QI The Book of the Dead

struggled to ‘see’ anything at all. So in 1582 he began using the services of a medium called Edward Talbott. Talbott was an unprepossessing man from Lancashire who always wore a cowl over his head to hide the fact that his ears had been cut off for counterfeiting. He had a basic grounding in alchemy from his time as an apothecary’s assistant and claimed to have the gift of divination. Almost at once, Talbott was able to summon up richly detailed visions for Dee. Most of them came via an ‘angel’ called ‘Madimi’ who spoke a language called Enochian. According to Dee, she was ‘a spiritual creature, a pretty girl of seven to nine years of age, half angel and half elfin’. For Dee, there was nothing ‘occult’ or un-Christian about these proceedings; indeed, he prepared for each session with prayer and fasting. He was delighted with the results and the two men formed a partnership, Talbott renaming himself Kelley to shroud his chequered past.
    In the meantime, Dee continued at court as a successful practical scientist. In 1583 he devised a scheme to bring the English calendar into line with the astronomical one. It was even more accurate than the one Pope Gregory XIII had recently imposed on the rest of Europe, and the neatness of Dee’s maths was widely admired, but the Archbishop of Canterbury blocked it: he saw it as capitulation to Rome. Later that year, the queen introduced Dee and Kelley to Prince Albrecht Łaski, a visitingPolish diplomat. He was keenly interested in the occult and invited them to bring their ‘philosophical experiments’ to his country. Encouraged by the positive endorsement of their spirit guides, Dee, Kelley and their families set off for Poland.
    Over the next six years, the two Englishmen practised astrology, alchemical experiments and spiritual divination in the grand palaces of Europe. The king of Poland and the eccentric Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (an ardent alchemist himself) were enthusiastic patrons. Dee and Kelley finally settled at the court of Count Rosenberg in Bohemia. Here, their waif-like angelic interlocutor Madimi suddenly evolved into Uriel, a full-breasted siren. She instructed Kelley that no further progress towards mystical enlightenment would be made until the two men shared everything, particularly their wives. Dee’s diary records his distress, not least because Jane had always professed to dislike Kelley, but he allowed the matrimonial exchange to take place as instructed. Soon afterwards the spirit conversations ceased, the partnership broke up and the Dees returned to England in 1588.
    At first sight, it looks as if Kelley manipulated the whole thing. By playing on the spiritual ambitions of the elderly Dee, he had his way with his partner’s pretty young wife and then managed to be rid of them both. Certainly he got rich quite quickly after Dee left; for ten years he conned European monarchs into believing he could manufacture gold at will. In recognition of his work, he was even made a baron by Rudolf II. Eventually, however, the lack of any actual gold became something of an issue, and he died in 1589 attempting to climb out of a tower where the Emperor had imprisoned him. But Dee’s diary tells a different story. Five weeks after what he calls his ‘Covenant’ with Kelley, Jane foundshe was pregnant. When the baby was born, the Dees and the Kelleys were reunited at the christening and the child named Theodore – ‘beloved of God’. Far from falling out, Dee and Kelley continued to correspond and Dee’s diary records his great sorrow on hearing of Kelley’s death. If that were not sufficient evidence, the Dees named their next daughter Madimi.
    Meanwhile, on their return to Mortlake, the Dees found their house had been ransacked: many books and instruments had been stolen and a maid had used a collection of Dee’s scientific papers to line pie tins. The queen’s enthusiasm for Dee had cooled, doubtless fanned by gossip from the Continent, and the best position she could offer him was the wardenship of Christ’s College, a religious institution in Manchester. Not only was his income much reduced, but he found his authority with the Fellows undermined by constant mutterings about his being a conjuror. In 1603 Elizabeth died, and was replaced by James I, a man famously averse to witchcraft in all its forms. The following year Dee wrote to him professing his loyalty and reassuring him that ‘none of all the great number of the very