Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mankie listener Discretion advised.
Speaker 2: The year was sixteen sixty two and the owners of
Speaker 2: a little sweet shop in London were running their fingers
Speaker 2: over their newest acquisition, an antique cedar chest. Their fingertips
Speaker 2: found a strange opening in the body of the chest,
Speaker 2: a hidden drawer. Perhaps they used a knife to pull
Speaker 2: at it. The drawer opened, and inside not the treasures
Speaker 2: they may have dreamt of, but a beaded necklace, a cross,
Speaker 2: and some handwritten books the sweetshops made. Wasn't especially interested
Speaker 2: in whatever someone's old books might have to say. She
Speaker 2: had work to do. But as she baked her pies
Speaker 2: atop the pages she was using as parchment paper, the
Speaker 2: smell of caramelized sugar spinning in the air, it was
Speaker 2: hard to ignore an uncomfortable feeling stirring in her gut.
Speaker 2: When she looked at the books pages. They were strange. Yes,
Speaker 2: they contained words and dated entries, as she might have expected,
Speaker 2: But the pages also contained diagrams and signs and symbols
Speaker 2: that she didn't understand. Unnerving symbols, triangles inscribed inside circles,
Speaker 2: intricate stars that pointed toward what might have been Greek letters,
Speaker 2: maps of what might have looked like planets, complex mathematical
Speaker 2: symbols that could only be witchcraft. She quieted her mind.
Speaker 2: She lifted the surely devilish pages one by one, and
Speaker 2: one by one let them blacken in the fire beneath
Speaker 2: her baking pies. But it didn't take long before other
Speaker 2: people started noticing the strangeness of the pages that hadn't
Speaker 2: been burned. One antiquarian realized that these pages weren't just
Speaker 2: some devil's unhinged ramblings. They were the lost diary of Renaissance,
Speaker 2: England's greatest conjurer, the occultist, once employed as astronomer to
Speaker 2: Queen Elizabeth the First, a man named John Dee. John
Speaker 2: Dee was one of the most fascinating characters in all
Speaker 2: of Elizabethan court history. He was a learned mathematician and
Speaker 2: also a magician, an astronomer, and an astrologer. He was
Speaker 2: a trusted political advisor to the Queen. He was a scientist,
Speaker 2: a cartographer, and even a special effects technician. He was
Speaker 2: also an angelologist, a Christian lawmanser, an occultist and a
Speaker 2: dabbler in alchemy. He was a student of Hebrew and
Speaker 2: the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. In addition to Christianity,
Speaker 2: he believed he spoke with angels, both angels from the
Speaker 2: Old Testament and some of his own discovery. He recorded
Speaker 2: completely credulously his angelic conversations with the likes of the
Speaker 2: angels Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. It may seem impossible
Speaker 2: to us now that someone so invested in the occult
Speaker 2: in sorcery could have had such a serious political career
Speaker 2: in a royal court. But it was the fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: the Renaissance. The classic Renaissance man did it all in
Speaker 2: part because it all was not so neatly divided into
Speaker 2: branches as it is today. Math, magic and miracle were
Speaker 2: not entirely distinct from each other. Politics were ordained by God,
Speaker 2: after all. Queen Elizabeth herself believed in the royal touch,
Speaker 2: the magic of her fingertips upon her subject's next to
Speaker 2: heal their ailments. The latest optical science was recognizing that
Speaker 2: light could bend it separated into rainbows through lenses and
Speaker 2: mirrors and crystals, where was the line between that science
Speaker 2: and the idea that gazing into a crystal ball might
Speaker 2: reveal concealed dimensions of God's creation, just as it revealed
Speaker 2: the different bands of color concealed within light. John Dee
Speaker 2: was a man who studied the heavens, and in fifteen
Speaker 2: seventy two he looked up as all of England cowered
Speaker 2: at a new star that suddenly appeared in the night sky,
Speaker 2: followed by a range comet. In fifteen seventy seven, and
Speaker 2: under the light of that comet, the Conjuror John d
Speaker 2: made a political plan for his queen. He encouraged Elizabeth
Speaker 2: to follow the path laid by King Arthur one thousand
Speaker 2: years earlier, to expand England into a term he coined,
Speaker 2: a British Empire. But the Great Conjurer would also do
Speaker 2: something else. Under the light of that mysterious comet. He
Speaker 2: would allow a man using a false name into his home,
Speaker 2: a man who would ultimately be his downfall. This was
Speaker 2: a man who would intercede with D's angelic conversations and
Speaker 2: put a wedge between d and the court life he
Speaker 2: was enjoying with Queen Elizabeth. When the Great Conjurer looked
Speaker 2: up into the sky and calculated the positions of the planets.
