From the Vault: John Dee, Part 1

Elizabethan scholar Dr. John Dee was one of the most learned men of the 16th century, applying his intense mathematical intellect to matters scientific, political, alchemical and occult. He advised Queen Elizabeth, sought communion with angelic beings, advocated British expansion and plunged the depths of human knowledge in age of great change. In this first of two episodes on the topic, Robert and Christian discuss the world, life and magic of the enigmatic Dr. Dee. (Originally published Dec. 6, 2016)

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's
time to venture into the vault for a classic episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This one originally published
in December of and uh, I hope you like wizards. Yeah,
that's right. This is the first of two episodes that
dealt with the enigmatic Dr d Dr John d who

(00:29):
was quite an interesting character. He advised Queen Elizabeth, sought
communion with angelic being's advocated British expansion, and it just
generally plunged the depths of human knowledge in an age
of great change. Uh. He's a figure that we discussed
in our recent episodes on the Vontage Manuscript and uh
and it may well come up again, like very a

(00:49):
very notable historic figure, no doubt. We hope you enjoyed
this classic episode about Oh wait this episode, I'm not
on this one. Just to warn you. This is you
and Christian, right, This was an episode I did with Christian.
Not like you need a warning. I'm just I'm about
to disappear. fALS warning Joe fans. Uh, He's not going
to be present in this episode. But it sounds like

(01:11):
a really good one. Welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
From how stuff works dot com. Thy character must have
the names of the five angels written in the midst
of sigellum, a myth graven upon the other side in

(01:35):
a circle in the midst whereof must the stone be
which was also brought wherein thou shalt at time to
behold privately to thyself the state of God's people through
the whole earth. Go and thou shalt receive terry, and

(01:55):
you shall receive sleep, and you shall see. But walk
and your eyes shall be fully opened. One thing, which
is the ground and element of thy desire, is already profited.
And out of seven thou hast been instructed of the
lesser pot most perfectly. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow

(02:22):
your mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Christian Sager.
And from the beginning there you may think that we were,
I don't know, performing a ritual of some kind and
trying to summon an angel, And you would be half right.
That's right. That is uh. That is a quote from
the writings of the legendary, the mysterious, the influential Dr

(02:42):
John d. The topic of both episodes this week. Uh,
and he is a fascinating character and elizabethan mathematician, UH, conjurer,
possibly a spy cryptographer. The list goes on first and
foremost a mathematician, but it gets it gets a lot

(03:04):
more complicated than that. Is you try and piece together
this man, the world he lived in, and what he
really believed in. D Is is one of those characters
that we've We've been talking about doing an episode on
him for a while now, and when we dove into
the research, we we really realized, Okay, this needs to
be two episodes. And the way that we've decided to

(03:25):
split these episodes categorically is this first episode is going
to be more grounded in the sexy, occult magical stuff,
and the second episode is going to be grounded in
his scientific endeavors and his state craft. Um. There's so
much about him that I learned doing this, and there's

(03:46):
so many different interpretations too. He's just this fascinating individual. UM.
If you're unfamiliar with him, I guess the best way
to describe him is that he was one of the
leading intellectuals of his time. It may not sound like it,
given some of the things we're gonna say in these episodes,
but he had magical interests. But despite that, he brought

(04:08):
developments to England and cartography, navigation, mathematics, astronomy and cryptography,
and his reputation in alchemy and astrology totally influenced the
court of Queen Elizabeth the first. He was no doubt
influential in that respect. Yeah, he he he had a
rapport with with Queen Elizabeth. Uh. Some historians go as

(04:31):
far as to say that they were friends, and you
do get the idea that there may have been as
much of a friendship as was possible between the Queen
of England and uh, you know, essentially a common born
intellectual who dabbled in magic. Right yeah, um, we'll say
this later, but he did think of himself as her Merlin,

(04:54):
which is really fascinating and comes into play. So the
I said that we're going to split these episodes up,
but one thing that you have to keep in mind
is that the magic and the science overlap a lot too. Um,
and so even in things like when he's advising them
on national matters, on expanding the English Empire, he's still

(05:15):
thinking in magical terms, like he's Merlin and she's King Arthur, right,
He's he's a guy who, like I said, it's it's
essential to keep the mathematics and in mind. But it's
not like he's a guy who, all right, I'm gonna
do my job here, which is science or mathematics, and
then in my free time I'm going to do a
little sorcery and in and then also I have this
advising gig with the Queen. He saw it all connected.

(05:39):
He saw it as part of a single tapestry of cosmos.
And so there's a note I just want to provide
here before we really dive in deep, which is I
was reading an article in History Today that came out
earlier this year by a woman named Katie Burkewood, and
she says, keep in mind, the main sources for the

(06:01):
story of Dee's life are all his own. Um so
mainly what we're looking at. What we didn't look at
this We looked at people's interpretation of those primary sources.
That's true, But mainly his diaries, which cover the period
from fifteen seventy seven to sixteen oh seven, so about

(06:22):
from his age of fifty until he died. Those were
a big source of his uh. I guess life history,
and this also coincides with the period of time where
he was up to his most fantastic endeavors, so keep
that in mind. His early years were documented in his
own autobiographical account, which was written in fifteen ninety four,

(06:46):
and what he was trying to do is explain his
past to the crown, basically to Queen Elizabeth, because he
was trying to secure a royal position or an appointment
that would secure him a regular income. Uh. And another
source is the books that were recovered from his stolen collection.
So we're gonna talk probably a lot throughout the course
of these episodes about he had this infamously huge library

(07:10):
and it was ransacked at one point, and some of
those books have been recovered, uh. And he wrote extensive
annotations in their margins, so some uh D scholars, I guess,
go and find these copies and read those annotations to
try to learn more about him. Apparently much of that
library now resides with the Royal College of Physicians, I

(07:31):
think in England. Yeah, so it's it's kind of difficult
to tell truth from fiction in some of these cases.
And Robert and I did our best when we read
something that sounded really strange to corroborate it with multiple sources,
and we we did find that, But then again, like
those sources were all mainly coming from D's own writings,

(07:54):
that's right there. There. Of course a number of wonderful
books out there on D and his work, some books
with with with different focuses than others. Uh. One book
that I kept looking at was the one by Benjamin Wooley.
Oh yeah, The Queen's Conjure. Uh, excellent book, very readable.
I recommend that to to anybody. But yeah, this is

