Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire

Highlights

• Explores the vision of a British Empire of the English Renaissance polymath, John Dee (1527–1609), in its historical and intellectual contexts.

• Highlights the connections between Dee’s vision of a British Empire and Dee’s occult, magical, and political pursuits.

• Reviews how scholarship has increasingly reconstructed the centrality of Dee’s “Cosmopolitics” to his worldview, biography, and era.

• Suggests that further research into Dee’s “esoteric imperialism” can shed light on the context, content, and networks of Dee’s British Empire.

Abstract

The life and works of the English Renaissance polymath John Dee (1527–1609) have been traditionally treated by scholarship in the context of the history of philosophy and science. Only in recent decades have two of John Dee’s most prominent and controversial endeavors - (1) his political philosophy and advocacy of a British Empire (a term he is credited with coining), and (2) his long-standing practice of angelic magic - been reconstructed in their significance to Dee’s worldview. This paper highlights how Dee’s visions of a British Empire and his angelic rituals were not only major landmarks in his corpus, but were intimately interconnected in Dee’s ideology of “Cosmopolitics.” Dee’s “esoteric imperialism” is situated in the context of his intellectual, textual, and political environment, and his angelic magic is identified as fitting within the medieval Solomonic current. It is argued that both ideological trends coalesced in Dee’s vision of an angelic-inspired British Empire.

Introduction

In the 410 years since his death, scholars have continued to introduce their studies of the English Renaissance polymath John Dee (1527–1609) with an admission that has nearly become cliché, namely, that “no single unifying theme to his work has emerged.”¹ As a testament to his own interdisciplinary intellect, Dee’s life and works have been treated extensively in numerous fields ranging from the history of philosophy, science, magic, Western esotericism and occultism, to the cognitive study of religious experience.² Dee specialists such as György E. Szönyi have warned against attempting to explain Dee’s ideological complex and diverse endeavors “from one single type of source material.”³ While recognizing the irreducibility of Dee’s polymathy to one line of logic or interpretation, this paper seeks to address a theme which has increasingly emerged across scholarship on Dee, namely, the link between Dee as a political visionary who articulately lobbied for a British Empire in the 1570s, and Dee as an occult philosopher and magical practitioner whose angelic rituals left behind a rich textual record, the latest, complete edition of which consists of nearly 2000 pages.⁴

This paper seeks to reconstruct the significance of imperialism to Dee’s intellectual context, worldview, and apperception, and to highlight the increasingly well-documented correlation between Dee’s imperial visions and his occult and magical pursuits. As will be presented over the course of this study, since the discovery of John Dee’s Brytanici Imperii Limites in 1976 and its accessible publication in 2004, a rich body of scholarship on Dee has progressively appreciated the centrality of John Dee’s advocacy of a British Empire to his worldview and biography.⁵ At the same time, however, numerous suggestions as to potential connections between Dee’s imperialism and his occult-magical engagements have lain somewhat dormant or isolated across secondary literature. In particular, in this article I seek to excavate and review the mounting documentary evidence for a connection between Dee’s “Cosmopolitics” and his intimate familiarity with and practice of Solomonic magic. As will be reconstructed in the following pages, such an “esoteric imperialism” was not only pervasive and intimately entangled in Dee’s historical-intellectual context, but it seemed to lie at the heart of his vision of a British Empire, a vision which Dee himself associated with a climactic culmination of all his philosophical inquiries.