John Dee's Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions) [Hardcover]

This is a great scholarly resource, full of quick synopses on important developments in the last few decades of John Dee research. Scholarship on Western Esotericism has reached a climax in this text, which provides a workable model on how to understand Dee's occultism properly in the context of the culture, politics, science, and theology of his day. A rich and nuanced picture of Dee emerges, and the traitorous reputation of a certain notorious nearby character receives a welcome deconstruction. Towards the end there is a valuable look at Causabon's anti-magical motivation for publishing Dee's scrupulous notes. The book is especially valuable for providing an eastern-European point of view, and is hip to the useful critiques in post-structuralist history.

Both academics and occultists will find this book most enjoyable, though challenging and dense. Great gift for the magician/intellectual who has everything, essential for libraries and bookshelves dealing with Renaissance Magic and the Elizabethan Age.

I was looking for a good book about John Dee written from a historical and culture perspective and I mostly found it in this book. The author does a good job of presenting Dee in a historical context. He also does a great job of reviewing the authors that were influential to Dee, such as Agrippa.

Be warned, this book is somewhat heavy reading and is boring and repetitive in certain parts. Overall though, it was an excellent purchase and I do recommend it to anyone interested in John Dee, historians and occultists alike.

With this work, Hungarian scholar Gyorgy Szonyi has made a significant contribution to John Dee studies, building on the work of scholars such as Yates, Clulee, and Sherman, and running parallel with, and complementing, Harkness' book John Dee's Conversations with Angels (1999) which was encountered by Szonyi near the completion of his book. According to Szonyi, Harkness utilizes an approach that "seems to combine the historical and the anthropological concerns and thus her interpretation runs quite close to my own" (page 12). He reflects on her suggestions throughout his text, and states in his preface that his book is intended to represent Dee research up to around 2000 while acknowledging the fact that other Dee studies paralleling his were being developed (such as Hakan Hakansson's Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism [2001]).

Szonyi analyzes Dee's occult philosophy within the context of Renaissance esotericism's mystical-magical concept of exaltation (or "exaltatio"), the deification of man. This concept was understood and applied by Dee within the Judeo-Christian context (via the Old Testament book of Genesis) of a Primordial Fall of the human race and its need for restoration. According to Szonyi, Dee's aim "was to restore the Adamic or Enochian wisdom of the Golden Age that had been lost with the Fall and which would not be compatible with the methods and means of the fallen science relying on discursive logic" (page 16). Dee's fervent desire was for elevation to the sphere of perfect knowledge, even omniscience, "in order to understand the divine plan of creation and God's intentions with the cosmos and man" (ibid). This central concern "framed and tied together" his "otherwise amazingly heterogeneous thoughts and activities" (page xiv), including the astrology of his Propaedeumata aphoristica, the alchemy of the Monas hieroglyphica, the magia naturalis of The Mathematicall Praeface, and his culminating search for the perfect, divine language via the angelic conversations as recorded in his spiritual diaries.

This major study is not only about Dee's occult philosophy and magic, but also about the historical precedents and sources for Renaissance esotericism in general. I agree with historian of magic Christopher Lehrich who said in his 2006 review of this book for The Renaissance Society of America that it is one of the best first books to read for "understanding the range and scope of occult philosophy in the early modern period". The organic world model (the "Great Chain of Being" and its correspondences) is introduced and, using the literary sources within Dee's library catalogs, the magical ideas relating to the concept of exaltatio in Hermeticism, Neoplatonism/classical theurgy, medieval ceremonial magic, and Cabala are covered. Enochian lore and sources for angel magic are also discussed before delving into the choreography of the scrying sessions, using Australian linguist Donald Laycock's examination of the angelic language.

In Chapter 8 (Dee and the Interpretive Community), Szonyi covers not only Dee's mission in the East, providing details found nowhere else, but he also utilizes post-structuralist approaches to successfully reveal the politics of interpretation in relation to Meric Casaubon. Additionally, he notes that Casaubon didn't deal in depth with the scrying role of Edward Kelly, and Szonyi allows for a more ambiguous role for Kelly than that taken by, for example, Wayne Schumaker who treated him as a fraud and manipulator. Joseph Peterson also holds a similar interpretation. In the introduction to his book, John Dee's Five Books of Mystery (2003), he states that views of Kelly "range from that of a highly gifted scryer to an outright charlatan. I am inclined to believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle" (page 38).

Although the reading can be dense at times, Szonyi's book covers a lot of information and it is worth studying and comparing with other books on the topic of Dee and Renaissance esotericism. Szonyi's recognition as an authority on Dee is evident by the fact that he was selected to write the entry on Dee for the monumental Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (2005).