Who Is John Dee?

Basically, the complex and fascinating Dr. John Dee (1527-1608) was and will probably ever remain an enigma, and a recent finding only adds to his mystique. By all accounts a true prescient genius and having had a quality education, which in those days included study of the occult, Dee was looked on as one of the most erudite men in Europe. He was a very popular speaker and compiled the largest library in England, with 2,670 manuscripts (some sources say as many as 4,000). He became Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, adviser, and confidant. (As an aside, he played a major role in ~ among other moves of consequence ~ the formation of the British intelligence service and, in fact, signed his letters to the queen "007.") Still, he accumulated many enemies, both political and religious, and many of his contemporaries looked on him as little more than a sorcerer and demonologist. Perhaps that's why it should come as no surprise that an X-ray of a late-19th-century painting of John Dee Performing an Experiment Before Elizabeth I reveals that, before the artist painted them over, Dee is standing in the middle of a circle of human skulls: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/17/john-dee-painting-circle-of-human-skulls-exhibition and http://boingboing.net/2015/02/19/john-dee-was-the-real-life-mer.html