Scholar, Courtier, Magician: The lost library of John Dee is showing at the Royal College of Physicians, London, until 29 July
“THE book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” claimed Galileo. His full argument is actually more complicated than this, but philosophers, scientists and historians have seized on his statement to characterise “true” science: no branch of natural philosophy could call itself a science until it had become mathematical. “There is only that much genuine science in any science, as it contains mathematics,” asserted Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.
Physicist Steven Weinberg seems to agree. The birth of modern science in the “scientific revolution” of the 17th century was “the search for mathematically expressed impersonal laws that allow precise predictions of a wide range of phenomena”, he writes in his book To Explain the World: The discovery of modern science.
Yet Galileo had the good fortune to work on mechanics and astronomy: problems that can be conveniently mathematicised. Even today this maths-based definition still doesn’t accurately describe much of chemistry (for which reason Kant denied that it was science), biology, the earth sciences or medicine. There’s not a single equation in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
“Dee’s work looks like mumbo-jumbo and mysticism. Yet it was mathematical“
One person who would have welcomed Galileo’s statement, had he not lived half a century too early to witness it, was the English scholar John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609). Yet Dee doesn’t appear in most histories of science, and some of Galileo’s champions might regard him with a degree of horror. Dee is more or less uncategorisable by today’s standards. Some of his Tudor contemporaries might have considered him a philosopher, an astrologer, perhaps even a magician – but they would have agreed that he was, above all, a mathematician.
And what did Dee do with maths? He cast horoscopes, practiced numerology and alchemy, and sought occult codes that would permit conversations with angels in the language used by Adam. Dee is, in short, the worst nightmare for those who want to tell the history of science along the same lines as Weinberg. To them, Dee’s work looks like mumbo-jumbo, superstition and mysticism. Yet it was fundamentally mathematical.
Dee’s eclectic interests are explored in an exhibition of his books at the Royal College of Physicians in London. These books are a few pitiful remnants of the legendary library at his home in Mortlake, west of London, before many of its contents were pilfered while he was travelling abroad. (The apocryphal story has it that the library was ransacked and torched by a mob who suspected him of demonic witchcraft.)
Among the volumes on display is the first English translation of the influential mathematical treatise by the ancient Greek writer Euclid, here called The Elements of Geometrie, published in 1570 by Henry Billingsley, Lord Mayor of London. It’s a gorgeous volume, with elaborate fold-out diagrams of polyhedra and intersecting planes, and Dee wrote the preface. That he was chosen for the task indicates the esteem in which his mathematical expertise was held.
What’s striking to modern readers about that essay is, first, that Dee considers it necessary to mount a defence of maths; and second, the breadth that he attributes to the discipline. Many people, Dee says, consider maths to be disreputable and allied with witchcraft. Indeed, some of the suspicion aroused by Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in 1543 came not from his heliocentric theory of the solar system, but from the fact that he used maths to deduce what he could not directly see. In Tudor times, maths books were often burned on suspicion of being “conjuring books”.
And maths really did have connections with the occult. Numerology was important to the Jewish mystical tradition called the Kabbalah, which Dee studied closely. Codes and cryptography were discussed in Steganographia (c. 1499) by the German abbot Trithemius, who was suspected of diabolical wizardry; it was this book that Dee examined to understand angelic communication. Even as late as 1651, Francis Bacon’s friend and biographer John Rawley was accused of conjuring when he used geometry to calculate the height of a steeple.
This kind of accusation isn’t fair, Dee argued. Maths is both useful and a source of hidden knowledge. He quotes the Italian Renaissance scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “By number, a way is had to the searching out and understanding of everything able to be known.” The wonders described in Dee’s preface were so captivating that, according to historian Peter Zetterberg, many readers were probably “disappointed by the Elements itself with its pedestrian tone and topics”.
In particular, Dee says, maths is a practical discipline, useful for technologies such as hydraulics and surveying (geometry, he reminds us, means “land measuring”). It was also needed to make ingenious mechanisms, a popular art at the time.
Practically minded “virtuosi” made their living by creating such devices for the princes and nobles of Europe, and Dee himself was said to have made a giant mechanical beetle for a play at Trinity College in Cambridge that astonished audiences. “And for these, and suchlike marvellous arts and feats naturally, mathematically and mechanically wrought and contrived, ought any student and modest Christian philosopher be counted and called a conjurer?” Dee asked.
“Copernicus aroused suspicion for using maths to deduce what he could not directly see“
Mechanisms like this were considered in those days to be allied with the tradition called natural magic, in which the invisible forces of nature were harnessed to work wonders. In 1648, the Englishman John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College in Oxford – where he convened the group of philosophers who later became the Royal Society – published a book called Mathematical Magick. The title might lead you to expect either a collection of “think-of-a-number” party tricks or a treatise on numerology. In fact, it was a textbook of mechanisms: levers, wheels, pulleys, screws, clocks, windmills – even submarines.
Dee personifies this natural-magic tradition. For some he was the archetypal Elizabethan magus, using a crystal ball with the help of his shady sidekick Edward Kelley to speak with angels or demons. It’s possible that Shakespeare used Dee as the model for Prospero in The Tempest.
But the giants of the scientific revolution took him and his vision of mathematics seriously. Wilkins’s Mathematical Magick, inspired by Dee’s work, was one of the young Isaac Newton’s favourite books, and Dee’s preface was widely read throughout the 17th century. Robert Hooke defended Dee’s angelic discourses when they were published posthumously, saying that they must be encrypted intelligence messages sent to the British court while Dee was abroad.
Dee prefigured 17th-century scholarly occultists such as the Englishman Robert Fludd and the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who discerned mystical “hidden knowledge” in nature’s workings while also exploring natural phenomena and mechanical inventions. If all this sounds a little like the mix we find in Isaac Newton too, you have got the right idea.
That’s why Dee is a noteworthy figure in the history of science. And his example stands as a warning: that if we cherry-pick from the time when Renaissance magic was morphing into modern science, we will never understand what that extraordinary time was really all about.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Count John Dee”
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