(08:14):
a guy that is really, in many ways a near
unbelievable character, truly stranger than fiction. Like if if Alan
Moore wrote him into a story, you chalk it up to, oh, well,
that's just Alan Moore's wondrous imagination and use of fictional
and historic and pop culture hybridization. The same if he
had appeared in an umberto Echo book, it might be
tempted to think, oh, this is a fantastic creation, this

(08:36):
Dr D. But but no, he this was a real
real man. He lived, he wrote, and I'm not sure
there has been anyone quite like him since. We we
see parallels and some of the figures that we've covered
on the show, and we'll and and are planning to
cover such as John c. Lilly or Jack Parsons, but

(08:57):
but D kind of stands alone. Yeah, And it's funny
that you mentioned Alan Moore because one of the sources
that I went to was a History Channel special that
aired in two thousand and two and it was narrated
by Brian Cox. It's all about John D's life, and
Alan Moore is one of the go to experts that

(09:18):
the summoned. You know, they cut to him every once
in a while and you hear that out in more voice.
But he's he really knows his stuff about d um
I imagine because Alan Moore is really into sort of
like the history of English magic and stuff like that
outside of his own fiction. But um, yeah, he the

(09:39):
first first of all, I recommend, like, if you're really
into John D. Go check out this this video. I
watched it on YouTube, and uh, some of it's hilarious
and some of it's really illuminating. But there's um they
like do that thing that the History Channel used to
do where they like re enact scenes of a person's
life with actors and they have like kind of makeshift

(10:00):
low budget like sets and stuff, so like shadowy scenes
if somebody dressed as John D shuffling papers around sort
of yeah that thing, or like him looking into a
crystal ball, or him just walking across the field. Yeah.
So I think probably the best way for us to
to really first introduce you to John D is let's
just do a broad stroke overview of his life. You know,

(10:22):
we've given you sort of the the two sentence summary
of who John D was, but we'll start with his
life and then we'll really dive in deep into the
magic stuff. Yeah, for with a guy like this, and
I feel like this is the best approach. We'll give
you the broad strokes and then we'll go back in
and discuss the areas that we we we have time
to discuss in these episodes. Yeah, Yeah, And I just
want to say to like, keep in mind that there

(10:45):
are people whose like entire career is writing about this guy.
So what we cover in like two two and a
half hours and podcasts, maybe you may be out there,
you may know some stuff about D and be like, well,
why didn't you you cover that? There's only so much
we could do here, So we really tried to condense
it down to fit the show. All right, well here
we go, let's kick it off with July. John d

(11:08):
is born in London, England. Yeah, and my first question
is who raises a guy like John D? Like, how
does he how does he end up like this? So
his father, Roland, was a merchant of fabrics and textiles
and he worked for King Henry the eighth. In fifteen
fifty three, his father was actually indicted and imprisoned in
the Tower of London, presumably because he had ties to

(11:31):
Protestant reformists and sympathizers of the late King Edward. So
there's a lot of This is a theme that goes
on throughout D's life, is the political struggles back and
forth between the Catholic and Protestant Church. Yeah, that's definitely
going on in the background the whole time. Now fifty two,
John d enters St. John's College at Cambridge. Yeah, and

(11:53):
so from what I read at the time, the curriculum
for such a college included something called the trivium, which
is grammar, rhetoric and logic. And once you master those
things you get your what would be your your bachelor's basically, uh,
and then the quadrivium is what you study for your masters,
and that's astronomy, geography, music and mathematics. Now okay, again

(12:18):
this is self reported from his own thing that he
wrote to the Queen later in life. But D says
that while he was there he only slept four hours
a night, so all he could do is study. So
on one hand he was essentially applying for a position
in this but also as as as we discussed more
about John D, I don't really doubt this for a second.

(12:40):
He seems like the kind of guy who who may
have only slept four hours a night, he can constantly
consume information. So in fifty five he really he receives
that bachelor's degree in Arts and readership. Seven he takes
his first scientific learning excursion of the Low Countries of

(13:00):
continental Europe, and this becomes important later on because he
spends an increasingly increasing amount of times there on various excursions.
Eight he gets his master's degree from Cambridge studying mathematics
and navigation, and then fifteen forty eight to fifteen fifty
one his second learning excursion to the Low Countries and

(13:22):
uh in particular. On this trip he studied under mathematician
cartographers pezro Nonez Gema for Silius, Abraham Ortelius and Gerardis Mercator,
as well as through his own studies in Paris and elsewhere. Yeah,
and these the second set of travels, these benefited England.
What he would do is he'd share his findings from

(13:43):
these travels with Queen Elizabeth's associate. So for here's an example,
in fifteen sixty two he discovered the works of Trithemius,
and we're going to talk about this later. He introduced
the court and subsequently Elizabeth to the study of modern
cryptography through this, ultimately changing I guess war games, right

(14:03):
with the way that they used cryptography. Yeah, yeah, well,
we'll definitely get into that in this into the second episode.
But this was a time when when coded messages were
were really important. There was a mayor a matter of
life and life and death. Now, as you mentioned, at
this time, he is he's he seems to have his
sight set on official, on an official position with the crown,
and in doing so, he turned down a mathematical professorship

(14:26):
at the University of Paris, and he turned down a
similar position at the University of Oxford that was in
fifty one and fifty four, and then he returned to England.
He went to court and there he offered mathematical science
instruction to courtiers, to navigators, just generally trying to make
himself useful to the court. He served as a consultant

(14:47):
and an astrologer to, among others, Queen Mary the first. Yeah.
So before he worked for Mary's court, he had a
patron who was the Duke of Northumberland, and this guy
tried to place his own utter in law on the
throne before Mary was placed there. He was charged with
treason and executed. And this is one of the first
of many times indeed's life where he had less influence

(15:11):
because he had sort of like followed the wrong person.
And he has these periods of like waxing and waning
influence over the English monarchy. Yeah, getting involved in the
machinations of of the court. Here, um, who's in and
who's out, Which which stars rising, which one's falling. So
then in fifteen fifty five, this is when he's jailed

(15:33):
on the charge of being a conjuror. He was soon
released thereafter. But let's let's pause for a second and
try to figure this out. So the thinking here is
that Queen Mary's examiners were the ones who jailed him,
possibly with charges of conspiring with her sister Elizabeth, who
was arrival at the time, and he was allegedly casting

