Given the sheer oddity of Dee and Kelley’s story (two men talking to angels!?) it’s no surprise that wild tales grew up around them. But, I want to write something historically accurate so I’ve been slowly winnowing out the facts from the legends. The further I go the stranger it gets, and Stephenie Woolterton’s post on bias in historical research reminds me that “facts” are always filtered through those relating them.
I’ve found two broad interpretations of Dee and Kelley’s partnership:
- Kelley was a fraud, full stop. Espoused mostly by Dee’s biographers, it makes sense at first glance but on closer examination seems inadequate. Their partnership went on for 7 years – if it was a con Kelley deserves credit as the best actor/storyteller of his age! It also ignores Kelley’s repeated attempts to leave Dee’s employment and his doubts about the holiness/usefulness of the spiritual messages. Why question it if he had Dee fooled? Why start the fraud in the first place?
- Kelley channeled something outside himself and the seances can be taken at face value. A minority opinion embraced by some modern-day occultists, it sidesteps their work’s resemblance to earlier magical systems (even Kelley points this out) and the English grammar and structure of the alleged “angelic” language.
If the historians can’t be trusted, the primary sources aren’t much better. Save a few letters and other miscellanea we only have Dee’s account of 1582-1589 and he’s not completely reliable.
Dee’s “private” diary was written in the margins of almanacs and wasn’t all that private. Erasures suggest that Kelley edited it with Dee’s knowledge and one can infer Dee expected that it might be read by others. Susan Bassnett points out that Dee left out significant information about Kelley’s stepchildren and brother – who and what else did he leave out, and why?
The spiritual diaries appear to be verbatim transcripts of Dee and Kelley’s seances, but they are incomplete. Not everything has survived to the present, and some pages were destroyed before their importance was known. We only have what Kelley saw fit to share with Dee and have little notion of any communications he received/created without Dee’s direction.
Indeed, very little is certain about Kelley at all. His early life is a series of rumors (did he raise the dead? Did he lose one ear, both ears, or no ears for forgery?) and almost everything else is from Dee’s diaries. He often comes off as a selfish, temper tantrum-throwing brat but given their tumultuous relationship it’s fair to say Dee had his own biases.
And here I show my own. I think Sledge comes closest to the truth when he suggests that Dee and Kelley’s work was the product of a mix of fraud, mental illness, and self-hypnosis. My hard-headed modern mind can’t accept a supernatural explanation but I doubt Kelley came up with 7 years worth of prophecies and magic on his own. I also suspect the more heretical material wouldn’t have shocked him so if he’d consciously invented it.
Dee pushed Kelley into frequent altered states and documented the “spirits’” every word. Is it unimaginable that with Dee’s constant encouragement Kelley might start to believe his own lies, but be resentful and angry from overwork? In this sense I don’t think Kelley was the cardboard-cutout con artist put forth by Dee’s biographers. Far more likely that Enochian magic came out of a shared madness between the two, with Kelley’s delusions directed by Dee’s obsessions.
In the end, does any of this really matter? I’m writing fiction, after all, and am free to make up what I can’t prove. Much as my inner history geek wants to know “the truth” I have to accept that reality is often subjective – one of the themes of my novel. Just because a thing isn’t objectively real doesn’t make it any less relevant.
Selected sources:
Bassnett, S. (2006). Absent Presences: Edward Kelley’s Family in the Writings of John Dee. In John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (pp. 285–294). Dordrecht: Springer.
Laycock, D. C., Kelly, E., Dee, D. J., & Duquette, L. M. (2001). The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Weiser.
Sledge, J. J. (2010). Between Loagaeth and Cosening: Towards an Etiology of John Dee’s Spirit Diaries. Aries, 10(1), 1–35.
Oh yes! Says she who is still monitoring the disappearance of the War of 1812 from American history books (last one I saw it had been reduced to a couple of naval skirmishes with Britain and no mention of the land war at all)
I don’t know if it’s unique to Americans but we have some epic blind spots when it comes to our own history. I learned little in primary school about the war of 1812 beyond the burning of the White House and the inspiration for the national anthem, but I’m not sure why it was so abbreviated – it may have been something as simple as not having enough time to cover it.
Other times the obfuscation is deliberate – see the latest round in the continuing controversy over the Confederate flag.
I hope that this is the last flailing defense of that horrible symbol, but the conversation reveals that many (usually white) Americans cannot imagine why large segments of the population finds it offensive. Illustrates that history isn’t always written by the victors – sometimes it really is the best *story*, no matter how false it might be.
Oh yes, every nation has its historical blind spots. I’d say that history is written by the survivors (on both sides) and tailored to make ’em look good to the folks back home is likely more correct than that it’s written by the victors. Just that as time goes by, the victors’ versions are more likely to be most common and available to later generations because they could afford to get more copies printed. 😉
Which is likely why I notice the rewriting of the War of 1812 … I grew up fairly close to where quite a bit of it happened and there are numerous monuments to battles and individuals. At the time it involved a large chunk of both the U.S. and Canada as they existed then but that’s a very small percent of our countries as they are today. Canadians outside of southern Ontario and Quebec probably get about as much classroom coverage of the war as you did. And these days most people up here only know Laura Secord as a chain of chocolate shops and not as a historical figure (http://www.warof1812.ca/laurasecord.htm). ;p
I’ve just been deliberately watching for the shift for a long time because I find it fascinating and it was a matter of happening to read the right thing at the right time back in the 80s to notice it at all … back then it was the elimination of the words Canada and Canadian and their being replaced with Britain and British (the reasoning behind that most likely being that Canada wasn’t officially a country yet but still a British colony, therefore the residents were “British”); from there later writers have slowly gone to British meaning only actual Britain and thus it has now dwindled down to only the naval encounters (previously just the naval plus the Battle of New Orleans … which happened three weeks after the war was over due to communications lag … but now even that last land battle (the only one that was 100% official British troops) has disappeared.
Interesting! The insistence on “British” vs. “Canadian” is TECHNICALLY correct, I suppose but seems awfully pedantic considering the geography involved.
“Technically” correct if one uses tunnel vision to only at who was governing at the time (which I suspect is what happened), but historically incorrect. The area that is now Ontario was then named Upper Canada, today’s Québec was Lower Canada (names based on position in relation to the flow of the St. Lawrence rather than which looked higher up on a map) and the inhabitants had been calling themselves Canadians for ages. There was only a skeleton force of British troops stationed in the colonies and no additional support was sent due to them being needed for a little problem called Napoleon; thus the bulk of the land forces involved were hastily assembled volunteer Canadian militia. So in our history books, it’s the Canadians who fought most of the war.
The whole thing has led me to wonder how much else of rewritten or biased history is actually a result of misused or mistaken terminology rather then deliberate mistelling …