Transcription
Our chemical texts are notorious for their obscurity. They employ an elaborate set of systems for chemicals and their transmutations. They relish in metaphor and allegory to explain themselves, and they seek to simultaneously reveal and conceal their truths in a tension that is as maddening as it is alluring.
Of course, this was an obscurity for the sake of obscurity. Alchemy was an extremely technical field of inquiry with competing theoretical and practical differences between these systems. Like all technical fields, a certain kind of jargon emerges to facilitate communication among experts. We shouldn't expect a technical alchemical treatise to be any more comprehensible to a novice than opening a contemporary article from a chemistry journal.
Further, many alchemists were entrepreneurs, and their texts needed to communicate that they were knowledgeable without totally revealing their art. This is just the medieval equivalent of trade secrets.
Finally, the texts are obscured simply because we don't share the same worldview of the alchemist any longer. Their religious, philosophical, and technical theoretical approaches have long since been eclipsed by the Enlightenment. Even if we reject so-called Enlightenment values, we are still approaching these texts from a post-Enlightenment hermeneutic. Their world has significantly lost to us, and even after a couple of generations of very good scholarship, we're only now getting a sense of how they might have understood what they were doing.
This isn't a reason to despair so much as it is to take inspiration, to take their works, in their world, as seriously in a scholarly as we can. There's perhaps no more difficult alchemical texts than that of John Dee, the Magus of Mortlake's 1564 Monas Hieroglyphica. Only 28 pages, including the dedicatory letter, this work has inspired hundreds of pages of commentary, exegesis, and at least one thesis, my own, while I was studying in Amsterdam. The symbol at the heart of the text, the Hieroglyphic Monad, has gone on to become something of an icon for Hermetic philosophy itself, appearing on everything from Rosicrucian pamphlets to anime.
Just what is going on in this text? This video is at least a first part of a three-part series on the Monas Hieroglyphica, one of the most important texts in the history of alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, but also, I would argue, philosophical metaphysics and semiotics, the study of symbolic representation.
In one, we're going to introduce the text itself, along with some of the historical and philosophical concepts important to putting the Monas Hieroglyphica in context, along with the actual structure and method of the text itself. In the second video, we're going to explore the complex interplay between alchemy and Kabbalah at the very heart of the Monas Hieroglyphica. And in the final video, I'll outline my view as to what I think is actually happening in the text at the level of semiotics, the study of representation, and ontology, the study of being.
The Monas Hieroglyphica is one of the most difficult texts in Hermetic philosophy, but I think that it's interesting because it intersects with so many fascinating topics and is worthy of this deep dive. So I hope you'll join me in this three-part analysis of Dr. John Dee's 1564 Monas Hieroglyphica. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
Semioticians have coined an interesting term: *dank-rom*, reduced as the tendency of the human mind to confuse sign with the thing signified, the name and its bearer, the literal and the metaphorical, the image and the prototype. As the Renaissance gave way to early modernity, this tendency was not the result of confusion; it was the subject of a massive philosophical, linguistic, theological, and magical undertaking among philosophers from the mid-15th to the mid-17th centuries, most under the quote "miraculously appropriated influence," to borrow a phrase from Pico, of Kabbalistic sources.
It was not uncommon position that Hebrew, in some form of Reformation, was a language that God used to create the cosmos. "Vayomer Elohim, yahi or," "Vayahi or," "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light," was not simply narrative; divine speech was the very force of creation itself. By extension, it was also held that such a reformed Hebrew would also be capable of manipulating the very being of beings. That to know the true name of a thing, the name given to it by Adam in Paradise, would allow the knower godlike powers over that object.
This generated an enormous interest in the Hebrew language, but also the idea of a kind of divine *Ur-Sprache*, an original language that not only represented reality but actually forged it. Renaissance philosophers like Marsilio Ficino, the principle translator of Plato, Plotinus, and the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the tempestuous Giordano Bruno and the precocious, outrageously arrogant Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the reformer of medicine and alchemy, Paracelsus, all held versions of this view.
