John Dee and the Empire of Angels
Jason Louv
Hardcover & Ebook | 560 Pages | The Ultimate Guide to John Dee, Enochian & Western Magick | Available Now
This is the bestselling story of John Dee, the 16th century's foremost scientific genius. Dee laid the foundations for both modern science and the British Empire. Yet because of his other interests—magick and the occult—Dee has been erased from history. With the help of a criminal psychic named Edward Kelley, Dee devoted ten years to contacting angels. These sessions delivered Enochian, the language spoken before the fall from Eden. With these secrets, Dee would attempt to remake the entire world. From science to spirituality to geopolitics, Louv's book shows how John Dee created the modern world. And it shows how the occultists Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons used Dee's magic to bring that world to an end.
Enochian Magick & the Occult Roots of the Modern World
John Dee (1527-1608), Queen Elizabeth I's court advisor and astrologer, was the foremost scientific genius of the 16th century. Laying the foundation for modern science, he actively promoted mathematics and astronomy as well as made advances in navigation and optics that helped elevate England to the foremost imperial power in the world. Centuries ahead of his time, his theoretical work included the concept of light speed and prototypes for telescopes and solar panels. Dee, the original “007” (his crown-given moniker), even invented the idea of a “British Empire,” envisioning fledgling America as the new Atlantis, himself as Merlin, and Elizabeth as Arthur.
But, as Jason Louv explains, Dee was suppressed from mainstream history because he spent the second half of his career developing a method for contacting angels. After a brilliant ascent from star student at Cambridge to scientific advisor to the Queen, Dee, with the help of a disreputable, criminal psychic named Edward Kelley, devoted ten years to communing with the angels and archangels of God. These spirit communications gave him the keys to Enochian, the language that mankind spoke before the fall from Eden. Piecing together Dee's fragmentary Spirit Diaries and scrying sessions, the author examines Enochian in precise detail and explains how the angels used Dee and Kelley as agents to establish a New World Order that they hoped would unify all monotheistic religions and eventually dominate the entire globe.
Presenting a comprehensive overview of Dee's life and work, Louv examines his scientific achievements, intelligence and spy work, imperial strategizing, and Enochian magick, establishing a psychohistory of John Dee as a singular force and fundamental driver of Western history. Exploring Dee's influence on Sir Francis Bacon, the development of modern science, 17th-century Rosicrucianism, the 19th-century occult revival, and 20th-century occultists such as Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, and Anton LaVey, Louv shows how John Dee continues to impact science and the occult to this day.
An Occult Quest for the Nature of Reality
Occult Superscience
Discover Dee's scientific achievements, spy work, and imperial strategizing. Explore his methods of communicating with angels. Unearth the secret history of the world.
Angelic Exolinguistics
Piece together Dee's Spirit Diaries. Reveal the totality of Enochian magick. Unveil the angels' occult plan to establish a New World Order and initiate the apocalypse.
Arcane Anti-History
Study Dee's influence on Sir Francis Bacon, modern science, Rosicrucianism, and 20th-century occultists Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, and countless others.
Meet the Magicians
Spanning 400 years, John Dee and the Empire of Angels traces the secret history of the world, and the unlikely cast of characters it revolved around.
Dr. John Dee
The Magus
Imperial magus to Queen Elizabeth I, Dr. John Dee spent his career strategizing how to build a British Empire... as well as seeking out the secrets of the occult. Finally, with the aid of a criminal psychic name Edward Kelley, he made contact with angels: Angels who delivered the Enochian magical system, and showed him how to use it to help them create a New World Order.
Edward Kelley
The Fool
An alcoholic, itinerant con-man, Kelley spent his early life drifting through England, forging money, summoning demons and performing necromantic rituals for the highest bidder. But when he met John dee, he found a new calling: Acting as a psychic channel for angels. In the end, Kelley became a pawn in a much, much bigger game - the angels plan to bring about the Apocalypse.