(15:53):
horoscopes for Queen Mary and her family without their permission,
and because the predictions were bad for Mary, it was
considered to be practicing witchcraft against the crown. The story
goes like this that while Elizabeth was under house arrest,
she asked d to perform her in Mary's horoscope, and
so he did, and it predicted that Elizabeth would have

(16:16):
a long reign and that Mary would die, which you
know kind of happened, uh, And this is what landed
him in jail. Now after this, after he gets out
of jail, he's placed under the charge of Edmund Bonner,
who is the Bishop of London. And in one of
these writings he actually refers to Bonner as his quote

(16:37):
singular friend, and there's some dispute about like are they
actually friends or is this like his sarcastic term for
this guy who's like kind of his jailer um. But
after this point, all of these written works included sections
defending his reputation from slander. So he was well aware
that his mixture of astrology and magic and conjuring with

(17:00):
science and mathematics and statesmanship was under scrutiny, and not
for the last time. So in eight he published an
Afrotistic Introduction which presented his his own views on natural philosophy, philosophy,
and astrology. And then fifteen fifty eight, the same year,
this is also when the rule of Queen Elizabeth the

(17:20):
First begins. Yeah, and so the rumor here again this
is from d Zone writings, is that when Elizabeth took power,
she asked d to choose her coronation date based on astrology.
Now who knows. I mean, yes, there's evidence that he
was jailed performing horoscopes for her previously, so why wouldn't she.

(17:42):
But then, you know he's the one claiming this stuff,
and we know that later on in life he's just
constantly trying to gain favor of the court by sort
of but he's he's bolstering his resume. So yeah, he
becomes the scientific and medical advisor to the Queen and
uh and we're in the mid fifteen sixties. He establishes
himself at more Lake near London, where he builds a laboratory,

(18:06):
the largest private library in England more than four thousand
books in manuscripts, and he, uh, you know, we'll we'll
describe some more of the settings here. But it sounds
like a fabulous place. And he would he would invite
other scholars to come in and and use his books
if they needed to look something up. And of course
he was constantly in communication with other people, Like it

(18:26):
was I was reading just yesterday about how he had
these correspondence, uh, series of correspondence with with Chico Brahi,
the really yeah, the famed astronomer. Yeah, famously lost his
nose in a sword fight, another fabulous character at the time. Yeah,
we should totally do it, Tycho Brahe episode. Um. Yeah.

(18:47):
So the other thing about this to note, just for
context about the library, we say four thousand books, and
some of you are like, y, I got four thousand
books in my house, right. Well, here's context. He had
two thousand, six seventy menu scripts in that collection. Cambridge
University at the time only had four hundred and fifty
one manuscripts and Oxford University only had three hundred and

(19:08):
seventy nine. So this was considered a massive library at
the time. Like, if you're thinking about this, like uh,
going back to the Grimoire episode that you and I
did a couple of years ago, right, like, like, these
are not just like pulp books. They're not like soft covers, right,
Like some of these are written on parchment or their
palamp sests. Right, So I mean he's got like a

(19:30):
serious collection here in The books are unique too. Yeah.
In many cases, these would be books where you're wanting
to read them. You might ask arounding and you'll find out, oh,
well Dr D has a copy of that. You should
go ask him. Maybe you'll get to look at it.
Here's another interesting thing I wanted to point out as well.
There's no evidence that he ever earned a doctoral degree,
but he was always referred to as Dr D. Kind

(19:53):
of interesting. Now. In a fifteen sixty four he published
the Hieroglyphic Monad, in which he offered a single mathematical
magical symbol as the key to unlocking, uh, the unity
of nature. Yeah, and this, I mean, I guess we'll
maybe like post this on the landing page or something
we we actually shared or you shared it on Facebook yesterday,

(20:15):
kind of teasing the audience, say this is what we're
working on. One person got it and they referred to
him as the d um But it kind of looks like,
how do you pronounce that that German industrial band e'
Stretton's nine streads into a new Boton. Yeah, it does.
In fact, I had to look up a new Boton's
logo just to make sure that they weren't too similar,

(20:36):
because I'm like, I never thought about this before, but
you know, they're two distinct symbols, but they are reminiscent
of one another. Yeah, very much. So for some reason,
I also find it looks like it kind of looks
like it could be a character from a SpongeBob cartoon.
I don't know. It does have like an anthropologic quality
to it, of like a head with arms and legs
and then like devil's horns. Yeah, or it makes me

(20:57):
think of the the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five for some reason,
the ones that was like an eye on a hand.
I can't remember the name of them, but at any rate,
this was his his Lands and Slaughterhouse five. Yeah, there's
a there's an alien zoo for humans. I forgot all
about that. Yeah, okay, I just think about the horrors
of so In fifteen seventy he created the first English

(21:24):
translation of Euclid's Elements and added an influential preface that
offered a powerful manifesto unquote the dignity and usefulness of
the mathematical sciences, and he seems to certainly have highly
regarded mathematics is the key to understanding the natural world,
but also believed in the value of the occult to

(21:44):
unlock the deeper mysteries of the universe. And again, his
ideas of the occult and mathematics are kind of intertwined.
This is definitely going to be a theme that we
returned to over and over again in these episodes. Mathematics
is like the through line for him, whether he or
odd he's trying to talk to angels or if he's
just trying to plot out maps for people to discover

(22:05):
the Northwest Passage. Yeah, I feel like his mind was
inherently mathematic. If you if he had lived in our age,
I feel like you would undoubtedly be a hacker or
a high level program in addition to to whatever else
he was into. The History special compared him to Stephen Hawking,
and I thought that was an interesting comparison. Although I'm
still I'm still trying to I don't know if there's

(22:27):
anybody alive that that really has these two things together.
You're right, Lily and Jack Parsons are similar. But I'm
really trying to rack my brain for somebody who's like
a really influential intellectual but also dabbles in the occult right,
that's still very much an outsider in his interest and
speaking of being an outsider in his interest three three

(22:48):
through fifteen eighty nine, in order to unlock the deeper
mysteries of the universe, the sought communication with angelic entities
with the aid of convicted counterfeiter towards turn to occult sensation.
Edward Kelly, who's a very complex character and of himself,
will get into Kelly. So so these two end up
running around conducting seances in England, Poland and Bohemia and

(23:13):
have this rather volatile partnership. So it's like something out
of a reality TV show, like oh, you know how
like every time on the show, on this show, when
when we do some of these historical characters are like, oh,
this would make a great amc oh yeah show. The
Dr D Edward Kelly's show would be amazing because it

