Using pulleys and mirrors, Dee was able to create the illusion of "the Scarabeus flying up to Jupiter's palace" in a mechanical contrivance possibly based on rediscovered classical techniques.

The Catholic bishop Edmund Bonner, likely already a close friend of Dee's at this point, gave him special permission to receive all of the holy orders from first tonsure to priesthood in only a single day.

[22] In that same year Dee was arrested and charged with "lewd and vain practices of calculating and conjuring", because he had cast horoscopes of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth.

In some early editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Dee, as Bonner's chaplain, is recorded debating the Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist with Protestant prisoner Robert Smith (who accused Dee of Marcionism because his argument in favor of transubstantiation rested on the idea that Christ possessed only a spiritual body) and participating in the seventh examination of John Philpot.

[11][27][28] From the 1550s to the 1570s, he served as an advisor to England's voyages of discovery, providing technical aid in navigation and political support to create a "British Empire", a term he was the first to use.

[30] In 1564, Dee wrote the Hermetic work Monas Hieroglyphica ("The Hieroglyphic Monad"), an exhaustive Cabalistic interpretation of a glyph of his own design, meant to express the mystical unity of all creation.

Having dedicated it to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor in an effort to gain patronage, Dee attempted to present it to him at the time of his ascension to the throne of Hungary.

[33] In 1577, Dee published General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, a work setting out his vision of a maritime empire and asserting English territorial claims on the New World.

Failure of his ideas concerning a proposed calendar revision,[34] colonial establishment and ambivalent results for voyages of exploration in North America had nearly brought his hopes of political patronage to an end.

[38][39] They had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stephen Báthory of Poland, whom they attempted to convince of the importance of angelic communication.

In 1587, at a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives.

Dee returned to Mortlake after six years abroad to find his home vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen.

[49] No records exist for his youngest daughters Madinia (sometimes Madima), Frances and Margaret after 1604, so it is widely assumed they died in the epidemic that took their mother (as Dee had by this time ceased to keep a diary).

[33] His goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.

[4] His manuscript Brytannicae reipublicae synopsis (1570) outlined the state of the Elizabethan Realm[53] and was concerned with trade, ethics and national strength.

[4] His 1576 General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation was the first volume in an unfinished series planned to advocate for the establishment of English colonies abroad.

[54] In a symbolic frontispiece, Dee included a figure of Britannia kneeling by the shore beseeching Elizabeth I to protect her nation by strengthening her navy.

[60] Dee posited a formal claim to North America on the back of a map drawn in 1577–1580;[61] he noted that "circa 1494 Mr. Robert Thorn his father, and Mr. Eliot of Bristow, discovered Newfound Land.

"[62] In his Title Royal of 1580, he wrote that Madog ab Owain Gwynedd had discovered America, intending thereby to boost England's claim to the New World over that of Spain's.

[63] He also asserted that Brutus of Britain and King Arthur, as well as Madog, had conquered lands in the Americas, so that their heir, Elizabeth I of England, had a prior claim there.

Cotton's son gave these to the scholar Méric Casaubon, who published them in 1659, with a long introduction critical of their author, as A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz.

[66] Queen Elizabeth I used him several times as her court astronomer, not solely because he practised Hermetic arts, but as a deeply religious and learned, trustworthy man.

[citation needed] A revaluation of Dee's character and significance came in the 20th century, largely through the work of the historians Charlotte Fell Smith and Dame Frances Yates.

Fell Smith writes: "There is perhaps no learned author in history who has been so persistently misjudged, nay, even slandered, by his posterity, and not a voice in all the three centuries uplifted even to claim for him a fair hearing.

Surely it is time that the cause of all this universal condemnation should be examined in the light of reason and science; and perhaps it will be found to exist mainly in the fact that he was too far advanced in speculative thought for his own age to understand.

"[19] Through this and subsequent re-evaluation, Dee is now viewed as a serious scholar and book collector, a devoted Christian (albeit at a confusing time for that faith), an able scientist, and one of the most learned men of his day.

[52][67] His Mortlake library was the largest in the country before it was vandalised, and created at enormous, sometimes ruinous personal expense; it was seen as one of the finest in Europe, perhaps second only to that of De Thou.

[70] Dee was a friend of Tycho Brahe and familiar with the work (translated into English by his ward and assistant, Thomas Digges) of Nicolaus Copernicus.

[76] To 21st-century eyes, Dee's activities straddle magic and modern science, but to apply a hard and fast distinction between these two realms or epistemological world views is anachronistic.

[80] His scholarly status also took him into Elizabethan politics as an adviser and tutor to Elizabeth I and through relations with her ministers Francis Walsingham and William Cecil.