Aleister Crowley
The Wickedest Man in the World
Four centuries after Dee and Kelley made contact with angels, the occultist Aleister Crowley used their Enochian system to help establish a New Aeon, which he claimed would overthrow and replace all religions on the planet. Fashioning himself 'The Beast 666,' Crowley immersed himself in drugs, ritual magic, depraved sex and mind control - but was his Aeon to be one of spiritual liberation, or of the enslavement of humanity to cosmic darkness?
Victor Neuberg
The Channel
Crowley's lover and partner in undertaking the working of Dee's system of magick in the Algerian desert, Neuberg would witness the heights and depths of the Aethyrs, pushed far beyond his psychic breaking point as he and Crowley confronted the daemonic guardians of the universe's innermost workings. Nearly shattered by Crowley, Neuburg would forevermore live in the shadow of his former master, haunted by what the Angels revealed in their Enochian workings.
Jack Parsons
The Antichrist
A brilliant rocket scientist, Jack Parsons helped found NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and is one of the men responsible for getting America to the moon. But by night, he was Aleister Crowley's most dedicated student, combining Dee and Kelley's Enochian language with sex and drug-fueled occult rituals to help hasten the Apocalypse and crown himself the Antichrist - before he came to a tragic and shocking end.
Marjorie Cameron
The Harbinger of the Apocalypse
'Summoned' by Jack Parsons in the Mojave Desert of California, the artist Marjorie Cameron believed that her Enochian sexual wokrings with Parsons tore open the fabric of reality, creating the modern UFO phenomenon by allowing alien beings to pour into our universe. Cameron soon came to identify herself as the avatar of BABALON, the Scarlet Woman - and worked to ground the Apocalypse Machine created by Dee, Kelley, Crowley and Parsons into the world throughout the 1950s and 60s.
Book Reviews
Check out what occult luminaries are saying:
Douglas Rushkoff
John Dee is the original Elizabethan mage-scientist, who invented the British Empire and invested it with magical power. He is to Elizabeth what Merlin was to Arthur, except he was real. Here's the original technology of weaponized memes, psyops, and empire building in a gripping, authoritative account of how and why we became an occult society.
Media theorist and author of Aleister and Adolf, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Present Shock
Mitch Horowitz
Any biographical treatment of John Dee must be nothing less than epic—and Jason Louv has gloriously achieved this in John Dee and the Empire of Angels, a truly comprehensive, broad-spectrum, and lavishly beautiful historical study of the master magus and the counter-current of secret history Dee launched into the world, which has affected us all.
PEN Award-winning author of Occult America and The Miracle Club
Duncan Trussell
A crazy plunge into the weird world of angels and those brave or foolish enough to try to contact them. Be prepared, for this book illuminates the dark corners of history that many institutions would prefer to go unexplored and unmentioned—I'm thankful for the angels that aided Jason in his creation of this mind-spinning, glorious work of occult genius.
Host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, creator of The Midnight Gospel
Pam Grossman
Jason Louv's John Dee and the Empire of Angels is a groundbreaking new assessment of one of the Western world's most influential polymaths. It brings together a staggering amount of research on Dee's life and multivalent contributions to the fields of science, mathematics, esotericism, and religious thought. Louv is an assured guide, patiently unknotting each thread of Dee's output—angelic or otherwise—then weaving them all together again to show how these ideas form the very fabric of modern 'reality' as we know it. Through a combination of intellectual rigor, sensitivity to both historical and current socio-political climates, and perhaps a bit of his own intuitive scrying, Louv offers us a crystalline view of John Dee's visionary mind and complicated legacy.
Author of What Is a Witch and host of The Witch Wave podcast
Lon Milo DuQuette
Renaissance magus John Dee boldly set out to systematically tap the mind of God by communicating directly with a complex hierarchy of 'angelic' intelligences. It can be argued that he succeeded. His magical diaries have long held intense fascination among Qabalists, alchemists, and explorers of human consciousness who have developed workable magical systems from these records. Jason Louv's work succeeds, with breathtaking thoroughness, to tell this amazing and true magical tale. More importantly, he also reveals the profound geopolitical significance of Dee's magical explorations—effects that still shape the global realities of today.
