[from The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet]
DR. DEE
Upon my birth, the gates of heaven were aglow with a blood moon. The new moon seemed old and the crescent moons seemed like unto the Reaper's sickle. The Earth herself shook amid the tumult like a coward facing judgement before the wrath of the Lord.
LORD OXFORD
The very gates of hell op'd its jaws to belch thee out and cast thee up from the bowels of hell. The demon Apollyon did pry open the very jaws of the Demiurge with his trident to unleash thee from the bottomless pit.
DR. DEE
Thou speakest true. The Earth did hake the moment I was released from my mother's womb. All there gathered knew an unnatural event attended my nativity.
LORD OXFORD
Thinkest thou that we live in perilous times, that we live as if under a curse?
DR. DEE
The firmament was all ablaze with protracted sunsets. It was as if cannon balls were being hurled though the heavens so many comets did blaze through the sky to attend my birth.
LORD OXFORD
A portent of the age. The heavens are out of joint. Diseased nature makes Gaia pockmarked, her countenance breaking out in volcanic sores and earthquake eruptions. The indigestion felt in her bowels discharges bile, shaking the very foundations of her mantle, with shifting sand, moving plates, and all the Earth is sent topsyturvy.
DR. DEE
Thou speakest as if thou wert there. Those were exactly the conditions attending my birth. The pearly gates of heaven were bejeweled with rubies of deep red from the fiery firmament. The livestock fled into the hills, and the herds descended into the deep to hide amid the fog and morning mists. These signs mark me or the times extraordinary. And if it be the times, then we are all extraordinary for being born in extraordinary times. I was fated to be a magus, sorcerer and agent of the arcane. Who is my rival in all of England, Scotland, or Wales?
John Dee -- mathematician, alchemist, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher -- devoted himself to the study of divination and Hermetic philosophy. His surname was derived from the Welsh du ("black"), and he manufactured a genealogy showing his descent from Rhodri the Great, Prince of Wales. One of the most learned men of his age, he amassed one of the largest private libraries in Europe and was a founding fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge, where he first acquired a reputation as a magician due to the stage effects he created for a theatrical production. Invited to lecture on Euclidian at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties, he became a close friend of the cartographer Gerardus Mercator and returned to England with an important collection of mathematical and astronomical instruments but was soon conducting research on a perpetual motion machine and a gem purported to have magical properties. In 1555, he was charged with treason for casting a horoscope of Queen Mary I, but he exonerated himself. When Mary died in 1558, he personally chose the date for Elizabeth I's coronation. He invented the claim that Madog ab Owain Gwynedd had discovered America and also asserted that Brutus of Britain and King Arthur had conquered lands across the Atlantic and thus that England's claim to the New World was stronger than Spain's. He developed new instruments as well as special navigational techniques for use in polar regions, and he personally selected pilots and trained them in navigation. In 1583, asked to advise Elizabeth about the new calendar promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII, which adjusted dates by 10 days to restore the situation as it existed at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, he recommended that it be adopted although with seven amendments, including an 11-day adjustment, which would restore it to the supposed birth of Jesus. He also proposed to align the civil and liturgical years and to have them both start on 1 January. However, his advice was rejected, and the ambiguous results of his plans of exploration and colonization reduced his influence at court. He spent the last three decades of his life attempting to commune with angels and demons in order to learn the universal language of creation and bring about the unity of mankind. He regarded all of his activities as facets of the same quest: the search for a mathematically-based, transcendent understanding of the divine forms which underlie the visible world, which he called "pure verities." In particular, through the use of the alchemist/medium, Edward Kelley (calling himself "Edward Talbot" to hide his conviction for forgery), he claimed that angels dictated several books to him, some in a special Enochian language. In 1587, during a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley informed Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered them to share all their possessions, including their wives; their association ended soon thereafter (though Dee's wife perhaps bore Kelley's son), and Dee returned home after six years abroad to find his house vandalized, his library ruined, and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. He spent his final years in poverty.
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