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John Dee (1527-1608/9)
<bdi><a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:16th-century_portrait_paintings_of_men,_artist_and_year_missing" title="Category:16th-century portrait paintings of men, artist and year missing">Unidentified painter</a></bdi>
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mid-priority person dossier

John Dee (1527-1608/9)

Elizabethan polymath, mathematician, astrologer, alchemist; coined "British Empire" as a political concept; proposed the calendar reforms that became the British Gregorian adoption (1752). Cipher to Queen Elizabeth I read 007. Recommended cryptographic techniques to William Cecil + Francis Walsingham, founding the modern English intelligence service. The original-figure of the documented intelligence-occult parallel that Osterrieder traces forward through the centuries. Died December 1608 or March 1609 in Mortlake. (Claim WiU-4-002.)