Meric Casaubon

Meric Casaubon was born in Geneva in 1599, the son of the renowned classical philologist Isaac Casaubon, and moved to England as a child when his father took up royal patronage there. He followed his father into serious classical scholarship, was ordained in the Church of England, and eventually held a doctorate in divinity and a prebendary stall at Canterbury Cathedral, a career built on textual editing and theological writing that continued despite the disruption of the English Civil War, during which he was for a time deprived of his church living under the Commonwealth before its restoration.

Alongside his editorial and theological work, Casaubon developed a sustained scholarly interest in defending the reality of spirits, witchcraft and other supernatural phenomena against the skeptical natural philosophy that was gaining ground among some of his contemporaries, a concern that shaped both his most distinctive publications. He died in 1671, having spent much of his later career as one of English scholarship's most serious defenders of supernatural reality on textual and historical rather than purely theological grounds.

His father Isaac Casaubon had been renowned across Europe for demonstrating, on philological grounds, that the Hermetic writings long believed to record ancient Egyptian wisdom were in fact composed centuries later in the early centuries of the Christian era, a finding that reshaped Renaissance ideas about Hermes Trismegistus. Meric inherited both his father's rigorous philological method and, in noticeable contrast, a greater personal willingness to credit reports of genuine supernatural activity, a tension that runs through his own later writing on spirits and witchcraft.

Casaubon's most consequential single act of publication was A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, which appeared in 1659, more than fifty years after Dee's death and drawing on manuscripts that had survived by chance. The book made public, for the first time, the detailed record of Dee and Edward Kelley's angelic scrying sessions and the Enochian material they claimed to have received, material that would otherwise likely have remained unknown or lost. Casaubon supplied a lengthy preface framing the diaries not as a guide to genuine angel communication but as a cautionary case study in how a serious and learned man could be deceived by demonic delusion presenting itself as angelic.

That framing reflects the same concern that runs through his other major work, Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil and Divine (1668), a sustained defense of the reality of spirits and witchcraft against contemporary skepticism. Casaubon's editorial decision to publish rather than suppress Dee's manuscripts, despite his own disapproving reading of them, is the reason the Enochian system exists today as a documented historical record rather than a lost curiosity, an outcome later occultists who took the material seriously owe entirely to a scholar who did not share their conclusions.