The Early Alchemical Reception of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (original) (raw)
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Ambix, 2017
John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) was a work which involved a close collaboration between its author and his 'singular friend' the Antwerp printer Willem Silvius, in whose house Dee was living whilst he composed the work and saw it through the press. This article considers the reasons why Dee chose to collaborate with Silvius, and the importance of the intellectual cultureand the print tradeof the Low Countries to the development of Dee's outlook. Dee's Monas was probably the first alchemical work which focused exclusively on the diagrammatic representation of the alchemical process, combining diagrams, cosmological schemes and various forms of tabular grid. It is argued that in the Monas the boundaries between typography and alchemy are blurred as the diagrams 'anatomizing' his hieroglyphic sign (the 'Monad') are seen as revealing truths about alchemical substances and processes.
2015
| "John Dee and alchemy"-this phrase, particularly in and around Bohemia, almost automatically triggers the qualifi cation: "Dee was interested in alchemy, but the real adept in their tandem was his scryer, Edward Kelly. " Well, this is not necessarily true. Although it is indeed probable that Kelly was more accomplished and also more devoted to pursuing the way of transmut-ing base metals to gold, his master approached alchemy in a more subtle and complex way. He did not stand next to the furnace and the alembic day and night, but in his diaries he documented his practical experiments. More importantly, however, he theorized about alchemy in an intriguingly abstract way in which he connected alchemy with other sciences, with religion, with human cognition as well as with spiritual regeneration. His work, fi rst and foremost the Monas hieroglyphica, is consequently an important testimony to the recent scholarly debate about the nature of premodern alchemy, championed by William Newman and Lawrence Principe. I would like to revisit in this paper the Monas hieroglyphica as a strong counter argument against Newman and Principe's skepticism about the possible symbolic and spiritual nature of Renaissance alchemy.
The Hermetic Frontispiece: Contextualising John Dee's Hieroglyphic Monad
Ambix, 2017
This essay examines the elaborate title pages of some of alchemist, astrologer, and bibliophile John Dee’s publications with a focus on the two best known works that feature his famous Hieroglyphic Monad, the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) and Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). The aim is to cast light on its context, identify sources for some textual influences in the works, unpack the visual symbolism in the two “monadic” title pages in relation to the two complementary sciences of “superior” and “inferior” astronomy, speculate on some of the more enigmatic details, and conclude with a brief discussion of a possible astrological significance to the dates of composition of the Monas Hieroglyphica.
Pythagorean Number Symbolism, Alchemy, and the Disciplina Noua of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica
Aries, 2010
Tant dans sa Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) que dans sa Mathematical Praeface (1570), John Dee défend une vue des mathématiques qui se veut compatible avec l'idée d'un 'Pythagoricall, and Platonicall perfect scholer'. Cet article montre que ce furent les doctrines arithmologiques contenues dans les épîtres de Trithème—lues par Dee dans une copie du De vsu et mysteriis notarum (1550), qu'il acheta à Anvers en 1562/3—qui exercèrent sur les doctrines pythagoriciennes de la Monas de Dee un impact en profondeur. Alors que des commentateurs antérieurs ont mis l'accent sur l'orientation alchimique de l'oeuvre de Dee, une lecture serrée des lettres de Trithème (et les annotations portées par Dee sur celles-ci) montre qu'il croyait que le connaissance des mystères arithmologiques de Trithème s'étendait bien au-delà de l'alchimie, et devait constituer une 'discipline nouvelle' appelée à devenir une science occulte universelle.