Speaker 2: It seems he couldn't have seen just how tenuous his
Speaker 2: own position was. I'm Danish schwartz and this is noble blood.
Speaker 2: John Dee was born in or around London on July thirteenth,
Speaker 2: fifteen twenty seven, during the reign of King Henry the Eighth.
Speaker 2: He was the son of a merchant who served within
Speaker 2: the king's court. If you're into astrology, you're in luck.
Speaker 2: With this episode, Dee mapped his own birth chart, as
Speaker 2: well as the astrological positionings of many of the events
Speaker 2: that took place throughout the sixteenth century. According to D's calculations,
Speaker 2: Jupiter and the Sun were strong together in Cancer at
Speaker 2: the moment of his birth. I'm sure some of you
Speaker 2: listeners can interpret those signs better than I can. Biographer
Speaker 2: Benjamin Woolley notes that the moon and the Sun were
Speaker 2: in opposition in d'cas charts, and even I could tell
Speaker 2: you that symbolically, at least in literary terms. That suggests
Speaker 2: some internal conflict that might have been brewing inside him.
Speaker 2: And so we begin today's episode appropriately in astrology, a
Speaker 2: field with plenty of adherents still today a realm that
Speaker 2: draws on astronomical science and then, at least in my estimation,
Speaker 2: heads into the direction of belief. By fifteen forty seven,
Speaker 2: John d was nineteen and England was transitioning from the
Speaker 2: reign of King Henry the Eighth to that of his
Speaker 2: short lived only son, King Edward. At that time John
Speaker 2: Dee was in the midst of some personal drama of
Speaker 2: his own, and I mean drama in the quite literal sense.
Speaker 2: He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he
Speaker 2: was putting on a play. It was a play called
Speaker 2: Peace by an ancient Greek playwright, Aristophanes, and it called
Speaker 2: for a dung beetle to fly with an actor on
Speaker 2: its back. This was the fifteen hundreds. D did not
Speaker 2: have the benefits of electricity in staging his play, let
Speaker 2: alone projectors, lasers or drones. And yet the actor on
Speaker 2: stage instructed his scare a beetle to lift him into
Speaker 2: the sky, and it did. There was a gasp in
Speaker 2: the audience next craned backward to watch in awe. How
Speaker 2: was it possible the flying beetle on stage was like
Speaker 2: a miracle, or else some thought like magic or as
Speaker 2: some whispered as the play went on, it was witchcraft.
Speaker 2: D must have dealt with the devil. Only a few
Speaker 2: people in the crowd recognized that the beatle must have
Speaker 2: been some application of mathematics. D probably used some combination
Speaker 2: of Pulley's mirrors, springs, and pressurized air or gas to
Speaker 2: create the illusion of a flying bug. But this was
Speaker 2: a time when mathematics as a discipline were viewed as
Speaker 2: essentially indistinguishable from conjuring. D was cast under suspicion. In
Speaker 2: another life, we can imagine that D might have gone
Speaker 2: on to become the best practical effects guy of the
Speaker 2: Elizabethan age. We can easily imagine a D who went
Speaker 2: on to be an artist of the theater what D
Speaker 2: himself called art mathematical. Of course, his beatle was considered wizardly.