(23:35):
would be like them constantly like conniving behind one another's backs,
and then sitting in a room looking into a crystal ball,
talking to angels, and then like trying to figure out
a sleep with one another's wives. Yeah, this is another
situation where d described Kelly as a friend and it
makes me wonder, like what it makes me question his, uh,

(23:57):
his criteria for friendship because he talks about Kelly who
was arguably a scoundrel and may have been conning him
half the time at least. And then there's Queen Elizabeth,
who you know, there's no way they were really friends.
They were as you know, like I say, as much
of a friendship as you could have with the Queen
of England. Uh, that bishop I mentioned earlier. Yeah, and

(24:17):
then his his his the warden of his prison essentially
at the time. So I don't know, I don't know
if he ever really got friendship exactly, but it's difficult
in life. So Kelly and him, they they end up
going to essentially Poland and then Bohemia, conducting their seances
all along the way, and then they come back. Yeah

(24:38):
that kind of falls up, comes back. Yeah, their their
relationship falls apart. He returns to England nine to try
and try and put things back together. He finds his
home vandalized, his library has been ransacked. Uh, and he's
also come back to in England that is less tolerant
of his ideas, increasingly less tolerant. And then the Bubonic

(24:59):
plague strikes and kills pretty much everybody in his family,
including his wife and five of his eight children. So
he's utterly devastated. He's lost his library, he's lost his family.
He doesn't have as much influence as he used to,
so in fift his friends raised money for him and
interceded on his behalf with Queen Elizabeth, you know, just

(25:21):
trying to land him in the right place, right, So
she appoints him warden of Manchester College. And and this
is from what I was reading, this is not an
ideal place for him to wind up. He's not, you know,
he's constantly being undermined minded by other individuals there. He
doesn't have a lot of clout, but he has a
good way to shuffle him off and get him. So

(25:42):
he doesn't really have any influence over her court, but
he still feels, you know, he's cashing a paycheck. And
in sixteen o three, Queen Elizabeth dies and James the
First takes to the throne and provides no support for D. Yeah.
So so for some context, James the First was fervent
against witchcraft and he personally oversaw the torture of women

(26:04):
who were accused of it. So he's not going to
be particularly fond of John D and his angels crying
and astrology and alchemy. And then in December of eight
D dies following what is described as years of poverty
and isolation. However, it so even for someone like D,

(26:25):
it doesn't seem like poverty and isolation for him is
you know, quite the bottom of the barrel poverty and
isolation like this. A lot of this is him being
forced to sell off a lot of his prize possessions,
that sort of thing. Maybe not the proudest period of
his of his life. But I didn't read anything to
indicate that he was on the streets. Yeah, so I mean,
like to get an indication. I was looking at pictures

(26:45):
of um, what Mortlake looked like his estate and where
it is now today. I think there's like apartments right
along the River Thames, and uh it's you know, by
all accounts like it was a huge house. Uh. He
still had a lot of things. I don't think he
was going hungry. I just don't think he was wealthy
or had influence over the aristocracy the way he might

(27:05):
ride in the past. Um, now here's this is really interesting.
There's also evidence that he didn't actually die in December, uh,
and that he three months later was when he died
in the following March in the London home of an acquaintance.
So get ready out there, conspiracy theorist, because I'm sure

(27:26):
there's a lot of people out there who are like, oh,
John D found the Philosopher's Stone and his immortal and
uh is still with us today or something, or these
are fake accounts of his death, you know, stuff like that.
But the amazing thing about D is it's all everything
is already unbelievable enough with how to even going into
the conjecture of conspiracy theory. Uh, though there's a lot

(27:47):
of fun to be had there as well. Um. Hey,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and
when we come back, we are going to break into
the spirituality of John D and ultimately into his occult practices.
So it's important to remember that that D was born
into an age and a place of Christendom. So yes,

(28:11):
everyone still murdered each other every year over their beliefs,
and much of this entailed conflicts of Protestants versus Catholics,
the church versus heretics, and so forth. Uh, you really
had to go quite rustic or quite esoteric in order
to find alternative modes of belief that you could, you know,
actually embrace all of the stranger ideas that D entangled

(28:33):
himself with astrology, angelic communication, magic, etcetera. These were all
still connected to the culture of Christianity into the essentially
like the mythos of Christianity, I guess you'd say. And
there's a lot of evidence to suggest that D was
a devoted Christian his entire life, though certainly in a
challenging time for the faithful, which I guess it always

(28:54):
is uh, And he was. He was not afraid to
explore ideas and writings that others deemed danger is to
the faithful. And it's also worth noting here that like
a guy like the who you know you can say
was a weird guy, he had a he had a
unique brain. He had a unique view of everything. This
ability to see magic and mathematics and everything else wrapped

(29:17):
up into one, so he could, you know, cling to
a Christian faith. But his view of the Christian faith
was was and it was inherently different I think from
from most people's at the time. Yeah, I think it
was different. But at the same the way I like
to think of it is that he was into Christian mysticism, right,

(29:37):
and that like he he he was a believer. He
was trying to do the right thing. I think he
was trying to ride the line between Protestantism and Catholicism
so that he basically could stay alive. Um, but that
the stuff that he believed was the mystical parts that
were sort of like some people were like, oh yeah,
that that that exists. I don't know if I subscribed

(29:59):
to that or not, and others were like, oh yeah,
that's part of it. Yeah, talking to angels, uh, looking
into crystal balls. Yeah, definitely astrology, Okay, you know. Um
in the same way, I don't know, I'm like trying
to think of a modern day example, Like I guess
Caballa keeps coming to mind, and that's not even modern day.
I mean Cabrala was around at the time of d
was alive. Um, So maybe that's an example, and he

(30:21):
mentioned astrology. D kept a private diary where he mentioned
a lot of when we know comes from his own writings.
But this was a time before diaries and calendars of
the modern sort, so d would would plot out the
positions of the planets in reference to the recorded details
of his daily life, likely in order to identify links
between his personal life and celestial events. So it's an

(30:43):
uncharacteristically intimate account of Elizabethan life, much of it lost, however,
but still there's a there's a lot there. It's kind
of been written in shorthand, and it will include things like,
you know, his personal finances, jobs he picked up. Um.
I actually have an example here from his diary October

(31:03):
seven My anger with Edward my coke because of his disorder.
October eight Mr Richard Western lent me ten pounds for
a year. October nine, I dined with Sir Walter Rawleigh
at Durham House. October eleven to Edwards part of wagons.
Mr Banks lent me upon loan till after Christmas five pounds.

