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Endeavour
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ende

Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s

British Empire
Jafe Arnold
University of Amsterdam, Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

The life and works of the English Renaissance polymath John Dee (1527–1609) have been traditionally
Keywords: treated by scholarship in the context of the history of philosophy and science. Only in recent decades have
John Dee
two of John Dee’s most prominent and controversial endeavors - (1) his political philosophy and advocacy
British empire
Cosmopolitics
of a British Empire (a term he is credited with coining), and (2) his long-standing practice of angelic magic
Esoteric imperialism - been reconstructed in their significance to Dee’s worldview. This paper highlights how Dee’s visions of a
Magic British Empire and his angelic rituals were not only major landmarks in his corpus, but were intimately
interconnected in Dee’s ideology of “Cosmopolitics.” Dee’s “esoteric imperialism” is situated in the
context of his intellectual, textual, and political environment, and his angelic magic is identified as fitting
within the medieval Solomonic current. It is argued that both ideological trends coalesced in Dee’s vision
of an angelic-inspired British Empire.
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction recognizing the irreducibility of Dee’s polymathy to one line of

In the 410 years since his death, scholars have continued to
introduce their studies of the English Renaissance polymath John
Dee (1527–1609) with an admission that has nearly become cliché,
namely, that “no single unifying theme to his work has emerged.”1
As a testament to his own interdisciplinary intellect, Dee’s life and
works have been treated extensively in numerous fields ranging
from the history of philosophy, science, magic, Western esoteri-
cism and occultism, to the cognitive study of religious experience.2
Dee specialists such as György E. Szönyi have warned against
attempting to explain Dee’s ideological complex and diverse
endeavors “from one single type of source material.”3 While
E-mail address: jafe.arnold@gmail.com (J. Arnold).
1
Graham Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’: ‘A Laborious Treatise’ on Ophir of
1577,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 78 (2015): 247–276, on p. 248.
2
See the special issue: Jennifer Rampling (ed.), John Dee and the Sciences: Early
Modern Networks of Knowledge, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43, no. 3
(2012), https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/studies-in-history-and-philoso-
phy-of-science-part-a/vol/43/issue/3. See also Egil Asprem, Arguing with Angels:
Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2012); Stephen Clucas (ed.), John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance
Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); James Justin Sledge, “Between Loagaeth and
Cosening: Towards an Etiology of John Dee’s Spirit Diaries,” Aries: Journal for the
Study of Western Esotericism 10:1 (2010): 1–35. On the conceptualization of Western
Esotericism, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected
Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
3 5
György E. Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 202.
logic or interpretation, this paper seeks to address a theme which
has increasingly emerged across scholarship on Dee, namely, the
link between Dee as a political visionary who articulately lobbied
for a British Empire in the 1570s, and Dee as an occult philosopher
and magical practitioner whose angelic rituals left behind a rich
textual record, the latest, complete edition of which consists of
nearly 2000 pages.4
This paper seeks to reconstruct the significance of imperialism to
Dee’s intellectual context, worldview, and apperception, and to
highlight the increasingly well-documented correlation between Dee’s
imperial visions and his occult and magical pursuits. As will be
presented over the course of this study, since the discovery of John Dee’s
Brytanici Imperii Limites in 1976 and its accessible publication in 2004,
a rich body of scholarship on Dee has progressively appreciated the
centrality of John Dee’s advocacy of a British Empire to his
worldview and biography.5 At the same time, however, numerous
suggestions as to potential connections between Dee’s imperialism
4
Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and
the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Dee, The
Complete Mystical Records of Dr. John Dee: Transcribed from the 16th-Century
Manuscripts Documenting Dee’s Conversations with Angels, ed. Kevin Klein (Wood-
bury, MI: Llewellyn Publications, 2017). The first edition of Dee’s “angel diaries” was
published in 1659 as John Dee, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many
Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (London: D. Maxwell, 1659).
John Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, ed. Ken MacMillan and Jennifer Abeles
(Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.05.001
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and his occult-magical engagements have lain somewhat dormant
or isolated across secondary literature. In particular, in this article I
seek to excavate and review the mounting documentary evidence
for a connection between Dee’s “Cosmopolitics” and his intimate
familiarity with and practice of Solomonic magic. As will be
reconstructed in the following pages, such an “esoteric imperial-
ism” was not only pervasive and intimately entangled in Dee’s
historical-intellectual context, but it seemed to lie at the heart of his
vision of a British Empire, a vision which Dee himself associated
with a climactic culmination of all his philosophical inquiries.
John Dee and Politics: The View from the Academy
In 1964, Walter Trattner challenged dichotomizations of John
Dee as a “utilitarian scientist” or “evil practitioner of occultism.”
Instead, Trattner suggested that “Dee should be recognized as a
particular variant of the proto-typical Elizabethan marriage of
science, pseudo-science, and religion,” one of the hallmarks of
which was “mingling what has become the traditional elements
of expansion with God and patriotism.” Recognizing the
coherence of Dee’s political advocacy and its “occult-religious”
undertones in their Elizabethan English context, Trattner
suggested that “while many have dismissed Dee as a fanatic
and a megalomaniac,” Dee’s vision of a British Empire “had in it
an element of the prophetic,” and his overseas ambitions were
part and parcel of a “search for something deeper.”6 By breaking
down established, dualistic understandings of Dee, this opened
scholarship up to a more integrated understanding of Dee’s
politics and occult affinities within his wider range of
intellectual pursuits.
