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Monday, June 28, 2010

John Dee opera announced

Via alt.fan.rawilson, I learned that that there's an opera in the works about John Dee, the 16th century alchemist. Collaborators on the project are Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of the band Gorillaz (Albarn also was the brains behind Blur) and Alan Moore of "Watchmen" fame.

Here's an interesting sound bite from the Broadwayworld.com article I linked to: "He brings a wide range of influences to his work, such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson, and Iain Sinclair, New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock and horror writers like Clive Barker."

Wilson fans will have other reasons for being interested. The first COSMIC TRIGGER book, there are seven references to John Dee listed in the index. In one of them, Wilson links Dee to other members of the Illuminati, which in that context Wilson describes as "an underground mystical movement using sexual yoga in the Western world," thus linking Dee to other shamans in history, including by implication Wilson. In that theory, the secrecy was necessary to hide from the Inquisition.




1 comment:

Eric Wagner said...

Two years ago I read a bunch of books by Frances Yates, and her books made me more interested in Dr. Dee. Her books present a fascinating picture of the intellectual life of the era of Dee, Bruno, Shakespeare, Spenser and Byrd, etc.