(31:23):
Mr Emory sent me three pounds by my servant Richard
walka dine. So it's that sort of thing. So he's
just like kind of acquiring like a couple of pounds here,
a couple of pounds there for his services presumably. I mean,
I doubt that they're just giving it to him as donations.
Maybe he read their horoscope or maybe he I don't know,
I wrote a map for them or something. Yeah, it's
kind of like an It's kind of like he kept

(31:45):
an astrologically aligned chart of his finances to a certain
extent in these and he was doing a lot of
freelance activities like to to sup because he's a guy
who's spent a lot of money on books and UH
and his his his interests, and to support that, he
would do freelance horoscopes, you have freelance dream interpretations. And
I was even reading that he occasionally did some freelance

(32:09):
forensics work account of him apparently of him weighing in
on a robbery UH and deciding who was who was guilty.
It's kind of it's kind of faint going from his notes,
but that seems to be the case. So d you
believed in a natural magic? When we start talking about
his use of magic and his belief in magic and
his magic, that's tied up with mathematics. He saw magic

(32:33):
as the human ability to tap into the forces that
God unleashed when he created the cosmos, and that set
things in motion. So that's important, not not the power
of God, but the powers that God unleashed. Yeah, he
saw natural magic as actually a legitimate study of science,
and in his own books he listed the magical arts

(32:54):
as being a derivative subject of mathematics. Keep in mind
that his thought process wasn't usual at the time. Many
thought science and magic were different facets to just understand
understand what was going on in the mind of God. Yeah,
and it's interesting too to look at his thoughts on
magic that he's essentially talking about technology here, granted with

(33:15):
a lot of occult bells and whistles, but he's talking
about figuring out how these forces in the universe work
and figuring out how to manipulate those forces. You know,
it's a really interesting connection to to the magic as
technology thing for him. When he was in college, he
created special effects for a production of Aristophanes packs and

(33:38):
he was branded Sorcerer because of it. He apparently built
a giant mechanical flying scare of I don't know if
it actually flew, but it was it was like an automaton,
and it was apparently so realistic to the people who
were watching it that they were like, oh, he must
have used magic to do this, but it was just engineering. Yeah,

(33:59):
this was a crazy moment in his life, and his
life was just full of these where yeah, he just
did f X for a play and the FX were
so good that people said, well, that was pretty amazing.
This guy is probably somehow involved with demonic forces. It's
the only excuse. And I was reading like people weren't

(34:20):
really sure exactly how he pulled it off, too, because
he would have had limited resources with the stage at
that time, so it's not we're not even exactly sure
what he did how he achieved the effect, but but
he certainly what was I think it was pretty clear
that he was using practical effects and not not actual
sorcery here. Um. Another thing that we should note here too,

(34:42):
especially before we really get into his angelic communication, is
that the idea of an angelic language, which is referred
to as a Nochian, is said to be the mathematics
behind how creation was was made. So you know, keep
in mind, like as we're going through all of this
he's thinking of his interrogations of angels as being scientific

(35:08):
in nature, and that he's trying to understand how the
world works. Yes. Yeah, so in a sense, the Anochian
language and mathematics are like one is the secular and
one is the spiritual version of the same idea that
there's this underlying word, there's this underlying system that we
can understand, tap into and therefore gain insight into how

(35:29):
the universe works. Yeah. Alright, so here's the juicy stuff,
the angelic communication. So he really wanted to communicate with
angels to help him understand natural knowledge. And the way
he did this was by attempting to conjure spirits using
a crystal and this this was common at the time. Yeah.
And it's I want to add real quick for anyone
out there is not familiar with with Christianity and angels

(35:52):
and all that, because I found myself trying to explain
angels to my son the other that's gonna about it,
about what angels were, uh, And I didn't tell him
all of this, but in the in the Christian tradition,
the angels, of course the the servants of God. They
are powerful and at times very terrifying beings that do
everything from deliver messages to you know, destroy whole cities

(36:16):
and turn people into pillars of salt, that sort of thing.
I I wrote a video that we shot here about
different types of angels throughout Christian mysticism, and there's like,
you know, there's the thrones and the dominions, and they're
all there's like nine different categories. I think cherubs yeah,
uh and yeah, I mean they're utterly alien and terrifying

(36:36):
when you think about them from the context of these time. Yeah. Um,
so we're not the fluffy cherubs of the modern version
of the cherubs or renaissance cherub that you see on
a coffee mug or something. Yeah. No, not at all,
not at all. Some of them were like wheels of
burning fire with eyeballs in the middle and stuff. I mean,
like truly horrifying kind of imagery. Yeah. Fantasy illustra der

(37:00):
Michael Kluda, great. Yeah, he did a number of angel
illustrations for a short lived card game called Harressy Kingdom
Comeback in the nineties, and he did a fabulous job
invoking this I feel like that this this potent, intimidating
alien but also kind of but also holy feeling vision

(37:21):
of of an angelic entity. So I always connected those
when I try and think about these these angelic beings
as we encounter in UH in Christian tradition, and I
imagine as D was performing these seances that we're about
to talk about, although he didn't really see anything himself,
that's what he was imagining was in the room with him.
So why didn't he see anything himself? Well, D himself

(37:45):
couldn't see spirits, so he relied on psychics enter Edward Kelly.
So Edward Kelly, uh is this twenty six year old
cunning man. You may have heard us talk about cunning
men before on the show. I was referring to them
in an episode of UM when we were talking about

(38:06):
Warren Ellis's book Cunning Plans, because cunning men are sort
of I guess the best way to explain it real
quickly is just like an English shamanic tradition maybe UM.
And but he was also you know, a criminal and
a counterfeitter. He had his ears cropped from his head
before he met D. So think about that when you're
thinking about this guy. At least one of them, and

(38:27):
he apparently always wore a cowl to cover up the garage,
and that was for counterfeiting coins. Um okay. So D
and Kelly they meet for the first time in fifteen two. Yeah,
and this, this whole episode has there there's a lot
more detail, but I'll just try to go through the
basics here. So Kelly was calling himself Talbot at the time,

(38:49):
which is one of his his aliases. And uh, and
it's I think it's certainly fitting that even his introduction
to D was was clothed in deception. So he was
apparently he was apparently a pretty curious man character, as
we've talked about. He had difficulty kneeling, he walked with
the staff, and he's a young dude. But but he
also had had at least one ear cropped, uh for

