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.
This was Dr Dee’s great evangelical vision.
It might seem outrageous to modern sensibility, but it’s important to see it in the context of Church practice at the time. As we have seen, it was impossible to draw a clear line between priestcraft and witchcraft. Yet to Dr Dee the magical, spirit-invoking practices of the parish priests seemed mere superstitious folklore, lacking in intellectual rigour, sophistication and a systematic approach.
The neoplatonic drive to think systematically about spiritual experience and the spirit worlds had been spreading up from Southern Europe, influencing scholars like Trithemius, Agrippa and Dee. The German Johannes Reuchlin formulated a Christianized Cabala. He proved the divinity of Jesus Christ using cabalistic arguments, showing that the name of Jesus was encoded in the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of God.
Dee was undoubtedly interested in all these theories, but, as we have seen, he craved experience. His approach was experimental as well as systematic. Dee was proposing reasoned application of techniques to produce spiritual phenomena on a controlled, regular, predictable basis. In Dee as in Bacon we see early stirrings of the scientific spirit. The development of the mental faculties that would be needed to devise modern science evolved partly in an occult context.
What Dee was whispering into the Holy Roman Emperor’s ear was that if he fasted for a set length of time, performed this breathing exercise for a prescribed number of times and at prescribed intervals, that if he engaged in this sexual practice and pronounced this formula at this astrologically pre-determined time, he would enter an altered state of consciousness in which he could communicate in a free and reasoned way with denizens of the spirit worlds. All this had been established by repeatable experiment and the precedent of thousands of years of practice and led to predictable results.
Dee’s mission, then, was to introduce something entirely new into the stream of history. It is always the aim of initiatic brotherhoods like the Rosicrucians to help spread newly evolving forms of consciousness, appropriate for the changing times. Michael Maier, a contemporary commentator writing with apparent insider knowledge of the Rosicrucians, said ‘the activities of the Rose Cross are determined by the knowledge of history and by knowledge of the laws of evolution of the human race’.
These ‘laws of evolution’ operated both in history and in individual human lives. They are the laws that describe the paradoxical nature of life that we earlier called the deeper laws. They are described in the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda as ‘subtler laws that rule the hidden spiritual planes and the inner realm of consciousness… knowable through the science of yoga’. Formulations of these laws can be found scattered throughout Rosicrucian literature:
Heaven is never where we believe it to be.
If you cease to limit a thing within yourself, that’s to say by wanting it, and if you withdraw from it, it will come to you.
That which kills produces life. That which causes death leads to resurrection.
Rosicrucian conceptions of these laws would shortly surface in the mainstream of history and transform the culture of the West.
PERHAPS WHAT IS MOST EXTRAORDINARY about Dee’s career is how close it runs to the surface of exoteric history. Not only was he openly installed at the court of Elizabeth I as her resident Merlin, not only did he attempt to introduce ceremonial magic into the Church under the aegis of the Holy Roman Emperor, but he was so well known that playwrights could portray him and expect their audience to recognize him — in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
As we shall see, Dee was only the first of several strange and tragic personalities who tried to introduce esoteric doctrines into public life.
22. OCCULT CATHOLICISM
Jacob Boehme • The Conquistadors and the Counter-Reformation • Teresa, John of the Cross and Ignatius • The Rosicrucian Manifestoes • The Battle of White Mountain
IN 1517 THE POPE DECIDED TO REVIVE the selling of indulgences in order to pay for a new basilica of St Peter in Rome. It was to be the most splendid, lavish building in the world. Martin Luther, a teacher at Wittenberg, nailed his arguments against this selling of indulgences to the door of the local church that acted as a notice board to the community.
When this drew a papal bull excommunicating Luther, he burned this document in front of an admiring crowd. ‘Here I stand,’ he proclaimed. In Northern Europe, Germany in particular, a groundswell of restlessness had been rising, a resenting of the demand for unthinking obedience, a yearning for spiritual freedom. The hero of the hour, Luther escaped burning at the stake, protected by a local lord, and as more German leaders began to join in his protests against the excesses of the Papacy, Protestantism was born.
Some saw Luther as the reincarnation of Elijah whom Malachi and then Joachim had prophesied would come again to herald the new age.
Luther was steeped in mystical thought, the teachings of both Eckhart and Tauler. His closest friend and literary collaborator was the occultist Philip Melanchthon, nephew of the celebrated Cabalist Reuchlin. Melanchthon was an advocate of astrology, who wrote a biography of Faust. Luther himself communicated with the spirit worlds on familiar terms, heard voices guiding him and on one famous occasion hurled an inkpot at a demon who had mocked him.
But was he an initiate of the secret societies? There are intriguing hints. He once referred to himself as a ‘passed master’, a phrase that a Freemasonic initiate of a certain level might use to describe himself. He spoke approvingly of alchemy, praising it for its ‘allegory and secret meaning’ and recognizing, too, that it had a role in the resurrection of humanity.
The interest of some commentators has also been piqued by the fact that Luther adopted the rose as his symbol.
However, Luther’s white five-petalled rose containing a small cross is not the mystic red rose of the Rosicrucians pinned to the great cross of matter in order to transform it. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Luther saw his rose having a layer of meaning concerned with occult physiology.