John Dee, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist and possible spy was born on this date in 1527. 10 things you might not know about him.
In Dee’s time, mathematics was seen as one of the dark arts. Dee tried to break this association and promote maths as a practical skill. He wrote the preface to Sir Henry Billingsley’s 1570 English translation of Euclid’s The Elements of Geometrie, and helped introduce the mathematical signs +, -, x, and ÷ to England.
Astrology was frowned upon, too, and when Dee cast a horoscope for Queen Mary I in 1555, he was arrested for “conjuring or witchcrafte”, although he was exonerated after a few months.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne, astrology was more in favour. Elizabeth was interested in the science of astrology and appointed Dee as her astrologer. She asked him to choose an auspicious date for her coronation, which, according to his calculations, was January 15, 1559.
Dee owned one of the largest personal Libraries in England, containing about 3,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts. It came about after he asked Mary I to establish a public library to preserve the “excellent works of our forefathers from rot and worms,” and make it available to everyone. Mary refused, so Dee set up his own library. While it wasn’t open to everyone in the realm as he’d hoped for the one he asked Mary for, he did open it to other scholars. Sadly, when he went off on a tour of Europe in the 1580s, and left his brother in law in charge, a lot of the books were stolen.
He conducted many seances, many of them with his friend Edward Kelley, in an attempt to communicate with angels. He used a crystal ball and a spirit mirror made of obsidian to this end. When working with Kelley, the angels would allegedly speak to Kelley in an angelic language called Angelic, Adamic or Enochian. Dee’s job was to provide the translation.
He was a wife-swapper. During one of these seances, Kelley claimed that an Angel called Madimi had told him that the two men must share everything they had, including their wives. Dee’s wife Jane wasn’t keen on the arrangement at first. Dee recorded in his diary that when he told her, “she fell a weeping and trembling for a quarter of an hour.” However, both wives were cajoled into it in the end. Nine months later Jane gave birth to Theodore Dee whose paternity was clearly in question.
He may have coined the term “British Empire”. At least, he was the first person to write it down, in a missive to Queen Elizabeth I in which he recommended that she use the force of the navy to expand Britain’s overseas territory. He was also in favour of colonising the New World.
He was an early proponent of the Gregorian calendar, which Europe was starting to adopt at the time. He believed England would be wise to follow suit, but the Anglican church disagreed, because they saw it as Popish nonsense. England and its colonies did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1752.
Dee was married three times. His first two marriages, to Katherine Constable and a woman whose name isn’t known, were childless. He had eight children with his third wife, Jane Fromond, although as mentioned in fact 6, one of them might not have been his.
Some scholars believe that Prospero from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was based on Dee, who would have been a public figure at the time and like Prospero, was a wizard like figure with a large library who fell on hard times. It has even been suggested by an author named Richard Deacon that Ian Fleming’s James Bond was based on him in part, too. It is believed, though not proven, that Dee acted as a spy for Elizabeth I, and that Dee used 007 as his secret signature. However, no letters from Dee have been found which use that signature.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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