Anthony Testa - The Key of the Abyss.pdf

Chapter 3 : Dr. John Dee
There is an excellent biography of Dee, John Dee, by Charlotte Fell-
Smith, which is available on the Internet and can be read for free. Our
interest in Dee is in his magical pursuits but it would be improper not
to touch, however briefly on the remarkable life of the man who would
be the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe’s Faust.
Fell-Smith tells us, John Dee was the son of Rowland Dee; he was
born in London, according to the horoscope of his own drawing, on
July 13, 1527 29 . Dee attended Trinity College and acquired a sizable
library of rare and valuable works which caused him to be seen as
something of a diabolist by “common opinion”, no doubt for the
simple fact that literacy was a rare skill in those days. In any case, Dee
was well known for his introduction to Euclid’s Geometry and his
studies with Gerardus Mercator, the famed cartographer along with his
general knowledge of mathematics. If Dee had never so much as
thought about magic, he would still be remembered today for these
achievements, along with his “pioneering” work in the field of
espionage as he famously was the original “007”.
The first major incidents in his pursuit of Occult sciences occurred due
to his interest in astrology. As Fell-Smith describes the art and science
of the day:
Astrology was a very essential part of astronomy in the sixteenth
century, and the belief in the controlling power of the stars over
human destinies is almost as old as man himself. The relative positions
of the planets in the firmament, their situations amongst the
constellations, at the hour of a man's birth, were considered by the
ancients to be dominant factors and influences throughout his whole
life. It is not too much to say that a belief in the truth of horoscopes
cast by a skilled calculator still survives in our Western civilization as
well as in the East. Medical science today pays its due respect to
29 John Dee, by Charlotte Fell-Smith facsimile text of 1909 ed. London Constable Co. pp 16
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