On 13 July 1527 John Dee was born in London — the man who would embody, like no other, the border between science and magic. A brilliant mathematician, he owned the largest library in England; an adviser to navigators, he coined the phrase "British Empire". But he was also an astrologer, an alchemist and a seeker of angelic languages.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne, it was Dee who chose — by calculating the positions of the stars — the date of her coronation: 15 January 1559. The queen called him "my philosopher". In later years Dee devoted himself, with the medium Edward Kelley, to the famous "angelic conversations" from which the Enochian language was born, still studied by esotericists around the world.
The court Magus's legacy
Dee died poor and forgotten, but his figure has never stopped growing: he inspired Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest and remains the model of every learned magician in the Western tradition. His life is proof that in Elizabethan England, the stars sat in council beside the crown.