ABSTRACT
The first work of any significance in natural philosophy that Dee published was the Propaedeumata aphoristica that appeared in 1558. 1 Dee’s 120 aphorisms make a very slim volume, although the claims Dee makes for the content are not unpretentious. The subtitle indicates that the treatise concerns ‘certain preeminent virtues of nature’, and the title-page engraving shows the qualities of heat and humidity and the elements earth and water joined to the sun and the moon under the starry vault of the heavens through a symbol that will become Dee’s famous ‘hieroglyphic monad’ (figure 2.1). While the nearest subject matter of the Propaedeumata is astrology, the term ‘astrology’ did not have a simple, unambiguous meaning in the sixteenth century, or earlier for that matter. It could mean, as it does presently, judicial astrology – that is, predicting the influence of heavenly bodies on human affairs, an aspect of the subject that Dee also practised – but it could also mean mathematical astronomy, or simply mathematics. 2 The Propaedeumata is concerned less with the issues of astrological practice than with the cosmology, the natural philosophy, and the scientific method of astrology. I will argue that in the Propaedeumata Dee was addressing himself to astrology primarily as the theoretical and mathematical study of the influences operating on all things in the natural world in the spirit of his later definition of astrology as ‘an Arte Mathematicall, which reasonably demonstrateth the operations and effects, of the natural beames, of light, and secret influence: of the Sterres and Planets: in every element and elementall body …’ (MP, b.iij). He represented the ideas that comprised the Propaedeumata as ‘hypotheses for the confirmation of astrology’, indicating that they were nothing less than a contribution to establishing the foundations and certitude of astrological theories (NA, 58–9). Title page, Propaedeumata aphoristica, 1558 (By permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203083123/841bf10c-0eb9-4179-98dd-a77cd651d55b/content/fig2_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