(39:10):
for for engaging in counterfeiting. He also may have served
as a crooked notary in London at one port at
one point reputed to have dabbled in necromancy. He arrived
at D's to lie low after allegedly cheating a lady
out of some jewels. But he seems to have to
have talked his way out of trouble with with the
individuals who were pursuing him over this, and in his

(39:32):
private diary, D noted that quote I have confirmed that
Talbot was was a fraud. And Kelly himself came along
later at some point and scribbled Inde's diary a horrible
and slander's life, which which I think says a lot
about this friendship. Um. So that yeah, their friendship seems

(39:54):
to have been rather complicated. Uh D seems to have
considered him a friend, and certainly it would go on
to and a great deal of time with him in
the years they had. But it's also a quarrelsome intense relationship.
And to what extent was Kelly using D? To what
extent did D c himself is using Kelly if he
saw he saw perhaps Kelly is as an in the
way of of of better communicating with this spiritual realm

(40:18):
um So it's it's it's a complex relationship again. So
D's diary recounts a series of conversations with angels that
Kelly facilitated, and the hope was that D would get
these angels to help him recover the original language spoken
by Adam before the confusion at Babel, which you know
we referred to earlier as a nokian Um. And the

(40:41):
way that we know about this was the Spirit Diaries
were actually dug up in a field ten years after
his death, and in them is a completely new language
with its own grammar and syntax. Uh. The angels supposedly
provided him with the Anochian language, which they said was
the er language of humanity. And I want to I

(41:04):
want to add one thing in here, which is that,
you know, as I was reading through all this stuff,
I was utterly convinced that Edward Kelly was scamming d
the whole time, and that he was just making up
the names of these angel characters and performing there whatever
their traits were, and just making the whole thing up.
But Alan Moore in that History Channel thing points out, sure,

(41:29):
that's probably true, but how on earth did somebody like
Edward Kelly invent an entire language on the fly. He
wasn't a linguistics expert. He would have had to have
been a genius to just create a fake language out
of nowhere. And people have since studied an Occhi and
have looked over these notes and it's you know, it

(41:50):
functions as a language. So uh, the you know, the
big question is like, well, okay, if he wasn't talking
to angels, how did Edward Kelly come up with this? Uh? Yeah,
because you're left with a few possibilities here. As I understand,
it's either, ay, he actually did come up with this
this material, and there's some questions about about whether or
not he had the background to do it. Um the

(42:12):
other possibility and this seems this seems to to square
with what we know about his his character. Perhaps he
stole it from somewhere he he copied it from someone else,
and we're just there's a there's a certain amount of
ambiguity about where that might have been, where where it
might have been stolen from, right, Yeah, and that we
don't know now. Kelly, as he was looking through his

(42:33):
crystal ball or his scrying mirror, said that the angels
were angry with humanity for being captivated by anything but God,
and they described to d the order of the Cosmos,
instructions for rituals and predictions of the future, as well
as the Anochian language. Their major pronouncement was that that

(42:54):
they wanted the world to be united under a single
religion that united all the denominations of Christianity, along with
Judaism and Islam. So essentially, you know, four hundred years ago,
these angels quote unquote, we're advocating for globalism. So it's
kind of fascinating when you think about it, especially like
if we consider like Kelly was probably making the whole

(43:16):
thing up. He was like advocating for this very like
futuristic idea of socioeconomics. You know, it's it's fascinating. Yeah,
I can easily imagine a scenario where where one of
these angels is saying, look, Christianity, juda Judaism, Islam, these uh,
these factions are not gonna work everything out in the

(43:37):
foreseeable future. Better that we just combine it all into
one and then everybody can be unified. Now, for Kelly's part,
as you know, as he's relaying these messages from the angels,
he's also saying to D these angels are actually demons,
and I'm terrified to them because they know that I
previously had participated in some demonic grim wire magic Um

(44:00):
and D was like, nope, we've got to continue. I
absolutely insisted that we continue. I mean, Kelly was basically
like a prisoner and dzone um and the two of
them even asked the angels for money at one point,
and Kelly reportedly asked them for a loan, like like
they were gonna make money appear out of nowhere and
then he would give it back to them or something.

(44:21):
I don't know. So and and keep in mind too,
it's very likely that this is all just a fiction
in his own head that he's enacting in front of
D for D's purposes. Right. But then also, I mean,
when when you're when you're dealing with this kind of
magic and and if you're considering this some sort of
demonic entity that you're you're communicating with, uh, I mean

(44:42):
that that has some very real life ramifications, not an
age where you can just walk around on the street
and talk about your conversations with demons. So while they're
in the middle of all this and they're they're working
at AM more like they UH come into contact with
the third party. And this guy's name, he's a Polish
prince in his him is Lord Albert Laski UH, and

(45:03):
he had visited England and claimed that he was there
simply to meet the queen and enjoy the sceneries. UH.
He had previously been suspected of trying to steal the
Polish throne. Everybody's trying to steal a throne in this story. Yeah,
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind
about the about the European setting at the time is

(45:23):
this was not an age of stability. This was an
age of tense politics, an age of war, an age
of of rather robust espionage, UM coded messages going back
and forth, and and people people dying when these codes
are unraveled. So Lasky's involvement with these guys is is

(45:46):
weird and debated, and Robert and I had to look
to a couple of different books to try to figure
out how much we could, you know, resolve as to
what was his involvement in the situation. Apparently he started
showing up at the ances and this was considered problematic,
I think by Kelly because there was a third party

(46:06):
involved there, probably because Kelly was afraid that he would
get caught um. But also the idea was basically like
why would you why would you sit on on these seances?
Some demon could come out and destroy you. You know,
it's like this horribly scary thing. There's also, you know,
some question about whether or not he was an informer
either for Poland or possibly the Holy Roman Empire. Um.

