Buenos dias amigas y amigos. I remember the original thread and was really jive to the fact that someone had finally broached the subject of Dee. Then, as mentioned above, one of the members of SH1.0 blazed in and dismissed the entire figure of John Dee out of hand and it took some of the wind out of the thread’s sails. (JD755 if memory serves or near enough; crotchety British bloke who could always be counted on to keep it real...) If I remember his position correctly it would have meshed with this:
Here is what I think of Dee, 007, and the Enochian angel talk:
Thanks for the link, I’ll read it when I can, but absolutely am predispositioned to agree with the premise of a pageantry designed to conceal the mundane, as it were, within a veneer of the arcane.
Setting all of that aside, let’s indulge our imaginations here for moment. If anyone was unfortunate enough to read any of my drivel on 1.0, you’ll recall that I have a soft spot for old school pen and paper RPG supplements. In that vein, one of my favorite publishers of said materials is Steve Jackson Games; creators of the popular Illuminati card game. GURPS, their rule set and line of pen and paper RPGs, although overshadowed by DnD, .et al, is vast and excellent. One of my all time favorites is titled simply, Cabal.
View: https://www.amazon.com/GURPS-Cabal-Kenneth-Hite/dp/1556344295
The following excerpts fill in some of the mythos of the man. First, regarding
history:
The History of the Cabal
The Cabal emerged from myth and remains a rumor. Its past, deeply embedded in conspiracy and choked with misdi- rection, can hardly be separated from lurid occult anecdotes or from obsessive paranoid scribblings – in fact, it seems almost entirely made up of both. Its history, its dispersal and influ- ence, and its continuing goals – all of these remain subjects of bitter controversy among occultists, fringe-watchers, and Cabalists themselves.
Napoleon Bonaparte said that history was a lie agreed upon, and he made enough of it to know. The Cabal can’t agree on all the details of its own history any more than it can on any other tendentious issue. Even more than works of exoteric, mundane history, the chronicles of the Cabal depend very much upon the historian. Where the Eightfold Splendor of Heket Lodge claims that Napoleon was an inspired avatar of Zeus guided by a holy council of sages, the Apis’ Crosses Lodge mutters darkly that he was a homunculus created from Abyssal matter to be the vile pawn of the Sons of Imhotep. The following, then, represents a consensual “best guess,” with some of the more important (or interesting) doctrinal differences highlighted.
In the Beginning
Ancient legends from the Vedic sagas to Mayan codices to Hebrew scriptures all speak of a great time of destruction that altered the face of the world forever. According to ortho- dox Cabalistic theory, all these tales refer to the First Creation, and to its catastrophic end, metaphorically recalled as a cata- clysm of fire and flood, the Deluge. Scholars have reached no consensus as to the extent of this destruction. Perhaps the entire cosmos – all Four Realms – was remade, or merely some portion of the outer layers, where our material existence appears. Occult paleohistorians agree that Assiah, the Materi- al Realm (see p. 45), our world, was not always as it appears today; that the appearance of the “hologram” composed of magical, decanic images (see p. 43) has shifted profoundly at least once within the last hundred millennia. Cabalist Lodges such as the Wheel of Ptah or the Amonis Albioni attempt to trace the cosmic “fault lines,” claiming to detect signs of phe- nomenological “reality quakes” as recently as the early 18th century. Many of these fault lines seem to correspond with the Gates of Thoth (see p. 15), or with other soft places in reality (see p. 45).”
Did anyone else find this part intriguing:
“claiming to detect signs of phe-nomenological “reality quakes” as recently as the early 18th century.”?? (Just as a point of reference, this book was published way back in March 02, long before any of our present conceptions of our paradigm had begun to seep into the collective consciousness.) Not to get ahead of ourselves yet cowboys and cowgirls, let’s keep this in perspective, we’re just talking about a game here. You dig? Purely in the context of an RPG:
History Is the Bunk
Between the Cabal’s occult machinations, the Gates of Thoth (p. 15), simple historical forgetfulness, and those pesky reality quakes, the GM should feel free to alter anything, or anywhen, he wishes. Whole stretches of history could be bland consensus constructed by later scholars trying to earn tenure, or carefully concealed scrims erected by the Cabal to preserve some rich magical period from archaeological investigation. The history given in this chapter (and in GURPS Cabal as a whole) assumes that con- ventional historians are broadly correct about the events of the past but sadly mistaken as to those events’ true significance, causes, and meaning. Even in that respect, the author has added Atlantis and a pre-dynastic Egyptian civilization, and likely vastly overstated the roles of Queen Nitocris and King Arthur.
The GM should eagerly spoon in any historical fictions, conspiracy theories, revisionist timelines from creation science to von Däniken to Velikovsky, or half-remembered elements from Hollywood “sword-and- sandal” epics he wishes – the object is fun and flavor, not academic accu- racy. Similarly, if the GM wishes to change, modify, delete, or improve upon any of the explanations or Cabal personalities given in this source- book, then he should do so without a second thought. However, within the game itself, a Cabal campaign probably functions most smoothly if time has a functioning Observer Effect (p. TT45) and possibly a Recency Effect (p. TT42) to remove player temptation to “fix last week.”
Skipping over a crap-ton of interestIng content to get to the man, the myth, the...:
John Dee
Court magician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, John Dee was possibly the greatest magical genius in history. He developed cere- monies, especially theurgies for interacting with spirits of Briah, that even today only the finest occultists can compre- hend. A brilliant cartographer and cosmographer, Dee mapped ley lines, computed patterns in the Gates of Thoth, and developed conceptions of space-time unity prefiguring Einstein – and magical theories joining them that recalled those of Hermes Trismegistos.
