The Voarchadumia & John Dee…
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?
May 24th, 2009 at 5:21 am
Wow! Thanks, Nick! This is quite a post. A huge amount of new material on a perrenially popular topic.
I don’t have much of an opinion on Dee’s Enochian or his project in general. I had gone by the general opinion that he had been duped by Kellley with Enochian, but I know hardly any details; I don’t share the widespread interest on Dee.
The idea that he might have been practicing steganography in his angelic language is very interesting – that had never occurred to me! Dee was certainly very bright and I know he was often believed to be a spy.
You might want to discuss some of this with Jacques Guy. Jacques knew Don Laycock very well and has done his own research on Enochian, so he may well be able to offer some insight.
Dennis
May 24th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Hi Dennis,
Glad you enjoyed the post!
I thought I ought to add the references here that you passed on to me a few days ago:-
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
May 24th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Just to clarify, the Monas appears frequently in Dee’s annotations to his copy of the Voarchadumia rather than the text itself. His marginalia is discussed by Hilda Norrgrén, ‘Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee’s Reading of Pantheus’s Voarchadumia’ in Ambix vol. 52 no. 3 (November 2005).
Meric Casaubon first pointed out the similarities of Dee’s angelic letters to those in other alphabets in his Preface to ‘A True and Faithful Relation: ‘the original Characters (as I take it) of the holy tongue, they are no other, for the most most part but such as were set out and published long agoe by one Theseus Ambrosus out of Magical books, as himself professeth.’ Dee owned a copy of Ambrosius’ Introductio in Chaldaicam Linguam which cites amongst others Pantheus and Agrippa as sources and although no single alphabet is identical to Dee’s angelic, individual characters recorded by Dee and Kelley do resemble certain of those printed by Ambrosius, though not ‘for the most part’ as claimed by Casaubon.
Agrippa relied on book six of Trithemius’ Polygraphia for most of his alphabets and it seems likely that Trithemius in turn derived some of his material from explicitly magical texts that had previously circulated in manuscript. It would appear to me that Dee’s reception of the alphabet falls within this general, magical, tradition, particularly as it was used for only three specific purposes within the corpus: for a lamen, on the ‘holy table’, and for lettering the book known as Loagaeth. It isn’t mentioned at all, explicitly or implicitly, in relation to the later and probably more ordered ‘Enochian’ material, and Dee, rather passively I suppose, doesn’t seem to have done anything with the alphabet beyond what he was specifically told to do.
The languages are an altogether different proposition, and I think it’s unlikely Dee or Kelley knew of any specific precedents beyond the type of verba mystica to be found in magical texts or notions of, say, Hebrew as a holy language. Beyond his cabalistic speculations I’m not persuaded he was specifically looking for a divine or angelic language. But this is a complex and, as you say, contentious area!
Alan
May 24th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your comments! I corrected “Steganographia” to “Polygraphia” in the text, and had long forgotten Casaubon’s Preface, thanks for bringing that up too. Also, the observation that Dee’s angelic alphabet is arguably no more than an adjunct to the main Enochian material is something that is particularly relevant – I think I shall have to revisit all of this again very soon…
Thanks also for the Norrgrén paper, that has to be well worth a read. Its abstract is given here, and reads as follows:-
John Dee: a rational mechanic using an irrational toolbox, hmmm?
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
May 28th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Hi Nick, the point of the reference to Hepburn’s Virga Aurea was that it contains a listing of 70 alchemical? cipher alphabets, which may include or resemble the ones we see in Codex Palatinus Germanicus 597. That may be getting lost among all the trees.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Ah, OK – I missed that bit. Yes, Virga Aurea might well have CPG597′s cipher alphabet, then. I’ll check it out, thanks!
July 13th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Fascinating, the whole thing about Enoch, as the messenger/angelos par excellence – excuse my polygloss.
You know he was one of those paragons whose body was set suspended under the arch of a bridge. Like Aristotle in Sicily, these leading lights appear to have been part of the same religion practiced in Harran – at least judging by the rather vicious act performed on one of the oracular members of the Harranian temple after a wrong prophecy about the outcome of Julian’s battle. I can imagine a bird-speech kind of language among the Enoch-followers. I look forward to the translation.