John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World by Jason Louv
🟊🟊🟊
This a fairly wide-ranging history of the Enochian system of magick in western occultism styled as a "secret history" of Western imperialism and/or modernity. Structurally, the book begins with a thumbnail sketch of Western occultism in the Renaissance, before proceeding to an abbreviated biography of John Dee, including a very detailed recounting of his "angelic conversations." The work then offers an account of the subsequent reception of Dee's work, followed by a detailed discussion of the Enochian workings of Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons.
The book has many good features and few bad ones.
The Good
First, the author is clearly, deeply immersed in the literature. Louv does a good job of engaging with primary and secondary sources, both occult and mainline historical, including some welcome discussion of manuscripts not available outside the British Museum. I can only judge his scholarship with respect to sources that I personally know well, but in those areas the quality and fidelity of the work are generally high (albeit not perfect). The book is also jammed to bursting with footnotes, which is a pearl of great price in occult writing. Occult authors who take the time to cite their sources are rare, and ones who do so at this depth and volume are rarer still.
Augmenting the author's deep reading is the author's personal experience with the occult. Louv is a practicing occultist, which enriches the book, allowing him to draw fascinating connections between the sources and make some amusing technical critiques.1 He's also tough-minded and fairly skeptical (for an occult author) so he (mostly) doesn't run off on completely implausible tangents.
In short, while this book is likely to be of interest only to a specialist audience (occultists looking for a fairly detailed history of Enochian magick), it's really a very good book within those parameters. There's a lot to like about this book, but the work is not without its flaws.
The Bad
The largest problem is that portions of the book are unnecessarily detailed. While the author is a competent stylist capable of pointed, incisive writing when he's focused on the broader picture, the book too often wanders into prolonged recitations of events, or woolly explorations of arcana. For example, Louv provides an extensive, blow by blow of the conduct of Dee's angelic conversations: no angelic manifestation is too minor, no false start too "illusive" to be included. As a result, substantially the middle third of the book consists of the endless quotidian minutia of the scrying sessions. Frustratingly, Louv's account is not sufficiently complete to serve as a substitute for reading the source material, but the sheer volume of uncoordinated bits renders the discussion somewhat tedious and hard to follow.
As a second example, the early chapters of the book do a good job of orienting a non-specialist reader to the world of Renaissance occultism. However, the fifth chapter just leaps headlong into a breathless analysis of hermetic/qabalistic symbology, which the previous chapters could not have prepared a lay reader to follow. To be honest, despite careful reading and a solid background in Western occultism, I personally struggled to follow some sections of the fifth chapter. I can't help feeling that the book would have benefited from a stronger editor, and might have been more rewarding had it weighed in around 300 pages instead of 500+.
A separate problem is that the book's central thesis--that John Dee and the Enochian magickal system have been pivotal in the development of Western imperialism and the creation of modernity--is provocative, but, in my opinion, quite thin. Dee was one Renaissance natural philosopher among many, and he was hardly the only one to enunciate many of his non-angelic ideas. While the facts Louv marshals in support of his thesis are generally correct (and often interesting), the argument suffers deeply from an intense and selective focus on Dee: when you're writing a book on John Dee you're bound to see his influence everywhere, even when it is attenuated or more readily explained by other factors. The section of the book concerning Dee's reception after his death draws some particularly questionable conclusions about Dee's influence (e.g. the discussion of Royal Society).2
Finally, while the author is generally fair-minded, he is very partial to Dee, and fairly hostile to Crowley. This leads to some very obvious overreading and/or hand-waving in both directions. For example, he makes some truly shocking claims about Crowley that appear to be entirely speculative. He also, atypically, provides no citations for some of these accusations, which merits a raised eyebrow. Louv is not trying to hide his agenda: he plainly says that he's trying to offer a corrective to the often hagiographical treatment of Crowley in occult circles, and wants to ensure that people face up to the fact that Crowley was not just some misunderstood bohemian.
And that far, I agree with him: Crowley certainly did some despicable things and has a better reputation than he deserves. What's puzzling is that there is no shortage of negative, but well-attested, things one could mention about Crowley (only some of which are discussed in this book), so it's odd that Louv felt the need to wander into lurid speculation.3 However, in his conclusion to the Crowley segment, Louv writes:
[Crowley's faults] mean that, like the work of any historical thinker, Crowley’s prolific output must be approached with surgical clarity to separate what is of value from that which is not—and there is much that is of value. In many cases, this means fully severing Crowley the man (and even Crowley the symbol) from Crowley’s technical writing on magic.[...]
I can agree with that sentiment without reservation.
Conclusion
Although the book's thesis is unpersuasive, that is a smaller problem than it might seem. The bulk of the book is focused on providing a very thorough account of Dee's angelic conversations and the magical systems that grew out of them. As an occult history, the book can be read with profit if you engage critically with the author. Indeed, if one wants a detailed history of Enochian magick written by a practicing occultist, you would be hard pressed to find a better book, but buckle up for a long read.4 Recommended with those caveats.
Footnotes:
I particularly enjoyed his detailed critique of the assorted sorcerous errors Jack Parsons made in ramming through his Enochian workings.
In fairness, although Louv's case for Dee's secular influence is overstated, there's no question that Dee had a clear and significant influence on later occultists some of whom, in turn, had significant effects on our world and culture (which point Louv takes up towards the end of the book). In that vein, the book is a treasury of historical information about Dee and his inheritors (e.g. the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley, and Parsons).
Louv also seems to fundamentally mischaracterize some of Crowley's theology (occasionally suggesting, for example, that Crowley was a literal Satanist). Some of those points are particularly bizarre because Louv is clearly deeply immersed in Crowleyania and should know better.
If, instead, you wanted a book about the occult roots of the modern world, the book is likely to disappoint. It gets off to a good start in the first third, which does a very nice job of setting up all of the ways in which occultism was "in the air" in the early modern world and informed the development of science. But in the second third the book takes a hard turn, and becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the angelic conversations and their subsequent reception.