From The Equinox to the Enochian Revival

Crowley first published the working in 1911, as a special supplement to The Equinox I(5), under its formal Thelemic title Liber 418, Liber XXX Aerum vel Saeculi, "the book of the thirty Aethyrs or ages." Later editions added his own footnotes cross-referencing the visions to the wider apparatus of his magical system, including the Golden Dawn's Enochian material and his own Thelemic cosmology, so that the text functions on two levels at once: a scrying record in its own right, and a commentary Crowley layered onto Dee's older system after the fact.

The book's afterlife has been substantial within twentieth century ceremonial magic. It supplied much of the descriptive content later writers relied on when discussing the Aethyrs as a graded system of spiritual attainment, effectively becoming the lens through which many practitioners after Crowley approached Dee and Kelley's original Enochian material rather than a separate commentary alongside it. Organizations descending from or influenced by Crowley's own orders have continued to use the thirty Calls and the Aethyr sequence largely in the terms this text set, and the Choronzon passage from Aethyr ten in particular has been anthologized, discussed and reinterpreted independently of the rest of the work. Within this atlas, the thirty Enochian Aethyrs carry the specific content the working describes; this record exists to state where that content comes from, who produced it, when, and under what circumstances.