Gary Shaw (5:32)

Thank you for having me. It's fantastic to be here.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (5:35)

What an exciting thing we're going to be talking about today. Or several exciting things that you've looked at in your book. And we've spoken about the ever fascinating John Dee on this podcast before with Benjamin Woolley. And I urge listeners to go and listen back to that episode but remind us about Dee, who he was and how influential he was at the court of Elizabeth I.

Gary Shaw (5:58)

So, yeah, John Dee is one of these, as you say, one of these absolutely fascinating people of the Elizabethan age. And I think people come out in from many different directions, though that direction influences kind of the DU encounter, Right? So for much of the history, people were interested in his kind of scientific work, his work in mathematics, his work in navigation and exploration. If you were into Enochian magic and that side of things, you were kind of more coming into the occult side of his character. And it's really, I think, only in recent decades that academics have tried to really pull all of this together to try and get to grips with who Dee was. So, yeah, Dee is one of these absolutely fascinating people. He lived for over 81 years, mainly under Elizabeth. I mean, Dee is a man who really wanted to understand the cosmos. He wanted to understand the world around him. And he tried to do this from every way at his disposal at the time, every way that he could understand the world, he took that adventure. So, you know, he studied maths at university at Oxford. After that, he was offered various positions which he turned down. He seemed to want a certain level of independence, and he became someone who, well, effectively advised on all these areas of expertise that he accumulated through his vast knowledge. He was obsessed with collecting books. He wanted to learn everything he possibly could. And so he became an expert in all things from navigation to mathematics to the occult. And he effectively, although he never quite achieved this kind of cushy position at the court that you can see he clearly dreamed of. He was always kind of there, on the fringes of cult life, never quite getting himself properly in there. And so he was always trying to find ways to earn money on the side, looking for patrons. You could kind of see him working as a freelancer, I suppose. People would come to his house in Mortlake, just outside of London, and, you know, he would be interpreting their dreams. He would be later in his life even helping them look for treasure, buried treasure that might help their finances. And, yes, he did advise the Royal Court as well. So, I mean, he was on friendly terms with Queen Elizabeth. And this, again, as I say, never really led to him developing a proper position at the court. But, you know, when his first wife died, for example, Elizabeth came to visit him at his home. She dropped by to offer her condolences when they were reforming the calendar or planning on reforming the calendar. At one point, Dee was involved in this when they were talking about trying to discover the Northwest Passage through North America. Dee was involved in these navigation and exploration discussions. And so he was connected in that way. But he was also famous as an astrologer for his interest in the occult. He would cast horoscopes, for example, for people as well. So he kind of dabbled in all these different areas. You could say he was a polymath, I suppose, if you wanted to use that term. Anything that would help him understand the world around him, the cosmos. He tried. And over time, this kind of built.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (8:53)

So he's in search of knowledge. But why do you think in the end, he's driven to this point of only being satisfied with direct connection with the divine as he sees it?

Gary Shaw (9:06)

I guess you could see that over the course of his life, he followed all these different paths. As I say, he was interested in much everything, all knowledge you could get hold of at the time. But to him, there came a point where the means at his disposal just weren't enough to kind of get the understanding required of the world. And we also have to remember that at this point, many people were thinking that this was the end of time, the apocalypse was coming and people had to start preparing for this. There were signs that people were seeing. And so this influenced him too. He wanted to help, you can see there, a man who really seemed to care about, you know, using his knowledge to improve the world around him. And so when he reached the edge of kind of what people knew at the time, what technology allowed him to know, the only next step was this point of direct contact with the divine. But he knew as well that he did not have the abilities to do that. You know, this required someone with special talents, a scryer, some sort of psychic people who had this kind of way of connecting with the spiritual creatures, as he often referred to them in the cosmos. And it was only through this that he could really then add to his knowledge in a way that would make him make a dent, I suppose, in what he really wanted to know, which was kind of how to guide the world, how to help people for this coming apocalypse.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (10:25)

So who does he enlist?

Gary Shaw (10:27)

Well, we know that he was trying to contact Scryers while he was in his 50s. So this was roughly in the 1580s that we start getting the first evidence for him trying to enlist Scryers to help him. So the very first example we have of him speaking with a scryer, one of these people who had ability to contact the supernatural is in 1581. And this is a man called Barnabas Saul. Now, it seems clear that this was not the very first time he tried this, right? So there are clearly missing diaries, missing angel diaries from before that. But this is when we start getting the real information. And this interaction with this man called Barnabas Saul was very brief, didn't last very long. And so then we enter his relationship with a man who is a much more famous man called Edward Kelly, of course, at this point, going by the name Talbot, which of course, was not at all suspicious that, you know, he was hiding his true name. But whatever the case may be, Dee starts interacting with Kelly. Kelly seems to present himself as a much better SCRYER than Sol ever was. And suddenly they start working together in 1583. And immediately Dee is taken by this man's abilities. So in the very first meeting where you can see, I suppose you can imagine Dee trying to test Kelly slightly to see, you know, whether this man can do what he says he can do. In their first meeting, they sit together and Dee asks Kelly about this mysterious manuscript in his collection called the Book of Soyga. And this had been interesting to Dee for a long time. He was trying to penetrate its mysteries. It's basically full of mysterious squares that are full of numbers and symbols and so forth. And Dee was trying to figure out what these grids were effectively all about. And so Dee asks Kelly about this, and Kelly says, well, actually, the angels are telling me that the Archangel Michael will help you with this tomorrow. If we, you know, contact them tomorrow and go through the rituals, you know, this will help you greatly. And, you know, so Dee is very impressed by this. The next day, Archangel Michael does appear. And although the help isn't that particularly wonderful, it seems to be enough to actually get Dee's interest moving. And this is when Kelly becomes a much bigger part of Dee's life.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (12:36)

