ZAA

ZAA is the twenty-seventh of the thirty Aethyrs, or Airs, of the Enochian system, the thirty spiritual regions delivered to the mathematician John Dee and the scryer Edward Kelley in 1584, and named in the record Dee compiled from those sessions. Its three-letter name, ZAA, was received letter by letter through Kelley's scrying.

Place in the system

Each Aethyr is said to contain three Governors among whom the ninety-one Parts of the Earth are divided.

The thirty Aethyrs are the raw gift of the Dee-Kelley sessions; the elaborate visionary content attached to them in modern practice belongs to a later layer, above all Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, his record of scrying all thirty Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909. The Aethyr is described here as an element of that documented historical tradition, studied as such, its entities not reified.

The three Governors

ZAA's three Parts are Saziami, ruling a Part called Oacidi with no known referent, under King Ziracah of the tribe of Reuben; Mathula, ruling Babylon, under King Zarnaah of the tribe of Manasseh; and Krpanib, ruling Median, evidently Media, assigned a Part three Aethyrs earlier, under King Gebabal of the tribe of Asher. Babylon carries an obvious weight in material framed throughout in scriptural terms, since the whole Enochian enterprise was presented to Dee as the recovery of the language spoken by Adam and used by Enoch, the context in which a name of this kind would have been read.

Any statement about the twenty-seventh Aethyr belongs to one of three layers of the record, and they are roughly three centuries apart. Saying which layer a claim comes from is most of what can honestly be said about an individual Aethyr.

The diaries, 1580s

The name ZAA, its place as the twenty-seventh of the thirty, and the governors assigned to it all come from the scrying sessions of John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s. In that material the thirty Aethyrs divide the earth between ninety-one governors: twenty-nine Aethyrs hold three each and the thirtieth holds four. This atlas carries all ninety-one, and the arithmetic can be checked against them.

Crowley, 1900 and 1909

Almost everything said about the character of an individual Aethyr in modern circulation comes from Aleister Crowley. By his own account he began the series in Mexico in 1900 and completed it with Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in late 1909, and the record was published as The Vision and the Voice. Those descriptions are Crowley's visionary record of 1909, not Dee's, and they are not in the sixteenth-century diaries at all.

Why the layers are kept apart here

The three are separated in this atlas because they make different kinds of claim. The diaries supply the names and the structure, the order supplies a ritual context, and Crowley supplies the descriptions. Attributing any of the three to another is the commonest error made about this material.