In his doctoral dissertation, Graham Yewbrey devoted unprec-
edented attention to Dee’s political affairs, ultimately concluding
that Dee should be “approached in a completely new way as being
essentially a political philosopher.”7 As will be explored further
below, Yewbrey convincingly argued that Dee must have seen his
political vision of a British Empire as a culmination of his whole
philosophical complex. For Yewbrey, the chief link in Dee’s thought
is therefore his “Cosmopolitics” and engagement as “above all a
British philosopher, prophesying and promoting an era of
greatness under Elizabeth that is imminent and divinely-
ordained.”8
In contrast to Yewbrey’s view that Dee’s politics and occult
philosophy were tied together in the specific current of
“Cosmopolitics,” William Sherman argued that Dee’s “Cosmopo-
litics” are more “commonwealth” than “cosmos.” In other words,
Dee’s political program should not be “inflated into a full-blown
political, religious, and even mystical mission,” but instead be
appropriately placed within “standard Tudor historical practice.”9
In Sherman’s thesis, Dee’s politics are but contextual markers
situating him in a broader “geographical reconnaissance,”
“temporal or historical reconnaissance,” and “textual reconnais-
sance.”10 Thomas Green’s 2012 study of the textual sources of
Dee’s invocation of the Arthurian myth for imperial legitimacy,
and Ken MacMillan’s analysis of the historical, geographical, and
legal foundations of Dee’s argument for empire have similarly
6
Walter I. Trattner, “God and Expansion in Elizabethan England: John Dee, 1527–
1583,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 1 (1964): 17–34, on pp. 17, 25, 32, 34.
7 12
Graham Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’: Cosmopolitics and
Protestant ‘Activism’ in the 1570s” (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1981), p. 3.
8 13
Graham Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’: Cosmopolitics and
Protestant ‘Activism’ in the 1570s” (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1981), p. 14.
9 14
William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English
Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 144, 149, 150.
10
William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English
Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 151.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Arnold, Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire, NULL (2019),
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placed this facet of Dee’s oeuvre into a wider historical, less
“magical” context.11 On the other hand, Glyn Parry’s seminal
biography of Dee argues that Dee’s imperial writings should be
read as one extensive work that “emerged less from legal and
political theories than from his fascination with occult philoso-
phy.”12 Relying mostly on the works of Frances Yates, the
contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has identi-
fied Dee as the “pole of the ‘Astraea project’” whose “imperial-
mystical” visions “laid the foundations of occult colonialism.” For
Dugin, the pinnacle of Dee’s thought is the “imperial-mystical”
synthesis of his Hieroglyphic Monad, which represents the
culmination of longstanding prisca theologia narratives in a
British imperial project, a point that places Dee at the peak of a
kind of British “esoteric imperialism.”13
Such a brief overview of existing treatments of Dee’s imperial-
ism serves to illustrate that although the latter has become
evermore appreciated as a crucial aspect of Dee’s corpus and
biography, there is less clarity on what have been deemed the
“occult-religious,” “cosmic,” “mystical,” and “esoteric” attributes of
Dee’s vision, and his known magical practices in particular.
Therefore, in this article I revisit Dee’s imperialism to illuminate
the relevance, terms, and concrete themes of its “occult-religious”
dimension, and to establish the relationship of such to Dee’s own
magical practices.
Imperialism in Context: Imperial Archetypes and
“Cosmopolitics”
The grandiose contours and eschatological exaggerations of
Dee’s envisioned British Empire were in fact not so far-fetched in
his time. Both in the general European climate in which Dee
operated, as well as in the personal and scholarly connections
which had lasting impressions on him, the notion of an
eschatologically-charged empire with cosmic scope and signifi-
cance arising within the (astrologically) foreseeable future was
prevalent in the sixteenth century. This was true not only for
perceptions and self-fashionings of various European monarchies
in whom Dee took an interest, but also for the very scholars,
activists, and reformers among whom he developed his intellectual
apparatus.
According to Frances Yates’s classic study, the Christian imperial
idea in Europe dates back to Augustine’s fifth-century commentary
on the collapse of the Roman Empire in his The City of God Against
the Pagans, which counterpoised the “earthly,” pagan “city” to the
“city of God,” the Church.14 While the precedent of Christian
“imperialism” can be identified even earlier, in the fourth-century
rule of Constantine the Great, whose “politico-religious universal-
ist program provided the nascent Christian empire’s motive
energy,” Augustine’s “manifesto” would be seminal in its
formulation of a first “universal way for the liberation of the
soul” that could “extract itself from the rough-and-tumble of
history,” i.e., the historical, pagan baggage of Rome, and transcend
temporal historic-political variations through a divine mission.15
11
Thomas Green, “John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic,” The
Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 15 (October 2012),
http://www.heroicage.org/issues/15/green.php; Ken Macmillan, “Discourse on
History, Geography, and Law: John Dee and the Limits of the British Empire,
1576–80,” Canadian Journal of History 36 (April 2001): 3–25.
Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee (New Haven/London: Yale
University Press, 2011), p. 95.
Aleksandr Dugin, Noomakhiia: voyny uma—Angliia ili Britaniia? Morskaiia missiia
i pozitivnyi subekt (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2015), pp. 155, 161.
Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London:
Routledge, 1975).
15
Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late
Antiquity. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 88, 39, 50.
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According to Augustine, solely through the Church can temporal
prosperity and political power be redemptive, and thus the true,
archetypal Empire and Emperor could only be bastions of Christian
morality and salvation and one with the Church. Insofar as
Christianity’s expansion should be universal in scale, so, too,
should its imperial political shell as a “divinely-ordained medium
through which the truths of Christianity are to be both spread and
safeguarded.”16 Moreover, the struggle of Christianity, and hence
the Empire, to achieve and maintain universality necessarily lent
an eschatological dimension to the significance of the Empire in
the cosmos. This is reflected not only in the apocalyptic context in
which Augustine was writing, but also in Augustine’s discernment
of the last period being “from Christ until the end of the world,”
meaning “the end of history itself and the beginning of the eternal
Sabbath.”17
The evolution of this imperial ideal as manifested in literary
and political discourses up to Dee’s era finds its next upswing,
in Yates’s study, several centuries following the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire, with the Pope’s crowning
of Charlemagne, “whose favourite book was the De civitate
Dei,” in 800.18 With this, Yates argues, perceptions of Empire
received a “northern tinge,” i.e., Germanic association, in relation
to Rome.19 Yates distinguishes the “revival of Roman law at
Bologna,” which rebirthed the idea of a dominus mundi, or world
ruler, as a pivotal moment in the medieval imperial archetype.20
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II introduced the Ghibelline ideal of the supreme
emperor pursuing the sacred unification of the earthly domain,
even against the Pope. Inspired by Joachite prophecies that had
penetrated religious and academic institutions, Frederick II was
seen throughout Central and Northern Europe as the “Emperor of
the Last Days” and the “eschatological savior,” belief in which was
so prevailing that the “Second Coming of Frederick” came to be
regarded by Church officials as a “most dangerous heresy.”21
Emblematically, one imposter-Frederick was burnt at the stake,
about which Norman Cohn noted, “The method of execution is
significant, for burning was used not in cases of political
insurrection but only in cases of sorcery or heresy; which
confirms what the chronicles also indicate—that this man was a
fanatic who regarded himself not merely as the real Frederick II
but as an eschatological saviour sent by God.”22 This case and
others show just how cosmically charged were the eschatological,
imperial sentiments of the era. Moreover, it is worth noting that
both the “northern” and anti- or counter-Church shape of the
Ghibelline imperial vision would be a theme extremely relevant
to Dee’s later English context.