Just a word on Kelly. I mean, who is he? Do we know much about him before he comes in contact with Dee?

Gary Shaw (12:43)

Much of what people say about Kelly is legendary. You could say people have tried to reconstruct his history, but it's kind of hard to really get to grips with who he really was. He seems to have been born in around 1555, for example, maybe went to Oxford University at one point, but didn't really spend much time there. There are suggestions that he had a limp, for example. There are suggestions that he was. He had his ears cut off as a punishment for some crime he'd committed, and that he tried to hide this appearance quite often. But again, all of this is quite murky. There's not much to really say that we can factually say this is certainly the case about him. But as I say, he enters Dee's life presenting himself as a scryer was introduced by a friend, clearly at that point, when Banaba's soul was no longer in the picture and Dee was looking for a new scryer. But again, everything that goes around Celian in general, general, even when we do know a lot about him, is quite odd. You know, the beginning of his life is kind of difficult to reconstruct, and even the end of his life is also difficult to reconstruct. He becomes this very legendary person. And what we can say is that he was. Well, he had a bit of a temper, you know, he had mood swings. He seems quite an elaborate person in that way, kind of jumping to these kind of extremes. But, yeah, whether, you know, he truly believed that he had these abilities himself or whether he was purely a con man is also another thing that we can't really be sure about. Kelly himself think that he was entering trances and able to speak for the supernatural, or was he just playing Dee?

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (14:14)

These are the questions. So we've got this first encounter with our angelic being that Dee has. How does he describe it? And crucially, is he having any direct experience himself, or is it all being channeled through Kelly?

Gary Shaw (14:31)

Okay, so as I say, there just seem to be earlier angel actions, as Dee called them, which we don't have records for. So we don't have the very first interactions between Dee and, as he believed, angels. But we do know that certainly the ones that he was having with Kelly were much more, I guess you could say extreme, much more exciting for Dee at this point. So to answer the question of whether Dee was actually experiencing anything himself, first of all, you can say no on the whole, Dee never, ever experienced any of these supernatural experiences himself. He couldn't see anything in the Showstone, as they called it. So Kelly was witnessing the angelic actions, the conversations, by stirring into a sort of crystal ball, a thing they called the Showstone. And, you know, if Dee was looking into this, he couldn't see anything. Right. This was all being interpreted through Kelly. Kelly would describe it, dictate the conversations, and Dee would just kind of scribble everything down as quick as he possibly could. There are elements where, I mean, Dee is brought into the supernatural. Let's say he's not experiencing it directly, but we can say, for example, that demons, let's say, at various points, attacked Kelly. And so Dee can't see these demons, but, you know, he gets drawn into the situation around them in that at one point, Kelly kind of starts talking about how he's being attacked by demons with spades and kind of jumps up, you can imagine. Says they're biting him on his arm. And, you know, at this point, he shows a bite on his arm to Dee. And then Dee starts kind of scrambling up and drawing crosses in the air. And Kelly puts a stool between them and is kind of pointing out where the demons are. So he's not seeing the demons, but he's being taken in by this kind of performance that Kelly is doing before him now, you know, is this. Where did this bite come from on Kelly's arm that Dee saw? You know, was he bit by a dog that morning and then kind of unfurled his shirt to show Dee what had happened? Did he bite himself? It's kind of hard to say. I mean, the most extreme version of Dee actually encountering something supernatural comes a bit later on when, as I say, it's not normal for him. But he does say that there's a point later when after the Angel Diaries disappear, they're burned at one point and then they magically reappear, they're magically brought back. And at this point, Dee says that he sees a sort of. It's a sort of spiritual creature appearing in the form of a gardener, which sounds a bit silly when you put it this way. This gardener is the. And he's part of this bringing back of the manuscripts. But Dee records him as floating a foot in the air. Now, that's the only time, really, you can see Dee saying that he saw something supernatural personally. And it's hard to explain because Dee's normally quite. I mean, for the experience he's having, quite rational. Right. He questions the angels, he's writing down what they're saying, but he doesn't ever say that he himself can have this type of interaction.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (17:29)

So the underlying assumption of what you're saying is that we're assuming that Edward Kelly is not having encounters with angels and demons and is enacting a performance which includes at times being hit with spades and bitten. Does Dee ever doubt Kelly's ability to communicate with angels that you know of, or is he being completely taken in by what's being dictated and what kind of things are the angels saying?

