These were alchemical, astrological, and cabalistical treatises. The magical part of The Tempest, Warton has observed, “is founded on that sort of philosophy which was peculiar to John Dee and his associates, and has been called ‘the Rosicrucian.’”
Dr. Dee was a Theurgist, a sort of magician, who imagined that they held communication with angelic spirits, of which he has left us a memorable evidence. His personal history may serve as a canvas for the picture of an occult philosopher—his reveries, his ambition, and his calamity.
Dee was an eminent and singular person, more intimately connected with the patronage of Elizabeth than perhaps has been observed. It was the fate of this scholar to live in the reigns of five of our successive sovereigns, each of whom had some influence on his fortunes. His father, in the household of Henry the Eighth, suffered some “hard-dealing” from this imperious monarch injurious to the inheritance of the son; the harshness of the sire was considered by the royal children, for Edward granted a pension; Mary, in the day of trial, was favourably disposed towards the philosopher; and Elizabeth, a queen well known for her penurious dispensations, at all times promptly supplied the wants of her careless and dreamy sage.
That decision of character which awaits not for any occasion to reveal itself, broke forth in his college-days. His skill in mathematics, and his astronomical observations, had attracted general notice; and in his twentieth year, Dee ventured on the novel enterprise of conferring personally with the learned of the Netherlands. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, little experimental knowledge was to be gathered out of books. Like the ancient, our insular philosophers early travelled to discover those novelties in science which were often limited to the private circle; there were no Royal or Antiquarian Societies, no “Transactions” of science or the arts. Robert Fludd, the great Rosicrucian, who became more famous than Dee in occult studies, before he gave the world his elaborate labours, passed six years in his travels in France, Germany, and Italy.
Our youthful sage on his return to his college presented them with several curious instruments of science which were not then always procurable in the shops of mechanics. Philosophers often made as well as invented their implements. The learned Mercator was renowned for his globes; and mathematical instruments, of a novel construction, were the invention of the scientific Frisias.
Our young philosopher, already suspected of a dangerous intimacy with the astral influences, did not quiet the murmurs by his improved dexterity in mechanics. In the elation of youth, he astounded the marvelling fellows of his college. Dee has himself confessed, that “his boyish attempts and exploits scholastical may not be meet to repeat.” In a lecture, Dee executed a piece of mechanical invention which now would have been pantomimical, but was then necromantic. When a greater magician, Roger Bacon, by his art, had made the apparition of a man to walk from the top of All-Hallows steeple in Oxford to the top of St. Mary’s, this optical illusion had endangered his life; and another great occult philosopher set forth a compassionate apology for the science of optics, but could only allege it was not magical, though it seemed so. Two centuries and a half had not sufficed to enlighten the fellows of a college at Oxford.
Dee has suffered hard measure from those who have only judged of him in the last days of his unprotected distress. In his age, if we except mathematics, there were few demonstrable truths in science; disguised as it was by rank fables and airy hypotheses; nature was not interpreted so often as she was misunderstood. The ideal world seemed hardly more illusive than the material. While his sovereign, and the nation, and foreigners were looking up to the solitary sage, may we not pardon the honest egotism which once declared, that if he had found a Mæcenas, Britain would not have been destitute of an Aristotle? Bacon had not yet appeared; and however we may deem of his aspiration, we cannot censure his judgment in discovering there was yet a vacant seat for him who was worthy to fill it.
Dee was an eminent mathematician, but the early bent of his mind was somewhat fanciful; an inextinguishable ambition to fix the admiration of the world worked on a restless temperament and a long vagrant course of life; and his generous impulses burst into the wild exuberances of the reveries of astrology, alchemy, and the cabbala.