Upon his death in 1608, Dee somehow traveled back through the Iconic Realm and “overlaid” himself onto his pre- vious life pattern beginning in 1558, the year he became Queen Elizabeth’s magus. Every 50 years, Dee repeats the process, watching his life unfold while continuing and fur- thering his researches. By now, his supremely evolved men- tality operates on seven dimensional levels at once, coordinating a dizzying knot of relationships, experiments, researches, and objectives across four centuries. The resulting knot in time makes Elizabethan London a temporal fulcrum (see p. 10), from which Dee uses occult dramaturgy, Enochi- an rituals, and careful attention to the ebbs and currents of the Four Realms to influence events elsewhen.
Even John Dee can’t do everything himself; he is one of the most assiduous Grand Masters at recruiting new magi, and one of the least concerned with their past existence, species, or other ephemeral conditions. He does, however, prefer Christians for positions of trust and responsibility. Dee’s plans, even more than those of most Grand Masters, remain opaque, but their effects are quite visible. An enormous ecto- plasmic chain now links Dee’s Mortlake sanctum (near Lon- don) in Assiah to Camelot (court of the mighty eikone King Arthur) in Briah; another links it to the Lunar Sphere (see p. 46) in Yetzirah. Dee seems to be spinning (or casting, or call- ing into being) similar chains to Faërie and Atlantis. The chains have attracted astral barnacles, schools of spirits, and other peculiarly magical ecologies similar to those beneath the Sword Bridge (see p. 54), which have made investigation of the chains difficult. (Dee’s highly abstruse protective and cre- ative spells and glamours also add considerably to the impen- etrability of the chains’ nature.) Possibly related to this project, Dee has the greatest collection of mappamondi (see box) in the Cabal, reputedly including his masterwork, the Tabula Perfecta Quattuor Regnorum, which depicts every- thing in the known cosmos.
There is so much crammed in this less than 200 page book that I would love to hear the members here sound off on. For now I’ll just add an interesting note on Mappamondi in general and Dee’s magnum opus In particular, according to the text:
Mappamondi
The goal of Hermetic thought is to understand and recapitulate the world. One means to that end is map- making: by exploring and interrelating the world in a graphical scheme, the Hermetic cartographer gains a measure of knowledge, and therefore control. Mappa- mondi, or maps of the world (which to the Cabal includes the Four Realms), serve to represent such research in progress. Some maps “overlay” the other Realms onto representations of Assiah, other traditions depict the entire cosmos unfolded and spread out. Spe- cific maps depict astral currents, dangerous areas, and so forth; Erasmus Rooke developed and codified an entire cartographic symbology for astral and iconic mapping.
Magically drafted maps may grant bonuses to Seek- er, Trace, Pathfinder, and similar spells, assuming they depict the correct territory. Some mappamondi have actually recorded enough of reality that they begin to change to reflect it; boundary changes in Yugoslavia appeared on the Cabal’s great globe in Edinburgh eight months before the civil wars began. Studying these maps can therefore serve as a kind of divination. John Dee, the greatest of the occult cosmographers, is reput- ed to possess a mappamond, the Tabula Perfecta Quat- tuor Regnorum, which works the other way – properly scribed changes to it change the world in response.
More concretely, the maps and journals of specif- ic Cabal expeditions – whether the Templar voyages to America in the 1360s, the Rooke Geodetic Survey of Atlantis in 1866-1867, or the Qualls Expedition to chart the coastline of the Pearl-Bright Ocean between 1891 and 1901 – contain vital information for travelers seeking to retrace those voyages. Hence, many mappa- mondi become the carefully hoarded property of the more secretive sorcerers, and of exploratory groups such as the Golden Asten, Amonis Albioni, or Blind Haroeris Lodges. Only their members, or those they need favors from, may see the complete surveys of these remote regions
‘... a mappamond, the
Tabula Perfecta Quat- tuor Regnorum, which works the other way – properly scribed changes to it change the world in response.’ That sounds pretty tight... If Team America could acquire this device It could be used to spread freedom, even to those parts of the world who may feel, ya know, squeamish under Liberty’s mantle... Right, lest it should fall in the wrong hands?
EDIT: Doh, I forgot to include the segment on The Hell-Fire Club:
The Hell-Fire Club
Between 1719 and 1766, at various locations in and near London, a group of debauched libertines – many of them high government officials – met as the Hell-Fire Club to carry out drunken revels involving prostitutes dressed as nuns. Although the Club itself was secret, and its orgies open only by invitation (which is how Ben- jamin Franklin joined them in 1757), it concealed a still darker purpose. The true goal of the Hell-Fire Club was to graft demonic rule onto Great Britain and open the way between Britain and the Abyss. The orthodox his- tory of the Cabal says that the Amonis Albioni and the Apis’ Crosses Lodges together smashed the Club during the Wilkes scandal of 1763 – but its Grand Master, Sir Francis Dashwood, lived until 1781 and remained in the British government the whole time. Many prominent Amonis Albioni Cabalists joined the Club, ostensibly as infiltrators – but who, precisely, was infiltrating whom?
CHEERS ?
A final post note on 007, just dredging the old memory banks here: 00 = 2 balls + 7 = a cane. Hence, Bond, James Bond was a Tubalcain man. Fair to assume Dee was too?