Theorem I
The straight line and the circle are enough to show the first and simplest likeness of anything, whether the thing exists or is only hidden under nature's veils. Everything on this page is made of those two and the point.
← the library John Dee · Antwerp, 1564
The Hieroglyphic Monad: one figure, cut from the signs of the Moon, the Sun, the four elements and the Ram, out of which Dee claimed every sign of the planets and the metals could be taken, and which he explained in twenty-four theorems written in twelve days and dedicated to the Emperor Maximilian. Elizabeth had him explain it to her. Nobody has been sure since that he managed it. Below, the figure draws itself from the one measure Dee gives for it, and then the theorems, each in a few plain words of this site's own, with the figures the 1564 printing set in the margins redrawn in the temple's line.
Theorem XXIII, drawn in its own order: the point A, the lines CAK and DAE, the measure AB, the cross of one, three, two and two, the Sun on I, the Moon on K, the Ram on M and N, then the ornaments the mechanics may add. Tap it to draw it again. The whole line CK is nine measures.
A word on what this page is. The Latin of 1564 is out of copyright and the figures with it; the English translations in print are not, and are not quoted here. What follows is the site's own short account of each theorem, which anyone may check against the Latin facsimile or against Hamilton-Jones's English of 1947, both linked at the foot. Dee is dense, punning and sure of himself; the account keeps his order and his claims and leaves out his flourishes, of which there are many. Where he says we he means himself.
The straight line and the circle are enough to show the first and simplest likeness of anything, whether the thing exists or is only hidden under nature's veils. Everything on this page is made of those two and the point.
There is no circle without a line and no line without a point, so the point, the Monad, is where things begin to be. However wide the circumference, it cannot do without the service of its centre.
The point in the middle of the Monad is the Earth, round which the Sun, the Moon and the other planets go. The Sun has the highest dignity among them and is drawn as the circle with its centre showing.
The Moon's half-circle stands above the Sun's and looks the greater of the two, but the Sun is king. The Moon only gives back his light; she wants so much to be filled with it and turned to Sun that she vanishes from the sky for days at a time, and so she is drawn as horns.
Add the Moon's half-circle to the Sun's whole one and the idea of the solar circle is finished: the evening and the morning were the first day, and on that day the light of the philosophers was made.
Sun and Moon rest on a right-angled cross, which is at once a three, two lines and the point where they join, and a four, four lines with four right angles. Doubled either way it gives the eight, which Dee thinks the old magi never knew. Body, soul and spirit, the threefold magic of the first fathers, with the four lines that meet at the centre, make the first seven.
The elements, put out of their places, go home by straight lines, as anyone who has tried it knows. So four straight lines running from one indivisible point in four directions can stand for the four elements, each of which can be brought back to its own line. The geometers say a line is a point in motion; here the lines are made the same way, by a steady fall of drops, which is how the work goes.
Count the four the kabbalist's way, one, two, three, four, and it folds up into ten, as Pythagoras taught. That is why the cross, which is the Romans' letter X, was their sign for ten. The same cross marks where the three pours its force into the seven.
All of which suits the Sun and Moon of the Monad. By the magic of the four elements the matter is separated along their lines, and then joined again in the Sun's circle drawn round their ends, since round the ends of any line, however long, a circle can be described. So the Sun and the Moon are of use to the Monad, together with the tenfold proportion of the cross.
The sign of Aries, which the astronomers use the world over, a thing both cutting and pointed, marks where the fiery triplicity begins. It is added at the foot to say that the work of the Monad needs fire. Dee sums the whole figure up in one sentence: the Sun and the Moon of this Monad want the elements, in which the tenth proportion will flower, separated, and that is done by fire.
The Ram's sign is two half-circles joined at one point, and it belongs to the equinox, where the day and night of twenty-four hours divide evenly, which hides proportions of its own. That much, he says, for the Earth.
The ancients handed down five signs for the planets, every one made of nothing but the Moon, the Sun, the cross of the elements and the Ram. Take the lunar ones first. The Moon's nature, driven by the science of the elements once round our Earth, is what they called Saturn; a second time round, Jupiter, a very secret figure; a third, the dark figure they were in the habit of calling Mercury. A fourth turn, whatever some sages say, is not against the plan: the pure spirit does the whitening at the Moon's place and writes four earth-born figures into the prepared earth, the last of them in the middle of the rest.