Speaker 2: After all, what is special effects technology today but something
Speaker 2: we call movie magic. But aside from a brief stint
Speaker 2: when he was a student, D wasn't really interested in
Speaker 2: the theater. For D, the mathematical was only in service
Speaker 2: of his true aim, which was the revelation of some
Speaker 2: universal godly truth through the use of sciences that shaded
Speaker 2: without distinction in his mind into magic, and eight years
Speaker 2: later that lack of distinction between the occult and the
Speaker 2: approved came home to D in the form of a
Speaker 2: court order. It was fifteen fifty five and d was
Speaker 2: under arrest. This was during Queen Mary's reign. D stood
Speaker 2: accused of witchcraft, a serious charge under the new Catholic rule,
Speaker 2: which was definitely not opposed to burning heretics at the stake.
Speaker 2: D was also official accused of two other crimes, calculating
Speaker 2: and conjuring. Again, in that language, you can see the
Speaker 2: closeness of math and magic to this day. The word
Speaker 2: we use for solving a math problem calculating, it means
Speaker 2: something very different when applied to a person. A calculating
Speaker 2: person implies that they're sly bad scheming. And John Dee
Speaker 2: stood accused of doing the very thing that so many
Speaker 2: astrologically inclined bridesmaids do for their friends today. That is,
Speaker 2: mapping the horoscopes of Mary and her husband Philip to
Speaker 2: see if they made a good match. Kind of touchingly,
Speaker 2: de found in favor of Mary and Philip's union. It's
Speaker 2: pretty sweet, actually, His calculations suggested that their marriage took
Speaker 2: place under an auspicious rising sign for a new couple.
Speaker 2: But of course flick Queen Mary, defensive about an unpopular marriage,
Speaker 2: didn't exactly take the zodiac as a fun activity for
Speaker 2: a bridal shower. Luckily, Forde he escaped the fate of
Speaker 2: the heretics and outlived Mary, who died in fifteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2: That was when Mary's younger Protestant half sister, Elizabeth, came
Speaker 2: to the throne. Twenty five year old Elizabeth was the
Speaker 2: daughter of King Henry the Eighth and the beheaded Anne Boleyn.
Speaker 2: She was the second woman ever to ascend to a
Speaker 2: throne that had been until recently only occupied by men,
Speaker 2: and she needed to secure her reign. She appointed her
Speaker 2: favorite Robert Dudley to advise her, and Dudley, needing the
Speaker 2: good graces of not only the earthly but heavenly realms
Speaker 2: as well as he put together Elizabeth's coronation, decided that
Speaker 2: he needed the one man in England who could read
Speaker 2: the planets better than anyone else. Robert Dudley called upon
Speaker 2: John d. When John d agreed to choose the date
Speaker 2: for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, it was the beginning of a
Speaker 2: major life change for him. After being arrested under Queen
Speaker 2: Mary's reign. Now he was not only set free, but
Speaker 2: he was welcomed into Elizabeth's court. As his first order
Speaker 2: of business, D consulted the stars. He measured and mapped
Speaker 2: the angles between the planets, the positions of major constellations,
Speaker 2: the twelve astrological houses, and rising signs. At last, he
Speaker 2: decided that January fifteenth, fifteen fifty nine would be the
Speaker 2: most Heavens approved date for the beginning of the Elizabethan Age. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Mars was in Scorpio that day. After the coronation, history
Speaker 2: loses track of D for about five years. I like
Speaker 2: to imagine the stage magician's sleight of hand. Here D
Speaker 2: ducking into a cleverly designed set piece through which the
Speaker 2: audience of history can't see him. But he was somewhere
Speaker 2: all along, studying the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. He
Speaker 2: was seeking the secret names of God, learning the Hebrew
Speaker 2: language and its mystical numerology, the alphabet arranged around the
Speaker 2: first letter olive, middle mem, last tav, spelling out emmett,
Speaker 2: the Hebrew word for truth. He was seeking divine truth
Speaker 2: in increasingly more mystical modes, but D was far from
Speaker 2: done with politics. Once history catches up with him again,
Speaker 2: he steps out from behind the curtain. On June fourteenth,
Speaker 2: fifteen sixty four, when he and Queen Elizabeth are walking
Speaker 2: together at Greenwich Palace on the south bank of the
Speaker 2: River Thames. D was holding something in his hands, a
Speaker 2: slim book, and he was brimming with excitement and perhaps
Speaker 2: a little bit of fear. He was about to show
Speaker 2: the Queen the work of his soul, his Monas Hieroglyphica. Listener,
Speaker 2: allow me to tell you the monas is truly wild.
