Hermetic Geocentricity: John Dee's Celestial Egg

Abstract

IN THIS PAPER I will reconsider John Dee's opinion of the Copernican hypothesis, especially the claim that Dee's Hermeticism predisposed him toward heliocentricity. I grant at the outset that Dee may have been a Copernican, since it is always possible that he may have held in private what he would not advocate in print. However, I believe that Dee never accepted Copernican cosmology. And I will argue that he never accepted it because he was instead deeply committed-and the commitment was Hermetically inspired-to what he to be the geocentric cosmology of the ancient magi. Not until 1573, when Thomas Digges, in his Alae seu scalae mathematicae, accepted the Copernican system as a physical theory, did any Englishman openly defend the new system as something more than a useful mathematical device or, as Osiander had cautioned, a hypothesis, which need not be true nor even probable.1 Robert Recorde had included a brief discussion of the Copernican system in his Castle of Knowledge (1556), letting any examination of the cosmology of the theory passe tyll some other time,2 and several of Recorde's English contemporaries were undoubtedly familiar with the work of Copernicus. But as a physical theory, the novel hypothesis of De revolutionibus generated no debate in England prior to Digges' work. Even Dee, who tutored Digges in mathematics and astronomy, never expressed an opinion regarding the cosmology of the new system. Despite Dee's silence, a number of historians have speculated that Dee may have been a true Copernican. As evidence they commonly cite the laudatory references to the mathematical achievement of De revolutionibus that Dee makes in his earliest extant work, a preface to John Feild's Ephemeris anni 1557 (London), and also Dee's association with Digges. Lynn Thorndike, for example, grudgingly concedes that Dee may have quietly accepted the Copernican cosmology, although he adds that Dee believed in so many things that were wrong, that we could not give him personally any high credit, even if in this one instance he in something that happened to be right.3 More recently Peter French has drawn attention to another factor that he regards as relevant to the question of Dee and the Copernican hypothesis-Dee's Hermeti-