John motherfuckin Dee, bitch.
the man is a legend.
i'm not being flippant here, he really is, quite literally, a legend.
he is also a very real historical figure, and the two are not as separate as you might expect from the figure behind a legend so very like a character from shakespeare.
the thing is, he is a character from shakespeare.
Dee was the original prospero on that fated island in the tempest.
he isnt like a character from fiction; a character from fiction is a century spanning tribute to him.
he was of the elite mathematicians, astronomers, astrologers, geographers, and occultists of his day, named by many as the father of that last one in the united kingdom, and even spent some of his illustrious time here on the mortal plane as consultant to his queen, queen elizabeth I, coining for her the phrase 'the british empire'.
from wikipedia;
Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that number was the basis of all things and the key to knowledge, that God's creation was an act of "numbering". From Hermeticism, he drew the belief that man had the potential for divine power, and he believed this divine power could be exercised through mathematics. His cabalistic angel magic (which was heavily numerological) and his work on practical mathematics (navigation, for example) were simply the exalted and mundane ends of the same spectrum, not the antithetical activities many would see them as today. His ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.
say what you will about him, he is certainly one of history's most wonderful and fearsomely wise sons, and will no doubt be remembered yet another four hundred years after his death as an old man of over eighty.
yes, over eighty. John Dee saw almost all of the 1500s (save the 27 years he was yet to be born), and some of the 1600s.
a very long life, and one filled with many far reaching actions and words.
John motherfucking Dee, bitch.