tour 16 of 16
Enlightenment: Religion and Ritual
Dr Dee's magic
The British Museum has six objects with magical
connotations associated with the name of John Dee (1527-1608/9).
Dee was one of the most learned figures of his time, bringing
together what was to be a unique library and being well versed in
the foremost sciences of his day, particularly mathematics and
astronomy (including astrology). Typical for his time, he was also
interested in occult matters, which he believed to be just another
means of gaining knowledge about the universe. It is with this
interest in the occult that the magical objects are connected and
it is purely the connection with Dee which made the objects
interesting to antiquarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, such as Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) and Sir Horace
Walpole (1717-1797)
respectively.
The two
smaller wax discs engraved with magical signs, symbols and names
are all what remains of originally four discs allegedly used to
support Dee's 'table of practice', which
Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection was one of the founding
collection of the British Museum, had acquired together with some
of Dee's manuscripts. The larger disc, engraved in a
similar way and used to support one of Dee's
'shew-stones', corresponds exactly with a drawing
in one of Dee's manuscripts. A 'shew-stone'
could be a translucent or reflecting object used for occult
practice, and both the spherical crystal ball and the black
obsidian mirror of Aztec origin have been connected with
Dee's occult practices. The case made to fit the mirror has
a label in Walpole's hand associating the object with Dee
and his medium Edward Kelly, but the provenance of the spherical
crystal is less clear, although there is evidence in the
manuscripts that Dee had such a spherical crystal. The gold disc is
engraved with the 'vision of the four castles' as
experienced by Dee while in Krakow in 1584. It was acquired for the
museum in 1942 to join the group of magical objects associated with
the name of one of the foremost Renaissance
scientist.