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The Voarchadumia & John Dee…
Posted by nickpelling on May 23rd, 2009
Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this was largely a reprise of his 1518 book but dressed in additional historical garb for an air of antiquity and authority. Yet given that his word “Voarchadumia” was a mash-up of Hebrew and Chaldean (meaning something vaguely about making gold), it has to be said that Pantheo’s take on history was probably no less spurious than his artificially-constructed title.
Still, the Voarchadumia covers languages, alchemy, metallurgy, and various other topics: intriguingly, the well-regarded alchemy expert Adam McLean is currently working on a translation of it, and plans to be finished by the end of this year. Probably because it is currently only in Latin, the Voarchadumia seems to be one of those books which people often claim to have read, but which in fact they have only read about. Which makes it fertile soil for the weed-like seeds of misremembered half-stories to flourish in…
For example, the two most-repeated tales about the Voarchadumia concern its influence on John Dee: in one, Dee’s (1564) Monas Hieroglyphica symbol allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia, while in the other, Dee’s Enochian alphabet allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia. Are these true?
Well… it’s certainly true that Dee had his own copy of the Voarchadumia (which is now in the British Library, complete with Dee’s annotations!) However, having just gone through a scan of a 1550 edition of Voarchadumia, I can say that the first story seems just flat wrong (though please tell me if the symbol appears in a different edition!), while Dee’s angelic alphabet (though note that Dee didn’t actually call this “Enochian”) similarly fails to make any obvious appearance there.
Even so, what does appear on leaves 15v and 16r in Pantheo’s Voarchadumia, however, is an alphabet attributed to Enoch (”Antiquiores autem hi:& concessi Enoch“, to be precise) which has many visual similarities to Dee’s Enochian in its stroke structure and stylistics… even if none of the actual glyphs does actually match. Saying that the two are the same would be an easy mistake to make if you weren’t being careful.
A further angelic alphabet (marked “Angelicum“) appears in James Bonaventure Hepburn’s (1573-1620) early 17th century Virga Aurea, which contains 70 secret or ancient alphabets: Adam McLean discussed this alphabet in The Hermetic Journal in 1980, and even translated the (tiny) amount of text on the engraving depicted beside it. Even Athanasius Kircher subsequently wrote on angelic languages!
But angelic languages first appeared prior to the Voarchadumia, both in Trithemius’ Steganographia Polygraphia (where the prototypical stylistic blend of Arabic and Ethiopic lettering common to these Angelic Alphabets seems to have emerged first) and in Agrippa’s three Coelestis, Malachim, & Transitus Fluvii alphabets – according to Wikipedia, the Transitus Fluvii alphabet first appeared a decade before Agrippa (you may also have seen this in the Blair Witch Project!) It has been claimed that Pantheo formed the Voarchadumia’s second alphabet by munging together these three Agrippan alphabets, with fairly sensible historical reasoning, I’d say.
All in all, it should be clear that Dee did not invent the idea of an angelic or Enochian language – but then again, neither did Pantheo. And furthermore, I don’t believe that angelic languages were common in Dee’s time – though this runs contrary to the Wikipedia Enochian page, which cites Tobias Churton’s [very enjoyable] book “The Golden Builders” as support (but I can’t find any substantial reference there at all). My own reading of the evidence is that the notion of talking to angels in their own angelic language (for that was their purpose) was no more than a marginal, post-rationalized (if affectedly pious) Renaissance reworking of the kind of nigromancy still widespread in the Trecento and Quattrocento.
And so for me, the central issue about Dee is whether he was using the notion of angelic language in a fully necromantic sense (as modern occultists believe, following Aleister Crowley et al), or in a fully steganographic sense (pace Trithemius and possibly Agrippa), or perhaps some kind of epistemologically-confused mix of the two. This is hugely tricky and contentious, because it goes right to the heart of Dee’s entire Renaissance project - i.e. was he scientific or occult? Did Casaubon really have any right to label Dee a Faustian conjuror?