For these thinkers, there existed a language of being that could not be simply articulated in vulgar speech or writing. Rather, they aligned themselves with the sentiment of Platonists that, "It must not be thought that in the intelligible world the gods and the blessed see propositions; rather, everything there is expressed in a beautiful image." This sentiment helped later philosophers to collapse a distinction between speech, writing, and being. Ficino himself expressed the sentiment well enough when describing with what he took to be the divine language of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Ficino captures this idea very succinctly when describing the Egyptian hieroglyphics used by the sage, Hierophant, and Prophet Trismegistus. He writes, "When the Egyptian priests wished to signify the divine mysteries, they did not use the small character as a script, but the whole images of animals, plants, and trees; for God has knowledge of things not by way of multiple thought, but as the pure and firm shape of the thing itself." The end of that phrase, I think, is important in Latin and captures the deep Platonic idea at work in Ficino's thought. That last line reads, "sed tanquam conscium, et firmam, cuiusque rei formam." "The form of things." This is expressing this deep Platonic sentiment, but God doesn't see things in their propositional content; rather, God sees them in their divine form.
Humanist linguistic study into Hebrew reduced, but it did not dispel the search for a divine *Ur-Sprache*. The French polymath Guillaume Postel and the German Judeophile Johannes Reuchlin, the primary *breast* of his generation just after Pico and Ficino, would both claim that all mathematics and geometry, the mysterious logic of the Trinity, and the power of creation could be derived from the ineffable four-letter Hebrew name for God.
So we can see, even with the rise of Humanism, this idea that at some fundamental level, Hebrew, or some kind of version of Hebrew, or some other kind of language, stood at the very beginning of divine representation itself. I say all this to say that while the nominalist may have won the day in scholastic circles, a distinct position emerged in the intellectual milieu of the early modern period, far more radical than even Scotus in his *Opus Oxoniense*. It was a live position that there existed a semiotic system for which there was no difference, formal or otherwise, between the being of language and the language of being.
However, even as this investigation into Hebrew diminished in prestige by revealing the very terrestrial origins of that language, some philosophers remained committed to the idea that semiotics and ontology could not be easily divorced. One such figure, and I would argue one of the more radical holdouts for this position, was the Elizabethan mage, Dr. John Dee.
John Dee was born in 1527 and died either in 1608 or 1609 and was arguably one of the most educated figures in the world at that time. As court astrologer, he set the date of Queen Elizabeth's coronation and acted as one of her personal advisers. She even met him at his estate at Mortlake. He wrote the preface to the first English edition of Euclid's Elements, the main textbook on geometry. He was a navigational trainer for many English explorers and likely served as the inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero. His private library was one of the largest in England and would go on to become the Robert Cotton to form the backbone of the British Library. Dee was internationally recognized by his contemporaries as one of the most important English-speaking scholars of his day.
While brilliant, Dee fit poorly into the dominant regimes of thought of his time. He began to learn Hebrew as early as 1561, though it never seemed he really achieved the mastery of someone like Reuchlin. And with the publication of his 1564 Monas Hieroglyphica, Dee would reject that Hebrew, in any form of Reformation, would be the bridge between semiotics, that is representation, and ontology, that is being. Rather, Dee would offer a single symbol from which all knowledge can be derived and by which all disciplines could be reformed.
The specific fields of human knowledge he uses to prove this claim are, on the one hand, the practical side, that's alchemy and astrology, the transformation and understanding of physical nature, and on the other hand, the most theoretical aspects of human knowledge, specifically mathematics and geometry. From physical to metaphysical wisdom, Dee intended his Hieroglyphic Monad to revolutionize knowledge, language, and being itself. But to understand how he gets to these conclusions, we need to actually understand the structure and the method of the Monas Hieroglyphica.
The Monas Hieroglyphica was written over the course of about 12 days in January of 1564. Dee's roommate at that time, Willem Sylvius, would later print the Monas Hieroglyphica in Antwerp later that year, in March. While composed in 1564, Dee claimed that he had been "pregnant with it during the course of seven years." And the symbol itself actually occurs in Dee's earlier 1558 work, the *Propaedeumata Aphoristica*.
The text of the Monas Hieroglyphica is composed of a dedicatory letter to Maximilian of Habsburg. He had actually been at his coronation just the year previous. A letter to his friend and printer, advising him on very careful instructions for how to print the text, including the illustrations. From what we can tell, actually was observed, the 1564 text has virtually no printing errors in it that we can observe. And this is all followed by a series of 24 very densely written, very difficult to understand theorems, outlining the nature of the Monas Hieroglyphica, its function, and its ultimate aim.
The language of the text is Dee's rather crisp, though sometimes effusive, Latin, punctuated with a bit of Greek, a few neologisms that may have a Paracelsian origin, and a few lines of, to this day, incomprehensible Hebrew. I say incomprehensible because even Gershom Scholem himself, a philologist and leading expert in Kabbalah, couldn't really make heads or tails of just what Dee had in mind in the short lines in Hebrew.
