Читать книгу The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee - Benjamin Woolley - Страница 16

Following his brush with Bartlet Green and John Philpot, Dee appeared very much at home in the new Catholic order. On 15 January 1556, only a few days before Green’s execution, he published his ‘Supplication to Queen Mary….for the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and monuments’. The ‘monuments’ to which he referred were not the statues smashed by Protestant radicals in churches and monasteries, but the far more precious ancient and medieval manuscripts currently shelved in vestries and scriptoria. The tempest of the Reformation had already scattered many of these irreplaceable pages. ‘There was no quicker merchandise than library books,’ John Bale later observed of the period, noting that bundles of them were routinely to be found for sale in ‘grocers, soapsellers, tailors, and other occupiers’ shops, some in ships ready to be carried overseas into Flanders’.¹ If action was not taken quickly, England’s fragile intellectual infrastructure would be gone forever.

Dee’s plan was to send agents across the length and breadth of the country to collect or copy these works for a new ‘Library Royal’. This great national archive would not only preserve manuscripts and books from ‘rot and worms’, but provide a resource to which ‘learned men’ could turn in times of religious strife and uncertainty to settle ‘such doubts and points of learning, as much cumber and vex their heads’. For there they would find, Dee argued, that all the most troubling issues of the day – for example the true meaning of St Cyprian’s words concerning the unity of the church, the subject of Dee’s heated argument with Philpot – ‘are most pithily in such old monuments debated and discussed’.² Thus would ‘learning wonderfully be advanced’.

Although his scheme did not receive official backing, it provided Dee with a pretext for pursuing his own private version. A period of frenetic bibliographic activity followed. Dee criss-crossed the country, searching for material, keeping notes as he went:

Remember two in Wales who have excellent monuments. Mr Edward ap Roger in Raubon 7 miles from Oswestree Northward and…Edward Price at Mivod X [i.e. ten] miles from Oswestree, somewhat westwards. Archdecon Crowly and Robert Crowly sometime printer had Tully’s translation of Cyropaedia…³

Dee’s desire to preserve and own these texts pushed him to extreme measures. He borrowed four scientific manuscripts from Peterhouse College in Cambridge, promising to return them but apparently failing to do so. He acquired six manuscripts from the collection of John Leland within days of its supposed custodian, Sir John Cheke, being kidnapped in his exile in the Low Countries, brought home and forced to renounce his Protestantism.⁴

His quest was most obsessive when looking for scientific manuscripts and books. Dee also started work on one of his own, the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (Preliminary Aphoristic Teachings), a series of maxims explaining astrological powers ‘by rational processes’.⁵ For Dee wanted to discover the ‘true virtues of nature’, to find out how celestial events – the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets against the stars – influenced ‘sublunar’ (i.e. atmospheric and terrestrial) ones.

In early sixteenth-century England, astrology was in decline. This was not because of general disbelief in its powers. No one then seriously questioned that the planets influenced earthly events, any more than we would question the existence of gravity today. The cause of the decline was a general ‘torpor’, as the historian Keith Thomas put it, in English mathematics.⁶ It was impossible, for example, to get English ephemerides, so they had to be imported at great expense. Dee’s aim was to shake England out of this torpor, and it was his Propaedeumata that set the trend.

Dee theorised that every entity in the universe emanated ‘rays’ of a force which influenced other objects it struck. He took as an example the forces of attraction and repulsion produced by the ‘lodestone’ – magnetised iron ore. This demonstrated in miniature what was happening throughout the cosmos. The rays’ important feature for Dee was that they could be studied scientifically. He pleaded for more detailed astronomical studies, so that the true sizes and distances, and therefore influence, of the heavenly bodies could be established.

This became the basis of Dee’s natural philosophy, and in several ways it anticipates Isaac Newton’s ground-breaking Principia Mathematica, which triggered the scientific revolution and modern physics, by over a century. There are similarities with Newton’s theory of gravity: the idea of a magnetic-like force emanating from physical bodies which acts on others; the emphasis on mathematics combined with measurement as a way of discovering how such a force works. Furthermore Dee believed, like Newton, that the universe worked according to mathematical laws.

His other works of this time, few of which have survived, only reinforce the impression that he was moving towards a decidedly scientific view of the universe. He wrote papers on perspective, on astronomical instruments and on the properties of circular motions. As early as 1553, while working for Northumberland’s household, he wrote a work dedicated to the duke’s wife on the ebb and flow of tides, a subject directly related to the idea of gravity – also an interest of Newton’s.

He even endorsed the observation that two bodies of unequal weight fall to the ground at the same speed.⁷ The acceptance that this could be the case, even though it flew in the face of common sense and accepted theories of motion, is usually attributed to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and cited as proof of the great Italian astronomer’s pioneering role in making observation the keystone of scientific enquiry. However, Dee knew of it (and pointed out that others did before him).

But the Propaedeumata Aphoristica was no proto-Principia Mathematica: for at its heart lay a force that was magical as much as physical. This is revealed by the book’s title page, which shows the qualities of heat and humidity, the Sun and the Moon, the elements of earth and water all connected to the mystical symbol which dominates the centre of the image: the monad.

The monad was an astrological sign Dee invented. He regarded it as the key to a true understanding of the unity of the cosmos. Its appearance on the title page of the rationalist Propaedeumata Aphoristica indicates that Dee’s idea of physics strayed far beyond the limits of physical reality.

Dee’s belief that ‘rays’ emanating from physical objects could affect the human soul as well as body makes the Propaedeumata essentially an astrological work. For this was why astrologers, by applying principles abstracted from centuries of practice, could divine something about a person from the configuration of the heavens at the moment of his or her birth, and why, with a scientific understanding of such bodies and the rays, so much more could be achieved. Dee also suggested that the tools used to manipulate light could also be used to manipulate these emanations. Lenses and mirrors might be able to concentrate, reflect or refract these rays. Such instruments might even make them visible. Perhaps (though he was circumspect on the matter, because of its connotations of conjuration), a fortune-teller’s crystal ball works as a sort of lens, its material being of such quality that it is able to capture and focus the invisible rays in its immediate vicinity.

Thus, at the heart of Dee’s science lay what has come to be called ‘natural’ (as opposed to supernatural) magic. When God created the universe, itself an act that Dee accepted to be beyond scientific understanding, He let loose a divine force which causes the planets to turn, the Sun to rise and the Moon to wax and wane. Magic, as Dee saw it, is the human ability to tap this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology.

Dee planned the Propaedeumata to be his magnum opus, but managed to complete only a hastily written summary. During the final years of Mary’s reign, England suffered a series of disasters: bad harvests and famines at home, diplomatic failures and military blunders abroad. Meanwhile, two devastating epidemics of influenza (which got its name from the belief that it was caused by malign astrological influences) swept the country in 1557 and 1558. Falling seriously ill, Dee thought his days were numbered. He set his affairs in order, and arranged for a draft of Propaedeumata to be published, handing over the rest of his literary affairs to Pedro Nuñez.

Queen Mary was also in decline. At the end of 1557, six months after Philip’s departure for Spain, she announced once again that she was pregnant. In February 1558, in anticipation of the birth, she withdrew to her chamber. As before, the baby failed to materialise, though Mary was still waiting at the end of March. She finally gave up hope in May, and fell into a depression from which she never recovered – dying on 17 November 1558. Anyone associated with her regime and religion was now dangerously exposed, chief among them Bishop Bonner and his chaplain, John Dee.