Under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century,
the universal, sacred imperial “phantom,” especially its “Northern”
aura, was revived in Habsburg propaganda and found credence in
16
J. Mark Mattox, “Augustine: Political and Social Philosophy,” in Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, http://www.iep.
utm.edu/aug-poso/.
17
Quoted in Johannes van Oort, “The end is now: Augustine on History and
Eschatology,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 68, no. 1 (2012), Article 1188:
p. 3, http://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v68i1.1188; Brian E. Daley, S. J., The Hope of the Early
Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), p. 132.
18
Yates, Astraea (ref. 14), p. 3.
19
Yates, Astraea (ref. 14), p. 5.
20
Yates, Astraea (ref. 14), p. 3.
21
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.
181, 192.
22
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.
188.
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3
widespread anticipation of the “end times” manifest in varying
political and intellectual contexts and ambitions.23 Indeed, even on
the far other end of the continent, in Russia, an abbot from Pskov
christened Moscow the “Third Rome,” the final, eschatological,
imperial bastion of Christianity.24 Coincidentally enough, Dee
would later be instrumental in establishing trade contacts with
this nascent empire, even receiving—but refusing—an invitation
for employment by Moscow’s court in 1586, a similar proposal to
which Dee’s son would later accept.25
Dee’s intellectual development up to the point of his imperial
writings is saturated with constant contact with and digestion of
such visions of Empire and their advocates. During his study trip
to Louvain in 1547, Dee’s close mentor Gemma Frisius, a former
cosmographer to Charles V, introduced him to Charles’s interest
in the Arthurian myth “as the model for a Habsburg Last World
Emperor”—a theme that Dee would later elaborate as a central
underpinning for a British Empire.26 In Antwerp in 1550, Dee
established a close, lasting relationship with the leading
cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598)
who was steeply involved in promoting expansionist explora-
tion.27 It is none other than Ortelius’s networks which Bruce
Henry pinpoints as the original breeding ground of the term
“British Empire.”28
Around the same time, in Paris, Dee was profoundly influenced
by the Kabbalistic works of Guillaume Postel (1510–1581), the
“visionary” of the “mystique of the French monarchy,” on the basis
of whose diagrams Dee later developed his Hieroglyphic Monad,
and from whom he borrowed the idea of a “‘fourth, great, and truly
metaphysical revolution’ of universal empire.”29 Postel granted
himself the title of “cosmopolite,” by which he meant an advocate
of eschatological imperialism, on the title page of his 1560 De la
republique des Turcs, and Dee emphatically annotated “cosmopo-
lites” in the margin of Postel's 1538 De originibus seu de hebraicae
linguae antiquitate.30 Through Postel, Dee also developed an
admiration for and began collecting the works of Joachim de
Flore, the twelfth century theologian; de Flore’s prophecy of a final
empire, and his followers’ elaborations of it, were paradigmatic of
medieval imperialistic themes and Christian perceptions of
eschatology.31 At this point, Dee also became acquainted with
the writings of the physician and occult philosopher Paracelsus
(1493–1541), who heralded the coming of a “Kaiser of Peace” and
23
Yates, Astraea (ref. 14), p. 1.
24
Peter J.S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and
After (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 11–13.
25
Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the
Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), footnote 78 on p. 29.
26
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 107.
27
French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (New York: Routledge,
2002), pp. 50, 265; Bruce Ward Henry, “John Dee, Humphrey Llwyd, and the Name
‘British Empire,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 37:2 (Feb. 1972): 189–190, on p.190.
28
Dee remains widely attributed with coining the very term “Brytish Impire.”
However, the text in which Dee first purportedly employed the term, his Synopsis
Reipublicae Britannicae authored in the 1560s, has been lost. Bruce Ward Henry thus
suggests that the credit be assigned to Humphrey Llwyd (alternatively spelled
Lhuyd, 1527–1568), whose unfinished 1568 Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis
Fragmentum was translated into English in 1573, featuring the term “British Empire”
in one passage. This would put Dee in second place with his 1576 General and Rare
Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. See Henry, “John Dee” (ref. 27).
Llwyd and Dee not only shared close mutual contacts and interests, but Dee read
Llwyd’s unfinished manuscript and then owned two copies of its finished
translation: French, John Dee (ref. 27), pp. 255, 265. What is indisputable, however,
is that Dee was the one who developed an unprecedentedly elaborate vision for this
term, and sought to position himself as its main advocate.
29
Yates, Astraea (ref. 14), p. 125; Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 53.
30
Leigh T. I. Penman, “The Hidden History of the Cosmopolitan Concept: Heavenly
Citizenship and the Aporia of World Community,” Journal of the Philosophy of History
9 (2015): 284–305, on pp. 293, 295.