The theorems themselves take the form of the *more geometrico*, or the geometric method, by which simple logical starting points give way to further conclusions via logical deduction. Dee would have been intimately acquainted with the method, given his background in mathematics, of course. He would go on to compose the preface for the English edition of Euclid's Elements in 1570, only six years after the completion of the Monas Hieroglyphica.
The combination here of Hermetic philosophy, mysticism, logic, and mathematics strikes us as a bit shocking, but one can reach back all the way to a philosopher like Proclus and realize that this method is by no means unusual in mystical texts. That we see a tension between logic and mysticism says more about us than it does about logicians and mystics. Indeed, the *more geometrico*, the geometric method, would continue to be used in philosophy from Descartes to Spinoza to Wittgenstein, and some folks consider its people like Spinoza and Wittgenstein to be mystics in their own right, despite using a method known for producing analytical clarity.
The Monas Hieroglyphica is one of the most difficult and obscure books I know of. In fact, it's been called the most obscure book ever written by an Englishman. Over the course of the 24 theorems, Dee purports to unfold the Hieroglyphic Monad, revealing how it "mathematically, magically, Kabbalistically, and anagogically explains what appears to be the basic structure of reality itself." Everything from geometry to astronomy, astrology to alchemy, the structure of language, theology, and more.
For Dee, encoded in the Monas Hieroglyphica, and therefore capable of being reformed by the manipulation of the Hieroglyphic Monad itself. That is, the symbol is able to capture all human knowledge and thereby reform it, restoring it to its perfect state of purity. These texts are truly interdisciplinary. He glides from alchemical theory, Kabbalistic speculation, to linguistics, to astrology, to symbology, sometimes even in a single sentence. This textual mobility makes it very difficult to sort out exactly what's going on at any point of the text. Even his contemporaries were absolutely flummoxed by what was going on. The alchemist Andreas Libavius even wondered, "Quid's Monas Hieroglyphica, for the Sophia Longin?" Dee declared it, in other words, "What in the world is this guy from London talking about in this Monas Hieroglyphica?" I have to agree, it's not a bad question.
The text is very difficult to understand. In fact, it's so difficult to understand, I decided to write an entire master's thesis about just what's going on in the text while I was at Amsterdam. I've included a link to that thesis in the description below if you want to dive deeper into the Monas Hieroglyphica. While I'm preparing these videos, in my estimation, the best way for grasping what Dee is up to in the Monas Hieroglyphica is by taking two topics, that is alchemy/astrology and Kabbalah, and then using a bridge to unite them. And that bridge is going to be a kind of Neo-Pythagorean geometry.
It can unite both the practical side of things, that is astronomy and alchemy, with the theoretical side of things, and that for Dee is Kabbalah, into one united sign, and that sign is the Monas Hieroglyphica. Another way of putting it is that Dee is attempting a synthesis of alchemy, astrology, and Kabbalah using sacred geometry as a bridge. At a deeper level, I think Dee is forging a unity between semiotics, the representation of being, with ontology, the study of being itself, and arguing that once this is achieved in the Hieroglyphic Monad, there is established a transitive relationship between being and representation, the Hieroglyphic Monad being the representative of the totality of being itself. And as such, manipulation of the Monad results in the manipulation of being itself.
But before we get there, we have to unpack Dee's alchemical and Kabbalistic theories. So in the next video, we'll do just that. We'll begin to explore the complex relationship in the Monas Hieroglyphica between Dee's alchemical and Kabbalistic theories. We'll see that Dee is on the cutting edge of both fields, carefully attempting to balance traditional alchemy with the new maverick theories of the Paracelsians, and forging a novel understanding of Kabbalah, which, when combined with a theory of alchemy, will forge into a united synthesis represented by the Monas Hieroglyphica. It is this great syncretism that I think will form part of the foundation for much of modern Hermetic and occult philosophical beliefs.
So, you have my main thesis about what's going on in the Monas Hieroglyphica: Dee is forging a unity between all disciplines into a single discipline, and that is the unity of all knowledge, and therefore the ability to manipulate all being through a single, powerful sign, the Monas Hieroglyphica. So I hope you'll join me next time as I begin to expand on both alchemy and Kabbalah and how he will form a bridge between just those two disciplines in the Monas Hieroglyphica. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and you've been watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.