Albert Laski

Albert Laski arrived in England in the spring of 1583 as a visiting magnate, was received at court, taken to Oxford and shown the usual courtesies, and within weeks had found his way to John Dee's house at Mortlake. Dee was then in the middle of the scrying work he had begun with Edward Kelley, and the sessions Laski attended turned toward him quickly. The spirits addressed him directly, promised him greatness, and in the record tie his fortunes to the crown of Poland and to a coming change in the world. Dee wrote it all down, as he wrote everything down.

In September the whole party left England together, Dee with his family, Kelley, and Laski, travelling through the Low Countries into Poland, then to Krakow and eventually to the imperial court at Prague. Those years abroad are when most of the Enochian material was received. The corpus that later occultists inherited therefore exists in the shape it does partly because a Polish nobleman was willing to pay for a journey. Laski's own hopes were practical: the work was expected to yield gold by transmutation and a political result at home, and neither arrived. His money ran out, the arrangement ended, and Dee and Kelley looked elsewhere for support.

Laski matters less as a person than as a demonstration of how this kind of work was funded. Renaissance angelic magic and alchemy were expensive. They required a household, travel, apparatus, materials and above all uninterrupted time, none of which a scholar without means could supply, so the practitioner had to be useful to somebody who could. What a patron bought was rarely a doctrine. It was a prospect: gold, an heir, a favourable outcome at court, or advance knowledge of events. The relationship lasted precisely as long as the prospect stayed plausible.

The record shows the pattern repeat. When Laski's resources failed, the party attached itself to Vilem Rozmberk and settled for a period at Trebon in Bohemia, where the alchemical work carried on under a new sponsor. The scrying sessions continued either way, which suggests the material was not being produced to order, but its survival depended on somebody paying for the room it was produced in.

Almost everything known about Laski's part in this comes from Dee's diaries and from manuscripts printed long after both men were dead. That is a narrow evidentiary base for someone who was a real political figure in his own country, and it is worth stating plainly: the atlas holds him as he appears in another man's papers.