History
records some remarkable meetings of remarkable people.
Here, we look at two great men who knew John Dee.
John Dee (click image for biographical info)
Mercator
Gerardus
Mercator (born Gerhard Cremere but took the Latin name for ‘merchant’,
‘kremer’ being its German equivalent) was
born
on March 5, 1512.
He was the great Flemish cartographer, the
first to use the term 'atlas' for a collection of maps. It may be said that
his break from the geographical conventions of Ptolemy
was as important for geography as the innovations of Copernicus
were for astronomy.
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Even
by the age of 20, while studying at the University of Louvain
in Flanders (now Belgium), Mercator was eager to challenge the
principles of Aristotle. By the time he was in his early 30s, he had
done a great amount of work to this purpose and attracted the attention
of the academic and ecclesiastical authorities.
In
February 1544, the great (Protestant) mapmaker was arrested and charged
with heresy. Suspicions had been aroused in the Catholic Church, not
only because of Mercator’s faith, but also because he had travelled
far and wide to find material for his profession.
Mercator was
released from jail in September of that year, and in 1548 was joined in
his work at Louvain by John
Dee (1527 - 1609) the English mathematician, astronomer,
magician, alchemist and astrologer, who spent three years working with
his new friend. Their intimate and fruitful friendship is one of the
touching pages in the annals of the history of science.
Of this, Dee
later wrote:
It
was the custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three
whole years, neither of us lacked the other's presence for as much as
three whole days.
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Both
of these early-modern geniuses knew from experience the terrible prisons of
the day, and also the poverty that attended release from prison into an
unwelcoming and narrow-minded society. Dee himself, back in England, was
himself imprisoned on May
28, 1555 for the crime of ‘calculating’ –
practising the pagan craft of mathematics.
Dee
had something of a rehabilitation after some years, even at one stage teaching
Queen Elizabeth I some mathematics.
“In
1568 he published Propaedeumata Aphoristica and presented the work to
Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth was impressed and Dee gave her mathematics lessons
to enable her to understand it. The book contains a mixture of good physics
and mathematics, and also a lot of astrology and magic. Let us emphasise that
we should not think any the less of Dee because of his interests in magic;
most of the great scientists and mathematicians of his time, and much later,
had such interests. For example Brahe
firmly believed in alchemy and astrology as did Cavalieri
and Kepler
while Newton,
like Dee, was obsessed with studying alchemy. Among what we would describe as
"good science" in Propaedeumata Aphoristica is a statement
that unequal masses fall at the same speed. Dee refers to earlier scientists
who also claimed this fact. He also states that every object in the universe
exerted a force on all others.” Source
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Bacon
Francis
Bacon, Renaissance English philosopher, shares a birthday with Lord
Byron – Bacon on January
22, 1561, and Byron on that day in 1788.
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Bacon
was Lord Chancellor of the realm, and man of letters, author of the
Rosicrucian-inspired utopian New
Atlantis (1627).
The English poet Alexander
Pope called him "The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind".
Pope also wrote, in 1741, “Lord
Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever
produced.”
Many respectable scholars believe that it was actually
Bacon who wrote the plays of William
Shakespeare, claiming that the
supposedly uneducated Shakespeare could not possibly have done so. While
the theory is perhaps fanciful (we can deduce a little about Shakespeare’s
probable education), it certainly has persisted for a long
time.
In
1621 Lord Bacon was accused of accepting bribes as Lord Chancellor. To
this, he pleaded guilty and was fined £40,000, banished from the court
and disqualified from holding office. He was also sentenced to
imprisonment in the Tower of London. The banishment, fine, and
imprisonment were remitted, but his career as a public servant was
finished. However, such was his popularity and the public perception of
his relative innocence, his disfavour with the Crown, the Lords and
the people did not last long.
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When
he was 21, Bacon met
the alchemist and original 007, John Dee. On August
11, 1582 there was an entry in Dee's journal that they met at Mortlake – the young Bacon
came to the famous alchemist to learn about the ancient Hebrew esoteric
numerical code known as the Gematria,
one of the oldest cipher systems known, dating from 700 BCE.
Esoteric themes are threaded through much of Bacon’s writing and we can only
guess at Dee’s influence.
Bacon
died on April 9, 1626, ironically, a victim of scientific inquiry. He was out
riding in his coach on a cold day with Dr Witherborne, the physician to James
I, on the Holloway Road to Highgate, near London.
Always
exercising his inquiring mind, Bacon had noticed that cold meats seemed not to
go rotten as quickly as others, so it suddenly occurred to the great
experimental scientist that flesh might be preserved in snow as well as in
salt. The two men got out of the carriage and bought a hen from the cottage of
a poor woman and helped each other to stuff the bird with snow by way of
experiment. Sadly, poor Francis Bacon got a bad chill and could not return
home, spending several days seriously ill at the nearby home of the Earl of
Arundel, in a bed which was damp, having been unused for some time. His health
deteriorated till the great man finally died passed away.
Against cold meats was he
insured?
For frozen chickens he procured
brought on the illness he endured,
and never was this Bacon cured.
PW
Index of
articles on folklore and other topics
Alchemists
in the Almanac: Cornelius
Agrippa Roger
Bacon Count
Cagliostro John
Dee
Edward
Kelley Robert
Fludd Isaac
Newton Paracelsus
James Price
Tycho Brahe
Raymond Lulle
Elias Ashmole
The Alchemy Web
Site Wilson's Almanac Alchemy Clock
(a bit of fun) Shop
Alchemy
Virgil: the poet as magician
Assassination and a prophetic dream
How are other ancient gods like Jesus?
The Dundee
Code: Sequel to The Da Vinci Code
Sir Isaac Newton:
Last alchemist
Scrimmies: human bone-carving cult
Annie Besant: Social
visionary who lit a match
