LITMIR.BIZ

       IX

      Soon after Elizabeth’s coronation, Dee vanished. For nearly five years, he is absent from all historical records.¹ All that can be divined was that he spent much of his time abroad, continued collecting books and started to explore a new field of research: the Cabala.

      The Cabala was a potent combination of language, mathematics and mysticism based around Hebrew. Dee had taught himself the language, and acquired his first Hebrew texts around this time. Thanks to the influence of humanists such as John Cheke, there had been a growth of interest in Hebrew, because of its potential to release the knowledge contained in ancient texts. But for the Cabalists, Hebrew was much more than another language, because they believed encoded within it were the secrets of the universe.

      ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as St John put it. Dee and his contemporaries assumed that Word to have been in Hebrew, or rather its original pure form before it became corrupted by Adam’s Fall. Thus, an analysis of Hebrew was a way of discovering the structure that underlay God’s creation. The laws of nature were its grammar, the stuff of physical reality its nouns.²

      Cabalism’s obscure origins go back to first century Palestine. By the sixteenth century, it was regarded in orthodox academic circles with the same suspicion as mathematics, with which it shared many features. Among the multiplicity of methods it used to study language was Gematria, which involved searching for numbers which could be substituted for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. By then performing arithmetical operations with these numbers, for example by ‘adding’ two words together, it was hoped to find a mathematical relationship underlying the language which would show how one phrase related to another.

      Another feature of the Cabala was its numerological preoccupation with angels. Indeed, one of the purposes of Gematria was to work out how many there were (as many as 301,655,172 according to some calculations).³ It also provided a means for working out their names and relationships to one another. For example, it identified the seventy-two angels who provide a route to understanding the ‘sephiroth’ – the ‘ten names most common to God’ which together make his ‘one great name’. The names of such angels were derived from the Hebrew description of their function, suffixed with an ending such as ‘el’ or ‘iah’.

      These angels exist at the top, divine level of the Cabala’s three-tiered universe. Below them lay the celestial level of the stars, and at the bottom the elemental level of the physical world. This structure is reflected in the Hebrew language itself, in the three parts of Hebrew speech and the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, which divided into two groups of nine letters and one of four, corresponding to the nine orders of angels, nine spheres and four elements.

      Such correspondences strike the modern mind as meaningless. Meric Casaubon, who published Dee’s spiritual diaries a century later, warned that ‘some men come into the world with Cabalistical Brains, their heads are full of mysteries… Out of the very ABC that children are taught…they will fetch all the Secrets of God’s Wisdom’.⁴ But to Dee, it provided a crucial link between language and the mathematical basis of nature.

      The Cabala also had a practical, magical side. Since language was tied into the formation of the universe, words had the potential to change it. Cabalism provided a technology for engineering incantations that could summon spirits and influence events, as prayers are supposed to do, but formulated according to systematic, almost scientific principles. And, unlike prayers, such incantations would work whether you were Catholic or Protestant.⁵

      There is no evidence that Dee tried to use the Cabala in this way at this stage in his career. He was, however, fascinated by another practical use, an application of particular interest in the tense atmosphere of Reformation Europe, where governments were eager to find ways of preserving their own secrets and discovering those of their rivals – the creation of secret codes and ciphers.

      In February 1563, Dee reappears in the busy merchant town of Antwerp, staying at the sign of the Golden Angel. Still engaged in his endless, expensive search for works to add to his library, he was about to make what he considered to be the find of his life.

      Antwerp was filled with the clatter of printing presses. It boasted one of the world’s most important publishing firms, founded by Christopher Plantin, whose ‘Officina Plantiniana’ workshop turned out thousands of Christian and humanist works distributed across Europe and as far afield as the Spanish colonies in Mexico and South America. But Plantin also produced several heretical works, notably those of Hendrick Niclaes, founder of the ‘family of love’. This secretive sect, whose members came to be called ‘Familists’, included Dee’s friend the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, and the Birkmanns, a powerful bookselling family based in Cologne. Dee patronised their London shop continuously over forty years, falling into conversation with anyone who happened to be there.⁶ The familists invited all ‘lovers of truth…of what nation and religion soever they be, Christian, Jews, Mahomites, or Turks, and heathen,’ to become part of a learned brotherhood.⁷ They believed that members could show allegiance to any prevailing religious doctrine in order to promote the movement’s aims of developing an all-embracing theology. This reflected Dee’s own view, and it is likely he knew of and was sympathetic to the sect.⁸

      During the winter of 1563, Dee heard rumours that a copy of one of the most precious manuscripts in circulation, for which scholars from all over Europe had been searching for over sixty years, had turned up in Antwerp. It was called Steganographia, and had been written by Johannes Trithemius.

      Trithemius was one of the founders of modern cryptography. He wrote the first published work on the subject, Polygraphia, which appeared in 1518. Born in 1462, he took his name from Trittenheim, a town on the left bank of the Moselle in Germany. He claimed to be unable to read until he was fifteen. At that age he had a dream in which he was presented with two tablets, one inscribed with writing, the other with pictures. Told to choose between them, he picked the tablet with writing

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