In which I assemble the key points that will be addressed in The Angelic Reformation.

I. Introduction: The Man Who Invented the Modern World

• An introduction to John Dee and an overview of his impact on the world.

• A discussion of the phenomena of “contact” experiences occurring in the lives of advanced mathematicians and thinkers (Nash, Rasmussen, Carl Sagan’s fictionalization of the phenomenon in “Contact,” etc.) and the problematic but related genre of channeled works in the occult underground (Crowley, Parsons, Ingalls, etc).

• A broad, poetic evocation of Dee’s work, the high-adventure world of Elizabeth’s England and an outline of his massive impact on the world, continuing to the present day.

II. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Dee’s Early Life and Scientific Career

• Dee’s birth and family; his father’s trial for treason and the early association of the family with scandal.

• Dee’s education at Cambridge and in the Netherlands; his quest to understand and master all knowledge; his training under scientific and occult masters.

• Dee’s successful teaching career and work to bring light to the world by popularizing mathematics and the sciences.

• Dee’s ascent to power as scientific advisor to Elizabeth; the cultural changes attendant upon Elizabeth’s reign; Dee’s intelligence work and spying network; the assembly of his private library and academy at Mortlake.

• Dee’s work in navigation, optics and the other sciences: A rundown of his scientific contributions to the world.

III. All as Study of All

• A rundown of the Hermetic tradition, how Dee’s quest for all knowledge (including the occult) makes perfect sense within the framework of “holist” Hermeticism (and much less to over-specialized modern minds).

• A careful sifting of the Hermetic tradition as a mixed bag of “enlightenment” concepts with pre-rational folk superstition. For a useful skeleton key to the Hermetic corpus, we apply Ken Wilber’s “pre/trans fallacy” which distinguishes between pre-rational folk magic and post-rational enlightenment, which can be hard to separate for uninitiated readers of Hermetic documents.

• A comparison of Dee’s work with his contemporaries—Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, and others—and a demonstration of how radically sophisticated and alien Dee’s work was when compared to those of the tradition he worked within.

• The Hieroglyphic Monad, Dee’s masterwork of magick—what was he trying to say, how was it received and how did it fit into the Elizabethan episteme? (Elizabeth’s court was fascinated with the Monad.)

IV. The Ascendant Star of Empire: Dee’s Imperialism

• The appearance of a new star in 1572, and the general Millennialism of Elizabethan England within which Dee’s project was conducted.

• The planning of a Protestant English Empire to supplant Roman Catholic control of the New World; the poverty of England and the need for a conquest of the New World.

• The war, overt and covert, between the Protestant and Catholic blocs. Is there validity to the theory that Dee generated the Rosicrucians as a “Protestant religious secret service” to counter the Jesuits?

• Dee’s lobbying for imperial expansion and creation of the phrase “British empire”; his vision of Elizabeth as the new Arthur, himself as Merlin and America as the New Atlantis.

• Assessment of the story of the “Circle of Night,” a secret society allegedly comprising Dee, Raleigh, Drake and Shakespeare. Is there validity to Hakim Bey’s theory that The Tempest was propaganda for Dee’s imperial plan and that Prospero was a caricature of Dee?

V. The Angelic Conversations

• A look at the progression of Dee’s occultism, from his student days to his failed experiments at angel conjuring on his own and with various scryers, including Barnabas Saul.

• The arrival of Edward Kelly at Mortlake. Kelly’s history and occult efforts, including Goetia and alchemy. Jane Dee’s reaction to Kelly.

• What was Kelly’s gift? Psychic? Con artist? Chemical aid? My theory that alchemical “red powder” may have been milled ergot. Grant Morrison suggested to me that Dee and Kelly were affected by the Elizabethan era’s alcohol saturation, may include here.

• Description of the scrying sessions. What happened?

• A timeline of the reception of the material. Piecing it all together. False starts and corrections. The messages of the angels: Finding both a technical overview and a cohesive narrative in the Spirit Diaries—piecing together the fragmentary Spirit Diaries scattered across many books. I imagine this will be one of the biggest sections, as it deals with the cryptic and exceedingly complex utterances of the angels which must be assessed completely on their own outside of the biographies of Dee and Kelly. What, exactly, did the angels say? I want to be very precise in this section, laying things out in granular / bulletpoint detail to help the reader make clear sense of this exceedingly complex (and often self-contradictory) material.