31
See Matthias Riedl (ed.), A Companion to Joachim of Fiore (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
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forecasted the apocalyptic restoration of true knowledge and
order. Dee amassed the largest collection of Paracelsus’s works in
England.32
In 1563, Dee enthusiastically acquired and copied Johannes
Trithemius’s (1462–1516) Steganographia, whose author had
dedicated his De septem secundeis to Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian I as another proclaimed “Last World Emperor” figure.33
According to Parry, Dee’s “emphasis on Trithemius is striking
evidence of his perspective on empire,” as he took up Trithemius’s
scheme in De septem secundeis (of which Dee owned three copies)
of angelic- and planetary-arranged historical periods alleging the
onset of a new, eschatological era in need of an imperial project
worthy of jurisdiction in the End Times.34 In his later The Limits of
the British Empire, which we will examine in due course, Dee would
explicitly praise “none of greater name and credit than Iohannes
Tritemius” for his heralding of “Brytish Renowne”.35 Trithemius
himself, indicatively enough, “held the Frankish empire to have
evolved in accordance with a providential plan laid down by
God.”36 In 1564, following Trithemius’s example, Dee dedicated his
Monas Hieroglyphica to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, whose
lavish coronation was designed to “symbolise his inheritance of
universal empire,” the very same symbols of which featured in
Dee’s Monad.37 If these instances can be classified as potential
influences or indices of context, then the content of Dee’s
dedication of his Monas Hieroglyphica is a genuine primary
confirmation of his concern with a metaphysical imperial
imperative. Dee admitted in the dedication that during his
enraptured, twelve-day-bout of writing the Monas, he beheld
continuous visions of the emperor whom the monad should
magically guide in imperial statecraft.38 Thus, in his early career,
we can already detect a centrality assigned to Empire and the
intimate connection of such to his occult interests.
Unavoidably crucial to Dee’s “imperial” apperception and its
historical context were his exchanges with members of the “Sidney
group” starting in the 1570s, and the related trend of “Cosmopolitics.”
The Sidney group was a decidedly heterogenous, but stably
networked circle of Protestant intellectuals who sought to formulate
“religio-political” visions which could guide Elizabethan foreign
policy to establish a globally competitive Empire. As one of England’s
few local assimilators of the latest in Continental learning for
application in politics, the Sidney circle in many ways represented
the intellectual avant-garde think tank of its time; it is therefore
unsurprising that the climax of Dee’s philosophical and political
endeavors coincided with his engagement with this group.39 The
general intellectual thrust of the Sidney circle centered around
Cosmopolitics, a term and concept which Dee had encountered in a
particularly “esoteric-imperial” form back in Paris, in Postel’s
writings and his milieu.40 In a broad sense, Cosmopolitics in the
sixteenth century referred to a sum worldview synthesized out of
32
French, John Dee (ref. 27), p. 74. According to his library catalogue, Dee owned as
many as 92 editions of Paracelsus’s works in 157 copies total: Julian Roberts and
Andrew G. Watson (eds.), John Dee’s Library Catalogue (London: Bibliographical
Society, 1990), p. 11. On Paracelsus, see Udo Benzenhöfer and Urs Leo Gantenbein,
“Paracelsus,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff, et al., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western
Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 924.
33
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 109–110.
34
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 106; Roberts and Watson, John Dee’s Library
Catalogue (ref. 32), nos. 687, 969, and 1884.
35
Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (ref. 5), p. 67.
36
Noel L. Brann, Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over
Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1999), p. 59.
37
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 53.
38
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), pp. 109–110.
39
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), p. 272.
40
Sherman, John Dee (ref. 9), p. 144.
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the occult sciences, various meta-historical schemes and narratives
of an eschatological or apocalyptic bent, and the affirmation of a
need for religio-centric governance. The title cosmopolitan also
connoted “wandering European alchemists.”41 In Yewbrey’s words,
Cosmopolitics is emblematic of “all the varied issues and problems
which preoccupied both Dee and the ‘Sidney group’ during those
years.”42
Dee in turn referred to himself as a Cosmopolites and developed
an articulate, comprehensive Cosmopolitical system, which
Yewbrey suggests is the central link in Dee’s worldview. The
specific form of Cosmopolitical ideology associated with Dee is
defined as “a conglomerate discipline incorporating Geography,
Cosmography, Hydrography, Astronomy, Astrology, celestial har-
monics, and cosmology” with two main preoccupations: (1) “the
nature and constitution of earthly kingdoms in all aspects,
geographical and historical, economic and military, as well as
political,” and (2) “divine government of the universe, its creation
and the principles upon which it was constructed and which
control its continued existence.”43 This “enquiry into all areas of
knowledge” which “presupposes a universe in which all things are
interrelated and interconnected by their each having an allotted
place and purpose within a divine scheme” is advocated by the
“Cosmopolitical philosopher or ‘Cosmopolites,’” who “seeks to
relate the principles of God’s government of the universe to the
government of earthly kingdoms,” ultimately pursuing the
establishment of an essentially Platonic “theocracy.”44 Although
the Sidney group ultimately treated Dee’s own vision with
skepticism as too “esoteric” and “mythologically-motivated,” it
is within this Cosmopolitical context, and in critical engagement
with the Sidney group and its associates, that Dee committed to his
“principal attempt in English to realise his ideal of a cosmopolitical
theocracy in Britain,” i.e., the authoring of his imperialist programs
for Queen Elizabeth I.45
Dee dictated the initial part of his inaugural imperial program,
General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of
Navigation, in the first six days of August 1576. Between 50 and
100 copies of the work were printed by September 1577, only to be
withheld from distribution on Queen Elizabeth I’s orders by August
1578.46 Memorials was apparently intended to form a four-piece
volume, but the components were printed (and have mostly
survived) separately.47 The very frontispiece of the work, bearing
the title “British Hieroglyphic,” depicts an angel leading Queen
Elizabeth I forward on imperial conquest on a vessel, the masts of
which are appropriately adorned with the Chi Rho—the christo-
gram which Emperor Constantine instated as the divinely-
sanctioned Roman imperial insignia. In Memorials, Dee heralded
that Britain has the potential to measure up to “Cosmopolitical
Government” and surpass “any other particular Monarchy that
ever was on Earth since Man’s Creation.”48 To this end, Dee laid out
41
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 110. For example, the Polish alchemist and
physician Michael Sendivogius (Michał Se˛dziwój, 1566–1636) used the pseudonym
Cosmopolitanus and served the Polish and Holy Roman Imperial courts.
42
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), pp. 274–275.
43
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), pp. 14–15.
