ABSTRACT
In a postscript added to his preface to A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr John Dee … and Some Spirits, Meric Casaubon reacts to the appearance of Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, which had been published, Casaubon says, ‘Since this Preface was written, and almost printed’ in 1659 (in actual fact it had been printed seven years earlier in 1652).1 Although he says that he will ‘meddle not’ with Ashmole’s ‘Judgement concerning Dr Dee, or [Edward] Kelley’, and that his postscript was not written ‘of purpose to oppose the Author’, it is clear that he deeply disapproved of Ashmole’s veneration of Dee and Kelley as alchemical authorities, and he is more unsparing of Dee’s angelic conversations here than he is in the preface itself, reminding his readers of Kelley’s reputation as a necromancer, and reprinting the relevant passages from John Weever’s 1631 Funerall Monuments to underline his point.2 The strong likelihood (in Casaubon’s view) of the veracity of these rumours casts a dim light on Dee’s involvement with Kelley:
1 E. Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum; containing severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne ancient language. Faithfully collected … with annotations thereon, by E. Ashmole, etc. (London, 1652).