(46:28):
Either way, it seems that he was the one who
eventually leads them to Poland. Um. And the story goes
that he was duped by Edward Kelly and the whole
scrying thing, and he believed that great things were meant
for Kelly. Uh, and so he convinces them to return
to Poland with him in fifteen eighty three, and they

(46:49):
pack up their whole family, uh, and all their stuff
with them, except for the library, this huge library. Uh.
Now there's a lot of stuff that goes on in Poland.
We'll get into that. But when they get there, their experiments,
whatever they were doing, I think it was alchemical in nature,
were so costly that Laski lost his fortune in lands

(47:12):
trying to fund the two of their work. And when
it became apparent that he couldn't afford this any longer, uh,
the spirits began to express their doubts through Kelly that
Laski may not have been the right man to bring
about the changes in Europe that they desired. Yeah. Now,
this is a period of time where where Kelly just
increasingly seems like he's just a con artist, you know,

(47:35):
making promises of gold, like generating gold through alchemy for
his benefactors, and then here when things don't go as planned,
when he can't deliver, he cast doubt on his benefactors. Yeah,
and and and the way that the last KI basically
gets rid of them as he says, you know, I'm
gonna pay for you guys to go to Prague and
I'll provide you with a letter of introduction to Emperor

(47:56):
Rudolph the second his problem. Then, Now, I think we
mentioned this in the you know, the short bio at
the beginning, but apparently you know Rudolph threw D out
of the Holy Roman Empire. Now, some say it was
because he suspected that D was an English spy. Now,
considering you know what we know about D and cryptography

(48:17):
and statecraft, maybe he was. We're gonna talk about that
more in the next episode. But there's also evidence that
the Angels told D that he needed to go to
Rudolph and tell Rudolph that he was possessed by demons. Now,
the Catholic Church were aware of this, and they considered
D and Kelly a threat. Think about this though, like
in context of the time, D is so much of

(48:40):
a believer in what Kelly is telling him that he's
willing to go to the Emperor and be like, sorry,
you're possessed by demons and you you know you need
to really turn your life around. Why don't you listen
to us? I mean, that's an executable offense. Luckily he
just was exiled. Now it seems that D was very

(49:03):
sincere about this, while it also seems that Kelly was
probably duping him and their relationship lasted for ten years.
Here's where it all falls apart. So the angels told
them to swap wives. Sound again, it sounds like reality
TV show to me. Uh. There's this angel that they
keep communicating with named Medimi, and she's described as being

(49:25):
kind of this, um, I don't know, like coquettish little
girl that uh Kelly would describers like running around the
room and stuff. And she told them you guys have
to share all things in common, and they interpreted that
as meaning their wives. Now, Jane d was D's wife
at the time. She was his third wife. He had

(49:47):
had two previous wives who died I believe of illness.
She was much younger than him. I think she was
in like her mid twenties. And he was in his fifties,
and she was reportedly very upset about this because, by
all accounts, Edward Kelly was not uh an attractive man
or you know, a trustworthy man. So the last thing
she wanted to do was have to sleep with this guy.

(50:09):
But D thought it was a valid command from the angels,
especially because then even D was like, hey, I need
some uh some confirmation on this. So Kelly's like, okay,
let me look into the screwing ball over here, and
he summons the angel Uriel, who's like a pretty high
up in the hierarchy of angels, and Uriel confirms that

(50:30):
He's like, yep, you guys have to share everything. So
two days after they drew up their wife swapping contract,
then the Scarlet Woman Babylon appeared to Kelly. Now some
of you may recognize this from like a Crowley in
magic Um. She's also known as the Horror of Babylon

(50:50):
and Revelations. This was so scary to them, or at
least two D that they parted ways and their sessions
east forever. They they they their relationship ended. Kelly ended
up wandering around Bohemia, and he then convinces Rudolph the second, Hey,
I know alchemy, I might be able to use the

(51:13):
Philosopher's stone to make you gold. Yeah, and this would uh,
this would seem to be the just to spell the
final chapter of of Edward Kelly's life. Um, you know,
at this point the story I really d and Kelly
certainly kind of created, seemed to have created like codependently,
their their own little crazy trip here and uh and

(51:38):
I feel feel bad for the women that were sucked
along the way. But things finally come apart, they come
to pieces. I feel like the is the character who
certainly comes out off as more honest, more devout, whereas,
as you know, Kelly is is probably just a con
artist who's also buying into certain amounts of his own

(51:58):
con So I don't think one should take solace from
such things. But it seems that Kelly died in fifteen
seven or fifty in a check castle where he was
imprisoned for failing to produce that alchemist gold. And he
apparently died from injury sustained while trying to escape. According
to Benjamin Woolly's book, UM, Kelly tried to climb from

(52:21):
the window on a rope of knotted sheets. You know,
just like in the movies, and then fell breaking both legs.
And this was after drugging the guards with opium smuggled
in by his wife Joanna. This guy. Yeah. D later
writes that he'd heard that Kelly quote had been Swain,
and there were rumors that that Kelly, even at the time,

(52:44):
had faked his own death and was continuing to practice
alchemy in southern Germany or possibly Russia. But then then
the conspiracy theorists would say, like, he went on to
live for hundreds of years and he was rescputed. But
I have a feeling and it seems like the more
historians tend to agree that, yeah, he probably fell out

(53:07):
of that fell from that that that rope of sheets
and broke both his legs and then subsequently died of
the injuries. Yeah, that sounds right to me. So why
don't we take one more break, and then let's talk
about the sort of spiritual artifacts that come up after
D's death. All right, we're back. So D was for

(53:32):
for whatever else he was, And certainly he was a
lot of things again, all kind of woven together. He
was certainly a collector of occult paraphernalia and occult books. Uh,
and we still have some of these spiritual artifacts. The
British Museum retains ownership of several items that he and
and Kelly utilized in seances and other rights. So we've

(53:54):
already talked about these extensive library and you can think
of it in these terms. This is the way the
d divided it. You had the external bibliotheca, which is
the external library. You had several rooms or appendices which
led off from the library, and in these dependencies of
visitors to his home, described celestial and terrestrial globes, a

(54:19):
five foot quadrant, a ten foot to cross staff, a
sea compass, an accurate quote watch clock, uh portable time piece,
various marvels from his travels. And these rooms also housed
his libraries laboratories, so where multiple skills bubbled. You know,
it sounds like a complete uh you know, set from

(54:39):
like a hammer horror film. Yeah, there's no h It's
not a coincidence that our modern day idea of what
a wizard or a sorcerer looks like is d We
had that idea of him in the robe with a big,
long white beard. Yeah, we have some various we have
various illustrations of of what he looked like and I
think there's probably one the cover image for this episode,

(55:01):
so you have already have an idea in your head.
But yeah, he looked like our modern conception of a wizard.
So he had he had all these these rooms filling
off from the library, from the external library. But then
there was also the internal bibliotheca, the private study, an
adjoining chapel, and there was also an adjoining chapel where,
to quote Wullie, he presumably shelved the Bibles and devotional

(55:25):
texts so conspicuously lacking from the catalogs of the external bibliotheca.
But the internal bibliotheca, the internal library, this is where
he stored his magical equipment, his confidential writings, and certain
books of frequent use. And uh, by the way, this,
if this sounds like a rather costly man cave, you're right. Uh.