44
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), p. 15.
45
Yewbrey, “John Dee and the ‘Sidney Group’” (ref. 7), p. 278.
46
Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (ref. 4), p. 98; MacMillan, “Discourse on
History” (ref. 11), pp. 11–12; Glyn Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British
Empire in Its European Context”, The Historical Journal 49:3 (2006): 643–675, on pp.
648, 653; Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 105; Sherman, John Dee (ref. 10), p. 182.
I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out that Dee
remarked in his 1578 Limits that the “first of the litle booke” is “yet staied in my
handes”: Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (ref. 4), on pp. 98.
47
Sherman, John Dee (ref. 9), p. 154; Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1),
p. 251.
48
John Dee, Essential Readings, ed. Gerald Suster (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books,
2003), p. 58.
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J. Arnold / NULL xxx (2019) xxx–xxx
blueprints for the establishment of a navy to turn the “Brytish
Monarchie” into a Thalassocracy (“Sea Power”). To justify Britain’s
right to empire, Dee briefly presented the precedents established
by the “Triumphant Brytish Arthur” and the Saxon King Edgar the
Peaceful (c. 943–975). In the final sections, Dee included two
orations by the Byzantine Neoplatonist Georgius Gemistos Plethon
(1355–1452), whom Dee advertised as enlightened and imitated—
a philosopher-cum-advisor.
Dee wrote his Of Famous and Rich Discoueries between March
and June 1577.49 In this work, he meticulously summarized
available knowledge on navigational and trade routes to the Far
East, drawing upon a wide range of ancient, medieval, and
contemporary sources. He argued for exploring known and new
trade routes to the East made possible by his own “Reformation of
the Asiaticall Topographie.” Through these undertakings, Dee
proclaimed, England must become “the Incomparable Island of the
Whole World” and restore its purportedly expansive empire.50 The
latter, Dee outlined, is the legacy of King Arthur, a thesis which Dee
(re)constructed and would expand upon in his The Limits of the
British Empire.
The bulk of The Limits of the British Empire was, according to the
manuscript, authored in July 1576, but it was likely only presented
in complete form to the queen between May and August 1578.51
Perhaps the most important dimension of the text is Dee’s detailed
recapitulation and interpretation of existing Arthurian narratives
of British history to justify establishing a British Empire.52 Dee
extended and translated claims of an Arthurian empire into claims
for Britain to rule vast regions of the globe. The rigorous
argumentation of the text, in MacMillan’s impression, is such
that it “confirms the polymathic abilities of one of the most
remarkable figures in the English renaissance” in the form of “a
manuscript compilation about which no single interpretation will
suffice.”53 The impressive, synthetic nature of Limits demonstrates
Dee’s accumulation of sources ranging from historical chronicles to
geographical and cartographical accounts and articulate legal
arguments, resulting in a work which can be seen as seminal to
both theories of sovereignty and empire in European history and to
Dee’s career. It is here that Dee exhibits an erudite synthesis of all
his studies in a concrete Cosmopolitical program of (desired)
political use and cosmic significance, thus conveying “a vivid sense
of Dee at work as an imperial conjurer.”54
Authored as Dee attempted a career as advisor to Queen Elizabeth
I, his works on imperial statecraft, and the maritime undertaking of
such, expose several intriguing peculiarities. First, a significant
marker of Dee’s imperial writings is his own changing self-
perception, namely, his conviction that he had reached the end of
his “apprenticeship” and was now adept at Cosmopolitical mysteries.
At this point, it became his life’s mission to convert those mysteries
into political reality.55 This suggests that Dee associated his imperial
advice with the culmination of both his scholarship and occult
“initiation.” As Sherman has noted, Dee displayed “extraordinary
self-consciousness about his social and professional status,” a point
49
John Dee, Of Famous and Rich Discoueries, unpublished manuscript, London,
British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius C.VII. A summary is offered in Sherman, John Dee
(ref. 9), pp. 175–181.
50
Quoted in John Dee, Of Famous and Rich Discoueries, unpublished manuscript,
London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius C.VII. A summary is offered in Sherman,
John Dee (ref. 9), pp. 179, 181.
51
John Dee, Of Famous and Rich Discoueries, unpublished manuscript, London,
British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius C.VII. A summary is offered in Sherman, John Dee
(ref. 9), p. 182; MacMillan, “Discourse on History” (ref. 11), pp. 13, 18–19.
52
Green, “John Dee, King Arthur” (ref. 11).
53
Ken MacMillan, “Introduction: Discourse on History, Geography, and Law,” in
Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (ref. 5), p. 29.
54
Sherman, John Dee (ref. 9), 192.
55
Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 257.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Arnold, Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire, NULL (2019),
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.05.001
5
which is crucial to deciphering climaxes in Dee’s career and the
profundity of such endeavors as his imperial writings and, as we will
see, possibly related angelic “actions.”56 In his A Necessary
Advertisement, Dee, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, promulgated
his “affairs Philosophicall and Cosmopoliticall” presented therein as
the culmination of thirty years of his “Course of Philosophicall
Enquries,” the yield of the “uttermost of his power, and hability.”57
Rather climactically, Dee thus prefaces his work:
It will appeare, hereafter, in due tyme, that, greater, furder, and
of longer Continuance, hath bin his doings, and very well liked
of, Advertisements and Instructions, in sundry affairs Philo-
sophicall and Cosmopoliticall, for Veritie, Justice, and Peace
furdering, than hath, of any Three, of his neerest freends, and
most familiarly acquainted Cuntrymen, bin (as yet) perceived.58
As Yewbrey suggests, this climax of Dee’s “Course of Philo-
sophicall Enquiries” is thus “best addressed by investigating in
what way he thought the General and Rare Memorials, culminating
in Famous and Rich Discoueries, was its fulfillment.”59 Indeed, “Dee
believed his personal destiny at this time to be bound up with that
of Britain, and that both were in accord with cosmic forces.”60 At
hand was Trithemius’s Age of Jupiter, a point which Dee added in
the margins of Memorials and other documents as he “felt
apocalyptic pressure to warn Elizabeth about her prophetic
imperial role.”61
Parallel, or interrelated to this, all three of Dee’s major imperial
works feature two noteworthy occult hallmarks: (1) discursive
concealment and (2) an increasing, even at times retrospective,
divine attribution. Dee remarked that there is a “Secret Center” of
Discoueries which “is more bestowed, and stored up than I may, or
(in this place) will express,” and in Limits he retroactively
attributed his imperial writings to being “vehemently stirred up
by” and written with the “aide” of the Holy Trinity.”62 In the
illustration of Memorials, he included the Latin phrase for “more is
hid than uttered” and requested royal patronage in exchange for
his otherwise “hid” services not only, or not so much of his own
concoction but of “the Almighty his will and direction.”63 Further
additions to Memorials have also been identified by Parry as
“allusions intelligible only to the inner coterie aware of his angelic
magic.”64 In Memorials, Dee claimed that his treatise had come
“from above only . . . hath gratuitously streamed down into my
Imagination.” Moreover, the perspective of his Discoueries would
later be referenced by one commentator as that of “a spiritual and
heavenly eye looke on earth.”65 Not only did he progressively
attribute these “advices” to higher powers, but he also
56
Sherman, John Dee (ref. 9), 4.