Gary Shaw (18:02)

So, yeah, I think Dee believes. Yeah, I think he truly does believe that Kelly is having these interactions. I don't think he doubts them really at any point. I mean, he questions the angels, he doesn't seem to question Kelly at any point. So I think that maybe shows a certain level of gullibility on these front. But again, it connects with his. I think he's just overriding urge to try to understand the world around him. And so he does believe that this is possible. And so he believes that Kelly is doing this. And I think Kelly helps his case by giving Dee what he wants to hear, let's say. So Kelly is clearly, clearly quite smart about the way he's going about this. So, for example, Dee is very interested in trying to reconstruct the language of Adam, the original language, at the beginning of time, because this language was the language that was used to name all things that spoke creation into being, the language of the angels. And so with this pure language, he believed that this would give a great insight into the divine. And this is basically what Kelly gives him. Right? So Kelly comes along and says, you know, I'm speaking with the angels, and they are telling me how to draw the Alphabet. They're telling me how to pronounce their Alphabet. They're telling me words in their language. And this is exactly what Dee wants. Right? And he's clever about this, too. So, like, he seems to have become inspired by some of the letters, you could say, by snooping around Dee's library, inspecting various books that he has, getting the names of angels, looking at the styles of sacred alphabets or world alphabets that were written down in some of these books, and he kind of bases it on them. But interestingly, too, he makes sure that the Alphabet of The Angels has 22 characters, and that's the same number that you find in Hebrew. And so this is kind of what Dee was expecting to hear. Right? Hebrew was always regarded as one of these first languages. It was one of the steps towards the language of Adam and the mind of people at the time. And so the fact that he would have 22 characters made perfect sense to Dee. So this is one of the major things that Kelly was giving to Dee and feeding what he wanted. When the angels start dictating the books to Dee through Kelly, these are very similar, at least at first, through the book of Soyga, which, as I mentioned earlier, was kind of what this first interaction in their first meeting, Dee trying to understand this mysterious book in his collection that was basically filled with mysterious grids. And so, surprisingly, or maybe not, as you could say, the first book that Kelly starts giving to Dee is filled with grids connected with these angelic words connected with these angelic symbols. And so you can see how Kelly is kind of bringing Dee into this world of the supernatural, giving him what he wants. And then, you know, Dee's taken Dee's fully on board by this point. And so a lot of what they're discussing is connected with these books, these divine books that the angels are giving to Dee over the course of years now. But, yeah, there are lots of other interactions too, that they discuss. It's not simply all these kind of signs of the coming apocalypse or mysterious books that are being dictated, but they also have similar simple conversations, too. Disagreements with the angels, for example. I mean, there's a number that the angels. I can't remember the exact example, but, you know, the. The angels are talking about the importance of the number 40. And Dee stops them and says, don't you mean 42? Because this is more important in Kabbalah. And the angels are like, well, actually, yeah, I suppose they kind of correct themselves. You can see that's Kelly kind of fixing himself. And there are moments where, for example, Kelly, you know, as I say, lots of the angels mentioned are found in the books in Dee's library. And at one point, Kelly's been talking about this and then suddenly says, oh, by the way, you'll find these angels in this book by Agrippa. And it's like, you know, is he thinking, you know, is he wondering if Dee's going to catch him out? And so he's saying this first, you know, because Dee would know the content of these books.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (21:51)

So there's this. The extent to which possibly Kelly has access to Dee's library and is conning him into believing what's already on his shelves there is.

Gary Shaw (22:04)

Yeah, I mean, Kelly certainly snooped around a lot. Kelly was living in the house with the family, had his own room there. And you can say, yes, that he was going around the library. He even seems to have been looking. Not seems definitely was looking at Dee's private diary he was keeping. Because there are occasions when Kelly has made notes in Dee's private diary disagreeing with the interpretation of certain events, which led Dee to then start writing some of his diary or, like, more sensitive stuff in Greek letters so that Kelly couldn't read it. For example, the angels also know that some of the earlier angel diaries that Dee had made tree Kelly were hidden in the chimney in a bag, basically. And so how did they know this? It seems Kelly might have gone snooping around looking for, like, where things were hidden in the house. So certainly, yes, there's an element there of Kelly looking around and kind of figuring out stuff. There's also little signs like, you know, he doesn't seem to really remember the names of the books himself. So when the angels are describing the books in Dee's library. They often do it by describing the spine, the color of the spine, the description of it. And so as if Kelly's spotted it on the shelf, remembers what it looks like, but can't remember the name or the author.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (23:15)

And the conditions for receiving communications were quite specific, weren't they? These are conditions obviously dictated by the angels themselves. What did they wish for?

