A Suburban House at the Root of Modern Magic

Between 1582 and 1589 Dee worked with Edward Kelley, who acted as scryer while Dee recorded what Kelley reported seeing in a crystal. The output was enormous and highly systematic: an alphabet, a body of text in a language Dee called Angelical and later writers called Enochian, tables of letters, and a scheme of governors, watchtowers and calls.

Deborah Harkness reads the project as continuous with Dee's scholarly life rather than a departure from it, an attempt to recover a pure original language and through it a knowledge of nature that had been lost. Whether Kelley produced the material by fraud, by some form of trance, or by a mixture of both is not settled, and the surviving diaries do not settle it. What is not in doubt is the transmission. The manuscripts passed through collectors, were partly printed by Meric Casaubon in 1659 in an edition intended to discredit Dee, and were later worked over by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century and by Aleister Crowley after it. Through those channels the Mortlake material became a working component of modern Western ceremonial magic, and it is still in use. That places the origin of a large part of a living practice in a Thames side house whose exact location is now uncertain.