VI. The Angelic Reformation

• The Terminal Monotheism: The angels’ plan for a unification of Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam—to be combined with Elizabeth’s terrestrial New World Order.

• The arrival of Count Laski and plans for a Continental trip. Laski’s manipulations of Dee and Kelly.

• The Continental trip. King Stefan Batory and Emperor Rudolf II. Confrontation with the Papal nuncio and the Church’s plans to co-opt or silence Dee. The shockwaves that Dee’s work sent through the Church.

VII. The Daughter of Fortitude

• The infamous wife-swapping incident while on the Continent. Why did the angelic messages change? Are there parallels to be drawn between this “deconditioning” exercise and left-handed taboo breaking exercises in Sufi and Tantric circles?

• The appearance of BABALON and precursors of Crowley’s Thelema, down to the “Do what thou wilt” phrase and a proto-Thelemic philosophy given by beings Kelly considered evil. (Line drawn forward into future to Crowley and Neuberg’s astral experiences in Algeria; connection of the “AL” in the center of the Enochian Holy Table of Practice and Liber AL, the Book of the Law.)

• Dee and Kelly split. Kelly’s work as an alchemist, imprisonment and death. Dee returns to England; plague, death of Jane Dee, Dee’s ill fortunes, regime change to James I. An assessment of Dee’s ongoing occult career: Continued work with new scryers, diary hints of OTO-style sexual magick conducted with Jane Dee (!). Dee’s death; he bequeaths his gear to his alchemist son Arthur Dee.

VIII. The Rosicrucian Underground

• Assessment of Dee’s work—and destruction of his legacy—by the Royal Society and Méric Casaubon.

• Overall, the question of secret traditions that carried on Dee’s work, following:

• Dee’s ongoing influence on the English geopolitical plan. Bacon’s New Atlantis. Can a connection be drawn between Dee and Bacon? Was there a secret tradition here as well?

• Dame Francis Yates’ theory that Dee is the anonymous author of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes, and that he engineered the Rosicrucian underground that gave birth to science. Potential connections between Dee’s work and Scottish Rite Masonry.

• An assessment of Stephen Skinner’s theory of an ongoing secret tradition that carried on Dee’s angelic conjuring, and that it took place in the very upper echelons of British society. The role of Arthur Dee, Elias Ashmole, “Dr. Rudd,” Francis Hockley and others in carrying on the tradition and bridging the long gap between Dee & Kelly and the Golden Dawn.

IX. Under the Shadow of the Wings: The Influence of Dee on Occulture

• High-ranking Masonic Rosicrucians Mathers, Westcott and Woodman build on Hockley’s work with Dee’s files in the British Library. The Sloane Manuscripts as likely source of the Golden Dawn, rather than the “Fräulein Sprengel” story.

• The genesis of both the Golden Dawn and the OTO out of SRIA, and how Crowley may have acted as a “cross pollinator” of Enochian and other ideo-complexes between both groups.

• An assessment of the Golden Dawn’s work with Enochian, and the problem of Mathers’ additions to and reworkings of the system. The explorations of the Golden Dawn Inner Order and the development of the astral (imaginary) exploration method, very different from Dee and Kelly’s use of optics and direct scrying.

• Crowley and Victor Neuberg’s astral exploration of the 30 Aethyrs in the Algerian desert and Crowley’s development of the system as a method for the revelation of the Aeon of Horus. Deep assessment of The Vision and the Voice as it relates to Crowley’s work and the broader Enochian corpus. Does it belong as part of the system—is it a fuller realization of Dee and Kelly’s work, or an anomaly?

• The BABALON Working of Parsons, Hubbard and Marjorie Cameron. Connection of Enochian to the birth of the space program and of Scientology (can be excised or deftly written if this is problematic).

• Later bastardizations of Enochian in LaVey, Aquino, Carroll.

• The grimoire revival. Post-80s academic renaissance in Dee studies. Work of Stephen Skinner, David Jones, Ralph Abraham, Lon DuQuette and the repurposing of Enochiana in the OTO system.

• What Dee has to say to the 21st century. Is his work continuing to detonate into the future? Have we even begun to fully catch up with Dee’s vision? Potential of interviews or snippets from modern practitioners and experts (Jones, Ralph Abraham). The role of the Internet in revitalizing Dee studies. But—how much of the world we currently live in might be said to be an outgrowth of Dee’s work?