(55:47):
It steadily became unsustainable on his mirror eighty pound annual
stipend from his rectory at Long Leadenham. And so he
provided this. Whine provided no number of freelance services, including tutoring,
astrological readings, dream interpretation, medical consultations, and forensic advice, which
already mentioned. So among the various items in his possession. Again,

(56:12):
a few of them survived this day, and one of
them is uh Dr D's Magical mirror, also known as
Dr D's Magical speculum. That I don't know where we're going,
but the party sounds bad. So there's some wonderful images
of this, and I'll try to include some on the
landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. The black mirror here, this uh, this

(56:35):
magical mirror. It's probably not quite what you would imagine
if someone asks you to envision on elizabethan sorcerer's mirror.
It looks rather like part of an Ikea coffee table. Actually,
it's an obsidian quote smoking mirror, so named because the
squire gazing into the mirror would see clouds of smoke,
which would part to reveal a vision. Uh. And and

(56:58):
this is definitely an item that Edward Kelly made use
of as well. Apparently it's of Aztec origin, brought to
Europe after the conquest of Mexico, acquired by Dr D
for use in his magical pursuits in the late sixteenth century,
perhaps created though up to two centuries earlier in Mexico,
and this is in the British Museum. Yeah, it's a obsidian.

(57:21):
There's a wood case covered in tooled leather with label
and a handwriting of one Horace Walpole and a quotation
from a Samuel Butler poem. So do you think this
is where the idea for the title of the show
Black Mirror came from. I've I've never seen there. I've
never seen any connective tissue there, but I couldn't help
but think of it, you know, the scrying mirror. I

(57:42):
know that the black mirror that on the TV show
is you know, supposed to have to do with like
the the the the black screens of personal devices. But
it does make me think too now about scrying mirrors.
And I wondered, Yeah, I wondered to what extent a
smoking mirror is invoked in that. Now, this is not
to be confused with the strange mirror um just as

(58:06):
as it was sometimes called, that was given to d
by one William Pickering the quote great perspective glass. And
this apparently stood in a corner of his study, And
according to Wully, anyone who lunged at the glass with
a dagger found their reflection lunging back at them. Quote
with like hand sword or dagger creating an unsettling effect,

(58:28):
but one that d would use to explain how all
strange effects could be explained by the mathematics of perspective.
So this was not something that he apparently used in
occult practices, and I guess based on what we know
about it, it would have been a nonreversing mirror, of
which there's a few different varieties, and the Queen herself

(58:48):
apparently once stood before this mirror. Now, he also had
two crystal balls, one of which good Old Edward Kelly
or Talbot used to see Uriel. Uh. There's the seal
of God or Sigillum Day used to support other occult
objects such as the crystals. This is also in the
British Museum, so this would have been kind of you know,

(59:09):
the table for their their other objects. Uh. There there
are the crystals themselves, one of which is in the
British Museum. John D's crystal who used for a clairvoyance
and for curing disease metal in courts uh from around
fight two. You can also see images of this, so
it's it's fascinating we have some of the magical artifacts

(59:32):
of his life of his time still with us today.
He Yeah, I can't help but think about again, like
the research that we did about grimoires in that uh,
that a lot of those were created I think earlier
than days time, but he's still relying on a lot
of the I guess magical thinking would be the right

(59:53):
way to put it. Um that surrounded those texts and
then applied them to objects in the way that we
now understand as being just like part of fantasy genre
of like, well, this is how a wizard works. They
have a staff and a crystal and a huge library. Right. Uh. Yeah,

(01:00:13):
it's interesting that you know, certainly Merlin is the the
the the the perfect example of the the the English
wizarding character, and it's certainly a character that had an
influence on D. But then D himself becomes this this
influential icon of of English wizardry. Uh. And it's almost

(01:00:34):
certain that William Shakespeare modeled the character of Prospero in
The Tempest on the character of D. Yeah. Uh And
interesting again, tying it back to the whole Alan Moore thing.
In Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Prospero shows up
as a character and it's heavily implied that he is
John d you know, speaking of sort of modern interpretations

(01:00:56):
as looking around. Uh interestingly enough, Rocky horror our mastermind
Richard O'Brien played Dr D in the nine film Jubilee,
which is kind of like a time traveling Elizabethan thing.
Actor David Threlfall played both the Prospero and Dr John
d uh the later in the second Elizabeth movie. Okay, yeah,

(01:01:17):
I was gonna add because there's been these Elizabeth movies
and I thought they must have included D somehow. Yeah.
I have not seen the Golden Age, but he apparently
he shows up in that, as do some of these
other characters, especially ones will discuss in the next episode
that that deals a little more closely with his you know,
his real world pursuits. And then wait a minute, there's

(01:01:38):
a note here about Terrence McKenna. Yeah, so this largely
according to the Internet movie Database, Terence McKenna played D
in The Alchemical Dream, Rebirth of the Great Work and
the Whole. You can find the whole thing on YouTube.
It seems like he just like McKenna, just narrates it.
I didn't watch the whole, but I didn't I didn't

(01:02:01):
notice a scene in which he dresses up as D.
But still that's like a um, I don't know, like
modern day quote magicians slash psychedelic psychonauts dream come true,
that's kind of a thing. Yeah, So it's interesting to
see these influence in uh in in modern society and entertainment. There,

(01:02:21):
they're a whole list of of examples, and we're not
even gonna get into where D shows up in various
fictional works to varying degrees, either as a as an
amazing side character or occasionally as a central character. Huh Well, okay,
so I feel like we've covered as well as we
can in the time available to us the occult, magical

(01:02:43):
aspects of D. Now we're gonna cut this episode and
our next episode this week is going to be all
about his contributions to science, to state craft and cryptography.
That's right, So pick up with us again in the
next episode and we will dive into more uh tantalizing

(01:03:04):
details about the life and work of Dr John A. D. Now.
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch
with us, don't forget that we are available on social
media at Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Uh, and you
can always visit us at stuff to Blow your mind
dot com. And if you want to send us an
email the old fashioned way, you don't have to use

(01:03:24):
any fancy wizarding equipment. You don't need a magic mirror
or a scrying crystal. Just send it to blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff

(01:03:46):
works dot com