Page 110 "...symbols reminding one of John Dee"

From page 110 of the book:   "...I looked at my watch and, just realizing how late it was, and that I might be arrested for vagrancy or prowling (the French word for it was rôder; je rôde: I prowl, therefore I am). I wondered if I were going mad. I searched for the hallway to the front door and quietly let myself out.  

   After securing the front door, I stepped back a few feet to examine the rectory. The number thirteen was posted on the left. The windows, each divided into eighteen individual glass panes, were paired up with wooden shutters, which were in desperate need of paint and which were etched upon with symbols reminding one of John Dee. There was the archangel Uriel, holding his bronze disk marked with the symbols of the zodiac; there were crystals and bulls framed by the overgrowth of ivy. One in particular displayed the fish-entwined anchor of Jacopo Sannazaro. Vines of healthy, arcadian ivy grew up the sides of the house and around the windows, giving me the impression at first that they were closing in. On further inspection, I realized that the windows assumed personalities all their own; cajoling the ivy, inviting it, "Come in. Come in." I walked in the direction of la Fontaine and tried to restrain the presence of the metaphysical in my life."
                                                                   

(Clockwise from top left: Portrait of John Dee [artist unknown];
various occultic symbols associated with Dee.

[John Dee (1527-1608) was a noted English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist,[4] and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy.  Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his age, he had been invited to lecture on advanced algebra at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties. Dee was an ardent promoter of mathematics and a respected astronomer, as well as a leading expert in navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery. In one of several tracts which Dee wrote in the 1580s encouraging British exploratory expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage, he appears to have coined (or at least introduced into print) the term "British Empire."]

Archangel Uriel (illustration courtesy of
Order of the White Lion)

["In all their affliction he was afflicted,

and the angel of his presence saved them:

in his love and in his pity he redeemed them;

and he bare them, and carried them

all the days of old." (Isaiah 63:9 King James Version)]

[In Christian apocryphal gospels, Uriel plays a role in the rescue of Jesus's cousin John the Baptist from the Massacre of the Innocents ordered by King Herod. He carries John and his mother Elizabeth to join the Holy Family after their Flight into Egypt. Uriel is often identified as a cherub and angel of repentance. He "stands at the Gate of Eden with a fiery sword," or as the angel who "watches over thunder and terror." In the Apocalypse of Peter he appears as the Angel of Repentance, who is graphically represented as being as pitiless as any demon. In the Life of Adam and Eve, Uriel is regarded as the spirit of the third chapter of Genesis. He is also identified as one of the angels who helped bury Adam and Abel in Paradise.]

Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro by Titian, 1660
and his epigraph of a fish-entwined anchor

[Jacopo Sannazaro (1457-1530) was a poet whose work both in Latin and Italian was extremely fashionable in its own time. The court poet of King Ferdinand I of Naples, Sannazaro was a member and then leader of Pontano's humanist academy from the 1480s on.]