrain:
‘In the land of the great heavenly temple’ to the idea of a terrestrial Zodiac. The Nostradamian scholar John Hogue’s suggestion that this refers to a temple of Apollo which once stood on the site of Westminster Abbey is a bit lame, especially as the phrasing suggests a location away from London. And, as Geoffrey Ashe notes, even Stonehenge was not known at the time as an astronomical temple or observatory.
The best book I found on Nostradamus himself was Ian Wilson’s Nostradamus: the Evidence.
John Leland: the facts, as given by Dee, are largely provable. Leland did provide information for Thomas Cromwell. He did return to Glastonbury after the Dissolution, with an over-ambitious project in mind. And he did go mad, almost certainly regretting the way his information had been used. It’s suggested he might have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the topographical task he’d taken on.
Leland was also well into the hidden.
Wool-sorters’ disease would later be called anthrax.
Ignis sacer, the holy fire, is a recorded phenomenon, caused by the grain fungus later known as ergot, a natural hallucinogen used in the twentieth century during the development of LSD. It was known as St Anthony’s Fire after an eleventh-century religious order was founded, in the name of St Anthony, to help the large number of people in the south of France afflicted by convulsions, madness and that awful burning sensation.
You can find much about this in Andy Roberts’s history of LSD, Albion Dreaming.
Nicholas Culpeper, born in 1616, was the first in ‘modern’ England to write of the links between astrology and herbalism, though such beliefs were obviously common in Dee’s time. Culpeper’s Herbal is still available.
For help with Elizabethan speech, my thanks to the master linguists, David Crystal and Ben Crystal, author of the fascinating Shakespeare on Toast. Also Jo Fletcher and Kathy McMullen. Sadly, I had to ignore much of the advice to help Dee meet the new level of clarity to which he aspired in telling this story. Because we’re unable to hear Elizabethan speech – which was unlikely to follow Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter – a strict adherence to Elizabethan written structures and terminology would only have made it sound stilted in ways it never would have been at the time.
Thanks also to:
From the British Society of Dowsers: Graham Gardner, Helen Lamb, Ced Jackson, John Moss, Richard Bartholomew.
In Glastonbury: Geoffrey Ashe, Jackie Edwards, Sig Lonegren, John Mason, Simon Small, Francis Thyer.
The tireless Mairead Reidy supplied me with more background information and commentary on Dee than I even knew existed.
Prof. Bernard Knight on matters of decomposition and crucial forensic details.
Caitlin Sagan, curiously, on the Bible.
Sir Richard Heygate, co-author with Philip Carr-Gomm of The Book of English Magic and his, um, friend from Mortlake for personal information not available in the biographies.
Grant Privett for astronomical lore.
Geraldine Richards for early French.
The Tudor oracle David Starkey directed me to the fascinating work of James P. Carley, author of Glastonbury Abbey, the Holy House at the Head of the Moors Adventurous. Starkey’s own works on Elizabeth and Henry VIII were hugely valuable, even if he doesn’t seem to have much regard for Dee – but, then, he wouldn’t, would he?
Tracy Thursfield’s informed esoteric advice was as perceptive and valuable as ever.
Adrian Vine and Brian Morgan at Nant-y-groes (both of them) showed us the Dee family’s Welsh roots.
Frances Yates’s book The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age still stands alone. From it comes the explanation of John Dee as a Christian cabalist. Ruth Elizabeth Richardson’s Mistress Blanche, the Queen’s Confidante, collects virtually all that’s known about Dee’s cousin, Blanche Parry. And The Ends of Life by Keith Thomas is a wonderful guide to the psychology of the sixteenth century.
Thanks to my paranormally laid-back editor, Nic Cheetham, who’s been pushing me at Dee for well over two years. To my agents Andrew Hewson and Ed Wilson for encouraging noises throughout. As for my brilliant wife Carol, devious plot-doctor, assiduous researcher, ruthless editor… words like chestnuts… fire… yet again… come to mind.
For the record, John Dee was never a sorcerer and there’s no evidence that he was psychic (much as he would have loved to be).
The Monas Hieroglyphica, Dee’s first significant book, was finally published in 1564, four years after the events related here. It’s JD at his most impenetrable, a meditation on a symbol which connects astrology with the creation theories in the Cabala and a supporting element of Christianity. The circle is the sun, the semi-circle the moon, below which we have the cross and, at the foot, the symbol of Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, the very base of creation.
The dot in the middle says,
You are here.