A game of correspondence with the spirits of John Dee’s diaries.
Play It
Characterization
Creatures of Dr. Dee is a game of imagined correspondence: the Fellow takes up the position of a contemporary of John Dee — Elizabethan court astrologer, geometer, librarian, and conversant with angels — and engages, by letter and by record, with one of the entities Dee himself reported in the seven hundred extant pages of his spirit diaries. The game does not ask the Fellow to believe in angels. It asks them to take the seventeenth-century practice of angelic correspondence seriously as a literary and contemplative form, and to discover what it is like to write into that form as Dee did. The discipline belongs to the Heart-Openers because its central exercise is moral imagination: a sustained, attentive, written conversation with a being one has half-invented and half-inherited.
Lineage
Drawn from the historical record of John Dee’s scrying sessions with Edward Kelley (1582–1589), preserved in Méric Casaubon’s 1659 edition and in the manuscripts held by the British Library and the Bodleian. The discipline’s contemporary form was designed in 2023 as part of the Academy’s founding constellation.
Quests
The Magus
Devise an entity not catalogued in Dee’s diaries — an angel, daemon, or genius of place — and draft the rules of correspondence by which a Fellow could engage them. Specify the entity’s name, the form of address, and at least one constraint on what they will and will not say.
The Adventurer
Conduct a single sustained correspondence with one of the diary-attested entities — Madimi, Galvah, Ave, or another of your choosing. Write at least three letters across at least three days, in the seventeenth-century epistolary register. Record the entity’s last reply.
Trace the history of angelic correspondence as a literary form. Place Dee’s practice between two predecessors and two successors — the Liber Loagaeth, the Heptameron, the visions of Catherine of Siena, the automatic writing of W. B. Yeats, or others of your choosing. Cite each.