Post by Tamrin on Jul 11, 2009 9:58:33 GMT 10
John Dee and the Secret Societies
[Excerpts - Article by Ron Heisler originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1992,
via The Alchemy web site on Levity.com - Linked Above]
[Excerpts - Article by Ron Heisler originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1992,
via The Alchemy web site on Levity.com - Linked Above]
Man of science and magus extraordinary, and for two decades England's leading mathematician, it is only in recent years that John Dee's reputation has begun to properly recover from the obloquy attached by an age of militant rationalism to those notorious angel raising episodes in which he engaged in the 1580s. Meric Casaubon's poisonous 1659 edition of Dee's angelic diaries, which did not include all extant volumes, leaves us with little more than an impression of a rather pathetic Dee seeking to communicate with angelic spirits with frustratingly meagre results. What I am seeking to identify is the political and religious significance of these episodes and the clues they give to the secret society culture of the late Elizabethans.
In tracing the origins of Rosicrucianism, commentators have often turned to the mysterious journeyings of Nicholas Barnaud, a Huguenot alchemist around whom an enormous mystique has gathered over the centuries. Barnaud's fame partly rests on his authorship of one of the most controversial of all Huguenot political polemics, Le Réveille-Matin des Francais et de leurs voisins (prétendus), whose first edition dates from 1573 and for which he used the pseudonym of Eusèbe Philadelphe. This ultra-radical work, which was greatly expanded in subsequent editions, betrays a line of thought more consistent with the revolutionaries of 1789 than with the Huguenot aristocrats and their pet theologians of the 1570s. Virulently anti-church in sentiment, the author insists on the marriage of priests and the abolition of tithes, pursues the theme of a grand Huguenot alliance with the house of Guise to overthrow the Valois dynasty, justifies tyrannicide and the right of resistance to oppression, and outlines a novel form of political control for society with clear republican implications. Horrified, the great Calvinist writer Beza rushed to condemn the book at Geneva. Both John Dee and Gabriel Harvey owned copies of the work.
