Tag: Wellcome Collection

biweekly links 5-30-2018

The 1618 Defenestration of Prague explained: May 23rd was the 400th anniversary of this famous incident in which Protestants threw Catholic nobles out a window of Prague Castle, and this article from BBC’s History Extra blog explains the precipitating factors, mechanics (how did they survive the fall) and fallout. Comes about just as I’m editing a scene in which the papal representative to Bohemia expressed a desire to do the same thing to Edward Kelley* – evidently defenestration was a thing in Prague as recently as 1948.

woodcut of men in seventeenth century dress being thrown out a window into a waiting crowd
Contemporary woodcut of the 1618 defenestration, from here. {{PD-US}}

The ‘lawe of nations’: how diplomatic immunity protected an Elizabethan assassin: especially timely after the recent attempted murder of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal.

Rot, drills and inequity: the tangled tale of teeth: just the images from this current Wellcome Collection exhibition are enough to feed any nascent dentistry phobias for all time. An example of while I love history, I wouldn’t have chosen to live in any time period prior to the invention of modern medicine.

What Magic Got Trump Elected?: less about magic and more about New Thought/modern self-help mentalities and how they inform modern business goals. Introduced me to my new vocabulary word: egregore, a kind of occult product of the group mind (see also: tulpa).

* Though the nuncio wanted to he didn’t, settling for kicking Dee and Kelley out of Bohemian lands. Much tidier, but didn’t last.

bright, clear, and glorious – John Dee’s “shew stones”

Tradition and folklore show Dee and Kelley viewing spirits in a crystal ball. But was this the case? As with everything Dee and Kelley-related legend and rumor obscure reality so what Dee’s “shew stones” looked like and whether they still exist is open to debate.

The most well-known scrying receptacles associated with Dee are the crystal ball and black mirror in the British Museum. Many authors attribute them without question but recent scholarship shows no provenance for either object. We only have Horace Walpole’s claim that the black mirror belonged to Dee and the crystal ball has no obvious origin.

I’m a little more convinced by the Wellcome Collection’s crystal. It claims a reliable chain of custody from Dee through the mid 17th century.

So much for tradition. What evidence did Dee leave us?

The spiritual diaries mention two roundish objects. The first is a “stone in a frame” he received from an unnamed friend. He sketched it in the margin:

Dee's first "shew stone"
The “stone in the frame”, taken from the diaries via Ackermann and Devoy

The other shew stone materialized in Dee’s study on November 21, 1582, several months into his partnership with Kelley. He described it as “big as an egg: most bright, clere, and glorious.” Author Aaron Leitch suggests it might have been a lens rather than a ball.

Of course I’d be tickled to death if the real deal still existed but this looks unlikely, or at least unprovable.

For inspirational purposes I keep this little thing on my desk while I’m writing:

my own shew stone
Found at the local renn faire

Not especially clear or glorious, but it’s egg-shaped and pretty to look at. It helps me get into my character’s heads, staring into something similar and waiting for the curtain to rise.

Selected Sources:

Ackermann, Silke, and Louise Devoy. 2012. “‘The Lord of the Smoking Mirror’: Objects Associated with John Dee in the British Museum.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (3): 539–49.

Leitch, Aaron. 2014. The Essential Enochian Grimoire: An Introduction to Angel Magick from Dr. John Dee to the Golden Dawn. Llewellyn Publications.

Whitby, Christopher Lionel. 1982. “John Dee’s Actions with Spirits: 22 December 1581 to 23 May 1583.” Ph.D. Thesis, Birmingham: University of Birmingham. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/3149/.