Spiritual Alchemy: Scrying, Spirit Communication, and Alchemical Wisdom - Jenny Tyson 2016

First Contact with John Dee
My Training and Initiation

During the last week in May 2013, my husband and I decided to attempt to contact the spirit of the Elizabethan magician and alchemist Dr. John Dee using a spirit communication board.

We believed we would find it easier to communicate with a spirit with whom we feel a personal connection. Dr. Dee is a spirit who shares many interests and values in common with us. My husband and I both have the same fascination for Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, and angelic magic that Dr. Dee had during his lifetime. Were he still alive today, we would eagerly seek him out as a teacher. We also share similar life values with Dr. Dee.

In particular, we had a keen interest in Dr. Dee’s esoteric work, particularly the secret diaries in which he described his communications with angels. I had studied the earlier portion of the Enochian magic system that is described in the diaries for about two years. Donald had written a book about the later magical material in the diaries received by Edward Kelley from the angels (Enochian Magic for Beginners, Llewellyn, 1987) and more recently had been writing occult adventure stories about Dr. Dee and Edward Kelley (The Ravener and Others, Avalonia, 2011). We hoped to gain more information about Dee’s life and work through the communication board.

These common interests led to the first successful experiment in communication with Dr. Dee. But before I describe it in more detail, I have asked Donald to write a brief account of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelley so that those readers unfamiliar with these two men will understand who they are and what they did.

A HISTORICAL NOTE

By Donald Tyson

Jenny has asked me to write something about the extraordinary pair of men who play such a central role in this book, the Elizabethan scholar Dr. John Dee and his scryer, the alchemist Edward Kelley. Both men are astonishing historical figures, their lives filled with adventure, romance, intrigue, and magic. They have been badly treated by popular writers, who have mischaracterized them as conniving and evil, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Today Dee and Kelley would be called scientists. Both men sought to acquire knowledge, not merely through book study but through experimentation. Dee hoped to learn the magic of heaven that the angels were reputed to have taught to the patriarch Enoch after his ascent to heaven while Enoch was still alive in the flesh. Kelley, for his part, burned with a lifelong passion to unravel the alchemical mystery of the philosopher’s stone, which would transform base metals into gold.

Dr. John Dee

The uncommonly long life of Dr. John Dee (1527—1609) spanned the entire Elizabethan Age. As a boy he witnessed the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries under Henry VIII, and as a very old man he saw the hysterical witch persecutions under James I. In his prime he served Elizabeth I throughout her reign as her trusted political advisor, physician, and espionage agent. He is best remembered by historians as a cartographer and a mathematician, but he was also an astrologer, an alchemist, and a ceremonial magician.

During his own lifetime he was universally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in all of England, and his reputation as a scholar extended across the channel to continental Europe. It was Dee who coined the term “British Empire.” He was in the forefront of the exploration of the New World by English ships. The captains of those ships relied on Dee’s nautical charts to avoid being wrecked on hidden reefs. His personal library was the largest in England. Men came from all over Europe to consult with him and his books at his home in Mortlake, which at the time was a small village on the River Thames just outside of London (it has since then been absorbed into the growing city).

Queen Elizabeth I would sometimes stop at his house when she took her royal barge up the Thames from her palace at Hampton Court or when she traveled across her realm on horseback with her courtiers. Dee was her special favorite. Their friendship began while the young princess Elizabeth was being held under house arrest by her half sister, Queen Mary Tudor. Mary was Catholic, and both Elizabeth and Dee favored the Protestant cause of the Anglican Church created by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.

As a demonstration of his loyalty to Elizabeth, Dee drew up a horoscope that predicted her ascent to the English throne and her long and prosperous reign. He did so at great personal risk because such an astrological chart could have been considered treason against the reigning monarch, Mary Tudor. It was also Dee who chose the most astrologically auspicious date for young Elizabeth’s coronation as queen following the death of her half sister.

In later years Elizabeth never forgot Dee’s loyalty toward her during her time of peril. Their friendship remained steadfast throughout her life. She consulted him as a physician when she suffered medical complaints that her own royal physicians were unable to cure. She also used Dee as a spy when he traveled from England to continental Europe and as an astrologer when some dire portent such as a comet appeared in the heavens.

Her most significant mark of regard toward Dee was her private assurance to him, repeated several times, that his occult experiments would never be called into question during her lifetime. She gave Dee carte blanche to do whatever he wished in his studies of magic and alchemy without having to worry that he would be imprisoned or executed.

