Peter Marshall’s (2006) “The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague” takes a sideways look at everyone’s favourite mad Holy Roman Emperor, by using those around him as a kind of slightly wonky mirror. The choice of who makes the cut is a bit arbitrary in places: John Dee (who never came close to [...] Read more »
Word just in from my friend Peter Nockolds, concerning some John Dee Anniversary events…
Magus John Dee died 400 years ago, either this year or next, and to mark this there are a series of events in Mortlake Parish Church where he was buried (although the grave isn’t marked). These begin with a talk tomorrow evening, [...] Read more »
One of the major figures in the early 20th century history of the Voynich Manuscript was John Matthews Manly, the man who definitively debunked Newbold’s strange micrographic cipher claims. During the First World War, Manly worked in the US Military Intelligence Division, and left in 1919 having attained the rank of Major. After that, he [...] Read more »
My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II).
It is certainly true [...] Read more »
For those of you who like the whole John Dee / Edward Kelley mythology schtick, I thought I’d mention that the Wikipedia entry on Edward Kelley points to a silly link with the Blair Witch Project. There, the witch is named “Elly Kedward”, a spoonerism of his name: there’s even a fake site for her [...] Read more »
I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world’s favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in “The Biggest Secret” (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice.
Much as you’d expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For [...] Read more »
Nosing around in Borders the other day, I noticed a popular teen alchemist-themed book called “The Alchemyst” (2007) by Michael Scott: it had a nice cover, good in-store marketing (early-teen-eye-high positioning, right next to some Philip Pullman books), and featured John Dee and Nicholas Flamel, doing a whole bunch of the-world-is-in-danger demonological things with two [...] Read more »
I’ve just started reading Colin Wilson’s “The Philosopher’s Stone“, so I thought it might be a good idea to blog about an article from the Metromagick blog where he also plays a role.
The piece is called “Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon & the Cleansing of the World“, and was written by Colin Low in 1996-2000. [...] Read more »
John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, [...] Read more »
No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I’m talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film’s gigantic marketing spend?)
The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, [...] Read more »