Speaker 2: It's a whole book dedicated to explaining a mystical symbol
Speaker 2: of divine revelation that D invented himself. It looks kind
Speaker 2: of like a cross between the artist formerly known as
Speaker 2: Prince Symbol and Harry Potter's Deathly Hallows. D's symbol was
Speaker 2: a millage of Latin wordplay, alchemy, numerology, celestial calculations, and
Speaker 2: you know, his idea of the unity of all things.
Speaker 2: So was no doubt excited but nervous as he walked
Speaker 2: alongside the Queen, no doubt remembering how he had been
Speaker 2: arrested for doing a Queen's horoscope. Years before, Elizabeth had
Speaker 2: taken D's astrological advice for her coronation date. Though perhaps
Speaker 2: she would be open to his new book of divine
Speaker 2: celestial work, or perhaps she would have him arrested on
Speaker 2: the spot. He offered her the book. Elizabeth paused for
Speaker 2: a moment, observing the symbol. D's pulse pounded. Then he
Speaker 2: saw Elizabeth's eyes light up in curiosity. I will be
Speaker 2: your scholar, she told D if you explain this work
Speaker 2: to me. And so John D sat with the Queen
Speaker 2: of England and described to her his special invented brand
Speaker 2: of mysticism. John D and the Queen went on to
Speaker 2: have a good relationship. She paid him occasional visits at
Speaker 2: his home. She consulted with him about whether she should
Speaker 2: marry one of her suitors, the Duke of Anjou. He
Speaker 2: said she shouldn't, and she didn't. But the greatest cause
Speaker 2: De advocated with Elizabeth, and the one that would mark
Speaker 2: ultimately the end of his close relationship with her at court,
Speaker 2: was a bit of political fortune telling that would ultimately
Speaker 2: come to pass in a big way. It was D's
Speaker 2: deep belief that Elizabeth should set out to create a
Speaker 2: British empire. D wasn't just fortune telling when it came
Speaker 2: to this idea of empire, he was actively promoting it.
Speaker 2: As Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe, D was
Speaker 2: coining the term British empire. He was hearkening back to
Speaker 2: King Arthur a thousand years before, arguing that the British
Speaker 2: right to an extensive empire had been established a millennium ago.
Speaker 2: He encouraged Elizabeth to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese claims
Speaker 2: to the New World, especially Spain's claims in North America.
Speaker 2: His suggestions were even more persuasive than usual, because just
Speaker 2: as D was petitioning Elizabeth on the idea of expansionism,
Speaker 2: there was a strange thing going on in the world,
Speaker 2: something that could seem like a message directly from the heavens,
Speaker 2: something no one in all of Britain, in all of
Speaker 2: Europe could possibly miss. All anyone needed to do was
Speaker 2: step outside and crane their necks back as they had
Speaker 2: years ago to gaze at John D's flying beetle on stage.