One of Dee’s preoccupations was his desire to establish communication with angels so that he could learn angelic magic. His purpose was twofold. He wanted this esoteric knowledge for its own sake, on the principle that knowledge is its own reward, but he also intended to use it in a practical way to advance the supremacy of England on the high seas and to extend the lands of the British Empire.

It was said in the Bible and other holy texts such as the book of Enoch that the patriarch Enoch had been elevated to heaven while still living. He was one of only two men accorded this honor by God, the other being Elijah. When in heaven the angels taught Enoch all the magical arts that were forbidden for mankind to know at that time. Dee wanted to learn the same magic that had been taught to Enoch.

He began his attempts to contact the angels by scrying into various crystal globes. Crystal gazing was well known and commonly used in England in Dee’s time and was not in itself against the law. Communications with angels were also perfectly legal. The scrying only became illegal when it was used to communicate with spiritual beings other than angels. The assumption was that all non-angelic spirits were demonic.

Dee had only middling success in his solitary experiments with crystal scrying. This led him to hire several professional scryers to help him in his work. Even with these paid scryers, his success was mixed until March 8, 1582, when a man calling himself Edward Talbot came to visit his Mortlake house.

Edward Kelley

This mysterious visitor was Edward Kelley (1555—1597), who for reasons of his own choosing introduced himself to Dee under an assumed name. It is possible that Kelley first went to Dee’s house for the purpose of entrapping Dee into performing spirit magic before witnesses who would testify against Dee in a court of law. Kelley may even have been paid to fulfill this role. In spite of the protection of Queen Elizabeth, Dee had his enemies at the English court.

Kelley tried to induce Dee to show him some of Dee’s mastery of magic. When Dee declined, Kelley offered to display to Dee his own skill in spirit evocation. Dee professed to be horrified at such a proposal and said he wanted no part in such unholy work, but on a later day he asked Kelley if he would care to assist him in his attempt to communicate with the angels of God by scrying into a crystal, a perfectly lawful activity. Kelley readily accepted.

The first scrying session between Dee and Kelley was immensely productive. Almost at once Kelley made contact with spirits who would later identify themselves as the angels who had instructed Enoch in the magic of heaven. Dee sat at his desk and copied down verbatim everything Kelley described seeing in the crystal and every word the angels spoke to Kelley. This became part of Dee’s meticulous written record of the angelic scrying sessions, which is often known as the Enochian diaries.

In his own way, Edward Kelley was even more extraordinary than John Dee. Born to an apothecary in the city of Worcester, his fascination with chemistry began early in life. It is a reasonable speculation that he must have helped his father mix the various chemicals that went into the making of the medicines prescribed by physicians. While still in his teens, he attended Oxford University but left without obtaining a degree.

He was a wild young man given to drunkenness, lawlessness, and a fascination for alchemy and necromancy. He is said to have earned a living for a while by drawing up false land-title deeds and also from “coining,” which was the Elizabethan equivalent of counterfeiting. Coiners made coins out of base metal, which looked like gold or silver but was almost worthless, and exchanged them for the real thing.

There is a rumor that he was put in the stocks at Worcester, and even that he had his ears “cropped”—the tops of the ears of criminals were snipped off with a pair of shears to mark them for the rest of their lives. There is little on which to base this story. It is probably false.

What is not in dispute is that Kelley also earned money by putting on displays of necromancy in which he called from their graves the spirits of dead men and questioned them regarding the locations of hidden treasure. For this work he was paid by noblemen seeking buried gold or sometimes secret information from the dead. This was a serious crime, which is why John Dee pretended to be horrified when Kelley suggested at Mortlake that he would display to Dee his prowess as a necromancer.

Kelley was an enormously gifted scryer. Dee recognized this instantly and proposed that Kelley should stay at his house in Mortlake and scry for him. Having no better prospects, Kelley accepted. He immediately betrayed the men who had employed him to entrap Dee, revealing them to be Dee’s enemies. The two formed a bond of friendship that endured until Kelley’s death. They worked closely together on the Enochian communications from 1582 until 1589, when they were parted. In spite of their separation, their regard for each other never wavered.

Kelley’s primary interest throughout his life was alchemy. He sought with a burning passion the secret of transforming base metals into gold. For a period while they lived in Bohemia, both Dee and Kelley worked together at practical alchemy. They each had their own separate alchemical furnaces, but they exchanged information freely.