57
A Necessary Advertisement served as a preface to Dee’s Memorials and is dated
July 4th, 1577; John Dee, “General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte
of nauigation annexed to the paradoxal cumpas, in playne: now first published: 24.
yeres, after the first inuention thereof,” ed. Text Creation Partnership, Early English
Books (Ann Arbor, Oxford: Text Creation Partnership, 2003), https://quod.lib.umich.
edu/e/eebo/A20020.0001.001.
58
A Necessary Advertisement served as a preface to Dee’s Memorials and is dated
July 4th, 1577; John Dee, “General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte
of nauigation annexed to the paradoxal cumpas, in playne: now first published: 24.
yeres, after the first inuention thereof,” ed. Text Creation Partnership, Early English
Books (Ann Arbor, Oxford: Text Creation Partnership, 2003), https://quod.lib.umich.
edu/e/eebo/A20020.0001.001.
59
Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 258.
60
Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 247.
61
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 112.
62
Quoted in Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire” (ref. 45), p. 647;
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 105.
63
Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire” (ref. 45), p. 647; Parry, The
Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 104, 106.
64
Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire” (p. 46), p. 662.
65
Samuel Purchas, quoted in Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 262.
See the discussion of Purchas’s account below.
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retroactively emphasized such an aspect of his works. His
“convinced himself that he channelled the Holy Spirit because
Monas hieroglyphica contained kabbalistic mysteries revealed by
the angel Michael.”66 In 1574, Dee defended his 1558 Propaedeu-
mata aphoristica against accusations of plagiarism by arguing that
the “extraordinary gift” of “angelic illumination,” “admirable
divinely influenced consensus,” and “God’s complete knowledge,”
does not operate with copyright.67 In 1578, in Limits, Dee stressed
that both Memorials and Discoueries contained “matters” which
“God he best knoweth how humblie, dutifullie, carefullie, and
needfully” Dee had attained knowledge of such “commodities.”68
Parry summarizes that Dee “believed that Memorials recorded
what angels had revealed about restoring the British Empire” and
“saw himself as the prophet of this ‘Incredible Political Mystery.’”69
This posture assumed by Dee vis-a-vis his imperialist manifestos
highly resonates with the themes of “alienated agency” and
“creative dissociation” which, according to Marco Pasi, are among
the key indices of the “cultural framework” of esotericism in
Western intellectual history.70
Dee’s increasing attribution of his work to divine sources is
especially intriguing if we consider MacMillan’s proposition that
Dee’s imperial arguments were already convincingly based on an
“impressive scholarly edifice of classical and contemporary
historical, geographical, and legal evidence at a time when each
of these disciplines was increasing in use and importance.”71 In
other words, Dee’s argumentation, even without divine attribu-
tion, was enough to “germinate into long-term intellectual
justifications” and set a precedent. While the argument could be
made that such divine attribution is simply a discursive strategy for
political and social leverage, it is worth remembering that Dee and
his “advices” were constantly held suspect and berated by key
figures of the Elizabethan court precisely because they were
accused of originating in the realm of dangerous, untrustworthy,
and possibly malicious spirits and practices, or “conjuring.”
Moreover, as cited above, in Limits Dee explicitly credited
Trithemius and his model of heavenly intelligences for foreseeing
the advance of “British renown,” which emphasizes the close
conceptual connection between Dee’s imperial vision and his
occult sources, even alongside his perhaps more developed
arguments of an “earthly” nature.
The Solomonic-Theurgic Connection
While Dee’s first surviving record of an angelic-magical ritual is
dated December 22, 1581, there is much evidence that Dee was not
only engaged in such rituals much earlier, but that such also
coincided with the height of his imperialist works. It is known that
Dee performed an angelic ritual for Princess Elizabeth in 1555,
claimed “angelic aid” in property restitution cases in 1564–1566,
and Dee “mentions contacting angels from 1569 by unspecified
means, and from 1579 by a ‘scryer’ and crystal.”72 This and other
evidence suggests that angelic invocation was by no means foreign
to Dee’s activities by the time the “Angelic Actions” became his
main documented engagement in the 1580s, on the heels of his
“initiation” and apocalyptic imperial manifesto.
66
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 108–109.
67
Quoted in Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 109–110, 112.
68
Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (ref. 4), p. 98.
69
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 111, 113.
70
See Marco Pasi, “Hilma af Klint, Western Esotericism and the Problem of
Modern Artistic Creativity,” in Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage (eds.), Hilma af
Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible (Stockholm: Axel and Margaret and Axson
Johnson Foundation, 2015), pp. 101–116.
71
MacMillan, “Discourse on History” (ref. 11), pp. 3–4.
