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Dr John Dee (1527-1608)

Was Edward Kelley a black magician?

By Gavin Baddeley, writer and consultant specialising in the macabre and exotic

When I was first told the title of this series I misheard it as Martyrs of Darkness, a more evocative moniker than Masters of Darkness. It is also oddly appropriate. For all four of our villains suffered - both in their lives and in the eyes of history - for 'crimes' that seem less serious under closer inspection. Indeed, a case may be made that Rasputin, Crowley, de Sade and Dee were more sinned against than sinning, their positive characteristics far outweighing their supposed moral shortcomings.

Black or white?

Dr John Dee is a special case, for he belongs as part of one of occultism's most notorious double acts, partnered by the scryer Edward Kelley. Subsequent generations of commentators and historians have used this partnership to absolve Dee of charges of villainy, using his friend and employee Kelley as a scapegoat for the good doctor's mistakes and deficiencies.

The story that Dee is the white magician and Kelley the black is seductively simple. But life is seldom cast in clear-cut moral tones of black and white - rather it comes in varying shades of grey. Though grey seems a thoroughly inappropriate description of a life as colourful as that led by Kelley.

Evil or intellectual?

Certainly Kelley was a black magician, though that does not imply that he was 'evil'. The distinction between black and white magic was one frequently made by practitioners themselves, in an attempt to avoid the potentially fatal consequences of being thought in league with the devil. So those medieval and renaissance occultists with pretensions to respectability described their art as 'divine' or 'natural' magic, as opposed to the 'demonic' magic practised by their less scrupulous colleagues. In essence, the former was magic designed to find out more about God's design, in contrast to the latter which was the art of actually trying to change the world to your own ends using supernatural forces. In many ways, rather than the implied moral distinction, white magic was theoretical, while black was practical and experimental.

The black magicians of the middle Ages and renaissance represented an underground academia that existed beneath the surface of Europe's legitimate world of learning. It was composed of wandering scholars who were too rebellious, loose-living or atheistic to find employment in the church, the institution with a jealously-guarded monopoly on learning in that era. Indeed, many black magicians were maverick priests, supplementing their clerical income by moonlighting. Black magicians lived off their wits, becoming nomadic scholarly jacks-of-all-trades while avoiding the attentions of the murderous agents of the church who condemned all intellectual activity not directly under their control.

Scholars or satanists?

Certainly black magicians summoned demons and cast curses, but they more often indulged in a diverse range of turning a buck. Typically, a black magician might be adept at translating Greek and performing conjuring tricks, at casting horoscopes and teaching the classical principles of siege warfare. Certainly many, even most, black magicians were often less than honest, and were motivated by selfishness and the pursuit of pleasure. But compared to the sadistic, holier-than-thou churchmen that condemned them, the practitioners of the black arts were an oddly likeable bunch. And they represent a strange, anarchic force for intellectual freedom, albeit one whose motives were seldom lily-white.

Black magicians are appropriately shadowy figures, whose nefarious activities only come to the historians' attentions when they become embroiled in some high-profile affair. So it was with Kelley, who would almost certainly have disappeared into the mists of time had he not become involved with Dee, something of a celebrity in his day. Kelley's background is shrouded in mystery. Dee had been a brilliant student who studied assiduously (he claims 18 hours a day) at Cambridge University, before becoming a lecturing sensation on the Continent. By contrast, Kelley was kicked out of Oxford for some unspecified misdemeanour.

Criminal or cryptic character?

Rumour then places our young drop-out entering the legal profession, then thinking better of it and setting up as a counterfeiter and forger, before a close encounter with the law courts left him with mutilated ears, literally making him an outcast for the rest of his days. Even this detail has been contested by some authorities, who point out that his ears seem perfectly intact in portraits of the elder Kelley. It is by this route that our half-educated rogue finds himself among the ranks of the black magicians. We next find him plying his new trade in a lonely Lancashire graveyard, digging up a corpse in order to revive and interrogate it. It remains a source of contention as to whether this was to foretell the future of a local nobleman, or to locate buried treasure.