What do you think?
The Voarchadumia & John Dee…
Posted by nickpelling on May 23rd, 2009
Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this was largely a reprise of his 1518 book but dressed in additional historical garb for an air of antiquity and authority. Yet given that his word “Voarchadumia” was a mash-up of Hebrew and Chaldean (meaning something vaguely about making gold), it has to be said that Pantheo’s take on history was probably no less spurious than his artificially-constructed title.
Still, the Voarchadumia covers languages, alchemy, metallurgy, and various other topics: intriguingly, the well-regarded alchemy expert Adam McLean is currently working on a translation of it, and plans to be finished by the end of this year. Probably because it is currently only in Latin, the Voarchadumia seems to be one of those books which people often claim to have read, but which in fact they have only read about. Which makes it fertile soil for the weed-like seeds of misremembered half-stories to flourish in…
For example, the two most-repeated tales about the Voarchadumia concern its influence on John Dee: in one, Dee’s (1564) Monas Hieroglyphica symbol allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia, while in the other, Dee’s Enochian alphabet allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia. Are these true?
Well… it’s certainly true that Dee had his own copy of the Voarchadumia (which is now in the British Library, complete with Dee’s annotations!) However, having just gone through a scan of a 1550 edition of Voarchadumia, I can say that the first story seems just flat wrong (though please tell me if the symbol appears in a different edition!), while Dee’s angelic alphabet (though note that Dee didn’t actually call this “Enochian”) similarly fails to make any obvious appearance there.
Even so, what does appear on leaves 15v and 16r in Pantheo’s Voarchadumia, however, is an alphabet attributed to Enoch (”Antiquiores autem hi:& concessi Enoch“, to be precise) which has many visual similarities to Dee’s Enochian in its stroke structure and stylistics… even if none of the actual glyphs does actually match. Saying that the two are the same would be an easy mistake to make if you weren’t being careful.
A further angelic alphabet (marked “Angelicum“) appears in James Bonaventure Hepburn’s (1573-1620) early 17th century Virga Aurea, which contains 70 secret or ancient alphabets: Adam McLean discussed this alphabet in The Hermetic Journal in 1980, and even translated the (tiny) amount of text on the engraving depicted beside it. Even Athanasius Kircher subsequently wrote on angelic languages!
But angelic languages first appeared prior to the Voarchadumia, both in Trithemius’ Steganographia Polygraphia (where the prototypical stylistic blend of Arabic and Ethiopic lettering common to these Angelic Alphabets seems to have emerged first) and in Agrippa’s three Coelestis, Malachim, & Transitus Fluvii alphabets – according to Wikipedia, the Transitus Fluvii alphabet first appeared a decade before Agrippa (you may also have seen this in the Blair Witch Project!) It has been claimed that Pantheo formed the Voarchadumia’s second alphabet by munging together these three Agrippan alphabets, with fairly sensible historical reasoning, I’d say.
All in all, it should be clear that Dee did not invent the idea of an angelic or Enochian language – but then again, neither did Pantheo. And furthermore, I don’t believe that angelic languages were common in Dee’s time – though this runs contrary to the Wikipedia Enochian page, which cites Tobias Churton’s [very enjoyable] book “The Golden Builders” as support (but I can’t find any substantial reference there at all). My own reading of the evidence is that the notion of talking to angels in their own angelic language (for that was their purpose) was no more than a marginal, post-rationalized (if affectedly pious) Renaissance reworking of the kind of nigromancy still widespread in the Trecento and Quattrocento.
And so for me, the central issue about Dee is whether he was using the notion of angelic language in a fully necromantic sense (as modern occultists believe, following Aleister Crowley et al), or in a fully steganographic sense (pace Trithemius and possibly Agrippa), or perhaps some kind of epistemologically-confused mix of the two. This is hugely tricky and contentious, because it goes right to the heart of Dee’s entire Renaissance project - i.e. was he scientific or occult? Did Casaubon really have any right to label Dee a Faustian conjuror?