Gary Shaw (23:25)

So, yeah, again, through Kelly, the angels give very specific requirements on what was needed for the angel actions to occur properly, as well as obvious things like purity and prayer and fasting and so forth like this. They give him directions on the room itself. It has to be somewhere quiet. And so Dee takes a spare room, a spare bedroom and makes it suitable. But beyond that, they talk about, you know, the stone, the kind of showstone, this magical crystal that they used to see the angels that has to be put on a sort of wooden stand which is placed on a wax seal which is marked with certain symbols and also kind of the angelic writing as well. And that goes on a holy table which had to be made to the angels requirements as well. Again, covered in symbols that were useful for the angels. This had to be done twice because apparently the instructions weren't quite right the first time and so had to be corrected. Again, is this the case of Kelly making an error in the way he wanted to do this and changing things? Who knows? And beyond that, I mean, D himself also had to address in a certain way. For example, he had to wear a special particular type of ring, for example, wear certain clothes, a particular type of scepter as well. So all of this is coming via the angels to create this kind of very ritually charged environment to make sure that the angel conversations can occur correctly and properly. So again, if you're thinking in terms of a showman, then he's creating the scene, isn't he? He's creating the setting for the theater, for what's happening around him.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (24:56)

He is absolutely set dressing, but is also something kind of that has echoes of the Bible here in terms of this precise description of the Ark of the Covenant and the setting of the temple and, you know, with measurements and all that. So you can see that Dee would have been taken in by this specificity because it rings true. You mentioned that Dee's sort of rapidly writing things down. Can he keep up with Kelly? I mean, have you seen the Angel Diaries? Are they hard to decipher?

Gary Shaw (25:28)

I have not seen them in person, unfortunately, but I've seen. So I've had to work with published materials that are online. So I'VE seen, yes, what they look like, obviously, the pages that you see. And they do look like, you know, Dee's handwriting was famously difficult anyway, in general. But in these cases, these diaries, you can see that he's writing incredibly fast. It's just basically squiggled lines of multiple languages. You know, English, Latin, Hebrew's in there, too. The angelic words are in there. He's trying to get this all down as fast as he possibly can. He makes abbreviations to make this possible. So, for example, his old name, D, he would use the Greek delta just as a sort of little triangle to mark things that he was saying. He would abbreviate to the initials of the scrya. So Edward Kelly is normally just ek. He would do the same with the angels names as well, which gets complex because sometimes the angels have multiple names for the same angel. And then he's also sometimes drawing little charts as well, drawing the beings that Kelly's describing. In cases, there's a demon in one page that has been drawn that Kelly must have described, there's a little drawing of the angel Camara standing next to a grid, because the angel was basically telling Kelly the letters that are appearing in this grid for one of the books that are being proclaimed with a stick. And so the angel is pointing at the little grid squares and saying what's appearing in each little square. And so Dee drew this little picture of the angel pointing at the grid. And so it's all sorts of little things like this that make it fascinating. There's this mixture of languages that Dee is just scrolling out as fast as he possibly can. Little drawings as well. But he would also go back sometimes as well and then kind of make extra corrections and say, okay, I remembered this too, or scribble something out and then say, actually, this is what happened. So, yeah, he would go back and fix things. But on the whole, it's basically just one long stream of consciousness. It starts with the day, you know, puts the date down, the year, where they are at the time, who's present, which angels appear, that if there was a pause or a gap, sometimes the angels didn't appear straight away. And so he had to wait and pray, and then they might appear and then disappear. And he just writes down all these details. So it's not just simply their conversation. It's also sometimes what the angels are appearing in. So the clouds in which they manifest in, or the sword they're carrying or the different things they're doing as well is described. So D would have had to get this all down very quickly.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (30:12)

And sometimes the instructions from the Angels are quite funny, aren't they?

Gary Shaw (30:17)

Yes. Not it's not simply the instructions, which are quite mostly detail. It's more, I'd say more. So the the funny thing is the conversations they're having. Like I say, you know, the Angels tell Kelly off, for example, at one point, which is strange. If again, in this interpretation of what's really happening here, why are they telling off Kelly? So at one point Dee needed Kelly's help with something and Kelly had gone fishing. And so when they have the angel action, you find that the Angels are telling Kelly off for going fishing and not Being present for Dee. So, I mean, this is a strange one to have in there. There are questions about money, for example, too. Dee, throughout his life, has financial problems. As I say, he never really got this cushy position at court. He was often kind of brought in as an advisor and got a bit of money that way. And he had some income, but, you know, he was strapped for cash a lot. So he asked the angels, you know, where can we find some income? I mean, Kelly straight up asks one of the angels for a hundred pounds. Not the type of thing you would assume that you would be talking about with spiritual beings. There's an occasion where, for example, the angels tell Kelly that Dee should go looking around on the floor in the corner of his study because there's something there that the angels want him to have. And so Dee's like, what? There's something on my floor? I've never noticed anything on my floor floor. But he does what the angels tell him and he goes and checks and they find this magical stone that has been there on the floor. And so again, this is a great sign that the angels are correct and this is all true. I suppose you can imagine Kelly planted it there earlier. You know, things like this, what they discuss as well, weird predictions as well that tend to come true, if you can see it that way, if you interpret it a certain way.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (31:51)

Yes. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, that there are moments where he's creating a sort of. Kelly is reporting at least that there is arguments or where the angels are annoyed at him, mocking him or whatever. I mean, what do you imagine is going on there? Why is he kind of creating this sense that sometimes he's at odds with them.

