Lucy rolled her eyes with humor. “Alex, that’s very interesting, but please don’t sidetrack me. We’re coming to the essence of the excitement about cabalistic doctrine.” He smiled and nodded at her. “Now,” she resumed, “for the Christians, an appealing aspect of the cabala was the way in which the tradition of cabala seemed to confirm the truth of Jesus as the son of God. In this way: when you have the name IESU for Jesus, or better still Jeshua—like Joshua—which is its variant, you are, so they thought, adding in the substantial medial letter ‘S’ to the consonant only name of Yahweh. They saw this letter ‘S’ making the unutterable name utterable; YHWH is otherwise entirely without vowels. For the Christian cabalists, the name made audible was the same as the Word made Flesh.”

Alex laughed aloud, glancing at Lucy as they turned off the dividing highway toward the little village of Longparish. “Well, even taking the etymology of ‘Yahweh’ out of it, it’s a strange argument. And I can just hear how much more irreverently my brother would have put that.” She laughed. “Did they buy it?”

“Depending on how deftly you manipulated the Hebrew alphabet, and stretched the consonants to allow for elided vowels—yes! It seemed convincing to the adepts of the time. But part of the agenda was to convert Muslims and Jews to the idea of the Trinity—to Christianity.”

Alex nodded pensively. “Plus ça change! But, haven’t we come a long way from John Dee?”

“It must seem so. You need to understand this rather complex web of thought to see what excited Dee’s fine mind. Christian cabala gave its blessing to communion with the angels, via their holy names in Hebrew, which had a magical power to bring the magus, or conjuror, directly to God without doctrinal restrictions—”

Alex added: “In ancient times, names carried power. If you knew the real name of an entity, and spoke it, you had power over it.”

“And this, effectively, was what they believed Moses himself had had access to, as a special magus or initiate. And Hermes Trismegistus too. The journey of the initiated person was from the physical world—earth—through the ether or air—demi-paradise—to the celestial world—true heaven, or nirvana, if you like. But the angels protected the magic and the journey from bad spirits. So Dee could be both an ardent scientific enquirer and a conjuror of angels. For him, the concepts of Neoplatonism—which had been the spirit of the Renaissance and seriously upset Lorenzo de’ Medici’s implacable foe, poor old Savonarola—were high-minded ideas. He followed a Venetian friar, named Giorgi, who wrote a book on the teachings of Hermes and the cabala called De Harmonia Mundi, which was a philosophy of universal harmony.”