It was alchemy that got Kelley killed. When Dee returned home to England from Bohemia, Kelley stayed behind to make gold for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. By some accounts he was successful. He enjoyed great acclaim and great wealth for a few years, and was given lands and a noble title by the emperor that was equivalent to a knighthood, but in the end he fell out of favor with Rudolf, was imprisoned on two occasions, and died by falling from a wall while trying to escape his second imprisonment.

Enochian Magic

Dee’s secret diaries from the years 1582 to 1608 record his experiments in communication with the hierarchy of spiritual beings identifying themselves as the angels who had instructed the biblical patriarch Enoch in the magic of heaven. For this reason these spirits are commonly known as the Enochian angels. Dee sought to learn this system of heavenly magic from the angels by repeatedly invoking them into his scrying crystals during ritual séances. The Enochian diaries in which Dee recorded the scrying sessions he worked in partnership with Kelley from 1582 to 1589 contain the most fascinating information on the system of Enochian magic.

This system is incomplete, and the angels never revealed to Dee the exact manner of its working or its ultimate purpose. They prohibited Dee from using the magic during his lifetime. Over the past century Enochian magic has become popular among modern magicians, who have evolved different ways of using it. Enochian magic has acquired a reputation as the most powerful system of magic that exists, but some magicians also say that it is the most dangerous.

A matter that is often overlooked by modern magicians but was of great significance to John Dee is that Enochian magic is an angel magic. Dee believed it to have a holy purpose. The spirits involved are either angels or lesser spirits subjected to the authority of angels. To use it for base or evil purposes would be to subvert its very nature.

Some magicians believe that John Dee deliberately omitted details of Enochian magic to prevent its defilement by those who were unfit to work it. My own opinion is that it was the angels themselves who deliberately omitted portions of the magic in order to insure it would never be worked during Dee’s lifetime.

Part of the problem with the Enochian diaries was Edward Kelley’s attitude toward the angels. He was never sure what to make of them. At times he accepted that they were the holy angels of God, but at other times he accused them of being demons and refused to tell Dee what they were doing or saying. John Dee’s faith in the Enochian angels never wavered, but Kelley’s attitude toward the angels was at best ambivalent and much of the time was outright hostility.

The angels, for their part, treated Kelley like a telephone. They didn’t care about his opinion and were only concerned about conveying their system of magic accurately to John Dee so that Dee could write it down. At times the angels spoke to Kelley with scathing contempt, and their general disgust and irritation at his waywardness is often expressed throughout the Enochian record. To his credit, Kelley reported what they said even when they were insulting him.

Kelley’s main bone of contention with the angels was that they were not yielding up any information that he could put to practical use. The angels promised him the secret of alchemy as a reward for his faithful service to them and to John Dee. At the very end of their partnership, the angels claimed to have made good on their promise, and it is certainly true that eyewitnesses reported that Kelley was able to manufacture gold while he was living in Bohemia. Dee’s eldest child, Arthur, later wrote that, much as a child would play with a toy set of wooden blocks, as a young boy he had played with the ingots of gold Kelley had made in his alchemical furnace.

In modern times, magicians have used various parts of the Enochian system for mundane purposes, and they claim it is highly effective. This can only be regarded as a misuse of the magic from the angels’ point of view, but perhaps it is flexible enough to tolerate misuse. Only a relatively small part of Enochian magic is used by most modern magicians, the portion based around four complex squares of letters known as the four Watchtowers, combined with the beautiful poetry of the invocations known as the Enochian Keys and the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs. This comprises no more than around 10 percent of Enochian magic as it was recorded by Dee.

Jenny’s book is not directly concerned with Enochian magic, but it is because of the system of Enochian magic that survived in Dee’s diaries that both John Dee and Edward Kelley possess the status they presently enjoy as two of the greatest magicians who ever lived.

Until very recently mainstream historians downplayed Dee’s occult studies, just as they downplayed the similar devotion to alchemy by another great English scholar, Sir Isaac Newton. Magic was looked upon by them as a silly delusion, so Dee’s study of magic was dismissed as unimportant. Over the last few decades Dee’s historians and biographers have begun to realize that we cannot understand John Dee without understanding his passion for spirit communication. It was a huge part of his daily life, a part he hid from prying eyes because it could so easily be misinterpreted by others as illegal. He knew he had the protection of Queen Elizabeth, but he did not want to push his luck further than necessary, so all of his scrying sessions are contained in diaries that he carefully hid away.

It is something of a miracle that his diaries were not lost forever following his death. Dee had divided the diaries into two parts. The later portion he buried in the field next to his house at Mortlake. The other, earlier portion of the diaries he concealed in a secret drawer of one of his travel chests. Shortly after his death the buried portion of the diaries was dug up by the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton and published in 1659 by Meric Casaubon. The other part remained in its secret drawer for decades, then was finally found in 1662 by the owner of the chest and sold ten years later to the antiquarian Elias Ashmole.

