But not this. This idea of sharing wives did not fit at all.

‘Your own reason riseth up against my wisdom,’ Madami told Dee. ‘Behold, you are become free. Do that which most pleaseth you.’ He had become free. Throughout his career, Dee had struggled to reconcile reason with wisdom, understanding with faith. The angels had apparently provided him with the means of reconciling the two. His faith had delivered the message, his understanding would enable him to make sense of it.

…It was a test of his faith. Dee had to decide whether it was a divine instruction, which his faith must lead him to believe, or an elaborate deception, as his reason might otherwise conclude.

In undertaking the actions, Dee had ‘offered my soul as a pawn’, as he put it.

Dee did not understand. Share in what sense? he asked – in the sense of “carnal use, contrary to the law of the commandment, or of spiritual love and charitable care and unity of minds, for the service of God advancing?’”

A vision Kelley then beheld in the stone settled the matter: “Upon a scroll, like the edge of a carpet, is written: ‘I speak of both.’”

Not surprisingly, at the end of the séance, Dee was in a state of “great amazement and grief”, but such was his faith in the spirits that he agreed to go ahead. His diary tells us that his wife Jane was still less impressed by the idea, and we can only guess at how Kelley’s wife Joanna, felt about it. Before fulfilling the pact, the four of them signed a solemn covenant:

“… O Almighty God… at this present, [we] do faithfully and sincerely confess, and acknowledge, that thy profound wisdom in this most new and strange doctrine (among Christians) propounded, commended, and enjoined unto us four only, is above human reason.”