After Dee's appetite for spiritual conversations had been kindled, a ,an claiming to be Edward Talbot arrived at his door at Mortlake on the 8th of March, 1582. This was later proven to be a false name, his real name being Kelley, not Talbot. Kelley was about 27 when he arrived at Mortlake, and his life prior to this remains as a mystery. He has a reputation for travelling England, living as an Occult charlatan. He was not an uneducated man though, being an undergraduate at Oxford, but for some reason dismissed. He was able to speak Latin, although he often made grammatical mistakes. This comes to play in the wife swapping incident at the end of Kelley and Dee's time together.

The wife swapping incident was apparently showed to Kelley (Dee was not in the room at the time) through a simple cipher from the Elemental Table. The Elemental Table contains 624 letters, each of which were taken as a number from the cipher given by Kelley. The decoded cipher was written in Latin, not Enochian, with some errors (missing verbs, misspellings), a major one of which was that he numbers were one out. Many people have been led to believe that this was a construct of Kelley, to have his way with the attractive and young Jane Dee. Little is known about Kelley's wife, Joanna Kelley.

Kelley did not gain Dee's trust from the outset, as he was apparently reported to the authorities by Dee. This lasted not very long, and there was another chance given to Kelley on March 10 of the same year. The seance gave such results that the pair remained close friends for seven years, performing numerous seances.

Kelley went on to produce most of the information for the Enochian System for Dee. These began with a dictation of the Sigillum Aemeth (Aemeth being the Hebrew word for truth), given to them by Uriel for later use in other seances. Early pieces of information in the Enochian system include two tables of 7x7, which contain the names of various angels. The validity of this as new information was not to be affirmed initially, as these names could be found in any number of texts of the period. In fact Dee makes a marginal note of this in his transcripts of the seances. Other names were made from these squares though, including Madimi, a spirit which would spend much time with Dee and Kelley during their seances.

During the seances, Kelley was to speak in more than a few tongues, including Latin and Greek as well as the Enochian language. As to whether Kelley actually understood them still remains to be seen. At one stage Kelley, from the spirit Madimi, is reported to have warned Dee about Kelley's departure in Greek, which Kelley protested to, saying that he would no longer convey such gibberish. He could quite as well have actually understood what he was saying, and done this to keep up his elaborate ruse. Since Kelley's life is shrouded in mystery, we may never know the full extent of his knowledge and hence his rightful place in the creating or revelation of the Enochian System.

After his split with Dee, Kelley went on to set himself up as an alchemist, possibly with the information given to hum by the angels. He eventually ended up in Prague, working for Emperor Rudolph to produce gold. While there, he died under obscure conditions in 1595, at the age of 40. The angel Uriel had given him a life expectancy of some 87 years, which, as in Dee's case, was far more than his actual age at death. The general consensus surrounding his death is that he was imprisoned for not producing gold, and fell from the tower while trying to escape. This will probably remain only as speculation, and his death will remain as mysterious as his life prior to his association with Dee.