Now the solar ones. Mars is the Sun with the Ram, the elements lending a hand; Venus is the Sun set on the elements. Both look to the Sun's circle and the work of bringing back to life. Further on comes another Mercury, twin of the first, made by the whole lunar and solar magic of the elements: the messenger, the Mercury of the philosophers, the little world, Adam, whom some of the best ranked with the Sun himself. That cannot be done in this age, Dee says, without adding to the coral-and-crystal work a soul parted from its body by the art of fire, which is hard and dangerous for the sulphur in the breath, but works marvels. Bind it to the Moon's disc, or at least to Mercury's, by Lucifer and by fire, and show in the third place that it is the Sun of the philosophers, and the seven are complete.
So the whole mastery hangs on the Sun and the Moon, as Hermes the Thrice-Greatest keeps saying: the Sun is its father and the Moon its mother. The red earth is fed by the rays of both.
Watch what the Sun and the Moon do to the Earth. When the Sun enters Aries, the Moon entering the next sign, Taurus, takes a new dignity in his light and is exalted there, and the ancients wrote that nearness of the two lights as the Bull, which is why Taurus is the house of Venus, of chaste and fruitful love, since nature rejoices in nature. The Sun, after many eclipses of his light, takes on the force of Mars and is exalted in the house of Mars, which is the Ram. Both exaltations are in the Monad: the Bull at its head, Mars in the Sun joined by a line to the Ram, which is the reading of the two theorems before. Two notes: the sign of the Bull is the Greek diphthong ου, and a circle and a half-circle touching make the letter alpha twice over.
A while on the cross. Its two lines are equal, as justice asks, but the parts are to be used both equal and unequal. Cut the upright cross through its centre and each half is the Romans' V, their five, which is half of ten: one upright and one upside down, five times five making twenty-five, the circular number. Cut the cross as it stands in the Monad and each half is an L, their fifty, the letter whose name is El, tenth from the start of the alphabet and tenth back from X. Ten in the cross, five in a half, fifty in the other half, a hundred in the two together: one, ten, a hundred is the decimal proportion of the cross. O my God, Dee writes here, how deep these mysteries are.
Count the cross every way at once: four fives, four fifties, the ten it plainly is, the twenty-one of its place in the alphabet, and one, because it is one, and it comes to two hundred and fifty-two, a number Dee commends to kabbalists who have not yet had the use of it. Then the same parts read as letters: L, V and X, LVX, light, the last word of the mastery, three joined in the unity of the Word.
The astronomy of the heavens is the guide of the astronomy below. Dee folds the Monad into the figure of an egg, the planets' circles inside a shell with the Sun at the centre and the messenger beside him, and says the miserable alchemists may learn from it what the white of egg, the oil of the yolk and the calcined shell really are. Then a fable, which he says is Oedipus's and not Aesop's: the scarab, avenging the eagle that hunted frightened men to his cave, drops his ball into the lap of Jupiter, who shakes it off and breaks the eagle's egg with it, and the remedy is that no scarab may fly while the eagles sit their eggs. The wise have dissolved the egg and its shell in its own white and circulated the mixture, as the scarab rolls his ball, through many turns round the Sun until it came to a yellow liquor; Anaxagoras made a medicine of it. Nothing, Dee says, can exist without the virtue of the Monad.
The Sun and the Moon pour their bodily force on the bodies of the lower elements more than all the other planets do, which is why, under the trial by fire, every metal gives up the watery humour of the Moon and the fiery liquor of the Sun, by which everything bodily, earthly and mortal is kept alive.
On the point at the centre of the cross. Two lines and their point are a three; take the point away and you do not get a two, you get a four, since the lines fall apart. The point is no part of either line and yet part of the form of both, which is how the four lies hidden in the three, and Dee asks God's pardon for writing it down where anyone can read it. The mathematicians can move the point off, and when it goes the four stands clear; what went was the dark, watery, superfluous point of the elements, not the point of the Trinity. Happy the man who reaches the one and drops the other: after some labour the garment comes out white as snow. The figure A is the cross with its point of necessity; B is the four lines drawn back from the centre, leaving a hollow where it was. He stops to wish Maximilian, or some other of the house of Austria, the greatest power on earth when the time comes.
