# John Dee and Elias Ashmole: Magic and the First Museum

*History & War · Eleanor Hartwell · 2026-10-30*

## TL;DR

John Dee was an Elizabethan scholar of mathematics and the occult who served as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. Elias Ashmole, a later English antiquary and alchemist, collected manuscripts and curiosities in the tradition Dee represented. His 1683 donation to Oxford became the Ashmolean Museum, widely regarded as the first public museum.

## Key facts

- John Dee served as an adviser and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I during the sixteenth century.
- Dee's personal library at Mortlake was one of the largest in England before it was scattered and partly destroyed.
- Elias Ashmole, born in 1617, pursued alchemy, astrology, and antiquarian collecting in seventeenth-century England.
- Ashmole compiled Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, a 1652 collection of English alchemical writings.
- The Ashmolean Museum opened at Oxford in 1683 on the strength of Ashmole's donation, and it is often called the first public museum.

## The Wizard Behind the World's First Public Museum

In 1683, a set of doors opened in Oxford onto something Europe had never quite seen before: a collection of books, manuscripts and natural curiosities that ordinary people were allowed to walk in and look at. The Ashmolean Museum is credited as the first modern public museum, and the man who pushed it into being was Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), a 17th-century English scholar and government official who supplied its first collections.

Here is the part that surprises people. Ashmole is remembered for mathematics and natural science, but his curiosity ran straight into alchemy and astrology too. He didn't see a wall between the two. Neither did the scholar whose shadow shaped his whole idea of what a museum could be: **John Dee and Elias Ashmole** belong to the same strange lineage, two Englishmen who chased truth through geometry and through the occult with equal seriousness.

Dee was born in 1527 and died in 1608, and in between he built a reputation that history has never quite settled. Philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, seeker. Somewhere along the way he also became the template for the wizard figure itself, and you can feel his outline in Shakespeare's Prospero and in a certain Hogwarts headmaster.

What connects the two men most directly is an idea. Dee spent his life gathering knowledge and arguing that it should be preserved and opened up to researchers. Ashmole took that instinct and gave it walls, a library and a laboratory. The first modern public museum is, in a real sense, Dee's philosophy made permanent.

## Who Was John Dee, the Mathematician History Remembered as a Sorcerer?

John Dee (1527-1608) was one of the most formidable minds of Tudor England: a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who advised a queen and built a library that stunned Europe. Yet the same man is remembered today less for his equations than for his crystal balls. That gap between the scholar and the sorcerer is the whole story.

Dee showed a gift for numbers early. He went to St John's College, Cambridge, and took his bachelor's degree there in 1545, followed by a master's in 1548. From there he crossed to the continent. He studied under and corresponded with Gerardus Mercator and engaged the work of Pedro Nunes on mathematics, navigation and cartography, though documented direct collaboration is not well established. Around 1550 he was lecturing on Euclid at the University of Paris, a young Englishman holding a lecture hall in the French capital.

He also owned and annotated Copernicus and knew the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, but the specific claim that Brahe was the conduit for Copernicus's revolutionary ideas is not reliably documented. What is not in doubt is his appetite for books. Over a lifetime of collecting, Dee assembled one of the largest personal libraries in Europe, more than four thousand volumes stacked in his house at Mortlake, a treasure trove that drew scholars to his door.

Back in England, he served Queen Mary I, though a specific role teaching mathematics and navigation to her courtiers is not well documented. The later claim that he became Elizabeth I's principal advisor on science and medicine, along with her astrologer, overstates what was in truth an informal, on-and-off relationship with the crown. He advised. He cast horoscopes. He was never quite the official he is sometimes made to sound.

For Dee, none of this was a contradiction. Studying nature, doing mathematics, and reaching for what his age called magic were all pieces of one search for truth. That hunger would eventually pull him toward stranger rooms, and toward the reputation that outlived the scholarship.

## Enochian, Kelley, and the Price of the Occult

In the 1500s, the people we would now call scientists went by another name: natural philosophers. For John Dee and his contemporaries, mathematics, philosophy and what they called magic were not rivals. They were pieces of one hunt for truth. Alchemy and astrology sat on the same shelf as geometry, studied with the same seriousness and the same hunger.

Dee took that hunt to its furthest edge. For the last thirty years of his life, he chased contact with spiritual beings, hoping to recover what he believed was the universal language of creation. That pursuit is how Edward Kelley enters the story. Kelley claimed he could speak with spirits, and the sessions the two men held together produced the complex written system we know as the Enochian alphabet. Whatever you make of the method, the alphabet itself is real and survives.

The partnership carried a cost. Kelley's presence dragged Dee's name into scandal and accusation, and the whispers outran his academic achievements. He lost his position at court. John Dee died in poverty in 1608, a strange ending for a man who had lectured on Euclid in Paris and built one of Europe's largest private libraries.

Not everything he touched was shadowed. In 1570, Henry Billingsley printed the first English translation of Euclid, and Dee wrote its preface. The book is a marvel of paper engineering as much as of scholarship: detailed drawings of polyhedra that fold outward from the page, plus careful diagrams of intersecting planes. A reader could lift the geometry off the flat sheet with their hands.

Cotton acquired some of Dee's manuscripts, but the specific claim that he purchased the Mortlake house and recorded the remaining objects is not reliably established.

