The Five Books of Mystery

The Five Books of Mystery are John Dee’s own records of his earliest ‘actions’ with angels, conducted at his house in Mortlake between December 1581 and May 1583. Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician, antiquary and royal adviser, did not scry himself; he employed mediums who looked into a crystal or ‘shew-stone’ and reported what they saw and heard while he wrote it down. The first sessions were with Barnabas Saul; from March 1582 the scryer was Edward Kelley, whose partnership with Dee would last for seven years. The five books chart the revelation of the angelic system later called Enochian. Book I describes the method of working; Book II the Sigillum Dei Aemeth; Book III the seven ‘ensigns of creation’; Book IV the angels of the ‘mystical heptarchy’, their kings, princes and tables; and Book V the dictation of the holy book Liber Loagaeth, with an appendix of further sessions. The manuscript, British Library Sloane MS 3188, was among the papers recovered by Elias Ashmole in 1672 after they had been hidden in a chest. These records precede the material printed by Meric Casaubon in 1659 and are therefore the foundation of Dee’s angelic magic. Historians now read them not as curiosities but as evidence of Dee’s religious and apocalyptic hopes, his search for a pre-lapsarian language and a reformed natural philosophy, and his place in the politics of Elizabethan England.

What it contains

• Book I: the manner of working with the shew-stone
• Book II: revelation of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth
• Book III: the seven ensigns of creation
• Book IV: the angels, kings and princes of the Heptarchy
• Book V: dictation of the holy book Liber Loagaeth
• Appendix of later sessions and diagrams