John Dee

John Dee was the Elizabethan magus in whom the scientist and the mystic were never quite separable. Mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, he chose Elizabeth I's coronation date, advised her voyages of discovery, and first coined the phrase "British Empire". He assembled the greatest private library in England at Mortlake, lectured on Euclid in Paris, wrote the famously opaque Monas Hieroglyphica, and later chased angelic conversations across Europe with the dubious Edward Kelley. He returned to find his library ransacked, was cast off by James I, and died in poverty around 1608, his grave now lost.

His Sun shone in Cancer, the sign of the crab and the shell, an emotional and intuitive light, almost psychic, guarding something soft within. Set in the twelfth house, the unknowable realm of spirit and the collective unconscious, this is the Sun as sponge and seeker, drawn to the ether and the hidden record, endlessly vulnerable to charlatans. His Moon in Capricorn in the sixth was the unspoiled, dutiful soul who grew up fast, serving through patient labour. Leo rose, the regal torch-bearer with the presence that turns heads. A magician built to shine in the invisible.