Author of Enochian Vision Magick: An Introduction and Practical Guide to the Magick of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley and Enochian World of Aleister Crowley
Zach Leary
John Dee was a crucial piece within the formation of the Elizabethan age. Jason Louv weaves a masterfully poetic web that first introduces you and then sucks you into Dee's luminous world of magick, Hermetic philosophy and occult divinity. He gracefully presents Dee's mind blowing relationship not just with Elizabeth I but with the British Empire as a whole, whose influence on the modern world is felt even today. John Dee and the Empire of Angels is not just a book about the occult and magick, it's also a unique historical reference guide that I found to be a hypnotic read. Jason is a brilliant mind and writer, and this proves that.
Host of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and It's All Happening podcasts
Brendan McCarthy
Jason Louv's masterful account of the enigmatic Elizabethan magus John Dee places him in the top tier of new esoteric writers... Louv's assertion of Dee as both a creator and custodian of Western civilization is thought-provoking, and is backed up by meticulous research. Highly recommended.
Artist, designer and co-writer of Mad Max: Fury Road, Dream Gang, Rogan Gosh
Dr. Ralph Abraham
The Dee story is among the most mystifying and important in the entire history of the Western Esoteric Tradition. And here, Jason Louv has given us the most complete, complex, and balanced account yet of Dee and his aftermath. An awesome achievement.
Professor emeritus of mathematics, University of California, Santa Cruz; chaos theorist; author of Chaos, Gaia, Eros and coauthor of The Evolutionary Mind and Trialogues at the Edge of the West
Lionel Snell (a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes
This is the first book I've seen where Dee's angelic magic is neither discussed in isolation, nor dismissed as an eccentric sideline, but recognized as a key part of Dee's philosophy and political influence right up to the present day. I only wish I had found a book like this when I first became interested in John Dee.
Author, My Years of Magical Thinking, Uncle Ramsey's Little Book of Demons
E. Elias Merhige
Dee's sixteenth century work in magic and angelic technology is the precursor to the unconscious, technology-driven times in which we now live, with our iPhones and iPads (the scrying glasses of the twenty-first century). Dee was a kind of 'divine Coder'. He saw the future not in binary, not in ones and zeroes, but in the harnessing of living angelic hierarchies that could be mastered consciously, inwardly and outwardly, as a key towards an enlightened utopian vision for mankind. Never has there been a more valuable and prescient time than NOW to have John Dee and the Empire of Angels published.
Director of Begotten and Shadow of the Vampire
Carl Abrahamsson
Jason Louv's book is absolutely invaluable. It contextualizes the very bedrock that Western ceremonial magic is based on. Dee and Kelly's legendary experiments are the cornerstone of our Western understanding of how magic works. But there's more to it than that. Louv's impressive work is not only an enjoyable, adventurous journey into esoteric history but also one into the multifaceted—and sometimes dangerous—machinations of the human mind.
Author of Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward
Gordon White
Our current magical revival is largely defined by the restoration of context. It is pleasing to see Dee and Kelley put back into the historical currents that they both defined and were defined by, where they can come alive once again after more than a century's relegation to the cabinets of Victorian orders. The Queen's conjuror returns to Mortlake.
Author of The Chaos Protocols and Star.Ships, host of the Rune Soup podcast and blog
Jason Louv
Jason Louv is the author of eight books, including Generation Hex, Ultraculture, and Thee Psychick Bible. As a journalist, he has covered surveillance, international trade and the dark side of technology for VICE News, Boing Boing, Motherboard and many more. As a futurist and strategist, Jason has worked on Buzz Aldrin's international campaign to colonize Mars, Google's artificial intelligence program, and in many more strange and wonderful places.
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