Gary Shaw (32:11)

Yeah. Why is that happening? I guess again, the two main explanations. One is he truly does believe he's having these interactions. He's in a sort of trance like state and he believes this is true. And so these conversations are going through his head in this state he's in. And maybe it's a sort of manifestation of guilt. Maybe he felt he should be there for Dee and he's being told off. The other one is perhaps Escane part of this kind of staging, that maybe Dee was annoyed with the way Kelly had behaved and, you know, so creating this kind of problem is quite realistic. You know, it's a case in all the way of making it all seem more real to Dee in that, you know, Dee was probably annoyed. If the angels are annoyed too, they tell him off. Dee feels happy about that. They're all together on this, you know, and so it just seems more realistic, perhaps. So there's two ways of looking at it, I suppose you could say.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (33:03)

And you mentioned these predictions or prophecies. Is there anything that the angels are allegedly saying that becomes true or comes true?

Gary Shaw (33:12)

So, yeah, I mean, they make various predictions at various points. For example, at one point they say that Dee will die in 1601, which is of course, not true. He died in 1609. So there are things like that which didn't come true, the two that are most famously mentioned. So, yeah, with these prophecies, he basically says on one occasion that Murray Queen of Scots will soon be beheaded. So he's predicting the death of Murray Queen of Scots and he says this will be imminent. Of course, this wasn't really imminent. It happened years later after these events. And at the time, I suppose if you were clued in to events going on politically, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that this was going to happen at some point.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (33:52)

Yeah. So, I mean, it's four years out, isn't it, from her execution, but they probably know that she's been implicated in plots and perhaps it's not that. That greater stretch to think that maybe she's going to die at some point.

Gary Shaw (34:03)

Exactly, yeah. So it's not the best prediction ever. The other one is also a bit dodgy. In the other one, he talks about a fleet of ships coming to attack England, a foreign force is coming by ship. And again, people connect this with the Spanish Armada, obviously, which again, was also years later. But England is on an island. Right. Any enemies coming to attack would have to come by ship. So it's a bit of an easy prediction to make, that at some point ships would be coming to attack. And so it's, again, one of these things with hindsight, where you can make this connection and make it seem truer than it was. It's an easy prediction to make. And so you can say that in these two occasions, Kelly just simply got lucky, I'd say.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (34:45)

So one of the things about people who can tell the future or are able to have secret knowledge is one always thinks that they should get the lottery numbers. So if with thinking of an equivalent in this time, we know that Dee and Kelly are facing some hard times, and then the angels step in with stories of buried treasure, what happens in that particular escapade?

Gary Shaw (35:10)

So, yeah, again, another very odd occasion in the angel diaries that Dee records, basically, at some point, Kelly and a friend of his turn up at the door saying they'd been to this place, and when they were there, they came across a scroll, a book, and some red powder that they'd been led to by spiritual creatures. Again. And this is all very unusual. And they want Dee to take a look at it because it's enciphered, right? There's captions written in this mysterious cipher. And Kelly can't understand it, but they suspect because of the divine directions, that this might not lead them to an interesting place, to an interesting discovery. So Dee's like, of course, sure, I'll take a look at this. And he does. And quite quickly, quite easily, he decrypts the cipher. It's a very simple cipher. And he finds out that the scroll, for example, it has a bunch of images on it of places. And the captions effectively give clues as to where these locations are. And so that's great. Okay, wow. There's something apparently buried in these locations. He goes a bit further and starts reading some more of the text. And, wow, this is apparently a Danish treasure that was buried long ago that the angels are leading in toward. This is going to solve all of their financial problems. Fantastic. But Dee's a bit unclear, sorry, a bit unsure about what to do here because digging for buried treasure like this was illegal. You had to get royal permission to do this type of thing. So he comes to Kelly and says, well, although this sounds interesting and fascinating, we shouldn't be doing this because it's going to be trouble trying to get their permission to do this. We might get turned down. And so again, then Kelly consults with the angels and says, okay, fine, we're not going to dig up the treasures ourselves. We're instead going to just get some soil. So if you can give me the directions from the enciphered, now decrypted text and send me to the locations, I'll collect some soil. And if we collect all of these collections of soil and bring them here, the angels will make the treasure manifest for us in your chambers. And so these, like, fine, this sounds great. There's an extra added layer here, too, that the red powder that was brought, Kelly believes is connected with the philosopher's stone. So, you know, that's also something that he would want to be connected with and would also help him greatly with his finances if he could sort that out. So he sends Kelly off on this little mission to go and find these bits of soil, which he does. Brooke comes back from the various locations, says, here we go. They talk to the angels about it, but then, as you would imagine, nothing happens. And this is one of these, another strange thing. So if you can imagine, this has all been set up by Kelly. They've made these documents, they've God and got this soil. What was Kelly expecting would happen? You know, the angels are very helpful at this point. Dee is very excited. He's expecting a treasure to appear and solve all of his financial troubles. Nothing happens. He's quite disappointed. And to the extent that this clearly sticks on his mind for a long time, we have in the Angel Diaries, a year later, he's still experiencing financial troubles. And he says to the angels, at this point, surely it's about time you can make this Danish treasure materialize for me. You know, it'd be really handy right now. And nothing happens again. The angels don't do anything and it leads to nothing. So it's a strange, strange example why Kelly did this. Did he just need time away for some reason? Was he wanting to be released from his duties briefly and sent away to go? This was the excuse again. Everything with Kelly is full of mystery now.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (38:36)

