A close-reading of a key passage from John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica serves to illustrate the complex processes and potential of hieroglyphic reading. In the preface to his dedicatee, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, Dee describes the special knowledge that he claims is locked within his monadic symbol, and explains the process of
“actuating” or completely understanding it:
I know well (O King) that you will not shrink away in horror if I dare proffer this magic parable in your royal presence. This our hieroglyphic monad possesses, hidden away in its innermost center, a terrestrial body. It teaches without words, by what divine force that terrestrial body should be actuated. When it has been actuated, it is to be united (in a perpetual marriage) to a generative influence which is lunar and solar, even if previously, in heaven or elsewhere, they were widely separated from that body. […] When that advance has been made, he who fed [the monad] will first himself go away into a metamorphosis and will
afterwards very rarely be held by mortal eye.75
In unpacking this example, we may begin to explore how hieroglyphic authors identify and address their readers, how authors intend their readership to interpret the text (using text broadly to mean anything interpretable, including images and movements), and how readers might engage with the text both in ways that authors intend and those that they might not. Defining readership is a key idea for this project: the modes of engagement with his text that Dee mentions are surprising and curious. Some people might “shrink
away in horror” from this book, but he believes Maximilian will not, being such a laudable and exceptional person. The book, in a way, tests for its own ideal reader who can “actuate” the symbol, because that person will change into another order of being entirely, in what Dee calls “the true invisibility of the magi.” In later chapters, we will see that each author defines and addresses a supposedly worthy readership, while excluding the unworthy.
In most cases, as in the case of Monas, this construction of a worthy readership is inextricable from the work’s socio-political and cultural contexts. This excerpt comes from Dee’s lengthy dedicatory letter to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, which takes up almost a third of the length of the whole book. In my longer analysis of Monas, I will consider the context of Dee’s extravagant praise of Maximilian, his presentation of the book to Elizabeth, and his anxiety about readership expressed in the epistle to the printer. His language also places Monas within the discipline of occult philosophy, with the readership issues that entails.
Dee’s concern with readership extends as far as prescribing how readers should engage with his text. Dee describes what the process of “actuation” should look like, in which the terrestrial body (i.e. the small dot in the center of the monad) “is to be united” with the lunar and solar influences to particular ends. The passive periphrastic
construction in “Lunaris & Solaris est (Matrimonio perpetuo) copulanda” denotes obligation on the part of the reader. He expects, even commands, his readers to come to certain conclusions.
Dee distinguishes his Monas from other texts in a fundamental way, though; in calling the monad a “magic parable,” he emphasizes the way in which hieroglyphic
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discourse works like parable. Scholars of early modern emblematic expression have noted the parallels between such symbolic discourse and biblical parable; Diana Galis, for instance, notes that in his Hieroglyphica, Valeriano connects the “hieroglyphic method” of revealing while concealing to the way in which “Christ himself used hieroglyphic when he spoke in parables.”76 Even though Dee’s monad is an image, not a story, it nonetheless functions like a parable, and moreover, a magic parable, in that Dee intends his image to influence the reader via its occult properties. It is through the dynamic process of seeing, absorbing, and interpreting this magic parable that the monad is “actuated” (a process that functions through similar mechanisms, as we have seen, as spiritual alchemy).
At first glance, one major difference between the monad and a parable – that is, between a single image and a story – is that the image “exists” all at once. There is no narrative built into it. Dee’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the monad in his theorems, however, takes a static image and, setting it in motion, turns it into a narrative. He hints at this in the above excerpt: the references he gives to the “lunar and solar influences” and the “terrestrial center” literally refer to the lines and points of the symbol. The large circle represents the sun, the upper crescent the moon, and the small dot in the middle the earth. “Even if previously” the lunar, solar, and terrestrial components of the monad were “widely separated,” the disassembled parts have a relationship to one another, they influence each other: they can change and be manipulated. The “theorems” that comprise the body of Monas, as we shall see, deconstruct the monad into its
76 Galis, 364. See also Michael Bath, who writes: “To understand the connections between rhetorical commonplace, hieroglyphic symbolism, and biblical parable - different though all these things may seem to the modern reader - is to come very close to understanding the activating assumptions out of which the Renaissance emblem was created” (58).
component parts, explicating each part to the reader and enabling the reader to reconstruct the symbol herself.
Reading Monas (i.e. looking at this “magic parable”) is not a passive experience, or at least Dee does not intend for it to be so. In this passage, he uses dynamic language like “actuated,” “advance,” and “metamorphosis” to suggest change and activity, certain things coming together and others separating, things becoming visible or invisible. Dee also uses curiously dynamic “feeding” words to describe the monad: “he who fed” (qui aluit) the image will reap its rewards. In the omitted part of the passage, Dee describes the monad as something that can be “fed or watered” (nutriri … vel irrigari). These two feeding verbs, alo and nutrio, can both mean “to feed, nourish, bring up, rear.” Dee portrays the monad as organism to be tended and raised, like a plant. These feeding words suggest what the process of “actuating” the monad is like - gradual and nurturing, yet with a sudden payoff when the task comes to fruition.
The actuation process can be understood in another way as the process of getting to know the monad, which “teaches without words.” Dee claims that his hieroglyph
perfectly reflects its meaning so that the reader may experience it directly; that is, the reader’s access to meaning is mediated by the clarity and simplicity of the hieroglyph rather than by potentially obscuring words. Like Clucas’s concept of inspectival knowledge, Dee’s hieroglyph, at least on one level, is intended to be “read” through intuitive understanding rather than rational analysis. Intuition, however, does not entirely describe the mode of knowledge through which Dee expects readers to engage with the monad. In fact, the “feeding” metaphor is more apt: through contemplation of the monad, the reader seeks to elevate his own nature and nourish his own understanding of the
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surrounding world. Such transformation is a process: it may be unmediated, but it is not temporally immediate. Earlier, Dee explains that contemplation of the monad can substitute for practical experience, giving the example of scientists who will feel foolish at having spent many cold nights observing the stars or studying the nature of matter, when “here the doctrine of our monad will teach by most certain experience.”77
Actuation is an experiential process that enables worthy readers to transform themselves.
In a quasi-alchemical process, readers, prepared by both prior study and inherent virtue, transmute themselves through reading, watching, thinking about, or even
manipulating the text. This engagement with the central hieroglyph is a process, but the moment of transformative understanding is immediate and revelatory. The monad is the central exemplar of the early modern hieroglyphs that I will consider in this dissertation, in which a symbol functions as the static embodiment of transformation. The ultimate goal of the hieroglyphic is effecting change, or more specifically, perfecting the reader. This hieroglyph, and all those I will examine in this dissertation, is broadly about the arrangement of the natural and spiritual worlds – the order of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it. The monad supposedly illuminates a variety of fields: manipulation of metals, society as a whole, the organization of the natural world, but most importantly for my project, the actuation of potential within the individual reader.