From a Suppressed Manuscript to a Modern Ladder

The Enochian material did not reach the public through its authors. A portion of Dee's angelic diaries was printed in 1659 by Meric Casaubon under a title promising a true and faithful relation, and the edition was hostile: Casaubon published it to demonstrate that a learned man had been deceived by spirits, and his preface argues the case at length. The effect was the opposite of the intention. Printing put the system in circulation, and the later manuscripts that stayed in the Sloane collection supplied what Casaubon had left out.

The revival came through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which reorganised the material into a teaching system with elemental attributions the Dee papers do not contain, and then through Aleister Crowley, who treated the thirty Aethyrs as a sequence to be scried in order and published the record as The Vision and the Voice. In that reading the Aethyrs became stages of an inner ascent, and the Parts of the Earth that the Liber Scientiae tabulates fell out of view. The atlas keeps the table because it is the hinge of the system. Without it the Aethyrs have no ground, the ninety one governors have no jurisdiction, and the geography that the sixteenth century material actually asserts disappears behind a twentieth century reading of it.