This is a period in which people are feeling like the apocalypse is coming, that they're living in the end days. And the angels warn Dee by sounds of things, of this coming apocalypse, and urge him to leave England. So is this why they end up in Poland and then the German states?

Gary Shaw (38:58)

So, yeah, Dee goes on this kind of European adventure at the urging of the angels. Why he did this is probably a bit of a bad decision. It might have been. I mean, the angels are the ones directing it, but it's through Kelly. And it's all connected with this idea, as you say, of the coming apocalypse and Dee's role in this, which kind of heightens at the this point. He stops mostly just talking about signs and starts almost seeing himself through the angels as this intermediary between the divine and the world, a sort of prophet almost, who's got this connection with the divine and wants to spread the news, help people, guide them through this future apocalypse that would be coming soon. And so he first goes to Poland, supported by a man called Obrak Laski, this Polish noble, who he believes through the angels again, will have a big role to play in the future in this kind of realignment that is coming. Laski meant to be one of the key players in this new world that's about to emerge. And so Dee leaves. And this was a dodgy thing for him to do too, because, you know, he was debt ridden at this point, so he's effectively fleeing the country. He does it by night, leaves Mor at Night sails off to the continent to start this new life. Doesn't have much money still, but he's again completely believing the angels, that this is the best thing to do, to follow, to take Laski's help to move to Poland, first of all, then to Czechia. So he goes to Prague, actually, to try to get the help of Emperor Rudolph ii, the Holy Roman Emperor, and to spread the news of what the angels are telling him. And so this is him attempting to reach these patrons, these great courts of Europe, to spread the news of what the angels are saying to him. And this starts a new phase in the Angel Diaries as well, because we start getting, or for the first time, translations from the angelic language into English, which isn't present before. And also the way that Kelly is providing them changes too. Now, this doesn't go very well for D, frankly, this is a disaster. You know, he doesn't get taken very seriously. Emperor Rudolph in Prague doesn't take much of a liking to him. Dee gives one of his earlier books to Rudolph, the Monas, Hieroglyphia, Hieroglyphica. And, you know, Rudolf can't understand it, basically says, go away. You know, Dee basically turns up at the angel's urging, telling Rudolph that he needs to change his ways and needs to listen to the angels. This isn't the type of thing you say to an emperor. Normally. They don't like it when you tell them what to do. And, you know, when Dee wants Rudolph to look at the Angel Diaries and kind of see what the angels are telling him, he sends an underling in his place, Right? So he doesn't really want to have much to do with D. And so this leads to more and more problems that simply just develop while he's there on the continent.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (42:43)

And you said that the communications are evolving and we have new things being communicated from the angels at this time.

Gary Shaw (42:51)

So the big change, really, it's not so much, I suppose, the content, although it does become a bit more apocalyptic, you could say. What changes here is the way that Kelly starts presenting the language, you know, and again, Dee is very interested in the language of the angels. Back in England, when Dee is receiving this from Kelly, these words sound a lot like what you experience during people talking in tongues. It's like the type of, I don't want to say gibberish, but kind of words that are kind of created off the top of the head, as you could imagine, someone is just if they're trying to imagine a language. And so you can imagine Kelly sitting there and inventing words and saying, this is the language of the angels. It ever provides a translation. So these early books that Dee has, for example, the very first one, the Libel, the Book of the Speech of God, as they called it, you can't see what it says. This later phase, which starts when Dee is in Krakow in Poland, this is being dictated by the angels through Kelly using the grids in these earlier books. So if you imagine that these earlier books are made of these huge grids, each with letters in them in the squares, the angels are now telling Kelly to point to individual letters in these grids, and these form the words. And so when you look at the words that are being produced, they're very different. One looks like something, the words that someone will create off the top of their head. These other ones look like ones that would be created by choosing letters from grids in random. And the translations that Kelly sat's producing are, you know, very loose. You could say words can mean a lot of things in the translation. Numbers from 1 to 9 are pretty clear, but anything above that makes no sense, really, in the numbering system. And this does cause Dee some problems. You asked earlier about him doubting Kelly. Dee doesn't seem to doubt Kelly at this point, but he does get confused. He's like, this doesn't make sense. You said this earlier. These numbers, what do they mean? Or grammatically, this doesn't make much sense either. What's the grammar here? And so this Kerfool scholar that Dee is, you know, a man obsessed with knowledge and recording things. He's trying to really get to grips with this grammatical system of the angels and failing because it doesn't really work. And so he's asking all these questions to try to understand it not doubting Kelly, but kind of just, I think, increasingly confused, you could say.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (45:13)

And then we come to 1586, and Dee is told to burn all his manuscripts. Why is that?

