Lynn Picknett - The Secret History of Lucifer - And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

The angels took over Dee's life. He and Kelley, together with their respective families, travelled widely in Europe on the suggestions/orders of the communicators, finally arriving at Cracow, Poland, in 1587. It was there that the angelic idyll turned terminally sour. On 17 April the angels urged the men to indulge in wife-swapping, which horrified Dr Dee - who worried that the angels might have become demons - but as the injunction was something of a command, they reluctantly complied. Perhaps in all senses, that broke the spell. Although nearly thirty years older than his wife Jane, Dee was devoted to her, often scribbling caring diary notes about her moods and health. Both of them had always been faithful to each other, and this new injunction - which they reluctantly obeyed - proved traumatic. Although still on speaking terms with Kelley, the Dees left him on the continent and fled back to England, where it is said Dr Dee renounced magic for ever, dying an outcast and a pauper in 1608.

(Many sorcerers have died in obscurity and poverty, providing an inevitable and facile cautionary tale for moralists and fundamentalists, but one wonders if the unfortunate magi had simply been too addicted to the delights and challenges of the other-world ultimately to bother to forge much of a life in this one.80 To be ravished by even the least spectacular magic often means ignoring bills - and the necessity to find the means to pay them81-and maintaining social ties. However, many scholars in disciplines other than the occult have also succumbed to the enchanted addiction of learning, but the moralists ignore the inconvenient fact that they, too, died of starvation and destitution, also utterly alone and without even the excuse of soul-devouring demons at hand.)

Even though receiving the equivalent of a knighthood from the King of Bohemia, Kelley's good fortune came to an abrupt end, although - as with much about his life - the precise circumstances are not known. Perhaps he had returned to his previous career as a forger, or the monarch simply tired of his empty promises to produce gold. Kelley was repeatedly thrown in jail, from where he wrote - full of indignation and self-righteousness - to the king, hinting once more that he could create gold for him from base metal. The tone may be seen from the opening passage:

Though I have already twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, an indignity which has been offered to me in no other part of the world, yet my mind, remaining unbound, has all this time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised by the wicked and foolish, but is praised by the wise. Nay, the saying that none but fools and lawyers hate and despise Alchemy has passed into proverb. Furthermore, as during the preceding three years I have used great labour, expense, and acre in order to discover for your Majesty that which might afford you much profit and pleasure, so during my imprisonment - a calamity which has befallen me through the action of your Majesty - I am utterly incapable of remaining idle. Hence I have written a treatize ... But if my teaching displease you, know that you are still altogether wandering astray from the true scope and aim of this matter, and are utterly wasting your money, time, labour, and hope .. sz

This mixture of indignation, barely veiled accusation and bombast was not well advised. Kelley ended his days trying to escape from jail in 1595.83

As for Dee, he seemed increasingly a broken man. Money was a serious problem, although Queen Elizabeth constantly reassured him that one day he would be granted a profitable living. It never came. Then came absolute disaster for such a dedicated scholar: his precious library and laboratory were razed to the ground by a mob who believed him to be in league with the Devil, and despite his royal patronage, it was with such an unenviable reputation that he eked out his last years. Then a double blow: the Queen's great councillor, Lord Burleigh (William Cecil), and Dee's friend and patron, died in 1598, and then the regal Gloriana herself passed on in 1603. For his last three years Dee entered not a single thought in his diary. The sad old man seemed to be living out Prospero's decline:

A trite and contrived end for a great magician. He went to join his Queen - and possibly Edward Kelley - on 26 March 1609.

It is easy for twenty-first-century readers to dismiss the angelic dealings of the Dee-Kelley team as foolishness, illusion, the product of suggestibility - even afolie a deux - or simply the result of some nifty stage-management from the unscrupulous croppedeared mountebank. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the first of the angelic messages urged Dee to pay Kelley the then considerable sum of £30 a year as a pension, together with the plain statement `none shall enter into the knowledge of these mysteries but this worker': similarly, the order to exchange wives coincided neatly with the climax of Kelley's lust for Mrs Dee. But as with many cases of the paranormal, bald scepticism rarely provides the complete answer.s5

As set down in Dee's Liber Logaeth, Enochian (communicated via Kelley from an angel called Nalvage) seems to be a valid language, complete with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax - difficult, if not impossible for a non-academic such as Kelley to have invented, at least consciously. The problem is that even in the twenty-first century we have little idea about the capabilities of the human unconscious, although the annals of abnormal psychology offer a glimpse of a dark, Luciferan world of immense and labyrinthine possibilities.

Dr Dee was by no means the only person to have received a completely new language under what might be termed paranormal circumstances. In the late nineteenth century, Catherine Elise Muller, a Spiritualist medium from Geneva, Switzerland, proved that while in trance she would produce automatic writing in Arabic, or - through a spirit `control' called Leopold - speak what she claimed to be Martian. She even drew crude sketches of life on Mars, complete with streets, houses and the latest Martian fashions.

As her fame spread, the renowned Swiss Professor of psychology, Theodore Flournoy, took an intense interest in Catherine - now operating under the pseudonym of Helene Smith - spending five years sitting in on her seances and recording her `Martian' outpourings. Applying psychoanalytical techniques, he concluded that she was abnormally imaginative, her fantasies emerging as highly coloured fact during the dissociative state of trance. She may not have been consciously cheating, but her unconscious mind was. However, Flournoy added that Catherine's exceptional gift for fabrication was probably augmented by real psychokinesis (mind over matter) and a certain amount of telepathy - a conclusion that would be far too brave and subtle for today's media-hungry alleged `parapsychologists', eager to make their names as professional debunkers, a species of televangelists for a particularly aggressive and bigoted form of rationalism.

Moreover, although a Sanskrit expert declared that 98 per cent of Catherine's `Martian' words could be traced to known languages, he claimed that her outpourings behaved like a real tongue, with authentic grammatical constructions. If a relatively uneducated young woman in the nineteenth century could unconsciously invent a passable language, it is possible that in the heightened atmosphere of a sixteenthcentury sorcerer's laboratory, so could Edward Kelley.

As we will see when discussing The Book of the Law, produced by ritual magician Aleister Crowley in 1904, inspired or `channelled' writings usually appear to have originated with another personality or mind entirely, which is why they are so compelling in the first place. Of course these days we know all about dissociation in principle - the apparent splitting of an individual's consciousness to reveal seemingly discrete personalities. The most obvious example of this is multiple personality, where a single person can exhibit such entirely different modes of thinking and expression that other people appear to be trapped, as it were, inside the `host' body. Although this is understood to be classic dissociation pure and simple, certain related phenomena take multiple personality into the category of `extreme possibilities' (as The X-Files' Fox Mulder would say): for example, while six of the seven personalities obediently slumber after the host takes a strong sleeping pill, the last one refuses to succumb and stays awake. But how? In other cases one particular personality might claim to suffer from diabetes - which is confirmed by a blood test, although none of the other personalities test positive when it is their turn to take over ...