Johannes Dee (or Doctor John Dee) was born at Mortlake on the morning of July 13, 1527. His genealogy contained a Superintendent to the of the Royal Table, at the English Court (Rowland Dee, his father), and possibly Welsh Kings and Princes as far King Arthur. This may not actually be fact, since it was only a claim made by Dee, and generally, the records of genealogies were not as well kept back then as they are now. Either way, Dee himself was a distinguished man in his own right.

Dee graduated from Cambridge in 1548 with a Master of Arts, and then went abroad to Louvain for further study. Later, he was to give lectures at the University of Paris, at the age of 23. He took few jobs in his life, relying mainly on Royal and ecclesiastic pensions to survive. These, however, never amounted to much more than £80 a year, (or roughly £2130 in today's currency). He was, however, to amass one of Elizabethan England's largest libraries, spending over £3000 (£80,000 today), on more than 2500 books and manuscripts. These dealt with mathematics, alchemy, philosophy, classical literature, geography, and the hermetic tradition.

Dee was later to act for Queen Elizabeth I in many different roles, including theorising on new naval routes, and travelling to the continent to meet with high standing officials. Dee was commonly associated with Rudolph, Emperor of Poland, and was offered a similar job to the one Queen Elizabeth had for Dee. Dee never accepted this, and continued in the service of his mother country, although he often made trips to meet with the king of Poland. While on these travels, Dee often studied whatever he could get his hands on to, often purchasing books and manuscripts for his library. The most interesting of which is a copy of Trithemius' Steganographia, a book on codes and codification. Correspondence between Dee and Cecil (and official to the queen who paid for many of Dee's overseas visits) suggest that this find was great enough that Dee should be allowed to stay on for a longer time in order to find more about this book.

This leads many people to think that Dee himself was a spy on the Continent for the Queen of England. The book would have given Dee enough of a basis in codes that he could encode whatever he learnt, and send it back to England rather than having to return himself with the information safely kept inside is memory.

This book would also be a major find in terms of his Enochian System. If, in fact, the Enochian system was a completely created system, of Dee's devise, this book would have given him the technical knowledge to be able to create such a linguistic system. He was certainly intelligent enough to know multiple languages (including Greek, and some Hebrew), and hence able to translate foreign languages. This could quite easily be employed to create a language and then translate anything in to it.

When it comes down to it, the validity of the Enochian system is still to be confirmed or denied, and any astute student would be ignorant not to consider both views on it's existence while studying it.

Dee died, as he lived, in poverty, in England in 1608, at the age of 81, having very little to do with the Enochian system and it's angels after his split with Kelley after a wife-swapping incident. This incident was apparently at the request of the angels, but could quite as well have been at the request of Kelley and his "scrying". Either way, the tensions between Kelley, Dee, and their wives could have become too great after this time, and forced Dee and Kelley to part ways. There was a recorded attempt at another seance in 1607, but it gave nothing like the results that Kelley had given. Dee's age at death was given to him by the angels as being 122, which does not show much for the revelations of the angels!