Monday, April 18, 2005
JOHN DEE AND HIS WORLD
Dr. John Dee, philosopher to Queen Elizabeth who did her horoscope; Founder of the Rosicrucian Order, a Protestant response to the Jesuits; alchemist; hermeticist; cabalist; angel conjuror who developed the Enochian Alphabet which he used as an angel language; translator of Euclid; establisher of the legal foundation for colonizing North America; depicted as Prospero and King Lear by Shakespeare, owner of the greatest library in England with over 4,000 volumes; John Dee is a colorful historical figure.
The John Dee Society, an internet-based organization, was founded to produce a standard edition of the published and unpublished works of Dee. The webmaster, Ralph Abraham, is a member of the Lindisfarne Association founded by William Irwin Thompson at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and now located in Crestone, Colorado. Lindisfarne's purpose is to promote Gaian politics with the help of Maurice Strong. As such, we can assume that the John Dee website is not friendly to Catholicism. Crestone, Colorado might even be thought of as the New Age Vatican.
Within the John Dee website is a text linked as the Calder thesis. Chapter IX of the thesis offers a good insight into what Rosicrucianism is about:
the doctrine that man may come consciously to associate with angels in this life a familiar feature in contemporary mystical Platonism - similarity of Kelley's "angelic books" and the Cabalah - the frequency of crystal gazing - Dee's own view of the conferences as the crown and seal of all his past intellectual endeavour - scrying as one of the chief parts of "experimental science" - the union of practical experience and speculative theology.
Association with angels during terrestrial life, Kaballah, crystal gazing, scrying...all otherwise known as conjuring of disembodied spirits in one form or another. And as the website clearly states: "the usual orthodox condemnation of all dealings with spirits," activities clearly condemned by the CCC.
The Rosicrucian claim of recourse to the love and mercy of God would certainly need to be applied overly generously in this case.
Joachim of Fiore is one of the sources of Dee's beliefs, as the website indicates:
Dee's...apocalyptic view of history - influence of the cyclical theories of Trithemius and progressive revelations through time of Joachim of Flora - Dee's chronology - connection with astrological teachings - the doctrine of trigons governing historical and religious change - the conjunction of 1583 interpreted as indicating the birth of a new religion or the end of the world.
The material provided comes the following source according to the website:
The principal source of our knowledge of Dee's life and activities for some years following 1582, is his own detailed record or "spiritual diary," consisting largely of verbatim accounts of what passed at each of his "angelic conferences," with a few narrative links. A portion of this was published by Casaubon in 1659 under the title: A True and Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee (a Mathematician of great Fame in Queen Elizabeth and King James their Reignes) and some Spirits: Tending (had it succeeded) To a general alteration of most States and Kingdomes in the World....with a Preface concerning the Reality (as to point of Spirits) of this Relation and showing the several good Uses that a sober Christian may make of all.
