The more one learns about Dee and his work, the more complex the terrain becomes—and the more threads of the modern world one can trace back to this crucial historical flashpoint.

Jason Louv, The Angelic Reformation: John Dee, Enochian Magick & the Occult Roots of Empire

Consider also:

  1. “Taken together, it seems that Dee may be responsible for nothing less than our present world.”
  2. “one man’s search for an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world”
  3. “if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.”
  4. “He sees that difficulty, adversity and persecution serve a beneficent purpose. These are his ‘wages’: and he learns to accept them ‘without scruple and without diffidence, knowing that he is justly entitled to them, and from the confidence he has in the integrity’ of that Employer who has sent him into this far-off world to prepare the materials for building the temple of the heavenly city.”
  5. “This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme.”