In 1582, Kelley presented himself at the house of Dee. Dee was known to employ black magicians (though he would doubtless have balked at the term) as mediums, and Kelley was able to convince him that the mystic currently in the doctor's employ was crooked (spirits told Edward apparently) and secure the post for himself. In truth, Kelley was always a reluctant medium - that manifest reluctance being among the evidence that his visions were more than mere chicanery. Kelley had originally visited Dee in the hope of securing his assistance in making use of some alchemical powders - one batch of red and one of white - that he had acquired along with a cryptic magical instruction manual that explained how they could be used to manufacture gold. According to Kelley, he'd purchased these artefacts from an innkeeper, who in turn had bought them from two rogues who'd unearthed them in a forgotten archbishop's tomb.

Visionary or con man?

It certainly sounds like a scam. But Kelley evidently believed in magic. Nobody goes on grave-robbing expeditions for fun. Similarly, if Kelley had disappeared with the Dee family silver shortly after arriving, one can accept charges that he was simply a confidence trickster. But he worked in, often claustrophobically, close quarters with Dee for the next six years. Much of this, to Kelley's growing discomfort, was spent scrying with spirits rather than trying to manufacture gold. Kelley seemed well aware that the visions and voices he experienced while scrying may have been dark manifestations of his own unconscious - or 'delusions' as he told Dee. At other times he became convinced that the entities were demons - certainly they took on an increasingly demonic character. It was Dee, who had never seen or heard them, that staked his soul on his improbable conviction that they were angels and insisted that the contact continue.

When the duo finally parted after their peculiar trans-European trek, it looked like Kelley's luck had finally changed. While Dee headed home to sink into gradual obscurity, his erstwhile employee began manufacturing gold for the German Emperor Rudolph II, who rewarded the alchemist with a title, making him Sir Edward Kelley. But his star fell as quickly as it had risen, and when his powers waned (or he was found out), Kelley was gaoled. Spirited to the last, he made two escape attempts. In the first Kelley killed one of his guards but failed to overpower the other. In the second attempt, the ladder Kelley had improvised from bed sheets gave way, and he fell, sustaining injuries that proved fatal in 1597.

Drop out or wash out?

Historians are inclined to recount Kelley's end with a level of smug relish that contrasts starkly with the sympathetic tone adopted to relate Dee's descent from royal favour into poverty. Academics find it easy to relate to Dee, the Elizabethan scholar who not only taught at the Sorbonne, but became something of a lecturing sensation in mathematics. Kelley however, no doubt reminds many a lecturer of their least diligent students. Kelley remained motivated by comfort and cash rather than the pursuit of knowledge. But then he never enjoyed the generous aristocratic patronage that Dee took for granted until his final years. Dee never knew destitution, a condition that had haunted Kelley. It is easy for modern academics on their comfortable salaries to be similarly ignorant, and condemn Kelley as a con man in order to protect the reputation of a scholar who reflects their own grey lives far more than the colourful and cunning Kelley.

Not everybody holds this opinion. 'To condemn Kelley as a cheating charlatan - the accepted view - is simply stupid,' said Crowley. Crowley's admiration went beyond words - he declared himself the reincarnation of Kelley, attempted to replicate the angel magic the Elizabethan duo had undertaken, and hailed the messages Kelley received from the spirits as poetry of rare genius. 'I prefer to judge Kelley from this rather than from stale scandal to whom any magician, as such, smelt of sulphur.' Perhaps it was natural that Crowley - a fellow university drop-out and black magician - should find sympathy with the roguish Kelley just as diligent historians can identify with the bookish Dee. But what are we to make of this - just one rogue tipping his hat to another? One man who knew Crowley was the writer Somerset Maugham, who was sufficiently impressed to use the Beast as the inspiration for the character of Oliver Haddo in his novel The Magician. He would later reflect that Crowley was 'a fake, but not entirely a fake'. Perhaps the same verdict applies to Kelley.