The Great Magician of the Elizabethan Age
Full of intriguing details, this book by Benjamin Woolley is highly enjoyable.
John Dee has been considered by others during his lifetime and afterwards to be a great philosopher and magician and by others to be mad or deluded. In his book The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee, Benjamin Woolley is open-minded in his study of an extremely complex intellectual, who may have frequently discoursed with spirits and angels in his study.
I love the description of the visit to Dr Dee by the Spirit girl Madimi, at his house at Mortlake, London in 1583. As she skips around amongst his piles books and papers and esoteric instruments, in his cluttered private library, the heaps of papers seem to move aside to prevent her tripping over them. The visit is recorded by Dee in his diary, along with many other visits by angels (or demonic sprites) and transcribed by Woolley.
” She seemed to play up and down, child-like, and seemed to go in and out behind my books, lying on heaps: and as she should ever go between them, the books seemed to give place sufficiently, distinguishing one heap from another, while she passed between them…Am I not a fine maiden?” the spirit asked flirtatiously. “Give me leave to play in your house”.
Dee’s skryer (medium) Edward Kelley, noted that as she skipped passed the ‘great perspective glass’ in the corner of the room, there was no reflection in the mirror.
My own version of a Madimi-like spirit girl in the attic, is a much plainer dressed little person. But I like to think she has a similar playful energy.
2026
Teresa Wilson
Sculpture installation in the attic. Work in progress.