Jenny believes that it was not mere chance that preserved the Enochian diaries but purposeful design on the part of the angels. I am inclined to agree that something more purposeful was going on. When you consider how easily either half of the record might have been lost, yet both were discovered and preserved, it does seem that there was a higher providence at work.

—Donald Tyson

THE SPIRIT BOARD

The system of ritual magic communicated by the angels to Dr. Dee and Kelley is called the Enochian system. It is widely practiced by those who are serious about the study of Western esotericism. It is regarded by modern Western magicians as the most powerful system of magic that exists in the world. However, there are many unanswered questions about the content of Dr. Dee’s diaries. Some of the information appears to be incomplete. We decided that by contacting the spirit of Dr. Dee directly, we might be able to obtain answers to some of the mysteries in the Enochian system that have never been fully explained.

In a sense, we were following John Dee’s own approach to occult wisdom. When Dr. Dee sought to learn the secrets of heaven, he asked the angels of heaven directly in a series of spirit séances with Edward Kelley. We sought to learn the unwritten mysteries of Enochian magic by asking the spirit of John Dee directly through the spirit communication board.

The spirit board is a device that has been used for centuries to communicate with spirits. In its simplest form, the spirit board consists of twenty-six slips of paper, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it and arranged in a circle on the smooth surface of a table. An inverted glass sliding across the table indicates letters of words in the response of the spirits.

Almost everyone is familiar with the present commercial form of the board, which is called a Ouija Board and has been sold by Parker Brothers since 1966. The original Ouija Board was patented by Elijah Bond in 1891. Bond was the first person to combine a planchette, or pointer, with a board on which were printed the letters of the alphabet. However, the general concept of selecting letters of the alphabet by means of a pointer moved by spirits has been in use since the time of the ancient Greeks.

The Ouija is a rectangle of pressboard, smooth and glossy on its upper surface. Letters of the alphabet are evenly spaced in two crescents, along with the words yes, no, and goodbye. A wooden triangle on three legs, called a planchette or pointer, slides over the board to indicate letters of words or yes-no answers to questions.

The spirit communication boards that my husband and I use are spirit-specific. If we use a communication board that is not constructed specifically for the spirit we are contacting, then other additions are made to the setup to assist our focus on the spirit we are attempting to communicate with. The photo on the following page shows the communication board used to talk to Dr. Dee.

THE SÉANCE

In this séance to achieve contact with John Dee we did not consider astrological factors or hours of the day. In traditional magic this is known as the use of times. It is common to take the hours of the day assigned to the planets into account in communications with nonhuman spirits, but in Spiritualist operations, where one is working with a human spirit who has passed on, it is generally not a vital consideration.

When using the communication board, we sat on plain wooden chairs facing each other with our knees almost touching. The board rested between us, on our knees. It was oriented sideways so that it was not upside down from the perspective of either of us. We each rested one finger on the base of the inverted shot glass that served as the planchette.

We focused on Dr. Dee’s portrait and sigil intensely for several minutes to assist him in finding us, and we graciously invited him to talk with us. We explained to the spirit that we desired communication to be made through the spirit board by influencing our hands to move the shot glass to the letters that would spell out his responses.

This is the board and glass we used for the initial contact.

Our invitations to spirits are always polite and gracious. We remember that spirits can feel our emotions and hear our thoughts as easily as we hear and respond to spoken voices. We never attempt to force a spirit to appear.

It is a common misconception that spirits move the pointer on the spirit board. In reality, to communicate with us Dr. Dee influenced the movement of our hands on the board. Our hearts, minds, and bodies had to be open to the influence of the spirit of Dr. Dee in order for the pointer to move.

Once the formal invitation was made, we moved the planchette in a clockwise circular direction. I find that using my non-dominant hand sometimes works better for this sort of thing, as I have less control and it makes it somewhat easier for the spirit to influence its movement, so I used my left hand. Donald used his right hand on the planchette.

The touch of a spirit is gentle and light, so we had to be quiet, open, and responsive to his suggestions. Dr. Dee’s touch was clear enough to be discernable. We were working in good harmony with him. Neither Donald or I felt as though our hands or bodies were being possessed. There was no violence and almost no intrusiveness, only the calm, light touch. We knew Dr. Dee would never attempt to disrupt our bodies in any harsh way just for the sake of communicating a few words.