Gary Shaw (45:19)

That's right, yes. Yeah. This is one of the most intriguing parts of the diaries, too. So Dee, at this point, is still on the continent. He's been interacting with Polish nobility, with the nobility in Prague as well, and Czechia, and he's getting a lot of attention by this point. You know, the angel diaries are not secrets. His interactions with the divine are not secrets, but he is a bit careful about the information. But by this point, it seems to be. He seems to be getting the attention, let's say, of the Inquisition of the Catholic Church. There's kind of rumblings of heresy and accusations of necromancy going around. And it does look like, oh, maybe they were getting nervous, maybe Kelly was getting nervous. Whatever the case may be, in the presence of a Catholic called Pucci, this priest. The angels tell Kelly and D to burn all the manuscripts, all the records, not just the angel diaries, but books that were produced from the diary. So Dee would make his diaries, and then he would extract from them the angelic books and make nice copies of the books that the angels had dictated to him. So he burned the books, burned the diaries, burned any notes they had connected with everything. And this priest is meant to have watched all this happening. They then actually also produce a pamphlet, they publish a pamphlet describing the burning of all of this as well. So they make clear to the intellectual circles that anything that they were connected with in this way is now gone. The angel communications have ended. They literally hang up the holy table on the wall pretty much in Prague and say, it's done. And it just seemed to be that this is a whole big effort to make the Catholic Church stop taking notice of them, to think that, you know, okay, if they were doing some of these naughty things, it stopped. And so everything is fine again now. But what happens next is even more strange because we then have a bit of a gap where the angel diaries have gone, the manuscripts have gone, they're all burned, the interactions have stopped. But suddenly, Dee and Kelly are in their house in Prague, where they were living at the time, and they notice down below, this mysterious gardener, and the gardener's trying to get them to come downstairs, come out into the garden, and then explodes into this great column of fire, the description goes. And so. So Kelly's like, oh, this is a bit strange. We should probably do something about this. The two men don't rush down themselves straight away, for some reason, they send Kelly's wife to go check this out first of all, which, you know, seems a bit cowardly of the two of them as they're not going down themselves. And when she says, you know, yeah, fine, come down, they do. They wander around the gardens for a bit. And then suddenly this gardener effectively has produced some of these manuscripts. Some of the bird manuscripts that they had seen disappear are returned to them on the floor in the garden. Kelly then disappears off with this gardener while Dee sits beside an almond tree. And Kelly goes back to the furnace where they burned everything, and finds that the other manuscripts are now magically returned as well. So only a few are missing and remain missing, but the vast majority of the manuscripts and documents that were burned were magically returned. And so, says Kelly, by magical divine help. And so Dee sees this, again as a great wondrous event. He'd seen these things being burned again. For us interpreting it today, though, what happened, you know, again, Dee wasn't normally taken in by things like this. You know, if he saw something, he would record it accurately, you know, the angel communications, as we say, he wasn't interacting with the divine. Kelly was, but he was. Was dutifully writing everything down correctly as far as he could see. So this is something Dee went through, but he seems to be experiencing here something odd and supernatural. What actually happened, though, we can't really say what's the truth in this? We don't know.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (49:13)

All very mysterious then. And perhaps the last straw is when Kelly and Dee are told by the angels that they must swap wives. What comes of that? Would you say that their relationship breaks down at that point?

Gary Shaw (49:28)

