Jack Wagner

Welcome to the Otherworld Patreon.

I'm your host, Jack Wagner.

In this episode, I am once again joined by Wolf Fleetwood Ross to dive into the life of a historical figure who had a profound influence on all of the things that we cover on Otherworld.

This time, we're talking about John Dee.

John Dee was born in 1527.

He is a preeminent English polymath, mathematician, and astronomer who served as a trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. John Dee was many, many things, as you're about to hear.

But I feel like the simplest way to explain him is that he's the real-life inspiration for the medieval scholar, magician, or wizard archetype that you've probably seen replicated in so many books, TV shows, and movies.

John Dee was that.

This was back in a time when science, religion, and magic sometimes weren't all that different from each other.

And during that time, John Dee made significant contributions to navigation and cartography that helped lay the groundwork for the British Empire.

However, he spent much of his life pursuing alchemy and having angelic conversations, believing that the secrets of the universe can be unlocked through mathematics and the supernatural.

and you're about to hear all about it.

Part of what makes John Dee's story so interesting is that this took place over 400 years ago, and humans didn't know as much about the world and how it works.

So it's fun to hear about the Queen of England and other powerful people.

relying on this strange man who's using alchemy and divination to make extremely critical decisions that affect the course of history for the entire world.

But recently, after recording these episodes, I started thinking that we've begun seeing militaries use artificial intelligence not only to navigate bombs,

but even to choose targets.

That's very frightening to me, but it's also not that different at all from what we're talking about in this episode.

Outsourcing major decisions to a third-party, non-human source that we don't fully understand yet.

So I think these episodes accidentally ended up being very relevant to our modern times, and maybe things aren't so different right now after all.