Those papers did not vanish into a trunk. Some of the manuscripts and archives drifted into the private collections of English aristocrats, and the trail leads forward to the founding of the Ashmolean. Hold that thought, because the man who built that museum would spend years trying to give Dee his good name back.

## How Elias Ashmole Became John Dee's Champion

Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) first caught the scholarly bug during the English Civil War, while he was stationed at Oxford and mixing with the intellectual circle gathered there. That wartime curiosity grew into something much wider: mathematics, natural philosophy, medicine, English history, and botany all pulled at him. And like John Dee before him, the same scientific hunger led him straight into astrology and alchemy. In the academic world of the time, those subjects were not treated as wholly separate from natural science. They sat on the same shelf.

Ashmole collected manuscripts the way other men collected coins. He gathered the papers of many scholars, but he gave Dr. John Dee special attention, almost a devotion. That devotion went public in 1652, when Ashmole published the *Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum*, a compilation of English alchemical texts that carried Dee's writings along with a short biography of Dee himself. In those pages he called Dee "a complete and perfect master" of mathematics.

"A complete and perfect master" of mathematics. That was Ashmole's verdict on Dee, printed for anyone to read in 1652.

The records show Ashmole intended something bigger: a full biography meant to restore Dee's reputation. He never finished it. The admiration never faded, though. In private letters and in his other published works, Ashmole kept defending John Dee as a respected scholar, long after the world had decided to remember Dee as a sorcerer. He was, in a very real sense, Dee's champion.

## From The Ark to the Ashmolean: Turning Private Knowledge Public

John Dee spent his life arguing that knowledge should be preserved and opened to researchers, and that conviction would eventually find a permanent home in the Ashmolean Museum, which opened its doors in 1683. Getting there meant changing how Europe thought about collections. In the 17th century, books, manuscripts and natural-history specimens mostly sat in wealthy private cabinets, and the public rarely got within arm's reach of any of it.

One household broke the pattern. The Tradescant collection is documented as publicly accessible in the 1630s, when the gardener and plant collector John Tradescant and his son opened their collection, known as "The Ark," to visitors, though the specific 1634 date is not firmly established. What they displayed was genuinely strange: natural-history specimens, old antiquities, and oddities that had no easy label. The idea that a curious passerby could simply walk in and look was radical.

Elias Ashmole turned that gesture into an institution. He came into the Tradescant collection through a contested deed of gift, then merged it with his own books, manuscripts and objects. Oxford was his lever. He had worked there during the English Civil War and kept tight ties to its intellectual circle, and those connections let him convert a private hoard into a public place of learning.

When the Ashmolean opened in 1683, it carried a library and a research laboratory under the same roof. Its stated purpose was to safeguard objects of scholarly value and make them usable for study. Ashmole's collections included John Dee's manuscripts, but a rare portrait of Dee among the donations is not reliably confirmed, so treat that part with caution.

The museum still runs today under the University of Oxford, preserving and showing works on human history, art and the natural world. Dee never saw it. But the through-line from his Mortlake shelves to an Oxford gallery is hard to miss.


## Frequently asked questions

**What is the connection between John Dee and Elias Ashmole?**

Both were English scholars drawn to mathematics, alchemy and astrology, and Ashmole built on Dee's legacy directly. Ashmole collected Dee's manuscripts, published Dee's alchemical writings in his 1652 Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum , and defended Dee's scholarly reputation. Ashmole then led the founding of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which opened in 1683.

**How did John Dee influence the founding of the Ashmolean Museum?**

Dee argued that knowledge should be preserved and made available to researchers, and Ashmole carried that principle into the museum. Ashmole's donations to the Ashmolean included Dee's manuscripts, so Dee's vision of shared access became a physical institution when the museum opened in Oxford in 1683.

**Why did Elias Ashmole admire John Dee?**

Ashmole respected Dee as a rigorous mathematician and a fellow student of alchemy and natural philosophy. In 1652 he published a compilation of English alchemical texts that included Dee's writings and a short biography calling Dee a "full and perfect master" of mathematics. He reportedly planned a longer biography of Dee but never completed it.

**What did John Dee contribute to the Ashmolean Museum's collection?**

Dee's manuscripts, gathered during a lifetime of book collecting that produced one of Europe's largest private libraries at more than four thousand volumes, reached Ashmole and were among his donations to the museum. The 1683 Ashmolean held them within a collection that also included the Tradescant "Ark" and Ashmole's own books and objects.

**Was John Dee a sorcerer or a scientist?**

He was both, by the standards of his time. Dee, who lived from 1527 to 1608, was a mathematician who lectured on Euclid in Paris and wrote the preface to the first English translation of Euclid, printed by Henry Billingsley in 1570. He also worked with Edward Kelley on spirit communication, which produced the Enochian alphabet and earned him the nickname "the Queen's Magician."

**When did the Ashmolean Museum open and why is it considered the first modern museum?**

The Ashmolean opened in Oxford in 1683 as the first modern museum open to the public, a claim its own records support. Unlike the private cabinets of curiosities that dominated 17th-century Europe, it combined a public collection with a library and a research laboratory, and it still operates under the University of Oxford today. Editorial note: Details about the exact contents and later fate of Dee's manuscripts, and about how directly Ashmole acquired them, remain debated among historians and are presented here as unconfirmed where relevant.

Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/john-dee-and-elias-ashmole-magic-and-the-first-museum/