Definite, yes. So, yeah, again, this is another one of these rather extreme, very unusual events. So the angels are having their communications with Dee and Kelly, as usual. And at this point, the angels basically tell them that they have to share everything, and that includes their wives. And immediately Dee says, this is appalling. You know, why would God or any divine creature want us to do this? This is against the rules of God, against our religion, religion. And questions them and questions them and says, no, I can't do this. This is crazy. He then gets sent a sort of enciphered text by the angels, which again, Kelly dictates to him. He breaks the cipher and it basically says to obey, to do what the angels are telling him. So Dee's like, what am I supposed to do about this? He goes back at home. He's already at home, I should say, has supper with his wife that night. And breaks this news to her. It was of course, again, like D himself appalled by all of this, says, this can't be happening. Why would they ask this? This is crazy. In the Angel Diaries, she's described as trembling. They argue into the night about all this. She cries. She's obviously incredibly upset. And this is, as you could imagine, a very, very, very big deal. Kelly's wife, Dee's wife, neither of them want to do this, obviously, and they ask Kelly to have another angel conversation to kind of get better information, I think, is the way they literally phrase it about the angels, about what they want, why they want this to happen. And Kelly refuses. He says, no, the angels have said what they want. We're not going to talk about this anymore. And eventually, you know, Dee wants sort of, I guess, to absolve himself of some of this. They make a contract which the four of them sign in a chapel in the presence of God, saying that they're going to go ahead with this. And it does seem it happened. I mean, yeah, Dee notes in his diary that they went through with it in an entry which has been rubbed out. It looks like at some point he was so appalled by the actions that he tried to erase the entry. I mean, nine months later, Dee's wife has a baby as a result of this. Is it probably Kelly's? Potentially. We never know. But, yeah, this is effectively when things completely break down. We have an angel conversation from a couple of days later after this happened, and the angels basically asks Kelly and Dee if their wives were obedient, I think is the word they use, and they say yes. So it does seem this all happened. But after this, yeah, it completely breaks down after this, the angel conversations start becoming more infrequent. Kelly and Dee start going their own ways, as you could imagine. And eventually, yeah, this completely stops. They go head off in their own directions. A couple of years later, Dee goes back home to England, Kelly remains in Prague, and Dee carries on with his angel conversations, but with different scryers later on in the future. So this is the point where, yes, their relationship breaks down. This was too much for even Dee, who has gone along with so much by this point, doing what Kelly wanted. This was a kind of major turning point that you could imagine was a major trauma for everybody involved.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (52:34)

Yes, it absolutely reads as a case of serious abuse of power.

Gary Shaw (52:40)

Absolutely.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (52:41)

And one feels particularly for the women in this instance who haven't elected to be in this situation and haven't signed up for it unless until the point at which they're Forced because of the nature of patriarchy at the time.

Gary Shaw (52:53)

Yes. Yeah.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (52:55)

Now, you have covered so many wonderful mysterious manuscripts in your book. The John D. Angel Diaries are just one of them. But what drew you to them in particular? Can you. Can you make sense of them in the end? What do you think they really are?

Gary Shaw (53:12)

So, yeah, it's again, a hard question to properly answer. I was drawn to them again because of the different, I guess, levels of which you can look at them. I was interested in examples of mysterious scripts and people using mysterious alphabets on languages, and so this fits the bill for that. The fact also, though, that I was interested in examples of hoaxes where people tried to use mysterious manuscripts and scripts and languages as a hoax. And, you know, I know there are people who believe that Kelly was truly speaking for the angels, others that believe he's. It's a hoax, etc, and I was drawn to it from this point of view of being a sort of hoax that was drawn out over many, many years. The fact that Kelly's having to constantly produce this material, trying to keep everything making sense enough to keep the interest in, to produce a whole script of his own that, you know, as much as he tried to make sense in it, the language he produced to try to make sense of it, but then on top of all of that, to be producing texts that have a certain, I guess you could say, biblical flavor that would give Dee what he wanted as well. So much of it is quite difficult to follow what was being produced. There's a lot of numbers, a lot of names, a lot of descriptions of actions. It's kind of very apocalyptic in the way it goes about things. As I say, many of these texts are simply grids with numbers in them and symbols, words that you can't translate. In cases of the very early books, some of it are simply guides on, like Dee is put together on summoning certain angels, summoning spiritual creatures. I should say that Dee wanted to do. The others are the angels and spiritual creatures that are looking after parts of the world, their responsibilities. So that's important to know who to be summoning. And so it's quite impenetrable in that way. It's very difficult to understand. But to me it shows, again, a certain level of gullibility on Dee's side, but also his need to help. I do think he truly believed that he was helping the people that he was trying to convince of the Angel Diaries reality, that he truly believed himself to be a sort of prophet and intermediary for the coming apocalypse to guide people so in some ways you can see him as a bit gullible. In other ways you could see a man trying his best in a world that he thought was collapsing around him and then eventually, you know, it all just coming to a catastrophic end, at least with Kelly. And so I think the story there, I mean, for me, as I have a background in academia, but I mainly these days work as a science journalist covering the archaeology. I'm interested in the story here that as far as the mysterious manuscripts goes, it's great, It's a great topic, it's great as a mysterious manuscripts in themselves, but I'm interested in the people. And what I was drawn to here was the character of Dean, the character of Kelly, and their interactions are kind of united by these mysterious manuscripts that they produce together and where it tells you about these individuals and the times they were living. I think they're a fantastic example of this.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (56:01)

They certainly are. And it's been absolutely fascinating to go sort of forensically into the creation of these diaries that people have heard about. They've heard about Dee and they've heard about Kelly, but you've really kind of unpacked for us the relationship between the two and what the angels were saying to them. It's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. I'm hoping that maybe you'll come back another time and talk to me about some of your other mysterious manuscripts. Would you do that?

Gary Shaw (56:29)

That'd be my pleasure. Absolutely, definitely. I'd love to.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (56:32)

Well, thank you so very much, Gary Shaw, it's been an absolute joy.

Gary Shaw (56:37)

Oh, lovely to be here. Thank you.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (57:45)

Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tutors and to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit Sat.