The nine-week voyage of the Puritan ship the Arbella in 1630 is almost as mythologized as the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock. The Arbella was the ship on which Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor John Winthrop would deliver a sermon where he declared America to be a “city on a hill.” Rediscovered by scholars in the 20th-century, Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” with its imploration that the colonists must “labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community,” has long been interpreted as a foundational text of American identity, a veritable birth certificate for the idea of this as a redeemer nation. Figures on both the right and left, from Ronald Reagan to John F. Kennedy, have long quoted Winthrop, his invocation in the sermon conceived as one of the earliest and most potent expressions of American exceptionality. So much so that the governor is retroactively understood as a kind of de-facto founding father.
Yet alongside the governor was a very different man, his 24-year-old son John Winthrop the Younger, who had in his possession an unusual set of books which he described as a “Hogshead of Ancient papers of Value;” works such as those by the notorious English alchemist, necromancer, and occultist John Dee. Dee—the magician and court-astrologer to Elizabeth I decades before the Arbella sailed—was infamous for his supposed communications with angels in an esoteric tongue called “Enochian.”
Hellbound and Down 