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About John Dee

John Dee in fact invented the famous “Enigma Machine”- used in world wars by the Germans as a ‘code language device’ and also appearing in the Da Vinci Code. He was the first to utilize the wheel method of cryptography. John Dee was a noted English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultist, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy.

In addition to being the father of modern mathematics and several other features of modern society (like the English Language), Dee was laced with magic. He communicated with Angels and wrote down the “Enochian sigils or Enochian Keys”. These are the keys to the heavenly realms and what they represent is as deep as your imagination will take you.

Specifically, he sought to contact Angels through the use of a "scryer" or crystal gazer, who would act as an intermediary between Dee and the angels.

These "spiritual conferences" or "actions" were conducted with an air of intense Christian piety, always after periods of purification, prayer and fasting. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could bring to mankind.

Enochian is a name often applied to an occult or angelic language recorded in the private journals of Dr. John Dee and his seer Edward Kelley in the late 16th century. The men claimed that angels revealed it to them. Dee's journals did not describe the language as "Enochian," instead preferring descriptors like "Angelical", the "Celestial Speech", the "Language of Angels", the "First Language of God-Christ," the "Holy Language," or "Adamical" because, according to Dee's Angels, it was used by Adam in Paradise to name all things. The term "Enochian" comes from Dee's assertion that the Biblical Patriarch Enoch had been the last human (before Dee and Kelley) to know the language.

A student of the Renaissance Neo-Platonism, Dee did not draw distinctions between his mathematical research and his investigations into Hermetic magic and divination, instead considering both ventures to constitute different facets of the same quest: the search for a transcendent understanding of the divine forms which underlie the visible world.

Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his age, he had been invited to lecture on advanced algebra at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties. He spent much time and effort in the last thirty years or so of his life to attempting to commune with angels in order to learn the universal language of creation.

Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that number was the basis of all things and the key to knowledge, that God's creation was an act of numbering. From Hermeticism, he drew the belief that man had the potential for divine power, and he believed this divine power could be exercised through mathematics. His cabalistic angel magic (which was heavily numerological) and his work on practical mathematics (navigation, for example) were simply the exalted and mundane ends of the same spectrum. His ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and Protestant churches (at war with each other at the time note: the Thirty Years War) and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.

According to scholars, in his lifetime Dee amassed the largest library in England and one of the largest in Europe. The word incunabulum means cocoon or cradle and refers to something either in infancy or in metamorphosis. It is also referred to as the printed books prior to 1501, and has been extended to mean any rare and hermetic collection of books. John Dee used the term incunabula to refer to his library, which contained the most comprehensive collection of information since the Library of Alexander burned.

More Study Notes about John Dee.