John Dee's Optics, Cabbalism and the Monas Hieroglyphica
Extract from Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden: Brill, 2000) An examination of Dee's text "Monas Hieroglyphica" in the context of his interest in magic mirrors and cabbalism
Roots of Coded Metaphor in John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations, 2020
An enormous amount of research on John Dee has materialized within the last forty years. Contrary to research published earlier in the twentieth century, such relatively recent studies have considered Dee’s idiosyncratic plurality of parallel traditions instead of trying to pigeonhole his activities into one of several discrete camps. That research (much of which is listed in the Bibliography) has been helpful hypothesizing what his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) may mean for several fields of study in an interstitial capacity. Students of Early Modern mathematics, neoplatonism, and the histories of alchemy, chemistry, Christian kabbalah, and astronomy are among the many diverse subjects to which the Monas speaks though its obscure references. Dee’s claim that his “sacred art of writing” can unify and even supersede the boundaries of disciplines is predicated on poesis or poetic constructive-readings of “hieroglyphics” using geometrical forms, letter shapes, and numerical values which are assigned signification in a bank of poetic spiritual meanings. Using the mathematical substructures of the Monas which carry hieroglyphic meanings (coded and compacted meanings), readers may unfold and lift anagogical readings of new relationships between animated elements in motion seen through dynamic cognitive registry, new literary and visual relationships which join with their own preconceived bank of significations to create novel unions of localized, personal meaning and poetic insight. While extant literature directly addresses the Monas’ intertextual references to alchemy, mathematics and theology among others, this paper seeks to consider a wide base of generalized semiotics of the period and its roots in the emblematic and hieroglyphics traditions of Europe. In doing so, it seeks to comment upon less well-known field-relations between “hieroglyphics” and the Monas for a wider readership in cultural studies, facilitating more specialized readings made available in the Bibliography for those interested.
Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry: Papers from Ambix . Edited by Allen G. Debus
Ambix, 2007
The history of alchemy and early chemistry (or chymistry) has come a long way since George Sarton listed alchemy among the "pseudo-sciences" in the critical bibliography of the journal Isis. Alchemy is now studied as a serious subject in its own right and no longer viewed by most scholars in the field as an irrational precursor to the "properly" scientific discipline of chemistry. The role played by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry in this historiographical sea-change was vital, and it is fitting that this volume of essays published by its society journal Ambix ("one of the first journals in the History of Science to be published in the English-speaking world") should be published so close to the seventieth anniversary of the journal's first issue in May 1937. In his brief introduction, the distinguished historian of alchemy and chemistry Allen G. Debus, who has done so much himself to promote the study of early chemistry, emphasises the unparalleled significance of the journal in its coverage of the history of chemistry prior to 1800. Debus makes a judicious and intelligent selection from the journal's extensive backcatalogue, beginning with two articles from its historic first issue by Julius Ruska and F. Sherwood Taylor, running right through to some early pieces by some of the leading historians of alchemy of today (Lawrence M. Principe, William R. Newman and Bruce Moran are all represented here). Debus's selection neatly encapsulates the seismic shifts in the discipline: from the philological and textual-critical focus of the 1930s, through to the more social and cultural historical approaches of today, which seek to set the practices of alchemy and chymistry in the context of patronage systems, religious confessions or other social forms of knowledge construction. The volume also spans the history of alchemy from its murky beginnings in ancient Greece (represented here by studies of Pseudo-Democritus and the ancient "Origins of Greek Alchemy") to "the end of alchemy" in the work of Nicholas Lemery in eighteenth-century France (an "ending" currently being reappraised by contemporary scholars). Between these two extremes, we find a wealth of valuable material on some of the most significant areas of early modern chymistry. Debus's lifelong devotion to the Paracelsian tradition is reflected in his choice of several pieces, including an essay by one of the early doyens of the Society, Walter Pagel, whose views (which rather too loosely conflate Paracelsus's ideas with those of late-antique Neo-Platonists and gnostics such as Plotinus, Numenius and Valentinus), while they might not seem entirely convincing to today's researchers, have undoubted historical significance to the discipline. It is also good to see collected here Piyo Rattansi's pieces from the 1960s on the place of Paracelsianism and van Helmontianism in the Revolutionary and Restoration England of the seventeenth century, and Graham Rees's excellent pieces on the "semi-paracelsian" cosmology of Francis Bacon from the 1970s. The contrast offered by C. H. Josten's piece on Robert Fludd's Philosophicall Key (published in 1963) and Berthold Heinecke's 1995 study of Van Helmont is illuminating, marking as it does the shift between a period in which unreflective description seemed to