The touch of a spirit is very subtle and can take a few tries to pick up. In the past, with other spirits, I had found it more difficult to feel the influence of the spirit and had to try multiple times before getting any results.

The spirit board can be operated by only one person if that person has a high degree of mediumistic ability and uses a voice or video recorder to make a record of the letters selected by the spirit. However, it is usually easier to have good communication sessions when two or more people operate the board. If a solitary operator is nervous, a second person should be present or the séance should be postponed until the operator is calm. I have occasionally operated a spirit board solo. The results were not nearly as interesting as they were when Donald assisted the operation.

We attempted to voice record the communication session. However, I ran into a problem with the voice recorder. The battery was not at full charge when the session was started, and the instrument failed. Though spirits sometimes are believed to drain electronic devices when they are attempting to contact the physical plane, I think in this case it was my own fault. I did not check the recorder’s battery prior to the communication.

The time of the operation was about 7:00 pm. In Nova Scotia in late spring we have light in the sky until after ten o’clock, so the sun was still well up. The light in the séance room needs to be bright enough to see the board. If the operator wished to work at night, an oil lamp would be appropriate to insure enough ambient light to easily see the letters. We don’t feel that electric lights are conducive to spirit work, and candles have to be monitored constantly and are distracting.

We did not use a protective ritual circle during this procedure. The room in which we worked is closed with a set of double doors, making the walls of the room itself a kind of circle. Both of us are accomplished magicians, and we felt comfortable with our ability to focus our attention with sufficient strength of will to prevent distractions. In the past we have used circles to help the focus of a ritual operation, but we did not feel it was necessary in this particular case as we both had a high level of motivation. The use of prayer and meditation can be just as effective as a ritual circle to focus the content of the séance.

The response to our attempted contact with John Dee was immediate. He responded yes to the question “Are you here with us?” Making contact took less than a minute from the initiation of the communication to the first movements of the planchette. His responses were firm and clear. We kept the séance short; it lasted about ten minutes. The questions were geared toward confirming his identity.

The most memorable response came when we asked for a word in Latin that would confirm that we were actually in contact with Dr. John Dee. Latin was used as the universal language of scholarship in the sixteenth century, and we reasoned that Dr. Dee would be able to give us a word in the Latin language that we could translate using an online translator, since our knowledge of Latin is limited.

The response of the spirit was immediate but at first extremely puzzling. He moved the pointer to the letters I and V. This made no sense to either of us at the time. After receiving this response, we closed the session. We had achieved our main objective—establishing communication with Dr. Dee. We were disappointed that our request for some kind of Latin verification word had failed, but overall the effort was successful for a first attempt.

When Dr. Dee indicated the session was over by selecting goodbye, we asked if he would allow us to contact him again. He indicated that he would. We thanked him with a brief blessing and closed the session.

It was about two hours later when Donald finally realized what Dr. Dee meant by the letters I and V. The letters IV are the Roman numeral for the number 4, and the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet is D, which is the initial letter of John Dee’s last name. Dee’s name and the letter D sound the same. This caused Dee to sign his name in personal letters and in his private diary entries with a triangle. Why a triangle? Because the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet is delta, which is the Greek equivalent to the Latin letter D, and the Greek delta is shaped like a triangle. It was a kind of pun on the sound of his last name that Dee had used throughout his life when signing letters—a triangle to represent the Greek letter delta, and the Greek delta to represent the Latin letter D.

It was a simple but very clever code the spirit had given us, and it met the requirements we had specified. The Roman numeral IV was, in a sense, a Latin word. Perhaps it was intended by the spirit as a kind of test of his own—a test he applied to us to see if we were serious and bright enough to be worth talking to. We had asked the spirit to provide proof that he was who he claimed to be, and he, in turn, tested us to determine if we were worth his effort.

Once Dr. Dee’s code was broken, it gave us a confirmation that our operation had been successful. We had indeed managed to achieve communication with the spirit of the great John Dee, and on the first attempt.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

At this point I decided to begin a more serious, long-term effort to improve communication with the spirit of John Dee. Donald continued to lend his support for the work as it progressed, but the effort to learn the secrets of Enochian magic from the spirit of John Dee became my personal obsession.

Little did I realize at that time that this simple experiment with the spirit board would result a year later in a life-transforming and completely original alchemical initiation—the Great Work that is the ultimate goal of spiritual alchemy. I never would have suspected that my teacher and guide in this Great Work would be not John Dee but his friend and partner, Edward Kelley.