Speaker 2: But this time the magic was taking place on a
Speaker 2: much bigger stage, the night sky itself, And if anyone
Speaker 2: looked up to the night sky in November of fifteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven, there it would be the great, glittering, terrifying thing,
Speaker 2: the bright light with a luminous tail, a comet. Many
Speaker 2: believed that the cosmic event signaled some vexation from God,
Speaker 2: some calamity to befall mankind, or thought many of the
Speaker 2: English to specifically befall England or the Queen. But Elizabeth
Speaker 2: wasn't going to believe just anybody's fears about this strange
Speaker 2: celestial happening. She was going to consult one man when
Speaker 2: it came to the skies, John D. The comet is
Speaker 2: nothing to fear, he advised her. It is not important
Speaker 2: of approaching doom, but of your approaching greatness. Perhaps the
Speaker 2: bright light with the tale that arcing through the sky
Speaker 2: is a sign of England's destiny to be the bright
Speaker 2: light with a long tail that is a global empire.
Speaker 2: Of course, D's vision for English expansionism is exactly what
Speaker 2: would happen. The English would defeat the Spanish Armada in
Speaker 2: fifteen eighty eight, when D was not yet sixty years old.
Speaker 2: But ultimately D had nothing to do with Elizabeth's actions,
Speaker 2: as she set out in favor of the empire that
Speaker 2: he had initially encouraged. The comet lit the sky, and
Speaker 2: D's eyes were drawn heavenward. He lost interest in court.
Speaker 2: He had begun his life with one interest, and it
Speaker 2: was not the earthly realms of battle and conquest and bloodshed,
Speaker 2: though his concept of empire would inevitably contain all three.
Speaker 2: The comet faded from the sky, and John D left
Speaker 2: his influence at court behind. From there, the rest of
Speaker 2: D's life became ever more involved in the occult. He
Speaker 2: worked closely with scriers, people who divined things via the
Speaker 2: use of objects like crystal balls. Some or I might
Speaker 2: say all of these were frauds. D's closest scrier was
Speaker 2: a man who first entered his life calling himself Edward Talbot.
Speaker 2: Talbot would later re enter D's life using his real name,
Speaker 2: Edward Kelly, which goes to show the type of upstanding
Speaker 2: honesty we're dealing with here. With Kelly's help, D communed
Speaker 2: with the angels in a special language called Inokian. D
Speaker 2: and Kelly conversed with some of the people you may
Speaker 2: have learned about in religious schools, like Raphael and Michael
Speaker 2: and Gabriel and Uriel. In his diaries, d earnestly record
Speaker 2: these angelic conversations. Uriel would say things like, quote, we
Speaker 2: cannot visit thee now at the twelfth hour, thou shalt
Speaker 2: use us. Then at the twelfth hour Michael would say
Speaker 2: something like, quote, divide the seven parts of the circle
Speaker 2: everyone into seven by seven. All government is to my understanding,
Speaker 2: It's not exactly a clear message. Sometimes D worried that
Speaker 2: he and Kelly were communicating with devils instead of angels,
Speaker 2: but for the most part D believed in Kelly. He
Speaker 2: and Kelly even traveled to Poland and Prague together, where
Speaker 2: they wound up banned by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph
Speaker 2: the Second on suspicion of necromancy. Eventually, Kelly received a
Speaker 2: message that he and D should share not only spiritual experience,
Speaker 2: but something a little closer to home, their wives. This
Speaker 2: experiment in sister wifing lasted only about one night. It
Speaker 2: seemed like a horrible incident for D's wife Jane, and
Speaker 2: in the end it sat very badly with D as well.