What do you think?
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Re: The Voarchadumia & John Dee…
Tue, July 14, 2009 - 4:06 PMI have run into the word "Voarchadumia" before--recently in the context of Dee's work, though I don't remember where. The first place I remember seeing it was in E.R. Eddison's classic fantasy novel, "The Worm Ouroboros"; the word appears in the chapter titled, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower", but it is used without explanation in a ritual for summoning a basilisk. The fact that the word is repeated, I believe about three times in the ritual just at the climax suggests that it is supposed to be the specific word of summoning, which has little to do, apparently with making gold. I assume that Eddison simply found it somewhere and was using it quite out of context with no knowledge of its meaning.
I have not been able to summon anything at all with it, so the idea that its translation relates to the making of gold is the first helpful comment I have seen on the word. Thank you for that.
>>>the central issue about Dee is whether he was using the notion of angelic language in a fully necromantic sense. . .was he scientific or occult?<<<
So far as I can see, Dee was hardly a necromancer, if by necromancer we mean conjuring the spirits of the dead. He believed he was summoning angels, archangels (possibly the Seniors as he calls them) and lesser angels. The names of demons can be culled from his tablets, but all the texts I have seen recommend against using them. But I'm not certain that Dee's opinion is the one that matters here. Edward Kelley, Dee's scryer, seems to have been the one that saw the angels in the shewstone, transmitted to Dee their instructions on how to make the tablets and form the letters of the Enochian language and to have given Dee the translations of the Enochian texts delivered by the angels. Kelley himself is suffciently mysterious to justify any sort of theory that anyone might come up with. He was apparently a thief, since his ears had been cropped before he came to Dee's attention, this being a common punishment for a petty thief at the time. He was later accused of being a fraudulent alchemist when he was working in the employ of Emperor Rudolph II of Prague and died in prison (1597). Apparently Rudolph still had given Kelley enough credence to imprison him in the hope of forcing him to produce the long desired gold.
Given Kelley's unscrupulous character and seemingly low birth, it is doubtful that he had the education to produce the angelic language on his own. Yet Dee, who certainly had both the education and the intelligence to have designed such a language, seems to have relied entirely on Kelley and his visions. The controversy over Kelley's role in these strange transactions still rages. Some regard Dee as Kelley's dupe, while others see him as Kellley's accomplice. It is puzzling to me why Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of Edward Kelley rather than of John Dee. With the information you provide on prior appearances of "angelic languages", it becomes possible that Kelley found some of the sources and cooked up an alphabet by combining several originals, but modern students are convinced that Enochian is a true language with its own grammar and syntax, which makes an invention by Kelley problematic. Maybe neither Dee nor Kelley is telling us the whole story of how Enochian came to be.
Of course, it is common knowledge that Dee became the Astrologer Royal for Elizabeth I, and was given credit for raising the storm that doomed the Armada. He later became a diplomatic messenger and probably a spy for England. And he was probably the most accomplished cryptographer in the world, or at least in Europe in his day. A man of mystery, who left so much unexplained that occultists continue quarreling over him to this day.
Scientific or occult? The two were scarcely distinguished from each other in Dee's lifetime. They are commonly believed to have been finally divorced with Robert Boyle's publication of his "The Sceptical Chymist" in 1661, long after the death of Dr. Dee in approximately 1608. So I suspect John Dee considered himself a scientist with a deep interest in occult matters. Sorry, I can't give you more of an answer, but it seems to me the evidence for a more definitive appraisal is lacking.
Sources: Magick in Theory and Practice--Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy--Dennis Hauck, The Worm Ouroboros--E.R. Eddison, personal recollection of various tidbits of information, Wikipedia articles on John Dee, Edward Kelley and Emperor Rudolph the II.
With love under will,
Bob, Adastra,
The Wizzard of Jacksonville