Turn the Monad inside out, or the outside in, and the philosophical transformation shows. Read from the top as Plato ranked the planets: Saturn and Jupiter joined at the Ram, the cross standing for Venus and Mercury, then the Sun, then the Moon at the bottom. Then take the figure apart into three. C is the Moon with her horns turned down and D is the Sun with his point, both looking toward the Earth, which is fixity; B is the double crescent of the Ram, turned round and set on top, with the cross of the elements hung from it. The two small half-circles of B, joined by a certain art, would make a circle, E, and give B the fullness of the Sun; but their radius is less than D's and C's, so from B you get the sign of Venus and never the true Sun, and never the true quicksilver either. Quicksilver, worked by the elements, has the solar power only through that joining. The three parts, Dee says, run back together of their own will, with a force both magnetic and active, and he adds for recreation that B is also the shape of the crude letters that are three, or six, or three times three, and leaves the steadying of them to the men of letters.
The vessels of the sacred art, read out of the Greek letters that the Monad's lines make when it is taken apart and each line is given a letter. Alpha is a vessel made of the Sun's circle and the Moon's half-circle with the line M, and differs from the letter only by a shuffling of its parts. Lambda is a vessel of glass and delta one of clay; the two together are the pestle and mortar in which made pearls, crystal, beryl, chrysolite, rubies and the other rare stones are ground. Omega, two equal half-circles, is a small vessel of mysteries, the last letter restored to its first meaning. Alpha turns in a quick and secret spiral and keeps the incorruptible salt; from lambda, while it works, every breath of air must be kept out. The corollary of omega, Dee says, is a man agreeable, ready and active at all hours. He will not say what else is needed, or of what the vessels are made.
The proportions, for anyone who would cut the Monad on a seal or a ring, which is what the big drawing above follows. Dee says here that the Spirit writes quickly through him and that he hopes to be no more than the pen. Take a point A and draw the line CAK through it, and DAE across it at right angles. Choose B on AK: AB is the measure of the whole work. AC is three measures, AD and AE two each, so DE is four: that is the cross of the elements, equal and unequal, since nothing under the Moon has its elements in equal measure and the art restores the balance. Two measures up the line from B is I, the Sun's centre; the circle on IB cuts the line at R; one measure past R is K, the Moon's centre, and the half-circle on K with the same radius is the Moon, FLP. At C, across the foot, lie M and N one measure to each side, and the half-circles on them, CHO and CGQ, are the Ram. The whole line CK is nine measures. No centre is to be left showing but the Sun's. Then the ornaments the mechanics may add, for show and not for any mystery: a ring round the Sun a quarter or a fifth of a measure out, a second arc to give the Moon her horns, second arcs for the Ram, and the cross's lines widened to a fourth or fifth of the measure, on condition that nothing offends the symmetry, since the measures must come down the years undisturbed. After that, two small tables of the quaternary: one, two, three, four, which is ten by addition and twenty-four by multiplication, the count of its possible orderings, which Dee uses in the Hebrews' letter-shuffling; and a second, artificial four whose parts come to twenty-four by another reckoning, the fineness of pure gold in carats. And a story: four friends of philosophy, together over the great work, saw a great miracle in it one day and gave the rest of their lives to praise.
The book began with the point, the line and the circle, and has gone out from the point of the Monad to the line of the elements and round like the equinoctial, which turns once in twenty-four hours; it ends on the twenty-fourth theorem, the change and the shuffling of everything the four contains, which is twenty-four. Dee closes with the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, the four living things with six wings that never rest from their song and the twenty-four elders round the throne casting down their crowns, and signs off: begun on the thirteenth of January, finished on the twenty-fifth, at Antwerp, in the year 1564. The common eye, he says last, will see nothing here but darkness, and will despair a good deal.
Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, Antwerp, Willem Silvius, 1564, in Latin, out of copyright. The figures here are redrawn from the printing, of which the Wellcome Collection's copy is on Wikimedia Commons and a whole facsimile is on the Internet Archive. The English in full: J. W. Hamilton-Jones's translation of 1947, at the Esoteric Archives, which is in copyright and not kept here; C. H. Josten's, with the Latin facing, is in Ambix XII (1964), and Burns and Turner's of 2021 is the recent one. The account of the theorems above is this site's own, as is the drawing; the measure is Dee's. The sign itself, and what it meant to the alchemists who took Mercury's sign for its root, is in the nave. One script.