Speaker 2: Shortly after his relationship with Kelly finally broke down. Still,
Speaker 2: the timing of the wife swapping did throw the paternity
Speaker 2: of one of D's sons into doubt. To Dee's credit,
Speaker 2: he treated the boy as his own. He was an
Speaker 2: involved father to all of his children with Jane, who
Speaker 2: was his third wife. He was such an involved father
Speaker 2: that he even asked one of his sons to be
Speaker 2: a scrier for him, which ultimately wound up as a
Speaker 2: failed experiment. By the final years of D's life, he
Speaker 2: had outlived Jane and five of their eight children. He
Speaker 2: had also outlived Queen Elizabeth. He died in in December
Speaker 2: sixteen o eight at the age of eighty one. His
Speaker 2: hidden diaries would be baked under the Sweet Shop Pies
Speaker 2: fifty four years later. D may have been the inspiration
Speaker 2: for a lot of canonical characters who are well known
Speaker 2: to English lit majors. William Shakespeare's magician Prospero, Christopher Marlowe's
Speaker 2: necromancer Faust, Edmund Spencer's meditative Old Sage in the House
Speaker 2: of Temperance in The Fairy Queen. But above all, Dee's
Speaker 2: legacy is as a figure who strived earnestly for divine revelation,
Speaker 2: often in ways that seem profoundly unscientific to us today,
Speaker 2: and yet even today, the great contemporary mathematician Edward Frankel
Speaker 2: went on Lex Friedman's podcast this April to discuss the
Speaker 2: present state of math. They talked about contemporary physicist and
Speaker 2: the so far in vain quest for a grand, unifying
Speaker 2: theory of everything, and they joked about when you show
Speaker 2: up and meet God and there's one equation on the
Speaker 2: board and the two of you just chuckle. Unlike D,
Speaker 2: scholars today have separated math and science from religion. Yet
Speaker 2: the image of God's chalkboard is still there, even metaphorically.
Speaker 2: There's still some sense that when we try to derive
Speaker 2: the mathematical and physical underpinnings of the world, we are
Speaker 2: dealing with something bigger than ourselves. John D, for all
Speaker 2: he foresaw and failed to foresee about the future, probably
Speaker 2: would be happy about that. That's the story of Queen
Speaker 2: Elizabeth's court astrologer John D. But stick around after a
Speaker 2: brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about
Speaker 2: his astrological birth chart. All right, for all of you
Speaker 2: astrology buffs out there, let's dig some more into D's
Speaker 2: birth chart. First of all, D wrote his chart in
Speaker 2: the form of a square. More like the Vedic style
Speaker 2: natal chart than the typical circular charts he might see today.
Speaker 2: In a box at the center of D's chart, his
Speaker 2: careful script recorded the following his birthday fifteen twenty seven
Speaker 2: July thirteenth, his birth time four hours and two minutes
Speaker 2: in the afternoon, and his birthplace latitude fifty one degrees
Speaker 2: and thirty two seconds north latitude. We don't know what
Speaker 2: D made of his own chart. Surely he read a
Speaker 2: lot of meaning into it, but none of that made
Speaker 2: its way to us today, which leaves many modern biographers
Speaker 2: and podcasters a lot of interpretive wiggle room. Biographer Benjamin
Speaker 2: Woolley notes that the star Antaris in the planet Mars
Speaker 2: were together on D's chart, which, in his interpretation, was
Speaker 2: a disturbing or threatening sign. We reached out to a
Speaker 2: friend who's an amateur chart reader and with no knowledge
Speaker 2: of whose chart this was. She looked at the eleventh
Speaker 2: House and said, ruled by Mercury and reflects the archetypes
Speaker 2: of Aquarius, so futuristic ideas, thinking about innovation and the future,
Speaker 2: sort of space alien stuff. But a different friend replied
Speaker 2: that astrology is pseudoscience and no place to end a
Speaker 2: historical podcast, although to be fair, one could argue that historically,
Speaker 2: during this period in question, astronomy was thought of as
Speaker 2: a sign. But for those who think like the second
Speaker 2: Friend and to be blunt, think like me. One final, cold,
Speaker 2: hard fact the astronomy in D's chart is remarkably correct.
Speaker 2: Using Ptolemy's formulas, decalculated the positions of the known planet
Speaker 2: at the time of his birth with extreme accuracy, within
Speaker 2: a few thirtieths of a degree. The least accurate calculation
Speaker 2: he made was for mercury, and even then, with the
Speaker 2: science of the sixteenth century, he was only off by
Speaker 2: two degrees.
Speaker 1: Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and
Speaker 1: Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted
Speaker 1: by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by
Speaker 1: Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.
Speaker 1: The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and
Speaker 1: rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive
Speaker 1: producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts
Speaker 1: From iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.