72
Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire” (ref. 46), pp. 645, 649, 650.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Arnold, Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire, NULL (2019),
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.05.001
As Stephen Clucas has convincingly illustrated, it is definitively
by the early 1580s that Dee had developed an angelic-magical
ritual practice whose most significant precedent and prototype is
the medieval magical current of “pseudo-Solomonic theurgy.”73
While there are obvious conceptual risks with reducing the
polymath Dee’s whole theoretical and methodological approach to
magic to one tradition, the implications of Clucas’s hermeneutical
analysis that Solomonic theurgy “dictates many of the ritual,
instrumental, and linguistic forms of his [Dee’s] actions” deserve
serious consideration.74 Solomonic magic, according to the most
recent scholarship, was a current of loosely related magical
manuscripts and associated rituals which took shape between the
thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.75 Many of the most influential
Latin manuscripts in this genre “claim to pass on techniques and
mysteries which had originally been revealed to King Solomon
through a ministering angel sent to him by God.”76 While the
specific ritual aims and forms differed across texts, one of the
major vectors of Solomonic practices centered around the
establishment of a “relationship with the angelic world, most
often for the purposes of obtaining understanding or revelations or
even, finally, salvation.”77 The dissemination of Solomonic magic
has also been noted to correspond with the rise of universities and
“curricular knowledge” of the sort to which Dee dedicated himself,
and some of the results promised to be afforded by these texts’
magical proscriptions relate to precisely the “knowledge of natural
things . . . as well as political powers.”78
In addition to the recurring symbol of the kingly figure of
Solomon commanding angelic-delivered knowledge and abilities,
the Solomonic texts feature distinctly power- or political-related
motives.79 In particular, the Liber Sacer, also known as the Liber
Juratus or Sworn Book of Honorius, promises a vast range of political
results, such as the powers “to destroy a kingdom or an empire,” “to
have power over every man,” “to have a thousand armed men,” “to
form a castle that shall never be destroyed,” “to cause unity and
concord,” “to have the favor of everybody,” and “to cause [hold
back] danger, both by sea and land.”80 In his first recorded “angelic
action” on November 20, 1582, Dee addressed a spirit with the
similarly worded specific imperative of enlightenment as to an era
of “new people, new kings, new knowledge of a new govern-
ment.”81 What is more, the practice of Solomonic theurgy
varyingly fits into the seminal early modern occult philosopher
(and Sidney group source) Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s third
category of systematized medieval and Renaissance magic,
ceremonial magic, i.e., one of the most dangerous and powerful
73
Stephen Clucas, “John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and the Ars Notoria:
Renaissance Magic and Medieval Theurgy,” in John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in
English Renaissance Thought, ed. Stephen Clucas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp.
231–273, on p. 231.
74
Stephen Clucas, “John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and the Ars Notoria:
Renaissance Magic and Medieval Theurgy,” in John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in
English Renaissance Thought, ed. Stephen Clucas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp.
231–273, on p. 231.
75
Julien Véronèse, “Solomonic Magic,” in The Routledge History of Medieval Magic,
ed. Sophie Page and Catherine Rider, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 187–200.
76
Clucas, “John Dee’s Angelic Conversations” (ref. 70), p. 241. On the historical
evolution of perceptions of Solomon, see Pablo A. Torijano, Solomon the Esoteric
King: From King to Magus, Development of a Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
77
Véronèse, “Solomonic magic” (ref. 75), p. 194.
78
Claire Fanger, Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to
Sixteenth Centuries (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), p. 4;
Clucas, “John Dee’s Angelic Conversations” (ref. 70), p. 245.
79
On the historical evolution of perceptions of Solomon, see Torijano, Solomon the
Esoteric King (ref. 76).
80
Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), “Liber Juratus Honorii, or the Sworne Book of
Honorius,” Twillit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica (2009), http://www.
esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm.
81
Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 257.
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“recommended” only for the most daring and initiated. Sophie
Page has also identified Dee’s magnified self-perception as the
“new Adam, receiving the perfect wisdom possessed only by angels
and prelapsarian man,” as well as the nature and aims of his
consultation of angelic beings by the mid-1580s, with the tradition
of the Solomonic Ars notoria.82
Dee’s familiarity with the Solomonic current, which manifested
itself in fullest textual and systematic form in the 1580s, can in fact
be traced back even earlier, coinciding with the development of
Dee’s “imperial consciousness.” By the time of his early published
manifestation of imperial interest in the Monas, it is likely that Dee
had already been acquainted with medieval theurgic texts such as
the Sworn Book of Honorius and the Summa sacre magice, which,
along with the Ars nova closely used in developing the Ars notoria,
he had annotated for practical application.83 It was at this time that
Dee dedicated considerable effort to obtaining Trithemius’s
Steganographia and On the Seven Planetary Angels, whose angelol-
ogy profoundly influenced his providential scheme of history and,
indeed, the names of the angels with whom he would later
converse. Solomonic texts occupied a significant place among the
sources of Trithemius’s models, which Dee borrowed.84 With his
acquaintance with the works of Paracelsus around the same time,
Dee “wrote into one of his earliest Paracelsian purchases the names
of good angels who revealed Elect knowledge: ‘Anchorus, Anachor,
Anilos’”—which are from the Sworn Book of Honorius and Ars
Notoria, two key Solomonic texts.85 Thereafter, particularly
noteworthy is Dee’s relationship with “England’s first empire
builder,” Humphrey Gilbert, an advocate of imperial expansion
who is known to have extensively practiced medieval ritual and
ceremonial magic using Solomonic theurgic texts, been advised by
Dee on exploration plans in 1567, and who might have had none
other than Dee in mind when he proposed to establish an
“academy” in London in 1570.86 Gilbert and Dee were apparently
part of a larger “circle of practitioners” with closely resembling
magical operations.87 In the very same year of his consultation on
imperial exploration with Dee, Gilbert and his family were
practicing and systematically recording rituals very similar to
Dee’s later “actions.”88 In other words, such Solomonic themes
were, to say the least, contemporal and consistent with Dee’s
sources and networks of knowledge. Moreover, in his Cosmopo-
litical worldview, it is by all means likely that the exploration and
conquest of the terrestrial realm which Dee advocated and the
82
Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult
Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2013), p. 139.
83
Jan R. Veenstra, “Honorius and the Sigil of God: The Liber iuratus in Berengario
Ganell’s Summa sacre magice,” in Fanger, Invoking Angels (ref. 75), pp. 151–191, on p.
184, n. 3; 185, n. 10.
84
Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 138; Véronèse, “Solomonic magic,” (ref. 75), pp.
188–189.
85
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 51–52.
86
William Gilbert Gosling, The Life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert: England’s First Empire
Builder (London: Constable & Company, 1911); Frank Klaassen, “Ritual Invocation
and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experiments of Humphrey Gilbert,” in
Fanger, Invoking Angels (ref. 75), pp. 341–366, on p. 347; Parry, The Arch-Conjuror
(ref. 12), p. 84.
87
William Gilbert Gosling, The Life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert: England’s First Empire
Builder (London: Constable & Company, 1911); Frank Klaassen, “Ritual Invocation
and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experiments of Humphrey Gilbert,” in
Fanger, Invoking Angels (ref. 75), pp. 341–366, on p. 347; Parry, The Arch-Conjuror
(ref. 12), pp. 359–360.
88
William Gilbert Gosling, The Life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert: England’s First Empire
Builder (London: Constable & Company, 1911); Frank Klaassen, “Ritual Invocation
and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experiments of Humphrey Gilbert,” in
Fanger, Invoking Angels (ref. 75), pp. 341–366, on p. 347; Parry, The Arch-Conjuror
(ref. 12), p. 346.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Arnold, Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire, NULL (2019),
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.05.001
7
“scrying” and mastery of the celestial, spiritual realm were seen as
intimately interconnected.89
It is noteworthy in this light that Dee, for whom the figure of the
angelic-guided Emperor was of high symbolic significance to his
vision of Cosmopolitics ever since his Monad, specifically chose to
dwell on none other than King Solomon as an inspiration in his
imperialist proposals to Queen Elizabeth I. In his 1592 Compendious
Rehearsal, which he had compiled in tense political circumstances
to document his life’s work in a kind of curriculum vitae, as well as
in a letter to Archbishop Whitgift from 1595, Dee explicitly referred
to the now lost opening chapters of Of Famous and Rich Discoueries
as containing “the History of King Salomon, every three yeeres, his
Ophirian voyage.”90 It is at this same time, when Dee was
defending his “‘divinely prescribed means’ to attain legitimate
knowledge, advance God’s glory and benefit the kingdom” from
accusations of “conjuring”, that Dee commissioned what would
become his Ashmolean Museum portrait, in which he appears in a
black cloak and cap.91 In surviving anecdotes from the Gilberts’
rituals, such black attire was supposedly demanded by Solomon
himself for the “scryer” and “master.”92 The English publisher of
exploration tales Samuel Purchas (c. 1577–1626), whose remarks
on Dee’s manuscript have been used by Yewbrey to inform the
reconstruction of the missing chapters, advertised the text as a
“laborious Treatise almost wholly of this Ophirian argument.” Here
it should be recalled that Dee himself referred to Discoueries as
having a “Sacred Center.” Purchas explicitly describes Dee’s
account as being inspired “farre aboue my selfe, farre aboue all
Heauens . . . (That is to bring Christ from aboue) and thence with a
spirituall and heauenly eye looke on earth . . . .”93 In Yewbrey’s
analysis: “While it cannot be known what in the manuscript
prompted Purchas’s comment, his thoughts are suggestive of a
perspective on human affairs which could have accorded with
Dee’s angelological observations.” The significance attached to
Dee’s Solomon narrative, the association of such with an
“angelological” apperception “from above,” and the situation of
these themes in the “Secret Center” of Dee’s whole imperialist
corpus, taken together, are highly suggestive of resonance with his
other, soon to be predominant Solomonic pursuits, i.e., his angelic
magic. Tellingly enough, in his first fully documented angelic
action on December 22, 1581, Dee claimed the guidance of the
angel “Annael” and referenced the latter as the “Chief governor
Generall” invoked “in my boke of Famous and rich Discoueries.”94
Conclusion
The above observations present serious grounds for further
research into what might be a crucial theme and context of John
Dee’s imperialist works in particular, and his worldview and
intellectual biography in general. As I have sought to recapitulate,
Dee’s vision of a British Empire is increasingly recognized to have
been one of his most central intellectual endeavors. Dee’s distinct
form of “esoteric imperialism,” moreover, can be seen as part of the
wider historical context of “religious,” “magical,” and “cosmic”
visions of empire which saturated Dee’s milieus and sources. Dee
89
On Dee’s scrying, see Christopher Whitby, “John Dee and Renaissance Scrying,”
Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 3:2 (1985): 25–37.
90
Quoted in Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 255.
91
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), pp. 244–245.
92
Klaassen, “Ritual Invocation and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experi-
ments of Humphrey Gilbert,” p. 359, footnote 59 on p. 366.
93
Quoted in Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 112; Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish
Impire’” (ref. 1), p. 262.
94
Parry, The Arch-Conjuror (ref. 12), p. 112; Yewbrey, “John Dee’s ‘Brytish Impire’”
(ref. 1), pp. 255, 261, 256, 262; Dee, The Complete Mystical Records of Dr. John Dee (ref.
4), Vol. I, fol. 4b.
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8 J. Arnold / NULL xxx (2019) xxx–xxx

himself seems to have treated his imperial philosophizing not only
as the culmination of his intellectual inquiries, but also as his
“initiation” and revelation of divinely-inspired wisdom. At the
same time, these Cosmopolitical expositions of Dee’s significantly
correlate, both chronologically and thematically, with Dee’s
knowledge and practice of Solomonic magic. Indeed, the synthesis
of Solomonic-angelic and Cosmopolitical visions seems to have
been far from foreign to the sources and networks in the history of
ideas with which Dee developed his specifically accented
formulation of a British Empire. In this light, further exploration
of the intersections between Cosmopolitics and occult-magical
pursuits in Dee’s corpus and networks promises to enrich scholarly
reconstructions of the many unexplored inspirations and realms of
John Dee’s British Empire.
Conflict of interest
None.

Please cite this article in press as: J. Arnold, Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire, NULL (2019),
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.05.001